Steps Family Therapy

  Good and Evil: Restricting the Emotional Spectrum   The point of therapy is not to keep you from feeling sadness or pain. It is to help you feel everything : happy, sad, fear, pain, pleasure, love, anger... The key requirement in our ability to feel the whole emotional spectrum is feeling safe. It is when our bodies feel threatened or hurt that we are tense and anxious, or numb and depressed. It is hard to feel happy or loved when we feel unsafe.  And where does the danger come from? If your current life circumstances are traumatizing (job, relationship, societal dangers), then your fear or numbness are appropriate. You don’t actually have a “mental illness” if your emotions match the current environment. If you are much more afraid, angry, or numb than seems appropriate, the danger is wired into older neurons--there is trauma in your past. You have unhealed wounds that you have attempted to numb out in dangerous circumstances, so they are coming back to be treated now ...

  Are You Racking Up Emotional Debt?    S ome of you know what it’s like to have ever- increasing financial strain, and feel the need to spend to keep debt at bay (e.g., using a credit card to pay off a loan). This slows the problem in the short-term in exchange for a greater measure of pain later on. Not a good trade-off. Sometimes you need a financial consultant to help you out.  Mental health and relational issues often become extreme enough to get a consultant once the emotional debt gets out of control. The emotional principal of your debt includes all the emotional pain you have ever experienced, but have not processed. You can tell a trauma is unprocessed because it evokes a painful emotion when you let yourself think about it (in the same way that your financial debt doesn’t stop causing hurt, even if you can distract yourself from it).  The unpaid emotional debt begins racking up interest if unaddressed, often in the form of anxiety, depression, conflic...

  It’s About TIME: Why People Pay Me for This   "Get some rest. If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything."  -Count Rugen, from The Princess Bride   What wisdom from the 6-fingered man! If you are not healthy enough, you literally can’t do anything, do it well, or enjoy what you can do. The most basic prerequisite to both mental and physical health is that you need to be sleeping for about 1⁄3 of your life. If you’re not, your health may be declining much faster than necessary. Your body will punish you for this.  *Maybe you don’t know why you can’t sleep. Your first priority should be to figure that out! (Anxiety? Trauma? Poor sleeping habits? Physiological problem?)  Another principle of health is healing , or taking time to address the wounds and illnesses we have, which often get worse if they are not treated. If we don’t take time to do this, the brain and body will incapacitate us and force us to take a load off (a good way to conceptua...