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Posts Tagged ‘how to balance life’

Infidelity, Hunger, and Bank Robbery: Emotions Make Terrible Drivers

Thursday, April 30th, 2020

Crime and Empathy

I cannot know what it is like to rob a bank. Or, maybe I can, but I haven’t yet. I do, however, know what it is like to press my right foot against the gas pedal a little harder, to consciously look away from my speedometer, to cast glances at my rear-view and side-view mirrors for police, and to mentally practice the, “My husband was supposed to get my speedometer fixed officer. It’s been off five miles per hour for months,” speech.

I know what it’s like to want something so badly, even if it is just to get to  Trader Joe’s before it closes or to my daughter’s volleyball practice so the coach won’t count her late, that I cheat a little. This little nugget of self-realization means while I truly don’t know the urge to rob a bank, as a human with my own law-breaking nature, I can’t look down my nose at the person who does.

Hangry and Lonely

Urge (and its cousin crave) is a funny word. In Alcoholics Anonymous and Allanon we use the acronym H.A.L.T. to describe typical urges. The acronym stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. When I work with clients I often add ‘thirst’ and ‘need to potty’ to that list. Urges are good things and key to our survival. If I am hungry, I need to eat. If I postpone eating, I won’t get less hungry as time goes by. In fact, I will grow more hungry and until I eat, I will enlist my emotions to make that happen. Unfortunately emotions are terrible behavior drivers.

For example let’s say I skip lunch and arrive home from work and see my kids’ toys in the driveway. Hungry now looks like anger and I yell at my kids about their toys. Once I eat, all is well with the world. Another example might be, what if I am a shy person and I feel lonely much of the time. I don’t recognize lonely but I do recognize the chocolate cake in my fridge. Instead of calling a friend (which is hard for me) I eat a chocolate cake. The result? I get a  wonderful  endorphin/serotonin hit from the cake but when I crash, I’m still lonely. I may never be brave enough to phone a friend, but I don’t have to be. I know where the cake is.

Urges and Healthy Behaviors

Emotions and urges are brothers-in-arms.  They are designed to work with cognition (our thoughts) to initiate behavior that keeps us healthy.  Go back to my ‘need to potty’ urge and see what I mean. You’re having a lovely conversation with the queen when your lunch begins to turn somersaults in your tummy. You know avoiding this urge is an invitation to disaster so you think of an excuse to politely exit the conversation and go take care of yourself. Rule of thumb? The longer you fight the urges, the sicker you become.

Counseling is about teaching our clients the language for urges so they can match them up with helpful thoughts and behaviors.  Like a miles-long contrail in the sky indicates there is a tiny jet way up there somewhere, infidelity, restricting food, or substance abuse are signs of underlying unmet urges. Unmet urges indicates there’s a lot of pain in there.

Where there is pain there is impulsivity, over-indulgence, restricting, and even healthy-looking things like high performance discipline routines, super healthy eating (orthorexia) and over training (follow David Goggins, author of Can’t Hurt Me if you don’t believe me). Over-ANYTHING can be a sign you have unmet urges (suffering) that you are trying to meet with behavior that completely misses the target. Welcome to humanity.

Healthy Humans

When you make an appointment, counselors don’t judge you because we’ve all been there. We all have urges we’ve allowed to dictate our speed, our relationships, and our health. Your counselor’s job?

  1. Help the hurting identify underlying emotions so they can
  2. Disconnect unhealthy responses to normal emotions and
  3. Reconnect something that IS healthy and will positively affect their job, relationships, health, and freedom.

If you are struggling, you must take care of yourself. Need help? Worried about your own unhealthy behavior? Call a counselor today.

 

To Succeed You Gotta Get Gritty

Monday, June 15th, 2015

Good morning Achievers!

You know grit is quite a hot topic these days (check out Angela Duckworth’s research here). Grit means you go through a hellacious experience and you do more than just survive, you thrive. Or perhaps you are the Energizer bunny and no matter what happens, you just keep going and going and going. My own gritty experience (I think the actual word I used to describe it at the time only rhymed with gritty) involved getting a cancer diagnosis, having three little kids, knowing my husband was in a combat zone, and deciding to start a Ph.D. program and a new counseling practice. So what are the five traits of Grit? They are courage, achievement, follow-through, resilience, and excellence (rather than perfection).

 

Courage, or your ability to manage fear of failure, can only be cultivated through hardship. That’s a tough sell to entrepreneurs. We want to succeed because we have a mortgage to pay, student loans to pay back, or food to buy. Achievement might seem like an easier virtue to swallow, but it’s important to note that this is NOT meticulous conscientious completion. It is a ‘do your best-finish it up-get on to the next task whether it looks pretty or not’ virtue. Follow-through is akin to Malcom Gladwell’s ‘10,000 hours to mastery’ theory. It tells us that practice with purpose is the driver behind accomplishing long term goals. Resilience can be descried as the belief that “everything will be alright in the end, and if it’s not alright, it’s not the end.” Excellence-not perfection is a gritty trait because it is an attitude. Perfection, on the other hand, relies on the opinions of others and is impossible to reach.

 

To see Angela Duckworth’s TED talk about grit click here.

 

Have a Gritty Day! – Kate

How Classroom Routines for Children Provide Security in their Daily Education

Sunday, October 7th, 2012

This is the first of a four-part series that examines the importance of rituals in our lives. This article will examine the daily rituals that we all take for granted, as we often fail to recognize their role in keeping us grounded. It is important to know “routine” definition. A routine is a sequence of actions regularly followed, or a fixed program. These daily rituals are particularly significant as children start school, when parents adjust schedules to accommodate the changes from a more flexible summer routine to the more demanding requirements of a daily education program.

Our schools are very rich in the usage of rituals. The day begins with morning announcements, the children have certain times and routines for classes, recess, lunch, etc. Have you ever observed routines for children throughout their day at school, including the classroom routines? They know exactly what to anticipate the moment they walk in the door. There is a place for their backpacks, jackets, supplies. They know when they are supposed to take out materials from their desks, open books, etc. In order for rituals to be effective, they have to be meaningful, so the rituals in the schools and classrooms provide a security for the children as they become comfortable knowing what to expect. Have you ever listened to a child explain that they had a substitute teacher? You can tell from the child’s voice that the routine was different. Have you ever heard a child explain that they had music that day rather than PE? It is significant for them, because it is a change in what they expected.

As schools create daily rituals for children, it is also crucial for parents to use rituals in the home to provide that same sense of “grounding.’ Getting up at the same time, going to bed at the same time, reading books together, doing homework at specified times, etc. Children want and need that security that rituals provide them.
Surprise yourself and make a list of all the daily rituals that you have provided for your family.

Next month we will examine those rituals that families create for special occasions such as birthdays.

Balance

Friday, October 7th, 2011

Achieve Balance Today!
Sounds great, but how?
Welcome to my Blog. I’m Kate Walker and in addition to founding and owning achievebalance.org (https://achievebalance.org) and our new non profit Ann’s Place (http://annsplacetexas.org) I am a licensed professional counselor supervisor and a licensed marriage and family therapist supervisor. Every day I’m going to give you hints and tidbits of information about achieving balance in your relationships, your work, and within yourself. I don’t presume to have all the answers, so I plan to direct you to resources written by experts in the field of health, nutrition, exercise, spirituality, recreation, communication; you name it. My ambitious goal is to be your one-stop-shop for topics related to achieving balance.

To do what I do for a living, I must have faith in my client’s ability to help him or herself. To that end I am asking for your help. Your comments to my posts will help your fellow man/woman who may need help today. There are some rules to the game, however.

• Posts that use profanity, vulgarity, mean-spirited comments and general nastiness will not see the light of day (or your computer screen).
• Although I enjoy a good debate/product placement/soap box pontification as much as the next person, those types of comments probably won’t make the cut either.
• Be helpful, be short, and be nice.

Thanks for joining me. Now, let’s go make a difference!