Resilience Series Part 1

Life is full of good moments, but it isn’t always a smooth ride. There are many ups and downs, such as love and loss, success and struggle, happiness and heartbreak, and joy and trauma. Furthermore, none of us have a road map or a chapter index for our life journeys. Through the next 5 blogs, I will offer a step-by-step science-based approach to help you boost your resilience.

Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You – Part TWO

In part two of my blog, “Worry! Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You”, I am going to present to you some general recommendations and thoughts about dealing with worry.

My Journey Through Chronic Pain: A Personal and Professional Story of Healing

Physical pain in the body that is produced by our brain is identical, whether there is an actual structural injury in the body or whether the brain mistakenly believes there is a structural injury in the body. To offer an analogy, a smoke alarm that sounds because it is broken makes the exact loud and very real noise as a smoke alarm that sounds because there is smoke from an actual fire. 

Israel Wartime Anxiety: 3 Emotion-Focused Therapy Tips

The more we turn towards the pain and express unmet needs, and not avoid them, the less anxious we will be.

Shining Light on Feelings 

When we are able to just be with whatever we are feeling and experiencing, without judgement or an agenda we bring light

Sating the Binge

Bingeing is an issue of physiological needs and emotional nourishment. If we attend to these, we can find peace with food, our bodies, and our minds.

Fundamentals of Trauma Recovery, Part 3

While extremely distressing, flashbacks are actually memories. Registering what is a memory, and what is happening now, is essential.

ADHD or Trauma?

Over the last few decades, many children and adolescents have been receiving a diagnosis of ADHD at alarming rates. ADHD, which is typically understood as a brain or nervous system disorder which tends to be genetic in nature, is often identified when a child shows symptoms of inattention, distractibility, hyperactivity and/or impulsivity. What unfortunately often gets missed with a diagnosis of ADHD, however, is the possibility that traumatic events may be the source of these symptoms.

Facing Our Fears

Facing Our Fears

The Hidden Layers: A Therapist's Guide to Understanding Trauma

Just like an onion, trauma has many layers. What you see on the surface is rarely the full story, and true healing often begins when we start peeling back the "how," "who," "where," "when," and "why" behind the "what." This article explores the powerful onion metaphor in understanding trauma, revealing how a deeper look can lead to profound transformation. Discover why exploring every layer is essential for both clinicians and those on their healing journey.

How to Choose the Right Therapist

Choosing the right therapist may feel overwhelming. Here are some tips to help guide you.

The Interplay of Dread AND Hope: Holding and Navigating Contrasting Emotions in Cultivating Resilience

People often ask me: how it is possible to celebrate amid deep suffering and life-altering traumatic events that shatter any sense of safety or security and leave us in confusion and the unknown?  Dread and Hope, though seemingly contradictory, can coexist in a complex dance that shapes the human experience.  Here's how...

Re-Frame Rejection so You Can Successfully Move Forward in Relationships

I have been rejected more times than I can count. By friends, boys, jobs, my kids, you name it… One of my most memorable rejections happened while in 6th grade. My English teacher encouraged us to write a journal, which I kept "hidden" in my desk. In it, I wrote all about a crush I had on a boy named Joey, a fellow classmate. I forgot that in the morning we sat at one desk and in the afternoon another. A fellow classmate found my journal and proceeded to read that very entry aloud to the entire class during recess.

PERFECTIONISM is the Enemy of FREEDOM

It's getting close to Pesach and I'm thinking: what do I want to focus on at my seder table with my adolescent children who can now carry intelligent conversations and think about things in a deeper and more complex way? Afterall, our exodus from Egypt is not just a historical event and with kids, the way to facilitate spiritual connection is through relatable modern-day experiences. The obvious answer would be to focus on what each of us finds ourselves enslaved to in our lives and how we can access our personal freedom, but we've been down that road before and it hadn't hit home the way I'd want a good juicy introspective theme to do. So, I came up with IMPERFECTION

Adult ADHD

Success for adults with ADHD often stems from identifying and building on their strengths, while not over-focusing on their weaknesses. Discovering one particular talent or specialized area of accomplishment is critical for adults (and children) with ADHD. The earlier in life that individuals with ADHD identify their strengths, the greater the likelihood that they will succeed as adults in their chosen academic or occupational fields of interest.

Lesson from a Construction Site: Don't Dismiss the Scaffolding in Your Relationships

Marriages, like buildings, sometimes need scaffolding - temporary, unglamorous interventions - that provide the platform needed to repair damage and build a strong, lasting structure.

On Becoming a Personal Scientist: Beginnings

As the baby gains enough safety and security via his attachment systems with the significant people in his life, he is able to identify and then befriend the familiar within the strange.

10 Ways to Improve a Marriage

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were just 10 do it yourself fix it solutions…

Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You – Part THREE

Worry! Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You
Part Three
Strategies to Help you Manage your Worrying
I am glad you are back again to read the final part of my blog Worry! Ways to Manage Worry Instead of it Managing You. In part three of my blog I will give you some specific strategies to help you manage your worrying.
Here are some specific strategies and tools that can help you avoid toxic worry. Let’s get to it shall we!
Hallowell’s Strategies of Managing Worry

Hope and Healing: From Warsaw to Jerusalem

It was amazing how the strength of the comradery of the women enabled them to shift their view of themselves and their experience of MRKH from one in which they were hard done by and less of a woman, to feeling special. They were able to explore the possibilities that having MRKH presented to them. They also recognized the hope and possibilities that lay within their situation, on many levels. When the women started the workshop, many were nervous and fidgety. By the end, they were sitting up straight with big smiles on their faces and hope in their eyes.

What I learned was that we can all be hope experts, as we have all experienced life challenges. The more we recognize the challenges that we endured, remove the shame connected to those challenges and celebrate the accomplishments, the better able we can help others feel more hopeful too.