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Negative emotions are a part of life, but why are they important? Nobody wants to feel sad, lonely, angry, anxious, worried, or fearful. Often, people don't understand the purpose of emotions they perceive as bad, and they want to get back to feeling good. The problem with labeling our emotions as "good" or "bad" is that we may assume our negative emotions do not serve a purpose, are purely unhelpful, and should be avoided at all costs. The truth is, our negative emotions have positive life lessons for us if we know how to attune to them properly.
I survived sexual abuse as a child, but did it contribute to my later diagnosis of schizophrenia? Research suggests a possible link between psychotic disorders and childhood trauma, but the exact nature of this link remains unclear. The significant impact of child sex abuse on my life, however, is indisputable.
Maintaining healthy relationships when you're under stress is difficult. For example, this past week, I had a really tough time at work. I was feeling sick, working on a lot of projects, and struggling just to keep my head above water. As the week went on, I became progressively more focused on myself, trying to figure out how to get through all of my work and stop feeling so stressed out by it. Unfortunately, this meant that I was devoting most of my attention to myself and wasn't supporting my girlfriend as I normally would. By the end of the week, I was struggling to figure out what I could do differently to be supportive despite the stress I was experiencing at work.
Before I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression, I did not appreciate the importance of self-care. Sure, I knew that it was important to practice good hygiene, work hard in school, exercise, etc. But I had no idea that self-care required more than just the basics for living. I had no idea that self-care activities can be so different for everyone. By using the Olga Phoenix Self-Care Wheel, I learned how to truly care for my wellbeing. Read this article to learn about how the self-care wheel has helped me with my mental health.
You can increase your level of being present by making yours a feng shui home. Feng shui (pronounced ‘fuhng SHWAY’), a Chinese tradition that involves arranging a physical environment for the best energy, seems mystical and even scary to those who haven’t learned about its principles, but feng shui boils down to essentially a healthy dose of common sense as well as a set of mindfulness practices to choose from.
Drug and alcohol withdrawal can be dangerous. Making the decision to stop using drugs or alcohol is the first step to long-term recovery, but the process that you go through to detox your body of substances can be life-threatening and what you don’t know could hurt you. Here are six facts that you may not be aware of about drug and alcohol withdrawal.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and shame have a very tight relationship. So tight, in fact, the more shame you experience, the worse your PTSD symptoms can be. Often though, you may not realize shame is what is driving your PTSD.
Explore your low self-esteem? How do you do that? Picture a road map. On one side is a bright red dot, labeled "High Self-Esteem." This is our destination, the place we dream of arriving. Our map is covered in routes that twist and turn, approaching the red dot from all different directions. On our journey we will be able to explore these, finding the ones that lead us closer to our goal. But in order to begin, we need to find the dot labeled "You Are Here." We have to know our starting point. We have to explore the starting point of our low self-esteem to know how to raise it.
Reacting to verbal abuse is the most natural, but not the best, choice; instead, learning to respond to verbal abuse is something you can do. For example, if you've ever been in a situation where someone is verbally abusing you, you've probably had the urge to do one of four things: get away as soon as possible to avoid the abuse, smooth over the aggression, zone out or freeze up and wait for it to end, or fight back.
Sometimes, I expect myself to just snap out of it: it being my schizoaffective anxiety. This is problematic for several reasons. First, it reeks of self-stigma—to the point where I would say it is a form of self-stigma. What’s even worse, it can block me from doing the necessary hard work in therapy to get better.