Category Archives: Solution Focused Strategies

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.

 

Information, Solution Focused Strategies

Emotional Health

Our negative emotional patterns of suffering will continue to make us sick throughout our lives until we heal ourselves from our core and gain emotional health and wellbeing.

Did you know that our cells hold memories of our emotional patterns of suffering? These deeply embedded cellular memories continue to feed anger, jealousy, fear, helplessness and general disenchantment with life. They contribute to emotional drama in our lives; they are linked to unsatisfying relationships; and they power a downward trend in our emotional health.

Good emotional health is aligned with high levels of emotional well-being. Recent research by such people like biologist Bruce Lipton shows that our emotional health directly affects our physical health. For instance, depression can correlate to heart attacks, anxiety can create digestive issues, and anger over stresses our heart.

Western medicine tends to ignore the impact of such negative emotions on our physical health. Many of us are in denial of the impact of these negative factors on our emotional health.

Improving our emotional health is crucially important if we are to feel more empowered, have better relationships, and achieve high states of personal wellness.

In Michael David Lawrience’s book “Emotional Health – The Secret for Freedom from Drama, Trauma and Pain” readers learn how to break the cycle of suffering, heal emotional pain,  overcome sabotage of your happiness, removing things which sabotage success, and awaken their excitement and joy. Emotional Health is really an owner’s manual which describes practical methods to release physical and emotional chronic pain, suffering, and stress.

When you get “Emotional Health”, you will read stories of people who healed their emotional suffering to gain greater freedom, including a former CEO of a major company, a therapist for teenagers, a minister, a medicine woman, an author and spiritual coach, a horse whisperer, a quadriplegic, a life consultant coach, a core energetic healer, a psychotherapist, a former nurse, a transpersonal therapist, and the founder of spiritual organization. Now just from reading this book and following the steps laid out be the author, you, like these people, will find, learn and apply the solutions you have been looking for and get the benefits you deserve.

Now if you want to read more about how you can find your way from emotional hurt, pain, suffering, trauma and drama to full emotional health and wellness, then I suggest you get “Emotional Health – The Secret for Freedom from Drama, Trauma and Pain” here now.

Information, Solution Focused Strategies

Surviving Infidelity

 

From presidents or people who want to be president to ordinary people from every area of life, infidelity seem to be one characteristic that plagues marriages. And as we have seen, infidelity leads to hurting hearts that are hard to heal.

According to Psychology Today, “Infidelity is breaking a promise to remain faithful to a sexual partner. That promise can take many forms, from marriage vows sanctified by the state to privately uttered verbal agreements between lovers.”

The list of infidelity stores is long and the exclamatory comments by those betrayed are indicative of people who are deeply wounded, deeply hurt emotionally, – people whose hurt might be potentially hard to heal.

Psychology Today contends that as unthinkable as the notion of breaking such bonds may be, infidelity is common—and when it does happen, it raises thorny and emotionally painful questions. Should you stay? Can trust be rebuilt? Can you and should you forgive and move on? Can you survive infidelity? Can you heal your hurt?

Nothing your marriage has sustained in the past compares to the pain of discovering that your spouse has been unfaithful. The betrayal, rage, sadness, and jealousy is unlike anything you’ve experienced before. And yet it is possible to move forward, decide what to do in your marriage, decide on surviving infidelity, and most important, decide to heal your hurt!

For more than ten years, “Surviving Infidelity” has been offering sage advice and compassionate, non-judgmental analysis. Based on the private practices of licensed marriage and family therapist Rona B. Subotnik and clinical psychologist Gloria G. Harris, Ph.D, Surviving Infidelity, 3rd Edition brings you the new hope and the empathy you need in this difficult time. It is the hope that you can heal your hurt and heal the emotional pain in your heart.

Powerful Review by a customer who bought the book:
“I recently was informed by my spouse that she had a past 1 year affair. I remember being very numb and angry. It was recommended that I read Surviving Infidelity. What a true blessing this book provides. At a time when I felt my world was coming to an end this easy to read paperback has given me the strength to move forward and understand why people in general have affairs but more importantly than that the book affirmed the emotional feelings I am experiencing right now are NORMAL and though I share some responsibility for our relationship I am not at fault for my wife deciding to have the affair. I have decided as a result of this reading that my relationship with my wife is worth saving and this book has given me valuable tools to move in that direction.”

Here is another review by another customer:
“This is a great book. It offers solutions to problems such as deciding whether to remain married, how to treat your spouse, how to control your anger/sadness/self-esteem, etc. It never at any point blames either person (betrayed or betrayer).

 

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