wellness Tag

Counseling Monroeville, PA

Counseling in Monroeville at Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh our therapists are trained in a variety of specialties including Marriage and Family Therapists, Child Therapy, and Certified Nutritionist, Kinesiologist, Clinical Herbalist, and Meditation Instructor are proud to be Monroeville’s only Integrative Counseling Center. Our Counseling team include top-rated therapists with decades of experience in Mental Health and Marriage or Couples Counseling in Monroeville.

Our therapists serve Western Pennsylvania and our Counseling Center East is near you in Monroeville, Murrysville, Penn Hills, Plum, New Kensington, and Westmoreland County. We provide compassionate and scientifically validated therapy solutions specifically available for your emotional health and wellness. Our counselors treat individuals who are suffering from a broad range of mental health concerns such as anxiety, anger management, depression, chronic mental health diagnoses, trauma, bipolar disorder, late stage alcohol and substance abuse recovery, intimacy, life transitions, managing the emotional effects of a medical diagnosis, grief counseling, stress disorders, stress management, obsessive compulsive disorder, mood disorders, personality disorders, compassion fatigue, parenting, life balancing, postpartum depression and many more. Our child therapists help children who are dealing with bullying, trauma, grief, behavioral, and attentional disorders. The Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh has therapists with specialties in all ages and stages of development.

Some of the commonly treated disorders which can be helped by our Couples Therapy specialists are intimacy, communication, conflict, infidelity, parenting and co-parenting, as well as premarital counseling. Family counseling is also an option and our therapists have worked with families of all types and sizes including parent child, adult children and parents, step families, siblings, and grandparents.

As an integrative counseling center we utilize many approaches and offer solutions for emotional, relational, and physical health in our centers. Our counselors use cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness, humanistic, psycho-dynamic, and emotionally focused techniques as well art therapy for kids. We also have a wellness team to provide natural solutions to enhance well-being including herbalism, meditation, and nutrition counseling. In other instances we are glad to collaborate with psychiatrists and psychologists to provide continuity of care for those clients who hold psychiatric diagnoses. Please refer to our providers individual bio’s for a more comprehensive explanation of their professional styles, training, and educational backgrounds.

We accept many insurance companies including UPMC, Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield, United, Aetna, and Cigna. Additionally and for your convenience we also accept HSA, credit and debit card for self paying clients. We staff therapists who care and who do offer the sliding scale so that all clients can access the mental health coverage that they need.

We do offer distance solutions at all of our centers and can provide counseling using Skype.

If you have a question about whether we have a counselor to treat your specific concerns and emotional needs, please send an email and we will be glad to let you know or answer any other specific questions or inquiries.

Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh is conveniently located at 2539 Monroeville Blvd, Monroeville, PA, 15146. We are in a freestanding building with a large parking lot attached to our center.

Call us at 412-856-WELL or 412-856-9355

HOURS:

Monday 7am-9pm

Tuesday 7am-9pm

Wednesday 7am-9pm

Thursday 7am-9pm

Friday 7-am-9pm

Saturday 7am-9pm

Sunday 7am-9pm

Mindfulness in Motion, Moving Beyond Anxiety

Mindfulness in Motion, Moving Beyond Anxiety

“Now days everyone replaces their emotions with Fear” Paulo Coelho

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

How much of our joy, our comfort, our desire do we replace with the sensation of fear and anxiety? We gain the promotion but then immediately start to wonder how will we maintain it; will we have the time required to devote to our new station? We buy the house but before we even close on it we start to panic about lawn care, taxes, the neighbors seemed a bit odd. After 3 years of the single life we meet the perfect partner but obsess nervously about whether they have called or texted back, do they like us, are we saying the right things? If any of this sounds familiar then please read on.

 Often our tendency toward fearful or anxious thinking is so ingrained that we often don’t even realize that what we are experiencing is anxiety in action, perhaps we notice only that we feel bad, sad, hopeless, always keyed up and hyper aware. or maybe riddled with physical sickness. Often when we are adrift in the gravity of this emotional process we may simply think that we are mulling about the possibilities or that we are preventing these bad things from happening by considering them beforehand. The concern is that when we think so deeply about all of the possible negative crisis’s and downfalls that could happen in the future we are zapping ourselves of the opportunity to enjoy the peace and pleasantness of our joys now. We become so fixated on how we will acclimate to the managerial position that the joy and triumph of our promotions victory loses the wind from its sails before the ship leaves the port. This is one of the reasons that anxiety and depression are often co-mingled, anxiety is a feeling state which effects our perception, when we ruminate over the unrealized possibilities around each and every corner depression is often a natural out cursor.

If this is a somewhat familiar song and dance to you, then you may want to try some of these mindful tips to help reduce stress or anxiety.

• Become reflective of your mind’s process, that means mindfully noticing that you’re in an anxious thought cycle as it is happening. Mindfulness is a fantastic tactic in forming awareness of your psychological and emotional process which is the best first step toward change.
• When in an anxious state practice self-soothing, Imagine for a minute all of the situations that you have worried about that have never in fact happened, this is the equivalent of the self-soothing mantra, “everything will be ok.”
• Be patient with yourself. We sometimes get so crafty with our worrying that we then beginning worrying about the fact that we are worrying. No need to add an extra layer of anger, guilt or shame because you are noticing that you are worrying or fearful, remember that these thoughts shall pass as all thoughts and feeling states do. In fact, in a recent study published in psych central, the most helpful statement that one can make to a person experiencing anxiety or panic is that “this will pass, just as all feelings pass.”
• Psychotherapy, there are many forms of therapy which can help, commonly popular Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an excellent intervention to make progress in changing maladaptive thought patterns.

May the best of luck and preparation guide you on your journey!

Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh and Monroeville

Contributed by Stephanie Wijkstrom, MS, LPC, NCC

830 Western Avenue

Pittsburgh Pa 15233

412-322-2129

The Psychology of a Win!

The Psychology of a Win!

Pittsburgh Penguins Stanley Cup 2016

There are many reasons that the city of Pittsburgh and Penguins fans afar are basking in the glory of last night’s Stanley Cup win! If you are like many of the fans, last night’s win may have left you reeling in the energy, perhaps noticing a burst of confidence, optimism, and even sexual energy. Of course psychology has a way of understanding just what happens for us as fans, when our victorious team landed the winning goal into the net, bringing home yet another Stanley cup victory for our city.

According to a research study conducted by the National Institute of Health (NIH), the main reason that fans enjoy that rush of endorphins comes down to heightened testosterone levels when their favorite sports team wins. The study was able to measure testosterone levels in self-identified sports fans as they watched their teams win and at others times watching them lose. The study concluded that those watching their favorite team win had a surge in testosterone and those watching their team lose had a significant dip in testosterone.

Testosterone is more than a “male” hormone. It is a key player in the health and mood of both men and women, and according to the National Institute of Health, Testosterone plays a role in:

• Mood and wellbeing
• Energy
• Confidence
• Sex drive/libido

So Pittsburgh, enjoy the win and all of the feel good energy that goes along with it! While we revel in The Stanley Cup today, there may be an opportunity for mindfulness, when we think about those San Jose Sharks fans. The laws of balance that govern all things dictate that what goes up shall to come down, and all of the positive mood, confidence, and energy of the win becomes just the opposite when we feel the effects of a loss, resulting in lower mood, lower energy, pessimism, and even at times aggressiveness. That however, is  certainly not where our great city is today, and on that note, let us enjoy the sweet rush of victory!

Go Pens!

In celebration and optimism,

The Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh

830 Western Avenue

Pittsburgh Pa 15233

412-322-2129

For more reading on testosterone and the mentioned study, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9811365

“Peace Out Happiness; Why letting go of Happy may make us more Healthy!”

                                                                     “Peace Out Happiness; Why letting go of Happy may make us more Healthy ”

             Letting go of Happy! CIAO!

In psychology, in pop culture, in our songs and movies, our social media, we hear words and anthems which suggest that all the world is happy or in search of happy. “Happy” is the new salvation, happiness is quantified, we travel the globe, move our homes and families, friends coach each other through break ups by saying things like “it’s for the best, you weren’t happy.” We take pills, we change directions, we do it all on the quest for the place where we can experience this Holy Grail. Happy is one of those feeling states kind of like love, it means something a slightly different to everyone. What most people mean when they say that they are feeling happy is really more of an ecstatic sensation brought on from external stimulation. We eat, we shop, we serial date, and we orgasm our way into euphoric happy but it’s likely that it’s never enough because this happy is always fleeting leaving us with the notion that something is missing, so begin cycle again, more eating, more shopping, more dating and on and on. Perhaps even most of all, notice the way we judge ourselves or lapse into despair when we inevitably come crashing into the notion that perhaps we are not “happy,” we feel like a failure at life, imagining that everyone else has some secret to being that we have not. Yet maybe, just maybe we are ok just as we are without all of the trappings of that five letter word. 

                  All we need is peace…

Our proverbial quest changes the moment that we notice that these fleeting sensations are the cheap imitation version of long standing peace. We have been tricked, happiness is a fallacy, balloons bursting, drum roll stopping, external states of joy or daft manic amusements are no place by which to chart the life map. In the misguided journey, happiness will always be a place ahead, sometime in the future looming on a distant horizon. “After the promotion, after the next high dollar sports car, when I graduate school, after we are married, when our first child is born.” Happiness, peace, a space where we can stop and take a breath, the life marker where the “aha’ moment presents itself and the final sense of accomplishment graces our countenance. Be cautious traveler, searching for the treasure trove called happiness will throw off the compass, encouraging the bypassing of eternal states such as peace and serenity which are by far more sustainable emotional destinations.

Sit down and think on Peace and Love

We can nurture peace when we are living our life in balance, hard things will present themselves but we will assimilate and understands those things and we will allow them to pass by in their right time. Happiness can’t be sustained through the weathers of lost jobs, parking tickets, gossip mongers, accidents and hurtles but serenity, the far more virtuoso milestone can. Yet we know there will be days when happiness will stop by, she will sit down for an afternoon visit, we will always enjoy entertaining her but we know that she must ever move along on her Sunday drive, and we respect this, never demanding that she remain seated for yet another serving of our crumpets, frantic in our fears that the lovely face of happiness may never come again. That which we allow to come and go freely shall remain yet that to which we cling will forever suffocate and seek to escape us.

Our sense of serenity, the little kernel of you which is based upon confidence in personal integrity, the security which knows that whatever may come will be handled with wisdom, we are seasoned captains of our own vessel, when we notice that we have veered into some familiar or odd storm ridden sea which challenges our equilibrium and decimates our sense of peace, fear seizes the cloaked night as we are cradled in the turbulent arms of high winds and sea sprays, white knuckled grasping the helm. The captain allows the winds to die down and high seas ebb away without disturbing his peace.

Storms happen, life happens but peace can remain even in the midst of change, chaos, destruction.  Peace is more profound than euphoria, more enduring than pleasure and more tangible than happy. Perhaps the flower children of the 60’s had something right with their peace mantra, maybe we can find a way to come back to that, when we make our life goals, our relationship goals, when we weigh and assess how we are living our life, maybe rather than ask, “am I happy?” or “were we happy together?” “will this new job make me happy?” maybe a better question to ask, “is this allowing me to hold on to my sense of peace?”

Peace and Love…

The Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh

Contributed by Stephanie McCracken MSPC

830 Western Avenue Pittsburgh Pa 15233

412-322-2129

50 Wellness Keys To Happiness

Meditation for Peace and Connection.

50 Wellness Keys to Living a Happy Healthy Life

Our therapists and wellness gurus have compiled a list of 50 happiness keys- Be Well PGH!

• Make peace with your past.
• Have faith in the future.
• Find love for everyone but love some very deeply, this may require learning how to love and feel.
• Forgive yourself, forgive others, especially those who have not asked for it.
• Trust yourself and honor your feelings, feelings will guide you if you let them.
• Find a passion, something that makes you feel alive, practice it regularly.
• Learn the difference between being emotionally reactive and emotionally reflective.
• Prioritize a deep sense of safety and never entertain people or places which stir in you feelings of fear.
• Keep dreaming, nurturing the flame in others and yourself.
  

  Woman of The Earth

• Mindfully indulge your bodies appetites for food, play, connection.
• Learn to find and enjoy the comfort in silence.
• Make time for solitude, it is here that our creativity and vitality is rejuvenated.
• Pay attention to the words that you speak to yourself and to others.
• Wish success, beautiful love, and peace for your partners of the past.
• Try your best, push past the limits, that is where the magic happens.
• Know when to quit, some ideas and people are best left behind.
• Be cautious of too much routine.
• Regularly break into song and dance.
• Connect with The Earth and learn to hear The Words in the Wind.
• Learn to breathe with intention and harness the power of your lungs.
• Stare up at The Stars on long clear nights and think of the infinite.
• Don’t let other’s perception of you define your self-esteem.
• If you want to know someone, watch the way that they treat others in their life.
• Cling fervently to your intuition.
• Spend time closely with the elderly, they hold the wisdom.
• Recognize how short and special each moment of life.
• Hold hands while crossing the street.
• If you experience anxiety or depression start to manage it.
• Encourage yourself as you would others.
• Travel somewhere far away where you know nobody.
• Become enchanted with a strange place, person, or idea.
• Scoop a hand full of soil into your hands and smell it.
• Take off your shoes and walk in the grass.
• Stand the wrong way in an elevator.
• Stop and smell the spring flower blossoms no matter how hurried you are.
• Meditate upon love and light, glow with the thrumming of universal consciousness.
• Stretch often, get to know the little intricacies of your body, your sacred space.
• Savor the feeling of your heart beating fast from exercise, kissing, or the unknown.
• Do something for someone who can not or will not return the favor.
• Talk to a homeless person, hear their story.
  

  Nature grows, earthing the street

• Organize your home and office, a organized mind creates and organized space and life.
• Be cautious of being overly organized 🙂
• Strive for balance in all things!!! ^^^^
• Take Vitamins and eat meals made from delicious food instead of powders or meal replacements.
• Eat glorious multicolored fruits and vegetables.
• Indulge in the second piece of CAKE!
• Chew slowly and savor for a long time.
• Create a meal without using a recipe.
• Paint something abstract without caring how it turns out.
• Tell your parents you love them and make sure they know you mean it.
• Don’t speak in the heat of anger, the words can never be taken back.
• Love an Animal as you would a friend.
• Don’t pay attention to numbers on the scale, bank account, or the years of life.
• Know that there is a deep, profound Sacredness illuminating all things.

These are our wellness keys for health and happiness!

Be Well Pittsburgh,

The Counseling and Wellness Center of Pittsburgh

830 Western Avenue Pittsburgh Pa 15233

412-322-2129

On the Border and Crossing The Line, Recovering from a Close Encounter of Another Kind

For any of you who have felt yourself a part of a relationship which was dizzying in its highs and staggering in its lows, no matter how brief or long, your head very well may be feeling woozy in recalling the rapidity of its pace. While there are indeed many personality types and pathologies which can lead themselves to destructive cycles in the interpersonal domain, we will today briefly explore Borderline Personality Disorder and what this kind of encounter may mean for someone who is attempting to heal and recover in its wake. Much literature has focused on the trait of borderline personality disorder as it relates to women yet in recent years clinicians have noted that there may be a growing number of males who meet the diagnostic criteria for the disorder.

While there are many typologies of the borderline character structure there will undoubtedly be an intensity to the initial meeting phase. For a woman meeting a borderline male it’s likely that she will be dazzled and showered with heaps of attention and affection, “at last a male who seems to thrive upon open emotional discourse”. Despite all of those enchanting words and the promise of the sort of intimate encounter that one has been eagerly waiting for, the Borderline male or female will inevitably change as soon as he or she detects that you have been won over. What was once Casanova like attention and praise will become brooding and coldness, likely even implacable possessiveness. The conundrums lies within the fact that the more closely one moves to the center of a borderline person’s inner constitution the more resistance that one will note. The borderline has a hallmark knack for stirring up fights and dramatic interplays which make them feel more alive, the function of the heated angst is to shield against the emptiness of their true center. A borderline likely has suffered some trauma or abuse in early childhood and the sustainment of true emotional intimacy is a most insurmountable task for this person. If this cursory note sounds like someone you or a loved one now or eventually it will be important to seek professional help and be careful. If you are in the process of leaving someone with Borderline Personality Disorder (or any other domestic abuser) this is the most dangerous time. The Borderline Personality will not respect or note boundaries or have any qualms about stalking or seeking to ruin a victim’s life. Their key note is abandonment and the game stakes have just begun increased for the borderline when a friend, lover, or casual acquaintance is attempting to diverge on life’s path. This often recreates a point of abandonment, abuse or neglect that the borderline had experienced in early childhood. The borderlines inability to come to terms with healthy boundaries and no means no mentality makes them a typical recipient of restraining orders and PFA’s.

Yet many people who are in a relationship with a person suffering from Borderline Personality disorder may not recognize the issue until months or even years into it, this is true even for intelligent and successful people who maintain such vivid memory of the courtship or fall victim to the Borderlines intense need to recouple after falling apart. If you were or are in relationship with a person who exhibits Borderline personality traits or a full blown disorder there is a chance that you too have had some trauma in your childhood or adulthood which puts you at risk to accept this kind of attachment. It can be significantly challenging to see the signs of the disorder as the Borderline is very skilled at using something clinicians call “Gaslighting,” for instance when this person goes into one of their episodic fight picking modes they will literally leave their victim with the feeling that it was their fault, they may cause a friend or partner physical, emotional, spiritual harm yet they will always leave their victim believing that they are to blame or even deny that anything even happened. The Borderline also may exhibit martyr like tendencies, spewing to all who will listen of how much they love their victim and how much they have suffered for their love, they can even make bystanders believe that the victim is the crazy one during their epic and frequent altercations. If you recognize yourself in either part of this description you may want to seek the help and advice of a psychotherapist or other mental health professional.

While diagnosing Borderline Personality Disorder is the domain of a psychological professional who has been trained to administer measures and tests, here is the DSM IV-TR criteria for achieving the diagnosis.

A pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts as indicated by 5 or more of the following.

1) Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

2) A pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation.

3) Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self.

4) Impulsivity in at least two areas that could potentially be self-damaging. (Spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating.)

5) Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior.

6) Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g. intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually only lasting a few hours and rarely more than a few days.)

7) Chronic feelings of emptiness.

8) Inappropriate and intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)

9) Transient stress related paranoid ideation or sever disassociate symptoms.

Keep in mind all of you singletons or those recovering from a whopping dating fiasco, that if something doesn’t feel right then it probably isn’t, if someone is moving too fast for your comfort then there may be something underlying all of that intensity and there is never any case in life which should permit a healthy person from recognizing that within life, love, and conversation, no means no just as well as yes means yes. J

In good health and love,

Stephanie McCracken MSPC

Offering Psychotherapy and Marriage Counseling

412-215-1986

Reviving Minds Therapy

1010 Western Avenue Pittsburgh Pa 15233

Anxiety; Pills and Possibilities, A Psychotherapists Musings

Who among us has not suffered from feelings of anxiety at some point in his or her life, it is common enough to be among the more often seen symptoms which bring an individual into a therapist’s office. Even for the most staunchly healthy psyches anxiety is a typical benchmark which exists in a range of degrees within the human emotive process. Depending upon you as the individual and the technical approach of your clinician you may be offered a multitude of conflicting remedies to intervene upon that which is ailing you.

There are the wildly popular pharmacological interventions such as Xanax or Valium, while widely popular these interventions do nothing to examine the “how’s” or “why’s” of an anxious feeling. These interventions assume that an increased cardiovascular response, heightened worry, tense muscles, sleepless nights, feelings of agitation are all in the physical realm yet quite mysterious. Indeed anxiety in its more insidious form is a grave health concern so it is with accolades that I note the vast number of humans seeking treatment to escape its grips. There is something inexplicably disconcerting about the hyper arousal of anxiety which compels one towards a greater risk for many other issues health issues such as addictions, depression, coronary heart disease, even eroding the erectile function of both the male and female, to name but a few.

 Most of us recognize that there are yet other forms of anxiety which are our “bon amie,” the kind which compels our actions for good causes such as self and social betterment. Without a touch of anxiety one may hit the snooze button each and every morning and drop out of society all together. Yet for our purposes we will consider the more sinister form with its wanton undesirability which causes many to seek its avoidance at all costs. There are vastly varied approaches within the medical community in terms of treatment of anxiety, there are folk remedies, homeopathic remedies, new age methods, each with their unique utility. Yet most all of these interventions lavish attention upon the amelioration of physical symptoms but may from sheer neglect, fail to examine the psychological underpinnings of anxiety itself. For those who do experience the necessity of utilizing anti-anxiety medication it is an empirically validated fact that the best therapeutic outcomes exists for individuals who make use of psychotherapeutic settings simultaneously. It is within the psychotherapeutic setting that the focus is cast specifically upon the unique psychology which may be breeding and offering sustenance to an overabundance of anxiety.  Allow the remainder of this small essay to offer a rudimentary overview of some of the more typical sources of psychological anxiety.

Significant Life Changes

This form of anxiety is a reaction to some looming occurrence which has skated its way across your horizon, it may be adaptive and is completely natural. Many of us thrive upon constancy, as much as this tendency is at odds with the nature of the universe, inevitably we experience some anxiety while changing jobs, graduating, marrying, divorcing etc. While it is normal to exhibit some emotional reaction to such transitions be mindful to give extra care to yourself even during those joyous transitions. For any anxious feeling that continues to gnaw at your innards, give yourself some time to thoroughly examine  all of your thoughts surrounding the (fill in blank) transition. This reflection affords the opportunity to hone in on any ways your emotional self may be beckoning you towards a closer look at something that your conscious awareness is not seeing completely.  

Emotional Expression

 The more that we attempt to repress our emotional experience the more that they tend to rupture forth in greatly unmanageable ways. Perhaps you are a product of early learning which valued emotional repression and lack of expressiveness. In some way you may have learned early or later in life that it is dangerous or taboo to talk about feelings or even notice that they exist for you, yet the vast and unstoppable torrent of the feeling state will not be escaped. This form of anxiety or panic urges the person towards understanding and experiencing of inner awareness and emotional expression.

Time

The exactitude and finite nature of time is stated by some to be the source of all anxiety. What is it that you will you do with your precious earthly allowance? By becoming more aware of lapsing time, acknowledging that life proffers beauteous opportunity, love, and abundance still too, how will you cope with mounting defeats, losses, and unrealized potentials? Ones highest hope is to make father time ones friend, utilizing our human energies to compel feats which contribute to human progress. For you that may mean many things, to raise a family, build computer software, tend the forest, love deeply, the myriad meanings for the human riddle.

Control

For some of us it is alarming to consider doing something that risks ones perceived control over ones surroundings. That could mean riding in an airplane, making interpersonal changes like developing new relationships, people are the ultimate unknown variables full of competing needs and possibilities.  Will you be able to extend the risk of letting go of the known order to enjoy the potentials?

While this is in no way an exhaustive exploration of that powerful human indicator named anxiety it is something that may compel one to begin to relate to it in a slightly different manner. Perhaps it is time to consider its possibilities, its latent messages, it may one with greater respect for behoove one to not simply extinguish an anxious feeling with a pill or an exercise but to sit with it, even for just a moment, entering its heart palpating, dizzying sensation, in reverential respect for its utility and possibility as an psychic indicator. There is an understanding that in most cases, under the layers of any symptom are a fortunate beckoning towards the best version of yourself, the unrelinquishable layers of consciousness which insist that ideals will be felt and known.

In good health and energy,

Stephanie McCracken MSPC

412-215-1986

Reviving Minds Therapy

1010 Western Ave

Pittsburgh Pa 15233

*This article does not intend to diagnose, treat, or in any way address an anxiety disorder or supplant psychological or medical advice. This is intended for your consideration only.