News

Dr. Friedman TeBockhorst has a new research article published.  Click the link to check out her article on one way that people sometimes respond to trauma — by freezing up. http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2014-41512-001/

If you or someone you know may need counseling in Boulder, CO, we’re here to help. Here at the Metis Center, we create a comfortable environment where you should never feel ashamed for seeking counseling. We see and help all different people from all kinds of backgrounds and situations, including those who may be questioning their sexuality or spirituality. Depression is serious and real. It’s also something that most of us will experience at least once in our lives. While it may be hard to accept and talk about depression because it makes you feel “weak,” it’s absolutely necessary if you want to feel better. Victims of depression need a steady support group of friends and loved ones to help them get through the lowest lows. If you’re a friend of someone who is suffering from depression, we have some help for you. If your friend hasn’t specifically already told you that they’re feeling down or depressed, it’s time to acknowledge it. Tell your friend you’ve noticed that they seem down or depressed. Let them know that you want to help them and try to show them how they’re needed and appreciated. Talk to them when you’re upset or when you want to vent, tell them about things you wouldn’t trust with just anyone. Never pretend like their depression doesn’t exist or that it’s not a serious condition. Try to find out why your friend is depressed, too. Did they just go through a break up? Are their parents getting divorced? Showing that you care will help them.

Here at the Metis Center For Psychological Services, a place for therapy in Boulder, CO, we’re serious about providing a safe, welcoming place for people of all backgrounds and situations. We’re a nonjudgemental environment and a LGBTQA safe space. By now, you likely have a go-to coping mechanism for stress and problems. While we hope it’s on the healthy side of the spectrum, some coping methods aren’t. No matter how you deal, though, everyone can use a little extra support and one of the best sources of this is talking with a professional therapist. Today we’ve got a few ways that everyone can benefit from therapy. Therapy can help you handle and deal with your emotions from stress and problems in your life, even if this stress or problem isn’t life changing. Therapy itself is well-known for its problem-solving techniques and tools for managing and overcoming anxiety, depression, and even professional challenges. These techniques and tools are also invaluable for establishing a better emotional wellness in your daily life. Therapy can hold you accountable for reaching your goals. No matter what struggle you’re going through in life, whether it’s losing weight or finding forgiveness within yourself, we can help you get past the those mental blocks that you can encounter with any challenge. You don’t have to face anything alone. Talking with someone can help you find purpose. When you speak to a professional therapist, you’re opening yourself up to what you’re struggling with and acknowledging where you’d like to go from there. This allows you

We offer testing and assessments to help our clients better know and understand themselves. The Ancient Greek aphorism “Know Thyself” has persisted over the centuries in many cultures. Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu wrote, “He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.” For the average person, motivation in life is to do well and be successful. For some, not knowing who they are and under what circumstances they operate  best actually holds them back from reaching their goals. At other times, it may be the goals that are not well suited to the person; the expectations don’t fit reality. It’s difficult to discern when this is the case for the person who doesn’t know their own strengths and weaknesses. Having used those terms, strengths and weaknesses don’t go hand in hand with good and bad. Rather, they show where a person can work to improve or where they excel, while providing opportunity for optimizing work and productivity through creating boundaries or finding people to come around and provide skills in areas of weakness. All this can be learned through the different assessments we offer. The cognitive assessment can help to identify attention, memory, problem-solving, language skills and intellectual functioning. The learning assessment helps to pinpoint if there are any learning disabilities so we can help you find strategies in learning in the way you need. The personality assessments will help to confirm what you may already know about yourself, but the evaluation will help to identify key things that have the potential to

Here at The Metis Center For Psychological Services, Dr. Sunda Friedman offers safe and comfortable counseling and services right here in Boulder CO for people of all ages and backgrounds. We see quite a few young people come through our doors at the Metis Center and we, as we were once also teenagers, know how hard it is to get through the teenage years. Now it’s easy for us, as those who have survived being teenagers, to see how perfectly normal it is to be sad sometimes and need to speak to someone about it. However, sometimes we feel more than just sadness and those feelings are real and they need to be addressed. Teenage depression is real. When you feel depressed, it can feel like no one understands you. However, depression is far more common in teens than many people realize. You are not alone and your depression is not a hopeless case. While you may feel like you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel, it is there and can be found even faster through proper treatment and healthy choices. It’s oftentimes hard to put into words what depression feels like and different people experience it in different ways. However, there are some more common issues and symptoms that may help you decide if you or someone you know closely is battling teenage depression. Feeling irritable, sad, and angry Nothing seems fun anymore and you just don’t see the point anymore Feeling worthless or guilty Too much or not enough sleep Frequent unexplained

September 10 and 17: Training doctoral interns at the University of Northern Colorado on trauma psychology and effective clinical practice September 15: College Success for Students Who Learn Differently at the Broomfield Library October 15:  Webinar: Dealing with Depression: Warning Signs, Treatment, and Suicide Prevention October 16:  Live on Channel 22: Diagnosing and Treating Mood Disorders from 12:30 to 1:00 October 21:  Feeling Down?  Helping Adults Manage Depression at the Louisville Library  

What to make of those letters after a mental health clinician’s name? Before you contact a therapist, here’s what you need to know about what he or she knows. http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/alphabet-soup-decoding-mental-health-credentials-0916145  

The decision to go to college comes with so much opportunity, and the burden of those opening doors can be overwhelming to say the least. It seems like you are forced to take on loans, jobs, school and the decision of a career before even knowing what you want from life. Stepping into higher education does come with responsibilities, but they can be met with excitement instead of stress by forming goals and preparing. The start of the school year is upon us, it’s time to invest in you or your child’s future with the counseling Boulder, CO needs. With our directed and specific goal assessments, we can help you find the right majors for your interests and help you figure out just what you want from college and how you can attain these goals. By identifying your academic strengths and weaknesses, you know going in what you need to work on and develop study techniques to help you succeed. College is about finding yourself, and getting there without the pain and stress of doing it on your own is priceless. Finding a partner in your education can be your best tool for success. The last thing that anyone wants is to walk out of college with a degree you can’t use or you don’t like and a mountain of debt knocking on your door. Knowing your goals and methods to execute them will not only make college satisfying, but will make it the exciting journey that it is intended to be. Find out how we

“The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality.” This quote from writer Andrew Solomon contains some important wisdom about the nature of the beast we call depression. It is normal to experience sadness, to have days of feeling grumpy or down. We all have days like this, sometimes a few in row. It is normal to feel sad in response to distressing life events – these are the bumps in the road of life, and for most of us, we navigate over the bumps and get on with the life we recognize as ours. However, when the obstacle is not the normal vicissitudes of daily life, but rather a run-in with depression, this can be altogether a different story. Life becomes a foreign and exhausting experience, where it feels like there is no respite and no hope for a more engaged tomorrow. Here are some things to look for if you aren’t sure whether or not you might benefit from help for depression. If you have found that, for more than two weeks or so: 1. Everything is exhausting: the tasks of daily living – getting the mail, taking out the trash, doing the dishes, talking to friends or family – are overwhelming and extraordinarily demanding. If it feels like doing the little things of everyday life is just too much to face, you may be dealing with depression. 2. Everything is annoying: for many people, and this can be especially true for men, who in our culture our discouraged from acknowledging that they feel

Last month I wrote about avoidance, one component of trauma-related struggles for many people. Another one of the primary things therapists consider when exploring trauma-related problems is what we call “re-experiencing.” When the natural healing process after a traumatic experience does not go smoothly, one of the things that many people will find themselves struggling with is the fact the memories of the traumatic event won’t seem to settle in and fade into the background, instead remaining very charged and intruding frequently into day-to-day life—re-experiencing. Re-experiencing happens in a few ways. Some people find that they have unavoidable nightmares related to the event. This can be so distressing that some people find they avoid going to sleep at all. Others find that thoughts about the event and its aftermath trespass unbidden in their minds during their waking hours; we call these “intrusive thoughts.” Some find that memories from the event pop up and that they cannot control when and how these memories occur, sometimes in response to specific environmental cues and sometimes seemingly at random. When these types of memories begin to plague a person, they can be quite distressing. This is because the way our brains form memories during a critical incident is physiologically different than the way they form the more pedestrian memories of our day-to-day lives. When the memories associated with a traumatic event are formed, they tend to be stored as sensory memories: we remember the sights, the smells, and the sounds the way we experienced them during the event. The part of