Acculturative Stress and psychotherapy for international students, anxiety, culture and counseling.

Finding Muslim-sensitive mental health care can be a challenge. I have presented to audiences of mental health professionals on some of the background issues that make accessing mental health treatment difficult for some people of the Muslim faith.

Don’t miss this piece in the NY Times from 7/31/22 featuring Korean Adoptee Chefs and how they navigate their relationship to Korean food and identity. If you don’t pay for the Times you can usually read 10 articles for free per month and this is a good piece on a part of the Korean, transnational/transracial and adoptee experience that foregrounds how we live in the world. Please share your responses with me if you want!

I was contacted by a colleague who is doing a research survey for adopted persons, and if you are interested in contributing some of your time and experience feel free to contact her.

Rooted in Adoption is a new anthology of short pieces by adoptees reflecting on their experience as adoptees. As such, it is a wonderful addition to the growing canon of books, films and podcasts that bring our often silenced or neglected adoptee voices forward.

If you don’t know where to start, but you have a feeling that adoption might be something you need to address in your life and you are considering therapy, group therapy can be a powerful option.

Today’s blog post will be a short one, to provide a good resource and some hope for sailing through the holidays without too much turmoil, inner or outer.

The first chapter of The Body Keeps The Score looks at how van der Kolk came to be interested in the problem of trauma treatment from his work with Vietnam veterans. He discusses an early case that had a big impact on him, and led him to search for answers. He also talks about how little was available in the literature on trauma and PTSD, and what he learned from his early clients.

In the first post in this series I looked at Gestalt Therapy Theory, and how we conceive of anxiety as an interruption of the excitement of creative growth, when the excitement does not have enough support in the organism or environment to emerge freely. In the second post I explored how anxiety is treated in gestalt therapy in session, how we attend to the actual bodily experience, the meaning of the anxiety, and look for clues of what the anxiety is doing for you, how it is protecting you, as we experiment with your own anxiety mechanism.

In my previous post, Anxiety Treatment: Gestalt Therapy Theory, I explored what gestalt therapy theory says about anxiety. In this article I am going to concentrate on anxiety treatment from a gestalt therapy perspective.

I treat anxiety in its many forms. We have different names for it: social anxiety, generalized anxiety, performance anxiety (also click here for more on my work treating people with performance anxiety), and panic attacks, for example. I’m often asked for tips on how to manage anxiety and there are many tips online as well as some good book recommendations for books on self help for anxiety, and if you suffer from anxiety it is worth exploring some of these coping strategies.

One of the books my clients refer to most when they come to work on trauma and PTSD with me is The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.