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Four Helpful Hints for Improving Relationships

There are many areas of our lives, our vehicles, our bodies and our cars that need attention and fine-tuning to remain healthy and balanced.
It takes work and commitment from both individuals to willingly and openly address issues that will ultimately arise.

Here are four hints to help you

1) Are you repeating the same patterns in your relationships?
We will often repeat patterns and maybe attract the same type of individual in our lives.

2) Know that all relationships will bring up our own individual issues.
As Harville Hendrix discusses in his Imago Couple therapy work. The relationship is the therapy.

3) Be aware if you are looking at your partner from a critical perspective.
This can wear on a relationship and ultimately push your lover away.

4) Become more aware of yourself and what your triggers are.
These triggers often give us clues of unresolved issues that need to be explored.

EMDR-What Is It?

What is EMDR?

EMDR (which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a modality used in psychotherapy. It was developed during the 1980s by a psychologist named Francine Shapiro. The procedure is non-invasive, and basically uses the patient’s own rapid eye movements to help lessen the negative power of emotionally-charged memories. It was first used in the treatment of PTSD and anxiety related issues. Since its inception its use has expanded and has been used effectively to treat many areas of anxiety, phobias, grief, changing negative patterns, addictions, pain management and many other issues. I often use it along with bilateral stimulation and NLP techniques to help my clients get the best results.

So how does EMDR work?

I use EMDR about 70-80% of my time with clients. It takes a different approach to dealing with challenges instead of relying on medications or on more traditional talk-therapy.

When we experience a disturbing event or a negative experience in our lives, it is stored in our memory along with the emotions that were unexpressed at the time. Since this often happens in our childhood we do not have the mental capacity to discern and process what truly happened. Our young brain does not have reasoning ability because it has not developed yet.

The memories,the events and the feelings all cause us to create a story about ourselves (what I call our ‘personal lie’) that is stored in our subconscious.

Until these emotions are expressed, processed and released the original story line or ‘personal lie’ will show up repeatedly in our lives and create havoc, often without being aware as to why until it is healed-once and for all!

Personal lies are the underlying belief we create about ourselves from these earlier experiences. Some of the most common lies are ‘I am unworthy’, ‘I am inadequate’, ‘I am unlovable’, ‘I cant trust anyone’.

I have observed how destructive these beliefs and lies can be. They can contaminate and cause someone to struggle with relationships on all levels such as intimate relationships, friendhships, money, career, and school.

EMDR helps desensitize both internal and external triggers.

Carl Jung said it best “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Until these emotions are expressed, processed and released the original event will show up repeatedly in our lives and create havoc, often without conciously being aware of why. Once the origianl event(s) have been processed the memory is dishcharged of the emotions and then just becomes a distant “memory. We have then created space in the subconscious to know the ‘truth’ about the situation and work to create new behaviours for the future.

Clients often state that they “feel like a weight has been lifted from them.”It’s been well-established that clients who receive EMDR treatment always tend to leave the sessions more relaxed and more at ease than they were when they arrived.

EMDR has been backed up by a number of medical studies. Countless people have seen remarkable recovery through the use of EMDR therapy—especially when combined with other modalities and life changes.

Because it is so safe and so effective, many believe that it should be a more common first-step approach to dealing with trauma and negative associations—and in my office, I’ve seen first-hand how effective it can truly be

10 Beliefs that will help you through life

1.I believe that people, strong and resilient though they may be, sometimes
require guidance

2.I believe that we, as social beings, require social relationships for our
well being. These relationships however, are a double-edged sword; they
are often the source of much of our heartache and struggle.

3.I believe that pain and tribulation is inevitable and necessary for growth.
However, I also believe that we have an innate and an enormous capacity
to heal and emerge even stronger from such experiences.

4.I believe that a low level of self-esteem is often at the heart of our
emotional struggle.

5.I believe that change is inevitable. It is a process and not

usually a quick fix. It requires time, effort, courage, awareness and openness.

6.I believe that unless we are in harmony with ourselves, we cannot be in
harmony with others.

7.I believe that people must be treated as a whole-and therefore, it is
critical to address issues of mind, body, spirit and environment.

8.I believe that a deeper understanding of oneself, a higher level of
awareness, and new ways to live more meaningful, happier lives are
possible through therapy.

9.I believe that a “victim mentality” is unhealthy, regardless of whether one
is a victim of trauma or unfortunate circumstances. This mentality leads to
blaming others, which does not help us to emotional well-being.

10.I believe that above all we all need to be heard, understood, accepted,
and validated.
Therapy can help us achieve this.

Mind-Body Healing

Mind and Body Healing

How am I really feeling? This is a question we don’t ask ourselves that often, even though we should. Are you happy or is there that underlying hint of from something you have not dealt with? Are you more tired than you realize? Is that stiff neck still bothering you?

We have the power to diagnose and heal ourselves. Taking a few moments a weeks to check in with our minds and our bodies can do a lot of good.

How do you do this?

Well, the most important step to self healing is believing in your own healing abilities. Belief is a powerful tool and can help you in everything. The best way to believe in self healing is to see it as something natural – not magical but know there will be a happier, healthier you.

1. You can start the process with a mental body scan meditation. This is an easy to do routine where you check your body for tension or aces. If it helps you can see yourself as a computer that needs to scan itself for malware.

2. Listen to what your body tells you and focus on the stress points. If something feels strange or painful it needs attention. Bring your attention to that spot and send love and positive images and words to that place, believe you are mentally massaging the pain away – or deleting the spyware as it where. If the pain is mental pain you had blocked try and re-shift your opinion on it, work on making the negative positive.

3. Rewire your brain, think more positive: the more you train your brain to have a positive outlook on life the happier you’ll feel.

4. Make changes in your life. Holding on to bad habits and toxic people can make you ill. Re-evaluate your attitudes, your social circle and your community. What changes can be made to it?

5. Look at your stress level. Stress related disorders are an epidemic these days. What can you do at work or at home to keep your anxiety level down and keep your body and mind as stress free a possible? Meditate on it, think about your day to day life and try and feel where you feel the stress creep in and how you could stop this from happening. Learn how to relax.

6. Exercise: relaxing and exercise are related: you can’t relax if you feel bloated or full. You will also feel groggy if you don’t move for at-least twenty minutes every day. Don’t stress yourself by thinking you must do certain exercises: a brisk walk, two hours of shopping (without the car!), dancing around the room, even walking while watching TV are just as valid as the exercises magazines and TV shows insist we do.

7. Eat healthy: try and incorporate some healthy food in your diet: add fruit, vegetables and water.

8. Have fun: start doing things you enjoy. Join clubs, meet new people, or go back to that old hobby you liked so much. Learn new skills. Do something that programs you to think that you matter.

Whatever you do, remember this: Always be kind to yourself. There is only one you!

Personal Empowerment

Personal Empowerment: The Basics

Personal Empowerment is something that all of us chase, at least to some degree and to some extent. And yet, many people fail to understand what the concept really means. Many people chase personal empowerment from the outside. They read books, they attend classes, and they seek out people who make them feel better about themselves.

All of these activities are certainly positive and worthwhile—but maybe it’s time to start looking at what personal empowerment really means.

To truly find empowerment, you need to develop it within yourself. This, unfortunately, isn’t achieved in a monumental, profound moment of enlightenment or a miraculous healing event—but rather, is something that we live and demonstrate on a day-to-day basis. It’s a process that takes time, dedication, hard work, and devotion.

The biggest challenge that we all face, when it comes to finding our own sense of empowerment and self-worth, is that we’re usually habitual in our self-judgement and self-criticism. We reject ourselves out of habit, not because we have real, rational reasons to do so.

Please don’t misunderstand—self-doubt and self-criticism aren’t always so easily explained. Sometimes, these issues are very deep-seated and complicated. But in the words of the famous Sean Covey, “we become what we repeatedly do.”

If you make an effort to live an empowered life, and wake up every morning with a sense of intentionality and dedication concerning this goal, then you’ll find yourself much more likely to be successful.

The hard, cold truth is that self-empowerment really needs to be self-taught—and we can only teach it to ourselves by becoming what we wish to be. This means that you need to visualize the ‘you’ that you wish to be one day—and then create that person with your words and actions.

This doesn’t mean that you pretend to be something you’re not. It means that you habitually correct one negative behavior at a time, until the process becomes automatic. And when this happens, you’ll realize that the change wasn’t an act. It was real, genuine, and effective.

Relationship Counseling

Relationship Counseling: Can It Really Work?

Relationship counseling, couples counseling, and/or marriage counseling are pretty common terms that seem to come up whenever people are talking about potential deal-breaking differences or conflicts between themselves and their partner or spouse. Sometimes, this form of counseling can also be used to help two family members or co-workers to work out their differences—but for the most part, the term ‘relationship counseling’ tends to be used interchangeably with ‘couples counseling’.

But here’s the big question… does it really work?

According to a quote by William Doherty (pHD, LCSW: source), it would seem that it certainly can—and usually does. Here’s what he said in a quote that was shared on the subject on webmd.com.

“Studies show that, in the hands of a good counselor, marriage counseling is successful 70- 80% of the time…”

Of course, the biggest goal (and challenge) with relationship counseling as a whole is to get both people involved to see the problems from a third-party perspective. People are often so caught up in how many problems the ‘other’ person is causing that they fail to look at themselves or the context—and therein lies the brunt of most relationship problems.

Couples counseling (or really any other type of relationship counseling) seeks to correct this by changing the perceptions of those involved. If both individuals can figure out what’s going wrong and why the problems are happening, then the possibility exists that they can change their behavior enough to begin the rebuilding process.

Broken trust, hurt feelings, bitterness, resentment, and full-fledged aggression can all play a part in the destruction of a relationship—but these things are often started in small, subtle ways. The biggest problems usually end up being simple problems that have been multiplied or repeated over and over again. And sometimes, simple fixes in behavior and attitude can make all the difference in the world.

Of course, relationships are complicated—which is why relationship counseling is sometimes the best choice when people just can’t seem to get along as well as they would like. It sometimes takes an outside perspective to really fit the pieces together, and that’s where a professional, experienced counselor can truly work wonders.

EMDR-What Is It?

What is EMDR? EMDR (which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a modality used in psychotherapy. …

10 Beliefs that will help you through life

1.I believe that people, strong and resilient though they may be, sometimes require guidance 2.I believe that we, as social …

Mind-Body Healing

Mind and Body Healing How am I really feeling? This is a question we don’t ask ourselves that often, even though we …