Kate Motaung

The holidays are such a joyous occasion. For a day or two, you can feel the magic of Christmas as you honor Jesus’ birth with traditions. You spend time with your family, watch your favorite movies, and recreate family dinners. However, the holidays can feel like a trap for someone who struggles with stress eating. The weeks leading up to Christmas may have been spent with worry about making ends meet, gift-giving, menus, extracurricular events, working overtime, and keeping

Few things can damage a committed relationship more than infidelity. The closeness that a couple cultivates can be shattered through an affair, regardless of the length of that affair or whether it was an emotional or a physical one. One of the main areas that is affected in the relationship is the couple’s intimacy. Their emotional, spiritual, and physical intimacy can suffer damage, and it takes a lot of work to rebuild that broken trust. Why intimacy after infidelity is

The teenage years are a notoriously turbulent time, as young people seek independence and look to assert their unique identity, often without yet possessing the right emotional and life skills to effectively do this. One area parents can particularly struggle with is teen anger management, which can appear in many shapes and forms and usually hints at an underlying issue. While deep emotions are difficult enough to deal with, it sometimes seems impossible to break through the angry façade,

Grief is the emotional and psychological response people have after suffering significant loss. Different societies have norms, rituals, and attitudes toward grief that are considered normal. When grief does not align itself with these norms and attitudes it is termed disenfranchised grief. The term was coined by Dr. Kenneth Doka, a respected authority on understanding grief and bereavement. According to him, disenfranchised grief is grief that is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. Though a person’s grief

Most couples get married with the hope of a, “happily ever after” etched deeply in their hearts and minds. In the early days of marriage, husbands and wives proclaim undying love for each other, telling each other how they couldn’t imagine living a life without the other. Passion, romance, affection, and sharing of hopes and dreams are probably the most common and expected characteristics of the early stages of marriage. It is in these early stages that most people

New Year Resolutions are typically broken in the first few weeks of the new year. But what if you could change that? What if you could create habits, you will follow through on month after month? They say it takes twenty-one days to form a habit. When you accomplish a goal, your brain rewards you with a rush of chemicals that make you feel happy and confident. When you feel more in control, you improve your mental wellness. By

Have you ever set out to start healthy eating or exercise more only to give up a few days later? If you have, you are not alone. While people set out to make resolutions or goals for these important changes, it can be hard to accomplish these things on our own. Fortunately, as believers, we don’t need to do anything in our own strength. We have the help of God in everything we do. Let’s talk about goals. Goals

Belonging to a family, whether by birth, faith, or choice, develops connections. These can sometimes be marked with apparent contradictions. They can prove exhilarating, but also exhausting. We love each other, but don’t always align. We toggle between the tensions, finding ourselves at odds and offended by each other. Instead of covering faults with prayer and love, we expose one another and misuse our relationship as an opportunity to injure and retaliate. It can result in cutting each other

Depression is more than feeling unhappy or down in the dumps for a few days. It is a real mental health condition that affects mood and ability to function. It can vary in intensity from mild to severe, be brought about by numerous reasons, and impact you in unique ways. Although the exact cause of depression is not fully known, risk factors include a family history of depression, abnormal brain chemistry, significant losses, chronic stress, and life circumstances. Typically,

When life gets hectic, we take stress for granted. Who does not experience stress at some point in their lives? Yet, mental stress can create problems with well-being and lead to more severe disorders. The mental aspect does not exist in a vacuum, either. If your mental health is in jeopardy, your physical and emotional states may also be. Learn how to deal with mental stress and improve your mental health to avoid worsening conditions like anxiety and depression.

Teenage life is often a lot of fun and there are many articles discussing the positive developments that occur in the life of a teenager. It is equally important to be aware of the issues, sometimes big issues, that can make a teen swerve into unhelpful behavior and development. Some of these teenage problems will include the risks of body shaming, bullying, anxiety, and social media, to name a few. A strong family environment and culture will certainly assist

Traumatic events are unpredictable and devastating. They can happen any time and anywhere, leaving the people who experience them with significant struggles as they try to process and recover from the memories of the event. Some people are gradually able to come to terms with what happened, but others are not. People whose symptoms do not go away may be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Their symptoms may become so pervasive that they interfere with their ability to