For this post, I went to the website of the woman who created the phrase Religious Trauma Syndrome, Marlene Winell PhD. On her website, Dr. Winell describes Religious Trauma Syndrome at: Religious Trauma Syndrome is the condition experienced by people who are struggling with leaving an authoritarian, dogmatic religion and coping with the damage of indoctrination. They may be going through the shattering of a personally meaningful faith and/or breaking away from a controlling community and lifestyle. RTS is a function of both the chronic abuses of harmful religion and the impact of severing one’s connection with one’s faith. It can be compared to a combination of PTSD and Complex PTSD (C-PTSD). I can explain nor discuss RTS better than she does; here is the website . But I can tell you a little bit more. If you are a client looking for deconversion help or for help with what you think might be Religious Trauma Syndrome, make sure to look for a therapist who is a...
S o many of us work hard to improve our self-esteem and self-confidence and one of the common strategies for making improvements is to use affirmations. Affirmations are statements that we can use as a form of positive self-talk in order to get into the habit of substituting negative thoughts about ourselves to positive thoughts. You might be considering using affirmations for yourself or even for your child. If you were to pay attention to all of your thoughts in a given day and to count all of the negative things you say to yourself in a single twenty-four hour period, how many negative thoughts about yourself would you guess you say to yourself? Five? Fifty? Five hundred? Some studies estimate that we have over fifteen thousand thoughts in a given day and that, conservatively, over 75% of those thoughts are self-judging thoughts. That can be over eleven thousand negative thoughts in a single day! Think of that! Thousands of negative thoughts in a single day! We know that...
In my longing career, in my life, I've been fortunate to see tremendous growth and change in the field of mental health as we understand better. Some of the things that have changed dramatically over the past couple of decades include (but is not limited by) this list: our understanding of Trauma, our understanding of people on the Autism spectrum, our appreciation for and understanding of various gender identity and sexual identity, how to approach and treat people with several important diagnoses, our increasing understanding of our brain with trauma and with human behavior as a whole, the chemical agents in our brain: their absence and their presence, and how they affect us, and SO much more. It's exciting to me. But I'm older now. 😀 It's very, very hard for me to learn all of these new things. The information is amazingly available, but I'm struggling to read the material and to really remember and process it quickly. But with my effort, it IS happening for...
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