I have to be honest. My general feeling about the holidays usually leaves me wanting to go to sleep around Thanksgiving and wake up after New Year’s. Thanks to the pandemic, those feelings have only intensified this year. That being said, I’m going to take some of my own advice … Expect to feel a...
I’d like to talk about the term “Choice Point.” It comes from the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT model. A Choice Point refers to a moment in time when you can choose behavior that moves you toward your values or behavior or one that moves you away from them. In the most simplistic terms,...
A client of mine had the greatest metaphor for her obsessive compulsive disorder. She said that when she came to see me, she had been singing “OCD’s song” for 50+ years. Through our weekly sessions and A LOT of work between sessions, she was able to learn “a new song which gave her freedom.” A...
I often tell my clients to practice being “sure enough.” While this might initially sound a bit negative, it’s quite the opposite. It’s less about the ho-hum “the best you’re going to get” and more about making a choice that helps lower your anxiety. Here’s the thing. Anxiety wants you to seek out certainty, a...
There are a lot of anxiety myths out there. In my last blog post, I dispelled 3 of them. Here are the final 4. Myth: Thought stopping (or replacing, suppressing) is an effective anxiety management technique. I think these were techniques used in the 80’s or sometime, because I still get the random client who...
There are a lot of anxiety myths out there. In my next 2 blog posts, I dispel 7 of them — and give you better solutions for dealing with excessive worry or anxiety. Myth: Anxiety is bad. Anyone who’s been reading my stuff knows the answer to this one. False! Anxiety is neither good nor...
Well, this has been a pretty shitty year, hasn’t it? I’m hard-pressed to find a silver lining, but I do feel moved when my clients say things like “having worked on my anxiety helped me face this situation so much better than my friends and family” or “for once, I am the one coping, and...
If you haven’t gotten this question yet as a parent, I’d bet it’s coming. Parents are more anxious, and so are kids. Remember that you can’t control your own anxious thoughts and feelings let alone those of your child. They’re going to happen. What you can do, however, is respond to your child in ways...
Most of us have heard of Post-Traumatic Stress, but not as many of us are aware of Post-Traumatic Growth. It’s a theory that explains a transformation that can happen after experiencing trauma. Developed in the mid-1990s, by psychologists Richard Tedeschi, PhD, and Lawrence Calhoun, PhD, Post-Traumatic Growth “…holds that people who endure psychological struggle following...
I really don’t get people whose temperament isn’t naturally anxious — who now call me and say things like “Wow, Joanna. I now know what you’ve been talking about all these years when you describe waking up anxious” or “not being able to stop the worry.” I feel like I was born anxious. I’ve always...