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Information, Solution Focused Strategies

Emotional Abuse

Emotional abuse leaves little or no physical scars. Its victims suffer no black eyes, broken bones, torn flesh or spilled blood. Still, those who are emotionally beaten down might describe it as the most painful and destructive form of domestic violence.

While statistics are elusive, experts agree that emotional abuse—for mostly women, but some men as well—have reached epidemic proportions. And despite its everyday occurrence, few of us recognize it, identify it or even do anything about it.

Here are a few questions that might help you recognize it:

  • Are you walking on egg shells around your partner or spouse?
  • Are you worried, anxious or nervous about your partner’s attitudes or moods?
  • Are you concerned about you’re their criticism, sarcasm, frowns, glares, gestures, silence or other behaviors?
  • Are you concerned that they will withdraw or give you the cold shoulder?
  • Do you feel tense when you hear the car pull up in the garage and hear the door open and your partner comes home?
  • Does your partner uses economic, sexual or other power tactics to control you?
  • Are you happy and feel free when you are alone?
  • Do you think that if you tried harder that things will be better?
  • Are you mostly defensive about your actions? Are your reactions on automatic pilot?
  • Do you sometimes feel trapped in your relationship?

So what is the impact of emotional abuse?

Here are a few that are easily recognized. The emotionally abused individual will exhibit:

  • Loss of self-esteem and self-confidence
  • Increasing levels of self-doubt leading to the inability to make normal life decisions
  • Signs of anxiety and depression
  • Inner fear and anxiety that he/she ‘is losing it’
  • Loss of enthusiasm for life, decreased involvement in normal social activities, and decreased involvement with friends
  • Feeling of a loss of power and control over one’s life
  • Development of a very critical internal voice
  • A desire to avoid, escape, or run away
  • A false sense of hope that ‘everything will be OK’ when…
  • Increasing self-blame for everything that goes wrong
  • Pervasive feeling of ‘not being good enough’
  • Defensive of the ‘other person’ to friends who ask questions and show concern

What can victims of emotional abuse do?

Here are some suggestions:

  • Reach out to other people who you know care.
  • Read a good book on the subject as a form of bibliotherapy. See my article on this subject here.
  • Realize that you cannot change your partner… you can only change how your respond.
  • Develop a list of how you are affected by the emotional abuse.
  • Get professional assistance.
  • Make the decision to deal with the situation.
  • Develop your internal emotional and cognitive strengths and focus on emotional health.
  • Emergence of mental health problems such as anxiety and depression.
  • Change your self-talk from self-criticism to self-empowerment.
  • Look at your own behaviors and decide what you need to change and what new behaviors you need to adopt.
  • Decide on what you want and how you want to live your life.
  • Decide on and then set some personal boundaries and clear expectations for the other person to change their behaviors. Also describe the consequences.
  • Follow through on your decisions.
  • Make an internal commitment on your ultimate decision if the person does not change. In other words, are you willing to say goodbye to the person and hello to a new, more vibrant life?

At this blog we recommend tens of books that will help you through the process of confronting the emotional abuse and then starting to move towards emotional health. Here are some that we specifically recommend to help with emotional abuse.

                                                         

Information, Solution Focused Strategies

Emotional Wounds

We are a wounded people. In this largely uncaring world, people are hurt from exploitation and victimization. People everywhere are experiencing all kinds of rape and trauma: racial, financial, political, organizational and sexual. Children are abused. Marriages are broken. Tragedies of all kinds – natural and man-made – afflict all of us. And many of these ‘wounds’ cut deep and last beyond a lifetime.

In many cases, emotionally wounded people are victims of the criminal, hurtful, or selfish actions of others. In other cases the emotionally wounded have self-inflicted wounds and are victims of their own hardheaded, addictive or narcissistic actions. The outcome is the same regardless of the source. People are emotionally wounded! And so they struggle with crippling emotions such as anxiety, anger, fear, desperation, shame and guilt, hatred, depression, and low self-esteem.

The pain of such emotions is often present with us even though the incidents and relationships that caused the hurt may be long past. We have difficulty with our relationships – even those within our own households. On the job, we can’t get along with colleagues. We fight with our neighbors – whether they are next door, around the corner, in the next county – or in the next country. Politically – there are fights everywhere: neighbor against neighbor; family against family; country against country.

Our emotional wounds show in the insanity of our public and private actions. What else can explain a father raping his daughter or a mother killing her kids? What else can explain a priest sexually abusing young children? What else can explain a politician raping his country of the financial resources earmarked for those who need it most in his country? What else can explain caregivers who exploit the elderly and the disabled? Those people – the perpetrators of those disgusting and horrible actions – are themselves emotionally wounded.

Caution! Think carefully before you decide that because you are not in this dastardly group and you therefore are not emotionally wounded!

Not everyone who is emotionally wounded abuse or hurt others to the degree that those described above do. Most people who are emotionally wounded do not abuse children and are not involved in any kind of rape – financial, political or sexual. Most appear to live ‘normal’ lives. Their emotional wounds and hurt are hidden deep on the inside… and only shows itself to the trained analyst and the expert eye. But those emotional wounds do wreak havoc with their lives and the lives of those closest to them.

What are some of the symptoms?

  • Addiction to approval and people pleasing
  • Alcohol and drug abuse
  • Gambling
  • Manipulation of others
  • Lust for control and power
  • Possessiveness
  • Extreme selfishness, disloyalty and self-centeredness
  • Lashing out at and hurting others without any visible signs of regret
  • Eating disorders
  • Kleptomania
  • Shopping addiction
  • High levels of anxiety
  • Fear of intimacy
  • Emotional numbness
  • Overly sensitive
  • Intensely secretive
  • Very little patience or tolerance for others
  • Shame and guilt
  • Nightmares
  • Rage and hatred – including self-hatred – and anger towards themselves
  • Depression
  • Sense of hopelessness leading to suicidal thoughts and gestures.
  • Phobias
  • Obsessive compulsive disorders
  • Irrational expectations (stated and unstated) of others
  • Abusive behavior including child abuse
  • It shows up in their children who exhibit emotional pain by being abusive and violent; children who use drugs and become involved in anti-social and delinquent activities.

As you can see emotional wounds are a fact of life and is exhibited all around us.

There is hope, however, for those who think that they are alone in their suffering. Despite emotional and psychological wounds – there are things that they can do individually and collectively to heal the emotional wounds and improve their overall emotional health. People with emotional wounds need a lot of things.

Here are a few of the many tasks:

  • They must acknowledge that they need help. This may be difficult for those who believe that their situation is hopeless. It could also be difficult for those who are intensely secretive.
  • They need intensive and clinically sophisticated help through counseling and psychotherapy with expert clinicians.
  • They need to feel a sense of hope. This will start them on their journey towards healing.
  • They must express themselves, to talk and be listened to. In this endeavor, they need to hear themselves from the inside and at the deepest levels of their psyche. Talk-therapy could be enhanced with expressive therapy whereby the individual is allowed to express themselves in myriads of ways with the guidance of an experienced professional. In this regard, any therapeutic intervention would have to take into account the dynamic, sensitive, tenuous and potentially dangerous nature of the therapeutic process for people suffering from deep emotional trauma.
  • They must accept that time does not heal emotional wounds or scars! Then they need to give themselves permission to let go of the past and heal from the inside out.
  • If codependency is a factor, they need to begin recovery and healing and develop awareness in the many ways that this is a feature in their lives.
  • They must uncover and then deal with the shadow parts of themselves which remain hidden from their conscious minds.

There are many resources that can help people who are suffering from emotional wounds.

Here are a few.

                                   

 

 

 

 

 

 

Information, Solution Focused Strategies

Mood and Depression

In the past 15 years, the number of people seeking treatment for mood and depression in the U.S. has doubled to 25 million a year. That’s bad news, but what is worse is that according to recent research, 90% of these people left their doctor’s offices with a prescription for antidepressants. It is downright frightening that prescription drugs have become the treatment of choice instead of psychotherapy and other less dangerous and more effective therapies.

We are in a bad mood epidemic and in a pharmaceutical/drug epidemic and crisis! We need other ways of treating people for this exploding mental health disorder.

One in four women will have a severe or major mood and depression disorders in their lifetime. For men it is one in eight. And, 35 million Americans each year suffer from SAD according to JAMA. One in five Americans are depressed or unhappy, and report high levels of stress, anxiety and sadness. And internationally, 121 million people have been diagnosed with mood and depression disorders while countless others remain undiagnosed because of low access to mental health services. Depression can affect a person’s ability to work, form relationships, and destroy their quality of life. At its most severe mood and depression disorder can lead to suicide and is responsible for 850,000 deaths world-wide every year.

How do you know if you need help? Answer some of the question below. Caution: The questions below are not clinically diagnostic questions. They are being shared as information only and to provide you an incentive to get additional information on mood and depression from other resources.

  1. Do you have a tendency to be negative, to see the glass as half empty rather than half full?
  2. Do you often experience a dark mood and pessimistic thinking?
  3. Do you really dislike the dark, dreary weather, or is your mood triggered by a fall/winter depression (SAD)?
  4. Are you often worried and anxious?
  5. Do you often feel guilty, critical of yourself, have low self-esteem, or suffer from a lack of confidence?
  6. Is your drive, optimism and motivation low?
  7. Do you have difficulty concentrating and focusing, and is your will-power low?
  8. Are you easily upset, frustrated, irritated, and snappy while under stress?
  9. Do you often feel moody, pressured, stressed, uptight, overburdened, and that you don’t have enough time to complete your tasks?
  10. Do you tend to avoid painful issues or situations where you will experience painful emotions?
  11. Have you experienced a great deal of emotional pain and hurt?
  12. Do you have the feeling that your emotional health needs to be boosted?
  13. Do you have crying spells?
  14. Do you have intermittent mental confusion, forgetfulness, and difficulty concentrating?

If you answered yes to five or more of the above questions, then you might consider reading the Mood Cure for more information on how to move from emotional hurt to emotional health. This is information that might help you avoid the nightmare of having to use prescription drugs to treat your condition for the rest of your life!

The Mood Cure provides the good news that we can recover from mood and depression disorders and feel better
emotionally, without the use of caffeine, alcohol, tobacco, or anti-depressants-and the even better news that we can begin to see the results in just one day.

The Mood Cure is a comprehensive natural approach that jump-starts your personal program to uplift your moods and boost your emotional health with brain-fueling amino acids combined with a high-protein, healthy-fat, veggie-rich diet and other nutritional strategies.

Beginning with the 4-part questionnaire to identify your mood type, The Mood Cure will help you to:

  • Lift the dark cloud of depression, sadness, grief and low moods
  • Blast the blahs and moodiness
  • Cool and clear up feelings of anxiety and stress
  • Comfort oversensitive feelings of moodiness, frustration and irritation
  • Let go of emotional eating and progress to emotional healing
  • Recover from addictions
  • Boost your emotional health with alternatives to the nightmarish scenario of having to use potentially dangerous anti-depressants for the rest of your life!

         Read The Mood Cure here now!

Information, Solution Focused Strategies

Valentines Day Depression

For most people Valentine’s Day is a very special day when they both receive and show love. But for others, it is a day of pain, renewed grief, loneliness and sadness.  February 14th can trigger feelings of loss, inadequacy, low self-esteem, disconnection, emptiness, rejection and questions about one’s place in the world. This special day can be the time when some people need to focus on their emotional health.

According to Dr. Laura Slap Sheldon, “It is hard to keep ones heart open when it has been hurt and traumatized by a loss.” Valentine’s Day can also be difficult for those who are single, separated or divorced. Not only can it be difficult, it may be cruel when you see your colleagues in the office receiving roses, hear them talking about the gifts that they are purchasing for loved ones, or when you notice TV ads for roses and fine jewelry.

According to Psychology Today, humans need connection to others in order to thrive and be happy. So when Valentine’s Day comes around and triggers feeling of loneliness and disconnection, it can signal the need for the individual to focus on emotional healing. Research shows that people with a stronger social support network are happier, recover more quickly from surgery and disease, and are at lower risk for depression.

Thus feelings of sadness, loneliness, loss or inadequacy around Valentine’s Day (or on any day of the year) are signs that you need to find ways to heal your hurt, heal your emotions and heal your heart! When Cupid’s Valentine arrows miss the heart – it is time for emotional healing to start!

Here are some tips from Dr. Laura S. Brown, professor of psychology at Argosy University/Seattle on how to handle depression and other emotional health issues during the week leading up to Valentine’s Day:

1. Do not define yourself by your relationship status. Your relationship status is not your identity.

2. If you are single because of a recent loss, allow this to be a day of grieving. Do not pretend that it’s not a hard day. Get support and sympathy.

3. Realize that Valentine’s Day is a commercial holiday. It is not about love and relationships; it is about selling flowers, candy, and diamond jewelry. Think of all the money you are saving.

4. Plan well in advance to do something that will not place you in the path of billing and cooing couples. Even if you usually like dining out alone, do something else on Valentine’s Day.

5. Get together with people who do love you — friends, family members, the people who already have relationships with you.

6. If you are single and you don’t want to be, start now to think about what is in the way of you creating the relationship you want. Find ways to work on becoming the person your dream partner would fall in love with. Start therapy. Take up yoga. Begin to volunteer. Create art. Make meaning. Act to change the world. It is into the fullest lives that love is most likely to fall.

7. If you are single and you like it, now is the time to affirm your choice. People who never marry or partner have close, loving, emotionally intimate relationships and lives worth living. Do not let a couple-driven culture define your choice as something wrong.

Here are some other resources you might find helpful: Click on the images for more information!
A Big Kiss For You! Plush Puppy Care Package Gift Box – Valentine’s Day

Click here for more information.

Solution Focused Strategies

Enjoy Emotional Freedom

Emotional Freedom Therapy or (EFT) is a remarkable technique that alleviates emotional distress using simple yet elegant techniques based on the body’s energy meridians.  There are very, very few techniques that ordinary people can use by themselves in order to gain some control over their dysfunctional feelings. EFT is one of those techniques.

The EFT tapping techniques are a series of astoundingly fast and easy processes can help just about anyone to achieve genuine freedom from the emotions that have created problems in their lives. These techniques have been described by some as one of the most important breakthroughs in the area of psychology in this century. They have been used successfully with thousands of people with a broad range of difficulties.

EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) is becoming known to many amazed users as a “modern miracle.” It can dramatically relieve emotional disturbances along with many physical symptoms. It often works in minutes, its results are usually long lasting, and side effects are almost always positive.

While there are many books on Emotional Freedom Techniques, I recommend one book as a first read for those who seek the quick benefits of EFT. By teaching an easily adopted system of tapping on the body’s meridian points, the book Enjoy Emotional Freedom enables you to ‘tune’ and ‘tone’ your body’s energy system for immediate relaxation and relief from stress and anxiety.

Enjoy Emotional Freedom enables and empowers the ordinary person to start getting results now, without having to be trained for years as a therapist. It’s full of useful tips and strategies which can be deceptively simple yet produce powerful results. This book guides you into ways of being better balanced and more emotionally ‘fit’. Best of all, it gives you the life-long gift of being able to help yourself far more than you ever imagined.

According to one professional, “This book, by two of the most inspiring pioneers in the field of energy psychology, is a lucid and light-spirited introduction to the field. It covers all the essentials, plus powerful refinements they’ve originated in their extensive clinical experience. If you’ve been held back from your dreams or goals by stuck emotional responses, you will find yourself shifting even entrenched patterns quickly — within the first hour of using the methods described so ably in Enjoy Emotional Freedom.”

Another reviewer reported, “I read Enjoy Emotional Freedom thinking that the ideas in it couldn’t possibly work. As I was reading it I thought I might as well try their suggestions, so I did what they said as I read. When I got into bed that night my husband said, “So what’s got into you tonight?”  “Why?” I asked, and he said, “You are so full of energy when you are normally tired and ready to go to sleep”. That’s when I realized their ideas really do work even though I was cynical! Since then I have started using then daily and found I am in a really good place emotionally and health wise.”

 

 

Information, Solution Focused Strategies

Bibliotherapy

 

The Reading Cure!


As a Clinical Psychologist, I am always looking for low cost yet very effective ways in which my clients can help themselves. Most clients meet with a mental health clinician a couple of times per month. Between those sessions clients ought to be busy working on healing themselves by practicing the strategies and techniques and making facilitating changes in their behavioral, cognitive and emotive processes. Most successful mental health outcomes are generated when people are focused on helping themselves.

One very useful method of self-help for emotional pain such as grief and depression is reading books. Reading books? Absolutely! Reading therapy!

The idea that reading can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato. Plato said that the poets gave us the arts was “not for mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself”. The Greeks had it right! Additionally, I don’t think that it was a coincidence that the Greek God Apollo was the god of both poetry and healing!

These days “reading therapy” is officially called bibliotherapy! Bibliotherapy is defined as an expressive therapy that uses an individual’s relationship to the content of books and poetry and other written words as therapy. In some studies, bibliotherapy has been shown to be effective in the treatment of depression and the results have been shown to be long lasting. Bibliotherapy is also an old concept in library science. The ancient Greeks put great faith in the power of literature, posting a sign above some of  their library doors describing the library as a “healing place for the soul”.

The idea of bibliotherapy or reading therapy seems to have grown naturally from the human inclination to identify with others through their expressions in literature and art. For instance, a grieving child who reads (or is read to) a story about another child who has lost a parent will naturally feel less alone in the world. Bibliotherapy is often used very effectively with children

Among adults, reading groups (book clubs) seem to serve many purposes. They serve as social gatherings for like minded people to discuss issues, ideas and topics relevant to their collective interests. Reading groups however also help to bring people together so that they feel less isolated and so that they can build their self-esteem. Reading groups also seem to be an experiment in individual and collective healing.

In one study, there was an indication that involvement in reading groups helped some members to deal with depression, loneliness and grief. Some book clubs specifically help members who are going through the loss of a spouse through death, while it helps others deal with those experiencing the pain of separation and divorce. Reading specific books as biblio therapy is also a feature of meny self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Books seem to help everyone… whether as individuals or in groups. No matter how ill you are, there is a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems.

The benefits of bibliotherapy or reading therapy as a ‘reading cure’ are threefold: Identification, Catharsis and Insight. Simply stated, when reading the appropriate book, a individual has the opportunity to:

  • relate to the main character and his predicament
  • become so emotionally connected to the story that their own feelings are revealed
  • realize that his/her problem is solvable or, at the very least, that he/she is not alone
  • process possible solutions to his/her problems
  • develop hope based on the positive outcomes from the lives of the characters in the book
  • bring an added positive dimension to the self-talk that goes on inside

As a result of reading certain books, people are uplifted, positively influenced motivated and inspired to heal themselves from the inside out.

The key to making all of this work is making sure you have a great book. With so many out there, how do you know which one to choose? In this Blog – Heal Your Hurt – we provide you with lots of suggestions – all of which can be seen through the lenses of reading therapy (biblio therapy). All of the books recommended in this blog can help with emotional pain, depression, sadness, grief or other devastating emotions that people can experience.

Here is another great book suggestion: The Help!  Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.

In The Help, author Kathryn Stockett creates three extraordinary women whose determination to start a movement of their own forever changes a town. And it forever changes the way women – mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends – view one another. This is a deeply moving novel filled with poignancy, humor, and hope.  The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don’t.

I found The Help to be therapeutic. My clients all rave about the many benefits that reading it provides them. You too will find it beneficial when you read it.