Dali’s Mental Health Care Page

09/05/2025

It’s a matter of perspective
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNhaBGlztgV/?igsh=bnpwdGVveXJrbnJn

08/29/2025

Book recommendation:
“When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection” by Dr. Gabor Maté is a book about how chronic stress, emotional repression, and unresolved trauma can manifest physically as illness. Here’s a clear summary:

Main Premise:

Dr. Maté argues that our emotional health and physical health are deeply connected. When we habitually suppress our emotions—especially anger, grief, and stress—our bodies can “say no” by developing chronic illnesses such as cancer, autoimmune diseases, and other stress-related conditions.

Key Points:

Chronic Stress and Illness
Persistent stress weakens the immune system, alters hormones, and affects the nervous system, making the body more vulnerable to disease.

Personality Patterns Linked to Illness:

People-pleasing – Putting others’ needs first and ignoring your own.

Emotional repression – Avoiding conflict, suppressing anger, and denying pain.

Hyper-responsibility – Feeling responsible for everyone else’s well-being.

The Role of Childhood:
Early emotional experiences shape how we handle stress. Children who learn to silence their feelings often grow into adults who disconnect from their bodies—until illness forces them to pay attention.

The Body as a Messenger:
Illness is not a failure; it’s a signal. The body “says no” when the mind has been saying yes to too many demands.

Healing Requires Awareness:
True healing involves acknowledging and expressing emotions, setting boundaries, and living authentically rather than under constant self-imposed pressure.

Key Quote:

“When we have been prevented from learning how to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us.”

08/16/2025

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMtFFaZBPdI/?igsh=bGdvNHU3N2p1NWow

07/03/2025

Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff discusses how to live freely in a goal-obsessed world by adopting an experimental mindset to combat cognitive overload and productivity pressure. She identifies the "Maximalist Brain" as the belief that everything we do has to be the biggest and most ambitious version of a goal, which often leads to overwhelm and burnout. The experimental mindset, based on the scientific method, involves observing your current situation, asking a research question, and designing a tiny experiment to collect data. Being aware of your mindset is crucial because it influences your decisions, relationships, and feelings, and she identifies three limiting mindsets: cynical, escapist, and perfectionist.
More to learn in the video about the challenges of facing uncertainty and productivity while ensuring your actions align with your authentic desires rather than external pressures.

"We try to stick to routines and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process. There is a lot more to think...

11/11/2024

“it’s not what happened in the past that creates our present misery but the way we have allowed past events to define how we see and experience ourselves in the present. A person can survive being beaten but cannot remain psychologically intact if he convinces himself that he was beaten because he is by nature blameworthy or because the world by its very nature is cruel. A child can overcome sexual violation, but she will be debilitated if she thinks that she somehow either deserved the abuse or brought it upon herself. She also cannot function as a self-respecting adult if she comes to believe that she is loveable or acceptable only for her sexuality. A neglected child may be helpless, but the damage comes if he acquires the defining belief that helplessness is his real and permanent state in the world. The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma, or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meanings we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past.”

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate

10/29/2024

“The natural order in all mammalian cultures, animal or human, is that the young stay under the wings of adults until they themselves reach adulthood. This is how under normal circumstances the human young were reared throughout the course of evolution and history, until very recently. Immature creatures were never meant to bring one another to maturity. They were never meant to look to one another for primary nurturing, modeling, cue giving, or mentoring. They are not equipped to act as one another’s focus of orientation, to give one another a sense of direction or values. The predictable and widespread consequences of what my friend, psychologist Gordon Neufeld, has termed peer orientation are the increasing immaturity, alienation, violence, and precocious sexualization of North American youth…It is commonly thought that peer affiliation leads to drug use because kids set bad examples for each other. That’s part of the picture, but a deeper reason is that under ordinary circumstances, adolescents who rely on their peers for emotional acceptance are more prone to being hurt, to experiencing the sting of each other’s immature and therefore often insensitive ways of relating. They are far more stressed than are children who are well connected to nurturing adults. Kids are not cruel by nature, but they are immature. They taunt, tease, and reject. Those who have lost their orientation to adults and look to the peer group instead find themselves having to shut down emotionally for sheer protection.”

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Gabor Mate

10/23/2024

"Today he might also include in his sermon sugar, caffeine, talk shows, gourmet cooking, music buying, right- or left-wing politics, Internet cafés, cell phones, the CFL or NFL or NHL, the New York Times, the National Enquirer, CNN, BBC, aerobic exercise, crossword puzzles, meditation, religion, gardening, or golf. In the final analysis, it’s not the activity or object itself that defines an addiction but our relationship to whatever is the external focus of our attention or behavior. Just as it’s possible to drink alcohol without being addicted to it, so one can engage in any activity without addiction. On the other hand, no matter how valuable or worthy an activity may be, one can relate to it in an addicted way. Let’s recall here our definition of addiction: any repeated behavior, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. The distinguishing features of any addiction are compulsion, preoccupation, impaired control, persistence, relapse, and craving.

Mate Md, Gabor. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (pp. 223-224). North Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition. "

09/11/2024

Friends, I have 2 slots open if you can help share my post and spread the word. Thank you!
https://cccsanjose.com/therapists/dali-chen

09/04/2024

I am currently taking new clients. Here is my info. Feel free to send me an email or leave a voice message.

Marriage and Family Therapist Trainee (669) 232-0976