JC Counselling
231 6 Ave SE T1A 2S4 Medicine Hat, AB, Canada

From all of US to YOU! Restful and restorative days to you all!

Interesting learning this week: One of the common symptoms of PTSD is moments of excessive anger that appears exaggerated compared to the environmental context. This week a thought hit me: prior to the traumatic incident how was this person functioning? ... That turned out to be a rather important question. The learning I took out of this: A person is not simply the sum of their traumas.

Recently I had someone say to me: I am not sure how talking about what happened in my past is going to help. I have told many people about this and I am comfortable in doing so. My response ... When you have talked to other people you have told them about things you already understand. I am looking for the part that you don’t understand. There is tremendous power in becoming aware of the parts of our story that we don’t understand.

Today is the first day that I am full time in private practice. 2004 I finished my masters degree. It has been an interesting journey. From the Calgary Counselling Centre, where I learned how important it is to understand people’s problems within the context of their life rather than their diagnosis as the problem to Canadian Forces Base Cold Lake where I learned to value the sacrifices our soldiers make for our freedoms and how trauma reorganizes the connection we have to... ourselves and our ability to relate to others. I then spent 2 years working as a family therapist in an intensive treatment program for teens where I learned about the importance of self determination and how to join with a person to understand their perspective. I have worked for the last 11 years with the adult team in Addiction and Mental Health. I was there when mental health care and addiction care integrated. I learned so much about how motivation influences readiness for change, about how substances affect the body and about recovery. I learned that the foundation of mental health problems and addiction problems are the same. It all comes to connection. Health comes from those things that add to our positive connection and illness those things that injures connection. I also spent half of my time on the adult team in rural clinics, Bow Island and Oyen. I came to understand and appreciate what it means to be a part of a community. To be part of the infrastructure that helps a community to be healthy. I also worked with many seniors and I can see the effects of compounded loss, loss of functioning, and loss of friends and family. What I learned most of all in the last 16 years is that healing is possible and it happens in the right conditions. We do not need to learn to cope with life we can learn how to live life accepting all of the hard, and wonderful things that come with it. To all of my coworkers that I have had: thank you for the experience we shared together and the ways you have shaped me. To all of those that have sat with me in a therapy room: thank you for the trust you have given me. I have been honored to walk your path with you. To my new colleagues I am now working with at the Medicine Hat Counselling Collective: thanks for allowing me to join your ranks. I am excited to work alongside you and learn from you and grow together.

Before you come to the conclusion that fear is bad... I hope you realize that fear is important, it keeps you safe. Instead of trying to turn it off you may want to turn it down. Leave it loud enough that it does what it was intended to do: keep you from avoidable harm. Know when to conquer your fears and when to listen to them.

This has been on my mind a lot lately. I hope that those of you with a faith background can connect with this video. We use guilt to try and motivate ourselves and that simply has too high of a cost and brings us down rather lifting us to new competence. https://youtu.be/GpGrAQxYfVk

Here is a significant component of developing wellness. Know the difference between emotions and feelings. Emotions come through cognition. Eventthoughtsemotions.... Feelings Come through your body. Your body is like a radio antenna picking up everything that is happening around it. The complicated part, and where it gets confusing, is we use the same words to describe our emotions and our feelings. Sad, excited, jealous and so forth. It is important to have a sense of is this an emotion or is this a feeling? Because I suggest you rationalize your emotions and feel your feelings. Approach your emotions with some level of scepticism. Is there a distortion in my thinking? Approach your feelings with curiosity. What is my body trying to tell me? This two pronged approach will help you challenge distorted thoughts and thereby address over the top emotions without suppressing your feelings. We have been taught that it is a strong person that is in control of their feelings. Not true, any coward can run away from their feelings. It takes a strong person to feel their feelings.

I realized that if you are saying to your kids: I’m sorry I can’t right now I’m busy. Or you are saying to your spouse: I’m sorry I have been so busy then it would be a good time to start talking to yourself and say I’m too busy you see, you are telling the wrong people that you are too busy. They already know that. You are the one that seems like you don’t know that you are too busy. Once you have had that conversation with yourself then I suggest you do something about it.

Behaviour is an incomplete measurement of obedience

Here is an interesting read on the pathologization of human experience. This is very harmful. One of the possible negative effects is to excuse bad behavior. "It is ok that I yelled at you for eating so loudly you see I have Misophonia" In fact early versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Health Disorders were clear in stating that a diagnosis does not represent a statement about an individual’s culpability for their action.... You even hear people using language such as: I couldn’t get motivated my ADHD was really kicking in It is important to recognize that mental health disorders occur in the context of social expectations of what is normal rather than as biological truths. This is not to say that mental illness is not real. It is to undertand mental illness in a proper perspective. https://www.sociologylens.net//lack-of-common-sense-/29776

Useful during our current stuck togetherness

Some important thoughts during these unprecedented times.

Acronym of skills to cope https://youtu.be/BmvNCdpHUYM

Hello all, It has become more evident then ever that we all need each other. You need to take care of yourself so you can be there for those who are most important. Here is my word of advice:... Be selfish when you need to so you can be selfless when you have to. See more

Let’s talk about PTSD. I was watching a video from Dr Bessel Van Der Kolk author of The Body Keeps the Score and the founder of the Trauma Center. He said when they discovered and developed an understanding of trauma injuries they were so hopeful for the future. He conveyed his disappointment in how things have turned out. There are 2 categories to that disappointment. 1. He relates that we have a diagnostic process that poorly serves people as it is too restrictive and per...petuates pathology as causality rather than understanding that it is the interconnection of people in their environment that is the problem not the symptoms the person is experiencing. 2. Society has not changed. The underpinning group think that drives societal level decisions has not incorporated the understand of true human need for tribal connections. The result is a misunderstanding of PTSD as an illness of pathology that lies within the individual, rather than the mass numbers of people suffering from trauma injuries as a symptom of a broken society. A society that is not connected and does not care about each other.

I spent 2 years working with the department of national defence. It brought me to a deep and abiding respect for the service men and women that dedicate their lives to their country. I also grew to love military culture, it has it’s own language and rules that you can’t learn without exposure. More recently I have been lucky enough to work with BATUS members and have built a love for the British flavour of the military. Those of you vets and active service members you will ...recognize the coin below for what it is. By the way, I don’t drink so even if you do have 2 coins you are buying your own .

Something that I have realized over the last few months is that I had an incomplete understanding of emotions. This was the equation I used: 1+2=3 Where 1 is an event 2 is thinking and three is the emotions experienced. event + thinking = feeling ... While this is true it does not represent a complete picture of how you experience emotions and as such will not resolve distress in all situations or experiences. This is thehigh road into your emotions. The low road is much more intuitive, visceral and organic. It is the feeling of being punched in the gut or that you are going to vomit, or the intense physical sensations that come with anxiety, shakiness and feeling on edge. It is the panic attacks, the flashbacks the feeling like the horrible event from the past is happening to me right now. For many people you can not think your way out of this. Especially if you have had a significant trauma or ongoing adverse life experiences. If someone has said you just need to look at the bright side or think more positively. Then they are likely functioning under an incomplete understanding of how emotions work just like I was. If this resonates with you then likely your low road and your high road are are disconnected. The result will be that your body sensations will feel totally out of your control and you likely feel absolutely overwhelmed by your emotions. You then end up in a feedback loop, you try and control, turn off, numb your emotions through all sorts of avoidance strategies such as avoiding, people, conversations, thoughts. Using drugs or alcohol, sometimes even prescriptions are used to numb feelings rather than dealing with them. This will keep you stuck and exacerbate the problem. There is another way. When your body is screaming at you, you might consider listening. You can become whole again. You can reconnect your high and low road. The place to start is to help your body learn how to manage these sensations and build skills to sooth yourself. Then you can start to allow yourself to feel again without being swept away, crushed or overwhelmed by your emotions. As you do this then your thinking will start to become more rational and begin to have the power to moderate your emotions. The power that it had lost or maybe never had. Know this: you do not have to live in emotional pain. You do not have to accept mental illness as a never ending pit of despair. I have seen even those with the most insidious mental illness and trauma injuries find contentment and joy in life.

For those of you that are unaware, Banks are offering financial relief during this crisis. Contact your bank for further information. Here is a link to the request from from CIBC: https://www.cibc.com//covid-19/requesting-financial-assist

I have avoided talking Covid. Because when your getting messages from even your insurance company about Covid.... well you get the point. But it’s time to talk Covid and mental health. Here is my experience. My head is fine. No racing thoughts no ruminating. You see I know that it is what it is and I can only control what I can control. That is namely: follow the guidelines of social distancing, hand hygiene, cleaning objects that are touched often like doorknobs and buyi...Continue reading

Peer orientation as a child’s primary attachment hinders integrative intelligence, cripples the child’s ability to learn through trial and error, and directs the power to influence them into the hands of other children. These other children are not fully formed human beings with the capacity to provide mentorship. Children and particularly adolescents, learn strategies of relating to their world based on peer culture rather than the stability of mentoring adults.

Your mental health dose not happen to you it is far more than a biochemical process. It is a dynamic phenomenon that is multifaceted. It has multiple variables. Some of these are in your influence and others are entirely out of your control. If you believe your mental health happens to you then it likely will continue to go on in the same way it always has. Just know that this does not have to be the case. ... Medication may be part of the picture in your mental health portfolio. However medication will never in itself be a cure for your life problems. You see, medication will never fix the issues we have with connection. At the core of mental illness is lack of connection. Connection to self and to our tribe. As human beings we all are part of a tribe. As a western society we have lost sight of the importance of our tribe. This has lead to dis ease or in other words disease. It is no wonder that mental illness is moving to epidemic levels.