Self-esteem is simply how we feel about being ourselves. How we feel about ourselves is based upon who we believe we are. In effect, our self-esteem is based upon our self-concept. If our thoughts of ourselves are typically negative, then we are typically unhappy, just as positive thoughts about ourselves create good feelings in us. Because how we feel about ourselves is what we have to offer others, our self-concept and self-esteem significantly affect our relationships. If, our estimation of our self is high, others tend to accept that assessment and will treat us accordingly. If our opinion of our self is low, others likewise will regard us in that manner. In essence, however we see our self is the image we will project to the world.

Our original self-concept is usually derived primarily from our childhood and tends to stay with us in a modified form. Because we come to know ourselves through others, if our self-concept is a negative one we eventually become painfully aware of its limitations through adolescent or adult relationships. Sometimes specific traumatic events dramatically shape our sense of identity, perhaps warping it for many years to come. More often a chronically painful image of ourselves persists over time based on continuous feedback from others. Letting go of habitual negative thoughts entails a willingness to be aware of them and to replace them with constructive ones.

The only true foundation on which to formulate a new self-concept and develop high self-esteem is through being in accordance with the deepest promptings of our inner self. Counseling can be extremely helpful in the discovery of who we believe we are and the creation of who it is we want to be.

Communication flows smoothly enough in the absence of negative or fearful emotions. It is when we encounter such feelings as anger, guilt, jealousy or disappointment that problems arise. Whether they are problems within us, within others, or between others and us, communication can be helpful or harmful to their solution.

Since it is difficult to experience uncomfortable emotions in ourselves and others we may merely avoid our awareness or expression of them. But unconsciously repressed or consciously suppressed feelings will find expression indirectly, sometimes inappropriately, or take a toll within if not allowed to surface. It is healthier instead to acknowledge bad feelings and to talk them through to a point of resolution.

Learning to do so usually requires conscientious effort. While most of us recognize that communication skills can deter or disentangle personal and interpersonal conflicts, we have often not had any training in effective speaking or listening for conflict resolution. Automatically relying on habitual styles learned in childhood, we slip unwittingly into patterns of attack and defense, become cagey or withdrawn, feel misunderstood, hold grudges and create distance in our most important relationships.

In counseling we can learn specific communication skills that will facilitate positive interactions, peaceful resolutions and healthy relationships.

Marriage can be an experience of great happiness or deep suffering. It is commonly a blend of these two extremes while we navigate the middle ground in our best live and learn fashion. As with our own personal development, we sometimes settle in marriage for expedient solutions that compromise our true nature and grow increasingly dissatisfied over time. Yet we go on.
As the high rate of divorce attests, it is not easy to create satisfying love relationships that last. A healthy marriage is one that meets the needs of both parents. It is cultivated through a shared devotion to mutual respect and trust. It rests on each person’s separate devotion to self-respect and sense of being true to one’s self. Given that people have fears, make mistakes, and are otherwise perfectly imperfect, it generally takes awhile to forge strong bonds of love between them.

There are many factors complicating the decision to save or end a marriage. While we normally enter matrimony with the best of intentions, certain assumptions, and future expectations, events soon expire to test our mettle. Couples, like individuals, encounter ever-present challenges in life, which strengthen or weaken their integrity. Characteristic responses to life’s challenges form character, along healthy or unhealthy lines. A relationship crisis is usually a culmination of deeper strains of dissatisfaction finally emerging openly. It can be an excellent time to understand, forgive and start anew with a reinvigorated commitment to each other. Sometimes it is best to start anew alone.

In either case, it requires the utmost care for our own happiness, since how we feel about ourselves is what we have to offer either our mates or a prospective new partner. Whether renewing a marriage or surviving a divorce, marital counseling can be immensely helpful in clarifying and evaluating our situation and our options.

Parenting is probably the greatest life challenge we will ever undertake with such little understanding of and preparation for the complexities involved. Against the shifting circumstances of time, aging parents contend with their survival and the continuously changing needs of growing children while striving to maintain a happy, loving family. The basic purpose of parenthood to love, nurture and teach our offspring sometimes becomes lost amidst a tangle of demanding, rewarding, never-ending, ever-changing tasks.

We begin as new parents with only our upbringing as a source to draw upon and a standard to measure by. Sometimes unresolved childhood issues in ourselves bias our perspective of our children’s behavior or experiences and we become too permissive or authoritarian. Children face crucial choices in their development, especially in adolescence when they may be most difficult to parent. As parents it is our desire and responsibility to give our children love, discipline, and constructive guidance at all times. An apparent low point or crisis in a child’s life or a parent-child relationship can be turned into a positive pivotal step with appropriate counseling.

Anger is fear expressed as attack. We commonly respond with fight or flight to apparent threat. As fear seems extensively interwoven into our lives, especially through the media, anger or violence is often seen as an appropriate response to many situations. Since fear is love’s opposite, its creations are always destructive. Anger is essentially an attempt to intimidate others by making them feel guilty.

Due to differences in personality and upbringing, anger rears its ugly head in various ways, both blatant and subtle. Some of us have an undercurrent of hostility or a judgmental edge. Others brood, nursing their resentment, and explode unexpectedly. Still others are too good-natured or sensible to waste much time being angry except for occasional displays of temperament. From the wrath of self-righteous indignation to the nuances of bitter sarcasm, it’s all the same old stuff: fear. It is a rare and wise soul who seeks to rise above the fearful thoughts anger requires to fuel its existence. Do you know one?

Be it our body, income or beliefs that seem threatened, it is always our peace of mind that is lost, and it does not return when we attack another. Instead we feel guilty, consciously or not, while others then often feel defensive and justified in counter-attacking. While possibly providing a temporary solution on the surface, this really just continues the age-old cycle of attack and defense so prevalent among humankind.

Because we are ultimately loving by nature, an unloving approach to any task encountered will bring a less than fully satisfying solution. There is nothing of lasting value constructively done in anger, as popular as it is, and part of maturity entails a willingness to peer deeply into the wells of our own consciousness to understand and release whatever angry thoughts we hold. In finding the wisdom and courage to do so, bypassing the tempting indulgence of madness, we greet the rewarding challenge of living in peace with each other and ourselves. Counseling can aid in uncovering the roots and eliminating the practice of this fearful response.

Loss is a most devastating psychological experience to feel. Although significant loss comes in many ways including loss of limb, home or job, the loss of a love relationship is is often most poignantly felt. We frequently feel an especially deep and abiding loss through divorce and death.

Experiencing the death of a loved one, particularly when sudden, unexpected, or tragically premature, can be the most difficult of all to endure. No matter how well we handle the passing of a loved one they are inescapably missed. Sometimes this finality is additionally burdened by unfinished business, such as love unexpressed or mistakes unforgiven. While the break-up or divorce of a couple or a family lacks the final impact of the blow of death, it frequently has the sting and heartbreak of rejection for adults, adolescents and little children alike.

Fortunately part of the beauty of life is that the passage of time does heal while we move through our grief or mourning in our own way. To suffer can mean to allow the healing process to occur naturally and we help or hurt its progress with our thoughts as life goes on. Counseling can assist in the acceleration of this process.

Depression is a state of mind that arises from the fearful thought that we are suffering from deprivation or loss. It has often been described as anger turned inward, whether anger at ourselves, others or life in general.

Anger at ourselves usually stems from the thought that we are failures or unworthy in some significant way. Anger at others is typically caused by the perceived mistreatment of ourselves by other people. Anger at life commonly comes from the thought that circumstances have been unfair to us. When we think of ourselves as attacked or victimized by life, other people or even our own failings we feel justified in counter-attacking. If we fear to express this, for whatever reason, and hold our attack thoughts within us instead, we inwardly rage at our helplessness to right apparent wrongs. The willingness to suffer or endure this state of mind results in depression or the deflation of our spirits. While holding this grievance or grudge in our minds, we are then truly deprived of the joy of being alive.

Frequently depression can descend upon us through the loss of a loved one, especially if our mourning gives way to self-pity. Sometimes in the winter, especially here in a northernmost climate, some people are inclined to experience depression. They feel deprived of the light, the warmth, or their fair weather regimen of outdoor activities. Often this is complicated by holiday memories of bad times in past years, good times that are gone now, or good times that were wished for but never came true.
Whatever the thoughts, they all lead to the same point; feeling deprived of a good time right now. In holding these thoughts, whether seasonable or not, we turn inward around them, encircling our defenses in a ring of self-protection while withdrawing from others into a black hole of despair. The dark depths of depression can feel overwhelming as if we were sinking into a bottomless pit of emotional quicksand. The anguish and misery fostered by this self-affliction is usually disturbing to those who care for us, as they feel ineffective in futile attempts to counter our mindset.
Whether this malaise is sudden and acute or stubbornly chronic it is possible to heal ourselves with appropriate care. Today it is common to treat depression with pharmaceutical drugs or natural herbs. Such procedures may well be very helpful on a temporary basis by helping us maintain the steadiness of focus necessary to look deeply within. But the real healing is done by our willingness to examine the thoughts of deprivation at the roots of our misery. Counseling can be an indispensable aid in undoing the effects of mild or deep depression by uncovering the causes of our sense of deprivation and focusing on the fulfillment available to us now.

As life is a ceaseless movement of unpredictable happenings, we are undergoing various changes all the time. The rhythm of life being cyclical, we experience significant changes, or transitions, as beginnings, ups, downs, and endings. This pattern is clearly reflected in the course of a day, the lifespan of a creature, and the turn of the seasons. The seasons especially, each with their own felt meaning, pass through us as we pass through them and we are seasoned each year by greater growth experiences.

As the luster of each year’s summer slips away, fall brings the feel of turning inward again, reaping and storing for the long northwest winter. In every community, children and adults alike enter another industrious period of learning and working. With vacations over, families reorient themselves to a new and busier schedule. Children particularly, since they are not in control, may feel unsettled by fall transitions as they refocus their lives. Single parents and mothers, especially working ones, often find their lives strongly impacted by the revision of family activities. They bear the brunt of new adjustments necessary to accommodate everyone’s differing needs. The transitions these changes entail are best made with all members of a family coming together in a renewed spirit of cooperative reorganization.

Though the seasons endlessly come and go, recycling life into death and back again, we are always left to ourselves. In our adaptation to seasonal variations, we can learn that it is not so much what happens to us but our response to it that counts. Whether changing by choice or by circumstance, we are always free to accept or resist the inevitable transitions life brings. They are most gracefully made in the calm realization that it is time to let go, move on, and start anew, while remaining connected with the continuous flow of life and ourselves. Counseling can be helpful to all family members in sustaining that connection while making those transitions with the advent of autumn.

The holiday traditions of the winter season celebrate profound truths of the human spirit. As the year winds down to a new beginning, we rejuvenate ourselves by reaffirming commonly shared and dearly held spiritual values. Though most of us seem to have our hands full trying to live in accordance with them, these values do sustain us in our innermost heart of hearts and give us lights to live by in our lifetime.

It is especially appropriate that we precede the onset of cold dark winter with a lavish Thanksgiving ceremony to usher out the fading fall. Giving thanks, or expressing gratitude, is a perfect way to experience good feelings in ourselves. Since we always get what we give, it feels great to be grateful towards life, other people, and God. As we often lose touch with such feelings in the course of the months, the year’s end is a perfect time for such a touchstone to reemerge.

The following holidays of Christmas and Hanukkah glorify humankind as spiritual beings and honor our relation of fellowship with each other. We are a community of people in communion with God, though much of the time we feel isolated and alone. To feel our connection with the divine is a personal matter no one else can do for us but ourselves. Living with a sense of divine purpose gives us a perspective on life that transcends the ego or self-made sense of self that we often lose our Self in. Beneath the limits of the rational mind we feel the presences of heart, conscience, and intuition, To live by these impulses, as hard as it may seem at times, is the most gratifying way to live. Living by the dictates of our own inner guidance is indeed the true message of our winter “holy” days and it is certainly a most welcome one. We can use the winter holiday time of this passing year to reconnect with our Selves and our source, in our own personally meaningful way, as the New Year approaches. Doing so will make a difference between now and next winter.