January has a way of quietly turning life into a comparison. As goals and fresh starts fill conversations and social media, it can be easy to feel behind, unsure, or unsettled, especially if anxiety is already close to the surface. This post explores how comparison in January quietly fuels anxiety and how a therapist in Wakefield can help you reconnect with your own pace, values, and sense of steadiness.

January often arrives with the expectation that you should feel motivated and ready to set goals, but when you already feel overwhelmed, that pressure can feel exhausting instead of inspiring. This post explores why traditional goal setting can backfire during heavy seasons and how a therapist in Wakefield can help you create kind, realistic goals that support you rather than add more pressure.

January is often framed as a fresh start, but if you already live with anxiety, the New Year can feel heavy instead of hopeful. The pressure to feel motivated, set goals, and move forward can quietly turn into self judgment and overwhelm. This post explores why January feels harder for anxious minds and how working with a therapist in Wakefield can help you move into the year with more steadiness and self trust.

The start of a new year often brings a mix of emotions. There may be excitement about a fresh beginning, but there can be a heaviness too. January can feel like a spotlight suddenly shining on everything you wish felt different. You may feel a sense of obligation to have things figured out or to feel energized and ready, even if that is not your current reality.

Some people move into the new year with a burst of enthusiasm, but others feel the opposite. You may feel like a deer in headlights with everything in your life that needs attention, yet attending to everything feels impossible. There may also be a sense of betrayal if last year was difficult. It can create a fear that this year will only bring more of the same disappointment. Hope might feel fragile, or even false.

If you notice this inner tension, it can help to reach out for support. Therapy offers a helpful place to understand what is happening inside and to find steadier footing for the months ahead. You can learn more about support from a therapist in Wakefield on my main page.

Thinking, of course, is a good thing. It’s what helps us plan, solve, and create. But like so many things, too much of it can backfire. The goal isn’t to stop thinking or to become carefree overnight—it’s to let go of the extra thinking that keeps you trapped in indecision and start trusting your own judgment again. By the end of this post, my hope is that you can learn to trust your mind a little more—or at least enough to take your next step forward. Learn about more approaches to overthinking from a therapist in Wakefield.

If worry has started to feel like your brain’s background noise, you’re not alone. While it can seem like preparation, chronic worry often drains energy and peace of mind. In this post, Wakefield therapist Michelle Butman Collins shares simple, compassionate ways to break the worry habit and restore a sense of calm.

Do you ever catch yourself spiraling through endless “what if” scenarios? While it can feel like preparation, this kind of thinking often feeds anxiety instead of easing it. In this post, Wakefield therapist Michelle Butman Collins explains why our brains latch onto worst-case scenarios—and how to gently quiet the noise.

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.