Category Archives: Emotions and Feelings

Seasonal Anxiety?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Anxious woman

Seasonal anxiety?
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

Is there seasonal anxiety?

Officially there is no diagnosis for any seasonal disorder, but the profession does recognize that there is a form of Major Depressive Disorder that is highly influenced by the seasons. We denote this by referring to it as Major Depressive Disorder with a seasonal pattern.

Researchers on a lot of other mental and emotional illnesses are reporting that they find seasonal patterns in their disorders also, so far no one seems to be considering these seasonal influences on disorders like Anxiety.

So what other effects might the weather and the change of seasons be having on Anxiety and other disorders?

People who regularly see their doctors and have their blood pressure checked are more likely to find that they have elevated blood pressure as a result of stress in the winter months than in the summer months.

Yes, we do get stressed out more in the winter than in those lazy days of summer even when we are well into our working lives.

Women, particularly those working as supervisors and in responsible positions, report more anxiety and stress during the winter months than in the summer. They also report more physical ailments at that time of year for which no medical problem is found. Researchers are apt to call those issues “Somatic symptoms even though actual physical illnesses can’t be ruled out.

The bottom line here is, however, you see these complaints, stress, and anxiety are causing these women more problems in the winter than the rest of the year.

Anxiety disorder is worse in winter but Panic Disorder gets worse in the summer.

Several researchers into Panic Disorders have reported that panic disorder gets worse in the summer months. This appears to be related to the heat more than the hours of light.

Dehydration has been reported as a cause of this heat-related panic attack. Some people when out in public avoid drinking water because of the need to find restrooms. Don’t drink enough water and you get dehydrated which can trigger panic attacks.

One corollary to this was an article that reported more people in America are “Sunbirds” than “Snowbirds” that is more people go up north to escape the heat in the summer than go to the south in the winter to escape the snow in that northern tier of states.

There is a season to anxiety disorders and for most people, that season is throughout the wintertime.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Giving thanks or gobbling turkey?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

What motivates you today on this launch of the Holiday season?

Some people used to call this next month the Christmas season, now it is a pure electronics consumer feast. So before you rush off to capture and kill the latest i-creature, let’s consider what Thanksgiving is and whether we are really thankful for what we have, or are we just craving more?

Thanksgiving is, according to the Century Dictionary of 1891:

1. The act of rendering thanks or expressing gratitude for favors, benefits or mercies. An acknowledgment of benefits received. It cites an older Biblical use of the word to mean acknowledgment by offering.

The illustrative text for this?

Every creature of God is good and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving.       1 Tim. iv 4.

2. A public celebration of divine goodness; specifically in the United States.

3. A form of words expressive of thanks to God; a grace.

The first U. S. celebration – 1621 in Plymouth by the Pilgrims and Strangers. (See the book Saints and Strangers by Willison.)  Saints and Strangers, Being the Lives of the Pilgrim Fathers and Their Families

My fun old book, The Century Dictionary, also includes a definition for a “thanksgiver” who is defined as:

One who gives thanks, or acknowledges a benefit, a kindness, or a mercy.

I realize my old Century Dictionary is now a dinosaur, full of words that are no longer in use. Despite the fact that each of the six volumes weighs more than my tower computer and my laptop put together, I still find comfort in knowing that there are good old words there, just waiting for another chance to be used by humans.

So on this day, with its historical connections, I just wonder if some of us could spend some time thinking about what we are thankful for and are we thanksgivers before we all rush off to celebrate the Black Friday and the Cyber Monday festivities?

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Your emotional tape measure – scaling

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Emotional measurement.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

What tool should we be using to measure emotions?

Most of us know that we can measure a board with a tape measure. There is a big difference between a shelf that is 6 inches long and one that is 72 inches long.

We can check a child’s fever with a thermometer. It matters if your child’s temperature is 98.6 or 106.

You can see if you’re overweight or underweight by standing on a scale. Please fill in the weights as needed.

Does it matter how much of an emotion you are feeling? It may be the difference between ignoring what was said to you and getting into a fight.

What tool do you use to measure the size and shape of your emotions?

Emotions like so many other things in life come in sizes and shapes. We get ourselves into a peck of trouble by equating all emotions as being the same size and importance.

Take anxiety for instance. Most of us are either anxious or we are not anxious. Anxiety is sneaky that way. There is that little kitten size anxiety and there is that big hungry lion size anxiety. It is important to know which is which.

If every time you feel the sound of hissing you run for your life you will be hiding from a lot of kittens. We talked a little about developing a scale of anxiety and learning to adjust the volume in a previous post on “selective desensitization.”

Anger is a similar creature. Lots of people have only two extremes when it comes to anger, not-angry, and violently angry. People caught in these two extreme modes of feeling anger jump from not-angry to furiously angry at the drop of a – well it could be a drop of almost anything.

One method used in anger management is to develop a scale. Say your anger is at zero when you are feeling happy and loved. When you “lose your temper” your anger is at a ten. How might you develop a scale of degrees of anger in-between?

One way of developing this scale or tape measure for your emotions is to find other similar words for your anger and place them on a scale. First, let’s scale the anger creature, and then our old sometimes-friend anxiety.

What other words might describe feeling sort of like anger but more or less intense?

How about – annoyance, irritation, fury, rage, antagonism, ire, wrath, dander, exasperation, rile, aggravate, provoke, and so on. While these words may not say anger to all of you, you can see that there is a lot of difference between rage and irritation. If you go looking I bet you can find more words that describe feelings similar to anger.

Take your list and arrange them by intensity from the most awful total feeling to a very mind form of anger.

Now comes the challenge. When you find yourself going from not-angry to furiously rage-full how can you turn the volume down on that anger and move from an anger rating of 10 to say a 6 or 5?

Learning to turn the volume up and down on emotions is a skill called emotional regulation. Being able to feel the necessary level of feelings when you need them can make your life a whole lot better.

Now, what about reducing anxiety?

Words for your scale might include nervousness, worry, concern, unease, apprehension, disquiet, fretful, angst, fear, terror, dread, horror, distress, panic, alarm, trepidation, and so on.

Again there is a lot of distance between being uneasy and being panicked-in-terror. Work out your own list and then consider – is this anxiety you have right now a 10 or a 9. How might you learn to turn your anxiety volume down?

It is worth noting here that we have talked about two scales, words and numbers. What most people find is that by changing the word they used to describe a feeling it also changes the number they would give it.

So if you are feeling panic but tell yourself well this is not really the worse panic I have ever had so maybe it is really worrying, you may find that the anxiety meter 10 turns down to a 5 or even a 4.

Try constructing an emotional tape measure and learning to scale your feelings and see if this does not help you learn to turn the volume down on negative feelings and turn the volume up on those happy positive feelings.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Can you focus your mind?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Focus

Focus.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

You can shift the focus of your eyes but what about your thoughts?

In old-school photography, every student had to learn selective focus. The goal was to keep one thing in clear focus while letting the other things in the scene blur out and become ambiguous.

If you had a person close to you, then you wanted their face clear and the things behind them, the background, to blur out. If you took a picture through a fence the goal was to get the things far away clear and the fence to blur until it disappeared.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could shift the focus on our minds just like that camera?

Well, some people can do just that.

Often when we interact with others our minds go all over the place. We think about the room temperature and lighting, what we will do after this meeting, what we did yesterday.

We can be overwhelmed and the result is that we lose the ability to pay clear attention to the thing we are doing or the person who we are speaking with.

When we try to relax our minds can become troubled with that swarm of thoughts buzzing around in our head. Things to do, people to call, emails to answer. Did you pay that bill? Should you check Facebook or Twitter first?

Seeing everything at once can result in seeing nothing as your life flows by lost in the jumble of thoughts.

One skill they teach in “mindfulness” training is how to shift that focus of your thinking, how to pay attention to the things you want to attend to and let the rest go. This is a valuable skill to have. The ability to attend to one thing and let the other things blur out is not something we are all born with but a skill that can be developed.

I realize that this selective attention or mindfulness can be more difficult for people with certain disorders like ADHD, but with the constant flow of information overload, all of us are at risk of losing our mental focus if we do not learn to attend to one thing out of a swarm of thoughts in our heads.

Do you sometimes feel like a traffic cop trying to direct thousands of unruly thoughts traveling within your head?

This age we live in has more information available than ever before. There are constantly things to do and distractions everywhere. The thoughts, feelings, and sensations run back and forth in our minds.

Do you run after each and every thought like a school worker trying to corral a group of unruly children?

Sometimes it is nice to just observe the thoughts as they run through our minds, let them go, and shift our focus from all that is going on outside us to what is going on inside yourself.

Learning to shift your mind’s focus, attuned to one important idea at a time can reduce your stress and improve your creativity and productivity.

Give that shift of mind focus a try and see if it does not bring a whole lot of things into sharper focus.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

What does being sad say about you?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Sad child

Sad.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

What do you tell yourself when you are sad?

Many of us can’t bear to let ourselves be sad. Not because the feeling is so unbearable but because we tell ourselves that if I feel that way there is something wrong with me. That insistence that we should not feel what we feel or that feelings are negative, can keep you from learning the lessons that feeling are trying to teach you.

Those things we tell ourselves to try to avoid feeling what we feel can keep us stuck in those negative feelings a lot longer than if you let yourself feel and then decided what you wanted to do about that feeling.

Do you tell yourself these things when you feel a sad emotion coming on?

1. If I am sad that means I am weak.

Sad or even depressed does not mean weak. Feeling sad means you are normal, especially if the sad is for what you see happening to others. Only a psychopath can see a child being harmed and not feel sad. So unless you are aspiring to become a psychopath let yourself feel sad when things happen that should make you sad.

Being sad is not weak, it is realistic. What you need to do is not stay stuck in the sadness but look for ways to be kind and compassionate to those that suffer.

That list of people who you need to be kind to – your name should be up at the top of the list of people deserving kindness.

2. Do you think being sad is pitiful?

Pity is a looking down on other’s emotions. Why are you looking down at yourself?

Be compassionate with yourself. Beating yourself up or telling yourself not to feel what you feel will undermine your ability to use feelings as a reliable guide to life events. It is not pitiful to be you.

3. If I let myself be sad I am a basket case.

It is not people who feel that end up in emotional trouble. People who try to hold things in eventually meltdown or they become dead inside.

Some feelings have to be felt before you can move on. If someone dies feel the grief. Be sad when sad things happen.

Do not let sad or your efforts to not feel sad take over your life.

4. Being sad makes me inferior.

Being sad is a normal human emotion. Everyone can and does feel sad some of the time. What matters is what you do with that feeling. Do you get sad when you should and then let it pass or do you get stuck there?

You do not need to be less feeling and more numb than others to think of yourself as acceptable.

It is not the feeling sad that defines you, it is what you do with that emotion once it has visited you.

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

What is kindness?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Do you know kindness when you see it?

Encarta says Kindness is:

An act that shows consideration and caring

The practice of being or the tendency to be sympathetic and compassionate

The Century Dictionary, 1889 has a lot more definitions:

Good will, Benevolence

Tender feeling, affection, love

Fitness, agreeableness

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”  ― Plato

“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”  ― Dalai Lama XIV

“Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.”  ― Henry James

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”  ― Mark Twain

Have you been kind today?

What is Happiness?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Happy children

Happy.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Would you know happiness if you felt it?

Happiness is the state of being Happy

Happy: feeling or showing pleasure, contentment, or joy, feeling satisfied that something is right or has been done right

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“People are just as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

― Abraham Lincoln

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”

― Dalai Lama XIV

“Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.”

― John Lennon

“Happiness is a warm puppy.”

― Charles M. Schulz

Quotes from GoodReads

Why are we so afraid of feelings?

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Man with feelings

Managing feelings.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Fear of feelings?

You would think that feelings were on the banned substance list. So many people are avoiding them. Failure to feel what we feel is at the root of a lot of mental health problems. Still, people go to great lengths to not feel those feelings.

We hear lots of advice about ways to avoid feelings, think logically, pull yourself together don’t let yourself feel that. The forces of logic have won the day and henceforth feelings are banned.

But we know in our gut that sometimes feelings are telling us the truth when our head wants to mislead us.

Some people grew up in homes where their feelings were invalidated. You said you were sad and you were told you are not sad, you don’t even know what sad is. If you feel that way you are being weak or selfish or some other terrible thing.

Numbing out the feelings.

So you avoided feelings, any and all feelings, and eventually, you became numb, chronically unhappy, or unable to feel any real joy. In your flight from feelings, you may have left a lot of love, friendship, and compassion behind. You may have resorted to drugs or alcohol or other addictions to avoid feeling what you were feeling.

Feelings have been blackballed, put on the most wanted list, and hunted down and exterminated whenever possible. We have become so very afraid that someone will get angry, depressed, or anxious and then something bad will happen. So we tell them to pull themselves together, forget that feeling and think logically.

Logical thinking, the scientific method has resulted in a lot of technological advances. We have more stuff than ever before in the history of the world. Stuff exists now that science fiction writers fantasized about just a few short years ago.

What we haven’t accomplished is any real reduction in pain or unhappiness. We have more pain-killing drugs but no less pain. We have more antidepressants but we have more depression than ever. We teach people to be more rational and there are crimes of passion on every corner.

In this process of avoiding being carried away with excesses of feelings, we have lost the ability to use feelings for the intended purpose.

Your feelings brain.

When we talk about using our brains, what is left out of the equation is just how much of our nervous system lies outside our heads. All those nerve cells, the ones surrounding your stomach, and the ones in your neck, they are trying to tell you things also.

Those expressions, someone is a pain in the neck, or that makes me sick to my stomach, those expressions are full of truth. Those bodily sensations are conveying information to the rest of our beings that we just may need to know.

Those other “thoughts” the ones in our feeling systems ought to get more attention. That skill we call intuition may just be those emotional memories of things in the past that are useful for actions in the present.

By avoiding our feelings for so long we have lost the ability to regulate those emotions. When we do feel something, like sadness, we can easily become overwhelmed.

When feelings are strangers we come to fear their presence. So many of us will do anything, drink, drug, numb out to avoid feeling what it is we are feeling. We become afraid that feelings are enemies out to destroy us rather than old friends here to tell us something.

One huge step in recovery is to learn that we can feel feelings, happiness or sadness, excitement, or anxiety without becoming overwhelmed and carried away. Having a feeling is not the same thing as being taken over by that feeling. Joy does not have to lead to an excessive celebration and sadness or anxiety need not lead to another relapse or flight.

One group of therapists talks about the need to learn distress tolerance. I can feel bad some of the time and that is OK. I will not cease to exist because I feel sad or anxious. It is possible to feel unpleasant feelings, ask what that feeling has to tell us, and then, like so many other thoughts, let that feeling move on.

Not every happy feeling calls for action, a celebration of excess that might lead to a relapse into drug use, overspending or inappropriate sexual activities.

It is possible to feel feelings and let them serve and inform us rather than being controlled by what we feel.

How do you feel about your feelings?

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

Want the latest blog posts as they publish? Subscribe to this blog.

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

Love

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Child and adult on beach

Love.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Thoughts about Love.

There are lots of description for love but despite all the meanings we humans never seem to get enough of this precious stuff.

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”
―The Complete Works of Lao Tzu: Tao Teh Ching & Hua Hu Ching

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Stranger in a Strange Land

“You don’t love someone because they’re perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they’re not.”
― Jody Picoult  My Sister’s Keeper: A Novel

“You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
― Dr. Seuss’s Beginner Book Collection (Cat in the Hat, One Fish Two Fish, Green Eggs and Ham, Hop on Pop, Fox in Socks)

Quotes from GoodReads.

Hope you have enough love today to be able to spread some around.

Tranquility

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Tranquility:

free of any disturbance or commotion, free from or showing no signs of anxiety or agitation.

“A lonely day is God’s way of saying that he wants to spend some quality time with you.”
― Criss Jami

“We are not going to change the whole world, but we can change ourselves and feel free as birds. We can be serene even in the midst of calamities and, by our serenity, make others more tranquil. Serenity is contagious. If we smile at someone, he or she will smile back. And a smile costs nothing. We should plague everyone with joy. If we are to die in a minute, why not die happily, laughing? (136-137)”
― Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras

“Our life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek, and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live, we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can have neither peace nor tranquility.”
― Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives: The Life and Teachings of Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

“The very secret of life for me, I believed, was to maintain in the midst of rushing events an inner tranquility.”
― Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself

Quotes from GoodReads 

For more about David Joel Miller and my work in the areas of mental health, substance abuse and Co-occurring disorders see the about the author page. For information about my other writing work beyond this blog check out my Google+ page or the Facebook author’s page, up under David Joel Miller. Posts to the “books, trainings, and classes” category will tell you about those activities. If you are in the Fresno California area, information about my private practice is at counselorfresno.com. A list of books I have read and can recommend is over at http://www.counselorfresno.com/recommended-books/

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