Kate Motaung

Many of us go through life more or less on automatic, making the best choices we can based on the available information. It is only natural for us to want things to run as smoothly as possible. If we aren’t naturally prone to worry, it is easy to brush away concerns about physical symptoms as long as they aren’t too disruptive. We may put off a physical examination, or ignore something that “isn’t that big a deal.” I have

How do you know you are experiencing depression? What are the common symptoms of depression? As a professional counselor, when listening to clients describe their symptoms, I am looking for patterns and changes in patterns, as well as a few key words or phrases. What is normal for one person may not be normal for another, but here are few of the most common signs and symptoms of depression. Most Common Signs and Symptoms of Depression Change in Mood

As a counselor, the vast majority of clients I see have either endured or perpetrated some type of emotional abuse throughout their lifetime. Emotional abuse is quite pervasive, and it is a fairly new topic to be discussed as generations prior would not have even considered the effects of their words or actions qualifying as abusive. I do want to differentiate right away between someone being an emotional abuser, and someone saying or doing emotionally abusive things. An abuser

When I was in my late teens, my mom told me a story once about one of my ancestors. I told her I was feeling “blue” and she proceeded to tell me of my great-great-great-great-grandfather Charles, who reportedly once described how he would get “in his moods” and not be able to shake it. For these occasions, he kept a pile of dirt in his basement. http://goo.gl/t5wvmX "Handsome Guy," courtesy of andy, CC0 Public Domain, ABSFreePic.com When

I remember my father describing being at the grocery store once. There was a woman with a child who was being unruly. She tried to get the boy to settle down and grabbed his arm, but he screamed and raged all the more. I remember the menacing look on my father's face as he commented a kid who did that in HIS care would only do it once. Few things can impact us as quickly and as deeply as

Being in my line of work, I often get friends and family approaching me about mental health questions. Sometimes specific, but sometimes very general as well and I notice some commonalities between them. Almost everyone wants to know about anxiety, and further, why it seems to be so prevalent in society today. Are people getting "softer"? Is the world turning towards more and more depravity? Or are we just talking about something that’s always been there? It used to

People often ask, “How can I know whether I have depression or not?” This is a valid question, especially considering that the Anxiety and Depression Association of America says that Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) affects more than 16.1 million American adults, or about 6.7% of the U.S. population When you have been depressed, people may have told you, “Just get over it” or that you must be having a “blue day.” Some well meaning friends may have said, “Just

In my work, I see a mix of couples, families, and individuals. It’s rare that a problem exists solely with an individual without any repercussions for the surrounding family. Problems that affect you will affect your family and problems that affect your family will affect you. A bedrock of your family, your marriage serves as a motor for the family as a whole. If the marriage is healthy, your family usually shows signs of health but when marriage problems

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), approximately 18.1% of adults in the United States are affected by an anxiety disorder of some kind – that’s about 40 million people. However, when allowing for errors in misdiagnosis or those who do not seek treatment for anxiety, this estimate rises quite a bit, to approximately 30% of Americans in the United States being affected by an anxiety disorder. These numbers are already quite astounding, but when we look

Grief is never something you get over. You don't wake up one morning and say, “I've conquered that; now I'm moving on.” It's something that walks beside you every day. And if you can learn how to manage it and honour the person that you miss, you can take something that is incredibly sad and have some form of positivity. – Terri Irwin, widowed wife of Steve Irwin Grief comes at us hard. Whether we had time to prepare

“You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly – that still hurts when the weather gets cold. But you learn to dance with

Emotional abuse is one of those categories that has an incredibly broad spectrum of narrative variety. Therapeutically, you will find as many kinds of emotional abuse as there are patients. They often follow similar themes of parental neglect or denigration, but because we are all wired differently, the impact on us is quite varied. One person may suffer cutting judgments from a parent and somehow understand they are wrong, and retain a good emotional structure, while another with similar