I am so excited to welcome Ginger Healy to the BraveBrains blog to share some support for that ever-elusive skill: self-regulation. Ginger has been a friend and colleague for years. She is currently the program director for the Attachment and Trauma Network where she co-anchors the podcast “Regulated & Relational” and speaks across the nation on trauma-informed schools, therapeutic parenting, and community engagement. She also gives great hugs! Dysregulation Dysregulation. The reality is that no...
Finding Our Way Forward in the Aftermath of Violence
I was feeling grumpy about a minor inconvenience when I heard the tragic news out of Uvalde, Texas. And this on the heels of the horrific hate crime in Buffalo on Saturday... As a mom, I just wanted to pull my babies close and weep for the parents who were learning that they would never get to do that again. As a therapist, I want to have open office hours for all the grief and...
Name It to Tame It
I know we therapists talk about feelings a lot, but there's a reason! Did you know that just putting a name or label to what you are feeling reduces the activity in the emotion center of your brain? Sounds like magic! But it’s just user-friendly brain science. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase "What's mentionable is manageable." Drs. Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson boiled down this complicated neurobiological process to a strategy they called Name...
What to do when life is hard
As I have been connecting with people lately, one theme keeps coming up... Life is hard right now. There’s an exercise I have been doing in workshops lately that has been really meaningful - and it changes your brain chemistry! If at all possible, will you pause with me for 3 minutes? [smartslider3 slider="1"] If that’s all you have time for, keep going with your day knowing that you just activated the caregiving part of...