life preserver hanging on wooden wall

What Are Coping Skills?

Depression, Relationships

Coping skills, also sometimes called “coping mechanisms,” are tools that help us deal with triggers, anxieties, and stressors in our lives. In a sense, they are the ways we choose to comfort or calm ourselves. Each of us has our own methods for working through stressful, painful, or difficult emotions and experiences. Some of these methods are things we turned to naturally, and some have evolved from what we learned throughout our lives. Coping skills are something everyone uses, but sometimes we develop ways of dealing with difficulties that end up harming us in the long run–manifesting in addiction, avoidance, or bottled emotions.

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Improving Self Esteem

Initial Steps to Improving Self Esteem

Self Improvement

Often times when we think about self esteem, we tend to think about things that we’re good at. Or things that we can do. And so what we look at is questions of — and there are two concepts that I would throw out there. This is a question of competence. Are you competent at what you’re thinking about doing? But then, there’s also this question of confidence. And when we really think about self esteem, what we really want is greater confidence, as opposed to greater competence. So confidence is your ability to do something. Confidence is your ability to fail at doing something.

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Maintaining a Healthy Relationship

Maintaining a Healthy Relationship

Relationships

When you’re trying to understand your partner’s emotions, the first thing, and the most prominent thing that couples come in to counseling for, is having a hard time communicating, and having a hard time with miscommunication. That’s because communication can be really difficult. One of the things I would focus on is the ability to listen. Listening skills become really, really important in terms of really understanding our partner and being able to resolve conflicts.

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Adjusting to a New City w/ Ryan McGinnis

Adjusting To a New City

Self Improvement

First of all, I think it’s really important to remember that it can take a while to adjust to your new living environment. I’d say it can take anywhere from six months to even a year to really get acclimated to your new city. So I think it’s important to remember to just be easy on yourself and to allow yourself to really experience the transition.

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What Makes a Counselor?

What Makes a Counselor

Therapy

There are many different approaches to counseling, but a good counselor makes every effort to get to know you. A good counselor shows empathy and concern and gets out of their own way so that you can do the work that you came to do. A good counselor isn’t a perfect person, but they’re someone who’s supportive, engaging and offers a valuable, professional opinion.

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Couples & Marriage Counseling

Benefits of Couples Counseling

Relationships

Couples usually come into counseling when there’s unhealthy patterns in their relationship that are leading to resentment, frustration, defensiveness, or loneliness. Counseling can help offer an opportunity to bridge some of those gaps, to work on communication, and to experience new ways of interacting with one another. Hopefully, when leaving counseling, you have the opportunity to grow closer together, to experience a deeper level of intimacy and connection, and to know one another in ways that you weren’t able to know each other previously.

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3 Signs of Depression

3 Warning Signs of Depression

Depression

As I think first and foremost, isolation. Isolation if you notice that you just tend to isolate and withdraw. And that can look like a number of different things. It can look like sleeping all the time. It can look like not returning phone calls, not reaching out to friends and family. That’s a pretty significant sign.

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