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.

Big life changes can bring a huge range of emotions, from dread up to excitement, and everything in between. Sometimes life changes are expected and you have worked hard to bring them into your life, while other changes feel forced upon you. Even the presumably desired changes can bring up challenging feelings, however, which can dampen the joy of the transition.

If you find yourself not up to celebrating and instead feel like the rug was pulled out from under you or like you simply can’t feel happy about the change, therapy might be helpful to get your enthusiasm back. A Wakefield therapist with experiencing supporting individuals through life transitions can help you identify the unique barriers you are facing and how to navigate them more effectively so you can get back to embracing the change at hand.

Sleep is one of those things we simply can not do without, no matter how much we wish we could. Trust me, I really wish I could get away with only four hours of sleep a night, but it’s simply not possible. Sleep plays a critical role in our health and mental health because it plays such a critical role in our brain health. It is one of our most primitive needs along with food and water. Can it feel inconvenient? Of course! Modern American life is all about busy schedules and commitments that can lead us to feel like there simply are not enough hours in the day to make room for sleep. Yet we suffer tremendously without it. 

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to improve sleep, including many ways that do not include medication or supplements. If you are struggling with sleep and worry you have tried everything to no avail, a therapist in Wakefield can help you overcome your struggles with sleep and help you get back to better, restful and restorative sleep.

Whether caring for an aging parent, a new baby, a spouse or other loved one, the act of caregiving can be incredibly rewarding, yet also incredibly challenging. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the relentless demands on your time, your flexibility, patience and your ability to feel like you are doing it “right.” The time needed to care for someone else can easily crowd out the time you would have spent caring for yourself, and this can leave you further depleted. Yet taking time for yourself can feel much harder when you are in a caregiving role, as it can feel like you are taking that time away from the other person (or people) for whom you care. You can end up feeling selfish or guilty for doing so, which can limit the benefit of your effort. While caregiving may not be easy, the good news is that with thoughtfulness, you can learn how to care for yourself in ways that still honor your caregiving role, yet don’t leave you guilty or resentful at the end of the day. If you find yourself stuck, a therapist in Wakefield can help you find a balanced path forward.

Even positive changes in life can bring up feelings of stress or grief. After all, the beginning of something new inherently means the end of something else. This could be starting or ending school, changing careers, losing a job, becoming a parent, moving to a new city or even simply a new apartment. It can certainly involve romantic relationship changes and retirement as well. Some of these transitions have an inherent sense of loss associated, while others are times that you might feel like you should be happy and excited, but you feel much more trepidation instead. 

It is really normal to lose our footing when going through major transitions like this, or even smaller ones, such as a change in roommate or officemate at work. The good news is that there are ways to honor the challenge of the transition and also dive more deeply into the fulfillment it can provide to you so you feel like you are moving in a direction you want to go. If you find yourself stuck, a therapist in Wakefield can certainly help you out at any time.

It can feel really discouraging to work hard at something and not get the results you hoped to experience. Maybe you have tried books or meditation apps. Perhaps you have downloaded so many podcasts about anxiety, relationships, insomnia or loneliness that you almost feel like an academic expert…yet you are still struggling with some of the familiar, fundamental concerns that leave you unfulfilled.

Self-help tools can be fantastic in many areas of life, but they are not always enough. When it works, it can be fantastic and accessible, but sometimes it falls short and something more is needed. Read more to learn how therapy might help where self-help leaves off.

It can be easy to go through phases of keeping to yourself and tuning out the world. When this lasts, however, you can end up feeling really disconnected and adrift. When you try to spend time with others, you might find yourself distracted, apathetic or tuned-out. It can feel like you
are just going through the motions and other people might even perceive that you have become more aloof or emotionally distant. 

There are a lot of reasons that people start to feel disconnected with others. It might be from habitual screen time, video game or social media usage that makes them feel more in touch with characters than with people in real life. They might be experiencing burnout in part of their life that leads them to experience emotional numbness. Many people also experience a sense of disconnection when they go through depressive periods and retract from others. 

Therapy can be extremely helpful at identifying what might be contributing to a sense of disconnection and developing a plan to restore connection. Sometimes this means working on existing relationships and other times it is about forming new connections, but always with a goal to get you back to feeling the amount and style of connection that YOU want to feel fulfilled in YOUR life.

I always joke that “fine” is the other four-letter word beginning in “f.” It can be a red flag, a warning, an ominous indicator of something large and unpleasant brewing. Or in a more mild moment, it can be more okay, yet clearly still not great. Mediocre. Not bad, though maybe not necessarily good. 

Is fine a lot better than miserable? Absolutely! There are times where it is natural to yearn for the simplicity of “fine,” which would be a relief. Yet on an ongoing basis, we can do better than “fine.” You deserve to do better than “fine.”

Read more to learn how therapy in Wakefield can make a difference for you.

It is really easy to feel lost in modern life, and particularly during major life transitions. Sometimes, those life transitions aren’t even noticed but can have a big enough impact to make you feel a bit disoriented and uncertain. Life is more enjoyable when we have a sense of purpose, meaning and direction, so feeling lost can disrupt this sense of intentional progression. Fortunately, therapy can be helpful to getting back on track with feeling in touch with yourself and your life in a way that feels deeply satisfying. 

It can be really easy to feel stuck emotionally. Whether you are stuck in a negative emotion like sadness or guilt, or stuck from taking action in a sort of analysis-paralysis, it is easy to wish for things to be different. People often get stuck when they feel overwhelmed, when they are facing uncertainty, coping with major life transitions, grieving or when they have big goals ahead of them. 

As a therapist in Wakefield, MA, I love to help people get un-stuck and back in movement toward what they want in life. Even when there are significant external barriers, movement is always possible. If you have been feeling stuck lately, read on to explore how therapy might help you get moving again.

If you often find yourself overthinking, and losing sleep over it, there is hope! Read more to learn about how to interrupt this vicious cycle and find relief.

Learn about why it is so easy to get overwhelmed and how to shift gears to cope more effectively.

Learn how to strengthen your ability to attain grounding and relaxation in ways you never thought possible.