The Wellness Diary

Insights, advice, new research, tips and tricks, and new resources to help you with your mental health journey.

Spirituality Sandra Kushnir Spirituality Sandra Kushnir

Navigating the Path to Healing: Christian Sexual Trauma Therapy

Sexual trauma can be a deeply personal and isolating experience, particularly for individuals who identify as Christian. Young adults and adults grappling with the aftermath face unique challenges, such as reconciling their experiences with their faith. This process can be confusing and painful as survivors strive to understand their trauma within their religious framework. This post aims to provide supportive and informative guidance for those on this challenging healing journey.

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Three Simple Ways to Find Calm and Nourish Resilience

Tame anxious thoughts, strengthen emotional agility and cultivate compassion and connection with mindfulness. Practicing mindfulness is a gesture of kindness toward yourself, your family, and your community. Taking time for intentional rest, learning to build emotional agility, and connecting with your undefended heart are the skills that mindfulness practice teaches us.

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Getting Over A Break Up: Re-vamping Your Space

When relationships end, people can experience a wide range of emotions, like sadness, anger, or even fear. Even when the relationship wasn’t particularly happy, people might still suffer its loss with feelings that could be best described as grief. It’s not uncommon for people who have recently broken up to feel relieved and enthusiastic about their future one day but might feel sad or even hopeless the next.

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An Introduction: Color Therapy and Healing

Color is there everywhere you look, and also everywhere you do not look. You delight in its marvels consciously plus subconsciously. The point has been you see color all the time, but how often do you think about its origins and effects?

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5-Mental Health Myths

We live in a culture that perpetuates pleasant feelings. Everywhere we look, from social media to advertisements, to our friends and family, we only see people who appear to be happy, easy-going and feeling good. We are raised to believe that we should aim to experience as many uplifting, happy emotions as possible and to minimize unpleasant emotions.

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High Functioning Anxiety: How To Live With It

People with high functioning anxiety experience many typical symptoms of anxiety, such as excessive worry and fear, overthinking, and poor sleep. Effective treatment is available for all types of anxiety. This article provides an overview of high functioning anxiety, its symptoms, and the potential treatment options.

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The Power of Hugs And The Fabulous Health Benefits

Are you a hug or a handshake kind of person? If you’re the latter, you might want to reconsider the power a hug can have on your health. We hug others when we’re excited, happy, sad, or even trying to comfort! Hugging is universally comforting and it makes us feel good. It turns out that hugging is proven to make us healthier, hastier, and happier.

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Episode 45: It's Not About Sex: Healing Intimacy Issues That Lead To Compulsive Sexual Behaviors

In this episode, I am joined by Andrew Susskind, LCSW who is an author, podcast host and therapist. He specializes in compulsive sexual behaviors. Andrew shares his experience working with clients struggling with these behaviors, his own journey to recovery and brings insight into what we can do to begin normalizing and healing these types of addictive behaviors through vulnerability and trauma work.

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Money Anxiety: Creative Ways to Alleviate Financial Stress

If you’ve lost your job in the last few months, you’re likely dealing with a layer of stress you had no way of planning for -- and searching for a new position doesn’t do much to alleviate your anxiety. Hunting for jobs is tough and comes with a lot of rejection, which can be overwhelming for many of us. It’s OK to wait for the right opportunity to come along, but there are always bills to be paid and life to be lived -- money is simply a necessity of life.

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Health and Wellness Sandra Kushnir Health and Wellness Sandra Kushnir

4-Everday Self-Care Practices

Saying the body and mind are connected is old news. The Ancient Greeks tried to understand the mental wonder of emotions and their intricate connections to physiology. Experts worldwide have analyzed the mind and body connection since the beginning of time, and even recent science supports the notion that they are connected at the core. Still, many people question the benefits of practicing self-care.

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Episode 43: Coping With Covid-19

Jillian Ziesmer, LMFT and LPCC joins me to discuss the impact of COVID-19 on our mental health. Jillian dives into easy to use coping skills that can be used to deal with anxiety or depression that might be coming up for you at this time.

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Toxic Positivity: It’s Okay To Not Be Okay

Toxic positivity refers to a pattern of behavior wherein a person adopts a lifestyle that engages in being positive at all points of time no matter what, because ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. It involves rejecting the negative triggers of your life, thus investing all your attention and energy into the positive stimulants. How come a lifestyle that sounds like a mental detox, be labeled as toxic?

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5-Simple Ways to Help Someone With Anxiety

Anxiety is a normal part of life, with everyone experiencing it to varying degrees. Anxiety is one of the things that has allowed the human species to survive and evolve, allowing us to assess situations and react accordingly to them. And while it is normal for everyone to experience feelings of anxiousness at some point in their lives, many people suffer from more serious and at times debilitating forms of anxiety disorders.

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Collective Crisis: How And Why People Respond So Differently To Fear

When life-threatening emergencies arise, fear begins to work in mysterious ways and it invokes a wide range of individual responses. To better understand the collective crisis and process the seemingly odd behavior of others, let’s demystify the varying degrees of the fear response. More importantly, building awareness around why you may react in a certain way and why others may respond so differently has the power to transform exasperation and judgment into empathy and collaboration, in a time where we are in dire need of the latter.

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Vlog: Attachment Styles

Vlog: Sandra Kushnir, LMFT discusses the impact of attachment styles on your relationships, emotional regulations and self-image.

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An Open Letter To My Fellow Women

Women have been pitted against one another for centuries. Whether it be for the attention of men, careers, looks, or even family life, women are no strangers to the fight. Moving forward, we have turned our fight from one another to the betterment of our own and to nurture the quality of our society.

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