Fight, Flight, and Freeze are the three responses that are biological instincts to protect us when our lives are in danger. However, what we find sometimes is that we experience fight, flight, or freeze even when there is not a threat to our lives.

Mental health treatment is different for everyone, and people often feel overwhelmed trying to figure out where to begin. Outpatient therapy is a great place to start, and you and your therapist can work together to figure out if that is the right course, or if you need a higher level of care.

You don’t need to fix or rescue your child from this situation. They got this. More than anything, they need you to believe they can handle anything that comes their way.

Medical trauma can cause a person to feel helpless and often hopeless. These emotions are certainly understandable. Taking care of your mental health and learning to advocate for yourself in the medical system can be empowering.

Young people need to understand anxiety is our brain's way of checking to see if we are okay, not to tell us that we aren’t okay.

Therapists expect clients to have questions about therapy when they come to a session, especially if this is their first time in therapy.

Parenting well can feel like trying to hit a moving target. Parental involvement and responsiveness have been linked to child success, yet too much of either can have detrimental effects to children. So how do you know how much involvement and responsiveness is too much?

Finding the right therapist can be difficult. For neurodivergent clients, finding a therapist who truly understands their needs is often even harder. Neurodivergent clients often spend years being misunderstood, having their experiences invalidated, or told they are “too much” or “not trying hard enough.” Working with a neurodivergent therapist can feel noticeably different in ways that matter.

Shared lived experience can create understanding that does not require constant explanation. For many neurodivergent clients, that difference alone can change how safe therapy feels.

ADHD stigma is considered one of several risk factors for negative outcomes of ADHD, including developing other mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, alcohol/substance abuse, and eating disorders. Stigma of any kind is often connected to increasing the risk of suicide. A shocking fact about people with ADHD is that they are 3 times more likely than the general population to commit suicide.

Even though ADHD can look different for each individual, there is a process for exploring a possible diagnosis. When we assess for ADHD, we are looking for what falls beyond the typical childhood behavior category and how their life is impacted by those behaviors and needs. If you’re noticing your child’s behaviors seem more intense, more frequent, or last longer than what is a developmentally appropriate behavior, that is a pattern to note. We also want to reflect on how their functioning is being impacted by their behavior. Let’s look at the 2 most common settings, home and school, and see what we notice…

Making sense of the passing of time can be hard, and sometimes we try to help ourselves understand this by setting goals. Therapist’s love goals! We set goals with our clients all the time. Goals themselves are not a problem, as long as you are kind to yourself and give yourself the grace to have harder days.

Here are some ways to think about the new year and set goals in a more positive way.

Positive psychology, promoted by psychologist and researcher Martin Seligman, encourages individuals to adopt—you guessed it—a positive outlook on life. But not in the way that Instagram influencers often encourage toxic positivity. Benefits of positive psychology include increased self-esteem, improved relationships, and a better outlook on life. To me, those all sound like things we are very much in need of as we see to the start of 2021. This isn’t to ignore all the seemingly insurmountable negatives from the past year, however focusing only on those discounts the little moments that help us get through those huge, life-altering events that are usually out of our control. What we can do is tap back into personal strengths, gratitude, wellbeing, and feelings of hope, compassion, and optimism that motivate us to get through the day. 

Everyone feels sad sometimes. Sadness is a normal, healthy human emotion. We feel sad when we lose someone, when someone we love is going through a hard time, or when we are disappointed. We feel sadness when less significant things happen too- our favorite restaurant is closed, or it rains on a day we plan to be outside. Depression is not the same. It is a diagnostic term that means someone is feeling a combination of different symptoms that get in the way of normal, everyday functioning. Depression is sometimes used in place of sadness, but, in a clinical setting, these words are completely different. Sadness can be an aspect of depression, but both can exist on their own. 

But how can “bad” emotions be helpful?

Often, though not always, what we mean is that humor makes us feel better. Humor is an important tool in relationships of all kinds, and humor comes up often during therapy. For example, “Opposite Action” is a coping skill commonly taught in Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Opposite Action is doing the opposite of what you feel to counteract the feeling or urge. In the case of humor, it could mean making a joke or attempting to laugh when you are feeling sad. Laughter can also bring people together, in the case of a shared sense of humor, or an inside joke, or can help us process an embarrassing event or moment.