Articles
What Is Friendship Abandonment?
Have you ever had a situation with a friend where you felt that something was different, but you could not put your finger on it? They just don’t act the same. After each interaction or declined invite, you are left asking yourself if you did something wrong. Then, out of the blue, the communication ends or starts to trickle in, confirming your fear that something is indeed wrong. The friendship ends abruptly and, most times, without explanation. This is called friendship abandonment. Abandonment can occur in all types of relationships. We have mostly been accustomed to the abandonment that happens to a [...]
Loneliness and Depression: Making the Connections and How to Address Them Both
You would think that with our ability to reach out across vast distances and communicate instantly with others, loneliness would be a distant memory. Billions are spent each year to enhance our ability to connect meaningfully with other people, but loneliness is still an issue we struggle to overcome. In some ways, the means we use to try and connect with others can further isolate us. Being lonely can have many consequences, and one of these relates to depression. Depression is a common mood disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. It negatively affects them, diminishing their capacity [...]
How the World Sees Your ADHD (and What God Says)
If you have ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), you’ve probably been labeled a time or two. Maybe you were the “hyper kid” in school or perhaps your parents threw around the label “lazy” about the lawn you were supposed to mow. Maybe your childhood report card mentions how easily distracted you were. The behaviors that you exhibit as a result of your ADHD are often misinterpreted by people in your life. It’s unfortunate that sometimes these misinterpretations turn into negative labels that not only follow you around throughout your life but can affect your self-perception. What the Others Say No one [...]
What is Emotional Regulation and Dysregulation?
Emotional regulation refers to the ability to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions in a way that is appropriate to the situation and facilitates goal-directed behavior. Conversely, emotional dysregulation describes difficulties in these processes. When you are experiencing emotional dysregulation, you may struggle: to identify or label emotions react intensely and disproportionately to emotional triggers have difficulty modulating the intensity or duration of their emotional responses experience significant impairment in daily functioning as a result of your emotional experiences This can manifest in various ways, such as impulsive behaviors during intense emotional states, difficulty calming down after becoming upset, frequent and [...]
5 Ways to Support a Spouse with Mental Health Issues
Marriage is a beautiful covenant between a man and a woman. When two people marry, they vow to stay together in sickness and in health till death. But illness can certainly try marriage and bring it to its breaking point. This can be especially true for people who have a mental illness. Anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues have been on the rise since the onset of COVID-19. "Comfort", Courtesy of Priscilla Du Preez, Unsplash.com, CC0 License; Many people need the help of professionals for medication and therapy to help them get through and cope with everyday life struggles. Mental [...]
Healing the Heart: Affair Recovery
Few things are as painful as the heartbreak caused by an affair. We get married believing that something like that could never happen in our lives. The reality is that over recent years, there has been an increase in extramarital affairs. The good news is that there is a way to recover from this heartache. The basic idea of affair recovery is to navigate the process of healing mentally, emotionally, and physically. One way to start the process is to define what the affair means to you. It is not always the same for each person. Some believe that it is [...]
5 Beliefs That Are Rooted in Childhood Trauma
Many people think of trauma as a major event that has the potential to completely derail someone’s mental health. They think of abuse, accidents, sudden deaths, or physical harm as events that cause trauma. While these examples certainly could cause serious long-term damage, there are many experiences we go through as children that shape the way we think, act, and approach relationships that are rooted in childhood trauma. We can define childhood trauma as any instance where we felt unsafe, endangered, betrayed, neglected, or abandoned. No child is immune to this type of trauma, and sadly it often happens in households where [...]
Long-Distance Relationship Advice: How to Maintain Intimacy at a Distance
There’s a beautiful description of intimacy to be found in the first few pages of Scripture. The first man meets the woman who’s to be his wife, and he waxes lyrical, saying, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man – Genesis 2:23, NIV Then the Bible adds this line reflecting on what just happened: “That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. Adam and his wife were both naked, and they [...]
4 Types of Cognitive Distortions and How to Find Support
In the thirteenth century, there lived a Christian philosopher and theologian named Thomas Aquinas. Due to his meekness and physical size, his fellow students called him “the dumb ox.” Unbeknownst to them, Thomas was compiling brilliant writings on faith and reason that continue to impact the Christian Church today. Thomas is revered as one of, if not the greatest, philosophical and theological contributors to Christianity as a whole. His ability to use reason to clarify complicated theological and philosophical problems is unmatched. Reading even one sentence of his work is almost like watching a genius solve a mathematical equation due to the [...]