Category: Solution Strategies & Goals
-
The ‘List’ – Goal creation in couples counseling
The content discusses challenges couples face in therapy regarding task delegation and list-making. It highlights how differing perceptions of responsibility can lead to burnout and resentment. The distinction between list addiction and task completion is crucial, affecting goal-setting in therapy. Interventions vary based on individuals’ relationships with responsibilities.
-
Does laziness cause depression or does depression cause laziness?
The content explores whether laziness causes depression or vice versa, suggesting a complex relationship. It lists 20 behaviors that might unintentionally promote depression and emphasizes the importance of intentionality and action in combating it. Each individual’s approach to wellness is unique, so addressing these factors can help alleviate depression.
-
Weight loss – what does that food mean to you? Insight, reflection, and replacement in achieving weight loss goals.
Quick summary: I will discuss why certain foods seem or feel impossible to give up and offer a brief suggestion as to what you can do to overcome such an obstacle. Food (as with many other things in life) often has a symbolic importance which is more influential or otherwise important that the simple tangible…
-
Addiction Intervention Debate | Increasing Freedom by fostering an increase in consciousness, reflective ability, and emotional availability | Is there always a choice or are certain stimuli too controlling?
This post will talk about the different views on treating substance abuse by looking at the themes of determinism, reflective ability, mindfulness, self-awareness of a person’s emotional self, moral compass, freedom, disassociation, empathy, and addiction. I will propose the controversial suggestion that some addiction interventions might be unintentionally decreasing a person’s ability to freely make…
-
Compassionately Assertive – Maintaining Boundaries without Aggression – using empathy and clarity to get your needs met
Quick summary: This post will explain how to use empathy, self-awareness, and assertiveness to ensure that your personal boundaries are respected by others. Often we have a difficult time when an instance calls for decisive action in order to help the environment to respect our individual boundaries. Some react with aggressiveness that protects a person’s…
-
Anger and Arguments – Are you defending the topic or your self?
Quick summary: as part of increasing your self-awareness I suggest that you take a look at the topics that really get you ‘heated’ with the goal of coming to an understanding of how you personally identify with that topic. In this self-exploration you might just find that your emotion has very little to do with…
-
Overcoming addiction to substance – find a replacement behavior that offers a comparable result – hope involves you being both reasonable and honest with yourself
Quick summary: Overcoming a substance addiction can be truly difficult as the majority of substances that people become addicted to offer: significant results, consistent results, fast onset, and results with little to no effort. The reasonable way to overcome an addiction is to isolate what emotional state (happy, uninhibited, spiritual, relaxed, euphoric, carefree, distracted etc)…
-
Setting realistic expectations and living within those realistic expectations…
Quick summary: When you desire a change or when you desire a certain set outcome, it is helpful to offer acceptance to your limitations so as to live with realistic expectations. To attain a sense of self which is congruent with our most basic intention is can be helpful to allow certain boundaries and guidelines…
-
Understanding how your Values impact the choices that you make
In this context I will use the word ‘values’ as having the following definition – a ‘value’ is an emotional state or character attribute that you desire to live within or to be defined by; If you value feeling in control you will make behavioral choices that you believe will lead you to acquiring the…
-
Creating Motivation for the Change Process – Why creating a mental image of the ‘new you’ works
Quick summary: I am going to explain a theory as to why visualizing the ‘changed’ or ‘new’ you can have a positive impact on your motivation and therefore a positive impact on your ability to meet your goals. Pop psychology and positive psychology have been telling the public to ‘think positive” and to “tell the…
-
Why are people Defensive? Reducing the anxiety of change
Defensiveness is a behavior that people consciously and unconsciously engage in to avoid the anxiety which inevitably arrives with change. Change requires us to drop our perceptions of permanence… this means that when we change we are offered an experienced example of how our concept of self is ever transient… it can feel uncomfortable to…
-
Some stress is best left
Quick summary – I have written a lot of blogs about steps that a person could take to reduce their stress and anxiety by simply working on his or herself and his or her relationship with others. There are times in life where the best option might be to find a way to remove your…
-
Argumentative? Dichotomies in conversations lead to arguments not solutions
Quick summary – Couples and politicians alike commonly experience unnecessary unpleasant emotional reactions and a failure to reach a resolution do to the use of false dichotomies in conversation. Dichotomous thinking is what people commonly refer to as “either or thinking” or “black and white thinking” – basically people oversimplify issues so as to believe…
-
Michele Weiner Davis’s ‘Divorce Busting’ – a response
Michele is applying a brief solution-focused intervention specifically to the issue of avoiding divorce (I enjoyed the consistency in that her book is literally and figuratively brief and solution focused).
-
Combined Wellness intervention
Quick summary: this is a template for a psychotherapy/nutrition combined service which mainly looks at the psychotherapy intervention. A psychotherapist and a nutritionist offer a combined service to assist a client’s mind, body and spirit to work together in achieving optimal health.
-
Labels, identification, and judgments from an existential view
Quick summary: Sometimes the masses seem to all engage in a consistent behavior … and when such an occurrence happens it is easier perhaps to take the phenomenon for granted so as to not put all too much thought into what motivates such a seemingly universal behavior. Most humans pass judgment, assign rigid labels, and…
-
Forgiveness is the Heart of Justice
Quick Summary: Forgiveness is the heart of justice… by this I mean to say that the ‘justice’ we seek can often be deconstructed into meaning simply vengeance. There is no justice is vengeance as the suffering which we seek justice for actually tends to grow with acts of vengeance (these acts which perpetuate suffering are…
-
Forgiveness
“As I forgive I become free… I learn to accept… I gain purpose as forgiveness opens the door for me to help a wider range of people… and I gain love… unconditionally.”