Avoiding Capital Punishment: Get the Money Monkey Off Your Back

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Money is given staggering amount of control over our lives. We feel vulnerable without enough, ashamed when spending too much, and clueless about how to manage it. However talented, educated, creative, or skilled we may be, we can feel as though we’re not earning what we should be. This only gets worse in relationships, as often “my” money becomes “ours.” One’s problem is now two’s.

Here’s an overview of the underlying causes for these feelings and how to deal with them.

Problem: Emotional Spending

You’ve heard of “emotional eaters,” but probably not “emotional spenders.” Emotional spending is another way for some of us to attempt to soothe frustration, loneliness, and the nagging void of love’s absence.

Solution to Emotional Spending

When you feel an impulse to buy something you don’t need, stop and take a few deep breaths. Your consumption compulsion may be rooted in a different desire entirely, so stop and ask yourself what you really want. Write down the first thing that springs to mind and assess the obstacles keeping you from getting it. Make a list of things you need to do and people you need to talk to—ideally good, compassionate listeners— in order to get what you really want.

Delaying the decision to purchase something until after having done something nurturing for yourself helps you think more clearly.

Problem: Limiting Beliefs About Money

Limiting beliefs stem from parental, cultural, and religious background. You may have internalized your family’s beliefs and attitudes about money without even having an explicit grasp on what they are. These attitudes range from anxiety, sadness, and fear over not having enough to guilt over having more than others. Some common limiting beliefs are:

  • I’m greedy if I want a lot of money.
  • Money is the root of all evil.
  • Scarcity is real.
  • I don’t have the power or ability to make the money I need or deserve.

Solution to Limiting Beliefs About Money

Here’s how to identify and let go of your limiting beliefs.

  1. Schedule quiet, uninterrupted time by yourself.
  2. List all of your limiting beliefs—even the silly ones.
  3. Compare those limiting beliefs to those of your parents.
  4. Next to each of those beliefs, write a positive affirmation to undo it. For example, if you believe “I can never make enough money,” write “I am making enough money.”
  5. Develop an actionable plan to make your affirmation true. Having an accountability partner to report to can help you brainstorm and stay on track.

Problem: Money Will Kill Your Relationship (If You Let It)

Money is like sex: it’s hard to talk about, makes everyone vulnerable, and gets associated with deep shame. However, unlike sex, money is the number one cause of divorce in the U.S.. You read that correctly: money ends more relationships than sex.

Money symbolizes power and control in relationships. It also exposes the boundaries of trust in a relationship, whether it’s faith in a partner’s decision-making or in their openness and honesty about their income and savings.

Differing limiting beliefs can cause clashes with your partner. Consider what happens when “My money is an indicator of my value as a person” marries “Money is the root of all evil…” Not pretty.

It doesn’t even take two to tango; emotional buyers can single-handedly wreck relationships with reckless spending ending in financial suicide.

Solution to Money’s War On Love

Examine your feelings, opinions and thoughts about money in your relationship. Find the roots of your limiting beliefs about money, and those of your partner, to establish a firm foundation for communication. Here’s how to work through those beliefs together:

  • Schedule a conversation with your significant other and discuss each other’s concerns regarding money in your relationship.
  • Assess your trust in each other regarding money management. Transparently explore what you do and don’t trust each other with. E.g., overspending on one of the kids, or impulse buying when emotionally distressed.
  • Develop a plan meeting both of your needs. It may include a pre or post-nuptial agreement, a retirement plan, or addressing how to introduce financial responsibility to your children.
  • If you are remarried with children from different relationships, be sensitive, especially if there are significant differences in your individual assets.

Closing Thoughts

Money is scary, but try to keep it in perspective.

Emotional spending can lead us to ruin, but taking time to assess what we really need can keep us from buying stuff we don’t really even want. Limiting beliefs can keep us from flourishing, but freeing ourselves from a legacy of misguided attitudes about money can let us realize our potential. Money kills relationships like flies, but exploring financial boundaries with our partners can help us tell Death, “Not today,” one more time.

Bright financial futures are just over the horizon. You can get there, but the path is neither short, nor easy, so watch your step.

Why Women Suffer from Anxiety: Biological and Environmental Threats

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Why women suffer from anxiety. Anxious woman with her face buried in her hands.

Women are twice as likely to suffer from anxiety disorders as men, and the symptoms begin earlier according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Women are by no means the weaker sex, but they do face unique biological and environmental factors that increase their predisposition towards anxiety disorders. Learn more as you help yourself or someone you love cope with these disorders.

Biological Causes

Are you familiar with the fight-or-flight response? It allows you to survive by fighting threats or escaping them. For women, that neurological response activates quicker and stays on longer than it does for men, thanks to two primarily female hormones estrogen and progesterone.

Those two hormones also cause PMS and menopause. The resulting hormonal shifts increase a women’s prevalence to suffer from anxiety.

Another hormone, serotonin also affects a woman’s predisposition to anxiety. Men process serotonin faster than women, which helps men handle stressful situations and move on. Meanwhile, women stay  stressed longer and think about the stressful situations longer, which makes them more vulnerable to long-term anxiety disorders.

Likewise, women possess a sensitivity to corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), the hormone that organizes stress responses. This sensitivity increases a woman’s likelihood to suffer from anxiety disorders because she senses reasons to feel anxious.

Environmental Causes

In addition to biological causes of anxiety disorders, several cultural contributors uniquely affect women and can create anxiety disorders.

  • Increased pressure to balance a successful career and a healthy home
  • Expectations to always be the strong core and sturdy backbone of the family
  • Responsibilities to nurture children, a spouse, parents and friends at her expense
  • Prolonged exposure to financial, relational or other stressors
  • Limited time or ability for adequate self-care

Women may be more predisposed than men to suffer from anxiety disorders. However, if you or someone you know suffers from anxiety disorders, contact me today. Schedule a consultation and discover effective treatment options that decrease anxiety and increase your quality of life.

Three Key Areas Where Anxiety Costs You

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Your heart pounds, your stomach feels upset and your muscles tense. That feeling is anxiety, and it’s more than a simple emotion like anger or happiness. It can be debilitating, affect every area of your life and hold you back in several key ways.

Blocked Goals

Maybe you long to lead your company to greatness, tell your spouse how you really feel about your relationship or work up the courage to leave the house. Anxiety blocks those goals if the thought of speaking in front of anyone makes you feel ill, your tongue is tied when you think about talking to a pretty girl or you feel dread when you try to leave the house.

You can follow advice from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America and tell your boss,  a trusted coworker and family members about your condition. However, you will need professional help in addressing the anxiety that blocks you from achieving your goals in life.

Health Concerns

A palpitating heart, insomnia and tremors are just three physical symptoms of anxiety, and each of these health concerns affects your ability to function physically. Stomach cramps keep you from enjoying your favorite foods and dining out with friends. Insomnia increases irritability and affects your ability to work, drive or remember simple things. Tremors cause you to drop things.

Address these physical effects of anxiety as soon as possible and especially before they turn into dangerous or debilitating health concerns.

Relationship Loss

Paranoia, jumpiness and irritability affect your ability to make and keep friends. You worry about what others will think of you, you can’t stand crowds and you constantly feel the need to defend yourself.

Eventually, you give up trying to explain why you feel anxious all the time. Your inability to participate in normal activities isolates you from family, friends and coworkers. You end up feeling more alone and anxious.

Stop the cycle of anxiety. Contact me today and schedule a consultation. Together, we can work through this troubling emotion and find a solution to anxiety that works for you and removes the blocks it creates in your life.

Can Individual Therapy Help You Build Happier Relationships?

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The Main Relationship Problems

You’re afraid to be hurt again. You hesitate to be vulnerable in front of your partner because you just don’t want to be rejected again. You find yourself guarded and defensive when your partner asks you questions about previous relationships. You don’t understand why you’re so uncomfortable. Three major factors make you feel that way: fear of emotional intimacy, past trauma, and failures of past relationships. Individual therapy will help you understand, heal, and make new choices, which will empower you to develop a great relationship.

Emotional Intimacy Issues

Emotional intimacy is essential for a happy relationship, yet you find yourself squirming at the thought of sharing deep feelings. You find yourself working long hours to avoid your significant other, which leads to emotional distance. You talk about other people’s and current events in excess. You might even confuse physical intimacy with emotional.

How Therapy Helps Restore Emotional Intimacy

Therapy, in a warm and safe environment, will help you explore your insecurities and doubts, with curiosity and kindness, and without judgment. The therapeutic process will help you develop emotional intimacy with yourself, and that’s the first step in developing it with someone else.

How Psychological Trauma Impedes Relationships

Emotional, physical, and sexual trauma impacts your view of yourself and the people in your life. The mental and physical ‘freeze’ following traumatic events colors the lens through which you see life. It alters your perception of your relationships with yourself, parents, siblings, friends, and significant others. You may be experiencing general heightened anxiety, panic attacks, depression, momentary disconnection from your routine, and various, medically-unexplainable aches and pains.

Recovery from Trauma with Therapy

Releasing the trauma from the body through cutting edge methods such as EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, and Brainspotting is more effective than talk therapy alone. Talk therapy complements these trauma-healing methods by helping you understand the trauma you went through, how it impacts your life’s choices, and helping you heal from it in a safe environment in which you can set new, achievable goals.

Problems with Failed Relationships

Your last relationship was a disappointment—yet another piece of luggage tossed on your growing heap of emotional baggage. Once again you were misunderstood, unappreciated, and taken for granted. You’re afraid to try again, because you believe you just have bad luck in relationships. You always try so hard to make it work, and end up feeling frustrated, drained and confused.

Therapy Breaks the Pattern Behind Your Relationship Failures

In individual therapy you learn what to look for in a mate, how to identify ‘red flags,’ and how to both listen to and honor your gut feelings. Identifying patterns of relationships you are repeating helps you stop getting the same results time and time again. You’ll explore your contribution to the relationship, grieve the loss, and move on with a renewed feeling of hope and a sense of empowerment that comes from healing and inner strength.

Conclusion: Individual Therapy Helps you Build Happier Relationships

Relationships can be very challenging, but they’re equally rewarding. Difficulties in establishing emotional intimacy, psychological traumas, and failed relationships casts a shadow of doubt upon your ability to a loving relationship. Individual therapy helps you explore and overcome major barriers to building, maintaining, and enjoying a successful relationship, and helps you find and get the love you want and deserve.

Therapy: What’s Luck Got to Do with It?

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Luck is the ability to open yourself to new opportunities (Richard Wiseman, The Luck Factor). Sounds easy, right? Sure, once you get past some hurdles. Many of them. Significant ones.

What separates the lucky from the frustrated? Is our fate in our hands, or is it just the luck of the draw?

Characteristics of “lucky” people

  • They create self-fulfilling prophecies through positive expectations and goals
  • Calm and positive disposition
  • Listen to their intuition
  • Think outside of the box
  • Resilient to in the face of bad luck
  • They make lemonade when life gives them lemons

Obstacles to good luck

  • High anxiety
  • Depression
  • Negative thinking
  • Self doubt
  • Victim mentality
  • Negative people, be they associates, companions, family members…

Therapy helps achieve good luck

Anxiety and depression are debilitating. Both slow your personal and professional functioning. When you’re highly anxious, your ability to see the unexpected is highly impaired. Therapy provides you with a safe, warm environment, which is essential to exploring the beliefs fueling your sabotaging behaviors. In therapy you will learn how to:

  • Identify the causes of your discomfort: e.g., anxiety, depression, or trauma
  • Heal through self-regulating techniques addressing your body and your feelings
  • Listen to your body, thoughts, and feelings
  • Honor your healthy needs
  • Self soothe
  • Develop resilience
  • Bounce back from negative life experiences
  • Develop a positive, achievable vision for your life

Self-help tips for creating luck

  • Develop a positive support system. Renew contact with people you like who you lost touch with
  • Experiment with new things regularly. E.g., volunteer, get a new hobby, take a class, play, etc.
  • Track your progress in a journal
  • Reward yourself when accomplishing each step in your plan
  • Decide that you can proactively create your ‘luck’
  • Get into therapy. It’ll help you heal and perfect your plan

The Takeaway

You have the power to improve your luck by getting more proactively involved in designing and living the life you want. There will be obstacles along the way, however, your approach to removing the barriers determines your outcome. Finding the positive in negative situations, and deciding to move forward, rather than staying stuck, will do wonders for your quality of life.

Good Luck!

Loneliness & Depression: A Rock and a Hard Place

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Loneliness is painful, isolating, and consuming. It also puts your health at risk. Hawkley, et al [PDF], found increased risk for poorer sleep quality and worse cardiac performance in the lonely.

There are two major types of loneliness: transient and chronic.

Transient loneliness occurs in response to an event such as the loss of a relationship, a job transition, or relocating.

Chronic loneliness may result after having failed to recover from transient loneliness. It can also arise completely independent of events that trigger transient loneliness, but instead due to other biological factors, such as physiological diseases that interfere with everyday functioning (e.g. cancer, MS, ALS, or muscular dystrophy).

Depression and chronic loneliness influence each other. Cacioppo, et al [PDF],  found “reciprocal influences over time between loneliness and depressive symptomatology” and that “can act in a synergistic effect to diminish well-being in middle-aged and older adults.” To get a feel for whether your loneliness is chronic or transient, ask yourself the following:

  • How long have I felt lonely?
  • Is it connected to a particular event or loss?
  • Is my support system intact?
  • Are my sleep patterns normal?
  • Have I grown anhedonic and stopped feeling joy or passion in anything?
  • How depressed am I?
  • Have any health issues affected my lifestyle?

Getting a sense for whether loneliness is chronic or transient gives you an advance feel for the path to recovery. The transiently lonely have an easier time snapping out of it. Their support systems tend to be more intact. They’re also more connected to social habits accompanying the interactions in their recent past. The chronically lonely, meanwhile, face an uphill battle of having to remember how to interact in ways that now feel foreign, but may also have to lay an entirely new foundation for a support system. Daunting!

The good news is that whether your loneliness is chronic or transient, you approach beating it pretty similarly. Take the following baby steps to beat loneliness and start feeling connected:

  • Reach out to family, friends, acquaintances, and people from your past.
  • Don’t be afraid to meet new people.
  • Get involved in your local community. (Reading the local paper can be a good first step.)
  • Schedule a frequent activity involving at least one other person. (E.g., exercising, taking a class, joining a book club, having a weekly movie or gaming night.)
  • Affirm that you are lovable and valuable, in front of a mirror.
  • Volunteer for a cause close to your heart. It’ll renew your sense of purpose and help you feel like you’re making a difference—because you are!
  • Find an “accountability partner” to serve as your sounding board as you experiment with new things.
  • Get professional help from a therapist.

With a little patience and consistency, you’ll overcome loneliness. Taking things slowly, at a pace you can handle, is the key to making lasting and successful life changes. Planning and scheduling deadlines for your actions will help you get and keep control over your life. Start feeling better now.

Happiness Is Within Your Reach

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Do you know someone who is happy? Do you know why? Whether you believe someone to be happy because of wealth, a great relationship, a fulfilling career, or more so, in spite of difficulties with the above, understanding and learning how one is happy, while another in similar circumstances is not, is worth exploring. 50% of our happiness was determined before we were born by our genetic code.The remaining 50% can be enhanced dramatically  through understanding what is unique to happy people that we know.

Resilience, the belief that you control your life, and believing that something good will happen to you is a common denominator to happy people. Resilience is your ability to confront and handle something bad that happens to you. It leads to a sense of control over your life. Believing that your life is determined by your actions reinforces the belief that you can rebuild that which was destroyed, and control your destiny, which increases your chances of succeeding in life and become happier. Believing that your mistakes were also under your control helps you realize that you have the power to fix them. Self fulfilling prophecies do happen. Believing that something good will happen to you can become a self fulfilling prophecy.

The happiness rules:

  • Happiness is not the same thing as pleasure.
  • Happiness comes from a small pleasure with a great meaning.
  • Meaning is achieved from hard work.
  • Happiness comes from feeling that your work is important and meaningful.
  • Happiness is achieved when we feel that you are contributing something important.
  • Happiness can come from being in a healthy relationship.
  • Happiness is enhanced by spiritual beliefs and practices.
  • Happiness does not come from a lot of money.

Achieving happiness is a complex process for most of us. It requires hard work, determination, and belief that we can obtain it.

Please let me know your thoughts, feelings and experience with happiness.

This blog post was inspired by a TV show on happiness that I recently watched on “The Israeli Channel”.

Overcoming Depression Shame

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Overcoming depression shame can be difficult and time consuming.

Depression is dark and heavy. It produces shame that you may want to hide from people in your life. You fear revealing your depression to someone close to you will result in abandonment.

Nagging senses of failure motivate you to shut everyone out and pretend everything’s just fine. You know the drill: that fake smile you make with your mouth, but not your eyes, that you hope no one will notice. Being caught depressed is a little embarrassing.

Your self esteem drops with each day the depression looms. Your life looks great on paper: nice family, great job, friends. You figure, others might be wondering, “With such a great life, what right does s/he have to be depressed?” Feeling ashamed about your depression, like you don’t have the right to your own feelings, make you feel even worse.

There’s a popular notion that depression should only come with good reason—some set of terrible circumstances that justify how bad you feel. There’s another one that a “good” reason has to be obvious to others.

Total misconceptions.

Even if things seem great from the outside, things like past trauma, unresolved grief, difficulty with relocation, culture shock, hormonal imbalances, hereditary predisposition, and many other things can weigh you down.

Being depressed isn’t your fault, regardless.

The good news is that help is available. Therapy, western medicine, alternative medicine, and things you do on your own to overcome depression will all help you feel better. Taking action now will help lift the curtain of despair, revealing a bright, new future in which you’re empowered.