Relationships & Communication, Sophia's Posts
Becky White George
Validation in Romantic Relationships

The importance of validation is something I emphasize with couples as it creates a dynamic based on understanding rather than score-keeping or proving right and wrong. In an emotionally charged conversation, it's common for individuals to focus primarily on their own emotional experience instead of their partner’s. Rather than listening to what the other person is saying, we may be thinking about our own response.

Validation in Romantic Relationships
Atalie's Posts, Relationships & Communication
Becky White George
Flexibility In Friendships

A common struggle for many of my clients in their 20s is navigating friendships. This includes friendship conflicts, growing apart, reassessing the closeness of the friendship, and defining what types of friendships feel fulfilling in which ones feel draining. In these conversations, we explore the importance of flexibility in friendships and why it becomes so much more pertinent during this life stage.

Flexibility In Friendships
Jessica's Posts, Trauma and Mental Health
Becky White George
Intellectualizing Feelings

I have thought through every situation from every possible angle my brain can come up with and analyzed so much of my life and experience that it often feels exhausting. This “self-awareness” can start to feel incredibly frustrating when I have some understanding, yet I still find myself in familiar patterns or generally not feeling better. If this description sounds familiar to you, you might be intellectualizing your feelings vs. actually feeling them.

Intellectualizing Feelings
Kalie's posts, Self Care & Mindfulness
Becky White George
The Animal Within

I recently stumbled upon the concept of animal chronotypes, which can be used to describe our personality traits based on our natural tendencies in social interactions and behavior. While these archetypes are often linked to sleep habits, they’re also super helpful for understanding how we connect with others. Each chronotype has its own unique traits and ways of navigating relationships.

The Animal Within
Jessica's Posts, Therapy: Getting Started
Becky White George
What I Wish Clients Knew

We were discussing a painful experience, and I was once again struck and inspired by their resilience. In this situation, I found a way to express this sentiment in the moment. However, there are many instances where sharing in the moment might not be the most therapeutic response. Even when I don’t vocalize it, I want my clients to know I carry these feelings and this care with me. Reflecting on this, I began to consider all the things I wish my clients knew about me, about the therapeutic relationship, and the process.

What I Wish Clients Knew

Becky's Posts

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Successful Co-Traveling

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Successful Co-Traveling

Traveling with a friend, a group of friends, or your partner can be incredible, but it can also be stressful in unforeseen and unplanned-for ways. I’ve had many clients talk with great excitement for weeks and even months about their upcoming trip with their partner, or their long-awaited trip with their mom to Europe, or their reunion trip with their sister to Australia. Usually, clients return from trips with amazing insights, new experiences, and great photos, but also some stories about the more difficult moments with their travel buddies. They tell me of moments of tension, annoyance, disagreement, difficulty negotiating needs/wants, and trouble with boundary-setting. 

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I'm FINE

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I'm FINE

It’s 7 PM on a Tuesday and your partner asks, “How are you? How was your day?” You stop to consider how to answer the question. You do a quick scan of your body and try to remember the day. Your neck is hurting from sitting at the computer, thoughts swirling in your head about that salty interaction you and your partner had that morning that went unaddressed, you just got a panicked text from your mother who needs you to call her immediately, you are annoyed with yourself for eating the peanut m & m’s when you said you wouldn’t, and to boot, you were up half the night stressing about a work project, so you were completely exhausted the entire day.

So, when your partner asks “How are you?” all you are able to muster up is the answer “I’m fine. It was fine.”

I’ve heard a few acronyms to describe the word FINE. F=Fucked Up, I= Insecure, N=Neurotic, and E=Emotional.

I also heard that FINE stands for Feelings Inside Not Expressed- a slightly more compassionate description. In my example above, from the neck pain to the disappointment in myself for eating the M & Ms, to the salty interaction from the morning, there were many feelings happening that were not being said.

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Self Compassion

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Self Compassion

I went on my first silent meditation retreat about 10 years ago. Fairly new to meditating, I was nervous for many reasons, but my friend encouraged me to come along with her and I nervously accepted her challenge. I’m glad I did, because at this retreat I learned my first pivotal lesson on the importance of self-compassion.

When you get to the retreat center, the first thing you do is hand over your electronics like your phone, tablet, laptop, etc. This was *incredibly scary* for me. At the time, my dad was ill, and I made arrangements with my mom that she could call the retreat center if anything came up that I needed to know about. But the idea of disconnecting in this way made me feel like the ground was about to fall out from under me.

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5 Stages of Grief

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5 Stages of Grief

I suffered my first heartbreak during my senior year of high school. I was 17 years old and had just broken up with my first boyfriend. I never knew it was possible to feel so much pain. For weeks I called my friend Julia multiple times a day, crying, I sat in my car in the school parking lot, crying, and went to bed and woke up, crying. I had never really lost anything before, and grief wasn’t yet something I had encountered much in my life.

My mom, also a therapist, noticing me in my pain, told me about the Stages of Grief as described by Swiss-American Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. For the first time in weeks, I was able to name the different waves of grief I was going through, and through this was able to experience some relief and stop crying every. damn. day.

Little did I know that I would return to the Stages Of Grief over and over again throughout my life as I moved through teenage heartbreak into adult heartbreak, and deaths of pets, friends, and family. The awareness of the stages of grieving helped soothe my aching heart throughout these different losses, and also helped me provide support to clients and friends alike to cope with grief at any stage.

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Couple's Conflict

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Couple's Conflict

It’s Never about the Tacos

We’ve all been there: those tiny trivial triggers that lead to big blow-up fights. Sitting across the table from each other with scattered taco fixings between you, wrist deep in guacamole, fighting about who left the spoon in the sour cream. Luckily, my husband and I were able to break down and process the The Great Taco Fight of 2022, and get to the core of what was going on. And you would never have guessed (or maybe you would): all the different ways we were triggered that had nothing to do with tacos (ex: I was hangry, he felt unappreciated, etc, etc.) The good news for all of us (myself included) is that couples therapy is a wonderful opportunity to explore these faster-than-the-speed-of-light escalations.

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Your Worst Enemy

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Your Worst Enemy

The “double-edged sword” is the concept that the same qualities and characteristics about your personality that make you kickass at work, can also hurt you in your personal life. The very thing that makes you so successful at work can also get the way in your intimate relationships.

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Gratitude vs. Guilt

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Gratitude vs. Guilt

I often assign a gratitude practice to clients that are experiencing depression, but I have noticed that sometimes it backfires. When we are depressed, we notice negative things even more than the average person. This means that a depressed person would have to work even harder than a non-depressed person to absorb positive stimuli in their environment!

We know that people experiencing depression are often more tired, have less ability to focus and concentrate, lack motivation, and also spend a lot of their time feeling like a failure. So asking a depressed person to work so much harder to identify positive things, is sort of like asking a person who has never gone on a jog in their life to go run a marathon tomorrow.

This is all to say that sometimes, gratitude doesn’t work.

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Starting a Business

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Starting a Business

“While there can be no question that the last two years have harmed us, it’s also encouraged us to rethink how, where, and why we work.” - Rha Goddess

As Rha Goddess so aptly points out, the last two years have led many of us to question the hows, wheres, and whys of our work. I have seen clients leave their jobs to start new jobs, leave their jobs even when they don’t have new jobs, and leave their jobs because they have a bigger “why” that’s calling to them. A lot of times this bigger “why” is connected to a deep sense of purpose and calling, a desire to remove themselves from the traditional 9-5, and create a relationship with work that honors their values and energy cycles.

As a business owner I find it so exciting to work with clients who are exploring the idea of starting their own business. I have learned a lot over the years from my own experience as a business owner. I have put in time, energy, and resources towards learning how to run a business (and still have so much to learn). I have educated myself with books, professional coaches, masterminds, and courses to learn about business, money psychology, and leadership. Through my own experiences and a good lot of trial and error, I’m sharing with you my 10 fundamental tips for starting your own business, whether it’s a side hustle or your true calling.

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Get Organized!

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Get Organized!

With some simple systems, tracking, and practices, you can free yourself up from the 80% of work that takes up most of your time and creates the least results, so that you can focus on the 20% of your work that creates the greatest impact! Freeing up your mind to do what it does best-- like being creative & dreaming big-- creates a profound impact on your well-being and the well-being of those around you.

Over the years I have developed some simple organization and tracking systems that keep me grounded and help me focus on the 20% that gets me 80% of my results. Creating organization systems to keep track of appointments, tasks, to-dos, ideas, and thoughts throughout the day, in addition to visions and dreams for my life, has helped me get grounded, and create more space for the things that really matter while spending less time on things that aren’t a priority.

Read on to learn more about how to get organized, track your moods and cycles, and free up your time and energy to focus on what really matters.

 

Start With You. Today.