Growing Light Counseling, PLLC

12/24/2021

With love, from your therapist! 💜🎄

07/29/2021

Thank you for showing us all how to set and hold boundaries, and how to be our own best caretaker.

07/27/2021

I love how clients express themselves and I always feel so honored when they share it with me. This one is about navigating the pandemic together. 💜

07/09/2021

Behind the scenes of telehealth. Sasha working hard to transmit calm, relaxing vibes.

05/19/2021

Trying to stay up on the latest treatment methods.

03/05/2021

A Friday pick-me-up. Bravo to all of us for just making it through today, this week, this year. I’m proud of us.

Drift away with Sia x David Guetta's song "Floating Through Space" Golden Globe nominee Best Picture - Musical or Comedy, Music, the new film written & direc...

02/19/2021

I created this post for my local community page, but thought it would be worth sharing here as well.

Hi friends! Your friendly neighborhood therapist here. Just offering a little mental health check-in for those who might need it.

I am a licensed professional counselor and I have been talking to my clients—the ones I could connect with—about this all week. We have all been through trauma over the last several days. We are not even on the other side of it yet since we still don’t have clean water and many people are just now starting to be able to assess the damage to their homes. In light of all this, you may be feeling the emotional impact of one of the toughest weeks in our recent history.

It is typical for our brains to “store” emotions until it feels safe to process them. It would make sense that as we slowly regain some sense of safety and normalcy, that we would also begin to feel the emotional fallout of everything we have been going through. That may look like exhaustion, depression, mood swings, anger, restlessness, avoidance, anxiety, etc. Please be gentle with yourself and with others as we all work to find some sense of well-being in the midst of a disaster situation.

I have heard some saying, “My power never went out, so I shouldn’t feel any of these things” or, “Others had it so much worse, I shouldn’t be struggling”. The reality is that even if you didn’t have outages or frozen pipes, you still lived in 5 days of fear that it could happen. That alone takes its toll. Any time our basic human needs are in jeopardy (food, water, shelter, warmth), it is going to cause a major fear response.

If you find yourself struggling emotionally over the next few days and weeks, please reach out for support. Everything you are feeling is understandable. Your overwhelming emotions are so valid in light of what we have been asked to endure. And consider the context: we have had to endure all of this in the midst of a year of pandemic conditions. It is so much for anyone to try to navigate.

If you’re looking for resources, here’s a great place to start: https://mentalhealthtx.org. Please take care of yourself and please be gentle as we all move toward, not just physical recovery from this week, but mental and emotional recovery as well. Sending love, my Denton friends!

Mental Health Texas provides learning and treatment opportunities for those coping with mental health conditions and those who support them.

01/01/2021

As much as 2020 sucked, I can’t hate it entirely. It did contain one of the happiest days of my life. 💜🥰 (Photo by: Rachel Meagan Photography)

09/21/2020

Don’t give up. Let’s believe in the good. 💜

08/22/2020

This quote is from the forward in The Power of Attachment by Diane Poole Heller, PhD. Such a powerful reminder to not only attend to our trauma narrative (the story we tell ourselves), but to also attend to our history of attachment and our physical experience of trauma information stored in our bodies to find healing.

08/12/2020

Continuation of my pandemic self-care backyard obsession: birdbath with a solar fountain (added in June). So cute!!! Stay tuned for updates on my birthday project...coming soon. 👏

07/29/2020

Francesca is all of us.