Mental Health
Coping During Crisis: 15 Strategies for Dealing with Coronavirus Stress
As the COVID-19 pandemic crisis continues, we can all benefit from taking a closer look at our coping skills; by doing what we can in the present we can help buffer against longer-term health issues. Crisis management is different than trauma treatment. I know this firsthand, as a Clinical Psychologist for the past 15 years,…
< Read More >Parents: We Don’t Have to be Perfect During the Coronavirus Crisis, but We Need to be Present
For: Tennessean – Part of the USA Today Network Since schools have closed, I’ve seen color-coded schedules for homeschooling popping up on social media and so many incredible virtual options for education. There has been idea sharing and cross pollination of fields in unprecedented ways. Amazing! Simultaneously, I’ve felt mounting pressure to create the infrastructure…
< Read More >Mother’s Day Manifesto: A Rallying Cry to Broaden Mother’s Day
Before we adopted our first daughter in 2011, we had a five-year journey with infertility. Each of those years I would gear up for Mother’s Day, thinking about how I would handle myself ahead of time. How would I hold my face when I saw those who could celebrate the day, celebrating? Would my longing…
< Read More >A Year With Cancer: Ringing Bells & Light Through The Cracks
It was December last year when I got news about my cancer. I sat in the glow of twinkling lights, my heart doing its best to stretch into this new reality. Leonard Cohen’s lyrics on repeat in my mind… Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in…
< Read More >We Can Do More: Breast Cancer Awareness Month
As a recent breast cancer survivor, it is stunningly clear that I stand on the shoulders of fierce women. It was the year after I graduated from high school when Congress passed a bill called the Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act of 1998, mandating that insurance companies cover breast reconstruction after a mastectomy for…
< Read More >When You’re In-Between
Have you ever found yourself in an in-between space? A door shut solidly behind, you squint to make out shapes with the leftover light that seeps in from beneath the closed door. Hesitantly, you begin to tiptoe around, on this other side, in the new country… careful not to make too much noise at first.…
< Read More >When Joy Feels Scary: 6 Resilience-Building Practices
For: Psychcentral: Mental Health Library After we’ve been given a “clean bill of health,” finished settling the estate, come home from war, or otherwise gathered up the pieces — it takes time for the dust to settle, time to trust the stillness. In these in-between spaces, when the word “survivor” feels both amazing and scary,…
< Read More >It Matters
The first few days after I was diagnosed I thought to myself, “Ok, cancer… I might be able to squeeze you in around the edges.” As if cancer was like taking on a new activity—volunteering to help with Girl Scouts or making room for an exercise class. Maybe I was bargaining with cancer, “If I…
< Read More >A Journey With Cancer
This was us on 12/3/17, on our way to a friend’s Christmas concert. On 12/4/17, I received biopsy results that I have breast cancer. Big pause. Since cancer I have been waking up too early. My brain sometimes gets stuck making and remaking the sentence, “I have cancer and I am the mother of a…
< Read More >6 Reasons to Reconsider Group Therapy
For: Psychcentral: Mental Health Library “I suppose that since most of our hurts come through relationships, so will our healing.”-William Paul Young Have you ever considered attending a therapy group? I hadn’t, until several years ago when I was wading through infertility… and a whole host of other stressful life events seemed to collide at…
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