Articles
What is an Anxiety Attack and What Should I Do if I Have One?
Have you ever felt a moment of intense panic, fear, or dread over which you had little or no control? Did you experience racing thoughts and unsettling experiences in your body? These are some of the ways an anxiety attack can manifest, causing significant distress. Anxiety attacks may come on suddenly without any seeming cause or may be induced by stressful circumstances overwhelming the nervous system. This article will look at anxiety attacks and their definition, along with the varying ways that symptoms may present, and offer empowering tools to help with the future management of anxiety. Anxiety Attacks vs. Panic [...]
How to Control Your Anger: Tips from a Christian Counselor
If I were to ask you to recall a time that you were furious, what would come to mind? I’m sure that every single person living today would have a few moments that stand out from the rest, in which we were furious to the point that we could hardly control ourselves. Even as a therapist, I am guilty of the sin as well. Understanding How to Control Your Anger I would love to take a journey with you on understanding what is truly happening to us when we start to have these feelings of anger and frustration and explore the [...]
15 Strategies for PTSD Therapy
PTSD therapy consists of various treatments, including clinical mental health techniques, grounding techniques you can do in between sessions, and long-term lifestyle changes. PTSD Therapy and Techniques PTSD therapy encompasses every aspect of your life, including your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. To manage traumatic memories, you need to look at your full holistic self, including but not limited to: a healthier lifestyle, psychological methods, individually curated tools and techniques, and social and spiritual support. PTSD treatment includes techniques such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Somatic Experiencing (SE), and/or Internal Family Systems (IFS). These [...]
The Path to Mental Wellness
Mental wellness refers to intentionally caring for one’s mental and emotional well-being by taking an active role in one’s health. Many people only focus on physical health and ignore their mental health, yet physical illness can often begin with mental distress. For example, if you care for an aging parent or have recently experienced financial strain, the chronic stress will affect your nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system triggers the fight-or-flight response, as adrenaline and cortisol flood the system. You begin to suffer from brain fog, panic attacks, and insomnia. Eventually, this can lead to physical illnesses. Boosting mental wellness can keep [...]
Recognizing and Understanding Hoarding Disorder
Hoarding disorder is a mental health condition that goes beyond just having too much clutter. It is characterized by an uncontrollable need to continually accumulate things to the point where they invade your living space and make it cramped and unusable. A hoarder finds safety in the hoard, in the stacks and piles, and he or she will grieve over the loss of those items when they are gone. – Matt Paxton In extreme cases, items may be piled floor to ceiling, making it difficult to move through rooms, prepare food, or even take a shower. Yet even just the thought [...]
Owning and Working Through Your Grieving Process
There are many things in life that we wish were not so, and grief is one of them. Grief sets in after loss, and loss often means pain. The grieving process is not easy, and sometimes it’s more convenient to either deny the reality of the loss and the pain it’s caused or to deal with it in an unhealthy way. Owning and working through your own grieving process allows you to face your situation squarely, offering you a path toward healing and wholeness. Grief and loss have been an inevitable part of the human experience since the days of Adam [...]
Psychedelic Therapy and Healing the Wounds of a Traumatic Experience
Christian women sometimes experience difficult moments that feel like they shape the rest of their lives. These moments disrupted safety and rewrote how they see themselves in the world around them. A traumatic experience typically reshapes our patterns of thought, our emotional responses, and our spiritual confidence in ways that women often do not understand. Some people want relief from the heaviness, but also want their healing choices to honor God. This is where psychedelic therapy becomes more widely discussed. It raises new questions about whether these treatments bring emotional clarity or introduce a risk. This invites an important conversation for [...]
When You Want to Take Control: How the Bible Can Reframe Your Perspective
When things go wrong in our lives, it is easy to try to control the situation or the people around us. We are grasping for anything that will make us feel as though we are okay. But in trying to control what is happening, we are only hurting ourselves and often hurting others in the process. Examples of People Taking Control Throughout Scripture When we take ourselves out of God’s plans for us, we often cheapen our experiences. A good example of this is when Sarah gave Abraham Hagar because she wanted a son. Sarah started to resent Hagar and Ismael [...]
How to Deal with Anger When You’re Hurt
We all get a little bent out of shape if things don’t go our way, and it’s not uncommon for us to feel anger at someone who causes us harm. As religious people, we can set up a hierarchy of transgressions, in which getting drunk is a huge no-no, but we permit anger because we feel justified in it. We can cloak our anger as righteous, virtuous, and merited, all the while yielding to what may truly be a vice. Augustine said, “Is it any merit to abstain from wine if one is intoxicated with anger?” (Augustine) These are words worth [...]