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Creating Emotional Safety In Relationships

When couples come for counselling, the most common concern they share with me is their struggle around communication. Most couples say that if their communication was better, they could work through problems that arise in their relationship on their own. I do agree with this assessment, but also believe there’s one more important layer that needs to be in place for good communication to occur. This foundational element is emotional safety. Emotional safety is the feeling of trusting your partner with your emotional well-being. It means that you believe your partner cares about your own emotional experience and vice versa. Emotional safety means that we feel comfortable sharing with our partner our hopes, fears, vulnerabilities and pain, because we trust that our partner will tend to these emotions with warmth and concern. Emotional safety is established when you share your feelings, and your partner conveys back to you that they care about your pain, hurt, emotional experience, etc. Th
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The Importance of Authentic Feeling

Sometimes we lose ourselves in ideas, concepts that our brain creates to make reality less painful than it is. We disguise our fears and perceived weaknesses in an attempt to appear as though nothing can bring us down. Nothing can crack the cold, hard, and seemingly invincible exterior in which we’ve coated our real, raw, and vulnerable skin. We seek out the beautiful moments in life while trying desperately to avoid the undesirable. We think that by always putting on that proverbial mask and creating an externally perfect surrounding, that we somehow bypass acknowledging our intrinsic world. We somehow escape the reality that we are just human, and we do feel. We feel everything. This includes inescapable lows that shake our souls and seem to unforgivingly rock our bones from the inside out. Pretending these moments in time don’t exist is just a hindrance to who we are. It’s just denying the complexity that is life and existing as a sentient being.   Common sense says that running a
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Fostering a Growth Mindset in Children

  Are we encouraging our children to have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset? The type of mindset that children develop early on in life can make a profound difference in their approach to learning, resiliency and ultimate success. We may have the best intentions in lavishing our children with praise about their talents and intelligence, however by doing so, we may be unknowingly setting them up for difficulties. Carol Dweck is a psychologist who coined the terms fixed versus growth mindset: https://youtu.be/wh0OS4MrN3E   Dweck’s research shows that children who were encouraged for their efforts versus praised for their intelligence were much more likely to welcome mistakes as part of learning, to persevere, and to take on more challenging tasks.  These children demonstrably achieved higher than those with a fixed mindset who wanted to ‘save face’ and appear smart. Here is a quick engaging video detailing more of Carol Dweck’s research findings: https://youtu.be/NWv1VdDeoRY  
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Are you in an Emotionally Abusive Relationship?

What is Emotional Abuse?   In simple terms, emotional abuse is defined as overt and covert negative behaviors; abusive attitude and language designed to control, intimidate, isolate, demean and degrade or humiliate someone by attacking their self-value or personality.   What does abuse look like?   Emotional abuse can be difficult to acknowledge because of the more subtle nature it happens in. The overt behaviors are the more obvious ones; but the covert behaviors and attitudes are less tangible. Also, the victim of abuse can lose their self -esteem and confidence and convince themselves that all of the problems in the relationship are their fault.   Overt behaviors of an Abuser: Humiliation, discounting, negating, controlling, judging criticizing, blaming, trivial and unreasonable demands, yelling, blaming, shaming, and name-calling, emotional distancing and the “silent treatment”.   Covert behaviors: The more subtle forms of abuse are withholding affection, dismissive or
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Getting to Contentment

There are countless self-help books on how to attain happiness. For many people suffering from mental illnesses like depression and anxiety, the idea of getting to a state of happiness can seem too far-fetched.  So I have a proposition: take a step away from happiness, and turn towards working on getting to contentment.  The following are some ways to get to contentment.   Avoid making comparisons.   We live in a world where society tells us that for us to feel worthy we must be better than – .  Better than your classmates, better than your coworkers, better than the other parents at your child’s school.  Even though these pressures come from society, we make them our own goals and then base our worth on someone else’s achievements rather than our own.  Making such comparisons can be damaging since no two people have the same circumstances and therefore cannot be accurately compared.  This concept applies to emotions too.  I have often heard people say things like, “I shouldn’t b
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Stuck on Perfect

Having high standards and striving for excellence can be a good thing and help us reach our goals in life. A high achiever can find satisfaction with their performance even if their goals are not entirely met, taking pride in their accomplishments and being supportive of others in the process. Healthy striving to obtain realistic goals can lead to a sense of self-satisfaction and increase one’s self-esteem. Failure is viewed as part of the growth process allowing high achievers to bounce back from disappointment. Perfectionism, on the other hand, goes to the extreme by setting excessively high standards that cannot be met or only met with great difficulty. Perfectionism has us relentlessly striving towards extremely high standards and then judging ourselves (or others) on the ability to complete such unrelenting standards. Perfectionists strive for flawlessness, are concerned about others’ evaluation of themselves, are rarely satisfied with their performance, and feel a sense of shame
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Psychology Mind Map

Psychology Mind Map Mind mapping is the brain-based psychology of interacting with other people. It’s the brain’s ability to make a mental map of another person’s mind. Mind mapping is an intuitive process, and it satisfies our inherent desire to figure out other people. Whenever you interact with people, your brain automatically creates mental pictures of their minds. What does he want? What is she like? Is he smart? Why is he looking at me, or not looking at me? Can I trust her? Should I be afraid of this person? Is he sexually attracted to me? Is she enjoying my presence? Does he think he’s superior to me? It then looks at these pictures and makes inferences about them. Then your brain uses these attributions to predict what other people are going to do and adjusts your agendas and behaviours accordingly. First and foremost, mind mapping is about predicting other people’s behaviour, whether it’s a stranger, or someone you interact with regularly, like a boss or co-worker, or perso
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