Radka Chapin Counseling, PLLC

12/23/2024

06/08/2023

Happiness isn’t something we need to chase…

Happiness is an emotion. And like all other emotions, happiness has an important job to do.

Happiness performs a specific function (it helps you look at the world with hope and delight) – but it can only do this properly if it’s treated with respect and allowed to arise in its own way and in its own time.

Remember to welcome your happiness on its timetable – not yours. Learn to work with your happiness instead of chasing it down or slapping it away. Welcome, honor, and thank your happiness. Then, let it go.

The key to working with happiness (or any emotion) healthfully is to see it as a momentary passage and not a final destination. Interestingly, if you give your happiness complete freedom, and welcome whichever emotions you feel before and after it arises, your happiness will tend to arise more often, and in response to more and different stimuli.

When you can allow your happiness to flow as but one of your many emotions, it will begin to arise naturally (and playfully) as it helps you restore full-bodied flow to your emotional life.

Join me on the blog this week as I take a look at the first emotion in the Happiness Family: https://karlamclaren.com/the-gifts-of-happiness/

08/04/2022

“While grief may look like an expression of pain that serves no purpose, it is actually the soul’s acknowledgment of what we value. Grief is the honour we pay to that which is dear to us. And it is only through the connection to what we cherish that we can know how to move forward. In this way, grief is motion.

Yet in our culture, we are deeply unskilled with grief. We hold it at a distance as best we can, both in ourselves and in each other, treating it as, Joanna Macy says, like “an enemy of cheerfulness.” There is unspoken shame associated with grief. It is sanctioned in very few places, in small doses, for exceptional occasions such as death and tragedy. Beyond that, it can feel dangerous and weak. Perhaps because we fear we’ll drown in our despair, or because it means falling apart in a world which values ‘holding it together’ above all else. But grief plays an essential role in our coming undone from previous attachments. It is the necessary current we need to carry us into our next becoming. Without it, we may remain stuck in that area of our life, which can limit the whole spectrum of our feeling alive.”

Excerpt from “Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home” by Toko-pa Turner (belongingbook.com)

Photograph of a river viewed through a berry bramble.

07/10/2022

Lately, this question has been coming up frequently.

"The first thing to keep in mind: “You never owe your parents anything,” Bryan Bruno, a psychotherapist in NYC and professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine, tells me. Read that again: You don’t owe your parents a thing. That idea can be difficult to accept, because it runs against a lot of our cultural programming, but the bottom line is relationships aren’t tit-for-tat.

Parental relationships should never be transactional — just because they birthed you and may or may not have taken care of you does not mean that they are ‘owed’ anything,” Bruno says. As a child, you may not have had a choice about the nature of your relationship with your parents, but you do now — and it’s crucial for your own health and that of your relationship that you feel a sense of agency. Coercion is not love."

For q***r folks — or anyone who has a fraught relationship with their parents — the answer is complicated.

12/21/2021

"Anxiety, depression and PTSD may be adaptive responses to adversity. “Defense systems are adaptations that reliably activate in fitness‐threatening situations in order to minimize fitness loss,” they write. It’s not hard to see how that could be true for anxiety; worry helps us avoid danger. But how can that be true for depression? They argue that the “psychic pain” of depression helps us “focus attention on adverse events... so as to mitigate the current adversity and avoid future such adversities.”
/.../
"Study author Kristen Syme, a recent WSU Ph.D. graduate, compares treating anxiety, depression or PTSD with antidepressants to medicating someone for a broken bone without setting the bone itself. She believes that these problems “look more like sociocultural phenomena, so the solution is not necessarily fixing a dysfunction in the person's brain but fixing dysfunctions in the social world."

What if mental disorders like anxiety, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder aren’t mental disorders at all?

08/23/2021

This is such a fascinating article and helpful as we're figuring out how to live on a planet in peril.

What is a good life? /.../ "There’s a another way to live a good life. It isn’t focused on happiness or purpose, but rather it’s a life that’s “psychologically rich.” /.../ one characterized by “interesting experiences in which novelty and/or complexity are accompanied by profound changes in perspective.”
/.../
Crucially, an experience doesn’t have to be fun in order to qualify as psychologically enriching. It might even be a hardship. Living through war or a natural disaster might make it hard to feel as though you’re living a particularly happy or purposeful life, but you can still come out of the experience with psychological richness.
/.../
You may experience suffering but still find value in how your experience shapes your understanding of yourself and the world around you.
/.../
The idea of a psychologically rich life wasn’t more popular in Western or wealthier countries than other places. And while people with happy lives tended to have higher socioeconomic status, the authors didn’t find significant associations between income and people with psychologically rich and meaningful lives."

A new psychological study says that "psychological richness" can be one important dimension of a full life.

12/04/2020