“I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself” -Hayao Miyazaki
Hayao…
Arielle Teets
Cognitive behavioral therapy is consistently used in my personal therapeutic approach. It helps teach clients to challenge their thoughts and beliefs. Put them on trial, see if they hold up, are they rational or irrational? Imagery can be used to extend this intervention, to create new images to accompany these thoughts, images that reflect the rational versus irrational, new adaptive helpful images. Imagery can be used in treatment of many different mental health diagnoses, including, but not limited to, depression, mania, anxiety, trauma, and phobias.
When someone engages in disordered eating habits, they may eventually find themselves in therapy to work through their habits. The body the brain and mental health overall suffer from disordered eating. Disordered eating describes patterns of restrictive eating, compulsive eating, irregular or inflexible eating patterns: fasting or binge eating falls in this category. Disordered eating is used to describe certain behaviors that may not meet the clinical diagnosis for an eating disorder. Signs of disordered eating patterns are dieting, compulsive eating, exercise and compensatory behaviors, body dissatisfaction, and food preoccupation. Disordered eating behaviors can have a negative impact on an individual's physical health, emotional well-being and overall quality of life. Even if someone may not meet the full criteria for a specific eating disorder, it doesn't dismiss them from needing help or needing to be taken seriously. Early intervention and support are key proponents of preventing these behaviors from escalating or evolving into more serious conditions.
People often fall accidentally and easily into patterns of emotional blackmail, especially when the stakes are high. We have all had a time where we may have felt guilt tripped into a request by a family member or coworker. The request often prioritizes what they want over our own personal wants or needs. Susan Forward wrote a book titled Emotional Blackmail in 1997. She explains how often traumatic relationships or ones that impact us negatively, often involve one person attempting to control another using their emotions. Emotional extortion (a term often used interchangeably with emotional blackmail) involves an individual exploiting a victim’s emotional vulnerabilities to control their behavior (Forward, 1997). This control jeopardizes the person’s autonomy.
Even though the election is over, for many, the anxiety that the election sparked and sustained is not going anywhere. According to the American Psychological Association nearly 70% of Americans reported the presidential election of this year was a source of significant stress in their lives. We see it everywhere we look, still, it is hard to limit your content consumption or manage doom scrolling but that is a must.
Our lives are a conglomeration of nature and nurture. We learn from our environment, how we are raised, our life experiences, and we adjust. Seligman and Maier in 1967 did a study which identified learned helplessness as a phenomenon in dogs. (Sadly) Psychologists did experiments on dogs and found when they were exposed to repeated shocks that they could not control, the animals abstained from taking action when they could prevent the shocks. This coined the term and theory of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness has been associated with and used as an explanation for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. The main features of learned helplessness are lack of motivation, difficulty learning from success and perceived emotional numbness.
