Agency Over Control: Choosing Your Response When Life Chooses the Circumstances
“You can’t control what anyone else does. What you can do is decide how to use your own agency to move forward.” What’s the difference between agency and control? Making this distinction now might be more important than it's ever been for preserving our mental health when so much feels out of our control. Read to learn more about how when recognize agency when our choices are limited.
Anxiety? Powerlessness? Ethical Distress? Use It.
It’s understandable that we could look at the world around us and feel anxiety, grief, and moral distress. We can recognize these emotions and give ourselves the space to acknowledge and process them. Moreover, we can recognize the need to combat our sense of powerlessness before it generates despair and paralyzes us into inaction. We can use our ethical compass and the physiological responses generated by anxiety and use these responses to our advantage. We can leverage these responses into action.
On Collective Grief: Caring for Our Emotions in Times of Political Unrest
Collective grief is a term used to describe the reaction of a group of people who undergo a significant loss or extreme change together. This can include experiencing any tragedy that affects a community or nation. We can feel this type of grief following a natural disaster, an act of mass violence, a hate crime, a pandemic, an act of war, or any event that threatens the safety and stability of our community.
Grief is a natural response to all kinds of loss - changing relationships, losing a job, moving to a new city, experiencing decreased physical or mental functioning, confronting our own mortality, or becoming disillusioned about the state of the world. We can also grieve the loss of a vision or expectation for the future.
Holding Sacred Space: What to Do When Someone Comes Out to You
You might already be aware that LGBTQIA+ Pride is celebrated in June, with festivals, parades, memorials, and marches held all over the world throughout the month. You might be wondering how you can best support LGBTQIA+ people, not just in June but all the time? While there are many ways to be a supporter and an ally, one of the most important is to be prepared to respond compassionately to someone who comes out to you. Here are a few keys to remember when you enter this sacred conversation.
Advance Care Planning: Know Your Options
During a period of critical illness many patients are unable to speak for themselves, and their next-of-kin is often called upon to help make decisions about the best care for them. In such cases, patient’s families often find it helpful when a patient has made an advance directive detailing what kind of treatment they would want if they were unlikely to recover certain levels of mental or physical functioning. You can take steps today to start (or continue!) this important conversation.
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU! And other stuff sick people wish they could say.
When a person in your life is going through a hard time such as an illness, divorce, or bereavement and your question is “how can I not say the wrong thing to them?” Dr. Susan Silk’s Ring Theory provides a simple answer: comfort in, dump out.