People House

01/10/2026

Happy Saturday from the House!

01/09/2026

Check out this new group being offered at NO COST! Sign up today!

01/08/2026

Say hello to this week's highlighted Core Practitioner, Nicole Altman, CNP-PMHNP!
I believe psychiatry is not only a science but also an art. Every person is unique, and therefore, the approach to their treatment should be unique. I strive to provide holistic, individualized, collaborative, and evidence-based care while meeting people where they’re at.

My goal is to help people feel genuinely seen and supported while collaborating to reach their personal and wellness goals through connection, curiosity, and compassion. I am passionate about eliminating the stigma surrounding mental health

As a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, I provide medication management and integrative psychiatric care for individuals in South Dakota and Colorado. My approach blends evidence-based medicine with a holistic understanding of how the mind, body, and environment interact to shape overall well-being.

Outside of my clinical work, I find enjoy and music, art, learning and research, house renovation projects, time with family, friends, and my dogs, being outdoors, campfires, and going for drives to chase sunsets.

Email:info@silverliningbhap.com

01/07/2026

01/07/2026

Closing the Loop || By Laura Zwisler, LPC

It’s no surprise after the excess of the holidays that we buckle down and set some goals when we get to the new year. Of course we want to get back to something that feels healthier and sustainable, but I’ve started to wonder if setting goals is really the way forward. I propose that instead of goals we need a better feedback loop, we need intention.

The clients in my office who change, really change, always embrace one practice: being honest about what happened, and honest about what needs to be different going forward. In fact, the most powerful explanations for things going awry I hear begin with the words, “I chose.” “I chose to have unprotected s*x and that’s how I got pregnant,” or “I chose to bottle up my feelings and not say anything and now I find myself so resentful I’m on the brink of divorce.” Granted, it can take a long time for people to get to the place where they see how their choices led to their outcomes. And, it can take a lot of humility for them to own those choices. When, and if they do, the changes that follow are profound. Owning our choices provides a way forward. In one admission of what we did last time we can also know what we don’t want to do next time.

The power of seeing our actions as a choice isn’t just in closing the feedback loop, though. Sometimes making a choice frees up bandwidth for living with the choice. Finding yourself on the fence about something important? We don’t tend to realize just how much energy it takes to stay perched on that precipice. The choice you need to make might be more clear than you’d like to admit, it’s what follows that you’re avoiding. But owning our outcomes is both empowering for future choice opportunities and for making forward progress. Perhaps you need to do something you really don’t want to do. You can spend energy holding yourself in limbo, or that same energy doing damage control and helping yourself cope with hard realities. At least the latter is moving your life forward. Your destiny belongs to you. Choose it. It will set you free.

So back to you, and your New Year’s Resolutions. Do you really need a goal, or do you need to be honest about what’s happening now? Do you feel crappy because you’ve eaten every cookie offered and skipped the gym for a month straight? Perhaps you don’t need to resolve to work out, perhaps you just need to own your choices and their consequences. “I chose to treat my body like a dumpster for the month of December, that’s why I feel bad.” I hope you’re smiling when you say this because this exercise isn’t about judgment, it’s about getting in touch with reality. Yes, yes I did live a large life at the holidays. Was it worth it once a year? Probably. Do I need to resolve to be better? Maybe not. I already know this isn’t sustainable. My body doesn’t need a big change, it just needs me to go back to normal. Continuing to choose this will continue to yield similar results. When the feedback loop is closed, the problem self-corrects.

Most of the things we want don’t actually need will power- they need intention. Do you intend to spend your monthly contribution to your Trip to Greece Fund at the bar? When we wake up on the first Sunday of January with a headache and less money for Greece we can skip the shame of “failing” at our goal. Instead we could start with the phrase, “I chose to spend Greece money going out last night.” That sobering sentence just might snap us into redirecting our fun budget for the following week back toward Greece.

More importantly though, every moment we feel like our life is off track, like a victim, or even just that Murphy’s Law is always two steps behind us, we come back to ourselves with the words “I chose.” In those two words is all of our agency. With those two words about our past we write our future. May the coming year be everything you set out for it to be.

About the Author: Laura Zwisler is a Licensed Professional Counselor and the owner of Lafayette Couples Counseling. She specializes in relational therapy and men’s work. Her practice reflects a deep belief that through corrective relational experiences we can heal traumas, get needs met, and fulfill our greatest potential. In addition to counseling, Laura supervises interns at People House, leads workshops and trainings, and writes about the human experience. If you are interested in working with Laura, please visit: https://www.lafayettecouplescounseling.com/ or email her at: laura@lafayttecouplescounseling.com.

01/05/2026

https://peoplehouse.org/affordable-counseling-interns/

12/31/2025

Fate or Destiny: It’s your choice || By Phannie Krentzman

Fate and Destiny have one thing in common; you make them both up. I am a curious person and when I learn or hear about something, I wonder about its origins, about its truth and how it applies to my life. On my journey of self-discovery, the concept of fate and destiny has come up a lot and through my natural inquisition I have come to understand the truth of fate and destiny as an expression of the human condition and human potential.

In one sense fate is something that happens to us, or rather, this is how we experience it. It is the bad luck, the road blocks, the limitations and the roller coaster of life. Fate is the pattern that drives your life, originating from your wounding in childhood. Fate gets named when you find yourself time and time again in the same experience, no matter how different the city, person or circumstances may be. Often we are bewildered by and victim to these recurring events and conditions. This repetitive pattern makes us feel trapped by our fate, and we quietly surrender to it as all-that’s-possible, abandoning our will and our hearts in the process.

Simply put fate is our unconscious beliefs played out by characteristics behaviors that we experience as the only way to be and survive in the world. A hidden agenda fulfilled by our assumption that we are separate and broken and require certain conditions to be viable. An invisible road map we follow unwittingly, fulfilling what we made up to be true about ourselves, others and the world in those formative years.

Destiny is an entirely different beast. Destiny, though often formatted to fit different belief systems, is your soul’s inherent tension to create what it loves and why it chose to be embodied. If you’ve lived long enough and have paid any amount of attention, you’ll have noticed that there are things that you’d really love to create or experience but, due to our conditioning, we give these dreams very little runway, either reformat them to something more practical or acceptable to ‘others’, deem them unrealistic, put them off until it’s a better time; the list goes on.

Destiny is an expression of our inherent power and connection to source energy. As science has proven now, energy cannot be created or destroyed. The energy that animates your form (and makes up your body and the world we live in) is the same energy that created the universe. Your soul is a universally unique expression of the creative energy that makes up everything, and it’s come to have an embodied experience on earth for a reason. Living your destiny is simple yet profound. It’s being the soul version of you. It’s expressing the inherent freedom you have and what brings you actual fulfillment and satisfaction in your life. Your destiny is the things that you love, for their own sake. The creation and experience of them brings you joy in the moments you are being them, and that energy cascades through your whole life.

We often only have a connection to the whispers of our hearts, our destiny. It gets so buried beneath our survival that it can take quite an excavation to remember who we are and what we love. Embodying your soul creates your destiny and heals you along the way. There are actually no barriers to you creating your destiny other than remembering and connecting to your inherent wholeness and listening to the language of your soul – your intuition, and following it.

Both your fate and your destiny reside within you. It’s your choice which one you create in your life. When you gain awareness of how you limit yourself, you gain the ability to choose something different. When you remember who you are in your heart, you create the opportunity to create your destiny and live a fulfilled, joyful, connected life. Both of these aspects of your humanness are created by you and are your choice. Which will you choose?

About the Author: Phannie has a long career of being a movement artist, movement and embodiment educator and creator. During her career as a professional dancer, studio owner, and company founder, she spent her time uncovering what is true and real in this world. Originally used as tools to create content for performances with strong messaging about the human experience, she created the embodiment teachings and methodology of the Radical Love Movement.

Phannie has dedicated her life to authentic expression and understanding how consciousness works. She now has alchemical structure to support others in discovery and application of their authentic selves expressed through the body.