As the days get shorter, many people find themselves feeling sad. You might feel blue around the winter holidays, or get into a slump after the fun and festivities have ended. Some people have more serious mood changes year after year, lasting throughout the fall and...

When it comes to Thanksgiving, we often picture Norman Rockwell-esque images of a happy family gathered together around the table. Delicious food, thoughtful conversations, and loving interactions, all sprinkled with a heart-warming dose of "thankfulness" and...

Your three-year-old refuses to hold your hand while crossing the street in spite of your reasoning and even bribes. Having to grab his hand to force compliance is irritating. Why can’t he just listen? In your irritation, you think you would have NEVER gotten away with...

It seems almost mystical. A person has long suffered, for example, from overeating, substance abuse, anger issues, laziness, or spending too much. And then suddenly the person changes, not incrementally, not in baby steps, but all at once. With my clients, it's...

Dark mornings, darker evenings, and chilly gray days in between mean winter is here — and with the coldest season come the winter blues. There’s no clinical diagnosis for the “winter blues,” but experts at the National Institutes of Health say the so-called winter...

A kind of magic happens when a desperately unhappy child is brought to the country to interact with horses. A change of environment, especially from an urban area to open, natural surroundings, filled with fresh air and flooded with sunshine, can have an uplifting and...

What we choose to focus on determines in large part the meaning of our lives. We know neurologically that mental focus amplifies and magnifies, that is, makes the object of focus more important than what we don't focus on. Due to the brain’s proclivity to form habits,...

Stress can be both clandestine and insidious. Often, we don’t realize it’s there, as it sneaks up on us like the preverbal frog in hot water, until it overwhelms us. Yet, at the same time, undetected stress can have a very measurable and deleterious effect on...

When people think of domestic abuse, they often focus on domestic violence. But domestic abuse includes any attempt by one person in an intimate relationship or marriage to dominate and control the other. Domestic violence and abuse are used for one purpose and one...

The loss of a loved one is life's most stressful event and can cause a major emotional crisis. After the death of someone you love, you experience bereavement, which literally means "to be deprived by death." When a death takes place, you may experience a wide range...