Thriving, Striving, & Surviving in Single Parenthood
No sleep, no sex, no breaks, no solitude. The single parent may find themselves thinking “How can I be craving alone time but feel so desperately alone at the same time?”
No sleep, no sex, no breaks, no solitude. The single parent may find themselves thinking “How can I be craving alone time but feel so desperately alone at the same time?”
You’re ready to dive deep into your mental health, armed with your insurance card, only to find out that the top-tier therapists—the ones who totally get the nuances of anxiety, depression, or those tricky relationship hurdles—often don’t mesh with insurance plans.
Some of the most common things I hear as a counselor are “I am just not an emotional person,” “ I don’t know what to do with my emotions” or “I don’t know how to feel and talk about my emotions.”
Physical touch is a crucial component in a healthy relationship. In this article, I offer very practical tools you and your partner can use to strengthen the non-erotic touch in your relationship.
Nobody can predict the future. We enter marriage with the best of intentions to “love and to hold…in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish.” Yet we know, how easy it is to become derailed and find ourselves experiencing pain, hurt and disappointment. So, how do we keep the embers of love burning?
Have you been feeling the roller coaster effect in your dating or marriage relationship? Perhaps there are periods of closeness where the two of you feel safe and connected. But these times are inevitably followed by someone pulling back, or by hurt and conflict. After a while, the closeness comes back but you know the downward plummet will eventually come again, and you feel stuck riding the relationship roller coaster.
When your face hurts from smiling as you think about your special day and your countdown gets smaller and smaller you start to notice something new come up inside of you… sadness. Wait what?? Sadness?? NO!! Why am I sad?! This “should” be the happiest day of my life? My wedding day! As fear starts to creep into your mind and you notice this new feeling emerge, you wonder: “Is this normal…?”
“I am not even hungry. Why am I still eating?” “I find myself eating past the point of feeling full. I actually eat until I am so full it hurts.” “I often hide the packages of the food I have eaten. I am so embarrassed that someone might see how much I ate.” These statements are from real people who are suffering from binge eating disorder.
You have taken the brave and painful step and sought out help to start addressing the infidelity in your marriage. You are experiencing the realities of this vulnerable work with your spouse, processing full disclosure of the infidelity, the inventory of its impact on you, and the steps needed to restore trust in your marriage. While sorting through the mountain of emotional, physical and spiritual debris of the events, how do you respond to your relatives and friends who want to know “how to help” you?
No one escapes trauma. Childhood is full of injuries that come from adventure, curiosity and unfortunately people. What if those injuries were life altering? Would you want a redo? Perhaps a better question would be: Are you willing to do the hard work that leads towards healing.