How Practicing Healthy Gratitude Can Help You Navigate Life’s Challenges

“Just be grateful.” It seems like everyone is touting gratitude lately: Kelly Clarkson is “Thankful,” medical researchers say it’s good for you, and even the makers of home décor want us to be “Grateful,” in loopy, cursive writing. Later this month, most Catholics will undoubtedly hear a sermon on gratitude connected to the celebration of Thanksgiving.

But what if you aren’t feeling grateful? What if, in fact, you feel like you’re struggling to keep your head above the waves?

Gratitude Isn’t About Denying Real Problems

Rachael Isaac, a pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com, runs into this a lot.

“One of the common misconceptions that I come across is, ‘Oh, I should just be grateful,’ meaning I should just be grateful and ignore my struggles,” Isaac explains. “But gratitude is not meant to invalidate our struggles. It’s a way to help us gain a better perspective on them.”

Rather than viewing gratitude as an either/or proposition—either we’re grateful or we’re acknowledging difficulties—Isaac advocates for a both/and approach.

“We have to acknowledge when bad things are bad,” she says. “That’s okay. We can acknowledge when hard things are hard. But then we can say, ‘Okay, what is also true? What also exists? What are the good things that are also happening in my life?’”

This balanced approach serves a practical purpose beyond mere positive thinking. As Isaac points out, “it allows me to break out of that all-or-nothing thinking, it allows me to see something other than the anxiety that I am experiencing due to the challenges that I’m facing.”

The Many Benefits of Gratitude

Humans are wired to give more of their attention to threats and challenges. That’s a useful trait if you’re battling a predator or figuring out how to stave off hunger or cold. But focusing too narrowly on your problems can actually be counterproductive: when your brain is on high alert, it may be more difficult to think through complex challenges that require a more nuanced solution than fight or flight.

Intentionally acknowledging the good as well as the challenge allows us to calm down and puts the brakes on the stress hormones flooding our brains. “And that allows us to bring that more solution-focused part of our brain online, so that we can think through our challenge,” Isaac says.

The past few decades have seen an explosion of research into the benefits of practicing gratitude, with researchers saying it can help improve sleep, cardiac health, social connections, mood, and problem-solving abilities, to name a few. The Bible recommends giving thanks to God as well, and spiritual masters have been pointing to the importance of gratitude for thousands of years.

But while the benefits of gratitude are well-attested, developing the practice takes time and intention.

“More often than not, it’s not a natural thing for people to do,” Isaac acknowledges. “At the end of our day, we kind of go through that litany of ‘didn’t get this done, I should have done this, I should have said this in that conversation.’ All these things are still on my to-do list that now I have to add on to tomorrow…

“That’s what we’re thinking about, and it requires some very conscious and intentional effort to say, ‘What went well today?’”

Practicing gratitude can be even more challenging for people who have feelings of low self-esteem or who suffer from religious scrupulosity, the sense that they can never be “good enough” to deserve God’s love and care.

The good news, Isaac says, is that the more we practice gratitude, the easier and more natural it becomes.

Three Tips for Effective Gratitude Practice

To help practice gratitude in a healthy way, Rachael Isaac offers her clients several practical tips.

First, be specific about what you are grateful for now, today. Yes, you “should” be grateful for your family, for the roof over your head, for your health. But reciting the same broad categories every day dilutes the power of gratitude. 

Second, set aside a few moments at the end of the day to practice gratitude, but also begin practicing it in the moment. For example: “You’re driving to the store, and the store is packed…and then you find a parking space really close to the door. And you take that moment to say, ‘Oh, thank you, Lord.’”

And third, write it down. Keeping a gratitude journal can actually be quite helpful. You’re more likely to stick with the practice if you have to sit down with a pen and paper, plus writing engages more areas of our brain so that our act of gratitude leaves a more lasting impression.

Here are a few questions Rachael Isaac suggests to make the above points practical and simple:

  •  What went well today?
  •  Where did I see beauty today? 
  •  What did I do well today?
  •  What blessings did I receive today (that parking spot, or kind words from a friend)?

A New View of Life

For clients who embrace this balanced approach to gratitude, the results can be profound. “People feel a lot more peaceful and a lot more hopeful,” Isaac reports. “Because again, it doesn’t make everything better, but it allows us to see that the good exists, too.”

This shift can be even more profound for people who feel they are not “good enough” to receive God’s blessings.

“It can really start to draw us into a closer and healthier relationship with God,” Isaac explains. “I’m not doubting his love for me anymore, I can see it all around me.”

The practice of gratitude, when approached with balance and intention, offers more than a temporary mood boost—it provides a pathway to deeper peace, stronger faith, a more nuanced understanding of our life, and more resources for creatively tackling our troubles and challenges.

If you are struggling with anxiety or negative thinking, reach out to Rachel Isaac or the other pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com. And if you are ready to begin journaling, and cultivating a new mindset, take a look at A Beautiful Life: A Year of Monthly Journal Prompts for a Happier, Healthier, Holier Mindset.

Going On A Bear Hunt–Understanding The Relationship Between Prayer and Powerful Emotions

Whether trauma, depression, anxiety, anger, or other strong feelings are causing us problems, turning to God in prayer is always a good idea. After all, God loves us and always wants to help us become more fully alive—more fully ourselves.

But in order to really benefit from prayer, we must “also learn how to pray,” as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says (#2650). It’s no wonder the Catechism spends more than three hundred paragraphs on the topic of how to pray.

When it comes to mental health, one trap that people sometimes fall into is treating prayer as a way to avoid the strong feelings that come with a crisis, according to Jacob Flores-Popcak, a pastoral counselor with CatholicCounselors.com.

“An unhealthy relationship to prayer says, ‘Help me climb up above this thing,’” Flores-Popcak said in a recent interview. Underlying that impulse is often the assumption that “spiritual things are higher than these base, awful, physical things like feelings.”

But the view that physical things—and by extension, our emotions—are to be shunned or avoided simply isn’t Catholic, Flores-Popcak said. In fact, this attempt to detach from embodied feelings is more in line with Buddhism or, within the Christian tradition, the old dualistic heresy known as Manichaeism.

The Christian tradition says that feelings are given to us by God for a reason, Popcak said: in fact, they are invitations to go deeper.

“There is no point at which any character, any person in scripture just prays a feeling away,” Flores-Popcak explained. On the contrary, the Bible is full of people who openly embraced their feelings. Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus, for example, and expressed his anxiety openly to his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“Feelings are meant to help us bond with other people and they’re meant to help us get certain needs met,” Flores-Popcak explained. “So to pray away a feeling is to pray away an opportunity for connection, and it’s to pray away a need.”

He continued: “God gives us our needs, and God calls us to relationships. Both of those things are, at their core, godly things. If I’m trying to just get rid of that, it’s gonna end up feeling like I’m just repressing the feeling, and it’s just going to come raging back later.”

It’s like the children’s song, “Going on a Bear Hunt,” Flores-Popcak said, in which the hunters come to an insurmountable mountain that blocks the path forward: “The refrain of that song is, ‘Can’t go around it, can’t go over it—gotta go through it.’ We’ve gotta go into that tunnel, into that bear’s den.”

Similarly, prayer is not meant to help us go “over” or “around” our feelings of anguish, anxiety, or sadness. “Prayer is supposed to help me go deeper into it, to find the truth at the center of it, or even on the other side,” Flores-Popcak said. In the Catholic mystical tradition, every challenge is “an opportunity to go deeper into my knowledge of myself, deeper into my knowledge of Christ, and deeper in relationship with other people.”

What does this look like? Instead of trying to pray away your feelings, try praying with these questions:

  1. “Lord, what do you want me to learn from this feeling?”
  2. “How do you want me to respond to the need at the center of this feeling?”
  3. “How do you want me to grow closer to you and to the people around me as a result of experiencing this feeling?”

Such questions align with the example of spiritual masters such as St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Teresa of Avila, and others, all of whom advise that instead of running away from feelings we’d rather not be experiencing, we ought to plunge deeper into their depths, accompanied by Christ and supported by friends—so that we can emerge stronger and more connected to God, ourselves, and the people around us.

If you need help managing your mental health and want to do so in a way that draws on your Catholic faith, reach out to Jacob Flores-Popcak or any of the other Pastoral Counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.

Don’t Reject Your Anxiety; Nurture a Better Relationship With It Instead

You think you want to get rid of your anxiety—after all, it takes over your brain and floods your body with stress hormones that don’t do much but make you miserable.

But do you really want to get rid of it? When push comes to shove, the idea of getting rid of your anxiety might just…well, make you anxious.

Jacob Flores-Popcak, a pastoral counselor with CatholicCounselors.com, often runs into this problem with new clients.

“Despite the fact that they are ostensibly coming to me for help decreasing their anxiety, they’ll often be very, very resistant to switching anything up,” Flores-Popcak said in a recent interview. The reason they often give? They can’t imagine how they could get along without their anxiety to keep them going.

“And so there becomes this horrible Catch-22 that people live with where they would really, really like to not be anxious anymore,” Flores-Popcak continued. “But when it comes right down to it, they don’t know how they’d get anything done, how they’d be in relationship with anybody, or how they’d keep themselves safe without anxiety to motivate them.”

When clients run into this roadblock, Flores-Popcak often invites them to reframe their thinking with a little help from the 2001 children’s movie Shrek.

Anxiety, the Overworked Sidekick

In the movie, an ogre named Shrek sets out on a quest, begrudgingly accompanied by an annoyingly talkative, overly helpful Donkey.

Anxiety, Jacob says, is like Donkey—or any number of other over-eager sidekicks from popular animated movies: “These sidekicks are always depicted as being very loving; they want what is best for the hero,” Flores-Popcak said. “But often, the ways that they attempt to help are kind of destructive. They mean well, but they are fallible and can get messy.”

On one hand, people suffering from constant anxiety may loathe this sidekick (much like Shrek trying to shake off Donkey in the early part of the movie). On the other hand, they rely on it for so much—getting out of bed in the morning, getting kids ready for school, managing household finances—that it can be difficult to imagine another mode for getting those things done. In this way, they can end up responding to their anxiety the way Shrek does later in the film, doing whatever Donkey tells him without questioning and suffering hijinks as a result.

“We often swing back and forth between treating anxiety as an antagonist in our story and then, on the other hand, doing whatever it tells us,” Flores-Popcak said. “But that attitude is really unfair to anxiety, poor little sidekick that he is, because guess what? He’s not a bad guy. He’s actually just like any of these other parts of me—another sidekick that’s trying to help me out. He has a job within me. For instance, if a bear is chasing me, anxiety can be a very helpful and effective survival mechanism. So anxiety certainly has its due place. But he can get overburdened.”

To put it in the language of faith, God gave us anxiety and all the physiological responses that come with it to help us out in certain situations. But habitually deploying anxiety to handle even the ordinary tasks of everyday life isn’t healthy, Flores-Popcak said.

The solution isn’t to fear and loathe our anxiety, he said, because when we do that, we’re really rejecting an essential, God-given part of ourselves. Rather, the better approach is to begin “re-assigning” the jobs that we habitually give to anxiety.

“To make progress in our experience of anxiety, we need to recognize that anxiety does not need to be my exclusive motivation for all those things,” he said. “I can wake up in the morning, and sure, I can feel anxious, and that can get me out of bed—or, I can wake up in the morning and I can challenge myself, ‘What would be a love-based reason for getting out of bed?’ And instead of just immediately giving into the kind of knee-jerk instinctual anxiety that hits me the second I open my eyes, let me take a deep breath and challenge myself to imagine a love-based reason to get out of bed in the morning.”

Similarly, when anxiety begins to assert its annoying self throughout the day (like Donkey’s constant chatter), consider pausing to take a deep breath, asking yourself: “Hey, what if I didn’t outsource this thing I’m worried about to my anxiety sidekick? What if I gave this concern to another part of me to handle? How would that feel different?”

Breaking the Habit of Anxiety

When people are reluctant to give up their anxiety because it’s the only way they know to get things done, reframing the situation in the way Flores-Popcak suggests can help overcome that mental roadblock.

But it’s no magic bullet, he said: “Just realizing, ‘Oh, huh, I can do all the things that I’m already doing, but for a love reason as opposed to a fear reason, and I won’t be anxious anymore’—no one’s going to hear that and just magically change.”

Instead, it takes time to build a new, healthier habit: slowing down enough to question the automatic anxiety response, then intentionally choosing a different response instead, and then actually carrying out that choice as an act of one’s will.

Someone has to make that choice over and over many times before it becomes habitual, Flores-Popcak said—a process that is often supported with other approaches during therapy.

But the effort is always worth it, he said, because it allows people to enter into a healthier relationship with themselves (including their “anxiety sidekick”) and with others. “It allows the actions that I take in regard to my co-workers, my friends, my kids, and my spouse to be more effective because they no longer feel that I’m coming at them with a giant fear gun,” he said. “Instead, I’m coming at them with a loving spirit.”

In the end, this allows us to arrive at the same point with our anxiety that Shrek arrives at in regards to Donkey: no longer resenting or repressing our “sidekick” as an unwanted intruder or antagonist, nor letting him control everything for us, but instead welcoming him as a well-intentioned sidekick who can be taken with a grain of salt.

For more about tackling anxiety, check out Unworried: A Life without Anxiety by Dr. Gregory Popcak. And for one-on-one pastoral counseling help from Jacob Flores-Popcak or another Catholic counselor, reach out at CatholicCounselors.com.

Everything You’ve Been Told About Raising Faithful Catholic Kids Is Wrong

Several times a week, Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak hear from parents whose adult children no longer practice the Catholic faith they were raised in. These callers to the More2Life radio program are devout Catholics who did “all the things” to pass the faith along to their kids: they sent them to Catholic school or parish-based faith formation, attended Mass every week, and involved their children in youth groups.

Yet despite their best efforts, their children abandoned the faith as adults. Why?

“Everything that parents have been told about raising faithful Catholic kids is wrong,” Dr. Popcak said in a recent conversation with Marcus Peter, host of Ave Maria in the Afternoon, on how parents—and the Church—can better support raising kids who remain faithful into adulthood. Despite the significant investment that churches make in youth ministry and faith formation, research shows that only about 15 percent of Catholic kids continue to practice their faith as adults.

“You know, the Church has this spiritual cancer where we are not going to survive the next few generations if we don’t get this number up,” Dr. Popcak said.

What Matters Most: The Family Transformed by Jesus’ Love

In 2018, Dr. Popcak, founder of both the Pastoral Solutions Institute and the Peyton Institute for Domestic Church Life, partnered with the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) to conduct the Future of Faithful Families Project. This study interviewed adults who had retained their Catholic faith to identify the common factors in their upbringing.

The study found that what mattered most was not the quality of the youth group or Catholic school, or even the family’s weekly Mass attendance. While those things are valuable, they are secondary to the habits and practices within the home, Dr. Popcak said.

“And I don’t just mean the prayers that the family says,” he explained. “I mean that the children need to experience the faith as making a significant difference in the quality of the relationships in the home compared to their less-churched friends’ families.”

Children need to see that their family’s faith influences how they handle challenges, celebrate joys, and navigate everyday life. Even in their imperfections, these families’ grounding in Christ challenges them “to address problems differently, to hang in there with each other, to pray through things, to talk about these things, to draw closer together in difficult times,” Dr. Popcak said.

“Kids need to experience the faith as a source of the warmth in the home,” he added.

Learning about Christ is important, but it is essential that kids experience the love of Christ within the family, he said. A child or teen might memorize the Catechism or attend Bible study, but that catechetical work builds on the foundation of the young person’s lived experience of faith.

“When we take the approach where we treat religion like algebra and just teach kids faith facts, they’re not falling in love with Jesus, right?” Dr. Popcak said. “But what happened in these families (in the study) is the kids experienced for themselves the real difference that living the gospel made in their daily lives as a family, which made it real for them.”

Connection, Affection, and Service

The Future of Faithful Families Project identified several common habits and practices among families who successfully handed on an enduring faith to their kids. Here are some key takeaways:

  • Prioritizing Family Time: Successful families made intentional efforts to spend time together regularly, whether through shared meals, game nights, or simply being present for each other. This emphasis on togetherness allowed faith to be modeled naturally and authentically.
  • Creating Meaningful Family Rituals: These families established daily or weekly rituals for working, playing, talking, and praying together. These rituals enabled family members to connect meaningfully with one another and practice the faith in the context of everyday life. Shared work rituals, for example, provided opportunities to experience how loving service and cooperation make work more pleasant and rewarding. They didn’t just pray at mealtimes; they brought God into everyday moments, whether through gratitude, a simple blessing, or turning to prayer during conflicts.
  • Practicing Generous Affection: Participants frequently described their families as “huggy,” highlighting a warm and affectionate atmosphere. From frequent hugs to verbal affirmations, these gestures created a sense of safety and belonging, reinforcing the idea that love is at the heart of faith.
  • Discipleship Discipline: Instead of punitive measures, these parents practiced discipleship discipline focused on teaching good behavior and encouraging virtue. They created structures that supported their children’s growth and helped them understand the “why” behind their actions.
  • Serving Each Other and Others: Families found small ways to serve one another and those around them, demonstrating that faith isn’t just about belief but action. Simple acts of kindness and service were seen as natural extensions of their love for Christ.

These families didn’t treat faith as a subject to be learned; instead, they showed that living the Gospel had a tangible impact on their daily lives, fostering resilience, hope, and a deep sense of connection.

Even in Today’s World, It’s Possible to Raise Faithful Kids

The habits and practices identified by the Future of Faithful Families Project are not a guaranteed formula, and other factors also play a role in young adults’ faith decisions. However, these foundational practices greatly improve the chances that children will grow into adults who experience the warmth of a strong relationship with God.

For parents feeling anxious about raising faithful children in today’s challenging cultural context, the study’s findings provide real hope and a clear path forward.

“The good news of this study is that we have the control, we have the ability to raise faithful kids,” Dr. Popcak said. “It’s not about the culture, it’s not about peers, it’s not about the media. It’s about how we live the faith in our home, and the degree to which the faith impacts the way we relate to each other, and the love that we share.”

For those seeking to deepen their family’s faith life, resources like the CatholicHOM app developed by Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak can support parents in cultivating these habits and nurturing their children’s faith in meaningful ways.

How ‘Virtue Discovery’ Can Change Your Life

When a client first meets with Grant Freeman, LMHC, they’re usually very focused on the problem for which they sought counseling. After an initial assessment, though, Freeman pivots the conversation in a surprising direction: “Tell me about some things you think you do well.”

His clients often resist this new direction—they keep wanting to circle back to the problem, but Freeman keeps redirecting them toward developing a list of things they do “well.” Not perfectly, necessarily, but passably—things like getting up in the morning, getting dressed, helping someone out.

Ultimately, the goal is to discover the virtues that the client already possesses, even if they are only as small as a seed, so that he or she can use those virtues to help solve their problem.

“You don’t talk about your problems, and they go away,” Freeman said in a recent interview. “You have to do something different.” Virtues are, in a nutshell, “behaving effectively” in a given situation, he said. “And if we behave effectively, then we solve our problems.”

For example, let’s say that you are at your wits’ end with your thirteen-year-old child; she doesn’t follow through on what you ask her to do, she’s argumentative and sassy, and lately, you’ve been getting in lots of fights.

Freeman might help you develop a plan for improving your child’s behavior, but in order to implement that plan, you are going to need to change your own behavior—namely, the way you typically respond to her provocations.

The virtue discovery process might help you identify virtues you’re already practicing in other contexts that would be useful to apply to this particular problem: restraint, perseverance, and gentle-firmness, for example.

But virtues do much more than help people solve problems, Freeman said; they are also the key to living a joyful, fulfilled life.

 

A Life Devoted to Virtue

You might call Freeman a “virtue evangelist.” Shortly after graduating from college, he gave up a promising career in an import/export business so that he could devote his life to sharing the joys of the virtuous life.

It was the all-boys Catholic boarding school that he attended in high school that first introduced him to that way of life. He and his classmates didn’t have CD players, television, or even radio—but they had lots of fun.

“They let us play very wildly and run rambunctiously,” he said. “We got to have a lot of fun, but it was governed. You didn’t have too many opportunities for getting way off the rails.”

After a few twists and turns in his life, he eventually decided to make it his life mission to share the “gift” he had received from his boarding school. That’s when he traded his role at the import/export company for a new role as a religion teacher at a Catholic high school.

To his delight, his students were very receptive to his message “that the good life, the beautiful life, is the life that is the most ethical, and that any fun that wasn’t virtuous was missing the mark of genuine fun.”

Eventually, he wound up at the Pastoral Solutions Institute, where he leads clients through the virtue discovery process—not only to help solve their problems, but to help them live a more joyful, satisfying life.

 

Discovering and Nurturing Your Virtues

The virtue discovery process isn’t difficult or complicated, Freeman said.

A good place to start is to realize that, as someone made in the image of God, you already possess the seed of all the virtues. All you need to grow them is the light of the Holy Spirit and some good soil—preferably, some rich rotted manure, which Freeman equates with the challenges and hardships we face on a daily basis.

“The virtues are all in there, because we’re made in the image and likeness of God,” Freeman said. “And they grow because of God’s grace, but also because they’re demanded of us. Whatever situations we’re in, we’re invited to grow in them. Now, to begin with, we perform poorly, and we will need to do some corrective work, but by hook or by crook, virtues can take root.”

To help identify and reinforce those virtues, Freeman advises clients to engage in a daily virtue inventory. The process resembles a simplified version of the Ignatian Examen. Here are the steps:

  1. Ask for the Help of the Holy Spirit: “This is not a ‘pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps’ sort of process,” Freeman said. “We can’t do anything without grace.”

Your prayer may be very simple: “Lord, show me myself. When you look at me, what do you see? Tell me about myself. You know me better than I know me, so reveal me to myself.”

  1. Review the Day: Take a few minutes at the end of each day to reflect on what went well. Ideally, write it down in a journal. If you can’t think of anything, ask your spouse or children or a friend who has your best interests at heart.

 “Your children might say, ‘You made us a sandwich,’ or your spouse might say, ‘I’m really grateful that you went to work today and came home on time ready for dinner.’ It’s as simple as that.”

  1. Identify the Virtue: Name the virtue that enabled you to do well in those situations. For example, if you helped a colleague with a difficult task, recognize the virtue of generosity or friendliness. It’s not crucial that you identify the traditional name of the virtue, Freeman said. 
  2. Look Ahead: Consider the challenges you might face the next day and determine which virtues you will need to employ to navigate those challenges effectively.

    “Once you’ve identified the virtues, then you take a little look into tomorrow and see where you might intentionally use one of those virtues in a particular place, with a particular person, in a small way, so as to become more and more familiar with that virtue,” Freeman said. “So, I exercised restraint with my kids when they were annoying me today. Now, where am I going to use that tomorrow?”

Practicing this daily virtue discovery process helps to make you familiar with the tools at your disposal to best navigate life’s challenges and opportunities.

In college, Freeman wrestled with how hard it can be to live a virtuous life, and he is still working on it. While acknowledging that reality, he advises clients that it is well worth the effort.

“The Lord tells us that if you found a sturdy friend, if you found a treasure, do everything within your power to preserve it or possess it,” Freeman said. “And virtue— your own possession of the image and likeness of God—is the greatest treasure you could possibly ever fathom. So take care of it, strengthen it, shine it up, work it out. You know, don’t leave it in the garage; take it out for a spin.”

For personalized help with the virtue discovery process, reach out to Freeman or another pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

After Trauma, EMDR Therapy Offers Hope for Healing

“Lucy” is 62 years old, but she is still haunted by the physical and psychological abuse she experienced as a child. Although decades have passed, Lucy continues to experience anxiety, periods of deep depression, panic attacks, and other symptoms.

Most of us will experience a traumatic event at some point in our lives. The U.S. Center for PTSD defines trauma as “a shocking and dangerous event that you see or that happens to you” in which “you think that your life or others’ lives are in danger.” Anyone can experience trauma at any age, and for a wide variety of reasons: bullying at school, a car accident, or conflict with a spouse or acquaintance, for example.

Often, people are able to heal following traumatic events. But in some cases, for reasons that aren’t entirely understood, the traumatic memory gets “walled off,” making it difficult to process—and heal. In this case, the trauma can persist for years or even decades.

God Wants Our Healing

But that isn’t what God wants for us, says Dr. Mark Kolodziej, a certified traumatologist with the Pastoral Solutions Institute.

“God wants us all to enjoy our lives,” he said in a recent interview. He tells new patients who suffer from past traumas that whatever happened to them was not their fault, nor was it a punishment from God, nor do they need to carry the pain to be “good” Christians. “God doesn’t want us to be stuck in this negative place in our lives.”

With God’s help and a cooperative attitude, most individuals suffering from trauma do get better. But it doesn’t “just happen,” Kolodziej said. “Time doesn’t heal anything,” he said. “It’s what you do in that time that’s going to heal things.”

And with the advent of a relatively new type of therapy, healing can be achieved fairly quickly—sometimes, in just a few sessions, he said.

EMDR Therapy: Breaking Down Walls

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is a specialized form of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) designed to help individuals process and heal from traumatic memories. Developed by Dr. Francine Shapiro in 1989, EMDR emerged from a theory that the brain processes and stores traumatic memories differently from normal memories. This difference can cause these memories to become walled off from the rest of the brain, leading to ongoing psychological and emotional distress.

During a traumatic event, the brain’s usual networking of memories and sensory experiences can go “offline,” leaving these memories unprocessed. This unprocessed trauma can manifest in various forms, such as anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other trauma-related conditions. The goal of EMDR is to help the brain reprocess these traumatic memories so that they no longer exert a harmful influence on a person’s life.

EMDR therapy does not require the patient to discuss the traumatic event in detail. Instead, the therapy leverages the brain’s capacity to reprocess memories through bilateral stimulation, most commonly achieved through guided eye movements, though other methods like tapping or auditory stimuli—first on one side of the body, then on the other—can also be used.

At the beginning of an EMDR session, Dr. Kolodziej asks the individual to identify a negative thought or emotion that is bothering them, such as anxiety or shame. Then he asks the person to complete a sentence associated with that negative feeling: “I am….”

“And the person will often say, ‘I am a loser,’ ‘I am afraid,’ ‘I am worthless.’ So that is your negative thought,” he said.

Then he asks the person to “float back” in their memory to the point in their life when those negative thoughts started, or to their worst instances. That’s the starting point for reprocessing the traumatic memory.

Next, he asks the person to identify a positive thought they would rather have associated with that feeling. “So right now your negative cognition is ‘I’m not worthwhile.’ ‘I’m a loser,’ right? So what would you like to change that to?” he said. “And they might say, ‘I have a lot to offer’ or ‘I am valuable’ or ‘I am strong.’ Okay, so that’s what you’d like to get to…. So now let’s let your brain work.”

This is where the “bilateral stimulation” comes in. For 20 to 30 seconds, the person follows Kolodziej’s finger without moving their head as he moves it across their field of vision, from left to right and back again several times. This stimulates the right side of the brain, then the left side of the brain, allowing it to more effectively reprocess the traumatic memory—breaking through the protective wall.

During bilateral stimulation, the person lets their thoughts flow in whatever direction seems best. The person might go into more detail about their trauma, or they might go to a completely different place. In either case, by bringing in new thoughts, “they’re reprocessing what happened and coming up with ways of being able to deal with it and cope with it,” Kolodziej said.

At the end of the bilateral stimulation, he asks the person what they are thinking or feeling. Then the whole process starts over again: naming the negative thought, the positive “replacement” thought, and the bilateral stimulation.

“They come up with another thought, and another thought, and another thought,” Kolodziej said. “I’ll have no idea where the thought process is gonna go, but what’s happening as they’re going from one thought to the next thought to the next thought, is they’re no longer stuck.”

‘Healing Can Absolutely Happen’

Over time, as the person’s brain continues to reprocess the memory, the emotional intensity associated with it diminishes. Kolodziej describes this as moving from the stage of having a “wound” to having a “scar”—a memory that no longer hijacks the present and is instead a part of the past.

EMDR is not the only way to address trauma; in certain situations, it may not even be the most appropriate method. But EMDR therapy has been widely embraced by mainstream health organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Whatever approach people take, Kolodziej said the most important step is to have hope that healing is possible. For those who doubt, Kolodziej offers a message of encouragement: “What if you could heal? What would that look like for you? There are so many people who have suffered like you and have found peace. With God at the helm, healing can absolutely happen.”

If you are dealing with the aftermath of a traumatic event, you can connect with Dr. Mark Kolodziej or Anne Brunette–who are both certified in EMDR–or another one of the licensed Catholic therapists at CatholicCounselors.com.

How To Raise The Dead

Guest post by Jacob Francisco M.A., LMHC, Pastoral Counselor at CatholicCounselors.com


There is an emotion that can kill, and that emotion is called shame. Shame is the sense that deep down inside, at the very core of who we are, we are unlovable, unworthy, broken beyond repair, or otherwise
bad. This feeling is something we are all familiar with going all the way back to the garden of Eden. For some of us, this shame seems to kill a part of us. We may describe ourselves as feeling “dead inside” or talk about the skeletons in our closet. Another common description is feeling numb all the time. 

Shame feels repulsive or ugly, like something dead, and we do not want to think about it or anyone else to know about it. It’s a natural impulse to bury something that is dead. We do this in the physical world and we do this emotionally. So we toss it in a hole and throw heavy stones on top to keep it buried. We medicate our self-loathing or despair with things that make us feel better in the moment; food, TV, social media, substances, pornography or other sexual behaviors, oversleeping, overworking. The list is endless. Sometimes the thing we use to bury the shame is even more of what we are ashamed of, and so the cycle continues around and around. Oftentimes we are able to numb out the shame to the point that we rarely consider it consciously anymore. We may deny that we have any shame at all. This dead part of us that we have now buried is a festering, rotting, thing that poisons the other parts of us. It spreads like a plague into many areas of our life, warping our thoughts and emotions into twisted half-truths that trap us in despair or suffering. 

Christ came to raise the dead in all senses of that phrase. He came that you may have life, and have it to the full. When Lazarus had died and Jesus went to Bethany, Martha and Mary asked Jesus for a miracle. In response to this request He says, “Take away the stone.” In other words, Jesus requires an act of faith. He requires that they work for what they pray for. Jesus is the only one who can do this and He requires that we clear the way.

 Here are a few steps to do just that:

  1. Identify the stone. What are the stones I have piled up over my shame? What sinful or unhealthy behaviors do I feel stuck in or powerless to change?
  2. Work for the miracle. I must do what is in my power to grow and become more healthy. I must act before I feel better. I need to cut away sinful behavior from my life. I must act contrary to my unhealthy urges and desires.
  3. Seek help. Big stones rolled in front of tombs are heavy! You will need help from someone trustworthy, mature, and/or professional. Start asking the Lord for the faith you need to believe He can raise the dead.
  4. Tell your story. Shame is like mold. It grows where it is dark and cool and hidden. Share your story with a trusted person. Let the light and the heat into that tomb. 
  5. Have faith and courage. Do what is within your power, and God will do what is within His. Your faith can raise the dead.

If you would like more resources or support to work through shame or other difficult emotions, reach out to a Pastoral Counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

Paralyzed by Powerful Emotions? Here’s How to Break Free

Have you ever been so overwhelmed by your emotions, it was next to impossible to take action to solve your problems?

If so, you’re not alone. This “emotional paralysis” is one of the most common problems that Judi Phillips, MS, LMHC, sees in her counseling practice.

“This is something I talk about with my clients all the time,” Phillips said. But she tells her clients that no matter how stuck or trapped they feel, “there is always something you can do; there is always a way forward.”

During a recent conversation, Phillips, a pastoral counselor with the Pastoral Solutions Institute, outlined exactly how she helps her clients get off the emotional treadmill so they can take practical steps to move forward.

 

Recognizing Emotional Paralysis

Anxiety is one of the most common ways that people get paralyzed by their emotions—in this case, fear and worry. But the problem can crop up in other contexts, too. College students might feel so overwhelmed by everything they have to do (especially at the end of the semester), they don’t even know where to begin.

Emotional paralysis shows up in relationships, too.

When Phillips does marriage counseling, for instance, her clients often want to begin by describing the problem they’re having with their spouse. But it is usually fruitless to address the surface-level conflict without first addressing what’s going on inside each person: guilt, anger, sadness, grief, and so on.

“I say to them, ‘Okay, I understand. But let’s go back to what’s going on within you. You know, what are you feeling?” she said. “What do you have to do to help yourself so that you can effectively communicate to the other person?  You know, if you’re angry or sad or overwhelmed or whatever it is, you have to first acknowledge that, because if you’re not able to acknowledge that, you’re going to continue to put the problem out there on (the other person). And you’re going to continue to spin around and feel powerless. And that’s not at all where God intends us to be.”

 

God Gave Us the Tools We Need to Move Forward

The fact that God doesn’t want us to get trapped by our emotions is revealed in Scripture, of course, but also in the Theology of the Body. (The Theology of the Body is based on a series of lectures given by Pope John Paul II that explored how God’s design of the human body reveals his purpose for us.)

Phillips said that the dual functionality of our brain—its emotional side and its reasoning side—demonstrates that while God intends for us to experience emotions, he doesn’t want us to be held hostage by them. The brain’s very design allows us to use our intellect, will, and reason to understand and manage our emotions.

Consciously naming what we are feeling enables us to begin addressing them, taking concrete steps that will move us toward the way we would prefer to feel.

People who are trapped by their emotional state often believe that once they feel differently, they will be able to take action to address their problems, Phillips said. “We say something like, ‘If I only felt…, then I would….’ But the truth is, we have to act first, and then the healthy feeling will follow.”

 

3 Steps for Breaking Free and Taking Action

Here are the three steps Phillips uses to guide clients from emotional turmoil to empowerment:

  1.       Identify your feelings. Ask yourself, “How am I feeling right now?” This step is crucial for acknowledging your current emotional state. At the same time, you can also name how you would prefer to be feeling.

“You’re honoring yourself in the way that God created you,” Phillips said. “And when you do that, you’re able to get more clarity about what is going on.”

To take the college student example, you might say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed and anxious because I have so much to do, I don’t know where to begin, and I am afraid I won’t get everything done on time.”

Bonus points if you write this down: the act of writing engages the brain more holistically.

  1.       Understand the cause. Ask, “What is it that’s causing this feeling?” Only by identifying the real-world cause(s) of your negative emotions can you begin to take steps to address those causes.

Continuing with our college student example, you might sit down and write out every single thing you have to do by the end of the semester.

  1.       Take action. This step has two parts:
  2.       First, figure out what you need to do to regulate your out-of-control emotions. There are many ways to do this, but one method Phillips likes involves listening to the rosary sung in Gregorian chant; the rhythm of the chant helps to re-tune our own internal rhythm, she said.
  3.       Make a plan, then act. Finally, ask, “What steps can I take to help me feel better?” Identify what specific actions you can take to move you toward your preferred emotional state. The college student, for example, might create a calendar or schedule that lists how she will tackle the tasks she needs to get done.

Phillips asks her clients who suffer from anxiety to write out all their worst-case scenarios. Then, she has them write down a plan naming how they would respond in each situation.

 

A Spiritual Practice to Boost Your Well-Being

Anyone who is familiar with the spiritual practice of the daily examen, also known as the Ignatian examen, might recognize some similarities between the method described by Phillips and the examen.

Like the examen, Phillips recommends checking in with yourself several times a day. As a spiritual practice, this works just as well with positive emotions.

“If I’ve been out in nature, walking, and it’s just a beautiful day, and I ask myself that question, ‘How am I feeling right now? I’m feeling really joyful.’ And what is it that’s causing that? The beauty of nature.

“Then: ‘What can I do to help myself?’ Well, there isn’t anything I really need to do to help myself, but I’m just going to acknowledge it, and by acknowledging it, I’m honoring myself in the way God created me to be.

“And then, thirdly, ‘What do I need to do about this?’ I don’t need to do anything other than offer a prayer of thanksgiving to God. I’m going to just acknowledge it, appreciate it, and thank God for the beauty of his creation.”

Incorporating this practice into your daily routine can significantly enhance your mental health and quality of life. Phillips notes that her clients who consistently apply these steps quickly gain self-awareness and change the way they tackle the problems life throws their way.

“It’s life changing,” Phillips said, “because you realize, first of all, I can always understand myself. Secondly, because of that, I can always find a way forward.”

If you would like more help with this or another mental health topics, reach out to Judi Phillips or another pastoral counselor at CatholicCounselors.com.

How to Find Marriage Counseling That Really Works—and Why You Shouldn’t Wait

Nearly half of all first marriages in the United States end in divorce, yet couples typically wait four to six years from the onset of problems before seeking professional help. That’s too bad, because numerous research studies have shown that marriage counseling can be effective at significantly improving relationship satisfaction and preventing divorce.

Why do couples wait so long to seek professional help? Many couples steer clear of marriage counseling because they are afraid it won’t work, or because they view it as admitting failure. In the meantime, they usually turn to the sources of support that are most conveniently at hand: friends, family, pastors, and so on.

But these sources of help usually fail to address the deeper issues in a troubled relationship. Worse, well-meaning friends can offer advice that actually causes more problems.

“No one sets out to destroy their relationship, but I cannot tell you the number of hours I have had to spend with couples cleaning up messes that were made from bad advice they had received,” Dr. Greg Popcak writes in his book How to Heal Your Marriage & Nurture Lasting Love. “Often, my clients will spend weeks undoing the problems caused by bad advice or poor support before we can even get to the original problem.”

When is it appropriate to lean on friends, family, and faith leaders for support, and when is it time to seek the help of a licensed marriage and family therapist? And how do you find a competent therapist—one who has training and experience in marriage counseling, and who is actually committed to helping you heal your marriage?

Dr. Popcak addresses all of these questions in chapter 11 of How to Heal Your Marriage, but we’ll summarize his advice below.

 

Family, Friends, Faith: The Limits of Common Marital Supports

Couples who encounter problems in their marriage often begin by seeking support from family and friends, and sometimes their pastor or another faith leader. Seeking emotional support and encouragement from family and friends can be a perfectly good first step, Dr. Popcak writes, when those people are able to provide informed peer support.

“The key words here are informed and peer,” he says. Peers are people who are on the same social level as you—not people who are emotionally or materially dependent on you. And an informed peer is someone who has demonstrated maturity, virtue, and good character. This is someone who is capable of lovingly challenging your outlook and assumptions rather than simply affirming everything you say.

While certain friends and family members can provide much-needed support, they are rarely a good source of practical advice for couples experiencing significant marital problems. That’s because friends and family are not usually in the best position to provide objective advice. Moreover, they usually lack the professional training and experience necessary to provide strategies that are research-tested and proven to work. Finally, Dr. Popcak says, in a culture where divorce is common, “most people intuitively know much more about what it takes to end a marriage than how to save it.”

What about your pastor? Your pastor may be able to offer you the spiritual support you need to tackle your marriage problems, but unless he has a professional degree in counseling, he is no more qualified to offer you marriage counseling than he is to treat your medical problems. That is not to say that you shouldn’t reach out to your pastor, but depending on the severity of your problems, most pastors will likely point you in the direction of marriage-friendly counseling.

 

Why Good Marriage Counseling Works

Human relationships, even between two people who love one another, are complicated, and the keys to a healthy relationship are not always obvious or intuitive. This is where a licensed marriage therapist can help. Drawing on decades of research, a competent marriage therapist can help couples learn the habits and practices that make for a happy, fulfilling relationship.

Dr. Popcak, for example, lists eight habits of happy couples:

  1. Regularly connecting through daily rituals of working, playing, praying, and talking together.
  2. Practicing emotional rapport and benevolence.
  3. Practicing emotional self-control, especially during times of stress and conflict.
  4. Practicing a “positive intention frame”—that is, assuming the best about your spouse even when they are at their worst.
  5. Taking care of one another as you work through conflicts.
  6. Practicing mutual respect, accountability, and boundaries.
  7. Learning from mistakes and learning to talk about “perpetual problems.”
  8. Finding good support for their marriage.

Couples who are struggling often think that the key is to solve the conflict between them. In fact, research shows that both happy and unhappy couples have about the same amount of conflict; the difference is that happy couples have the skills to handle those conflicts in ways that draw them together rather than pushing them apart.

A good marriage therapist serves as a sort of coach, helping couples learn these and other skills that will enable them to have a happy marriage. It is this long-term, expert guidance that makes marriage counseling so effective.

But how do you find a good marriage therapist?

 

Choosing a Competent, Marriage-Friendly Therapist

To find a good therapist, start by looking for someone whose training has prepared them to specialize in marriage counseling. Research by Gottman (2011) shows that therapists with specific training in marriage and family therapy have significantly higher success rates with marital therapy clients (over 90%) compared to general practice therapists (as low as 30%).

Ask about the potential therapist’s specific training and supervised experience in marital therapy. A qualified therapist should be able to describe their graduate coursework and practical experience in detail. If a therapist gives vague responses, they might not be the right fit.

Next, ask whether the therapist is marriage friendly. What is a “marriage-friendly” therapist? According to the National Registry of Marriage-Friendly Therapists, this is a therapist who believes it is preferable to help couples restore their marriage to health, if that is possible.

It might seem that most marriage and family therapists would hold this belief, but according to one national survey of 1,000 therapists, more than 60% said they are “neutral” on marriage versus divorce for their clients, according to the Registry.

For many Catholic couples, finding a therapist who understands and supports their faith tradition is also crucial. Research indicates that faithful Catholics prefer therapists with competencies in moral theology and other areas specific to their faith. Different faith traditions have unique perspectives on marriage, and working with a therapist unfamiliar with or unsupportive of these views can make counseling challenging.

 

The Path to a Happier Marriage

So, while many couples delay seeking professional help for their marriage because of fears or misperceptions about what it involves, the reality is that good marriage counseling is no different from the sort of help you would get from a coach, financial advisor, or a medical professional.

Throughout the Bible and two thousand years of tradition, the Christian faith acknowledges that good relationships don’t come naturally to us humans. We all need the help of God—and one another—to nurture happy, healthy relationships. Marriage counseling that respects clients’ faith and works from research-proven methods can provide the support couples need to fulfill God’s plan for their marriage.

For more advice about finding professional help for your marriage, see chapter 11 of How to Heal Your Marriage & Nurture Lasting Love by Dr. Greg Popcak. The National Registry of Marriage-Friendly Therapists can direct you to marriage-friendly therapists in your area. And you can always get tele-counseling marriage therapy from the many Catholic therapists right here at CatholicCounselors.com.

How to Turn Your Anger Into Healthy, Holy Action

Should Christians get angry? And when they do, how should they handle it?

Attempting to answer those questions on a recent episode of the More2Life radio show, Bill Donaghy, senior lecturer at the Theology of the Body Institute, pointed to a scene near the climax of the Star Wars movie, The Phantom Menace.

Two Jedi knights are battling the evil Sith Lord, Darth Maul. Their lightsaber battle rages through a power plant until a “laser gate” suddenly closes, separating the two sides. As they wait for the gate to open, the Sith warrior paces back and forth like a caged animal, twirling his double-bladed lightsaber and glaring angrily at the Jedi. One of the Jedi reacts very differently, though: he falls to his knees and closes his eyes in a kind of prayer.

The scene illustrates two very different ways of handling anger, Donaghy told Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak, and points to a key Christian insight about anger. Feeling anger isn’t sinful: “Be angry, but do not sin,” St. Paul told the early Christians (Ephesians 4:26).

Instead, it is what we do with our anger that matters.

Anger vs. Wrath

“Anger is meant to be a gift that calls our attention to an injustice and motivates us to act in proportionate, appropriate, and productive ways so that we can heal whatever that injustice might be,” Dr. Popcak said.

Anger that is appropriately channeled into setting things right—“righteous anger”—is better than unreasonable patience with evil, St. John Chrysostom, a doctor of the Church, once said: “He who is not angry when he has good reason to be, sins. Unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices.”

Wrath, on the other hand, is sinful. Wrath is “anger that is inappropriate, disproportionate, and unproductive,” Dr. Popcak said. While righteous anger aims to restore and heal, wrath seeks to destroy.

If anger is a gift from God—a signal that something is wrong that needs to be put right—then how do we handle this powerful emotion in a way that serves the good? Here are a few tips.

 

Don’t React; Instead, Step Back

The key to handling anger well is to avoid being reactive. Instead of launching into a hasty response fueled by the chemicals flooding your brain, pause, step back, and consider what is really driving your anger.

Is it really the thing in front of you that is provoking your anger, or is the thing in front of you stirring up old wounds? Is your child’s whining the real problem—or is the deeper problem that you are hungry and exhausted?

Understanding the real source of your anger is critical to addressing it in a proportionate, productive way.

 

Sublimate Your Anger to God

As you are collecting your thoughts, pray for the grace you need to handle the situation well.

“Anger isn’t so much a call to action as a call to prayer,” Dr. Popcak said. “Without prayer, anger can cause us to feel stuck, powerless, and perpetually outraged with no solution in sight.”

“We have to stop and say to the Lord: ‘Lord, I’m a mess,’” Lisa Popcak added. “’Everything is dysregulated inside of me because I feel like there’s an injustice happening. You went through the worst injustice possible. Show me what to do with this.’”

In the language of the Theology of the Body, your goal should be to sublimate your anger to God. Sublimation is not about repressing or denying your anger, Donaghy said; it is about “lifting it up to God, giving it to God and asking God to come into it.”

 

Learn to Express Anger Constructively

Righteous anger focuses on setting things right and finding solutions. In other words, it has a constructive purpose.

Setting boundaries for a respectful discussion can help. In a conflict with your spouse, for example, you might agree that each of you has a right to express their thoughts and feelings, but that it is not acceptable to express those thoughts and feelings in a disrespectful or destructive way.

Similarly, constructive anger focuses on finding solutions that address the concerns of all parties involved. The priority ought to be healing, restoring, and strengthening relationships, not “winning,” which only fosters resentment and fuels the cycle of angry conflict.

 

Don’t Be Afraid to Seek Help

Sometimes, dealing with anger —yours or someone else’s— requires some extra help. You can find Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak’s advice about handling anger in many of their books, particularly Parenting with Grace (for handling kids’ anger), Broken Gods: Hope, Healing, and the Seven Longings of the Human Heart (for anger as a gift from God), How to Heal Your Marriage & Nurture Lasting Love (for handling anger in a marriage), and God Help Me! These People Are Driving Me Nuts! Making Peace With Difficult People (self-explanatory, really).

And for more in-depth, one-on-one help, reach out to one of the many pastoral counselors at CatholicCounselors.com.