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Biblical Help for Codependency

By |July 2nd, 2024|Codependency, Featured, Individual Counseling, Relationship Issues|

Overcoming codependency is a complex process, but there is help available. One of the best things you can do if you are trying to navigate codependent relationships is to lean on biblical wisdom. This will help you make healthy choices such as relying on God, connecting with a Christian counselor, and setting healthy boundaries that honor the unique person God designed you to be. It is always advised to develop a support network to help you overcome issues like codependency. Consult with a pastor, spiritual leader, or Christian counselor in addition to trustworthy friends outside of the situation. They can provide guidance and support specific to your unique situation. As you do this, here are some biblical principles that can help: Seek God first But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. – Matthew 6:33, NIV God will provide the most important support you need in your journey to overcome codependence. You can rely on His strength and wisdom as you navigate decisions in your relationships. Accept God’s love and grace But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. – Romans 5:8, NIV God’s love for you matters more than the approval or validation of anyone else. This includes the person you are in a codependent relationship with. As you accept His love and grace you can stand firm on this foundation. Set healthy boundaries Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. – Proverbs 4:23, NIV God does not call you to engage with everyone in the same way. When you guard your heart with wisdom, you can establish healthy boundaries to protect your emotional and spiritual well-being. This will help [...]

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10 Signs of Depression in Men You May Not Be Aware Of

By |July 1st, 2024|Depression, Featured, Individual Counseling, Men’s Issues|

Do you get easily irritated, struggle to control your anger, or feel constantly fatigued? Do you work all the time or drink a lot to try and numb your feelings and help you cope? If so, read on. These are signs of depression in men, and you may be suffering from it. Depression is a common mental health disorder that impacts the way a person feels, thinks, and manages his or her daily responsibilities and activities. It affects both men and women but is sometimes thought of as a women’s disease because symptoms in men tend to manifest differently and are not always clear-cut. Male depression, however, is a real thing. Knowing what to look for can help lead to early diagnosis and treatment. Many men have a hard time acknowledging that they have a health problem, especially a mental health one that is affecting their social and emotional well-being. They resist reaching out for help because of the stigma attached to mental health issues and because they have been conditioned to believe that men are supposed to be tough, self-reliant, able to manage their pain, and to exert self-control. They think that talking about their emotions and admitting that they are having a tough time is a sign of weakness, so they try instead to ignore or mask their feelings and resist reaching out for help. According to the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI), only half as many men report being depressed as women. As a result, their depression may be difficult to spot, and too often goes unrecognized and untreated. Common signs of depression in men Below are some common signs of depression in men you may not be aware of. They are red flags that should not be ignored. Persistent sadness You have an overwhelming [...]

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Therapy for Adults with ADHD

By |June 26th, 2024|ADHD/ADD, Featured, Individual Counseling|

While plenty of children are diagnosed with ADHD, in recent years, there have been many adults diagnosed as well. This diagnosis can be a welcome relief to some, a feeling that they finally have a way to understand how their brain works. Others may be overwhelmed with the diagnosis. Whether you are now an adult who has known your diagnosis since childhood or are just beginning the process of understanding your ADHD, therapy can be a useful tool in navigating the world. A therapist is a teammate who helps you navigate the ups and downs that you experience as a person with ADHD. Just like medication, therapy provides you with a considerable amount of assistance. Your brain is unique to you. You will have strengths and weaknesses. Functioning well in your job, caring for your home and belongings, and caring for your physical needs may be challenging in different ways than other people. A therapist’s role is to help you find strategies that work for you. Common struggles for those with adult ADHD Time management. Meeting deadlines. Organization. Impulsivity and motivation. Forgetfulness. Trouble sleeping. Difficulty with listening and attention. Easily bored. Most adults with ADHD say that they want to manage their time, work projects, homes, etc. Many of them have tried strategies that receive rave reviews from adults without ADHD. But those strategies often go up in a cloud of good intentions. Therapy focuses on finding strategies that work for the individual, not the collective. Across the spectrum of people with ADHD, there is a great deal of variance in what works. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. Therapy can help adults with ADHD manage their time and meet deadlines by: Finding personalized strategies. Addressing underlying issues. Developing coping mechanisms. Building self-awareness. Providing accountability and support. Strengths of adults [...]

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Unchained: Breaking Free from the Prison of Toxic Shame

By |June 13th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Men’s Issues, Personal Development, Women’s Issues|

Shame is one of the most toxic mental and emotional states that we as humans can encounter. It may be no surprise why the enemy uses this against God’s people to persuade us into believing less than what God says. It differs from the guilt that provokes remorse when we do wrong. Shame seeks to imprint itself on our identity, thus evoking a sense of being inherently wrong or bad. As a virulent enemy, shame damages our self-perception, and destroys like the enemy who seeks to do the same (John 10:10). As an inside enemy, shame operates from our memory, to trap us and tether us to past trauma. It is subversive, captivating our thoughts and negatively rewiring our self-perception. It commandeers present choices and behaviors, halting progress toward the manifestations of God’s dream and our destiny. Shame collaborates with fear and other uncomfortable feelings to poison our patterns (in belief and behavior), infecting us with self-doubt. The weight of shame imprisons us in shadows, where we remain hidden and hurt. How God helps us break free from toxic shame In this manner, shame denies the Holy Spirit an opportunity to draw goodness out of us, though our gifts long to break through and showcase the light and splendor of a great God. We often pay more attention to its voice than the Lord who comes to comfort and counsel. The Holy Spirit will invite and encourage us, but He won’t overstep if we won’t allow God’s Truth to permeate our thoughts and inform our actions. Although it seems that the enemy screams, vying for our attention, we have a choice where to direct and harness focus. Too often, we entertain the distractions, negative thoughts, and limiting beliefs that persuade us of shame’s power instead of the authority that [...]

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What Depression Feels Like: How to Help a Loved One

By |June 12th, 2024|Depression, Featured, Individual Counseling, Men’s Issues, Women’s Issues|

If someone were to ask you to describe the colors you see when you look at a variegated rose, would you be able to do it justice? Or if someone wanted to know what the burger you’re eating tastes like, could you convey the sensations, textures, and flavors in a way they’d get? In both cases, you could do a fair job of communicating what you’re experiencing, but it’s fairly difficult to express certain experiences such as depression through words. This is one of the difficulties that a person going through depression experiences. It can be difficult to make sense of what is happening to you when you’re going through it, much less to describe your experience to others. However, understanding the experience of a loved one who is struggling with depression is key to supporting them. Understanding and describing depression When a loved one has depression, they are struggling with a mood disorder that affects how they feel, think, and act. Various possible forces interact to bring on depression, and these include genetic vulnerability, flawed mood regulation by the brain, and experiencing stressful life events such as bereavement, job loss, or the failure of a significant relationship. It affects a person’s ability to perform day-to-day tasks. It can be difficult to describe what depression feels like. From the outside looking in, some of the ways to discern depression include: Seeing a loved one's sleeping patterns affected, with them sleeping too little or too much. Changes in appetite such as eating way more or less than usual. Frequent fatigue. Expressing feelings of guilt, hopelessness, and worthlessness. Expressing suicidal thoughts and attempting suicide. The person experiencing depression might describe their experience of depression in this way, but there are other ways they may do so. Each person’s symptoms of depression [...]

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Identifying Work Burnout: Causes, Effects, and Solutions

By |June 10th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Professional Development|

Most homes have at least one person who goes to work every day. In some households, there are more. There are times that you may experience job burnout. Not every person will begin to have feelings of dread when they have to go to work, but it does happen. Job burnout is real and it can be costly. The stress associated with job burnout can cause health issues. There is no medical diagnosis or treatment for job burnout. The best prevention is to understand how to identify and overcome job burnout. He gives strength to the weary, and to the one who lacks might He increases power. – Isaiah 40:29, NASB What can cause job burnout? Job burnout isn’t always caused by just one factor. More often it is found that several factors have been known to contribute to job burnout. A heavy workload A heavy workload may keep you from feeling as though you made progress during your workday. This feeling of being overwhelmed with work tasks can cause resentment about your compensation. Lack of control The inability to have any sort of control of your job can cause frustration. You want to be able to have input on your schedule and workload. The lack of this can bring you to a point of job burnout through frustration at the leadership. Workplace dynamics Working with people who bully or even undermine you can cause you to dread work. A boss who is always looking over your shoulder can cause unneeded stress. The unfairness that you see when it comes to the boss who shows favoritism causes frustration and reduced respect for your boss and co-workers. Lack of reward When you complete tasks that are not in the normal scope of your duties you want to be rewarded. You [...]

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Coping with Hopelessness in the Midst of Financial Stress

By |May 29th, 2024|Coaching, Featured, Individual Counseling, Personal Development|

If you have ever had to work your way out of debt, especially if it is a large amount that takes time, you have probably felt a little hopeless at some point. It can be an overwhelming feeling when the credit score just sits and sits in the same spot or even worse, takes a dip because we’re focusing on paying off other bills or we have an emergency come up. What can you do to work your way through not only the financial stress but the mental stress? As a therapist and life coach, I have found that most people tend to be quite emotional about money, especially when advised on how to spend it, even when they ask for help. Ask for help to overcome financial stress The first step to getting all the emotions surrounding your finances under control is asking for help. Help comes in many different forms in this area, a life coach, a financial coach, a certified financial planner, an accountant, someone who understands numbers and how to work with them. This may even include taking Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University through your local church or purchasing the at-home guide to use by yourself if you’re single or with your spouse if you’re married. Having someone who is not emotionally attached to your money is vital to making better financial decisions. We all have some areas where we spend too much money or somewhere we could save money by changing where our hard-earned funds go. Create a budget The second step is sitting down and creating a budget. I hear so many couples say “It’s my money, I don’t need his/her permission to spend it!” One of my favorite quotes is “A budget is not a permission slip; it is a communication tool.” [...]

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Anger in the Bible: Wrestling with a Powerful Emotion

By |May 24th, 2024|Anger Issues, Featured, Individual Counseling|

Listen to this article A single moment can be powerful enough to change your life forever. A single moment of anger expressed in an unhealthy way can destroy your entire life. Anger is a secondary emotion that most people experience, and it is triggered by emotional hurt. Typically, when we feel angry, we experience it as an unpleasant feeling that rises in us when we think we have been injured, mistreated, opposed in our long-held and cherished views, or when we are faced with challenges that stand in the way of us attaining our personal goals. While all people get angry, what varies between us is how often we get angry, how intensely we might feel that anger, how long it lasts, and how comfortable we feel with anger, as well as what we do with our anger once we experience it. Our anger threshold also differs from that of the next person; your anger threshold is about how easily you get angered. Is anger good, bad, or neither? Like all our other emotions, anger indicates something. When you feel anger, that is a signal to you that something in your environment isn’t right. Our feelings are designed to capture our attention and motivate us to take action to correct whatever isn’t right in our world (or to celebrate what’s going right in our world, in the case of joy). However, our feelings are not meant to control us. We have to learn to get to the root of what causes negative emotions and begin the process of learning how to take control of them. Depending on who you are, your personality, and your life experiences, you probably view anger and the expression of anger a certain way. There are some people for whom feeling anger and [...]

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How to Forgive a Loved One Who Hurts You

By |May 17th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Relationship Issues, Spiritual Development|

We don’t always choose the people we love. By dint of circumstance and the various situations we find ourselves in, our lives become populated with people and relationships that have a huge impact on us, for good or for ill. People such as our parents, siblings, and relatives who form part of our extended family are a given for many of us, and they are in our lives before we are even able to make decisions about such things. Our loved ones aren’t perfect people, whether they just happened to be in our lives at the right place and time or because we chose to make them part of our lives. They make mistakes, whether these are errors in judgment, the result of poor communication, the inability to see someone else’s perspective, or sometimes through doing and saying hurtful things deliberately. When mistakes happen, they threaten the relationship and its ongoing existence. One of the main ways to deal with relational hurt is to forgive the person who hurt you. Forgiveness isn’t always easy, not only from the perspective of understanding what you’re doing when you’re forgiving someone but also from the experience of offering forgiveness itself. This article will provide some pointers for how to forgive a loved one who has hurt you. The place of forgiveness in relationships In all relationships, there comes a time when harm is caused, inadvertently or otherwise. Your loved one might not show up when you were relying on them to babysit. They might let slip to someone else something that was said in confidence. They might break a promise to pursue their rehab and treatment. They might lie, and so break your trust. They might say something in public that humiliates you. There are many ways for people to hurt each [...]

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How to Reduce Anxiety: Lifestyle Changes to Improve How You Feel

By |May 14th, 2024|Anxiety, Featured, Individual Counseling, Men’s Issues, Women’s Issues|

Chronic anxiety can create physical and emotional issues if not controlled. But events, tragedies, worries, and loss are a part of life. You cannot shield yourself from everything that feels uncomfortable or stressful, but you can lessen the effects. You need to know how to reduce anxiety for the rest of your life. How to reduce anxiety with lifestyle changes High blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity can develop over time from chronic anxiety. Although you can learn more about how to stop a panic attack and lower stress levels in just minutes, the best way to alleviate anxiety is to make lifestyle changes. Lifestyle changes mean analyzing and revamping your habits. Bad habits can worsen anxiety and stress. For example, your nervous system reacts to substances such as caffeine, sugar, medications, and illegal drugs. After consuming these substances, you might feel jittery or sluggish and experience inflammation and rapid heart rate. If you suffer from chronic anxiety, your anxiety levels will rise dramatically when compounded with these substances. Knowing how to reduce anxiety starts with changing your habits. Prioritize exercise Daily exercise is a lifestyle change that can immediately affect your stress. Exercise is the first step in reducing anxiety. When you work out, your cardiovascular system works harder to pump blood and oxygen to your lungs and heart. The body releases endorphins that give you a sense of well-being and happiness. Exercise boosts your confidence and self-esteem. If your anxiety is behind your high blood pressure, you might notice that your systolic and diastolic numbers drop, and your resting heart rate decreases a few hours after exercising. Exercise is one of those tasks you must do every day in some form to reap the daily benefits. Try various workouts throughout the week, [...]

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