Life and Loss
We had a common theme this past week at Basic Steps Mental Health and that was with loss. The subject of loss has many facets. There is loss of life, loss of a relationship, loss of health, and loss of purpose – as with retirement – to name a few. When we go through an abrupt change it can be startling. There is the classic Kubler-Ross stages of grief that can be used as a guide, in which I...Learn More
The Passing of Two Friends
This past week marked the passing of one of my best friend’s father, and the wife of another dear friend. Both of these people loved life, loved people, and were active in the community. The biggest part of being a therapist is keeping yourself in balance. In doing so, you are able to be there for others, unfortunately, both of the deaths hit me hard and I found myself counseling myself as I...Learn More
Continuing Education
Continuing coursework is crucial for people working in the mental health field. For me personally, I get bored presenting the same information over and over again, so I am always in search of information and techniques that grab my attention. To be honest, I get pretty giddy when something comes along that intuitively I know will be of great help. Sometimes I review approaches or periodicals...Learn More
Muscle Testing – The Effects Our Thoughts Have On Our Body
Years ago, I went through a seminar called Insight – which was entitled “The Awakening Heart Seminar.” Hey, I was single at the time and was looking to get my heart awakened – okay. However, there were a few things they showed us that still impact me today. I learned what negative and positive thinking does to our physical body. They called a woman who came to the front and asked her to hold...Learn More
Life Repeating Itself
It is interesting how my life is repeating itself again which shouldn’t surprise me. In graduate school, we focused our attention on repeating issues, because my professors believed that they were the curriculum of life. In studying Spiritual Psychology the belief is that spiritually speaking, everything is happening in our life for a reason and it all is in regards to our growth and...Learn More
Fix-It Time
While driving to work this week my car developed a problem, now it is in the shop and getting worked on. Such is life. It seems like I have had my share of fix-its recently, including changing the internet provider for a faster network and getting a new computer because the old one was bogging down. Though, I am not the only one. Many clients have also been experiencing problems with...Learn More
The Key to Getting through School
When I was 32 years old, I decided to go back to school and study something I was interested in – Psychology. It had been 10 or so years since I dropped out of Long Beach State, but wanted to get out of the construction trade and knew that I needed to finish my Bachelor’s degree. In my first class back, the teacher told us we needed to read something 10 times to memorize it. 10 times!...Learn More
Bottom Line – Healing Through Effort
I was looking through my files and came upon this article that hadn’t been published. Perhaps something more important was on my mind. Re-reading this I realized that, bottom line, this article is very important because it gets down to the root of my therapy strategy. For almost 30 years I’ve struggled to find “the solution”. You know, something that will fix everybody, so that they won’t...Learn More
What to Expect from Therapy
If you have never gone through counseling and wondered what happens in sessions, then this article was written for you. I remember the first time I went to a counselor and could feel my heart pounding in my neck and was looking for an excuse to sprint out of there. Though to be honest, I just found myself talking about myself, which was strange since at that time, all I wanted to do was...Learn More