Tag Archives: mood and depression

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

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!

Solution Focused Strategies

Emotional Freedom

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What is Emotional Freedom? Here is what Dr. Judith Orloff says:  Picture yourself in a traffic jam but feeling utterly calm. Or not letting your supervisor’s bad mood frustrate you. Imagine being peaceful instead of worrying. Or enjoying nurturing relationships and a warm sense of belonging in the place of loneliness. This is what it feels like when you’ve achieved emotional freedom.”

Emotional freedom is one of the answers that you need in order to heal your hurt and to deal effectively with emotional pain. To achieve emotional freedom you must learn how to understand and protect your own inner sensitivity. You must discover the secrets of how to empower yourself from the inside out. You must also develop ways to understand why you feel the way you do. Even more importantly you must learn how to change your feelings to those that sustain and uplift you.

Achieving emotional freedom involves learning how to face your inner fears, confront them and build unstoppable courage that leads to finally doing all the things that you have ever wanted to do and have never been able to follow through on.

Other benefits of gaining emotional freedom involves developing the ability to be sensitive to and read people’s emotions. You begin to combat the many emotional vampires in your life who have been sapping you dry, draining your energy and diminishing your spirit. You learn to stop other people’s emotions from dragging yours along with them.

One of the greatest benefits of emotional freedom is that you learn how to transform anger, jealousy, frustrations and disappointments into the positive energy of patience, hope, love and inner excitement.

Judith Orloff has written a powerful guide that encapsulates all of the above. In her book Emotional Freedom, she shows you how to identify the most powerful negative emotions and how to transform them into hope, kindness, and courage. Emotional Freedom is a road map for those who are stressed out, discouraged, or overwhelmed as well as for those who are in a good emotional place but want to feel even better.

Here are some reviews of Orloff’s Emotional Freedom by some well known individuals:

“Helping people free themselves from fear, worry, and anxiety is what we have to do. It’s hard work but we manage to get positive results. I’m enjoying reading your book on kindle.”
Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese Peace Activist, Nobel Peace Prize winner

“A must read for anyone who’s tired of feeling frustrated, lonely, jealous, or emotionally tense. Dr. Orloff shows you how to achieve a lightness of being and feel more positive and peaceful. Highly recommended.”   Deepak Chopra

“Emotional Freedom combines neuroscience, psychology, and spirituality to present a new approach for freeing yourself from negative emotions. This book offers you a path to greater health, intimacy, and compassion.”
Dean Ornish, M.D., author of The Spectrum

“A heartfelt, accessible guide to the graceland of peace and calm–regardless of our parents, our past, or our present. It’s loaded with nuggets of practical and profound healing wisdom.”
Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom

 

Information, Solution Focused Strategies

5 Simple Steps to Emotional Healing

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Stress, anxiety, panic attacks, fears and phobias, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, sexual abuse, depression symptoms, compulsive spending, compulsive overeating, bulimia, relationship issues, negative beliefs, low self-esteem, grief, and test anxiety are all issues which can cause severe emotional pain! Additionally, these problems can likely result from past emotional hurt.

According to Gloria Arenson, psychological counseling is like detective work. She tries to help her clients find out as much as they can about what makes them to so that they can help themselves get to the heart of their problems. Emotional healing is the critical step that is needed to move people from emotional hurt to emotional health.

She used Energy Psychology techniques so that her clients can achieve an understanding that most of their bad habits, harmful behaviors and negative beliefs which might have been created as imperfect solutions to threatening situations that might have happened a long time ago.

As a result the clients’ problems are positively transformed and their behaviors change for the better!

After counseling thousands of people for over 25 years Arenson has learned that everything people do makes sense in the context of their lives. No one else in the world has the same fingerprints as yours. No one else has had your identical life either.  And as a result your problem might need a specific solution that fits only you.

To achieve this, Arenson teaches clients a specific type of Energy Psychology that is specifically tailored to help clients with their specific steps to emotional healing!

Arenson indicates that many of the people who come to her who have had years of talk (counseling) therapy and are still suffering emotionally. She contends that talk therapies often take a very long time to be effective and, even then, may not eliminate the person’s emotional hurt. She claims that therapy only goes as far as people can remember, while Energy Psychology methods can go the level beyond awareness to provide emotional healing for past hurts. She advises that Energy Psychology techniques are generally gentle and work rapidly and permanently without causing more pain and anguish.

Arenson wants to teach people who are hurting emotionally and who suffer from deep emotional pain how to use her specific type of Energy Psychology to help themselves and to provide emotional healing.  She wants to assist clients  in resolving their problems as quickly as possible.

Arenson has written a book where she teaches readers a variety of Energy Psychology methods that will help to eliminate or transform the fears, anxiety, traumas, compulsive behaviors, and the negative thinking that may be holding readers back from moving forward. Such personal interventions may help to create a happy and healthy life.

Need help in to heal your hurt or help with emotional pain, then examine Arenson’s book: Five Simple Steps To Emotional Healing Here!

According to Arenson, it is the
“The last book you will ever need!”