Understanding and Managing Various Types of Grief
Grief is the aftermath that we have to make sense of. You may be wondering: “How could this happen to me?” “Why am I feeling both yearning and relief?” “I don’t want to wake up tomorrow anymore.” “Why don’t I feel anything?” “I should not feel this way, others lost so much more than me.” “I could have, should have, would have…” As we grapple with our loss, it can lead us to isolate ourselves from those who wish to share in our pain. After all, how can others understand that which we cannot fully fathom?
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Reducing Stigma Associated with Suicidal Thoughts
Having suicidal thoughts can be terrifying. These thoughts can be isolating. You might feel lost, as though you can’t tell anyone. Maybe the thoughts don’t feel so serious because you know you would never act on them. Or you might be ashamed that you feel that way in your weakest moments. You probably don’t want to burden your loved ones with your personal struggles.
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Navigating Important Relationships When You’re Dealing With Anxiety
Many relationships in life can cause a great amount of uncertainty. Do they like me as much as I like them? Am I being overbearing? Did I say the wrong thing? It is important to work through these feelings in order to thrive in the various relationships we have in our lives.
- Ava Kaplan, LMSW
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The Paradox of Grief: A Guide to Grieving When Others Don’t Understand
Grief is the intense emotional response to the pain of a loss (Kubler-Ross & Kessler, 2014, p. 170). This loss could be the death of a loved one, loss of a career, loss of identity, loss of health, or even something as innocuous as the loss of routine. Change, albeit exciting, can also bring about a sense of loss, be it graduation, moving to a new city or country, changing jobs, or having a family. Nevertheless, the loss of connection can translate into grief.
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The Language of your Body: Using Dance/Movement Therapy to Connect and Communicate
The physical element of movement therapy has its advantages - aerobic exercise elevates dopamine and endorphins, and reduces levels of stress anxiety, and depression. The emotional element of movement therapy allows us to become more aware and mindful of our mental state and how these feelings manifest in our physical states. It gives us a chance to truly connect with all parts of us. Click to learn more.
- Devika Chandnani (Studio Instructor)
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Teens in 2021: A Guide for Families Navigating the New School Year
The 2020-2021 school year was unprecedented. Millions of students around the world spent the year learning remotely, a process that disrupted peer socialization, changed learning habits, and created additional responsibilities for parents and caregivers. As students return to classrooms this fall, disagreements, challenges, fears and anxieties are natural and understandable responses to our changed environment. Where do we begin to manage these challenges? And how can families come together to help teens adjust to our new normal?
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Understanding & Navigating Through COVID’s Lingering Effects on Couples
We experienced massive shifts in our everyday realities in a short period of time: financial challenges abounded, domestic violence rates increased, and we longed for physical interaction with distant loved ones. We also experienced longer stretches of solitude, allowing us to reflect and initiate changes. The fear we felt - and in many ways are still feeling - is causing us to relate to and communicate with our partners and children differently - sometimes for the worse. What should we know about the pandemic’s effects on couples and families moving forward? What changes should we make to remain grounded in our relationships?
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How to Get Your Child to Attend Therapy for Teens
You’ve made it through the first steps: recognizing your teen is struggling with their mental health and broaching the topic of therapy with them. But what do you do if you’re met with resistance? Getting your teen to see a therapist can be a difficult feat, but there are additional steps you can take to help facilitate that process.
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What Dance Movement Therapy Looks Like Online: Healing through Movement in the Virtual World
Dance movement therapy is a somatic psychotherapeutic approach to further healing and connection to the self through a deepening of conscious connection between your body and mind. Through engaging in somatic-based interventions such as meditations, body scans, somatic sensing, breath-work, movement improvisation, structured movement phrases, imagery, and movement explorations you can reach places within yourself that words can not.
- Noelani Rodriguez, LCAT, RDMT
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Managing Anxiety: Using Yoga and the Breath
Most people will experience anxiety at some point in their lives, drawing their full attention to a uniquely stressful situation. For most people, once the crisis is over, the feeling of anxiety ends as well. However, for some, anxiety can feel like a full-time emotion that leaves us feeling powerless over our thoughts and regretful of overreacting to events, whether real or perceived. So, how can yoga and the breath help?
- Caroline Gomez, MA, ERYT-500, RM
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Experiential Therapy: What Does Art Therapy Look Like & How Does it Work Online?
When you were young and first learning to navigate the world, the adults in your life most likely repeated a certain phrase to you: “Use your words, use your words.” They wanted to encourage you to formulate your thoughts into statements, to use your voice, and to advocate for yourself through the spoken language. However, in the years that have passed since learning to speak, you may have realized that your voice can often fail you when you need it most - you just can’t “use your words” to explain your emotional experience.
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Managing Dating Anxiety When in College
College is a time of drastic change in the lives of young adults. Teens are required to begin a new life away from what they call home, with an increased sense of responsibility. Changes in social situations are to be expected as well as opposed to high school where young adults may have had a solid group of friends over several years. This time of transition may hold feelings of fear, anxiety, worry, and even grief. Grief surrounding the life they had before this time.
- Prerna Menon, LCSW, SIFI, CTP
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Being Together Whilst Living Apart: How to Sustain Long-distance Relationships
Society tells us that for a union to exist, the union must exist as one. You must live together, love together, exist together. Build a home, share a home, firmly plant your feet on the same soil as your significant other(s). So what happens when circumstances force distance? When circumstance creates a wedge between two longing hands? Does the foundation of your relationship have to crack? Is rupture destined?
- Prerna Menon, LCSW, CTP, SIFI
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What does Online Yoga Therapy Look Like & How Does it Work?
Yoga, and in particular yoga therapy, offers a refreshing counterpoint. Instead of adding more and more to our already full lives, how can we turn inwards and let go of the filters through which we see the world?
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Interested in Art Therapy & Response Artwork?: Understanding the Clinical Process
Art Therapy is not limited to solely the rich experience of a client creating artwork in a session. Often a clinician specializing in Art Therapy will engage in the process of creating Response Artwork to express their knowledge of the client and gain a deeper understanding of their therapeutic alliance. This process enriches the therapeutic bond and allows the therapist to navigate treatment in a way that is tailor made to the clients needs.
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An Open Letter to Moms Doing it All
Dear depleted mother,
We know your life force well. Your roots dive deep into the rich earth, reaching, surging, twisting, curling, grounding the growing tree of your family. You nurture, strengthen, and stabilize. You give so much of yourself. You are overextended.
- Lexi Garber, LMSW
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Why Seeing An Out-of-network Therapist Can Actually Save You Money
You think you’ve found a therapist that’s right for you: they align with your needs and goals, have a high level of expertise and training, and, most importantly, their personality and approach make you feel seen, heard, and understood. The only problem? They’re out-of-network (OON) with your insurance. The good news is that this does not, in fact, have to be a problem at all.
- Sarah Panzer, MSW
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What Are The Benefits Of Online Therapy?
Research shows that therapy from “afar” can be just as effective as in-person therapy. This research indicates that tele-psychiatry clients reported improved mental health after a month of tele-therapy. Tele-psychiatry patients also reported similar levels of overall satisfaction and comfort as in-person ones (Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare, 2006). Click above to learn more about online therapy.
- Prerna Menon, LMSW, CTP
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How EMDR Can Help You Become “Unstuck”
Sometimes people telling us to just get over it or being told we should let it go is not the most helpful. Actually those two keywords can do more harm than good making us feel they should fix what we are feeling. The reality is that for many people “just” and “should” does not change that we experienced something that is impacting us. Sometimes we can see how these experiences are impacting our current life and other times we may notice that our reactions to things today are more charged than they “should” be.
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Reasons Why Marital Wellness Checks in Therapy matter: Couples Therapy
Whether we like to admit it or not, no relationship is perfect. All couples experience conflict from time to time. The classic culprits responsible for these encounters are spending habits, differing sex drives, family of origin involvement in the relationship, miscommunication, and other patterns of argument that seem never-ending. However, for many couples, a new stressor has been added into the mix – living together in quarantine. This is especially true for married or cohabitating couples who were forced to work from home over the last year and a half in the pandemic.
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