Wellness
Please see the articles below on a range of topics, posted here to support you and give a sense of our approach.Romancing Your Body: Building a new relationship with yourself
In my years of clinical practice, I’ve witnessed dozens of young women beginning as young as 13 begin to lament about the skin they’re in. They begin to engage in an epic power struggle with their bodies, pitting themselves against their tissues, not realizing the foundation they are building now will likely create floods, cracks and structural damage in their soul’s home in the years to come.
These young women are fortunate that they are getting some guidance at a formidable age to combat these negative images and redefine their way of relating to their bodies. For others who don’t seek help early in life, I see the impact of years of countless criticisms, shame and guilt take its toll. Decades of harsh words, desperate physical measures and emotional disconnection are akin to the worst of abusive relationships. The difference in this dynamic is that there is no court that can grant you permission to separate from your self. The choices are to remain manacled to your own personal prison or find a way to make peace with your container.
I encourage my clients to consider the traits of a dysfunctional relationship. Words like mistrust, deceit, co-dependence, judgment, hatred and disrespect often come forth. I ask them to describe how a person in a relationship such as this would feel and emotions such as depressed, angry, shameful, guilty, lonely, desperate and hopeless arise. I then ask them what they would do if they found themselves in a relationship like this; some say they would leave and others say they would do their best to work it out.
They quickly see the parallels between this kind of unhealthy relationship and the one they have fostered with their bodies. It becomes evident that saying horrific words, generating negative feelings and wishing for escape is no way to relate to an entity that you have committed to “until death do you part”. As a marriage family therapist, I strive to give couples new ways of relating, communicating and attending to each other’s needs. I invite them to romance their relationship once again so that they may return to a time of excitement and bliss.
In order to do this, I take a different route than many counselors in that I don’t spend an exorbitant amount of time dissecting what is wrong in the relationship. Rather, I want to focus on what is right, fulfilling and pleasurable and encourage more of this. I am often met with some resistance, for many want to use the hour to reenact the power struggles they find themselves in outside of my office. Instead of colluding with this tendency, I ask them to shift to recounting a peaceful, close or tender time they had with one another recently. We delve into how this occurred and what contributed to the openness and vulnerability, for this is what we need to recreate.
This same shift in perspective needs to occur with your body if you want to come to relate to it in a more loving way. Ask yourself: when was the last time I felt comfortable in my body? What was I doing? What did this feel like? Get in touch with a time when you were allies with your tissues...you partnered to provide you with the life experiences you enjoy. Perhaps for some of you, this will be difficult to conjure up and you may have to return to a very early time. For others, you may not have a period in your life that you can recount and therefore, you’ll have to turn to brief moments of contentment.
Now ask yourself: what do I need to do to feel this way once again? The response most give is along the lines of the number of pounds they have to lose or the desire to change their most despised body part. This is much like the couple in my office who believes that they will be happy if and only if their partner changes. This is a very disempowering stance that leaves you depending on external circumstances beyond your locus of control for your happiness.
I invite you to do the same thing I ask of my couples…shift your perceptions and watch your physical world change. Thank those thighs for the support they give you…give appreciation to those arms for allowing you to reach out to others…have gratitude for that back that gives you structure and support. Ask yourself: What do I want to see in the mirror? How do you want to feel in my body? What kind of things would I like to do with boundless energy? How do I want people to respond to this energized, vitalized version of me? (By the way, how are you feeling now that you’ve begun to think of what you want? Chances are, excitement and bliss is bubbling…you are beginning to romance yourself once again.)
Look for opportunities to treat yourself well. Think back to the things that you have done at the beginning of a relationship to impress your suitor. Things like choosing your best outfits, making special date plans, taking extra time to attend to his/ her likes come to mind. Apply these to your new commitment to romancing your hot relationship with your body. I also urge you to be compassionate with yourself, should those old habits creep back in. Just like with my couples, I prepare them for change as quickly or as slowly as they like, but with the understanding that a slip doesn’t mean all is lost or that you have to return to a prior way of relating. Take time each day to think about how you wish to feel in your body and generate gratitude for the ways your body is supportive to you. This focus and attention to your desired relationship will tell your body that it can cooperate with you…that it is no longer at odds with you and can safely partner with you for a life of harmony together.
When it Gets Hot
Mood, attitude and wellness in the heat
With summertime officially upon us, the rise of the masculine (yang) energy creates an increase in the vibration of the molecules around us. This creates shifts in the atmosphere, which in turn impact our bodies, minds, moods and attitudes. Here are some considerations as we move into the heat of the year.
Move Around and Create
With increased sunlight, our bodies naturally want to be more active and spend the chi that has been cultivated in the previous seasons. Without moving your energy, it can become pent and bound up and actually turn on itself, creating anger and frustration. Find outlets- like outdoor festivals and fairs, gardening, dance (check out our Play Into the Way workshop) camping or sports, to creative endeavors- singing, painting, crafting or cooking. It’s really about expressing what is in your heart to create- without judgment or censorship.
Light up your Mood
This is a perfect time to get outside and get your dose of vitamin D. There’s actually been somewhat of a concern in recent years about the over use of sunscreen and sunglasses (as the eyes are one of the places where we absorb the most vitamin D), blocking the absorption of vital vitamin D and creating vulnerabilities for conditions like osteoarthritis and decreased bone density. Though proper protection is needed for extended exposure, don’t altogether shy away from the rays. There are many proponents of sun gazing for small periods of time, in the early morning (6am) for treatment of migraine headaches and improved mood, as sunlight has been studied for its impact on the creation of the feel good brain chemical, serotonin.
Heat Can Cook your Patience
When molecules vibrate and move at a higher rate, we often experience feelings of aggravation, irritation and annoyance. When you’re cooking without AC in your car or the wimpy fan in your room isn’t cutting it, patience can wane and tempers can flare. Studies have demonstrated that this affects things like the crime rate, which increases in the summertime. Though increased sunlight can bring forth greater energy, there’s often a point of diminishing returns where energy gets zapped and the body can become overwhelmed. Just like an overheated car needs a bit of a break, try slowing down when you feel the temperatures rise in your mood. We teach clients to do deep breathing exercises and move the energy down your body into the earth. Do your best not to allow the excess inside be projected upon the people you love the most by doing your part in cooling down.
So feel the rays, move energy in new ways and enjoy the charge of the season!
What is Dog Therapy?
By Alexis Sword Andre, MFT
When I first learned about Dog Therapy I was already a therapist working full time with children and their families. I thought it would be a nice distraction for the kids to pet and hold the dog while talking about difficult subjects. Over the years I have found it to be so much more and am surprised at how few people know about it and how few therapists incorporate it into their practice. The best way to explain the benefits would be to give you an example of a real life child that had tremendous success using the therapy dog in session.
Carrie, (name has been changed to preserve confidentiality) was diagnosed with severe anxiety and agoraphobia (fear of people), 4 grades behind grade level, morbidly obese and a recent drop out of special ed. When we first started sessions, I came to her home due to her fear of going outside. The girl and her parents agreed to participate in a therapy dog in session after many failed attempts by previous therapists to get the client to talk. The session started with her refusal to talk to me, but she could not resist the therapy dog, who was eager to sit next to her and be pet. She quickly laughed and asked me about the dog. It seemed talking about the dog was a safe topic for her. As she began to open up to me, she explained how she felt judged by people due to being overweight and therefore refused to go to school or to even leave the house. I convinced her to test her theory and she agreed to go for a walk with the dog. On the walk she kept expressing her increase in anxiety and feeling that people where only looking at her and thinking negative things about her, until someone stopped and complimented her on what a “cute dog” and began asking questions about the dog and if they could pet the dog. Carrie could only nod her head shyly while I answered for her. At our next session, Carrie asked if we could go for a walk again with the dog! She smiled and said that she was excited that people where nice and that maybe she was wrong about people. During the weeks that followed, the client returned to school, got a dog for her birthday, lost weight walking the dog each day, and made friends at her local dog park. Years later, Carrie continues to give me updates, eager to share her recent accomplishment of graduated high school on time and is enrolling in college this fall. It is stories like these that make me proud to have a therapy dog.
Over the years, I have seen dozens of cases where a depressed child found comfort and joy in the unconditional love and happiness that emanated from the therapy dog, a bully who learned how to give and receive love and affection first from the therapy dog and then from his peers, an abused child who found comfort and safety expressing her feelings toward the therapy dog after having lost her trust in people.
Empowering You This Spring
By: Alexis Sword, MFT
So spring is here and everyone is looking forward to the sunshine, warm weather and time off. So now is the time to look inward, set goals, and give yourself the satisfaction of achievement. Vacations always feel that much sweater when we can look back with a sense of satisfaction and say, I did that, I completed something and now I can rest. So here are some tips and tools to help you achieve your goals, young and old.
1. Motivation - doing something with out inspiration or intention just sounds like work and is depriving yourself from the deeper joy and satisfaction that comes from doing something with purpose behind it. So watch an inspiring movie or video, read a book, go online or share with a friend what moves and touches you. (eg: I love to read a runners magazine before going for a run. Before I know it, I'm looking forward to it and got some great tips along the way.)
2. Create a goal - how do you know you've reached your goal if you never set one? How can you give yourself the credit due if you never acknowledged where you started from? We are so preprogrammed to look for the negative, to expect so much from ourselves and yet never give ourselves a pat on the back. Yet, this is what fuels us to go on and makes our efforts feel more effortless. Be good to ourselves, your stuck with you, til death do you part. The more specific the goal, realistic, and small, the more likely you are to succeed. Set several and feel the satisfaction of checking them off. (eg: get an "A" on my Math final. Get a "B" on my Science test.) (eg: donate at east 10 items of clothing from my closet to charity.)
3. Address Barriers, Fears, and Negative self-talk - As you start making your goals or just thinking about them, you may find that your inner voice starts saying things like: you can't do that, or its too hard, or I don't have enough time. Acknowledge them, see if you need to adjust your goals, but then live bigger than that. "Not everyone who tries succeeds, but everyone who succeeds tried." Every great leader, athlete, musician, etc set big goals, sought out daily inspiration, worked hard, and Chose to believe in themselves. I could talk all day on this subject but the truth is talking positive to yourself is the secret energy source that fuels your life. Your better off calling yourself a "Rockstar" than drinking one. Say it enough and you'll begin to feel the benefits.
4. Success is build on Failure - consider failure as "falling up." Without failure you never would have learned to walk. You probably fell 100 times before you could run. The job you hated growing up probably taught you more about what you wanted to do than the one you liked. Look back at a struggle in your life and see what you learned from it. (eg: I learned that I was not good at Science in school and knew I needed to work twice as hard at it as my other subjects to get an A or even just a B. I also learned that I could get that A if I worked hard enough at it, despite not being good at it.) Being willing to admit you do not know something and then find ways to make it interesting to you, is one of the keys to successful learning.
5. Good Habits - getting up at the same time everyday, going to bed at a reasonable hour. These are good habits. Its not rocket science. We know this already, but we still push ourselves each day to do so much, even though we did not give our bodies the proper food, exercise and sleep to optimize its potential. Your body is a delicate and amazing vehicle that is the only one you have. Pretend you are going to live to 100 years old. Do you want your mind to be sharp? Do you want to be able to walk and live free of pain? Treat your body with the loving care it deserves and it will allow you to enjoy more of life and do all the crazy things we ask it to do.
Thank you for taking the time to read this article and consider how you can make your life more filled with joy, fun, and vitality.
Confidently Spring Forth
By: Brandon Hyatt, MFTI
Lack of self confidence is a problem everyone has faced at one time or another. The cruel fact of the matter is that confidence is gained from engaging in the act or acts that we lack the confidence to engage in or try. For example, it is easier to surf a ten foot wave after you have wiped out on a ten foot wave. I carefully choose the language in that example to illustrate an interesting point, wiping out (or dealing with our imagined terrible consequences) makes you much more confident in that situation than a successful ride or endeavor would make you (so is he trying to say that failing is good!!??). Many a wiser person than myself have comment that we learn little if anything from our success, but everything from our failures (I don’t like that word but it helps to illustrate my point). Human nature is geared toward minimizing loss and pain (physical, emotional, etc), so it is our very nature that stops us from being the people we want to be and have the experiences we yearn for. Without our initial efforts in anything we would not have been able to master it. Take walking for example; most of us learned to walk well before we had developed enough of our cortexes to understand the risk and dangers of trying to walk (falling down stairs, stumbling into tables, etc). Surely if we would have been aware of the possible dangers associate with walking many of us wouldn’t have taken that initial step (I definitely wouldn’t have). To quote the late great Bruce Lee, “Consciousness of self is the greatest hindrance to the proper execution of all physical activity”. To sum that up, over thinking anything is a large problem. I’m sure we all can remember suddenly being involved in a conversation with someone we would have never dreamed we could talk to, it just kind of happen spontaneously or without our conscious knowledge. If you were to take that same situation even with a guaranteed positive outcome and tell the same person (me in this case) that you have 10 min to prepare to talk to that person it would be an anxiety provoking situation, your (my) mind would flood with all types of negative thoughts and disaster type scenarios and those very thoughts would make it much more difficult to be your authentic self.
IF we are to extrapolate from those examples and investigate further in the domains of social and interpersonal risks we can see the same pattern. Often times our thoughts about the outcome of a risk often times create what we are afraid of. If we step back we can see that the actual consequences of a risk are never as bad or long lasting as we imagine. Think of the last embarrassing thing you saw on the internet, then try and remember it in two weeks, odds are that you will have forgot about it or it has lost its potency due to the 1000’s of other clips you have seen. Worse than that, we often time down play our success and highlight the negatives in our lives (back to our nature to limit loss). I can remember the two experiences where I put myself out there and was shut down horribly, but I would have a much more difficult time recounting the hundreds of experiences where nothing bad or even something good happened…oh human nature.
You might be saying to yourself that is a wonderful observation but how does that improve anything or build confidence. Well I was just getting to that. There is an easy risk free way to experiment with the above situations. We can take what is called the observer or third person perspective. This is a safe position because it is detached from the risks of the situation (embarrassment, success, failure, etc) hey it’s not me it’s him, I’m just watching. The best way to try this is when we engage in situation and start feeling less and less confident start paying attention to your thoughts or inner dialog don’t’ do anything just notice. When you notice these thoughts just acknowledge them and let them go out of your mind as quickly as they came in. You don’t have to listen or spend energy trying to block them (stage 1 is just about awareness). You may find that you notice your mind running wild with thoughts that are the opposite of what you want. If you’re lucky or have put in the hard work and this doesn’t apply to you, good job! But if you are like a lot of us and notice that you are shooting yourself in the foot or letting your inner dialog talk you out of your ability to succeed (limiting loss again) then you know where to start.
One of the most frustrating experiences is not knowing where to begin when dealing with a problem, mess, etc. However, with the above experiment you can figure out where to start. Other times we can deny that anything is even wrong (there our bodies go trying to protect us again). This is hard to deal with, but rest assured that having the courage and confidence in yourself to acknowledge that you want to change is the hardest step (nice to know that it gets easier as you go). We can all relate to the thought that change is scary and uncomfortable (how many people work jobs they don’t like because it is less uncomfortable to stay then to leave?) But how often have making changes every really done you wrong? Even Donald Trump has filed bankruptcy seven times (and aside from his presidential campaign seems to be doing well). To quote Confucius “Fall down seven times get up eight”. People only truly consider change an option when the prospect of change is less uncomfortable then staying in your present situation. If you are reading this article you might be at that exciting stage and done with the hardest part. Best to you in your journey!