Category: Techniques
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Teenagers and Anxiety
This post discusses anxiety in teenagers, characterizing it as psychological fear tied to self-concept and future uncertainties. Solutions include mindfulness, fostering intimate communication, and setting concrete goals, all of which can alleviate anxiety and promote emotional growth. The post emphasizes understanding the unique challenges teens face during development.
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Attunement Exercise
In building an empathetic ability it is very important that people first advance their ability to attune to another person. I will briefly explain attunement, then I will offer a practical – easy to use – intervention.
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Feelings are important in growing consciousness – Existential and Mindfulness Based Emotional Reflection Therapy
Accepting your emotional reality and holding an awareness of those feelings helps us to be conscious of how we are currently being influenced … understanding this influence opens up the possibility to use reflection to guide your actions towards your best interests and towards the most ideal interaction patterns.
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The thoughts, emotions, and behaviors triangle
The Diagram below can be used to understand the interconnectedness of thoughts, emotions and behaviors. Additionally the diagram gives an easy to understand explanation of the many different means of offering a psychotherapy intervention. I use this Diagram to offer a visual depiction of all the different options which are available to help the client…
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Relationship feel stuck? Try pretending that you don’t know everything about your partner
So what is the solution… pretend that you don’t know your partner at all… the more that you can honestly engage in this suggestion the more you will find that you actually don’t know your partner as well as you thought (in a good way).
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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…
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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…
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Support group for teens with type 1 diabetes
Quick summary: Research has shown that support groups for teens with type one diabetes are extremely beneficial to the participants overall well-being. In fact, people who have diabetes tend to have lower incidences of mental health concerns as compared to the general population – this is thought to be because of the amount of familial,…
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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…
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Parenting questions for couples – Questionnaire to increase synergy, collaboration, empathy, and overall understanding for couples who are co-parenting a child.
The intention of this exercise is to foster an open dialog surrounding the different parenting philosophies and different desires/dreams that each individual has for their children. As a person gains a greater insight into their partner’s philosophies along with a greater understanding or the emotional significance of those philosophies, they become better able to meet…
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Empathy building exercise – learning to be empathetic – increasing emotional understanding
Quick summary: In difficult times often we really want someone to ‘just be there for us’ and to ‘show compassion and understanding for what we are dealing with’ as opposed to offering pragmatic solutions or taking initiative to ‘fix it.’ In short people very often simply want empathy and they can feel worse, alone, or…
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Vengeance and the Ego
Quick summary: Vengeance is a tool which creates instability in an attempt to create a stable ego.
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Past goals driving current choices? – Overcoming your inner teenager
Quick summary: What drives your choices, ambitions and behaviors? I am going to suggest that many (if not most) of us still carry values, goals, wants, wishes, desires etc that we forgot to let go of when we grew into adults. Being a teenager is truly difficult… you believe that you are an adult though…
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Who are you? How to stop conforming to expectations and to start presenting the self you would like to present
Quick summary: Most people both consciously and unconsciously and both intentionally and unintentionally present themselves with different characteristics, beliefs, opinions, dispositions, emotionality, and behaviors etc in different settings. Who is the real you? How are different settings encouraging you to present your self in a certain way? If you closely examine the expectations of your…
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Problems sleeping? 10 Tips to help you sleep
Quick summary: I am giving you 10 tips that will lead you to create and maintain a healthy sleep cycle. Sleep is vital for optimal health… you owe it to yourself to dedicate yourself to a good night of sleep. If you can stay dedicated you should be able to create a stable sleep cycle…
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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)…
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Premarital counseling questions | life long commitment questionnaire | questions for a long & happy relationship
Quick summary: This is a premarital or a life long commitment questionnaire that I developed to encourage partners to talk openly about subjects that tend to have a significant impact on the success of a marriage or other long-term relationships. This questionnaire is suitable for people of all different cultures and religions and for any…
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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…
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Narrative therapy summary
Quick summary: My intention is to tell you what techniques can be used in narrative therapy, and why you would use them.
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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…