Category: Counseling (Page 1 of 2)

Grieving During the Holidays

By Neal Niznan, MSW, LCSW — The grief process is challenging any time of the year. Grieving the loss of a loved one around the holidays provides its own challenges that can magnify the intensity of grief you feel. As we move towards the end of the year, two short months and four major holidays, Halloween to New Year’s can be extremely hard to navigate. Planning in advance what you want to do during the holidays is one way to maintain a sense of management of the grief process.

The holidays embody an inherent sense of joy, happiness and peace. You, however, may not experience any of those feelings, and feel completely out of step with everyone else. It is hard to put on your happy face and make the holiday joyous when you do not feel that way at all. You may think it will just be easier not to do the holidays this year as a way of coping.

I would suggest avoid isolating yourself during the holidays. There may be a way to manage the emotional demands of the holidays and not throw yourself into a tailspin trying to navigate the demands on one’s time and wellbeing. Consider what you need for yourself and what parts of the holidays are important for you to participate in. This may be a year where you do not include all the family traditions. Review what you normally do to celebrate and select the most essential elements. Think about what the most meaningful parts of your traditions and see if you can incorporate them into your revised holiday plans. You may not have the energy to decorate the whole house or prepare all the family’s favorite dishes like you always did. Do what you have the energy for.

The grief process should be embraced not avoided. It is impossible to get together with others and not mention the deceased, or their absence. Try not to make it the elephant in the room. Include your loved one in the celebration by setting a place for them at the table, playing their favorite music, cooking their favorite dish, or including them in a prayer before the meal to honor them. Be proactive about how you would like to celebrate and include the deceased in the festivities.

It is important to have a plan for stepping away from, or even not attending, a holiday gathering. Despite your best efforts and intentions, give yourself the option, at the last minute, not to participate in family gatherings or parties if you are just not up for it. Give yourself space to participate in the way you can. Let others know that you may leave early or not join in certain activities. Others will understand this is a challenging time and you need space to be by yourself.

It may seem easier to avoid the holidays this year and hide until they are over. With a bit of reflection and planning, you can create for yourself a safe space to grieve, honor your loved one, and celebrate the holidays with family and friends. Everyone is grieving and missing the deceased loved one. We provide support to one another through our presence, our words and our touch. A message of love and support is expressed through an embrace with someone who understands our loss. Allow yourself to be the recipient of support from others and provide comfort in their grieving.

Marital Life: Share Your Expectations

Genesis 2: For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.

By Cindy Dowling, MS, LMFT — Marriage is a process full of growth and change. In a Christian marriage, each spouse’s role is to help the other get to Heaven. One important way to keep your marriage healthy is to share your expectations. As a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I am blessed to see clients at all stages of marriage: Couples who are dating and/or engaged who want to make sure they begin their Covenant on the right foot; couples recently married who want to anchor in healthy communication skills before children; couples who need support connecting and parenting young children; couples going through parenting transitions from pre-teens to teens or from high school to college; couples becoming empty nesters; and even retired couples. These couples could be in crisis. They could notice they are heading down a negative path and want to get ahead of a crisis in the future, or they could be just looking to strengthen their relationship.

When a couple gets married, each spouse brings with them their morals, values and traditions from their family of origin. They also bring with them their wounded past, possibly from their family of origin, past relationships or friendships. All these experiences help individuals create expectations of how they think their spouse, parenting and life will play out. When spouses don’t share these expectations with each other, it can lead to resentment and frustration because their needs or milestones they haven’t shared with their spouse have not been met. It is so important for couples to be open and honest, and share with each other the expectations they have for their life.

Here are some examples of expectations that people might forget to share:

• What a marriage should look like, chores, roles, who should work
• Communication
• Intimacy, affection, kind words
• Retirement
• Parenting
• Living close or far from family
• Cleanliness standards
• Sleeping habits (early risers/night owls)
• Need for personal space and need for time together
• Spending vs. saving
• Financial transparency
• Who pays for what
• Parenting styles
• When to have children and how many

This is a list of just some of the expectations I see couples struggle with in my practice. According to Dr. John Gottman, founder of the Gottman Institute, the normal couple waits an average of over six years of being unhappy before they seek marital therapy. If you are feeling unhappy in your marriage, don’t wait for help. Find a therapist who you connect with that you can have for the life of your marriage.

If The Empty Nest Makes You Depressed

By Teri Love, M.S. — When my son was one-year old, he loved to stand by the open dishwasher and “help” unload the clean dishes. One day, he dropped a glass, and it shattered at his bare feet. I was right beside him and swooped him up before he got cut. Later that day, I told my friend about the incident, and she said, “Our kids don’t realize how many times a day we save their lives.” I laughed because it was a little dramatic but also a little true.

Fast forward 17 years, and my husband and I dropped off that same son for his freshman year of college. How quickly the child we raised and protected since birth grew up and set out to begin his next phase of life. It was beautiful and exciting but also heartbreaking.

It is late August as I write this, and I see evidence of that same heartbreak in posts all over social media. There are college goodbye photos, tear-jerker parenting poems, and terms like “momancholy” in memes about the deep sadness we feel when adult kids move out.

What do we do with that deep sadness? It can be confusing because it often sits side-by-side with joy, relief and pride. It can also be complex if our kids don’t seem to be headed in the direction we hoped and prayed for. Because I’ve reckoned with oodles of these feelings myself, waded through them with friends and family, and addressed them in the therapy office, I would like to offer encouragement along with three ways to manage emotions during this phase of life:

Care for yourself. Recognize this is a colossal change, and practice self-compassion. Self-compassion might include a short break from work or other responsibilities while you grieve the empty room, empty chair at the dining table, or quieter house. It’s okay to cry and not apologize for it or criticize yourself. (“I’m being silly;” “I should be happy;” “Everyone else seems to be getting on with life.”) If there is something nice you would do for a friend going through a rough time — do that nice thing for you!
Talk! First, talk to God. God knows you and loves you and understands the details of your pain. Second, talk to people who’ve “launched” adult children before or are going through it along with you. This is the perfect time to invite another parent you know out to coffee or for a walk. It is surprisingly healing to be reminded you’re not in this alone. Third, if things seem too weighty to manage on your own, talk to a therapist. A good therapist can accompany, validate and help you navigate your way through this giant shift in your life and into the next phase. And speaking of the next phase . . .
Assess your life and dream a little about the next phase. Some parents might start this process well ahead of their adult child’s move-out day; others need a few months or longer to observe how things go and adjust to their “new normal.” When you’re ready, be intentional. Brainstorm things you’d like to do that match your personality, budget and energy. I’ve seen everything from turning a son’s room into an elaborate walk-in closet to taking sailing lessons, selling the house, and preparing for a trip around the world. The point is, life is not over and there are endless ways to invest in yourself, others, and your newly-adult child.

Six years have passed since our oldest son’s freshman drop-off at college. It doesn’t take much effort for me to recall the exact feelings I had as we drove away from him. It was (and still can be) a hollow ache and I don’t like it at all. If you are dealing with that hollow ache, I pray you will feel the consolations of God’s goodness and His promise to bring good things out of difficulties; the awareness that you are not alone; and the strength to talk about your experience with a trusted friend or therapist.

Managing Everything But Time

By Michael Kastelnik, Psy.D. – “Time management” is a funny phrase. To see what I mean, take the concept of management as largely understood in a business context. Companies all over the world spend a lot of time and effort to make sure their laborers can get the job done. Sometimes the mere presence of managers helps to keep people honest and ensure they are actually working and not slacking off or engaging in some other activity that is bad for business. This all makes sense with managing people that you can influence, but it makes less sense with such an invaluable yet intangible resource such as time. Nevertheless, there are other aspects of our lives over which we have more obvious control, albeit some of us more than others. I’m talking about things such as energy, stress and attention.

Like with many aspects of life, managing energy levels is relevant to the conversation. As such, any advice on improving time management will include the usual components of self-care such as proper diet, exercise or comparable activity, adequate sleep, maintaining wholesome relationships and stress management. In fact, stress management is a complex skill in itself and it may be fundamental to time management inasmuch as you need to have just the right amount of arousal to complete a task, according to the Yerkes-Dodson model of productivity. Too little concern for a task will literally get you nowhere, while too much concern can lead to progressively worse outcomes. Mistakes can occur. Burnout is an outcome when people are putting in more effort with no more output in the product. And, of course, health problems occur in the short term and over time when people get too stressed. Physiology is simple enough to regulate with activities such as slow, deep breathing or jumping jacks, while mental stress relief may involve something like journaling about concerns.

Attention is another resource that may require more discipline to regulate. We all tend to focus on things we find interesting and space out on boring tasks. Becoming your own behavioral therapist and limiting the interesting things to serve as a reward for the more mundane tasks could not only help you get your work done but could also build a resistance to forming unbalanced habits with things that exploit our attention, such as electronic devices.

In addition to short-term tactics to stay on task, it is also necessary to step back and make sure we are balancing efficiency, the ability to do tasks using less time, money or energy, with effectiveness, which is a positive contribution to our goals.

For example, let’s say you have a goal to build a stone wall on the front of your property. If you know you have a lot of large stones in your backyard, you may decide to start by gathering those stones and bringing them to the other side in the most efficient way possible. You could figure out how to reduce the likelihood of injury by lifting the rocks with a certain technique. You might utilize a simple machine, such a wheelbarrow, to do it quickly with simple machines like a wheelbarrow. You may be tempted to feel so proud of your method that you move the rocks to the backyard again because you can. Maybe that last activity sounds far fetched, but the point is that if the emphasis falls too much on efficiency, you may lose sight of other important things such as implementing the rest of the steps needed to complete the wall, maintaining it, and having a rationale why you are building it that you can instill in your children, who could in turn maintain or improve the wall when their time comes. The point of this example is to show how we need the ability to pause from our work periodically or even regularly to make sure we are growing in virtue and working towards worthwhile goals and not simply keeping busy.

So, what can we do if managing our time seems like such a complex task? We can pray that the Holy Ghost enable us to use His gifts such as wisdom. We can ask for counsel from respected elders and mentors on how to grow in prudence regarding particular problems we would like to solve. We can start where we are and acknowledge what we have some control over, such as self-care and attention, as well as those that we don’t control and could therefore benefit from avoiding worrying about, such as the passage of time. This is the Serenity Prayer in action. While we may not control time, there is a lot we all can do to make the most of it.

Hope for Teens with Specific Strategies

By Gian Milles, M.S., L.P.C. — We hear a lot today about the mental health crisis in teenagers. While it is true that teen mental health in America has been declining since the early 2010s, there is also reason for hope. According to research from the CDC, about 3 in 5 children ages 6 to 17 exhibit indicators of flourishing, including showing interest in learning new things, staying calm and in control when faced with a challenge, and working to finish tasks they start. Sometimes, with sensationalistic news and no shortage of geopolitical instability, we can be tempted to focus only on the negative. Depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, you may see the 3/5 figure as comforting (over half of our children are healthy!) or worrisome (nearly half of our children are unhealthy!). Either way, I want to share some good news with you.

If you are one of those people who are happy to hear that 3/5 of children are healthy, I rejoice with you. This is certainly a wonderful thing that so many children are doing so well despite the adversity they are facing in our tumultuous times. On the other hand, if you are concerned about those that are not or if you know a young person who is struggling, there is reason for hope.

Psychologists have defined hope as willpower + waypower. What does this mean? It means that having hope consists of having the mental energy or motivation to achieve clear goals and specific pathways, or mental plans, for being able to make these goals happen. With proper coaching, the 40% of children and teens who are experiencing significant anxiety and/or depression can grow in the virtue of hope, and hopeful people are protected against strong, persistent emotions such as anxiety and depression. Helping teens to stay motivated by offering them incentives (e.g. taking them to a sporting event or a trip to Rita’s Water Ice) can be helpful. If it appears that they are motivated, but are having trouble with follow-through, It can also be helpful to help them problem-solve with specific ways they can achieve their goals. This may involve guiding them through building more effective study habits, improving their diet, or helping them to join a sports team or get a gym membership.

In the context of these strategies, the most powerful force for good in a child’s life is unconditional love. Kobe Bryant advocated for this in one of Bryant’s last interviews. When you tell a child that you love them no matter how they behave, and, what’s more, that God loves them no matter how they behave, this gives teens the freedom to take risks, knowing that failure does not threaten their inherent dignity and lovability.

This combination of unconditional love along with specific goals, motivation, and pathways to success are the resources that allow teens to effectively experience the freedom from anxiety and depression that God and we desire for them.

Having a Healthy Mind, Body and Spirit: What Does that Really Mean?

By Cindy Dowling, M.A., L.M.F.T. — How many times have you heard the importance of having a healthy mind, body and spirit to live your life to the fullest? It is something that I share the importance of with my clients. You may be wondering what exactly that means. Read on . . .

A healthy mind is the ability to maintain emotional balance, cognitive clarity and mental resilience. A state of mind where you have control or authority over the negative thoughts that pop into your head daily. Studies have shown we have over 6,000 thoughts a day. Those thoughts affect our actions and reactions to situations and people in our lives. When one lets their thoughts cause them to get stuck in the past (past regrets/mistakes/ losses/failures) it leads to depression. When one lets their thoughts lead to over-thinking fears of the future, a person can suffer from anxiety. A healthy mind also includes emotional stability, the ability to process and express feelings in a healthy way, and the capacity to adapt to change or adversity. Finally, maintaining a healthy mind means taking care of your emotional needs, setting boundaries, and nurturing your sense of self-worth and purpose.

To maintain a healthy body there are many avenues to explore. Your diet should be full of nutritious, minimally processed foods including a healthy supply of fruits and vegetables. If you typically eat healthy, you will know when you eat something unhealthy because you can feel it in how your body functions. It’s like putting the wrong fuel in your car and then it just doesn’t run the way it should. You should exercise regularly. When you exercise, your body naturally produces endorphins which help regulate your body’s response to stress and anxiety, and contribute to a feeling of overall well-being. Sleep (7-9 hours a night) and hydration are also important pieces to having a healthy body. Finally, avoiding unhealthy habits such as smoking/vaping, drinking alcohol and drug use is important.

A healthy spirit would include having a sense of inner peace and being confident in your religious values and practices. A healthy spirit is nurtured with a disciplined prayer life that encompasses gratitude, compassion and self-reflection. It would include a personal relationship with God that instills a sense of belonging to the body of Christ and a deeper meaning for life.

Working to maintain a healthy mind, body and spirit can help keep you functioning in an optimal condition and enhance your overall quality of life. If you feel you are lacking or struggling in one of these areas and may need the help of a mental health practitioner, please give our office a call to set up a consultation with one of our therapists. God bless.

No Electronic Substitutes for Prayer

By Michael Kastelnik, Psy.D. — If you have been out in public in the last few years and patronized a business, you may have noticed some advertising that recommends you to “Download the App” that is pertinent to that business. This advertisement usually offers some reward, such as free gasoline or a free sandwich, for your downloading the free app. I’m reminded of the expression “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” but we can discuss the true cost another time. Whether you participate in it or not, I think we can agree these companies are successful in using this technique of reinforcing our purchases, and sometimes even giving them the not-so-subtle name of a “Rewards Program.”

Given the power of incentives to shape our behavior, is it possible that the appeal of making our lives easier applies to less worldly activities than eating, such as thinking or praying? There are plenty of websites, applications and content related to intellectual endeavors and even to our faith. In fact, you are probably reading this article on a website. I personally enjoy finding the occasional video, podcast or prayer on the Internet. Some of these activities are “infotainment” that can help pass the time as well as provide me with some level of information that can inform my worldview and my faith. I can even stay connected with my brothers in Christ around the world via email or other apps.

A problem arises if we consider simply engaging with religious electronic content as fulfilling our Christian duty, or worse — vaguely being a “good person.” We can consume such content both passively and actively. The passive reception of content, such as displaying sacred art on the walls of your home or hearing an audio recording of Gregorian chant while you do chores, surely has its benefits. And, attentively reading threads in a group chat or listening to a recording of someone praying can be quite engaging and even an invitation to pray on your own. The Holy Spirit can speak to us through other people including the words of a book or the recorded voice of someone expounding on theology. Those words can even be the content of prayer, but the words themselves are not a substitute for the activity required of us to speak to Him in prayer. Hearing a recording of the rosary playing in the background is probably better than hearing a lot of what is on the radio today. But passive listening, while helpful for reinforcing learning of a foreign language, probably doesn’t count as prayer time, especially if that is the only time you are giving to God. Just as the Greek meaning of the word liturgy suggests, it is the work of the people, and work typically requires producing rather than merely consuming.

Given the challenge of incorporating technology in our lives while preserving our humanity, what can we do? Even if using this technology is more necessary to work, study, shop and communicate, there are some aspects of our lives that we can and must retain in simplicity.

For example, we can pray. We can spend time speaking to God and attempting to quiet your mind in order for your soul to hear what He has to say. Practice meditating on Truth using a good translation of the Bible and a commentary from the Church Fathers. Pencil this time in your calendar or planner, if necessary. If you don’t have a minute or two to spare for prayer, you might want to consider freeing up your schedule a bit. Also, you can make rules for limiting your electronics use to certain times and/or places. With the rest of your time, try to incorporate activities with flesh-and-blood people around you and more stable objects around you such as plants or books.

Even if our devices help us exchange information with each other and allow you to spread good ideas including the Good News, it is up to us to use our whole being, not just our digital profile or consumption habits, to follow the commandments to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. There isn’t an app for that, and that’s okay.

Drug and Alcohol Addictions: Causes and Enabling vs. Helping

By Gian Milles, MS, LPC, Integrity Counseling Services

Causes of Drug and Alcohol Addictions

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, people begin taking drugs for one or any combination of four reasons:
1) to feel good
2) to feel better if they are feeling bad
3) to improve performance or psychological functioning
4) curiosity and peer pressure.
I believe this is exactly right. This means that when people have an addiction to drugs and/or alcohol, this addiction serves a function.

All of us want to feel good. I do not know anyone who enjoys feeling bad, purely for the experience of feeling bad. Some people may enjoy the pain of a good workout (I do), but it is really the challenging of the mind and the growing of the body that people are after. The pain for its own sake would not be worth it. Even people who engage in self-harm or suicide are typically attempting to alleviate some sort of intense suffering.

At the same time, every single one of us chooses to do things that make us feel bad. We each have bad habits that we are struggling to kick. In this way, we all suffer from addictions. Addiction, as a human phenomenon, is more a matter of degree and type than it is about certain people being built a certain way.

While it is true that we all have addictions, some are certainly more severe than others. My inability to put the stinkin’ remote down and stop watching the second season of Narcos on Netflix (yes, I binge-watched it this past week) is not severe enough to prevent me from going to work. We are all in this together, but some people more than others have addictions that interfere with daily functioning. See the work of experts Dr. Gabor Mate and Dr. Anna Lembke to provide a more comprehensive case for this position.

Enabling vs. Helping

Friends and family can play an instrumental role in enabling an addiction, or conversely, in helping a person to overcome their addiction.

Many people fear losing their loved one, so they do not establish proper boundaries regarding the addicted person. They may even give them money that is being used for the drugs. This enabling is doing far more harm than good. Any addicted person will tell you how brilliant they can be at exploiting their loved ones to finance their addiction. Brief tips on how to avoid enabling include not giving someone money, not allowing someone to spend time with you while they are actively using drugs, and not allowing someone to live with you while they are using. These can be very difficult things to do when we see a person suffering with the disease of addiction, but oftentimes they are what is ultimately most helpful.

On the other hand, people who have the support of friends and family are more likely to overcome their addiction. Part of the reason the 12-step programs like AA and NA have helped so many people is because there is such an emphasis on building relationships. In these relationships, addicted people can feel unconditional love and acceptance. Some ways you can be helpful to an addicted person are by buying them groceries, giving them transportation to work or to a doctor’s appointment, and letting them know that you love them unconditionally and are there for them if they ever need to talk. Tough love in the form of strict boundaries is often the best way to help. Encouraging them to get help and staging an intervention with other loved ones can also be effective.

If you or someone you know is suffering from an addiction to alcohol or drugs, please do not hesitate to reach out for help.

Therapist Gian Milles Featured on Relevant Radio

On April 17th, Integrity Counseling Services’ licensed therapist Gian Milles, MS, LPC was featured on Hour 2 of The Drew Mariani Show. Gian discussed how spiritual factors including a relationship with God and attendance at church improve one’s mental health, and how the absence of those factors can lead to depression and suicidal ideations.

Listen to Gian’s segment on the Relevant Radio podcast at The Drew Mariani Show 4-17-24.

Death by Distraction

By Deborah Rojas, MA, Integrity Counseling Services — Could you handle a few technology-free days? No phone, no laptop, no music — power down the technological devices, and not because the word “vice” is in “device.” Stillness and true quiet are necessary for contemplation, the time and space for getting to know God and ourselves in relationship to Him. Contemplation is impossible when we are distracting ourselves to death.

I recently went on my first silent retreat at a convent. The hospitality of the sisters set the stage for a few days of prayer and rest, and the natural order and rhythm of the contemplative life provided a technology-free, sacred space to pray. Other than Mass and the Daily Office, I was left to myself with nothing that I had to do.

On an ordinary day, the tasks of the moment rule. It was in this space of having no tasks and freedom from technological distraction that I was able to be with God and get to know myself better. Different parts were able to emerge because I slowed down. Some of the parts that came forward are parts that I don’t like or would rather avoid but need love and the healing mercy of God.

In therapy, we often have to learn how to see ourselves before we can begin to do interior work. When parts of ourselves make us uncomfortable, the natural instinct is avoidance. This is easy with distractions like social media or video games. However, some distractions are internal: daydreaming, fantasies, worrisome obsessions, or over-spiritualization, for example, and more challenging to navigate.

When Jesus encountered suffering, he walked, not away, but towards it! He had compassion. He saw, and he had compassion. Then the healing began. I am grateful to work with the Great Physician and walk towards others who are suffering. It is much harder to embrace my own wounded parts. This might be one of the reasons why I love counseling so much!

I would rather distract, avoid and turn away from painful realities in my heart. This is not the pathway to life and love. Rather, it is death by distraction. Friends, make the meaningful effort to look up, look within and share the loving, compassionate gaze of Christ with each other. If it is too difficult to do on your own, seek the help of a qualified counselor to see you and walk with you. May Jesus grant you healing in your relationships and a flourishing life this Easter season.