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Scam Shame.
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Scam Shame

If you have ever clicked on a website that had products that interested you and allowed it to collect cookies, or given out your email address, if you have accounts anywhere, including credit cards of any type (and who doesn’t?), heck, if you’re ever on a computer—you are prone to scams.

If you have an iPhone, if you have an Android, it doesn’t matter. If you have a burner phone, again, you are prone to scams.

Some of the latest and most common scams are called calendar scams. They show up only on your calendar and claim that you have a deadline to accept something and/or make a payment. Do not click on these. They will usually expire if you do nothing, and they can be extremely difficult to get rid of once you engage with them.

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panic attack

I Was Parked, And Panic Ensued

I was parked on the street in front of a cute little bungalow about to meet my real estate agent one fine summer afternoon. We were scouting out homes for a pending move my husband and I had decided to make in an effort to downsize. I was just swinging open the driver’s side car door when I saw a blue blur of a car race past me, ripping it right off the hinges as it went. Had I been swinging my legs to get out, they would have been gone too, along with the car door. Fortunately, that did not happen.

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What if one partner is more motivated than the other?
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Why Do We Love Personality Tests?

Ahhhh. We do love a quiz that promises to reveal ourselves to our, well, ourselves. And big business loves to to see how well you might fit into their organizational team. That we love personality tests is the why that drives their proliferation. But I wonder if you might like to understand why many of them are junk, clickbait, and rather useless. And how to pick one that gives useful information about your personality. I am going to help you do that!

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Do You Know The Cost To You Of Broken Boundaries?

In addition to my degree in clinical social work, I have a masters degree in public health. One important goal of public health is to prevent disease from spreading. I want to help you see the costs to you of broken (or non-existent) boundaries by using the analogy of vaccines. First you need to understand that prevention is often invisible unless you look at the prevented costs. Here’s an example of that.

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The Worry Box

The Worry Box Technique

The worry box technique is a simple skill used to help you manage when and how you worry. This sounds simplistic, and on its face it is. However, the results can truly help you place and pace worry better than simply allowing the random worries to crawl around in your head in the unending, unresolved circular pattern they tend to create.

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Why bother using coping skills?

Why Bother Using Coping Skills?

Why Bother Using Coping Skills?

If you aren’t practicing coping skills you learn in therapy regularly while calm, there’s a good chance a skill such as deep belly breathing won’t be as effective as you’d like. When the nervous system dysregulates quickly to fight or flight, instantly really, that lets me know you may need to work on stretching the threshold for your fight or flight response, which requires practicing coping skills when calm.

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Your OCD Thoughts Are False

Your OCD Thoughts Are False Alarms, And You Have To Treat Them As Such

Your OCD thoughts (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) are false alarms, and you have to treat them as such. What research from Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, UCLA School of Medicine shows: Bio-behavioral treatment works for retraining the brain that is stuck in OCD thought patterns. It’s not easy, but it is longer lasting and more permanently effective than relying on what he calls the “water wings” approach to treatment—that is meds only. There is no medication on the planet that will retrain your brain. Schwartz describes doing this training in the four steps below.

There is no medication on the planet that will retrain your brain.

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solo travel

The Mental Health Case For Solo Travel

Solo travel lets you wander. There is no schedule, other people’s expectations, or anything keeping you from a nap. It’s just you and time.
And even though I’m happily married, we let each other have this freedom, for many reasons.

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guilty

Why So Guilty?

Why so guilty? Or maybe I should ask ‘Why are you so afraid of being yourself?’

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Estrangement is heartbreaking.

From Childhood Trauma, The Single Most Difficult Thing To Believe

When I work with adult children who suffered from childhood trauma, the single most difficult thing to believe is also the most difficult to help them shift. Read more

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