www.bible.com/116/psa.100.4.nlt
Giving thanks to God Almighty for everything I’ve been through; the pain, growth the sad times, happy times, all I have and everything in between.
I humble myself in praise.
Tag: Healing
Borderline Personality Disorder, what exactly is it?
If you know someone who’s extremely sensitive and triggered about the smallest things, read this.
The majority of my posts bring attention to child sexual abuse, its long-term effects, and prevention. Honestly, I hadn’t heard much about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and didn’t begin researching it (until about a year ago) when someone close to me was diagnosed with it, presumably caused by their childhood trauma.
How is BPD different from common irritability, anxiety or depression? If you or someone you know is extremely sensitive, has explosive anger and volatile/unstable relationships, this post is worth reading.
BPD Simplified
Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental health disorder that impacts the way you think and feel about yourself and others, causing problems functioning in everyday life. It includes self-image issues, difficulty managing emotions and behavior, and a pattern of unstable relationships.
With BPD, you have an intense fear of abandonment or instability, and you may have difficulty tolerating being alone. Almost everything in your world is unstable. Yet inappropriate anger, impulsiveness and frequent mood swings may push others away, even though you want to have loving and lasting relationships.
People with BPD tend to be extremely sensitive. Some describe it as like having an exposed nerve ending. Small things can trigger intense reactions. And once upset, you have trouble calming down. It’s easy to understand how this emotional volatility and inability to self-soothe leads to relationship turmoil and impulsive—even reckless—behavior.
Borderline personality disorder usually begins by early adulthood. The condition seems to be worse in young adulthood and may gradually get better with age.
Causes
Some factors related to personality development can increase the risk of developing borderline personality disorder. These include:
- Hereditary predisposition. You may be at a higher risk if a close relative — your mother, father, brother or sister — has the same or a similar disorder.
- Stressful childhood. Many people with the disorder report being sexually or physically abused or neglected during childhood.
- Some people have lost or were separated from a parent or close caregiver when they were young or had parents or caregivers with substance misuse or other mental health issues. Others have been exposed to hostile conflict and unstable family relationships.
A diagnosis of borderline personality disorder is usually made in adults, not in children or teenagers. That’s because what appear to be signs and symptoms of borderline personality disorder may go away as children get older and become more mature.
Diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) manifests in many different ways, but for the purposes of diagnosis, mental health professionals group the symptoms into nine major categories.
In order to be diagnosed with BPD, you must show signs of at least five of these symptoms. Furthermore, the symptoms must be long-standing (usually beginning in adolescence) and impact many areas of your life.
Bipolar disorder vs. Borderline Personality Disorder. Bipolar Disorder is a mental (or brain) disorder, while BPD is an emotional disorder. Both disorders are characterized by mood swings, but the length and intensity of these mood swings are different.
The Nine symptoms of BPD
1. Fear of abandonment. People with BPD are often terrified of being abandoned or left alone. Even something as innocuous as a loved one arriving home late from work or going away for the weekend may trigger intense fear. This can prompt frantic efforts to keep the other person close. You may beg, cling, start fights, track your loved one’s movements, or even physically block the person from leaving. Unfortunately, this behavior tends to have the opposite effect—driving others away.
2. Unstable relationships. People with BPD tend to have relationships that are intense and short-lived. You may fall in love quickly, believing that each new person is the one who will make you feel whole, only to be quickly disappointed. Your relationships either seem perfect or horrible, without any middle ground. Your lovers, friends, or family members may feel like they have emotional whiplash as a result of your rapid swings from idealization to devaluation, anger, and hate.
3. Unclear or shifting self-image. When you have BPD, your sense of self is typically unstable. Sometimes you may feel good about yourself, but other times you hate yourself, or even view yourself as evil. You probably don’t have a clear idea of who you are or what you want in life. As a result, you may frequently change jobs, friends, lovers, religion, values, goals, or even sexual identity.
4. Impulsive, self-destructive behaviors. If you have BPD, you may engage in harmful, sensation-seeking behaviors, especially when you’re upset. You may impulsively spend money you can’t afford, binge eat, drive recklessly, shoplift, engage in risky sex, or overdo it with drugs or alcohol. These risky behaviors may help you feel better in the moment, but they hurt you and those around you over the long-term.
5. Self harm. Suicidal behavior or deliberate self-harm is common in people with BPD. Suicidal behavior includes thinking about suicide, making suicidal gestures or threats, or actually carrying out a suicide attempt. Self-harm encompasses all other attempts to hurt yourself without suicidal intent. Common forms of self-harm include cutting and burning.
6. Extreme emotional swings. Unstable emotions and moods are common with BPD. One moment, you may feel happy, and the next, despondent. Little things that other people brush off can send you into an emotional tailspin. These mood swings are intense, but they tend to pass fairly quickly (unlike the emotional swings of depression or bipolar disorder), usually lasting just a few minutes or hours.
7. Chronic feelings of emptiness. People with BPD often talk about feeling empty, as if there’s a hole or a void inside them. At the extreme, you may feel as if you’re “nothing” or “nobody.” This feeling is uncomfortable, so you may try to fill the void with things like drugs, food, or sex. But nothing feels truly satisfying.
8. Explosive anger. If you have BPD, you may struggle with intense anger and a short temper. You may also have trouble controlling yourself once the fuse is lit—yelling, throwing things, or becoming completely consumed by rage. It’s important to note that this anger isn’t always directed outwards. You may spend a lot of time feeling angry at yourself.
9. Feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality. People with BPD often struggle with paranoia or suspicious thoughts about others’ motives. When under stress, you may even lose touch with reality—an experience known as dissociation. You may feel foggy, spaced out, or as if you’re outside your own body.
BPD is treatable. Healing is a matter of breaking the dysfunctional patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are causing you distress. It’s not easy to change lifelong habits.
In the past, many mental health professionals found it difficult to treat BPD, so they came to the conclusion that there was little to be done. But we now know that BPD is treatable. In fact, the long-term prognosis for BPD is better than those for depression and bipolar disorder. However, it requires a specialized approach.
The bottom line is that most people with BPD can and do get better—and they do so fairly rapidly with the right treatments and support.
Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental health disorder that impacts self-image, difficulty managing emotions and behavior, and a pattern of unstable relationships.
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Sources: 1. Mayo Clinic – https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/borderline-personality-disorder/diagnosis-treatment/drc-20370242. 2. Helpguide.org- http://www.helpguide.org/articles/mental-disorders/borderline-personality-disorder.html
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9 Ways Your Parents Caused Your Low Self-Esteem
It’s not uncommon for childhood trauma to manifest itself well into adulthood. When we start to connect-the-dots, it’s clear to see a direct correlation between certain childhood events and our self-worth. Low self-esteem can be a result of a negative or dysfunctional family environment, but where exactly does it originate? There’s no one answer to this question but here’s a short list of ways your parents may be the root-cause of your low self-esteem.
1. Disapproving Authority Figures
If you grew up hearing that whatever you did wasn’t good enough, how are you supposed to grow into an adult with a positive self-image? If you were criticized no matter what you did or how hard you tried, it becomes difficult to feel confident and comfortable in your own skin later. The fear forced on you for perpetually “failing” can feel blindingly painful.
2. Uninvolved/Preoccupied Caregivers
It’s difficult to motivate yourself to want more, strive for more, and imagine that you deserve more when your parents or other primary caregivers didn’t pay attention – as if your greatest achievements weren’t worth noticing. This scenario often results in feeling forgotten, unacknowledged, and unimportant later. It can also leave you feeling that you are not accountable to anyone, or you may believe that no one in the here and now is concerned about your whereabouts, when that’s actually a carry-over feeling from the past. Feeling unrecognized can result in the belief that you are supposed to apologize for your existence.
3. Authority Figures in Conflict
If parents or other caregivers fight or make each other feel badly, children absorb the negative emotions and distrustful situations that have been modeled for them. It’s scary, overwhelming, and disorganizing. This experience can also occur when one parent is deeply distraught or acts unpredictably around the child. When you were subjected to excessive conflicts between authority figures, it can feel as if you contributed to the fights or to a parent’s painful circumstance. Intense conflicts are experienced as extremely threatening, fear driving, and you may believe you caused it. This feeling of being “tainted” can be carried into adulthood.
4. Bullying (with Unsupportive Parents)
If you had the support of a relatively safe, responsive, aware family you may have had a better chance of recovering and salvaging your self esteem after having been taunted and bullied as a child. If you already felt unsafe at home and the torture continued outside home, the overwhelming sense of being lost, abandoned, hopeless, and filled with self-loathing pervaded your everyday life. It can also feel like anyone who befriends you is doing you a favor, because you see yourself as so damaged. Or you may think that anyone involved in your life must be predatory and not to be trusted. Without a supportive home life, the effects of bullying can be magnified and miserably erode quality of life.
5. Bullying (with Over-Supportive Parents)
Conversely, if your parents were overly and indiscriminately supportive, it can leave you feeling unprepared for the cruel world. Without initial cause to develop a thick outer layer, it can feel challenging and even shameful to view yourself as unable to withstand the challenges of life outside the home. From this perspective, you may feel ill prepared and deeply ashamed to admit this dirty ugly secret about you, even to your parents, because you need to protect them from the pain they would endure if they knew. Instead, you hid the painful secret of what’s happened to you. Shame can cloud your perspective.
Eventually it can seem as if your parents’ opinion of you is in conflict with the world’s opinion of you. It can compel you to cling to what is familiar in your life, because it’s hard to trust what’s real and what isn’t. You may question the validity of your parents’ positive view of you, and default to the idea that you are not good enough or are victim-like and should be the subject of ridicule.
6. Bullying (with Uninvolved Parents)
If your primary caregivers were otherwise occupied while you were being bullied and downplayed your experience, or they let you down when you needed their advocacy, you might have struggled with feeling undeserving of notice, unworthy of attention, and angry at being shortchanged. When the world feels unsafe, the shame and pain are brutal. These feelings could also be evoked if parents were in transitional or chaotic states – so that what happened to you wasn’t on anyone’s radar. If there’s chaos at home, it can be hard to ask for attention or to feel like there is room for you take up space with your struggles. Instead, you may retreat and become more isolated and stuck in shame.
7. Academic Challenges Without Caregiver Support
There’s nothing like feeling stupid to create low self-esteem. If you felt like you didn’t understand what was happening in school – as if you were getting further and further behind without anyone noticing or stepping in to help you figure out what accommodations you needed – you might have internalized the belief that you are somehow defective. You may feel preoccupied with and excessively doubt your own smartness, and feel terribly self-conscious about sharing your opinions. The shame of feeling as if you aren’t good enough can be difficult to shake, even after you learn your own ways to accomodate for your academic difficulties.
8. Trauma
Physical, sexual, or emotional abuse may be the most striking and overt causes of low self-esteem. Being forced into a physical and emotional position against your will can make it very hard to like the world, trust yourself or trust others, which profoundly impacts self-esteem. It may even feel like your fault when it couldn’t be less your fault. Obviously, in these scenarios, there is so much going on at one time that you might need to check out, dissociate, go away. It can make you feel like nothingness. In an effort to gain control of your circumstances, in your head you may have convinced yourself that you were complicit or even to blame. You may have found ways to cope with the abuse, to manage the chaos in ways that you understand are unhealthy, so you may ultimately view yourself as repulsive and seeringly shameful, among a zillion other feelings.
9. Belief Systems
When your religious (or other) belief system puts you in a position of feeling as if you are perpetually sinning, it can be similar to the experience of living with a disapproving authority figure. Whether judgment is emanating from authority figures or from an established belief system in your life, it can evoke shame, guilt, conflict and self-loathing. Many structured belief systems offer two paths: one that’s all good and one that’s all bad. When you inevitably fall in the abyss between the two, you end up feeling confused, wrong, disoriented, shameful, fake, and disappointed with yourself over and over again.
It is important to understand that experiencing any of these early circumstances doesn’t mean you must be bound by them as an adult. They will be woven into your fabric and absorbed into your sense of yourself in different ways over time, but there are many paths to feeling that you are better prepared, less fragmented, and more confident moving forward.
As an adult, when you examine your history, you can begin to see that in some cases the derision or intense negative messages you encountered weren’t necessarily meant for you. Rather, they flowed from the circumstances of the people who delivered them. That perspective can help you to dilute the power of the negative messages about yourself you received and formed.
There are some circumstances you may have suffered that may be impossible to understand. You can’t and aren’t expected to understand, empathize or forgive in these circumstances. What matters most is continuing to find ways to feel as okay and as safe as you can in your own life right now.
The more you understand the sources of your low self-esteem and can put them into context, the more you can use your self-understanding to begin the process of repairing self-esteem and living the life you’ve always wanted.
Source: Original article, psychologytoday.com- 2013, by Suzanne Lachmann Psy.D.
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Adult Survivor: It’s Never Too Late to Begin the Process of Recovery
If you are an adult concerned for a friend or loved one who you know or suspect has experienced sexual abuse as a child, your support and understanding can be critical to their recovery.
Adults who have had experiences of sexual abuse as children need and deserve a chance to speak about their experiences with those who understand and can help.
Survivors of child sexual abuse can also play a critical role in the prevention of further abuse to other children. If you or someone you love needs support to recover, now is the time to reach out for help. Find the support you deserve.
If you are a survivor of sexual abuse as a child, it is very important to seek professional support and guidance for your recovery.
The impact of sexual abuse by another child, teen or adult can change over time. The changes unfold as a young person grows into adulthood and continue throughout a lifetime.
Even if you were offered support and resources earlier in life, if you are feeling the need for support at this time, we encourage you to seek the help you need and deserve. You can find resources and support here.
Are you concerned that the person who abused you will harm another child?
If you feel that the person who abused you currently poses a risk to a child or teen, it is important to share your concerns with others who can be allies to you in taking steps to protect this young person. We can help you find allies who share your concerns.
Perhaps you are recognizing signs of risk in the child or the adult. Maybe this child is near the age when you yourself suffered abuse. We urge you to trust your intuitions and act on your instincts by speaking to other adults who can take steps to protect this child.
There are many steps that can be taken before a child is harmed. You don’t have to wait until there is “proof” that abuse has occurred to act.
As a survivor, your experience can help everyone involved.
Learn about the statute of limitations in your state for reporting child sexual abuse. Filing reports about your own abuse (with the support of a counselor) can be a step to take if you believe that the same person who harmed you may have abused someone who is now a minor.
If others are already concerned, your coming forward can help ease the burden of disclosure the child or teen may be facing.
I know an adult survivor.
Care enough to take the risk and talk about it. If you are an adult concerned for a friend or loved one who you know or suspect has experienced sexual abuse as a child, your support and understanding can be critical to their recovery.
There are many resources that can help you to better understand what an adult survivor may be experiencing now and how the recovery process evolves over time. Sharing the resources you find here with the person you’re concerned about is a great place to start.
Support resources for family, friends and partners are important as well – by acknowledging how a loved one’s abuse can personally affect you, you are taking a step in becoming a safe adult for those who experienced sexual abuse.
Source: Stopitnow.org. https://stopitnow.org/help-guidance/online-help-center/adult-survivor. Accessed- September 19, 2019
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Teen Siblings Create notOK App for Peers in Distress
Charlie said his motivation for building the app came from watching his sister spiral into depression.
What a great idea! This may be old news to some but I’m just hearing about it.
If one button could change everything, save a life or help a teen, wouldn’t you tell everyone about it?
When Hannah Lucas was diagnosed last year with a medical condition that caused frequent fainting, she felt scared and alone.
“I started passing out more and more often and I was terrified of going anywhere,” Hannah, 15, told ABC News. “Because what if I passed out and no one was around or what if someone took advantage of me?”
Hannah, a high school sophomore from Georgia, became anxious and depressed and started to self-harm, she said.
From that dark point in her life, Hannah and her younger brother, Charlie Lucas, 13, created an app to help people in distress.
The idea for the notOK App came from Hannah, who told her mom she wished there was an app she could use to quickly alert her family and friends when she needed help either physically or emotionally.
Charlie heard his sister’s idea and used coding skills he learned in summer camp to design the app.
“I helped illustrate it out so he would know what to do,” Hannah said of her brother. “He looked at my drawings and he coded it to tell the coders exactly what I wanted and how I wanted it to look.”
Charlie said his motivation for building the app came from watching his sister spiral into depression.
“I saw Hannah depressed, and she told me about her idea, and I started wire-framing it,” he said. “Making this app made her feel better and that made me feel better.”
Hannah pitched the app while taking a summer class on entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech. Professors there were so intrigued by the siblings’ creation that they connected the family with a development company in Savannah.
Over the course of five months, Hannah and Charlie worked side by side with the developers, often over Skype, to see their idea for the app turn into reality.
They also compiled research on mental health statistics to make the case that their app would find an audience.
Mental illness is defined by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder. One in six U.S. adults lives with a mental illness, the institute reports.
Among adolescents, an estimated 49.5 percent between the ages 13 to 18 have a mental disorder, according to NIMH.
NotOK was launched in February 2018, both iOS and Android versions. The app, was originally came with a $2.99 monthly fee, but is now offered for Free. It allows users to press a button that sends a text message to up to five preselected contacts.
The text, along with a link to the user’s current GPS location, shows up on the contacts’ phones with the message, “Hey, I’m not OK. Please call me, text me, or come find me.”
“The reaction we’ve heard has been really positive, especially from parents and kids suffering with anxiety,” Hannah said. “Those kids don’t know the words to tell somebody.”
Hannah added of the app, “It definitely gave me a sense of comfort.”
Original source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.goodmorningamerica.com/amp/wellness/story/teens-struggle-depression-led-brother-create-app-52791054. By KATIE KINDELAN. Accessed September 12,2019.
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How Someone Else’s Depression Can Affect You
As is often said, depression is depressing to be around.
The word depression can mean very different things to different people. When someone says “I feel depressed” to describe everyday blues that come and go, these transient blues are not what mental health professionals mean by the depression.
Generally, clinical depression refers to symptoms that significantly affect a person’s functioning and last for a substantial amount of time. Most of us go through periods of dysphoric moods with temporary symptoms of depression, but we continue to function normally and recover without professional treatment.
What causes depression?
Most mental health professionals agree that usually a number of factors, both biochemical and psychological, work together to trigger a depression. Some people, because of their biochemical and genetic makeup, are inherently more vulnerable to depression when they experience life stress than other people who face the same stressors. For example; siblings can grow up in the same household but respond to family dysfunction in completely different ways.
Depression is often missed by either patient or family members because it’s hard to identify. Diagnosing depression often goes hand-in-hand with other mental and physical illnesses. If someone has a physical problem, it could be easy for the depression to be overlooked.
How does your loved one’s depression affect you?
You may be so intent on helping the other person, that you become blind to ways in which you’re being affected.
As time goes by, your own mind and body can also become filled with negative feelings. As is often said, depression is depressing to be around.
Effect on Spouse
As the person closest to the depressed individual, the spouse is often affected first and most. He/she may notice the signs before anyone else; indeed, some people are so good at hiding the signs of their depression that their spouses are the only ones to ever know anything is wrong.
The spouse is also most invested in the depressed person’s happiness. This is a source of strength, insomuch as it gives the spouse reason to help the depressed individual. Unfortunately, it can also be hard on a spouse if treatment is refused or unsuccessful. Prior to a diagnosis, the spouse might feel that they’re a failure for not making their spouse feel happier.
Effect on Children
Children are very malleable. This can be a good thing because it allows them to more easily recover from traumatic experiences, but it also means they are more susceptible to negative emotional environments in the first place. Because they need more positive encouragement and attention as they grow, children are less likely to thrive when one or both parents are depressed.
Like the spouse, children may feel compelled to help take up the family activities that their depressed parent is neglecting, forcing them to “grow up early”. Also like the spouse, children of depressed parents are more likely to develop depression or other mental illnesses in childhood or later In life.
Effect on Extended Family
Away from the nuclear family, depression can still have effects. Family that lives far away may experience anxiety about not knowing how the depressed person is doing or fear of not being kept in the loop. Meanwhile, family that lives nearby may stop visiting due to the negative atmosphere. Concern over the children growing up in such an environment, while justified, can lead to confrontations and acrimony between family members.
Conclusion
Ultimately, if you are depressed, the best thing you can do for yourself and your family is to seek or accept treatment. Don’t be afraid that you will not be able to take care of them while you take care of yourself. By focusing on your own healing, you are helping them.
It helps to think of the family as one entity. If one part (you) is sick, the whole suffers, and the emphasis should be on healing the sick part.
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Don’t Be Afraid To Rewrite Your Past
Your past, present, and future are all happening right now—at least in your mind.
Something for parents and teens.
According to the Theory of Narrative Identity, developed by scholar and researcher Dr. Dan McAdams, we form our identity by integrating our life experiences into an internalized, evolving story of ourselves which gives a sense of unity and purpose to our lives.
This life narrative integrates our reconstructed past, perceived present, and imagined future. All three coexist at the same time. Hence, from an experiential standpoint, the past, present, and future are not separate and linear, but holistic and co-occurring.
In other words, your past, present, and future are all happening right now—at least in your mind. As American writer and Nobel Prize laureate, William Faulkner famously put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
When you change the meaning and narrative of your past, you simultaneously change the narrative of your present and future. And vice versa.
Changing the narrative of your present and future simultaneously alters the meaning or narrative of your past.
The story we hold of ourselves is continually evolving and changing based on the experiences we are having. No, the facts about your past can’t change. But the story you tell yourself about them absolutely can change.
Unfortunately, most people are not strategic about their narrative identity. They aren’t conscious of the meaning-making process they instinctively go through in their day-to-day life, and as a result, they often shape limiting stories based on the emotions they are experiencing.
Your entire identity and view of the world is a meaning. A story. The questions to ask yourself: Is this story serving you? Is this the story you want to tell?
The story you have in your mind about the world at large and yourself as an individual is far from objective. Chances are, much of who you believe you are is based on stories that you tell yourself, that have come from experiences in your past. Potentially traumatic experiences wherein you didn’t or haven’t had an empathetic witness help you to positively and powerfully frame those experiences.
A fundamental aspect of reframing the past is to shift what was formerly seen as a negative experience into a positive one.
Having studied this for over a decade, I’ve never seen a more useful reframing technique that what Dan Sullivan calls, “The Gap and the Gain.” Continue Reading…
By: Benjamin Hardy Ph.D., https://www.psychologytoday.com
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This is how to rewire your brain for happiness: 4 secrets from research
“Thoughts determine feelings.”
Remember that. Make a note. Get a tattoo.
This is an awesome article which can apply to anyone, at any age. Especially teens.
By Eric Barker, TheLadders.com
Someone compliments you and you think, “They don’t mean it.” Something good happens and you hear, “I don’t deserve this.” You’re meeting new people and it’s, “They won’t like me.”
And you usually accept those words because they’re coming from inside your head. It’s like the horror movie where the calls from the killer are coming from inside the house.
These are called “automatic thoughts.” And they suck. But we all know the answer: you just need to think happy thoughts, right? Wrong. Let’s get our psychology lessons from somewhere other than Instagram memes, alright? “Think happy thoughts” doesn’t help unless you don’t need help.
From The Confidence Gap:
Their study, entitled “Positive Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others,” … showed that people with low self-esteem actually feel worse after repeating positive self-statements such as “I am a lovable person” or “I will succeed.” Rather than being helpful, these positive thoughts typically triggered a strong negative reaction and a resultant low mood.
So when you’re really feeling down, happy cliches won’t cut it. Nope. So we’re gonna need to science the hell out of this one. We need to rewire your brain, bubba.
From Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders:
This new approach— cognitive therapy— suggests that the individual’s problems are derived largely from certain distortions of reality based on erroneous premises and assumptions. These incorrect conceptions originated in defective learning during the person’s cognitive development. Regardless of their origin, it is relatively simple to state the formula for treatment: The therapist helps a patient to unravel his distortions in thinking and to learn alternative, more realistic ways to formulate his experiences.
It’s not hard or expensive, but it’s gonna take some practice. (Look, if you can spend 10 minutes taking a Facebook quiz to find out which Harry Potter character you are, you can spend 5 minutes a day to live a happier life, alright?). And once you get good at this it won’t just make you happier — these techniques are proven to help with all kinds of issues from procrastination to anxiety to anger.
From Thoughts and Feelings:
Challenging automatic thoughts is a powerful way to counter perfectionism, curb procrastination, and relieve depression and anxiety. It is also helpful in treating low self-esteem, shame and guilt, and anger. The techniques in this chapter are based on the cognitive therapy of Aaron Beck (1976), who pioneered this method of analyzing automatic thoughts and composing rational comebacks to refute and replace distorted thinking.
We’re gonna get some solid answers from Dr. Matthew McKay’s “Thoughts and Feelings” and even roll psychologically old school with UPenn professor Aaron Beck’s 1979 classic “Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders.”
Let’s get to it…
Cognitive Therapy 101
“Thoughts determine feelings.” Remember that. Make a note. Get a tattoo. This powerful idea goes back thousands of years to the Stoics. Aaron Beck even quotes Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus (the Biggie and Tupac of Stoicism) in his book.
From Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders:
If thou are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs thee, but thine own judgment about it. And it is in thy power to wipe out this judgment now. – Marcus Aurelius
“Always trust your feelings” sounds sweet but you wouldn’t tell that to someone with a phobia, a hoarding problem, or — god forbid — homicidal impulses, would you? No. Teenagers and golden retrievers are excellent at blindly following their feelings but neither are regularly consulted on their decision-making skills. Continue reading…
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‘It’s okay to have an off-day, it’s okay to break down and cry … But then it’s important to get back up’
Her smile would light up any room; inside she was tortured by dark thoughts, which left her feeling so empty she’s made four attempts to take her own life.
It’s one of the most common types of mental illness.
But Gwyneth Hume, from Kelso, says Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is still widely misunderstood.
The 21-year-old survivor is opening up on her battle with BPD to help raise awareness and encourage others to seek help.
She told Radio Borders News: “If I had one message for someone who’s struggling, I’d say it’s really important to look at yourself as an individual. Sometimes you have to be selfish and put yourself first.”
“I went through an absolutely horrific heartbreak in January and I didn’t think I’d ever get over that. And then I was like: ‘Do you know what? It’s time for me to build my own life.’ Because you need to think about making yourself happy before you even think about making anyone else happy.”
While, on the outside, Gwyneth’s smile would light up any room; inside she was tortured by dark thoughts, which left her feeling so empty she’s made four attempts to take her own life.
She said: “This last attempt on my life has made me realise I don’t actually want to die, but I want my life how it is to end. So I think that’s what made me think I need to speak out about what’s going on.”Continue reading…
Source: planetradio.co.uk
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Your adult child resents the way you parented them. Here’s how to handle it.
You can be a good parent and have unintentionally caused hurt in your child.
This 8-step process will help you get through the conversation and build a better relationship with your grown children.
By Nicole Spector
As my husband and I deepen our discussions around family planning, we’re tackling a number of questions about budgeting, housing, childcare, employment and so on. Most of our inquiries are of a fairly practical nature, such as “How can we afford this?”, and “What kind of parental leave can we work out?”
But some of our questions tend to veer into the wild, snake-infested territory of “what ifs”. One of my favorites to ponder, with an urgent hopelessness, is “What if we screw up and our kid grows up to resent us for it?”
It’s an impossible question to answer right now, but in 20 years or so, I might be asking this same question, and justifiably so.
“Even when they do their best, parents fall short regardless and there will be memories and experiences that children find hurtful,” says Lauren Cook, MMFT, a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at Pepperdine University. “There is no such thing as a perfect parent.”
So what is a parent to do if, after raising their kid as best they could, their grown child begrudges them for how they were raised or how said parent handled a particular issue?
Through consulting numerous therapists, we’ve pieced together a 8-step process detailing how parents can deal with this difficult situation, and ultimately build a better relationship with their grown children.
You can be a good parent and have unintentionally caused hurt in your child.
— Read on www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/your-adult-child-resents-way-you-parented-them-here-s-ncna1042081
The Youth Advocate 