• Gaslighting in Relationships: Effective Ways to Respond

    Imagine waking up to a world where your reality feels like a mirage, where the truth is foggy and distorted by someone else’s perceptions. This is the haunting reality of gaslighting. Gaslighting in relationships can leave you feeling disoriented, questioning even your reality, and undermining your self-worth. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which one person tries to make another person doubt their perception of reality, memories, or feelings. The term originates from the play, “Gas Light,” [...]

  • Anger in the Bible: Mastering a Challenging Emotion

    Anger is an emotion that occurs in just about every situation you can think of. Whether you’re at the grocery store, sitting at a restaurant to have dinner with your date, visiting a sick loved one in the hospital, at the school drop-off zone, or at the park walking your dog, anger isn’t far away. It can sometimes seem as though it is a living thing waiting to escape from its cage if we’re not vigilant. Our life experiences [...]

  • Codependency Recovery: Finding Healing from Codependent Relationship Patterns

    Codependency is a concern that affects relationships of all sorts, whether romantic relationships, parent-child relationships, siblings, friends, or colleagues. Codependency distorts relationships by introducing unhealthy patterns of behavior, often leading to the deterioration of both the codependent relationship and the overall well-being of the individuals in the relationship. Identifying codependent behaviors in your relationships can help you begin to find healing from unhealthy relationship dynamics. Breaking Down Codependency Our relationships are typically a network of interdependent connections that allow [...]

  • 3 Reasons to Stop Drinking Alcohol

    Alcohol is an accessible substance upon which people become chemically dependent. Because alcohol is so readily available, a person can purchase alcohol from their local grocery store or liquor store and bring it home and drink it from the comfort of their home. But there are a number of reasons you may want to stop drinking alcohol. Because drinking is also socially acceptable, alcohol is something that a person can do socially and then advance to drinking each night [...]

  • 5 Things You Need to Know About Eating Disorders

    If you just go with movies, television, and other media, you will come away with an odd mix of accurate and bizarre ideas about eating disorders. In those spaces, facts are often subordinated to storytelling or plain old sensationalism. It is no surprise then that many people don’t understand what eating disorders are, what causes them, who suffers from them, and how one can recover from them. 5 Things to Know About Eating Disorders Here are five essential things [...]

  • Does Breathing for Anxiety Really Work?

    “Just breathe, yes that’s it; slowly in and out.” If you’re someone who struggles with anxiety, chances are you’ve heard this advice more times than you can count. Well-meaning friends, family, or even strangers often suggest that breathing is the magic solution to calming down in the middle of a panic attack or stressful situation. But let’s be real, when you’re in the thick of anxiety, the idea of just breathing often seems way too simple, if not downright [...]

  • 8 Common Habits of Anxious People

    Anxiety is something we all have to deal with occasionally, but for some, it is a constant experience. Anxiety can be complex, irrational, and sometimes undetectable. However, the people who must deal with anxiety daily will feel the effects of it, whether they know where it comes from or not. Highly anxious people tend to develop similar habits over time. These might serve as indicators or red flags for the presence of anxiety in their lives. Common Habits of [...]

  • 5 Trauma-Informed Beliefs That Can Cause Anxiety  

    Many people experience anxiety without knowing where it comes from. While anxiety can be linked to external events or part of a disorder, more often than not, anxiety is connected to the way we see the world and the beliefs we carry. It is possible to gain control over certain types of anxiety. It might require that we face past experiences and rewire our limiting beliefs that are connected to unresolved trauma. In this article, we’ll consider some trauma-informed [...]

  • Hyperfocus: An ADHD Superpower

    If you were to comb the internet looking for everything that has been written about ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), it’s quite likely that the majority of the material available teaches you how to diagnose the disorder or how to live with it, or generally speaking, sympathizes with you because you have to deal with ADHD, rather than talking about hyperfocus. But recent years have brought on the dawn of a new era in ADHD Land (it’s not a [...]

  • How Anxious-Avoidant Attachment Affects Relationships

    When you think about relationships, do those thoughts come with warm and welcoming feelings, or are you left feeling on edge? People don’t experience relationships the same way, and how you interact with others and form relationships is influenced by your earliest interactions with others. Depending on what those interactions were like then, you may have trouble forming healthy relationships with people now. How a person relates to others and forms connections is called an attachment style. An anxious-avoidant [...]

  • Fear of Abandonment: How It Develops and How It Can Affect You

    Have you ever had an experience so visceral that to this day it feels like that moment never quite left you? It could be the first time you saw the ocean, the time you fell from a tree, a time when you saw a project come together and felt alive, or perhaps when you experienced a tragic loss. Our bodies and our minds remember the things that happen to us; they leave a mark on us, even if it’s [...]

  • PTSD and the Senses

    PTSD affects everyone in different ways, but one common effect of PTSD is how it changes the way we sense the world around us. We might find ourselves being shut down emotionally. It may feel like some of our five senses are not working as they should. Some people even lose balance or experience frequent dizzy spells. It can be alarming when you are caught unaware of the effects PTSD might have on the senses. A Sensory Processing Disorder [...]