The strong, handsome, teen boy sat in my office with a look of deep despair on his face. He was a kind person and a straight-A student, but recent trauma had pulled everything out from under him. There were panic attacks and sleepless nights. He struggled to...
Just yesterday, my granddaughter Anna came to me and said, “Let’s go for a bike ride.” While this is an activity that she always enjoys for its own sake, I could see that the suggestion was coming from a place of stress. Some bullying had been happening in her...
Some people seem to think of hope as kind of a feeling that comes and goes. Others understand it more as part of a person’s very constitution – you’re either an optimist or a pessimist, and once the thought pattern is set, that’s that. But in fact, hope is...
Not long after I’d begun work as a counselor in a high poverty, high trauma school, I played a social/emotional game with a group of students in which I’d ask questions to get them thinking. “What would you do if you found $10,000?” I asked the children. Having come...
If you followed the news at all over the 4th of July weekend, you likely saw beaches filled with an unsettling number of people, many ignoring the mask and social distancing guidelines for controlling the spread of COVID-19. Though plenty of folks were concerned about...
It’s more than a little ironic that some key things that could most help us manage stress can seem hardest to come by during times like our current health and economic crisis: hope, gratitude, and joy. Or at least it is when you believe they depend on circumstances...
