Learn how to tell the difference between overthinking and self-reflection. A therapist in Wakefield explains how to recognize mental loops, find calm, and think with clarity.

Overthinking can feel like trying to think your way out of quicksand—the harder you try, the deeper you sink. In this post, a therapist in Wakefield shares how to quiet the mental noise, understand what drives overthinking, and begin finding peace with your mind.

Life’s unexpected turns can leave us unsteady, whether through loss, sudden change, or even positive surprises. A Wakefield therapist shares how to rebuild emotionally—finding grounding, reconnecting with yourself and others, and creating meaning in the midst of life’s curveballs.

Transitions can bring a mix of hope, fear, and grief—sometimes all at once. Even positive changes ask us to release familiar roles, routines, or ways of being. In this blog, Michelle Butman Collins, LICSW, a therapist in Wakefield, MA, explores why change often stirs unexpected grief and how acknowledging both loss and new opportunities can help you move forward with greater ease. From subtle shifts in identity and daily rhythms to the emotional push and pull of letting go and stepping into the new, Michelle offers insights into how therapy can support you in making meaning from transitions. Learn practical practices to gently welcome new chapters while honoring what you leave behind, and understand how grief and gratitude can coexist as you navigate change with reflection, compassion, and presence.

When everything feels uncertain, it’s easy to lose your footing. Learn how therapy in Wakefield can help you find steadiness, meaning, and trust in yourself again.

Change is one of the few things we can count on in life—but that doesn’t make it easy. Even when we choose a change or recognize it as a positive step, the emotional impact can be surprisingly complicated. As a therapist in Wakefield, I often help people make sense of the mixed feelings that come with transitions—whether that means adjusting to a new phase of life, redefining relationships, or finding their footing after a major shift.

Let’s explore why life transitions can feel so hard, what emotions they tend to stir up, and how you can support yourself through them

Have you ever been asked “how are you feeling?” and felt yourself completely unable to answer, despite knowing that you have many, powerful feelings coursing through you at that moment? Or maybe, “can you just tell me what’s going on with you right now?” Even though there is SO much going on, you may feel at a loss to put it into words.

Why is this so hard? Often, we simply haven’t developed the language to name our feelings with any measure of authenticity. Sometimes, our feelings feel too complicated and descriptors like “sad” or “upset” don’t do our inner world justice. Being put on the spot can only make it harder as you are also then concerned with how the person might respond to what you share with them.

You might reflexively respond “I’m fine,” only to kick yourself later because you feel anything but fine, you just didn’t know how to say so at the time. Learning to speak emotional language can take time, and therapy can be a great way to become more fluent. With more breadth and depth to your emotional language, you will learn to have greater awareness of how you feel and also be able to articulate it with more ease to others, when you want to do so. Meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can make questions like “what are you making that face for?” much easier to answer.

Feeling deeply present is something that many people strive for in their lives. To feel free from distractions, entirely focused and centered. Yet, it is an incredibly tall order in our fast-paced society and amidst American values for hustle, productivity and multitasking.

People are increasingly striving for more “presence” in their lives and often looking to strategies like meditation to get them there, or at least closer. Is meditation the only path though? Not necessarily, as mindfulness is a more broad concept which can help people access the mental clarity they crave, and which is more likely to bring them to a sense of centeredness.

Therapy can include aspects of mindfulness, as well as mindfulness meditations, when it would enhance progress and help someone find the sense of presence they seek. Read on to learn more about how mindfulness might play a role in your life, even if you have not otherwise been inclined to meditation practice.

Sometimes, a decision might be easy and other times, you may feel like a deer in headlights. Totally stuck, unsure how to how choose and how to even take steps to get yourself closer to a decision. Has this ever happened to you? If so, you are not alone at all! There are a lot of reasons that choices might trigger a sense of paralysis, from concern about making the “wrong” choice, concern about what other people will think of you and simply out of not wanting to deal with the consequences of your decision. Sometimes, decisions are choosing between the less of two evils, and the paralysis almost feels like a rebellion against the forced choice. Other times, you may be simply completely exhausted, suffering from decision fatigue and simply not have the mental capacity to do the mental flexing involved in decision-making.

Whatever the reason, therapy with a trained therapist can be a really helpful resource to understand your personal reasons for getting stuck making choices. More importantly, meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can help you learn to work with your hesitations, so that you can ultimately move forward and make decisions more readily, trusting that you can handle the outcomes.

Decision fatigue is similar to any other fatigue…when something is overdone, our bodies simply can’t keep doing it. If you are doing bicep curls, you are going to lose your form and then simply not be able to complete any more reps. Decisions can be very similar, even though we have a capacity for high rep counts. Make too many decisions and they start to lose the quality of their form, meaning they might not represent your best interests and best judgement. Keep going and you simply might struggle to complete decisions entirely.

Unfortunately, these decision repetitions can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed, stressed and stuck. Then, for many people, there is a lot of guilt and shame for feeling that way. You might wonder why you can’t seem to “keep up” with everyone or why you can’t be “more productive,” yet the reality is that you might be faced with an overpowering amount of decisions.

Therapy can be a resource to develop strategies to manage decisions, determine what decisions can be made in a way that is more sustainable and importantly, to soften the way you treat yourself for finding this aspect of life hard. If you want your daily life and well-being to feel lighter, meeting with a therapist in Wakefield to determine how to reduce the fatigue of decision-making may be an important step for you.

The age-old adage that “old habits die hard” has a lot of merit! We crave familiarity and comfort in routines and patterns, as they allow us to relax a bit, to have an opportunity to free up our energy for other pursuits. Habits allow us to focus on what is more interesting to us and simply take the guesswork out of many aspects of daily life. Sometimes, however, habits and patterns can get us stuck in a rut. We can repeat maladaptive responses over and over again, despite knowing they don’t lead us where we want to go. We can essentially bang our heads into the wall over and over again, then get up once more to do it again. It can certainly feel foolish, and no one is immune to some level of shame getting evoked over doing things we know don’t work for us repeatedly (I write as I spent more time on social media last night that would have been better spent figuring out the logistics for the upcoming weekend so family activities would flow more smoothly).

Therapy can be extremely helpful for establishing new habits, patterns and routines that serve you better. Meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can help you move beyond the shame you feel for what keeps getting you stuck, and into compassionately understanding your needs and finding new routines to meet them more adaptively. You deserve to have habits, patterns and routines that support you and what is most important to you, and therapy can help you get there when you feel stuck otherwise.

Standardized therapy approaches typically fall short and it is easy to understand why. People are incredibly unique and dynamic, and failing to meet this uniqueness can make a lot of therapy simply fall flat. For the same reason that small talk can fail to truly connect people, one-size-fits-all therapy can also fail to make a meaningful connection between client and therapist to truly make a difference.

Is there a place for small talk? Certainly! It can help people get started, it can help open conversations, fill time and start opportunities for connection. Yet it’s not what goes deeper, it is rarely memorable and it is usually not very impactful.  

Standardized therapy approaches can be similar, and they absolutely have their place. They can be great for teaching general information and principles, for starting a relationship and for introducing concepts. Yet without something more personal, it is unlikely to be memorable or deeply impactful.

Personalized therapy, on the other hand, takes any general principles and applies them to the unique circumstances of who you are in your life at this moment in time. It allows therapy to be responsive and adaptive as you grow and evolve and keeps the therapy memorable, engaging and relevant. It ensures change is possible.

Most people who have suffered from a major disappointment in life feel a certain pressure to “get over it” at some point in time. Sometimes this pressure is external and people around them are telling them that it’s time to “move on,” and sometimes the pressure is from within, and people kick themselves for not having “moved on” yet. Either way, it is very unlikely for anyone to “get over” or “move on” from grief simply because there is pressure to do so. Instead, that pressure is actually more likely to make them stuck because they feel shame and are distracted by all the self-doubt that the pressure introduces.

Grieving and transitioning happen on their own individual timelines. Healing is almost never linear, nor does it follow struct timelines. Emotional pain simply does care, it only cares about honoring what is lost. So what are you to do if you feel stuck? Therapy with a therapist in Wakefield can help you honor your unique grief and distress in ways that help you feel like you can adapt to your new reality more easily. Instead of “moving on,” you can learn to move forward in your new reality.

It is really common for people to think of therapy as a means of damage control when something just blew up emotionally, such a coping with a major, unexpected loss or feeling ready to face the effects of a childhood trauma. Therapy can indeed be really helpful in these situations, yet it is also so much more.

Reconsider the role that therapy might be able to play for you…it might help you understand yourself in ways that allow you to feel way more in control of your life. Therapy can help you learn to work with your vulnerabilities so you feel like you can more forward in your life more intentionally and more consistently.

Everyone deserves support if they feel like they are stuck and a therapist in Wakefield can help you, no matter the scope of the challenges that are leading you to start.

Making its way into the mainstream lately is a concept that caregivers have known throughout time…the “mental load” or the “invisible load.” This load is than the physical labor of needing to get between points a, b, c and d or the labor of time taken to run an errand or attend an appointment. Instead of tasks, it is the emotional and mental labor that goes into these tasks and all the spaces in between them. It’s the invisible work of taking the examples above and adjusting the schedule to make it to the appointment on time, of knowing what needs to be recalibrated when the appointment runs late, the awareness of the time that needs to be created for the unexpected follow-up appointment. It’s the energy of determining what errands need to be run and when and how that can fit into life. It’s the invisible load of all of this. Sometimes, it’s manageable, and simply hums in the background of life. For most caregivers, however, this load is enormous and its invisibility makes it even heavier.

Meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can be in incredibly helpful space for having this invisible load come into the light. For sharing it with someone else who can help you figure out how to lighten it and for understanding the effects of it more fully on your life, so you can adapt to its presence more easily

Whether caring for an aging relative or spouse or caring for a child with a disability or other concern, caregiving a deep commitment. While it can be rewarding to support someone you love and incredibly meaningful to contribute to their comfort and happiness, the process can also be incredibly draining. Even the most natural and committed caregivers can face burnout and get overwhelmed in their role. Fortunately therapy can be a very helpful place to maintain endurance and have a sense of restoring yourself as a person beyond caregiving. Read on to learn more about how meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can help.

Shouldn’t you know what you want to do by now?

The question is painful, and society can put a lot of pressure on people to figure out what they want to do with their lives at SUCH young ages. All the pressure to know what you want to do when you “grow up” and to have a 5-year plan, a 10-year plan and so on, can be really suffocating for many people and lead them to feel utterly confused.

How are you supposed to know what you want to do in your career? When are you supposed to have it figure out? What if you learn that you don’t actually like what you thought you wanted to do? What if you’re simply not very skilled at what you want to do?

Working with a therapist in Wakefield can help you feel more secure in your decisions and your plan, or lack thereof, if you are finding yourself stuck.  Therapy can teach you to evaluate what is most meaningful for you as an individual, and how to make peace with external pressures that might be zapping your satisfaction and fulfillment.

After all the celebratory parties and dinners, farewells with roommates and selling-back of textbooks, comes “what’s next.” For some, this is a really exciting time because “what’s next” is planned travel or time with family before easing into an exciting job they landed months ago and living with friends. Yet for many people, “what’s next” feels incredibly daunting. This is true even if there are clear plans of where to live and work, and certainly true if there is a ton of uncertainty.

Graduating is a significant milestone in many people’s lives and the associated uncertainty can be emotionally paralyzing at times. What will happen with friendships? Why doesn’t it feel as exciting as it seemed like it would? There are so many questions and most of them don’t really have answers beyond “wait and see.”

If you find yourself worrying about how you will feel after graduation, if you already feel like you are flailing emotionally or if you know someone in this transition, read on to learn more about how to support yourself and how therapy can also support someone in this big life transition.

Just when you were feeling relieved to be past some of the social drama of high school and past the pressure to figure things out after high school or college, you may be getting struck by another wave of identity crisis. Perhaps you started your career, got married, starting having kids or moved and these all seemed like steps of coming into yourself, yet you find yourself feeling like you don’t recognize yourself and wonder who you really are.

If you find yourself consistently struggling to feel satisfied and comfortable with who you are and who you are becoming, read on to learn more about how therapy with a therapist in Wakefield can help you navigate the identity crises that so often impact people in their young adult years.

How many times this week have you wondered to yourself how everyone around you seems to have figured out their lives but you? Surely more times than you would like! It would probably also be safe to say that you don’t feel great after those thoughts enter your mind. After all, feeling like you are left behind, like you haven’t been able to do something that seems to come easily to others or feeling like there might be something wrong with you that will keep holding you back can be super discouraging.

While it can feel sometimes like everyone has a plan but you, this is usually not the reality. Instead, it is a common trap our minds can lead us into when we can’t figure out how else to move forward…so we blame a personal shortcoming. This doesn’t exactly help us feel inspired though, so what we can do instead? Read on to learn more about how therapy can offer a different perspective, and how meeting with a therapist in Wakefield can help you get unstuck.