Articles
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 [...]
Engaging Your Senses to Help When You are Overwhelmed by ADHD
Those with ADHD and other people on the neurodiversity spectrum tend to feel bored, overwhelmed, or overstimulated pretty regularly. When this happens, most of us have unique methods of self-soothing, colloquially known as “stimming,” short for stimulating. This might involve us repeating certain vocalizations, fidgeting with something, speaking in a foreign accent for fun, or making facial gestures. Stimming helps soothe our agitated brains by siphoning nervous kinetic energy into a repetitive behavior. Although most stimming is done on a subconscious level, we might find even more comfort if we intentionally engage our senses to help when overwhelmed by ADHD. Stigmatized [...]
Healthy Eating and Mental Wellness: The Importance of Treating Our Bodies Like a Temple
Treating our Bodies like a Temple Our mental health is serious, and we should be actively taking care of it. It can be easy to split our lives into three separate areas: physical wellness, spiritual wellness, and mental wellness, but I am here to argue that they are all connected. 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 says, “Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body.” (ESV). With life often being stressful and [...]