Maplewood Counseling
Work Life Balance for Better Mental Health

Work Life Balance for Better Mental Health

Relationships

Work Life Balance Strategies

Help Prioritizing Your Needs

Get in Touch with Maplewood Counseling in NJ

Help Maintaining Work Life Balance

Are you finding it challenging to maintain a healthy balance between your demanding work schedule and personal life? We completely understand how overwhelming it can be when the lines between professional commitments and personal space start to blur. But here’s the good news – you’re not alone in this struggle. Many of us find ourselves trapped in the monotonous cycle of work, eat, sleep, and repeat. However, we firmly believe that establishing a healthy work-life balance is not as daunting as it may seem at first glance.

Allow us to share a few practical tips that we believe can make a significant difference:

  1. Set clear boundaries: It’s crucial to create and maintain clear-cut boundaries between your work and personal life. Whether it means committing to not checking emails during family dinners or establishing specific work hours, taking charge of these boundaries is entirely up to you. By doing so, you can create space and time for the things that matter most outside of work.
  2. Prioritize self-care: Remember, you cannot pour from an empty cup. It is vital to dedicate time to activities that refresh and rejuvenate you. Whether it’s engaging in hobbies you love, practicing mindfulness and self-reflection, or simply taking time for relaxation, self-care should be an essential part of your routine. By nourishing your mind, body, and soul, you will have more energy and focus to excel in both your professional and personal life.
  3. Learn to say no: It’s perfectly okay to decline certain meetings or tasks that may not align with your priorities or overwhelm your schedule. Understanding your limits and learning to say no when necessary is a crucial step towards achieving a more balanced life. By doing so, you can create space for the activities and relationships that truly matter to you.
  4. Seek support when needed: If you’re feeling overwhelmed or stretched too thin, remember that it’s okay to ask for help. Whether it means delegating tasks at work or seeking guidance and support from loved ones, sharing the load can alleviate stress and provide a fresh perspective. Remember, you don’t have to face everything on your own, and seeking support is a sign of strength, not weakness.

In the pursuit of work-life balance, it’s important to remember that it’s not about achieving perfection. Rather, it’s about creating a lifestyle that brings value, fulfillment, and happiness to your life as a whole. We believe in you and know that you have the resilience, determination, and dedication required to achieve this balance. Embrace the journey, be kind to yourself, and take small steps every day towards a more balanced and fulfilling life.

If you need help managing work life balance and getting to a better place, reach out.  We’re here to help.

Get in Touch with Maplewood Counseling in NJ

 

 

Need Help Coping with Emotional Pain?

Need Help Coping with Emotional Pain?

Anxiety, Depression, Grief, Relationships

Coping with Painful Emotions
Trauma, Dysregulation, Coping Skills

 

Trying to Cope with Difficult Emotions?
Need Better Way to Manage?

 

Serving Our Community 20+ Years

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Get Help Coping with Emotional Pain

Need help managing deep and ongoing emotional pain in your relationship and personal life? You are not alone…

We all have to deal with emotional pain at different points in our lives.  Life unfolds in ways we never expected (or wanted) and finding ways to get throught these painful times is important. Deep emotional pain is the most challenging for us all.

Does this sound familiar?

  • You lost a loved one and feel like you are in the grips of deep sorrow, trauma, shock, and ongoing grief.
  • You are feeling lost after divorce or the end of a relationship and don’t know how to handle your intense emotions.
  • Maybe you’re feel ongoing emotional pain due to problems in your relationship or family.
  • Or are you’re just feeling empty and a deep pain in your gut is painful and hard to manage.

How can you cope better with this deep emotional pain?

Maybe you could use to find better way of managing the pain so you can lessen the impact emotionally and otherwise. Understanding the source of the pain and what to do with it can help. Emotional pain, which is also referred to as the “pain body” (by Eckhart Tolle) and also referred to as old emotional pain or undigested pain, can be extremely challenging to cope with. This type of pain can be very intense and cause strong emotional reactions, especially in relationships. Pain that is “unconscious” (meaning you are unaware of the true source) can cause intense fear, sadness, anger, confusion, or other unpleadsant emotions that are hard to process. Working through emotional pain means becoming more aware and conscious of the difference between the pain and the negative thoughts about the pain which can make things a lot worse for most people.

As therapists, we also experienced emotional pain as well and have to work through our pain, so we really understand how hard it is when going through it. We have a great deal of compassion and help others with their pain by focusing on the difference between emotional pain and the negative houghts about the situation. Negative thoughts make the pain feel worse, so a big part of helping is making people aware of the emotional pain and thoughts about it. Helping people increase their awareness and noticing the pain and trying to accept it’s there without making it into a mental concept, such as, “ this shouldn’t be happening” , “ oh, I’ll never get through this”, “it’s someone else’s fault that I’m feeling this way”. These are all examples of what can make your situation prolonged and much worse for you and others. Many people unortunately take out their uncoscious emotional pain on others since they are not feeling well and assume the reason is something others have done to cause you to feel this way. Others will trigger your old emotinoal pain, but developing the skills to work with the pain without lashing out at others will help tremendously.  You will not be able to work through old pain if you lash out at others.

Helping people process deep emotional pain takes developing more awareness about what’s going on internally in the body and paying attention to and trying to stop negative thoughts and “stories” about the experience. We can help you work on this to find the relief and peace you deserve.

If you are coping with emotional pain right now that’s been hard to manage, reach out and let us help.

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Relationship Triggers

Relationship Triggers

Relationships

Managing Relationship Triggers

How to Deal When You Get Triggered
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Relationship Triggers & How to Manage Them

 

We work with so many couples and understand how triggers can cause big problems in any relationship. If you have had a lot of challenging experiences in the past, especially childhood trauma and difficult experiences, you may get triggered by others easily.

The problem when you get triggered:

  • Causes you to lash out at the trigger.
  • Causes you to withdraw in silence.

Lashing out at the trigger can make you rage by yelling, screaming, criticizing, name calling, or act out physically against your partner, child or others who trigger you.

Maybe you shut down when triggered. The wall goes up and you check out emotionally or actually leave physically.

We understand triggers as unconscious seeds based on conditioning. Usually there is something very old – maybe you felt you did not matter or felt like you could not trust the adults to be caring and nurturing and childhood experiences were unsafe emotionally and sometimes physically. So, when your partner, child, or other unsuspecting person triggers you, the same awful feeling can be triggered. Unfortunately, the feeling is nowhere near conscious awareness and is just quickly acted on without any understanding of the true source.

We try to help people work on what to do when triggered. How to find healthier ways of understanding, then communicating in a more skillful way so you don’t destroy your close relationships.  This takes time and we have compassion for how challenging this can be and can help with the process.

Secure attachment is the ideal form of attachment. This means someone grew up in an atmosphere that fostered the 4 S’s Safe, Seen, Soothed, creates Secure Attachment

  • Feelings of Safety – you could express all types of feeling openly without threat of being crushed, ridiculed, criticized, or abused in other ways.
  • Feeling Seen – you felt seen when you expressed your feelings because parents and other adults were understanding or at least trying to convey an empathetic response.
  • Feeling Soothed –  you felt the parents or other adults were able to comfort you in any number of ways. “I’m sorry you are feeling sad,”  “I am sorry you are angry “ about ….”what can I do to help? Do you need a hug?”
  • Doing this over and over creates an atmosphere of security that allows the child to develop into an adult that has many tools for a healthy relationship.
  • If you did not experience secure attachment style as a child, your adult relationships can help you heal or confuse you. You might be reliving those earlier painful experiences with all of those unpleasant feelings that you felt when you were younger.

Therapy can help you understand your triggers and do a better job of dealing with them. If your triggers are causing big problems in your relationships, please reach out for help.  You can break these painful patterns. We can help.

Have questions for us? Get in touch

Need Marriage Counseling Before Divorce?

Need Marriage Counseling Before Divorce?

Relationships

What to Do Before Divorce?

Trouble Deciding? Unhappy?

Contact Maplewoood Counseling

Before Divorce: Why Marriage Counseling Is Helpful

Are you undecided about divorce?

Marriage counseling before divorce can help in a variety of ways. It can help with:

  • Improving communication with your spouse
  • Bettering conditions for your children
  • Easing financial stress
  • Making decisions about divorce
  • Regaining a more fulfilling life

Improving communication with your spouse

Communication problems or a lack of communication is the source of many upsets. Through communication, you and your spouse can address issues in your marriage that are making life difficult. There are ways of communicating that can benefit you both. This is true whether you end up staying married or decide to divorce. In particular, couples with children will have ongoing contact between spouses. Learning to understand each other’s wishes, needs and emotions can improve how you get along.

Bettering conditions for your children

Like it or not, how you and your spouse treat each other sets an example for your children. Your children learn by watching, and they learn to mimic their parents’ behavior. If family life is stressful, dysfunctional or combative, they are likely to show the same type of behavior themselves when adults. Developing healthy communication can help your children now and the future.

In fact, studies show that high-conflict marriages harm children. Divorce is one way to reduce conflict. However, even when divorced, parents need to find a way to minimize their conflict.

Easing financial stress

A divorce can be costly. If counseling helps you improve your relationship and you can avoid divorce, then it can ease financial stress. In addition, if you do decide to divorce, you may be able to do so amicably and avoid an expensive legal battle.

In fact, working together to resolve future problems is healthier for everyone. Parents and children, both mentally and physically. Reducing this type of stress can also reduce medical care costs, which can mount up quickly.

Making decisions about divorce

Some marriages can be fixed. Other marriages were a mismatch the start. In such cases, divorce may make life better for both spouses.

However, until you open up communication and address the issues in your relationship, it is difficult to know if you can resolve your marital problems. A counselor can help you uncover the truth and arrive at the right decisions.

In many instances, couples are not ready to end their relationship until they’ve done all they can in an attempt to repair it. This is where counseling comes in.

Regaining a more fulfilling life

Can you find happiness again after marriage? You may feel weighed down by problems involving your relationship. This can lead to depression and worries that life isn’t enjoyable anymore.

However, through counseling, a skilled therapist can help you rediscover a happy life. It’s possible to rekindle the joy and happiness you once felt.

Considering marriage counseling before divorce?

At Maplewood Counseling we can help you address marital problems before divorce and give you tools to repair your relationship. Find out how we can help.

 

Contact Maplewoood Counseling

 

Need Marriage Counseling Before Divorce?

Working Toward Couples, Marriage Counseling success

Relationships, Therapist

Marriage Counseling Success

What is Takes
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Working toward couples, marriage counseling success

How early should you start couples counseling?

Are you working toward couples marriage counseling success? People sometimes wonder whether they could’ve saved their relationship through marriage counseling or couples therapy. If they had done something sooner, would it have made a difference?

Let’s compare a couple’s relationship with maintaining your car. By the way, there’s no intention to objectify your spouse or partner with this comparison. The purpose is to compare how much time and attention people spend on their vehicles to keep them in good working order. For example, you inspect your tires, add air, and get them turned or aligned. You routinely check fluids—brake fluid, water and oil. And every several thousand miles, you change oil and filters.  You also recognize the warning signs if something that needs to be fixed. You know what to watch out for and what to repair right away. Why all the maintenance? Maintenance is important because it can avert a major breakdown. It can help you avoid disaster, such as a tire blowout, an engine seizure or a car crash.

Just the way vehicles need maintenance, so do relationships. Obviously, they require a different kind of maintenance. Thoughtful communication, attention and tender care can do a lot to repair a relationship.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t consistently devote the time and care that relationships need. In fact, this is evident in the 50% divorce rate that exists in the U.S. Perhaps, all too often, we take relationships for granted. If so, we might not see the warning signs that our relationship is falling apart. By the time we consider taking action, it might be too late to salvage it.

Tackling problems early on is best. When you deal with problems before they mount up, chances are you can restore the loving relationship you started out with.

Warning signs that a relationship is in trouble

The following are some indications that your relationship is faltering:

  • Fault-finding? Do you find yourself continuously aware of your partner’s faults? Do you often voice criticisms? Is your partner often critical of you?
  • Aggressive? Are your interactions with each other riddled with sarcastic remarks, arguments, knitted eyebrows and grimaces?
  • Feeling defensive? Do you or your partner take what the other says the wrong way, even when trying to turn over a new leaf or revitalize your relationship?
  • Drifting apart? Are you spending less and less time with each other, finding other interests and people to hang out with?
  • Envisioning a different life? Do wonder what life would be like with a different partner? Do you spend time daydreaming about being with someone else that you know?

If the above sounds familiar and is prevalent in your life, couples counseling can help. To get involved in couples therapy, you don’t have to wait until your relationship is falling apart. In fact, most couples are wise to seek counseling before their relationship reaches the stages described above.

What can trigger the above types of behavior?

Life changing experiences are often the beginning of downturns in a couple’s life together. Examples of triggers may include: childbirth, caring for elderly parents, relocation, career changes, death of a loved one or serious health issues. 

How can you plan for couples marriage counseling success?

The best way to avert disaster is to get help early on. Counseling can help you manage stress and communicate more effectively. Devote the time and attention to your relationship that it deserves. Learn how to nurture trust, intimacy, and gratitude. When you do, then you can also watch your lives improve.

Find out more about marriage counseling

If you have questions, we’re glad to answer them. Take the first step by reaching out to us.

Contact Maplewoood Counseling

 

 

Get Indian Marriage Counseling

Get Indian Marriage Counseling

Relationships

Indian Marriage Counseling NJ

Family & Couples Therapy

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Maplewood Marriage Counseling NJ Online Therapy

Looking for Indian marriage counseling in NJ

Are you looking for a therapist experienced with Indian marriage counseling? Searching for a therapist that can help you and your spouse sort through some relationship and family issues?

Does this sound familiar to you?

  • You’re unhappy in your marriage and need help with communication.
  • You struggle with your spouse’s family and the way they treat you.
  • You are in an arranged marriage and are not feeling happy and don’t know what to do.
  • You want to have a child or another child and your spouse is not ready and you argue frequently.
  • You are not sure you can work things out.

Do you feel stuck in a bad place and feel like it’s been difficult to improve communication in certain situations on your own?If you are in need of therapist experienced with Indian marriage counseling in New Jersey, Please get in touch. We are here to help and are very experienced working with Indian couples as well as mixed race couples.

Contact Maplewoood Counseling

We can provide sessions in person or remotely using a video platform if that is easier. Our office is located in Maplewood near South Orange, Millburn, Springfield and Short Hills towns and is also a short drive from Westfiled, West Orange, Livingston, Roselle Park, Montclair. Have Questions? Get in touch,