Untangled Counseling

Thought negotiation skills were only for business? Who knew? They can actually help improve your personal relationships as well!

Three components are needed to get started:

1. willingness to COMMUNICATE
2. mutual CONSIDERATION
3. the ability to COMPROMISE

If you have these 3 ingredients, you can begin the process of negotiating. I'll cover these in greater detail next time! If you don't have these though, you may want to find out WHY NOT first, in order to live your live untangled :-).

Happy New Year! While most of the world is focused on a different type of scale, let's consider the type of scale that can help us in all aspects of life...

Taking stock of the previous year and setting goals for the coming year is common this time of year. In most arenas of life, we can all benefit from ONE KEY thing - BALANCE.

As you consider potential goals for 2023, would you ponder what areas of your life can use some EQUILIBRIUM - and choose to live life untangled 😉

How can we get past the bargaining stage of grief?

By determining whether we are feeling sadness or depression. Sadness - appropriate emotional pain over the uncontrollable loss or disappointment experienced would be the next stage, one step closer to acceptance.

Depression however, causing lethargy, fatigue, inappropriate or excessive feelings of worthlessness or guilt, can mean that feelings are being repressed and turned inward. Taking OVER-responsibility for the loss is maladaptive and usually will keep you stuck in the grief process. It will usually take an outside perspective, a professional, to help realign how much control you really had in the situation.

Which way are you feeling about a loss, sad or depressed?

Have you ever been angry due to a loss?

Anger is listed as one of the stages of grief because typically we are angry at the situation. But we can also be angry at a person. This is often harder to admit or digest for several reasons.

1. We have been conditioned to believe anger is a "bad" emotion
2. We have been taught that if we feel angry, we are a "bad" person
3. We feel conflicted to be angry at a person we care/ cared about

No emotion is bad in and of itself, it's just a feeling. Our behaviors due to these emotions can be judged, but non-judgmental investigation of our feelings is the appropriate response. GREIVING in incomplete without FEELING... even angry.

Have you ever been in denial about something?

Denial is a self-protective measure the brain uses to help cope with difficulties... temporarily. Problems arise though when we never go back to process the situation and we keep it tucked away for months, years, even decades. This can cause mental health decline as our reality is skewed due to long term self-deception.

The solution is to periodically review the evidence associated with any given situation and compare it to how we are perceiving and managing it. Sometimes you need help with this process.

Is there something you've realized you've been in denial about?