It’s that time of year again for the holidays! Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are just three of the biggest holidays in America. The time people spend on decorating their homes, shopping for gifts, wrapping and hiding said gifts, and of course, traveling can cause even the most easy-going person to feel the stress and anxiety […]

Growing up one of my favorite movies was “Pollyanna.” The story is about a girl who had many tragic events befall her, but she refused to give in to the negativity that would have been so easy for her to adopt. Her optimism was infectious, and she was able to help others develop the skill […]

Most of us have experienced the heightened anger and frustration that comes from heavy traffic and thoughtless drivers. I have, on more than one occasion, allowed a few choice words to spill out when being cut off in traffic. However, my “road rage” has improved considerably since moving to this large city. I hear on […]

If you are reading this, maybe you are old enough to recognize the song from which I took the title to this blog. One of my first mental health jobs after receiving my graduate degree awarded low pay paired with an incredible amount of work and specifically paperwork. We would play the song “She Works […]

“TV dinners” which became popular more than 50 years ago now were one of the first steps in us becoming an “instant culture.” Microwaves became popular not long after. Now we have instant messaging, online shopping that magically produces brown boxes at our doorsteps in days to even hours, personal shoppers and access to a […]

Whether you are 5 years old or 50 years old, going back to school can be both exciting and frightening. School, like work, becomes our first place where we develop a love/hate relationship as we either love school or hate it, love our teachers or hate them, love our classmates or can’t stand them. Some […]

Children do their best to put on brave faces to cope with life’s stressful or daunting situations, assimilating to the best of their abilities. Starting a new school year or having a conflict come up with a friend can cause normal anxiety. In fact, if navigated well, these circumstances can help them to build the […]

Most of us are logically aware that we don’t know what the future holds. We make our plans and put one foot in front of the other, hoping things will turn out relatively close to what we envisioned for our lives. But what about those bumps in the road-those things we didn’t see coming as […]

As I said in the practical blog on this topic, I never learned about self-care in school. In fact, I didn’t really learn about self-care or what we as therapists call “positive coping skills” until I was a young adult. Sure, I had ways to cope and I even had some positive skills in my […]

In grade school, at least when I was growing up, we all took sex education class. I remember they separated the boys from the girls and talked to us about our bodies and how to protect them. They even showed us anonymous pictures of people with diseases so that we could know what the diseases […]