Health

How do we escape the vicious cycle of the never-ending chase for perfection? How do we raise our children with the self-esteem that grows inside of them rather than from our expectations of them? What does a “good” family look like? What are they made up of? The answer is this: Accountability, integrity and, above all, honesty. This is the recipe for a Spiritually Healthy Family System; a good family.

We often want to attach religion to the foundation of what makes a good family. Religion and spirituality are two very different things. Religion can absolutely be one of the pillars of a heathy family. Heathy families operate from a...

Photo courtesy of Sean Do on Unsplash.

Navigating the balance between work and life in the digital world is proving to be more of a challenge every day. Maybe work requires you to dedicate your days to connecting and networking over a computer screen, or maybe you feel like your job is centered around conference calls and Skype sessions with international clients. But what happens when you come home? After a full day’s work, you’d think our natural instinct would be to want to unwind and disconnect from technology all together. But the reality is, we don’t. We scroll through our social media pages, plug into a video...

by Dr. Kristen Ray

While there’s growing acceptance of common mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, overall, the stigma of mental illness still permeates our society. Depictions of the mentally ill in media are particularly troubling, as they’re too often hyperbolized and grossly altered to fit long-standing stereotypes of people with mental illnesses as menaces to society. This dangerous trend helps perpetuate the viewpoint that people who have a mental illness or mental health issue are hazardous to others. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many mental...

Families are struggling more today than ever. Parents’ external need to fulfill their own self-esteem through the lives of their children has become a dangerous cycle to the physical and mental health of their children and destroys the stability in the family system. Working with families provides family clinicians like myself the opportunity to see behind the curtain of the perfect photograph that is often an illusion of what is actually an extremely abusive, dysfunctional family system.

Families that are hiding patterns of addiction and abuse often use the smoke and mirrors of visual perfectionism in many everyday things that...