Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
Pocket Therapy for Emotional Balance by Matthew McKay, Jeffrey C. Wood, and Jeffrey Brantley is part of a series of pocket therapy books from New Harbinger Publishers. The book is short, the chapters are bite-sized, and it's very easy to read. The book is based on dialectical behaviour therapy, with a focus on emotional regulation.… Continue reading Book Review: Pocket Therapy for Emotional Balance
The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook by Matthew McKay, Jeffrey C. Wood, and Jeffrey Brantley is a self-help workbook that covers the major skills involved in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). DBT is considered the gold standard for treating borderline personality disorder, but its usefulness isn't limited to people with BPD. DBT is very skills-based, and… Continue reading Book Review: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook
The emerging blogger series is a way to give mental health bloggers who are early in their blogging evolution the opportunity to have their work seen by a wider audience. It's also a way to introduce you as a reader to some new bloggers you may not have discovered yet. This week, we have Tina… Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: Tina
Dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) has a lot of useful concepts, but one of my favourites is wise mind. Wise mind is the area of overlap between our emotional mind and our reasonable/rational/logical mind. To put it another way, it's like being able to draw on our left and right brain at the same time. It's… Continue reading Finding Wise Mind
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychological terms. This week's term is assertiveness. Wikipedia explains that assertiveness can be seen as falling in between passive communication styles and aggressive styles. Assertiveness training is a type of behavioural therapy developed in the 1960s that includes increasing awareness of one's own… Continue reading What Is… Assertiveness
We tend to create a lot of rules about how we should think, feel, and act. We may believe that there is some sort of objective truth to these rules, but the reality is they're really just mental myths. These examples come from Dialectical Behavioural Therapy: I don't deserve to get the things that I… Continue reading Mental Myths That Get in our Way
Some studies have shown that the quality of the therapeutic relationship between client and therapist is a stronger predictor of therapeutic outcomes than the type of therapy used. However, it seems logical that the type of therapy should at least to some extent match up with how you tend to conceptualize the problems you're experiencing.… Continue reading Psychotherapy Alphabet Soup
There are a lot of excellent mental health resources out there, and quite a few of them are actually free. Here are some of the good mental health workbooks and worksheets that I've come across. They're based on therapeutic approaches that have proven to be effective. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Acceptance and commitment therapy… Continue reading Free Mental Health Workbooks
