Psychoanalysis Psychotherapy Virgil Roberson New York City

October 20, 2014 by Virgil Roberson

Do You Need Therapy for Depression?

There are many signs and symptoms of depression. It can manifest as low self-esteem, a general lack of interest in life and an intense or persisting sadness. Depression can strike at any age. Often depression accompanies other diseases – both mental and physical. It can accompany debilitating illnesses such as stroke, Parkinson’s Disease, cardiovascular disease and any other degenerative or chronic diseases. Children may become depressed and exhibit moodiness, irritability, as well as insecurity and clinginess, or they may become very demanding. You may be suffering and struggling with one of the following symptoms or a combination of these most common forms of depression. You may find that some of these emotional states are often part of your daily experience –

Anxiety
Isolation
Despair
Feeling traumatized
Fatigue
Having suicidal and death thoughts
Hopelessness
Boredom
Feeling stressed or burnt out, or defeated
Nervous
Fearful
Panicked
Feeling worthless
Paralyzed – unable to work or participate in daily routines
Helplessness
Guilt
Self-hatred
Holding on to regrets
Low libido issues
Headaches
Digestive problems
Weight loss or gain

Do Your Problems Seem Insurmountable?

Once depression seems to take hold of you, it tends to permeate every avenue of life – family relationships, friendships, work and school. You may feel that your experiences are rife with negativity – the side effects of financial burdens, changes in the workplace, life transitions, difficult relationships, illness – your own or a loved one’s, care-giving responsibilities, eating disorders, abuses of any kind, sleeping too little or too much, endless worrying and/or obsessing over problems. Unavoidable circumstances may cause you to feel like you are barely coping. We rarely can control what is going on outside our minds in the world, but we can take control of what is going on inside our minds.

What If You Could Change Your Perspective?

Depression counseling can provide the tools needed to manage your problems without identifying with them. It can help you function more productively, to have a renewed sense of self-worth and identity. Therapy for depression may include health- promoting recommendations such as support through individual and group therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, exercise, and meditation. Working with a professional can offer techniques that allow you to face life with a renewed ability to solve and manage problems with a changed perspective.

Can You Afford Not To Seek Professional Therapy for Depression?

It may seem natural to feel some of the mentioned symptoms from time to time. However, when these symptoms begin to last for extended periods, become all consuming and excessive, feel out of your control, or difficult to let go of and resolve on your own – it may be time to seek professional therapy for depression. The cost of waiting could take a toll, not only on your general health, but also, on the lives of all those around you – your intimate relationships, your friendships, your work.

Are You Ready to Know Your Real Self?

The non-judgmental presence of the therapist is there to help you look at your thoughts, and discern with you, their validity versus their falsity. If your thoughts are hurting you and making you sad – then they are false, or at least, your interpretations are. Depression is a term that covers a broad spectrum, or many forms, of problems that have a common thread. Every depressing thought puts you down, makes you feel bad, goes against the truth of who and what you are, distorting the truth about your real self. Depressing thoughts are unloving thoughts. Holding on to these thoughts attack your self worth, and often get projected – beginning unconsciously with the attack of others.

Are You Ready To Live An Inspired Life?

Through depression counseling, you can train your mind to be aware of your untrue thoughts so that the truth of your natural, loving, innocent self can be revealed. Therapy for depression assists you in removing the mental blocks of hatred against yourself to allow your real self to emerge – the one who had been buried under the mountain of assaults and self-condemnation. However, you cannot get to the truth about yourself until the untruth is observed and brought to light and even realized. You must observe your very own thoughts that are putting you down. When you realize it is your own mind you use to judge against yourself – you can change your mind. All your power lies in your own decision-making. Depression counseling helps you reclaim your decision making ability, returning you to your right mind and thus, to your true self. That is where your peace is and where you can learn to live an inspired life rather than a pained one. Just as the rays of the sun are never separate from the sun, and the spokes of a wheel are not separate from the wheel itself, likewise, our minds are not separate from the Mind of Love and it is that Mind that we want to turn to, and focus on.

Do You Want To Improve Every Aspect Of Your Life?

Therapy for depression can help with specific types and symptoms of depression while uncovering the habitual thoughts, beliefs and assumptions that are reinforcing the depression. It is important to treat depression to prevent it from escalating into even more serious problems, such as alcohol and drug addiction and even suicide. Therapy for depression improves every aspect of your life – your health, welfare and relationships on every level.

Is Happiness Your Goal?

Everything in this world can either hurt you or help you depending on your perspective. But what can hurt one day and help another cannot be the truth because the truth cannot change. Yet, truth, or at least a reflection of it, must exist. However, truth can only exist within and depression counseling can point the way – back to the mind where only truth can be. Depression therapy is a means to re-focus the mind in the direction where peace and happiness can be attained. To look for happiness outside the mind, where it cannot be found, is a futile search. Seeking the quiet that you truly want, with a guide, your professional depression counselor, you can learn how to let go of all the unhappy thoughts that deny you your true happiness.

Are You Ready To Save Yourself Years of Suffering?

Thoughts affect everything – bodies, moods, emotions, interactions and reactions. With the guidance of a professional, depression counseling helps you look at your painful thoughts, question their validity, and change them. It can be a very difficult process to change your mind on your own. You do not want to reinforce guilt but become free of it. Professional therapy assists you in that freeing process, and can save you years of unnecessary suffering and pain. Though it may take some time to re-learn new ways of thinking, the improvement in the quality of life and relationships makes the work invaluable and truly life saving.

Are You Ready to Live the Life You Really Want?

Though there may be many situations you cannot change, therapy can help you change the way you look at those situations. It returns to your mind a sense of empowerment, freedom and peace, enabling you to think and live your life differently – from a relaxed and centered state of mind. Depression therapy makes it possible for you to live life fully, peacefully and unshackled by limiting ideas.

Make an appointment today to heal your depression so you can begin to live the life you are entitled to and deserve.

Photo credit: John French

October 3, 2014 by Virgil Roberson

Are You Ready To Face Your Anger? Start Anger Therapy Today!

Has anger become a routine response for you?
Do you often find yourself irritated and discomforted by the slightest triggers?
Has anger become an all too common reaction in your relationships, at home, work or in social environments?
Have you heard yourself making nasty remarks – out loud or in your own mind?

Are You Making Yourself Sick with Anger?

The disquiet, the rage, the lack of peace that occurs when you express anger makes life pretty miserable, not only for those around you, but especially for yourself. Anger therapy can help you address the inner conflicts of guilt, blame and self-criticism that get directed outwardly when you feel threatened or perceive yourself to be threatened by people, events, circumstances or any other intimidating encounter. Often the pain you are feeling within, the self condemnation, gets projected out. You can find yourself attacking others verbally or even physically or you can make yourself – your mind or body – the focus of self destructive behaviors, guilty feelings and anxious thoughts. Anger makes you sick – and others along with you.

Ease Your Pain With Anger Therapy

When the pain becomes too great you can find yourself unconsciously projecting that pain, without understanding why or what the underlying causes are for the aggressive reactions. Anger therapy can help you sort out the questions, doubts, confusion and meaning behind the turbulence, conflict and rage you are feeling.

Improve Your Health And Wellness Through Anger Therapy

Anger therapy can also help increase the level of well being you can achieve. Your quality of life can improve when anger is addressed as its expression can take a toll on your health. It can manifest physically with increased blood pressure, heart rate and even hormones, such as adrenaline. Anger can motivate you for survival but when used inappropriately it can make you sick. Anger therapy helps you resolve the issues that caused the defenses so that you can respond more peacefully and more relaxed to the challenges life presents. Through the professional help provided by anger therapy you may find life less challenging and more fulfilling.

You Can View Your Relationships Through A Different Lens

You may find relationships improve on every level. The inner difficulties and conflicts which served as the lens through which you looked at life before, can be transformed so that life can reflect your new found inner peace. Anger therapy will help you see and live your life from a new, calmer and more peaceful perspective.

Photo credit: Death to the Stock Photo

August 28, 2014 by Virgil Roberson

How You Can Overcome Your Addictions Through Counseling

Trying to understand and overcome addiction on your own can be a very slippery slope. In addition to the seemingly endless forms of addiction – food, drugs, sex, gambling, shopping, alcohol – there appears to be an equally infinite number of ways that addictions can wreck havoc in our lives. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, the ripples spread out further and further, encompassing various aspects of family life, friendships, work, attitudes, physical health, stability, security, finances, psychological well being, and on and on until it seems impossible to put life back on track, reign in the terror, ease the pain and restore a peaceful life. But it can be done – and addiction counseling makes it possible.

The Cost of Addiction

Addiction Counseling can take many paths to wellness. Certainly the benefits to addiction counseling can be seen in lives turned around as your hope for happiness is restored. Addiction counseling assists you in looking specifically at the effects and connections of addictions to your neurobiology, brain chemistry, sugar balance, stress and depression levels, cravings, weight management, sleep habits, cognition and other possible side effects involving unhealthy addictions.

Getting at the Roots of Addiction

Addiction counseling strives to get at the root of addictions – the painful thoughts behind the negative, destructive and attacking behaviors and actions that only appear to be out of your control. The underlying thoughts often include guilt, false ideas, shame, neediness, abuse, self-hatred, anxiety, depression, fear, obsession, control issues, as well as, feelings of isolation, lack, insecurity, confusion, dependence and discomfort.

Acquiring the Tools Needed

Counseling for addiction provides the tools needed to create the inner change of mind that is necessary to manifest and achieve both the inner and outer changes required to live the life you truly aspire to. Addiction counseling puts the keys to happiness and satisfaction back in your own hands reclaiming the control you had given to many outside forces that only seemed to have authority over your life choices and decisions.

Question Beliefs

Psychotherapy for addiction helps you step back and examine what is really being sought, as well as, how and where it is being sought. Then, together with a non-judgmental therapeutic presence – you can question the validity of beliefs surrounding the likelihood of achieving these goals and truly finding what is sought after. In this way, addiction counseling can get to the root of underlying causes for addictive habits which merely cover over the deeper problems that need healing and resolution.

Making Healthy Choices

Addiction counseling makes it possible to actually find what you are looking for, clearly determine and define what that is, and discover how to make the right choices. A centered, loving, healthy, secure, peaceful state of mind is the goal that can be accomplished in addiction counseling. Counseling for addiction helps you choose for yourself, rather than against yourself, away from pain, rather than towards it, opening the way for the peace you deserve and realizing the power of your own decisions. An aspect of that decision making comes into play with actions taken to break the chains of addiction.

Addiction counseling may be effectively supplemented by joining an appropriate support group –

It may involve finding a group in which to do the 12 Step program, choosing a sponsor, attending more than one group at times – for example, when it applies – AA and Alanon for what is referred to as the “double winners.” The addiction counselor may suggest supportive resources in the form of reading material and books.

The Ultimate Goal

Addiction counseling helps you work through the feelings that underlie all addictions – while encouraging you not to become identified with your addictions – nor to live identified with the addiction as you proceed through recovery. New healthy relationships are fostered to replace the old unhealthy ones whether they were with substances, things or people. Finally, addiction counseling teaches you to find real peace by learning to recognize the triggers that would spur a relapse. Through support via individual and group therapy along with attending 12 Step programs, cultivating hobbies, interests and healthy relationships, addiction counseling ends the vicious cycles, breaks unhealthy habits, renews your strength and faith in yourself and helps to heal your mind that thought it was helplessly imprisoned and controlled by your addictions.

Photo credit: Viktor Hanacek

August 21, 2014 by Virgil Roberson

Infidelity Counseling

When a couple’s world is shaken up and turned upside down by infidelity, the subsequent deluge of emotions may be difficult to circumvent on one’s own. During these times of immeasurable stress it can be a life saver to contact a therapist to begin infidelity counseling to assist in what can be otherwise a very long road to healing.

Save Your Other Relationships By Considering Infidelity Counseling

Expressing the feelings of betrayal, jealousy, rage, denial, confusion and grief to a non-judgmental professional within the context of infidelity counseling, rather than friends and family, can help to sort and resolve the many issues surrounding the causes and meaning behind acts of infidelity. There are the cases of repeated infidelity, conflicting feelings about hiding or revealing infidelity, guilt, anger, vengeance, blame. The difficulty in facing infidelity and all the perceptions of what it can represent – pertaining to relationships, security, attractiveness, neediness, addictions – can become too overwhelming.

Getting lost in the repetitive nightmare of betrayal thoughts, chaos, and the constant fighting that often occurs in the aftermath of incidences of infidelity, tends only to further deepen the already excruciating pain. For the sake of everyone’s health, the couple involved, their family members and their friends as well, it is wise and comforting to seek the guidance, understanding, empathy, and support of a therapeutic counseling relationship. Within the safety of the client-therapist relationship, couples and individuals can learn to communicate in new and freeing ways that work on building healthy, honest, fulfilling, real and open minded relationships. These are outcomes that are feasible and very possible once the burdens of emotional pain, resentment and betrayal have been looked at, addressed, released and resolved.

August 13, 2014 by Virgil Roberson

Empty Nest Depression

What happens to the parents left behind when the kids leave them with an empty nest? Does it feel like life is losing its center focus? How does one approach the sense of loss – of identity, of roles, of purpose, of a place in the world? The choices in which to respond may seem endless but how does one move forward when all one feels is sadness and even despair?

Empty Nest: Coming to Terms

Releasing fear and other blocks is key to proceeding so that changes in life and routines can evolve and be inspired from a calm and peaceful state of mind. Navigating this transition within the therapist-client relationship through individual or couples counseling can serve to hasten the journey through the gamut of emotions that may include fear of loneliness, panic for children going out into the world, anxiety for their and one’s own safety, as well as, boredom and unhappiness and loss of self-worth.

One cannot surmount and overcome the fears without looking at the thoughts, needs and beliefs from which they arise. The feeling of being out of control of our own and others’ lives, triggered by the changed environment and the judgments about empty nest circumstances, can leave one feeling confused, frightened and depressed about future goals and happiness.

While reasons for sadness may appear obvious and expected, the underlying assumptions and beliefs may not be as clear. In order to change the mind and gain a new perspective it may require time, discipline and dedication to explore the underlying causes for the conflicts – work that with the help of a therapist, can be more easily accomplished and achieved. Through the client-therapist relationship, beliefs and judgements that interfere with one’s advancement to peace and happiness can be examined and released to make room for healing, along with new ideas, attitudes, behaviors and goals.

Photo credit: Joshua Earle