Things you’re allowed to say to your therapist
How Grounding Helps Anxiety
Sometimes, the truth can hurt. It’s still important.
What happens in therapy?
Everyone’s anxiety does not looks the same
Which is it?
Things To Remember
Welcome to the team, Anthony!
Anthony Taylor, LPCA
Anthony Taylor is a Licensed Professional Counselor Associate who earned a Masters Degree in Clinical Psychology from Loyola University Maryland. He utilizes a person-centered, solutions-focused therapeutic approach emphasizing the present and future. His goal is to help individuals achieve meaningful outcomes in their life. Be it learning to navigate difficult social situations or finally ‘doing something about it’ he is there to provide an open and honest environment to facilitate personal understanding and growth.
Anthony is accepting new telehealth clients and provides services on a sliding fee scale.
Feeling Upset? Try This Special Writing Technique
After his father was rushed to the hospital with gastrointestinal bleeding, Yanatha Desouvre began to panic. So he did the one thing he knew would calm himself: He wrote.
“I’m so scared,” Mr. Desouvre started. “I don’t know what I’ll do if I lose my dad.”
In the next few weeks, Mr. Desouvre filled several notebooks, writing about his worry as well as his happy memories—the jokes he’d shared with his dad, the basketball games they’d watched, the time they put up hurricane shutters together, then cooled down with ice cream. Sometimes he cried as he wrote. Often he laughed.
“Writing allowed me to face my fear,” says Mr. Desouvre, a 42 year old who teaches marketing and business at a college in Miami. “My pen was a portal to process the pain.”
Something troubling you?
You should write about it.
An extensive body of research shows that people who write about a traumatic experience or difficult situation in a manner that psychologists refer to as “expressive writing”—recording their deepest thoughts and feelings—often show improved mental and physical health, says James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Pennebaker pioneered the scientific study of expressive writing as a coping mechanism to deal with trauma back in the 1980s.
Expressive writing is a specific technique, and it’s different from just writing in a journal. People need to reflect honestly and thoughtfully on a particular trauma or challenge, and do it in short sessions—15 to 20 minutes for a minimum of three days is a good place to start.
Dr. Pennebaker says that hundreds of studies over several decades have looked at the potential benefits of expressive writing, including for people with illnesses such as cancer, PTSD, depression, asthma and arthritis, and found that it can strengthen the immune system and may help lower the rate of colds or flu. Research also found the technique can help reduce chronic pain and inflammation. It may help lower symptoms of depression and PTSD. And it can improve mood, sleep and memory.
Now, a new website, part of a research endeavor called the Pandemic Project, gives people an opportunity to try expressive writing about the coronavirus. On the site, which was created by a research team led by Dr. Pennebaker, people are prompted to write about how the coronavirus is affecting them. A text analysis program then provides feedback. (This is not an expressive writing study, but the researchers will be analyzing the samples to look for themes around trauma and the coronavirus.)
Expressive writing works because it allows you to take a painful experience, identify it as a problem and make meaning out of it, experts say. Recognizing that something is bothering you is an important first step. Translating that experience into language forces you to organize your thoughts. And creating a narrative gives you a sense of control.
The mere act of labeling a feeling—of putting words to an emotion—can dampen the neural activity in the threat area of the brain and increase activity in the regulatory area, says Annette Stanton, chair of the department of psychology and professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences at UCLA. Dr. Stanton’s research suggests that expressive writing can lead to lower depressive symptoms, greater positive mood and enhanced life appreciation. “Writing can increase someone’s acceptance of their experience, and acceptance is calming,” says Dr. Stanton.
Expressive writing can even help your relationships. A 2006 study in the journal Psychological Science found that when one partner wrote about his or her deepest thoughts and feelings about a romantic relationship, both partners began using more positive words when writing each other instant messages, and the couple stayed together longer. “We think expressive writing helps people work through struggles in a relationship, that leads to positivity, and that positivity elicits more positivity in return,” says Richard Slatcher, distinguished professor in the psychology department at the University of Georgia, who was the lead researcher on the study.
What if you hate to write? Don’t worry. You don’t have to put pen to paper. Researchers say that speaking your thoughts into a recorder works just as well. Try expressive writing for 15 to 20 minutes a day for a minimum of three days. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or share your writing with anyone. But dig deep into your thoughts and feelings. The goal of the exercise is to find meaning in an event.
Hi, I’m Anxiety!
Change you actions, change your mood
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The seeds are already there
What To Say When A Friend Is Struggling
We want to be supportive of our friends, colleagues, partners and family members when they're having a hard time. But what does that actually look like?
"Showing up is the act of bearing witness to people's joy, pain, and true selves," Rachel Wilkerson Miller writes in the first chapter of her new book, The Art of Showing Up: How to Be There for Yourself and Your People. "[It's] validating their experiences; easing their load; and communicating that they are not alone in this life."
Miller walks us through the do's and don'ts of showing up for your people.
Keep your focus on your friend.
When a friend is confiding in you, it's easy to let the focus of your conversation drift away from the friend's experience. While it's tempting to chime in with a similar story in an effort to relate and connect, it's not always welcome. Your friend might feel silenced or feel that you've made their pain about you.
If you do feel that your experience might be helpful to hear, Miller's tip is to let them know that you went through something similar but allow them to decide if they want to hear about it in the moment.
"It's the best of both worlds," she says. "You get to tell them they're not alone, but you're not going to bore them with a story about how your pet died after their sibling died. You can let them decide if these things are related or not."
Ask how you can best help.
You don't need to automatically know what kind of help your friend wants. Just ask! Miller says to try these questions:
What's the best way I can support you right now?
Do you need someone to vent to? Or would you like my advice?
How are you feeling about [whatever tough experience your friend is going through]?
Tell me about your thought process.
A heartfelt "I'm sorry" goes a long way.
People may shy away from saying, "I'm sorry" in response to someone's misfortune because it might not feel like enough of an acknowledgment. But Miller says a genuine "I'm sorry" can go a long way to make your friend feel heard and validated.
"Sometimes there isn't a perfect response that is going to make people feel better," she says. "What you want to do is communicate, 'You're not alone. I'm with you. This sucks. I'm so sorry it's happening to you.' "
Lean away from clichés.
Platitudes like "Everything happens for a reason" aren't helpful when you're trying to comfort a friend. Resorting to clichés can make it feel like you're minimizing the friend's pain.
And stay away from statistics. For example, if a friend found out their spouse is cheating, maybe don't try to make them feel less alone by sharing that 50% of marriages end in divorce.
"Feel with your friend the bigness of what they're going through," Miller says. "Remember that just because it happens to a lot of people doesn't mean it's any less devastating."
Try not to "foist" or "fret."
In There Is No Good Card for This, a book outlining strategies for helping loved ones, the authors Kelsey Crowe and Emily McDowell identify two problematic kinds of helpers: foisters and fretters.
Foisters tend to push their advice — to insist on fixing or overcoming the problem. Fretters are so worried about their friend's challenges that they are preoccupied with whether they are doing enough to help.
Try to keep those behaviors in check, Miller says. "No one should have to manage you when they're going through a tragedy."
Showing up isn't a one-time thing.
Anniversaries of difficult dates can be tough. And grief is so complicated and looks different for each person. Remember that your friend might transition through several stages of sorrow, frustration or anger. Keep in touch with them and see if their needs change. "It means a lot to know that your friend is aware and thinking about you," says Miller.
Anxious? Meditation Can Help You 'Relax Into The Uncertainty' Of The Pandemic
In 2004, ABC News correspondent Dan Harris was broadcasting live on the air on Good Morning America when he started experiencing a panic attack.
"My lungs seized up, my palms started sweating, my mouth dried up. I just couldn't speak," he says. "I had to quit in the middle of my little newscast. And it was really embarrassing."
Harris credits meditation with helping him work through the anxiety that caused that panic attack. He went on to write a memoir, 10% Happier, about his experiences with meditation, and he talks about the subject on his twice-weekly podcast. He's also been hosting a daily meditation online with different leaders in the community of people who study and teach mindfulness techniques.
Harris says that meditation is more important than ever during the global pandemic: "I don't think we should sugarcoat it: It's scary," he says. "I've taken to saying, if you're not anxious right now, you're not paying attention."
Though he's been trying to help people quiet their anxiety with meditation and mindfulness techniques, he's careful to note that meditation isn't a "silver bullet" cure.
"Meditation doesn't make the uncertainty go away," he says. "It's not like I meditate and I'm walking through this pandemic like a unicorn barfing rainbows all the time."
Rather, Harris says, meditation allows people to "relax into the uncertainty. ... It just means that you're able to see that the fear — like everything in the world — will come and go, and that if you just relax for a second, and breathe into it, it will come and go."
On how a leading meditation teacher recommended the loving-kindness meditation as the best support during this pandemic
I had a very negative reaction to loving-kindness meditation [at first]. First of all, the name itself. I mean, could you come up with anything more treacly? And then it gets worse when you actually hear what the practice entails. So here's how it works: You sit and close your eyes and you envision a series of beings, so people or animals. Classically, you start with yourself and then you move on to a good friend, it can be your pet or kid, some easy person in your life that it's very easy to generate warmth for. Then you move on to a mentor, a benefactor or somebody who's played a positive role in your life. ... And then you move on to a neutral person, somebody you often overlook. And this is a poignant category right now, because the neutral people — the people manning the cash registers at the supermarkets and delivering our food and mail, and the neutral people for many of us that we often overlooked — are saving our lives quite literally now.
Then you move on to a difficult person — not hard to find for many of us. And then finally, all beings. In each case, you summon a mental image or a felt sense of your targeted being, and then you repeat a series of phrases. Usually the phrases are, "May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be healthy. May you live with ease." ...
There's a lot of science that strongly suggests that this practice and its variance can produce really meaningful physiological, psychological and behavioral changes. And if you think about it, this is a radical notion, the idea that warmth, friendliness, kindness, dare I say love — these are not factory settings that are unalterable.
You aren't wired a certain way when it comes to your interpersonal relations and unchangeable. In fact, these are skills that you can develop. And that is such a radical notion, that the mind is trainable. I've been doing this loving-kindness meditation now pretty intensively — including going on long retreats where that's all you do — for several years. And I've found it's made a big difference in terms of my inner weather, and how I relate to my own ugliness, because we all have ugliness.
On the important difference between fear and panic
I'm largely stealing this from a rather brilliant woman I met right at the beginning of the pandemic. The first pandemic-themed episode I did was in mid-March. And one of the guests was a woman named Dr. Luana Marques. She's Brazilian by birth, but now works at Harvard as an anxiety expert. And she told me about something called the — I think this is the right name — Yerkes-Dodson [Law]. You can look this up on Google; it's a bell-shaped curve. And it talks about this sort of utility of anxiety, which is an interesting concept. And it kind of gives us permission to not feel bad about the fact that we're feeling a certain amount of justifiable fear and anxiety.
And so at the beginning of the slope, right until you get to the top of the curve, the anxiety and fear that we may be feeling in the face of this pandemic or anything really, makes sense. It motivates us to act. But then it starts to go downhill. And that's when we tip into not very helpful panic, where we constrict and the physiological response is enfeebling and we're not able to make good decisions. That's when we hoard toilet paper or we're nasty to our neighbors or we spread misinformation on Twitter, whatever it may be. So what we want is to be at the top of the Yerkes-Dodson curve with the appropriate amount of anxiety without tipping in to panic. That is where I feel mindfulness meditation — the kind of meditation with which most people are familiar — that's one of the areas where mindfulness meditation can be really helpful.
On how many people are experiencing vivid dreams during the pandemic
I've been having wild dreams — classic anxiety dreams where I'm trying to get somewhere and I can't get there, or I'm being chased or I'm back in school. This is being reported widely across our culture, across the globe, as I understand it, and I was talking to Dr. Mark Epstein about this. ... I had him on the show originally and I was asking him, why do you think we're having these crazy dreams? And, in typical fashion, he gave the disclaimer that he doesn't really know, but his instinct is that we're "processing." That's what we're doing in these dreams is we're sort of flushing out, purging, processing the — this is his term, not mine — the collective trauma and the collective grief we're all experiencing right now. It can be jarring to have these dreams, but you might look at it as the functioning of a healthy brain and mind.
On how to practice mindfulness meditation
You sit in a quiet enough spot and you then bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. You don't have to breathe in any special way. This is not actually a breathing exercise. And there's nothing special about the breath per se, we're just picking something south of your neck to pay attention, we're going to get your attention out of the swirling stories in your head and onto the raw data of your physical sensations.
So it can be your breath. For some of us, the breath right now is triggering, given the fact that COVID-19, has pulmonary consequences. So you might want to pick just the feeling of your full body sitting or lying — or maybe your hands touching, or your bottom on your chair, just picking some physical anchor to where you can place your mind and you just kind of commit to it, gently, that I'm going to pay attention to this for one to five to 10 minutes.
That's the second step, and then the third step, the final step really, and this is the most important step — as soon as you try to do this, your mind will go into a mutiny mode. You're going to start thinking about, when can I get a haircut? Where do gerbils run wild? Why did Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture in 1991? Blah, blah, blah. And the whole game is just to notice when you've become distracted and to start again, and again, and again.
And this distraction, by the way, is not a failure. It is not a malfunction. It is part of the meditation. The key part of meditation is to get distracted, to see the wildness of your own mind over and over and over again, and then to begin again and again and again. ... It is the seeing of the wildness of the cacophony that is really important, because when you see it, it doesn't own you as much.
On why meditation isn't about controlling your mind
It's actually not about trying to tamp down on or control the way the mind works. It's about familiarization. Just getting to know how nutty it is inside your brain, inside your mind, is incredibly important, because when you've tipped over into panic or any other unhelpful, unskillful mind state — like greed or anger or hatred — then you might notice it. And then you have a choice: Am I going to be owned by this panic right now or am I going to be owned by this anger right now? Or am I going to be so controlled by the anger that I'm going to say something that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of my marriage? Or am I going to eat the 75th Oreo?
Having this self-awareness — otherwise known as mindfulness — which is what's developed through the process of seeing your distractions and then beginning again (gently over and over and over again), that is a game-changing skill. Because ... this nonstop conversation ... is a central feature of your life — whether you know it or not, we're all walking around with this inner narrator that if we broadcast loud, you would be locked up. And when you're unaware of this cacophony internally, it's owning you all the time. And what we're doing in meditation is dragging all of this nonsense out of the shadows and into the light.
On why focusing your energy on helping others can quiet the feelings of loneliness and despair during the pandemic
Helping other people puts you back in touch with what is good about you. And it can take you out of the black hole of self-obsession. And those are two really useful benefits of helping other people. It doesn't have to be grandiose. It doesn't have to be giving away all of your money. It can be running errands for your elderly neighbor. It can be checking in on friends. It can be making small donations to charity. It can be volunteering at a safe social distance with local nonprofit groups. There are lots of ways to help out. Adopting a cat, adopting a dog — many, many ways to get you out of the self-obsessed dialogue and put you in touch with your best characteristics, which are helping.
