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 So, for those of you who have been reading my blog for a while might know that I usually set an intention for each year around this time. 2020 has certainly not been a year where many of us have been able to keep our intentions, or resolutions for that matter. I debated about posting anything about setting an intention for next year as, well, I almost don’t want to put anything out into the world that will leave me disappointed! So much of the lessons of 2020 I think have involved digging deeper into ourselves and our relationships to figure out how we deal with extraordinary situations and difficulties. My word for this year ended up being Embrace (this is after a few revisions because I started with something else I believe). And well, as much as I might not like to say it, this is exactly what this year led me to do. I spent a lot of time leaning into and embracing things that have been hard and do feel that I have learned about myself, the world, and how to be a better mom, wife, person, and therapist. Do I dare consider setting an intention for 2021? I think I do. I would encourage you to as well to be honest. I think it is important to always consider how we can lean into or improve things in our lives, even during extraordinary times. My word for next year is going to be Generous. While I am often a very generous person, particularly at work and with my team, I struggle to be generous in the way I interpret my loved ones words or actions. The narrative that I come to most easily is often not the one that is kind and generous in spirit. I would truly like to work on this and considering the fact that 2021 seems like it might start out just as challenging as 2020 has been… I think there will likely be ample opportunities to practice my generosity! If you are considering setting an intention for the coming year, I applaud you! I think it is brave right now to want things and to work on improving ourselves and our lives beyond just getting through the day. Throughout this pandemic, I have been so impressed with my clients who have kept on working through the things that come up rather than just hiding from all of it considering the immense pressures on all of us. For those of you who would rather not tempt fate and want to give 2021 some space to be an improvement on this year, I get it. I want it to be better too! And it is entirely okay not to challenge yourself if that feels like too much. We need to all be compassionate and kind with ourselves right now. This is my last blog of 2020 as I will take a break for the holidays and resume in the New Year! I hope everyone stays healthy and finds some silver linings in the messy world of ours. If we at Thrive can do anything to help support you or your loved ones, please don’t hesitate to reach out! At Thrive, we take a positive, client centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy via video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304. As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio. To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.
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 Many people think that therapists are somehow immune from struggling in the way everyone else does. I am pretty honest about this being entirely untrue - as any of you who regularly read my blog or follow me on social media would know! All of us could use a little bit of self-care so I thought I would share my favorite things that I do consistently, pretty much daily, in order to help keep myself as mentally okay as I can be… particularly as a therapist during a pandemic! I do want to just say that please, please keep in mind that self-care is not a cure all strategy. I have a healthy dose of skepticism about the “wellness industry” and how much they are pushing us all to spend on ourselves in the interests of self-care. They almost seem to be trying to sell the idea that if you engage in “this activity,” you will never feel pain again. While I definitely accept the fact that some level of struggle is just a part of being human, I do try to find ways to lessen the struggle when possible. So while engaging in self-care is not a cure all strategy to never struggle again, it can be helpful to keep yourself hanging in there… which is all many of us can do in this wild 2020 ride. I also want to acknowledge that for many people, expensive self-care items or subscription boxes are just not realistic or practical. Plus, during a pandemic, many previous forms of self-care (going out with friends, massages, shopping, etc.) are just also not realistic. Additionally, many of us, particularly parents just don’t have the time for long self-care rituals. So, for this list I kept it as simple and free as possible. Plus, this is all actually what I do to keep myself functioning for my family, clients, and business. Okay, here’s my list!
I hope this is helpful for some of you! Most of the activities I shared do not actually take that long and are pretty accessible even in the busiest households during a pandemic. If these ideas are not for you, maybe think up a few others. Maybe journaling, having coffee alone outside, reading a book, or taking a long shower could go on your list. Self-care does not need to be expensive or dramatic, often it is just little things we practice doing over and over that help us feel more grounded and centered. At Thrive, we take a positive, client centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy via video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304. As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio. To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.  So often, there are messages all around us that we take in unconsciously. These are messages about gender roles, what life “should” be like, perhaps what people “should” be like, and even more insidious messages about people who are either different from us or who live their lives differently than we do. The idea of understanding our unconscious biases and “programming” seems to be a hot topic and popular idea lately particularly with the rise in awareness about the divisions in our country and resulting reckoning many of us are having about race and privilege. Interestingly for me as a psychologist, helping people work on their programming is something I have done for a long time. We learn in undergraduate psychology classes that we are influenced easily by the world around us. I remember this being discussed a lot around topics like violence in the media as well as body image. However, in my day to day work with clients, the topic of messages and narratives we have taken in from the world, our parents, our communities, the media, etc. comes up all the time. The truth is, on a personal level, we all have some unconscious ideas of what we should or should not be doing or what we should or should not be like. The programming around being “good” or “bad” is something that I have talked about for years as I find it to be so problematic for kids and teens to feel shame around their mistakes or challenges (which is often what “bad” behavior is). If you are someone who is interested in doing deep work about your unconscious bias or programming you might have taken in about others or yourself, good news, therapists are here for you and can definitely help. If you want to try to do this work on your own, here are some suggestions to help you get started.
For example, my parents were not always great at managing my willful spirit as a kid. I mean, the book “raising a difficult child” was often on my mom’s nightstand and we had numerous power struggles a day. So, here I am years and many hours of therapy later plus experience working with parents and kids in therapy… you might think I would have this figured out and know just exactly how to approach my son, who is also quite willful. And here it is… I don’t. I think sometimes I do a great job at understanding him and sometimes, it is harder than I like to admit. I realized when he was a baby that I had this unrealistic expectation of myself that because I am who I am (therapist, fellow sensitive human, parent “expert”), I would never screw up particularly around managing his behaviors and emotions, or even just my reactions. And the truth is, nope. I screw up too. The important thing is that I know this is okay and have recognized that the shame I feel is just because I have programming around both being willful and sensitive as a child, but also around who I should be as a mom. All of these concepts are a lot to put in one blog but I wanted to try! I think it is so important that people not familiar with therapy can understand a lot of what those of us practicing deep work with our clients are working on week after week. Building self-awareness is honestly really intense and challenging work but so rewarding. I have seen so much growth and change not just in my clients, but in myself by challenging myself to become as integrated of a person as possible. If you would like help doing the same, please feel free to call us at Thrive! At Thrive, we take a positive, client centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy via video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304. As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio. To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.  For so many parents, it is so hard to cultivate a mindset of positivity towards ourselves. Particularly for those of us who are super perfectionistic and are truly trying to achieve that super-parent life that we seem to believe everyone else is living. You know, doing all the things, all the time. It’s easy to feel like we are failing when our standards are unrealistic. I find that the pandemic has exacerbated this situation for so many of us and while in the beginning, I think it felt acceptable to release expectations and let our lives be a bit different - you know, messier, or less grinding towards goals - now, 7 months and counting, I think many of us have ramped up those expectations again. I think it is important to always keep in mind the fact that being hard on ourselves is the least productive thing we can do. You see, when we are hard on ourselves about everything and truly feel like if we are not perfectly doing everything that we are failing, we end up adding unneeded guilt and shame to our lives. These feelings not only take a toll on how we are feeling but they also add in a lot of emotional labor to engage in. We either spend time avoiding those feelings, projecting them onto others, or trying to heal them. I would suggest that our time is better used by spending it on working on the way we talk to ourselves. Rather than demanding more of ourselves all the time and being relentless in our guilt when we screw up, what if we talked to ourselves the way we would talk to a small child, baby, or even kitten or puppy? Most of us, particularly parents will be kinder to others than ourselves and using a dose of self-compassion can be infinitely more helpful than anything else in terms of helping us feel calm, grounded, and confident that we can do hard things. Here are some ideas for putting this into practice… “I see that you are struggling with that, let’s take a break and come back to it.” “It’s okay to be sad, overwhelmed, angry (etc.)” “What can we do to make this situation better” “You can do this” “Eventually, things will be okay” “This feeling is temporary” The more we can approach ourselves with loving, kindness the better we will feel. And guess what, then we can also approach our loved ones with even more loving kindness as well. Plus we are then modeling for them how to manage their emotions a bit more effectively! At Thrive, we take a positive, client centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy via video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304. As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio. To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.  The world just seems like a tough place to be a person these days. Or at least our country does. Things are so divided and people really seem to believe that anyone not on “their team” is the true enemy and some sort of bad person. While I could probably go on and on a bit about the social psychology behind this (in group/out group bias anyone? Black and white thinking anyone?) OR about how this is all encouraged by social media, I think it might be more helpful to share a bit about how I try to make sense of things to help myself cope when things feel challenging. For me, the key is this… Even when the world feels like an awful place, I believe that people are doing the best they can in their situation. I try hard to remember that people are just people and that most people are genuinely trying to do the right thing, whatever they think that might be. The follow up is this… the best they can does not always look like the best that you think they should have been able to do or the best you believe you would have been able to do in their position. Sometimes the best you can do on one day is not the best you would be able to do on another day. As people, our performance, decision making, and general abilities are not always consistent from moment to moment. And for me, this is an important principle to think about more in reality and less theoretically. For example, when you hear a story about someone on paper making a mistake, it is easy to theoretically think, “well they should have done this.” Or it’s easy for a sports fan to be a critic of the plays called and the mistakes made that led to their team losing the game. However, it is a much different thing to be the person out there making those mistakes or decisions under pressure and with a million other variables that are going to impact performance. While I would most likely not be willing to bet that even a top performing player will always come through in the end when it counts, I would bet anything that they would try their best because they are working for something of significant value to them. The thing is that I also believe that people generally try their best to do the right thing… we just might not agree about what “right” means. Sports are easy examples because the goals are obvious - to win as much as possible. Life is generally more complicated than that. Our values and personal goals are not always so easy to communicate, identify, or even in our own awareness. Here’s what I have come to also believe given my line of work, there is always a reason why people do things the way they do. Plus, we are more alike than we are different. While this lens can be challenging at times, particularly in our current climate socially and politically, I find that this lens helps me make sense of things and helps me keep more of an open mind and a kind, compassionate hard with everyone even when we don’t necessarily agree about things. To help me with this, I try to ask myself what is the most generous or compassionate interpretation of this situation? Especially with the people I am closest to, I find that this is the lens that helps me understand them but also how we can connect and understand each other better. It's way better than creating a narrative in my head about how I am right and everyone else is wrong. And when I say it is better, I mean that it is better for me, my peace of mind, but also for my relationships. While we all face the upcoming turmoil that seems anticipated for the coming election season in addition to the unrest already at play in our world, I hope this is a helpful reflection for some of our readers! At Thrive, we take a positive, client centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy via video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304. As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio. To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.  An Open Letter to the Thrive Community and Friends
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