Mindscapes

08/07/2025

As a therapist with chronic Lyme, I have first-hand experience of how Lyme can be devastating for mental health and can limit capacity for standard coping strategies. Please reach out if you need help on your health journey.

07/27/2025

Needing some support navigating this increasingly chaotic world?🔥😵‍💫 We have immediate openings for new clients! 🙂 Drop an email to michelleheyden@mindscapes-counseling.com to get started.

12/19/2021

It's been quite a while since I posted. It is so easy to get swept up in the chaos of holiday events and year-end work even without a pandemic. This is permission to take a much-needed break.

Trust me: It will all be there when you get back

08/21/2020

This article is great at explaining how our brains are struggling with the chronic stress of this pandemic and gives some ideas for adjusting coping strategies in a sea of the unknown.

“Your ‘Surge Capacity’ Is Depleted — It’s Why You Feel Awful” by Tara Haelle

Here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life

07/01/2020

We can't edit out negative feelings without editing out ALL feelings.

Gwynn Raimondi, MA
• • • • • •
To feel pleasure we need to come back home into our bodies. Or for some of us be in our bodies for essentially the first time in our lives. And this means feeling all the sensations of our body - pain, anxiety, discomfort and pleasure, peace, and comfort. We can't experience one without the other. We can't pick and choose which sensations we are going to allow ourselves to feel and which we aren't. It's an all or nothing type of deal.

And in order to really feel pleasure, peace, and comfort in our bodies, we need to first go through the initial discomfort of beginning to feel them. This may seem like an oxymoron, and yet it is part of the process.

You can read the full essay here:: http://gwynnraimondi.com/the-pursuit-of-pleasure-while-living-with-complex-trauma/

We will also be exploring this more in Embodied Writing:: Pleasure

http://gwynnraimondi.com/embodiedwritingpleasure/

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06/27/2020

In a time of a lot of change, this is an empowering way to view the process of growth.

We are in the midst of the greatest collective awakening.

We’ve been forced to look at our shadows + the shadows of our society in a way that we’ve never done before.

When we look at our shadows there is always pain, confusion, + rage. It’s a palpable energy you might feel in the form of anxiety, sleeplessness, or physical pain.

To wake up is not some esoteric “monk-like” experience. Waking up is simply expanding your consciousness, becoming aware, + having a realization of your own ego. An ego that keeps you repeating behaviors that began in childhood when these behaviors were a way of survival.

To leave this unconscious, autopilot, survival based state, we typically need to reach a breaking point. A bottom. This bottom pushes us to go inward. To pay attention. To shed the conditioning of the false self to embody the truth of who we’ve always been.

Awakening causes a ripple effect. As we alchemize our pain, our trauma—into purpose, we’re naturally drawn to help others do the same. We then are the living examples of moving beyond scarcity, beyond power/control dynamics, to abundance + cooperation.

We see others as limitless. Powerful creators. And we support + uplift them, rather than engage in destructive behaviors. Because we fully embody the truth: what we do to another, we do to ourselves.

What stage are you feeling you’re on?

06/05/2020

This is a great list of resources for white people who want to do their anti-racism work.

This is a working document for scaffolding anti-racism resources. The goal is to facilitate growth for white folks to become allies, and eventually accomplices for anti-racist work. All of these resources have been sourced from other Google docs, or articles -- we have simply reordered them in an...

05/31/2020

"Denouncing symptoms of the disease without treating the root cause is bad medicine."

Denouncing symptoms of disease without treating the root cause is bad medicine.

04/20/2020

If you are a healthcare worker of any type, on the frontlines or not, you may benefit from this series of free webinars on stress management and emotional wellbeing at these times. In fact, I think anyone could benefit from this information right now so please feel free to share.

It's a difficult time for everyone, especially those of you who are serving patients. Learn from experts how health care providers can reduce personal stress...

04/15/2020

We are navigating collective trauma. There is quite a range of normal reactions and some not listed below are:

* Feeling as though you should be reacting more and feeling guilty about it
* Feeling as though you're on an emotional rollercoaster throughout a day or an hour and having intense bouts of emotion seemingly out-of-the-blue
* Having a sense as though people can now understand how it feels to live with the anxiety and depression that you experience everyday
* Feeling as though not much is different in your life

Sharing of this has been pretty overwhelming (in a good way) since I first shared it. But in case you haven't seen it yet...

Normal human responses to a global pandemic that do not need to be pathologized or treated as abnormal:

• Food and eating challenges & difficulties

• Resurgence of compulsive or addictive behaviours

• Obsessive or instrusive thoughts, memories or fears

• Generalised fear, anxiety, panic & overwhelm

• Depression, dissociation, shutdown, freeze, hopelessness

• Feelings of abandonment or loneliness or isolation

• Sense of loss of control or powerlessness. Feeling confused

• Anxiety around money, shelter, food, and other survival needs

• Past traumas being triggered, activated or re-experienced

• Health anxiety heightened (about Covid19 and otherwise)

• Feeling unheard or unseen amidst the flood of stories

• Feeling like existing chronic needs are being ignored

• Thoughts and feelings about death and dying

• New and old grief surfacing

• Feelings of anger, irritation and frustration

• Caring for everyone to own detriment. Compassion fatigue

• Feeling exhausted, fatigued, unmotivated, lethargic

• Hyper-focus, surges of energy, keeping 'doing' to distract

• Immune system depleted, other illnesses starting, chronic flares

(list not exhaustive)

AND if you do need support with any of it, that's okay too.

Sarah Mariann Martland

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