One Rule For Life Vacations Can Teach You
Whenever me and my husband take group tours to Europe we make such fabulous memories. Planning these trips, and then taking them, makes each day after our vacation richer. But one thing we’ve learned about our trips is that a lot of things are going to go...
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Prince Harry Speaks About Mental Health on Mod World Podcast
I'm excited about this new podcast Mod World. In Episode 1 Prince Harry speaks to the Telegraph's Bryony Gordon for the first episode of her new podcast, Mad World, where she interviews guests about their mental health experiences. The half-hour conversation provides...
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EMDR For Sexual Abuse Survivors
Yesterday an acquaintance on social media sent me a private message. She had a question about a type of trauma treatment called EMDR. If you don't know what EMDR is, check out this video. It looks woo-woo, but it is actually a powerful tool that many therapists...
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The Shocking Way Childhood Trauma Affects Your Physical Health
You may remember in my book Renewed: Finding Your Inner Happy in an Overwhelmed World where I talked about the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE), which shows a scientific link between many types of childhood adversities and the adult onset of physical and...
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Help! My Depressed Friend Leans On Me Too Much
I'm in a social/friendly Facebook group where people randomly share situations in which they are needing advice from others. Here is one I saw and how I responded: I need some friendship advice. I’m in a difficult situation with one of my friends — he struggles...
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Emotional Bubble Wrap Strategies for Living in a Bumpy World
When I was 37, with middleschool children at home, I went to graduate school to study counseling. If you had met me then you would have seen a perfectionistic, seemingly happy young women. But in reality, I hid a lot of shame and massive amounts of unprocessed trauma....
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Anxiety – A Primer
I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor, Author, and Teacher at a local university. My tagline is "help for hurting people." Last week I sent out an email asking my subscribers what they wanted me to write more about. Two popular topics were grief and anxiety. So here's...
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Self Compassion and Emotional Agility
A few years ago I made a series of video clips about personality disorders and various types of counseling. They received tens of thousands of views and tons of subscribers. I'm not sure why I stopped doing that, but today I was thinking about my Youtube audience. I'm...
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Renaissance University – A course in selfcare
I grew up in a large Catholic family, in a small town. My dad was a doctor, my mom a nurse. We had a lot of fun. We had snow machines; I had freedom to run all over town, we went to Glenwood Hot Springs a lot. My mother, a nurse, was very loving. My dad, a doctor, was...
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The Comforting Thing I Learned About God’s Provision
I was 15. I went three days without food. I wanted to die, wanted to walk in front of a car, just have it be over. Depriving myself of food was just one more way for me to bury the pain. Heck, I’d tried guys, drugs, booze. None of those...
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