The path to happiness
Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be happy. What can I do to be happier? Does happiness play in mental health? What about physical health? People seem to use success and happiness interchangeably or one as a path to the other, but I think they are quite different in their own rights. What is the path to happiness?
The recent CDC report on suicides nationwide got me thinking about how we approach suicide prevention. This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I am a suicide loss survivor. The suicide rate has been rising despite educational and outreach efforts on the part of nonprofits, government agencies, and mental health practitioners. More people than ever are on at least one antidepressant while many are on two or more psychiatric medications. Access to care continues to be a challenge in low income and rural areas. Telehealth is positioning itself to address some of those people. Early death due to alcoholism is also on the rise.
People are trying to numb out of their lives
I started thinking about some other findings from the CDC report as well as some anecdotal information I gather from the client’s […]
What it means to do the work
My most recent experience in therapy has taught me the value of trusting myself. Rather than seeking gratification and responses from the external world, I learned the value of accessing wisdom from within. Through therapy, I have learned the intrinsic importance of meeting yourself where you are.
The truth about phobias
Phobias are more common than you think because many exist at the unconscious level. That means, by definition, you don’t know when you’re experiencing one. Phobias are unconscious. This can make people argue or deny that they actually have a phobia. But if you pursue this by granular questioning, you will find there is a hidden fear or shame underlying the problem.
Muscle testing allows you to get below the conscious level and find the unconscious fear or shame as well as the specific location in the body where the phobia resides. Once you find it and name it, you can easily heal it so that it no longer runs your emotions or behavior.
To learn more about how energy psychology can help you with phobias click here.
How do you know if therapy is working?
Before I learned about energy psychology, I had no real way to measure whether or not therapy was helping. Feelings change from day to day and are heavily affected by outside situations. Unwanted behaviors can be stopped, but compulsion often remains. Urges can cause quite a bit of emotional discomfort and distraction only goes so far. Improving your distress tolerance feels like a crappy way to live, long term.
I thought I would know therapy was helping me when I finally felt happy until a trusted therapist told me that the point of therapy was not to be happy. It was to have a greater understanding and develop a wider range of emotions. That answer felt like a huge disappointment that I’d spent years and thousands of dollars waiting for. Happiness was my goal, and I know it’s the goal of most people.
Much of therapy can feel like a pointless dead-end full of useless advice and not enough unless advice. As a therapist and a long term client, I was used to living in the grey area. Hoping that what I was doing in therapy would pay off eventually but not […]
How do you know what to look for in a therapist?
If you’re looking to start therapy, there are lots of options. How do you know you’ve found the right therapist for you? In this blog series I’ll tell you a little about my background, how I found energy therapy and why I think its the best thing you’ve never heard of.
People often ask me how I got interested in energy psychology. It’s been a long winding path. I was a depressed kid who was in therapy by the time I was ten. I turned my lived experience into a career that helps other people find their way out of the darkness toward a whole new life.
Humble beginnings
I got my start in the mental health field when I was 19. I got a job working the weekend shift at an 8 bed halfway house for the chronically mentally ill in Newburgh NY. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine someone thought I was responsible enough for such a serious job. But they did. I worked there on the weekends and took clients to run their errands or mine in the eight passenger van I […]
Ask and receive
Achieving good mental health is a process. Mental health hygiene consists of daily self-care, meditation, healthy diet and exercise, and some type of self-improvement routine. Personal evolution is an important aspect of mental health. You want to feel better, be happy, get rid of your anxiety and depression. I get it.
When it comes to personal evolution, I find “Ask and receive” to be the simplest most effective path toward personal growth. It is a simple yet elegant method that seeks to establish an agreement between your higher self and other parts of you that may have conflicting thoughts or limiting beliefs.
Internal conflict.
Have you ever felt ready to make a change in your life but kept falling back into old destructive behavior patterns? This is common and can sabotage you on goals ranging from weight loss to relationships, to money or insomnia. You want to adopt a new behavior but you find yourself falling into old patterns and sabotaging your new goals. This is caused by internal conflict.
Let’s assume that all your behaviors and belief originally developed to […]
Perfectionism
Are you a perfectionist who gets worried when you’re not in the zone? The paradox of perfection is that the harder you try, the more elusive it feels. Be kind to yourself. Give your self permission to relax and take a break. Take a look at what you are giving your focus to and stop pushing against what is unwanted. Meditation allows you to reconnect with your highest self which has all the answers you are searching for. If you are looking for extra guidance, energy psychology offers a path to reconnection and healing. Enjoy the journey and learn the lessons imperfection teaches.
How can you be more mindful?
Mindfulness is the practice of conscious awareness of the present moment. You can be mindful of your environment, your emotional state, or a felt sense in the body. The practice of mindfulness can ease depression and anxiety and other mental health concerns.
Heal depression and anxiety
The opposite of mindfulness is autopilot. You are probably very familiar with this concept. Imagine you are driving down the road and realize you haven’t paid attention to the last few exits. Your body is on autopilot. Your brain is extremely good at doing things it has practiced. It can get you to your destination while your conscious mind drifts and daydreams. The unconscious mind can process more than 40,000,000 bits of data every second. Your conscious mind is much slower. It can only process about 40 bits per second. Since the unconscious is so much more efficient, we tend to rely on it between 80 and 90% of the time. Being mindful allows you to be more aware of the mundane aspects of life.
The unconscious mind is programmed mostly by repetition and your perception of the […]
Help for PTSD
Post-traumatic stress disorder or “PTSD” is a complex mental health issue. It is caused by experiencing or witnessing a traumatic or violent event. Events ranging from natural disasters, car accidents, assaults, and combat can cause PTSD. Veterans and first responders are at risk because of the number and severity of traumatic exposures they face. It is even possible to develop symptoms from hearing about the violent experience suffered by a loved one. People fail to realize that secondary exposure to trauma is often just as disturbing to the mind and body as first-hand experience. Not everyone who experiences trauma develops PTSD. It is mitigated by a number of variables including social support, healthy attachment, coping skills, and more.
PTSD can cause intense disturbing thoughts and feelings long after the traumatic event has ended. The trauma may be relieved through nightmares, flashbacks, and persistent ruminating thoughts. Trauma is difficult to recover from without help because each time it is recalled, the body experiences a stress response. This means that physical sensations in the body such as sweating, racing heart rate, changes in visual or auditory perceptions, are triggered each time the person is reminded of the […]
Struggling with depression?
If you are struggling with depression, you are probably aware you lack compassion toward yourself. Lack of self-love is one of the worst contributors to mental health problems. Many people come in with depression, anxiety, relationship problems, and eating disorders and discover that they have overwhelming compassion for everyone but themselves. This is especially true for people who identify as themselves as an empath or very empathic.
Nearly 100% of the time, we uncover a total lack of self-love or self-compassion. If all of your compassion is directed outward, you will be left feeling drained, overwhelmed, depressed, depleted, and lethargic.
Energy therapy can help you correct the imbalances and go on to recover from depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health problems. You don’t need to struggle. I can help.
Dieting and Weight loss with HBLU
Yo yo dieting
Yo-yo dieting is a part of many eating disorders. It is particularly painful and damaging to self-esteem because, like gambling, with each win, you feel a chemical rush of happiness, satisfaction, and elation, and with each loss, your self-esteem crumbles under the weight of critical internal voices that say it’s your fault. The allure of dieting is a seductive one. Relinquish control to these rules, and victory will be yours. People who have been caught in the dieting net often feel relief to give up food in favor of shakes, prepackaged meals, personal trainers, and even body-altering surgery.
Being overweight is a societal stigma that can’t be hidden. It’s on display for all to see. The emotional pressure to be thin is enormous. It far outreaches the pressure to be healthy. The physical aspects take their toll in the form of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart and kidney problems, sleep disturbances, joint and muscle pain, loss of mobility, and on and on.
It’s easy to fall prey to the food and diet industry. The availability of cheap, densely caloric, low […]
Is holding a grudge really that bad?
HBLU allows you to find the reactions you may not be aware of and correct them in a matter of minutes. This allows a deep level of understanding and shifts the way you feel about your experience. Healing occurs on the conscious, unconscious, body and soul level of your being and symptoms disappear. Symptoms are your body’s alarm system telling you that one thing is wrong. Many therapies simply teach you to cope with symptoms, or use medication to mask symptoms. HBLU interviews the symptom, uses muscle testing to find the root cause of it and heals it with a corrective, energetic intervention. You know an issue is clear when your subjective experience of distress is a zero and your body muscle tests clear. No traditional therapy can promise that.