When I was nine years old, I dreaded going to the beach in the summertime. Visiting my grandmother’s beautiful home in Laguna Beach should have been exciting, fun, and carefree for a young California girl, but to me, the beach meant one thing. Wearing a swimsuit. Unlike other girls my age, my swim attire was […]
Billions of people use social media every day. This has changed the way we communicate with each other. These days, the average user spends 2 hours and 16 minutes every day on social media platforms. Although social media has given us an open door to more information than ever before, there are good and bad […]
Mental health is being increasingly recognized as an important and valid factor in our daily lives. As a result, there are many supports and systems in place to assist those who experience some form of mental illness. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) defines mental illness as a health condition that involves changes in emotion, thinking, […]
Take a moment to reflect on the qualities you value in yourself. For many of us, a term like “hardworking,” “a go-getter,” or “ambitious” might rank somewhere near the top of our list. We might value the effort we are willing to put into our work, our appearance, our relationships, or finding an overall sense […]
Stopping to smell the roses or admiring nature has always helped me focus on what is important. There is something about the air, trees, and liveliness of everything in nature, in my opinion. It helps to keep things simple in this over complicated world. The beginning of this summer is a bit different than last […]
Whenever I am asked why I became a mental health counselor, I typically try to be as honest as I can and explain that I just followed a hunch. Many therapists go into the field in some part due to their own positive experiences in therapy. Be it assisting with past trauma, navigating dysfunctional family […]
So often in our lives, we are looking for a quick fix to reduce our stress levels. We search for what is going to help us feel better fast. We turn to the internet, to google, to our friends and maybe even our therapists for answers. We want relief and we want it now. We […]
Grief, we are all feeling it these days, some more than others, and more than ever some are going at it alone. At our core, we all understand that one day life will present us with individualized grief and suffering, and under healthy circumstances, grief is a complex process that is not linear. As the […]
When I was an early career psychologist, if you had asked me my thoughts on working with eating disordered patients my knee jerk response may have sounded something like, “I don’t get it, if you’re hungry eat, if you’re not hungry don’t eat, simple”. Insert present self wanting to offer former self some words of […]
A lot of us were not shown how to disagree, argue, or have healthy conflict with other people, especially close loved ones. The role modeling of our parents at a young age resolving conflict is so influential to how we interact with people as adults when we don’t see eye to eye. Just like most […]
