It isn’t always obvious when someone’s suffering from anxiety. People with high-functioning anxiety move through life masking their battle with an easy smile and a quick joke. While we commonly think of someone with anxiety as freezing up or panicking, individuals with high-functioning anxiety may appear from the outside to have it all. They’re often successful at work and in their personal lives—they themselves may even think that they have tamed the beast, for a while.

Because depression makes us behave in ways normally out of character, it’s often closely correlated with shame. Whether it’s because we’ve turned to drugs or alcohol, gained weight, or fallen behind at work, the result is the same: a deep sense of shame and self-loathing makes us feel unworthy and broken. The sense of feeling unworthy or broken enhances the feelings of hopelessness and uncertainty that depression feeds on.

People with emotional trauma often struggle to articulate their experience with it. They may carry it with them for years, embarrassed, ashamed, or even unaware of the impact of a traumatic event on their lives. Many of us minimize or write off our own traumas. We look at the suffering in the world around us and think our troubles seem small in comparison and that our struggle to cope with them is a personal failing of some sort.

Strange to think of an empty nest as a cause for grief. On top of that, most of us are taught to view the empty nest as an achievement. It’s a sign that all your birds have learned to fly, and you’ve done your job as a parent to help them become independent adults. Still, the grief is there all the same—and that’s natural. Grief isn’t always a response to loss. Just as often, it’s a response to change.

The past has a powerful influence over our lives. Many of the challenges that we face with depression and anxiety stem from our relationships. The patterns we see in our relationships are things we learned as children from the people around us. When our early childhood relationships are unstable or abusive, they serve as an anchor that keeps us tied to the past instead of forging new, healthier patterns.

It’s somewhat fitting that codependency and enmeshment are so frequently confused with one another, and used interchangeably as terms. Both are disorders of the identity, and both revolve around the submission of the self to someone else. With each, there is a blurring of boundaries, unreasonable expectations, and a closeness that borders on unhealthy.

Being a stay-at-home mom comes with all kinds of expectations. Whether you’re home with the kids or getting them to school every day, there’s a constant influx of work that needs to get done. A tide of never-ending laundry, the churn of dirty dishes; meal prep, planning, and coordinating schedules. On top of that, stay-at-home mom’s are expected to put on a happy face even when they aren’t feeling it.

Whether age or unforeseen circumstance, chronic illness can arrive without warning. It upsets that delicate balance, introducing a new set of fears and worries. It inflames new and old anxieties alike, upending the delicate order of our lives. In this article, we’ll examine the interplay between chronic illness and anxiety.

Perfectionism is a form of Anxiety, and counter-intuitively, it is frequently linked to low self-esteem and feelings of inadequacy. Despite being high performers, their backgrounds cause them to feel abused, neglected, or missing control. Perfectionism is defined by a black-and-white worldview. Perfectionists either feel like they did a great job, or failed utterly. There is no middle ground.

Based on the pioneering work of Dr. Sigmund Freud, psychodynamic therapy is an effective tool therapists can use to help their clients explore and understand repressed or unconscious urges. Those urges simmer beneath the surface of our day-to-day lives in the form of impulses, anxieties, and desires. As a result, our actions are often driven by desires we may not even fully understand or recognize.

Narcissism gets thrown around quite a bit on social media these days, and there’s certainly more awareness of it than there has been in the past. Even so, people often still underestimate the chaos and turmoil that come hand-in-hand when you’re tangled up with a narcissist.

We’re taught from the time we’re very young about the importance of love and romance. So many of us are raised to think of it as our purpose in life and the one path toward true happiness. Like a dog chasing a car, we rarely stop to think about what we’ll do once we catch it. What good is finding love if we don’t know how to keep it?

A situation where this is especially common is when someone is going through a divorce. Even when the marriage wasn’t making them happy, the aftermath was a result of a lot of emotions bubbling up to the surface. This is completely normal and can almost be expected when dealing with a divorce. But, is it normal to have a grief response? Actually, yes it is.

Activity in our brain is shaped by how we see and process the world around us, which in turn affects the types of hormones our brain instructs our bodies to produce. Emotional states like anxiety have a powerful effect on the brain—here are some of the most common ways your anxiety may be impacting you.

In contrast to the normal grieving process, complicated grief is both intense and long-lasting. It persists for months or even years, churning under the surface. Think of it as quicksand—the longer you struggle, the deeper you sink—but even if you try to remain still, you’re still stuck in place.

Mothers appear throughout myth and popular culture as sacred. Artists for hundreds of years have depicted them as beatific and serene; angels of creation with a babe held sweetly in their arms. You would be forgiven for thinking they are somehow above all worry or concern. Not shown are the food cravings, sleepless nights, and terror over what the future might hold.

When we think of depression we often picture someone in a dark room, struggling to get up in the morning or take care of themselves. Depression is like a massive weight sitting on someone’s shoulders making even mundane tasks feel impossible to take care of.

Some people get to grow up, others have to settle for survival. Childhood trauma looks different for everyone, whether it’s the result of neglect, abuse, exposure to bullying, or even the result of serious illness or hospitalization.

Whether you’ve been in a relationship for a while or you’re still playing the field looking for love, it’s useful to start figuring out what your boundaries are. During the early stages of a relationship, it can be tempting to brush off red flags because you’re so excited to meet someone you click with.

There are so many accomplished professionals who wear their perfectionism as a badge of honor. They’re ambitious, successful, and determined. But those same qualities that translate into success in the workplace can cause issues for our romantic lives.

Anyone who’s ever dated or been married knows that relationships have ups and downs. The warm, fuzzy glow of those first weeks and months settles into a steady rhythm. In the best case scenario we’re able to kick back and enjoy ourselves—knowing that it won’t always be so easy. But what happens when that sense of peace evades us?

After I had my first child, almost twenty years ago, I was not as happy as I had imagined I would be.