Category: COVID-19
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More than Ever, We Need to Belong: Part 1
In October of 2022 I wrote a blog entitled “Why We All Need to Belong.” We were in the throes of the pandemic which made it challenging to interact with each other, creating problems with belonging. I thought it was important for us all to consider some of the issues the pandemic was creating with…
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Taking Inventory – What Kinds of Friends Do You Have?
As we move into the New Year I thought it might be helpful to invite you to pause to consider the friends you have and how healthy those relationships are. Questions to Ponder: Previously I wrote a blog post about membership circles, a concept that can help us explore this topic. To briefly recap, we…
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At Last We Can Hug Each Other And Why That’s So Important
One of the biggest losses for all of us during the pandemic was the lack of comfortably touching or hugging each other except perhaps in the privacy of our own homes. Even then, many of us were on edge, fearing that somehow we were exchanging Covid germs. Hugging and touching was to be avoided in…
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Have Your Senses and Values Been Altered and Desensitized?
You may be familiar with the story of the frog and the boiling water. Here’s a recap: “Urban myth has it that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water it will instantly leap out. But if you put it in a pot filled with pleasantly tepid water and gradually heat it,…
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Are You Feeling Hug-Deprived Because of Covid?
As we all know, the Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on most of us, causing varying degrees of stress, fear, loss, anxiety, grief and other struggles. Our normal lives have been disrupted and continue to be acutely impacted by this pandemic. Our previous normal seems to be gone, our patterns of life deeply altered. Something…
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The Importance of Unplugging from the News
Living through this pandemic has created a myriad of interesting and often very challenging problems associated with mental health. One of these is news addiction. Many of us feel like we are living on the edge, that the world we once knew has disappeared and almost every day we hear reports of the many ways…
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The Power of Pets to Help Us Navigate the Pandemic
By now most everyone is aware that the pandemic has been a source of extreme sustained toxic stress that has contributed to many mental health issues for adults and children: anxiety, depression, loss of motivation, desperation, frustration, and anger to name a few. Those who have trauma histories can be more deeply impacted because the…
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Alarming Research about the Impact of the Pandemic on Children’s IQs
There is some recent research about the impact of the pandemic on children that is alarming, research that we should all take note of. This past summer there were headlines stating that children born during pandemic have lower IQs. Not just lower IQs but substantially lower IQs. A headline from The Guardian states the following: Researchers blame lack of…
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Gratitude in the Era of a Pandemic
With Thanksgiving right around the corner, can we be grateful for….wait for it….the Pandemic?! Maybe. I thought an invitation to all of us to reflect on those things we are grateful for about the pandemic might be an interesting exercise. According to the website Positive Psychology in an article entitled What is Gratitude and Why is it so important the Harvard Medical…