Facing Our Fears

Facing Our Fears

Cultivating Self-Care

In its most general sense, self-care is often equated with self-pampering. Given this notion, it can be seen as selfish. However, that idea is mistaken.

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.

Can You Commit to Love Without All the Facts?

When we choose to marry, we often don't know everything. There are often things that are missing. After all, we haven’t seen how our partner behaves in a variety of circumstances, many of which they haven’t yet encountered. But more importantly we don’t always know ourselves. So we search for things to worry about in our partner in hopes of having some level of control. Not wanting to come to terms with the fact that we can't control the other. However, there is one element of control, and this lies within ourselves.

Challenges of Returning Reserve Soldiers

“Wow, so great you’re home, Aharon, now everything can go back to normal!” This sentence, and variations of it, have been said to me and countless other reserve soldiers over the last few months. Though well-meaning (and also an important injection of optimism and hope!), people’s wider networks are sometimes unaware of the challenges that returning reserve soldiers face.

Dying at a Distance: Grief During Covid

Humans are incredibly resilient. I am constantly in awe of the people that I speak to, in my role as a bereavement therapist, who are creating amended rituals to help them cope with their painful losses. There is no correct answer to our predicament. It feels unfair to be deprived of the comfort of our traditions that help guide and heal mourners. However, we can try to creatively engage in meaningful adaptations of our rituals during this crisis to help us process our grief.

Fundamentals of Trauma Recovery, Part 8/8

By tackling pieces of your recovery to tackle that are ever-so-small, you ensure your success; this will build greater self-confidence and foundations for each further success.

Feeling Helpless? Here Are 3 Corona (or Anytime) Coping Skills

It can happen at any time or place. But especially now, with the impact of COVID-19 still being felt here in Israel even as things are finally opening up, it's an expected emotion to be feeling. Helplessness. And we are all in it together. Including your therapist. What can you do when you feel like this? Here are 3 powerful skills I know of.

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

Get Grounded With Art

Creative expression can be a soothing and releasing form of self care and help us find our anchor.

Am I Depressed or Just Sad?

Growing up, I remember people saying, “I’m so depressed.” What made them so depressed? Various…

New Job Jitters

When beginning a new job if you are constantly worried about failing and feeling like you need to prove yourself at every turn that can cause significant stress which will most likely hinder performance.  Rather than engendering positive relationships and being open to learning, the fear of someone discovering shortcomings will be so pervasive that it will be very difficult to acclimate to the new position effectively.  On the other hand, a growth mindset which encourages you to learn from others, think about mistakes as essential to the process of learning and acclimating and being open to a new way of doing things will lead you to have more joy and energy, feel less anxious,  and make a good impression on your colleagues.

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.

Valuable Tips to Manage Pain

Given what we know today, it appears likely that unresolved trauma, whether minor or major, plays a role in the persistence of chronic pain, through mechanisms of kindling (a self-perpetuating phenomenon of neural excitation) and priming (in which the brain readies itself to respond a certain way), that cause us to continually brace ourselves against the threat that caused the pain or the internal threat of pain itself. This is great news, because it means that to the extent that the trauma is worked through at the body/mind level, the pain should either disappear or lessen.

Lets Talk About Therapy The Same Way We Talk About Going To the Gym

Imagine how much easier life would be if therapy was seen simply as a form…

Resilience Series Part 3

In the previous blog, we discussed strategies to manage our emotional reactivity. Although similar, regulating emotions isn’t quite the same as managing how we react emotionally. Whereas managing emotional reactivity works like a light switch that can dim the frequency and intensity of our emotional reactions, regulating emotions, on the other hand, involves altering our emotional responses to situations. We might consider regulating emotions as our ability to adjust our own emotional states. Sometimes we do this by increasing our positive emotions, whereas other situations are better handled by decreasing our negative emotions. How...

You and Your Body

Your body is not all of who you are, but it is a constant. You are in relationship with your body always.

Why Grownups Should Play Too

…as we get older, we stop playing. We feel the need to be productive or we feel so tired from our productive lives that we pursue mindless ways to relax and shut down, like watching TV, but watching TV is not playing, and playing is more important than you think.

Beginnings & Endings: Making Sense of Life Changes

The holiday season has ended, the parties and festivities subsided, and we come back to…

Making Space for Personal Growth

Being too busy is a dis-ease of modern society