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Showing posts from October, 2021

When Guilt Is Really Grief

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By: Megan Brewer, LMHC     When Guilt Is Really Grief Grief and guilt can blend together inside of us when we lose someone or something important to us, particularly when we lose a person and the relationship with the person was complicated. We can sometimes replace the painful feelings of loss (grief) with thinking about things we could have done differently (guilt) to feel the loss less intensely and gain some sense of control over emotions that feel out of control. What Is Grief? Psychiatrist Curt Thompson defines grief like this: “ Grief is our emotional inflammatory response to loss. It is an interpersonal neurobiological event with which we react when we are deprived of something—anything—to which we have a significant emotional attachment, to which we have ascribed salient meaning. It could be a relationship. An object. An event or experience. A job, a title, a savings account, an expectation or hope.” [1]   Grief is our heart’s natural response to losing something t

When Domestic Abuse is Psychological

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By: Megan Brewer, LMHC   Did you grow up in a home with psychological abuse? For as long as Jane could remember, she struggled with depression and anxiety. After carrying her struggles on her own for years, she decided to seek the help of a counselor. As Jane began to explore her feelings and the stories attached to them, she and her counselor started talking about the kind of home she remembered growing up in. “My home life was OK,” she said. “We were never physically abused or anything like that, and my parents provided for what we needed.” But as Jane continued to explore and unpack the relational dynamics of her childhood home, a different story began to emerge. While her father was involved in different areas of her life, she remembered being afraid of him most of the time. She remembered fragments of memories about how her dad used to treat her mom, and it never seemed right. It often felt confusing to think about. No one outside of the family seemed to really know about it