Blog Articles
What You Need to Know About Video Counseling
Who could have predicted the changes 2020 had in store? A virus changed the world. As a result, thousands got sick and death rates increased daily. Businesses closed their doors and countless people lost their jobs. Concern for family, health and paying bills increased as weeks turned into months! All of the fear and uncertainty led to feelings of loneliness, anxiety and depression, which made stressful life even more difficult. In response, counselors said, “We can help!” but just how helpful is video counseling?
Marriage Counseling or Personal Counseling: That’s the Question
Understanding how people in a marriage or family interact is important in addressing concerns in the counseling office. My introduction to this dynamic came more than 30 years ago. My wife and I began working as House Parents for a children’s home. We saw the influence we had on the behavior and emotions of children, and how they impacted us. We saw how the dynamics in the house changed when children came in and when they left. Each of us played a role in the overall functioning of that family system.
Significant Days in Your Grief Journey
Significant days are those times of the year that mark an event, time or day that stands out for some reason. Some of these days stand out on the calendar like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, a birthday or an anniversary. Not long after my sweet mother-in-law died, my wife asked me to go shopping for my own Mother’s Day card. This had typically been my wife’s “job” every year; she bought the cards, set them in front of me and said, “Here, you fill it out and send it.” However, this year she did not want to do the shopping. I knew right away that this year was going to be the first time she would not buy a Mother’s Day card for her own mother; it was just going to be too hard, too emotional. My wife knew this ahead of time and told me in her own way that this was now my responsibility.
Helping Your Child Grieve (Part 2)
As parents we want the best for your children and we want to protect them from any harm. However, when grief descends upon the family our children will experience the pain that comes with losing someone they love. No matter what we do, our children will hurt. Parents are then left with the responsibility of modeling honest grief and understanding their children’s grief as best they can. For parents this latter part has to do with understanding how children grieve during different stages of development.
Helping Your Child Grieve (Part 1)
Early in my career as a counselor, “long ago and far away,” a mother came in to the first session and spoke about the recent death of her husband. While this was a difficult time for mom, who was dealing with her own grief, her biggest concern was for her elementary-age son. He had been very close to his father and missed his father a lot. Being a young parent and having no experience with grief, she was not sure what to do about her son’s difficulties in school or how to help her son with missing his father so much.
Emerging Adulthood & Mourning
The Washingtonian recently published an article written by a woman in her twenties on how millennials mourn. For people in the millennial generation the experience of losing a loved one this early in life is profoundly different than anything experienced by generations that came before.
Grief and Honesty
Until you experience the loss of someone you love, or have a close friend or family member who has lost someone, you probably never knew how many writers and books there were on the subject of grief. Type the word grief into Google and you get more than 93 million results. Type grief into Amazon and there are 26,461 results. Either way, that is a lot of authors writing a lot of books, articles and blogs. So where do you go? Where do you start?