Kate Motaung

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

As we seek to understand our own grief process, this article will draw from the resource, Understanding Your Grief, by Alan Wolfelt to outline ten essential touchstones. Touchstone One: Open to the Presence of Your Loss “You have probably been taught that pain is an indication that something is wrong and that you should find ways to alleviate the pain. In our culture, pain and feelings of loss are experiences most people try to avoid. Why? Because the role of

You may have heard that only a small percentage of what you communicate is actually in your words. The look in your eyes, the expression on your face, the shape of your mouth, the tone and timbre of your voice, your body language – all join together in a little symphony of communication when you try to speak to someone else. All this information is coming your direction when someone is trying to communicate with you. To make matters

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of the more well-known disorders, made popular, among many other portrayals, by Jack Nicholson in the movie “As Good as it Gets” as Melvin Udall, a misanthropic author with OCD. If you’ve seen the movie, you may recall Melvin turning the lock repeatedly after closing his front door. As with all mental disorders, it is important not to self-diagnose based on information we have gathered from pop culture or the internet. OCD can

In my experience, some of the most common things that bring people into my office are symptoms of depression. However, often people are not quite able to articulate them as such. Colloquially, we use “depressed” to mean sad. While sadness is a symptom of depression – often the biggest and most salient – it is not the only one. Further, there are many different types of depression that can manifest in different ways. My goal here is to walk

One of the great tragedies in any life is the dissolution of what was supposed to be a lifelong journey. Divorce usually marks the death of shared hopes and dreams and is deeply disruptive to everyone involved. There is a scale of life stressors by someone named Rahe; on this list, divorce is rated second, just after the death of a spouse or child. The pain and stress of the transition are significant, sometimes enormous, even if the people

If you’re reading this, you are likely wondering if either you or someone you know is struggling with sex addiction symptoms. In fact, you may still be a skeptic concerning the idea that sexual addiction is even a real thing; if so, I understand that. After all, God created us to be sexual beings with the purpose of us procreating – so how can we possibly do too much of that? I’m glad you (hypothetically) asked. Perhaps if I