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 emerging blogger series is aimed at community-building through giving 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 newer members of our community. This post is by Valerie Rice of… Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: Valerie Rice (Tiny Couch)
Don't Believe Everything You Feel by Robert L. Leahy uses an emotional schema approach to help you manage anxiety and depression. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tools are ussd as part of this approach. It's set up as a workbook, with a substantial amount of text interspersed with worksheets. Some of the worksheets are fairly structured,… Continue reading Book Review: Don’t Believe Everything You Feel
My Heart's Song: Emotional Musings 3 is a book of poetry by Maria Pratico, who you may know from her blog Emotional Musings. She explains in the introduction that after a messy divorce, she realized that her purpose was to use her own experiences to help others heal. She describes the poems in the book… Continue reading Book Review: My Heart’s Song
My last hospitalization for depression happened after a suicide attempt. My primary nurse kept asked me what I was angry about. She was insistent that I must have been angry about something to have tried to kill myself. It seemed like she was annoyed when I assured her that no, I wasn't angry, and anger… Continue reading Is Depression Anger Turned Inward?
The emerging blogger series is aimed at community building through giving 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 newer members of our community. This post is by LaDonna of… Continue reading Emerging Blogger Series: LaDonna (Perspective on Trauma)
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is stoicism. Stoicism came up in a book review I did recently of You Got This, and I thought it was worth finding out a little bit more about what exactly it is. It means taking a detour… Continue reading What Is… Stoicism
This was originally posted in 2018 in the early months of this blog. I've decided to pull a few posts out of the archives where they were gathering dust, give them an overhaul, and bring them back to life. It's a bit of an experiment, and here's the first one. "Happiness is a choice." It's… Continue reading Happiness Is a Choice, My Ass
In this series, I dig a little deeper into the meaning of psychology-related terms. This week's term is alexithymia. Alexithymia involves an inability to identify and describe emotions. It's considered a personality trait that can be present to varying degrees and is relatively stable over time. It's been associated with a number of DSM diagnoses… Continue reading What Is… Alexithymia
Toxic positivity is essentially the idea that happy and positive is the only right way to be, and therefore, people need to cheer up, look on the bright side, think positive, choose happiness, allow good vibes only, etc., etc. It also shows up in the "it could be worse" guilt trip mentality. You're not in… Continue reading You Don’t Need to Be Positive