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family therapy after a divorce

Have you recently been through a divorce? Are you feeling the impact of the divorce in ways that you didn't plan for? After my divorce, my kids and I went through several months where they were angry and I felt like a complete failure. It was almost a year before I decided to begin seeing a family therapist to help us get through such a difficult transitional time for the entire family. She was so understanding, compassionate and helpful. She helped us talk through our feelings and provided us with the tools that we needed to get through the most difficult time in our lives.

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family therapy after a divorce

The Voice Of Reason: How Counseling Helps You Replace Anxiety With Rational Thought

by Fernando Barnett

If you suffer from anxiety as a mental disorder, you can fully understand and appreciate the limiting effect that it has on people's lives. You may even find plenty of reasons to avoid counseling and medication when anxiety dominates your thoughts and decision-making processes. However, you can get better, and a good therapist can help in the following ways.

Cognitive-Behavioral Modification

Most people who do not have anxiety issues falsely assume that your anxiety issues are "all in your head" and "nothing to worry about." While that has a tendency to downplay the turmoil you feel and does nothing to help ease your fears, to a certain extent, these people are correct. Most of the anxiety a patient has comes from thoughts in their heads that start with a particular event and end up on the far end of some wild, imaginary outcome for which they feel they have to control and need to stop but cannot. One of the first steps in your anxiety treatment is to modify your thoughts and behavior. It is not easy, but your counselor will provide you with tools that help.

These tools include

  • Stopping mid-thought to assess what is happening
  • Determining if the event or thought is one that absolutely needs your attention right now, is something that can clearly wait, or is completely irrelevant to any part of your day
  • Ordering your tasks by level of importance and level of anxiety produced by not attending to them
  • Completing the tasks as you ordered them and taking a moment to reflect and breathe on what you have accomplished as you complete each task
  • Meditating or daydreaming to clear your mind, release tension and rest your body both before you start a set of tasks and after you have completed everything on your list for the day
  • Exercising to relieve pent-up energy from anxious thoughts and anxiety-producing events

Talking with Your Counselor

The best part about spending weekly or monthly sessions with your counselor or therapist is that you have someone who can be your voice of reason in the midst of a tumult of unreasonable thoughts. Being able to bounce your thoughts out loud off someone who does not have anxiety helps you hear how ridiculous they might sound to other people and allows the therapist to delve into why your train of thought is barreling onward in an irrational direction. Eventually, it will help you to find a close friend or partner who is a very good listener who can talk you through your rambling thoughts out loud and help you make sense of them, but only a trained professional like The Center for Family Counseling, Inc. should be working with you for now.

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