The holiday season can be especially difficult when you’re grieving the loss of a loved one. This blog offers gentle, compassionate guidance on how to navigate the holidays while honoring your feelings and your loved one’s memory. Learn ways to manage grief, find moments of joy, and move forward at your own pace.

Feeling overwhelmed, overloaded, or completely tapped out is more common than you might think, but it doesn’t have to be your norm. This blog explores how your nervous system reacts in moments of stress using the Polyvagal Ladder framework. Learn to recognize signs of dorsal vagal shutdown, sympathetic fight-or-flight activation, and how to gently guide yourself back to a state of calm and connection (ventral vagal). With practical tools and relatable examples, this post provides simple strategies to help you move through stress and create more moments of balance and self-compassion in your daily life.

Anna Kraft, LPC is a licensed therapist in the state of WI with Empowerment Within LLC. Click here to get to know her a little more!

When your negative thoughts get too loud, acknowledging them instead of avoiding them may actually be the way through.

How you experience your body impacts your quality of life. Learn more here on what type of body image you may be struggling with and how therapy can help!

Millions struggle with significant hoarding problems. You aren’t alone, your family member isn’t lazy or irresponsible. It is usually the opposite – stemming from perfectionism, or feeling too much responsibility that leads to feeling like you can’t let anything go.

What makes therapy work is the relationship you have with your therapist and finding the right method for you.

The more evidence we provide ourselves that pleasant or neutral events are occurring, the more likely we are to combat narratives like the “bad day.” As you work to implement this exercise, be cautious of the difference between embodying pleasant experiences vs toxic positivity.

Self-compassion is a hard concept to grasp. There are many schools of thought when it comes to what self-compassion is vs. what it isn’t. The first thing to address is understanding the difference between self-indulgence, self-compassion, and self-pity.

Understanding what makes you feel regretful, assessing false vs genuine guilt, and realigning with your values to find peace.

4 tools to help you calm your body and mind when feeling anxious, stressed or down. Click here to learn how to implement these tools.

Attunement revolves around your ability to connect and sense what is happening within your client. Attunement in the general public can be knowing what your partner needs before they ask, sensing that a friend is down even if they put a smile on.

“Trust yourself” is a common phrase people use – telling you to follow your intuition or gut. Listen to yourself about what you should do next or where you should go. Trusting ourselves isn’t so easy when we haven’t been taught that we are trustworthy.

If you find yourself struggling with constantly caring for others over yourself, you need to examine the part of you that is wounded, the part that feels like your connection to others can only be maintained through our ability to people-please and caretake.

We need to learn to move from a place of motivation from criticism to motivation from self-compassion. People use self-criticism as a “motivator.” If we are our own worst critic then we will push ourselves farther. Unfortunately, that’s not the truth and in reality, actually holds us back.

This year looks a lot different from 2020 new year's. Patrice reflects on how this year's reflection looks different and working on embracing time & patience into 2021.

We often treat rest and relaxation as a reward. Something to be earned after burning the candle at both ends. In Western culture, this is seen as laziness. We have created a whole narrative to go with relaxation because we don’t understand its function.

As you move into your learning zone and gain trust that you will know where the line of unnecessary risk is, your comfort and learning zones grow. In turn, you can push yourself a little farther, find and take more opportunities you didn’t know existed, and create more space to find and be who you are.

To be a part of conversations, race, racism and our society, and to have opinions, we have to be open to new information and continue to challenge ourselves to gather information to be educated on institutional racism and its impacts on our community.

Now that you have been able to create more self-awareness of your mind you can work towards self-compassion and validation to allow a release of the chaos.