Online Counseling, Therapy & Life Coaching
EMDR Therapy for Individuals, Couples, Families – In Person, Video or Telephone
Adrenal Fatigue: Does Your Soul Feel Tired?
No pep, drive, or energy and wondering where it went?
Perhaps your soul feels untouched by life’s beauty and your excitement about things that used to bring feelings of pleasure is gone. Or, maybe life has lost its color, making everything seem black and white. Are you sometimes so overwhelmed by fatigue that you cry?
Adrenal fatigue makes you so exhausted and overwhelmed that you feel completely depleted of energy. If your fatigue is so intense that you feel tired within your soul, you may need to redefine your life.
According to Dr. Wilson, who wrote an easy-to-understand guide on stress and health called Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome, adrenal fatigue is much more prominent within our society than most of us know or recognize.
According to Dr. Wilson, the symptoms are:
• Tired for no reason
• Trouble getting up in the morning
• Needing coffee, colas, energy drinks, sodas, salty, or sweet snacks to keep going
• Feeling run down and stressed
If adrenal fatigue continues, the adrenal glands are not able to handle stress — from lack of sleep, poor nutrition, substance abuse, chronic illness, repeated infections, or an ongoing low-level crisis lifestyle — so they become compensated and no longer function correctly to provide energy.
Any prolonged stressful situation where you feel trapped or helpless can cause your adrenal glands to overwork and give out. Many people work hard to deal with the stress of jobs, parenting, illness, caring for parents and loved ones, financial issues, and time management problems. Lifestyle change may be part of the answer to your fatigue.
Living a creative lifestyle is important to good health and it can also add to your ability to overcome adrenal fatigue. For example, creative lifestyle changes such as introducing more nourishing foods and supplements, exercise, and deep breathing would all be positive support for someone who needs to heal their adrenals.
In some cases, talking to a therapist about reducing your stress by reframing your life, increasing fun, and decreasing stressors to improve your sleep patterns without medications would be advantageous. According to Dr. Wilson, “with proper care most people experiencing adrenal fatigue can expect to feel good again.”
When you feel better, you enjoy the soulfulness of life. See Dr. Wilson’s book Adrenal Fatigue: The 21st Century Stress Syndrome or check out Dr. Wilson’s Health Tips along with his Program for Adrenal Fatigue and Stress.
Copyright* Jean Pollack
Are You Having an Affair with Food?
Many people seek comfort when experiencing upsetting emotions such as worry, sadness, boredom, unhappiness, discontent, or loneliness. Are you replacing an emotional need with food? Like a lover, food can be used to silence one’s loneliness, pain, or suffering.
When Food Numbs Negative Emotion
Sometimes people are afraid to feel suffering, loneliness, or despair and attempt to silence it by consuming. Consuming takes the form of food, video games, shopping, alcohol, pornography, or other negative behaviors that create addictions.
People become frustrated with the ongoing cycle of numbing their uncomfortable feelings with food. They wonder why they can’t stop it and why they can’t get control. Most of them have tried for years — decades of dieting and exercise — but return to a repetitive cycle of guilt and even lower self-esteem. Many lose interest in sex. Some feel self-loathing about their overweight body.
This cycle of uncomfortable emotions — eating, guilt, remorse, and low self esteem — can lead to avoidance of many enjoyable activities such as intimacy, sex, and going out socially. This leaves people more alone, in more pain, and wanting more of what they are addicted to.
When you allow yourself to open your heart and feel pain and suffering, which is part of life, compassion for yourself and others will help you to heal your addictive eating. Jamie Marich, M.A. (ABD), LPCC-S, LICDC says, “Many addiction counselors who are aware of this phenomenon have turned to alternative therapies, such as EMDR, to help us access an individual’s entire brain, and in doing so, we are accessing the holistic self: emotions, sensations, cognitions, and any other relevant material that may emerge.”
EMDR therapy can help you to get out of this frustrating cycle by allowing you to feel the pain you are running from, develop compassion for yourself, and learn to accept and love yourself. This sounds simple but the process takes time and dedicated lifestyle changes. The rewards are a happier, less addictive lifestyle with more pleasure and less pain.
EMDR therapy can be very helpful in recreating new networks toward changing your negative thoughts and feelings. In effect, you become less afraid of feeling sorrow and pain, because you trust that joy and contentment are on the other side.
Learn more at emdrcoach.com.
Relationships: Heavy Baggage or a Carry-on?
In the first few encounters with a potential partner, we tend to assess their assets as well as their baggage. For example how many marriages and divorces has this person had? How many children, stepchildren, or any volatile relationships with exes?
Then, there is the area of addictions such as alcohol, porn, or gambling. These are heavy baggage type people. If there is a history of bankruptcy or a criminal history then this is also major baggage.
A good question to ask yourself is, “Do I want to start a relationship with someone who has major baggage or would I prefer a partner with carry-on size baggage?”
No matter how much chemistry you feel in the first months, assessing baggage weight is imperative. Does his or her baggage exceed the excess weight limit for what type of relationship you want?
Many times, people stay with someone thinking “my partner will change.” However, this is a hope that denies current problems. Change is always possible but you should never count on it. Look for a partner that you don’t have to change, especially as you mature.
You don’t want to spend your days, months, or years with the disappointments from the after effects of addictive behaviors. For example, gambling money creates instabililty; porn addiction creates distrust and can break a relationship; and, alcohol can leave behind emotional or physical destruction. Don’t be the person who rationalizes “he or she is stressed and has a few beers or a couple of glasses of wine at night to relax” or “he or she only gets drunk once or twice a year.” Don’t rationalize. Decide what you want in a relationship and wait for the right partner. Don’t accept the extra baggage unless you like to be weighed down. Most can live a lighter life alone.
Weighing In
Just as you do when flying, put the luggage on the scale and decide whether it exceeds your limit for the kind of relationship and life you want. Save yourself a lot of time, energy, and pain in the future.
What about compassion and love? Every relationship is tested as life presents itself with joys and sorrows, but when you begin with less baggage the relationship will withstand challenges and will also have the space to enjoy the lighter times.
Life As One Big Checklist
Has life become just another thing to check off your to-do list?
In my practice, many young people in their 20’s and 30’s have similar unconscious or conscious life goals that they want in a specified order — particular achievements to cross off “their list.”
The checklist includes: get accepted into the college of choice, have a boyfriend or girlfriend, graduate, get married then have a child, get another degree or career advancement, buy a big house and car, raise children, send children to college, and, finally, plan for retirement.
Each item also needs acquisition by a specific age. Long-term boyfriend turned husband by 28. Master’s by 30. House and children by 32. Yet, the underlying motivation often seems driven by the viewpoint or bias of family, media, or culture.
Fairly, with our fast-paced social media-driven lives, it has become more difficult to accomplish, much less stay focused, without an agenda. Therefore, large life accomplishments like finding a partner, getting married, and having children is on “the list” of short-term and long-term goals for many. Some days I wonder if a client will ask, “Do you think there’s an app for tracking my checklist?”
Generation Y (ages 18-35) is often referred to as the innovative generation because they grew up with overt consumerism. In effect, they are faced with constant pressure to keep pace, if not stay ahead. Many in this generation go through life with a competitive agenda pressuring to keep up with everyone else around them. It’s a faster, sleeker form of “keeping up with the Joneses,” and with Facebook an even more accessible one.
Social media is an easy and impersonal, though sometimes fabricated, format to view what others have and, therefore, what you should want: go to college, graduate, get married, have a child, get another degree, buy a big house and car, and then plan for retirement.
Why is this the good life to Gen Y? This generation wants instant satisfaction. They tend to be impatient. They don’t want to wait. To be is to work, gain social status, money, or love. However, if it’s not handed to them with great ease it goes in the “too hard basket” and they tell everyone that the goal is unattainable.
However, what makes life fulfilling for one person is often not the same for another. Many women already recognize the bygone belief that she must be married to be truly happy, but now Gen Y women feel they must be married by a certain age after completing a higher degree, have a great home and car, and then children to complete their lives. Plus, they must keep up with their friends and family expectations of what a happy life is.
Kate Schermerhorn, director of After Happily Ever After says, “Let’s throw away our antiquated ideas, our outdated formula for marriage, the ones that only work 50% of the time. Instead, let’s start thinking more creatively. Let’s find a way of making love, relationships, and marriage thrive.”
Creativity As a Way of Life
When you live a creative life, you are able to enjoy yourself, your purpose, know yourself, and create what makes you happy so that you move toward more happiness. When a relationship begins or ends, you continue to live creatively through the process.
According to an article in Huff Post Business 2012, Arianna Huffington was mentioned as one of the ten most creative business people. “When Arianna Huffington is looking for inspiration, she goes to sleep.”
There are many, many great ideas locked inside of us, Huffington says. We just need to close our eyes to see them.
Therefore, there are three nap rooms in the offices of the Huffington Post Media Group.
If you follow a natural pacing of creativity and rest throughout the day, you can create a rhythm that flows rather than resisting your natural urge to rest or create. You can learn to reflect on your internal wisdom and creativity using your life goals and dreams as a guide.
There is a strong connection between stress and creative expression. In fact, there are certain times of the day when growth, immunity, and anti-aging processes are occurring. There are other times when dynamics that regulate appetite, food intake, weight gain, healing, memory learning, creativity, and other balanced life processes are occurring. If these times are missed due to fighting your fatigue with caffeine or medicating your insomnia, you miss the important creative and physiological processes.
Living a creative life has to do with being aware of these processes, then reflecting on and nurturing them through the day. Early morning hours are conducive to sexual arousal, while meditation is productive in the later morning and gives way to exercise. Naps are helpful in the afternoon, especially if sleep is missed during the night. Late afternoon is a good time for nurturing and healing, making it an excellent time for therapy sessions. Evening hours are for social engagement and self-nurturing while 10 pm to midnight is quiet time in preparation for your dream cycle.
This four stage creative cycle named by Psychologist Ernest Rossi can be applied to any area of your life. You can read more about his influential writings in his book, The Psychobiology of Gene Expression.
Living creatively can be both challenging and rewarding. It becomes a way of life, not a checklist of things to be done. If your agenda is living life more creatively, relationships, marriage, college degrees, and other material wants and needs will be part of life, not a means to an end.
Read more at www.emdrcoach.com.
*Copyright Jean Pollack.
Texting Across Generations
“My friends understand me, but my mom and I fight because we miscommunicate when we text.”
Recently, in a counseling session, my client and her daughter were discussing relationship conflicts that seem to be triggered by texting each other. Eventually, the teenage daughter blurted out. “She texts me about things I can’t do anything about, like clean my room or taking out the trash. I’m at school, why is she texting me about that?”
According to Wikipedia, the average American teen receives over 3,300 texts per month. In 2009, it was estimated that 2.5 billion text messages are sent every day in the United States. What exactly are people texting about?
According to Forbes‘ The Psychology of Texting, by Alice G. Walton, “People use texts for a variety of purposes. What’s fascinating is what people are willing to say in texts that they would never say in person. Somehow it’s OK to be a little more revealing, forthright, and feisty than it is when you’re talking face to face. And this honesty via text works both to our detriment and betterment. ”
The female teenager in my office explained to me. “My mother doesn’t get it when I’m kidding and doesn’t know when she is annoying me.”
After a couple of sessions, the teenager and her mother decided to only text back and forth short messages about itinerary or short salutations of good luck or thanks. When other topics arose, she and her mother agreed to set up an appointment to talk in person.
Texting allows a distance between us and our textees. It gives us the courage to say things more impulsively and spontaneously than we would in person. We are freer to express what is happening, how we are feeling, and what we want at that moment. It can serve a good purpose, but for those who already have trouble communicating, this can cause further misunderstanding and conflict, especially when used across generations.
A generational communication gap seems to be inherent in texting. If there is, should texting be limited to just quick check-ins rather than full conversations like in the case of my clients?
Cracking the Emoticon Code
Texters of the boomer generation don’t use emoticons as frequently as the younger generations. Older people seem to equate emoticons with actual emotions, such as a wink means you are actually flirting whereas a wink to a younger texter could be only emphasizing the text’s content. Therefore, meaning attached to a text can be misinterpreted and lead to misconceptions and unintended emotional messages.
In the realm of psychology, many young adults, ages 18-26, particularly enjoy texting and emailing as a form of communication with their therapist. It is real time: current reactions to current situations. The information is available to review when they come into my office for a visit. Instead of forgetting something important, we can recapture the words, emotion, and situation, which is helpful. I have integrated texting and emailing into my psychology practice, and it has been used with many of my young adult clients very successfully.
Overall, texting can be and is used by many ages for a wealth of reasons, including therapy. Again, according to Forbes‘ The Psychology of Texting, Dr. Alan Manevitz, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center shares that texting can be very positive for psychology and for clients of all ages. “Texts also allow patients to be more comfortable opening up about their experiences than they tend to be in person. They’re more willing to reveal the thoughts they’ve had,” says Manevitz, “Or the choices they’ve made, which is particularly true for teens who are experimenting with new activities and substances that they might be ashamed to reveal on the couch.”
That said, texting is just one form of communication and like anything can be beneficial or detrimental, depending on the intent and context used. For example, if texting across generations results in misunderstanding and conflicts, stop texting about important topics. Instead, make an appointment to sit down and talk to each other or talk on the phone without distractions.
The teenager and her mother now limit their texting to certain topics and they notice how much more often they talk in person. As a result their relationship has improved because they have less conflicts and misunderstandings. Being present, at times, allows the full expression of the words to be more fully understood. Relationships are important. Choose your communication style carefully.
*Copyright Jean Pollack
Photo credit: Flickr
Recent Comments