Tagged With "Big Feelings"

By Michelle Cardell, Aaron S. Kelly, and Lindsay A. Thompson, JAMA Pediatrics, May 26, 2020 Parents, empower your adolescents so they can make choices that promote their healthiest self. Teens, getting older means making decisions about what matters to you most. Making healthy choices is a great place to start. Taking care of your physical, emotional, and mental health is what makes it possible for you to do all the things you want to do. Fuel Up You are in charge of what you eat and drink.

In 2012, Greater Richmond SCAN and five other community partners hatched a one-year plan to educate the Richmond, Virginia, community about ACEs science and to embed trauma-informed practices. Eight years later, the original group has evolved into the Greater Richmond Trauma-Informed Community Network (GRTICN) with 495 people and 170 organizations. And they're just scratching the surface.

By JoAnn Stevelos, Psychology Today, August 21, 2020 As a child, I was an orchid but lived like a dandelion. I have always prided myself on my resiliency, for surviving a long and painful childhood filled with abandonment, psychological, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse . Child abuse can do that to you—give you a false sense of self and what resiliency really looks like. Resiliency is not just surviving. This false narrative of resiliency can take years to undo. One approach is to try...

Anxiety is a fact of life. There's much we can do to calm ourselves in the short and long-term. Here are some tips for immediate relief.

Let's move forward with empathy, self-compassion, and connection. Like most people I know, sleep eluded me for much of last week leading up to this historic election. The good news is that I have a meditation practice and mantra to which I always come back. Much of Western meditation practice focuses on mindfulness – -noticing thoughts and, hopefully, quieting the mind by focusing on the breath. My 11th book, Meditation Station , deals directly with this concept. Our breath is always with...

Far too many people are walking around with unhealed, hidden wounds from toxic childhood stress. For some the pain is obvious. Others might look outwardly strong, capable, and in control. However, unhealed inner wounds inevitably cause untold and needless suffering and can lead to a dizzying array of psychological, medical, and functional problems. In this three-part blog, we’ll discuss the road to recovery. This blog is Part I: The Principles of Healing. Part II will explain why traditional...

What is psychological abuse? Psychological violence is a form of influence of one person on another, in which the harm done is measured not in "physical units", but in psychological ones. The most common forms of psychological abuse include humiliation, insults, threats, intimidation, and they are not necessarily verbal. Violence is not always aggressive, even with a smile on your face you can humiliate a person. What can the psychological abuse of a child lead to? The consequences of...

What Produces the Healing Power of Sound? We can feel it when we turn on the radio and our favorite song happens to be playing, or when we sit quietly and listen to the rain. There is a palpable peace when we are absorbed in quiet and a different kind of rejuvenation when we hear the wind in the trees. There is no doubt that sound has subtle, but profound effects on our body, minds and spirits. How exactly does sound work, though, to heal us? Sound and the Golden Number The possibility for...

New research sheds light on the physiology of gratitude, bringing us closer to being able to understand and harness the health benefits of this powerful emotion. How Gratitude Strengthens the Mind-Body Connection Given the clear relationship between mental and physical health, I thought that understanding what happens in the brain when we feel gratitude could tell us more about the mind-body connection—namely, how feeling positive emotion can improve bodily functions. I also thought these...

In 1999, an adult in my private practice remembered their difficult birth in their body while receiving bodywork from me. It was an eye opening moment. I had just had my first baby and was a newly graduated Biodynamic craniosacral therapist. We are trained to ask about the birth process in our adult clients because of the compressive forces on the body particularly the cranium. My client told me that she felt her lifelong depression was associated with her near death at birth, and what...

More and more people have adopted pets over the last year , as spending time with animals is a research-backed way to lower stress and anxiety. And yet, you don’t need to own a pet to reap the stress-reducing benefits. If pet adoption isn’t an option for you, you can still find comfort in visiting a friend’s pet, visiting the dog park on your lunch break, or taking a trip to a petting zoo over the weekend. They calm our nerves in high-pressure situations When we’re feeling particularly...

“The most important thing you can do with your children is play with them!” said Dr. Bruce Perry, noted child psychiatrist and author. He was answering the question, “How do we prepare our children to go back to school next fall?” Perry, a brain expert specializing in how children are impacted by trauma, gave a presentation on his neuro-sequential model of brain development to more than 800 people at an Austin Ed Fund event Monday evening. The co-author, with Oprah Winfrey, of the new book...

We are in a historic moment of trauma in the United States. How do we face these things fully, let in the devastation, and then both heal and act? Can we navigate through this toward healing? Toward racial, economic, and gender justice? Can we use this moment to alter the trajectory of climate change toward sustainability? Somatics and neuroscience reveal that we have inherent needs as humans—safety, belonging and dignity. We have essential material needs too, like healthy food and clean...

By Rahil D. Briggs, Psychology Today, September 21, 2021 There are many ways to think about baby, toddler, and child well-being. Perhaps you relate to the phrase “early relational health” or maybe you read the recent journal article in Pediatrics that called out the importance of ensuring that young children have safe, stable, and nurturing relationships (SSNRs). There are conversations happening about buffering toxic stress , increasing resilience , and promoting infant and early childhood...