Mental Health

Experiencing stress is very common, and some stress is important to experience. Stress allows you to be challenged, stimulated, and grow. Although, when stressors in your life are constant or increased, stress can become chronic. Chronic stress can cause adverse mental and physical health side effects that get in the way of everyday life.

Experiencing mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression can disconnect you from your inner power. Recovery is what allows you to get back in touch with the innate, intuitive, and powerful parts of yourself that you become disconnected from as a result of mental illness. You can get used to barely getting by, and you may not even have the awareness that feeling connected to yourself is possible.

Loss can be a truly traumatic and ground-shaking experience that no person should have to confront alone. A social support system is critical for healthily processing the stages of grief. You can overcome turmoil by participating in group therapy and connecting with others who understand what you are going through.

The ability you have to regulate your nervous system can either lead you to feelings of safety in your body and inner peace, or toward dysregulated states of stress, anxiety, and fear. Nervous system dysregulation might be all you know as you may have grown accustomed to living in chaos due to trauma or chronic stress. Therefore, learning how to regulate your nervous system is the key to access a greater sense of groundedness, ease, and presence within yourself.

Have you ever heard the phrase, 'mean what you say and say what you mean? This simple principle could be easier said than done if you grew up in a family where your emotions were not a priority. As an adult, you may lack emotional integrity, an important quality to sustain healthy and honest relationships. Learn about the signs that show you may be struggling with emotional transparency and how clinical modalities can help you heal from stressful and traumatic childhood experiences.

The first thing you lose contact with when experiencing stress is your breath. Connection with your breath is the key to accessing deeper states of presence in yourself. To begin rekindling a relationship with yourself and feeling more centered in your life, you must begin to build an intentional relationship with your breath. Allow it to serve as the guide home to your body and the present moment.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is a form of therapy that focuses on ideas of cognitive-behavioral therapy. It is rooted in recognizing how your thoughts influence your feelings and how your feelings influence your actions by way of practices rooted in mindfulness. These types of therapies can help you experience a new relationship with your thoughts and feelings that allow you to experience freedom from them rather than attachment to them.

Anxiety can feel like a blanket, only instead of comforting you, it suffocates you. It can feel heavy, dark, isolating, and can leave you wondering if it will ever leave. Although anxiety may feel like it is consuming your life, there are practices you utilize to intentionally and mindfully soften the weight that anxiety brings to experience freedom.

Allowance is the amount to which you permit something into your experience. In the absence of allowance, you may find yourself meeting resistance and feeling stuck physically, relationally, emotionally, or spiritually.

Beginning treatment for substance use disorder and mental illness can feel overwhelming. Not only are you learning to manage all the pieces of your treatment program, but you are also beginning to change in ways that you never have before and challenging parts of yourself that are destructive but have become your normal. Because healing can feel overwhelming and uncertain at times, it is important to take it one step at a time.

What is your relationship like with acceptance? It is common to confuse acceptance with staying “stuck." The line between acceptance and stagnation is thin and sometimes blurry. Despite that fact, what if acceptance of yourself and your situation was the launchpad for change, growth, and healing?

Self-forgiveness is essential not only for intentional healing journeys—like those from substance abuse or mental health issues—but in life in general. Even if you often allow yourself to forgive other people, sometimes it feels like forgiving yourself is off-limits, especially if you tend to have patterns of perfectionism and a loud inner critic.