SELF-CARE ASSESSMENT TOOL The Self-Care Assessment Tool can be used to help you identify strategies for self-care.[1] Reflect on each of the items below to determine how many self-care strategies apply to your life. To complete the Self-Care Assessment Tool, place the number beside each item that most closely reflects your current lifestyle: 1 = […]
Emotional Wellness Stress Disease Connection
Last time we learned about the ACE Study and how childhood adversity has long-term impacts on a person’s mental, psychological, and physical well-being, as well as one’s spirituality/sense of Self. Whether in childhood or as an adult, because of chronic adversity (read ‘stress’) elevated levels of toxic molecules (e.g., adrenalin, cortisol, etc. ) are released […]
Revisiting Our “Normal” Childhoods – The Impacts of ACE/Trauma
In Canada, 32% of an adult sample indicated that they had experienced physical abuse, sexual abuse, and/or exposure to intimate partner violence during childhood (2014). A 2014 U.S. study found that 8% of children have experienced 1 childhood trauma, and 23% have experienced 2 or more. These traumas (aka “adverse childhood experiences”or ACE) include: extreme economic […]
Better Understanding Our Dreams
From psychological, emotional and brain/neurological perspectives, dreams are created for compensatory and even healing reasons. Professor Daniel Siegel stated that dreaming is “one of the important ways we integrate memory and emotion.” Indeed, it is the feeling tone of the dream which is more important than the actual content. Often, dreams can help process unresolved intense […]
Staying Connected
Although the symptoms may vary – depression, anxiety, relationship issues – when exploring these further, one of the (if not the) factors at hand is a loss of connection of one type or another. From what are we specifically disconnected? There are a triad of connections: Self, Others & Greater Than. It is worthwhile, especially when we are […]
ACA’s The Problem and The Solution
The Problem Many of us found that we had several characteristics in common as a result of being brought up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional household. We had come to feel isolated and uneasy with other people, especially authority figures. To protect ourselves, we became people-pleasers, even though we lost our own identities in the […]
