People sometimes ask me how I manage to do this job, to sit with people who are hurting and have gone through such horrible things.

My training gave me some tools to use to manage compassion fatigue (which, yes, is a real thing), but also, it’s because I have so much confidence and hope that you are going to feel better! 

Clients also come to see me with great hopes of resolving their anxiety, but sometimes people think I can just give them some magic solution to make it all go away.

I wish I had that kind of power, but it’s just not that easy.  Or fast.

Let’s take a look at what is really involved with anxiety therapy. And what isn’t.

o often in the counseling room I find myself asking, “What meaning have you attached to that?”

I can hear a story of something that happened to you and think about what might feel hard to me about that situation, but I am not you. 

I can’t begin to figure out which direction to go in helping you work through something if I do not know what meaning is unfolding in your head around the situation you are describing.

It is so easy for us to blend our thoughts and feelings and past experiences into whatever moment we find ourselves reacting to.

It happens so automatically that we tend to immediately cling to the meaning we come up with as if it were absolutely true.

Have you ever had a scenario that you turned over and over again in your mind. And then again and again some more?

We might call this kind of thing rumination, or we might call it overthinking. We might say we are having intrusive thoughts. There are subtle differences in all of these things, but they all can be downright miserable.  

Let’s define these terms first, and then we can get to strategies to deal with them.

I know there are reasonable and good uses of AI out there in the world, but as it stands now, the potential (and actual) uses of AI pose dangers to my personal beliefs and values and will not be used in my counseling practice as far as I can help it.

How do I keep from feeling bitter?

I have had many women ask me this question, and not just in the counseling room.

One stands out in my mind, because it was asked by someone referring to a situation we were in together.  I was also recognizing the tendrils of bitterness curling around my heart, trying to take root.

My response at the time was, “I don’t know, but I am going to do it.”

(I had no idea how I would do it, but I knew it was possible and that is what I clung to at first.)

Often shame pops up almost automatically. It’s that red-hot, cheeks flushed, pit-in-stomach embarrassed feeling that makes you want to crawl back in bed and hide. Or shrink into the woodwork, become invisible.

We often get so caught up in feeling that emotion that we don’t stop to name it.  Just putting a word to the feeling can help get the other parts of your brain involved. This helps you start seeing what is going a little more clearly – it’s no longer just a feeling that engulfs you, but it is a feeling that you can think about.

I got to thinking that breaking up with a boyfriend can be similar to breaking up with some of our limiting beliefs.

It’s a process, and it involves us stepping out of familiar patterns.

That feels weird and uncomfortable at first. Sometimes there is “stuff” that lingers.

Sometimes we encounter triggers that seem to come out of nowhere.

 I’m here to tell you that it is possible to get some healthy distance between you and your limiting beliefs, and it’s so rewarding to get to the other side!

Why do I have a post early in the fall about getting ready for the holidays?

Because women who tend to fall into people-pleasing and perfectionism are typically the ones who read this blog, and those are the women who need that gentle reminder to get ahead of the holiday traps that leave us exhausted when January 1 rolls around.

Before you roll your eyes and throw your calendar across the room, hear me out.

The social structures the military provides build community.

Community is important to the military, because military units need to be unified to move forward on a mission.

Community benefits the mission and the service members, but it also benefits us as military spouses.

The hard parts are what really grew me and helped me develop the resilience I needed to function in this lifestyle. Resilience is one of those qualities that transfers to other areas of our lives, and for that, I am so very grateful.

Resilience is not the only lesson I’ve learned.

It is important to be very thoughtful and deliberate when we face these life transitions.

Sometimes life doesn’t let us take time to be thoughtful; sometimes those transitions happen fast and are forced upon us. Even when that happens, we can usually figure out a way to carve out some time to slow down and be intentional about how we move through the transition. This is time well spent.

Catastrophizing is a cognitive distortion, meaning it is a way our brains can play tricks on us.

If we have anxiety or a trauma past, this kind of thinking can become habitual, automatic.

Like breathing. (but shallow and fast)

With all or nothing thinking, our brain distorts situations into extremes.

Brains seem to like to sort things into tidy, polarized categories. It requires more thought to deal with things in the middle; the middle is messy and keeps us going back and forth.

Chucking it into the “all” box or the “nothing” box is much easier on the brain, so that’s what it does.

Life is full of stuff we just can’t control. The harder we try, the more frustrating it becomes that we can’t control it. Meanwhile, we lose presence, joy, peace, and focus while we are distracted by our attempts to control.

It’s a delicate balance between changing for someone else and changing because of the relationship.  Between changing to fit in, to be accepted or changing for personal growth and relational healing. If you decide you want to make some changes, here are some strategies to try, based on the three types of perfectionists I’ve written about before.

Perfectionism can show up in different ways. You might have high expectations of yourself, you might perceive that others have high expectations of you, or you may have high expectations of others.

Or you might experience any combination of the three.

Is perfectionism all good? Or is it all bad? Classifying things neatly on opposing sides seems to wrap it up in a tidy way so our brains know what to do with it. However, many things in life are on more of a spectrum than a clear cut dichotomy, and perfectionism is no different. Perfectionism, is not all bad, but it’s not always good.

Guiding principles help us connect to our values, because our values inform our guiding principles. They give us a layer of security when we want to waffle in indecision, overthinking, people pleasing, or perfectionism. Once we catch ourselves lacking a sense of peace about a decision, it’s time to revisit the guiding principles.

There are a lot of extra things on our to-do lists during the holiday season. There are also a lot of extra things on our calendars during the holiday season (reducing the likelihood of accomplishing all the things on the to-do list). Mix that up with the expectations of others (real and/or perceived) and the meanings we have attached to doing all the things and we have the ingredients for a hot mess. So far, I am just writing about the “extra” Christmas things – It gets even more complicated when we add in the difficult family dynamics that go on behind closed doors in our families.

Gratitude. It may not feel super-effective when it is forced, but sometimes we have to force it so that we can get into the habit of being grateful. This is a quality that successfully increases with a fake it ‘til you make it approach.