It’s February. The days are still cold and short, and we are in that in-between time when the holidays are over, spring has yet to come, and we are being bombarded by all the Valentine’s Day marketing. Rather than a narrow focus on romantic love, hopefully what you are seeing reflects the growing awareness that loving others well probably shouldn’t just be reserved for February 14th, and also celebrates all the various kinds of relationships that contribute to our wellbeing. So with that broader lens on Valentine’s Day, let’s talk about caring for ourselves well, and how that helps us care for others well.  I’m going to challenge us to shift our thinking about self-care away from much of what the popular media promotes under that label (fancy coffee, manicures, wine night, bubble baths, etc). Instead, think about self-care using a house analogy. In a well built house, you need a firm foundation, strong walls, and a solid roof. Likewise, self-care consists of the actions we take to ...

Hey Pioneers and welcome to January's blog on how to challenge the tendency of being a people-pleaser!  Raise your hand if you've ever sacrificed your own peace, needs/wants, or happiness to make sure others felt comfortable and to avoid conflict...Yeah, we see you and we know that struggle!  A people pleaser is defined as "a person who has an emotional need to please others often at the expense of his or her own needs or desires". The key takeaways that highlight where this becomes an issue is "emotional need" and "at the expense of his or her own needs or desires". This emotional need means that somewhere throughout life we learned that by pleasing others and focusing on others' happiness fulfilled some element of love and acceptance. This could be by watching role models/caregivers do this same thing, by growing up in an environment where keep the peace and ensuring other's happiness was the only way to experience a "positive" ...

Hello Pioneers and welcome to the December blog!  You might be surprised to see that this month's topic isn't necessarily "holly jolly". Our society has a great way of painting the holiday season as bright, cheerful, and a time for happiness and memories, but that's not the case for everyone. We expand more on this in the podcast for this month, but specifically for this blog post we want to talk about grief and the holidays.  As we know, grief is universal and something we all have/will experience in our lifetimes, as death is a part of life. But even though it's something everyone will experience, it's not something that people like to talk about or give space to. It seems a common trend in society is to avoid the hard feelings of grief and instead expect grieving individuals to put on a positive and happy "mask" so that others aren't affected. Specifically surrounding our topic, we see this come up around the holidays when others might mak...

Hey Pioneers, and thanks for checking in for another blog post! This November blog is all centered around the gift of presence for yourself, especially with the upcoming holiday season.  "During our average day, most of us speak around 16,000 words, but our thoughts - our internal, tireless chatterbox minds - produce tens of thousands more, 95% of which are reruns. No wonder it's so hard to get to our basic stillness; it's buried under tens of thousands of thoughts." - Caroline Welch In our every day, there are seemingly a million different things happening at once that can be overwhelming, distracting, upsetting, etc. In these moments, it can be easy to not even notice the lack of presence you are experiencing.  But what does presence actually mean for ourselves? Well, by dictionary definition, it means "being with another or in the immediate vicinity or proximity" which implies that the opposite of presence is in fact absence. According to Caroline Welch, ...

  Hello fellow Pioneers and thank you for checking out the third blog post of  When Life Feels Messy... (WLFM) I think we can all agree that a part of being human is the inherent desire to build relationships with others and have closeness.  Sometimes we have a natural ability to create healthy relationships but other times, due to multiple factors, such as role models, environmental factors, etc., we find ourselves in unhealthy and toxic relationships. Sometimes a relationship starts to turn sour and both partner's catch it in time to make amends. Sometimes, it is caught too late and the best thing to do is walk away. But sometimes, we might realize the relationship is toxic and not know how to get out of it.  As October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, we wanted to devote this blog to discussing the differences between a healthy relationship and one that is toxic. Our monthly podcast episode also features a special guest who has a lot of therapeutic e...

  Hello fellow Pioneers and thank you for checking out our second blog post of When Life Feels Messy... (WLFM) As you have noticed from our title, we will be diving into the relationship between traumatic events and mass media. We are highlighting this topic as the month of September brings forth the memories and feelings of life-changing traumatic events like 9/11, and the conversation of suicide as it will also be National Suicide Prevention month. The purpose of this month's WLFM blog is to engage this conversation by learning how traumatic events affect our body, what are some ways to help prepare ourselves for when it feels like mass media is throwing traumatic events in our face, and how to help and care for yourself after consuming so much intense dialogue. In today's culture and society, our personal and vulnerable experiences can feel enflamed by mass media. Mass media encompasses social outlets like blogs (like this one), magazines, social media (Youtube, Instagram, T...

AUGUST 2022:  HELLO! HOLA! BONJOUR! NIN HAO! ASALAAM ALAIKUM! KONNICHIWA! GUTEN TAG! Thank you for checking out the first official blog of TWU Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS)! We are SO happy to have you here, as this blog will be one of the new platforms CAPS' launches! In addition to the blog, we are also starting a podcast and these two projects will be connected and together named: "When Life Feels Messy..." These two resources are aimed for students, faculty, staff, and the larger TWU community to enrich awareness and exploration of mental health wellbeing. The goal for the blog and podcast is to provide digestible and relatable conversations about the many areas that impact mental health wellbeing while in college and life in general. Some of the topics we will be covering are: identity development cultural-based barriers self-compassion & loving yourself stress & test anxiety suicide prevention awareness healthy and unhealthy signs while dating...