If North America has been successful at anything, it has fully achieved the goal of taking nearly every fantasy and depiction of human sexuality and, in image, written word or other means, managed to make it available for anyone to peruse.
Read moreWhen we receive referrals from the medical community of clients struggling with anxiety or panic disorder, one of the most common requests we get is for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. It’s highly popular — though I doubt if the majority of those who refer for such have any idea what they are suggesting.
Read moreAs many as 75% of all pregnancies result in a miscarriage before the woman knows she is pregnant. Once the woman has tested positive on a pregnancy test, there is still a one in five chance of an early miscarriage. Later in the pregnancy, while quite uncommon, miscarriage still occurs about 1% of the time though, for some women, it may repeatedly occur.
Read moreRead moreWe all know conflict within marriage is inevitable. Two imperfect people under the same roof are bound to create sparks. Therefore, instead of trying to avoid having conflicts, it’s much wiser to learn how to have them effectively.
Usually, one partner is hurt or offended and begins with a harsh start-up to the conversation. Harsh start-ups usually begin with phrases like “you always” or “you never.” In response, the listener usually feels attacked and either becomes defensive or stonewalls, which usually creates even more tension.
Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – have been, for years, a prescriptive definition of what every grieving person must go through. They are so culturally imbedded that, when I was writing our company page on grief & loss, I had to include her name and stages or Google wouldn’t even recognize our page as legitimate.
Read moreIn 1994, the American Psychiatric Association removed sexual addiction (Then formally known as, “Hypersexuality,”) from the DSM-V – their expansive psychiatric bible that defines mental health disorders. It wasn’t strange or surprising – and it certainly wasn’t incorrect to remove it.
Read moreSharing. It’s a word we hear in so many contexts. Talk shows are no longer talking at us – we’re, “Sharing the conversation.” Churches are trying to stop laying down rules and invite people to, “Share,” or, “Participate in a discussion.” We don’t even post stuff anymore, we, “Share,” on Facebook.
With all these years of practice, we should all be good at communication and levels of emotional intimacy by now…
Read moreRead moreA life of feeling stalked.
Imagine what it would be like to live life constantly expecting a crisis to happen – always on the alert for some kind of threat or emotional trauma? What it would feel like to constantly scan the horizon seeking for sick people or germs – forever worried that they would make you sick or even just being around those people would cause you to feel sick?
Read moreImagine you have been watching your marriage slip away for years.
Perhaps you finally got to wondering what he had been doing on that computer all of those late nights. You found a spare moment, logged in and started looking at his internet history. When you did, you were instantly greeted by thousands of erotic or pornographic web sites and the hours spent on sites for escorts. Instantly, you understand why he hasn’t been sexually interested in you once this month.
Or:
Read moreIf you’ve never experienced depression yourself, imagine with me for a moment.
Imagine what it would be like to be unable to laugh, and unable to cry. To feel like your head is in a grey cloud that follows you everywhere and all of your thoughts just echo inside of it. Imagine living with the sense that you have no impact and the world has no impact on you — where your only release is sleep but the idea of waking up for another 16hrs fills you with dread. Imagine living inside a glass cell that you can see out of but no one else seems to be able to see you inside of or hear your pleas to get out.
That’s depression…
That’s why, for so many people who struggle with depression, thoughts of taking their own lives actually feel comforting.
If you or someone you love is experiencing this, know that things don’t have to stay this way. There is a way out and here is a map of the first steps on that journey.
