Mental Health Blog
Our thoughts on therapy, counselling, mindfulness, and well-being.
I have been excited to prescribe “time in nature” to some of my patients. And I’m finding people are generally receptive to such a simple solution. Like many naturopathic treatments, there is some effort involved and new habits to be formed. But the payoff is real and measurable, and a good reminder that the answers to our health concerns aren’t always in pill-form.
What do Taylor Swift, that guy whose best attempt at romance was to send you a picture of his junk, and bell hooks have in common? Well, if we managed to look past the catchy lyrics, the nauseating brocabulary, and the penetrating eloquence, we’d see that they all just want to be happy. But what is happiness, anyway?
Now that the days are as dark and cold as Justin Trudeau’s soul, it’s pretty normal to be feeling kind of down. And while Netflix and brooding Spotify playlists are awesome, they’re not usually enough to carry us all the way to April. The good news is, therapy nerds have wrestled for a long time with the question of how to address the winter blues, and we’ve come up with a few solid suggestions.
As a therapist, I’ve learned two universal rules: 1) living according to other people’s standards will make you miserable, and 2) trying to find lasting happiness by making only external changes doesn’t work. If you’ve been preoccupied with losing weight, you might want to consider whether your motivation comes from either a desire to live up to external standards or a belief that changing your outside will make you feel better on the inside. If it does, it might be time to try a different path to happiness.
Louis Sachar said, “It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward.” In a world plagued by impatience and the desire for FAST and EASY results, the idea of taking small steps to achievement seems like a futile process. Do you train yourself to believe that small things do not make a difference?
Just refusing to acknowledge history doesn’t change the fact that it has a huge influence on the present. Psychologically speaking, our brains are programmed by experience, most of which took place in the past. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to live in the moment, but the best way to become truly spontaneous is by integrating the past, not ignoring it.
How many times have you heard friends or family say they had physiotherapy and it did not work for them? Or that they went to physiotherapy and all they got was a hot pack and a machine? All physiotherapists and physiotherapy clinics are different. Just because you or someone you know had a bad experience at one clinic, does not mean you should not try another clinic. Why not check out BodyTech Physiotherapy? It was created out of a desire to improve the quality of physiotherapy care in the city of Kitchener.
Anxiety sucks. It can weigh on you every moment of the day and rob you of your ability to enjoy anything. It can ruin relationships, sabotage performance and even lead to suicide. It’s also the issue people most frequently want to address with me in therapy. Over the years, I’ve learned that there are three essential steps that almost everyone who suffers from anxiety needs to take.
“Use your words.” As a kid, that’s the extent of what I was taught about communication. As the years went by, I learned about times tables, the French Revolution, and condom use. But somehow my education on how to communicate effectively with other human beings never evolved beyond, “when you have a problem with someone, you should talk about it.” To be sure, that’s great advice. But it begs the question: how?
The enemy, men, is inside the gates. The unconsciousness that drives us into the world to seek revenge, to dominate, to conquer, to control, is the darkness that keeps us from connecting to our own hearts. The inner battle is far, far, more difficult than any external revolution, which is why most of us never try. Instead, we dismiss the inner realm as fiction or irrelevant, like the fairy tales in which the people no longer believe in dragons.
Somewhere along the line we seem to have gotten the idea that our inner and outer worlds are unrelated. Most of us no longer think it’s weird that many psychiatrists and psychotherapists are materialistic and classist, or that many activists who work tirelessly for inclusion and peace also harbour bitter hatred toward certain groups of people. Something’s wrong with this picture, and our world desperately needs it to be corrected.
Antidepressant medication for anxiety and depression is one of those topics that makes people want to abandon civilized conversation and just punch each other in the face. On one side you've got doctors and pharmaceutical companies who are eager to tell you that your brain is just broken, and medication is the only solution. On the other side is a jumbled alliance of those who believe a) taking medication is a sign of weakness, or b) anything produced by a pharmaceutical company comes to us directly from the mind of Satan. Here are four reasons to adopt a more moderate stance when it comes to antidepressants.
Relax: I’m not writing this to make you join hands with your friends and sing “Kumbaya.” I’m writing this because we have a problem: most of us don’t really know what feelings are, or how to deal with them. And that ignorance has a tendency to really fuck up our lives. When it comes to emotional intelligence, ignorance is definitely not bliss, so here are five things everyone should know about feelings.
Trauma. It’s one of those words that gets thrown around without ever really being explained. Derived from the Greek word for “wound,” trauma could refer to an overwhelming psychological experience or the psychological imprint left by such an experience. Either way, it’s important to know how to recognize trauma and post-traumatic stress and how to recover from them.
Goethe lamented that “two souls, alas, do dwell within this breast; the one is ever parting from the other.” We’ve probably all observed this inner conflict in ourselves and others: maybe we’ve been in a relationship where our lover’s affection was suddenly replaced by cold distance and abandonment; maybe we’ve bounced back and forth between an exhausting drive to achieve and a crippling lack of motivation; or maybe we’ve watched helplessly while a person we knew to be loving and gentle destroyed themselves and the people around them with rage or addiction. A big part of my job as a therapist is to help people understand these confusing and sometimes overwhelming inner realities.
Valentine’s Day is one of those special holidays with the power to make us feel totally shitty about ourselves. Some of that has to do with loneliness, and some of it has to do with romance, but most of it has to do with the fact that being socialized by capitalism and pop songs has left us pretty unsure of what loneliness and romance actually are and how they relate to each other.
As long as the underlying psychological process of self-judgment and self-rejection is in place, then becoming a supermodel or a CEO isn’t going to change much. The best we can hope for is to climb to the top of the ladder only to find that it’s against the wrong wall. Some people live their whole lives like that, caught in a game of psychological whack-a-mole, except instead of it being a fun 45 second game, this version saps you of all joy and keeps going until one day you just die.
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