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Avalon By The Sea is a certified dual diagnosis treatment center, providing primary care for mental health disorders when they are a primary diagnosis as well as a co-occurring disorder. For a confidential assessment and more information on our programs, call 1 888-958-7511.

Having a smartphone, computer, or other technological device to turn to for distraction can feel like both a saving grace and a detriment when you are living with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Apps and websites give you a thousand things to do at a time and bounce between as your fleeting attention seems fit. However, part of living with ADHD means learning how to create productivity in your life. Technology can become a distraction when it gets in the way of your ability to stick to normal routines and get things done during the day. You might be struggling with technology distraction if these things happen:

Eating disorders can be life threatening and cause ongoing health complications without recovery. Recovering from an eating disorder is tedious because it involves something that every human needs to survive- food. Most of the world struggles with insecurities about food and body image. It is easy to project that onto someone who is struggling with an eating disorder. Here is a quick guide of what not to say, even when you might be thinking it:

Therapy usually comes with a negative connotation for people. Spending money on time reserved for talking about your feelings or difficult things in the past sounds unappealing. However, immense healing can occur in therapy, helping someone to feel more free in their life.

Soon, prescription MDMA and therapeutic treatment using MDMA will be legal. MDMA is also known as ecstasy, a drug which finds most use in clubs, raves, and music festivals.

Not all abuse is physical. Neglect is a form of abuse. Childhood emotional neglect is an experience shared by millions of children and adult children around the world. Parents who were not taught how to be emotionally intimate, have a mental health disorder, are addicts or alcoholics, or are otherwise compromised in some way hold back their emotional connections. Childhood emotional neglect usually means someone has not received the kind of emotional attention and intimacy as a child they were in need of. Feeling heard, acknowledged, and validated is essential for a child’s positive development and growth. Additionally, a child needs to not only be met in their emotional states but responded to with emotions as well. Not receiving emotions from a parent is crushing to a child who isn’t old enough to understand the complexities of holding back emotions.

Being in any kind of a relationship with a narcissist can be trying. Narcissism is both appealing and unappealing for many reasons. If you are worried there is a narcissist in your life who needs help managing their mental illness, look for these signs. Without treatment, a narcissist can hurt people they love and destroy relationships, even when they don’t want to.

It’s 3 a.m. You’ve been soundly asleep, safely dreaming, when all of a sudden you’re woken up with a fright. A smoke alarm in your house is going off. A thousand thoughts run through your mind about your house burning down, the safety of others in the home, and your safety as well. You realize, you could die, but there isn’t much time for that thought. Your heart starts racing, your body goes into action, and you’re responding the emergency. Frantically, you find that there is no fire. All that reaction was for naught. After checking the house, you go back to bed and eventually fall back asleep. Panic attacks are a similar scenario, only, there’s no fire alarm. There’s not even a fire. Without a single trigger, the panic attack sets in, setting off all the same symptoms, and worse. Each day, people living with panic disorder fear the onset of a panic attack which is unpredictable and sometime unmanageable. Instead of worrying about everyone else, a panic attack has but one focus: the fear of dying. For about twenty minutes, the brain is convinced not that it is going to die, but that it is already dying. Increased heart rate, dizziness, stomach cramps, shortness of breath, and high emotions all accompany a panic attack. After twenty minutes, everything suddenly subsides, leaving the individual exhausted. Witnessing a panic attack as a loved one of someone with panic disorder can feel helpless. All help is not lost. Here are some suggestions for supporting a loved one through a panic attack.

At one point of time or another in our lives, we all experience symptoms of depression. Depression should be a passing phase which brings in its heavy rainstorms and then leaves behind a beautiful rainbow. For just less than 10 percent of the population, that rainbow will not come for some time. There is a difference between experiencing depression and being diagnosably depressed. For chronic depression, which is a clinical level of depression, the symptoms are ongoing and interfere with quality of life. Here are some signs and symptoms which might indicate that what you are going through is more than an extended case of bad emotional weather but a deeper problem needing professional treatment.

To transcend definitively means to “be or go beyond the range or limits of”. Transcendental meditation is a specific practice which focuses on transcendence, or going beyond one’s limitations. Few things can feel more limiting to the mind than trauma. Trauma can cause blockages to memory, impair social relations, prevent intimacy, and create a wealth of other side effects. Flashbacks, nightmares, hyperarousal, panic, and feel like the world exists within the repeated memory of traumatic events. According to Good News Network, a group of female inmates who demonstrated high level symptoms of PTSD were tasked with practicing transcendental meditation, specifically. “After four months of practicing (the technique), the women inmates in the meditation group had significant reductions in total trauma symptoms, including intrust thoughts and hyperarousal,” the website reported.

Childhood is a critical time for self-development, as developmental psychology has pointed out. Our relationships experienced in childhood have a lasting impact on how we develop as a person and who we are as a person. If our childhood relationships are positive, supportive, and nurturing, that will be the effect. On the other hand, if our childhood relationships are negative, neglectful, abusive, or abandoning, there will be an ongoing sense of instability in people as they grow older. New research suggests that the impactful effects of childhood trauma could last well into one’s 50’s and beyond. The research also found that childhood trauma can increase risk of heart disease, stroke, depression, and diabetes as well as smoking, sexual promiscuity, and a lower life expectancy. Specifically, the study found, someone who experiences six or more ACEs, adverse childhood experiences, died 20 years earlier than those who did not. Childhood trauma hurts, in more ways than one. Why Children Are Traumatised Many parents aren’t ready to be parents. Often, they’ve been abused or traumatised into their own lives without ever going through therapy and working on their own issues. Consequently, a child triggers all of those issues within them. Following by the example they best knew as children themselves, parents often enact their pain upon their child; sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. Childhood trauma is not always direct in the form of sexual abuse or physical abuse. Divorce, separation, abandonment, or domestic altercation can traumatise a child. Additionally, emotional abuse from parents or bullies at school can be traumatising as well. Healing From Childhood Trauma Unfortunately, the study did not elaborate on the many people who find healing and hope despite their childhood traumas. Through treatment and ongoing therapy, people are able to process and heal the traumas of their past while learning necessary skills for engaging in happy and fulfilling relationships within their own lives. If you are experiencing the painful repercussions of childhood trauma and feel like you may never heal, have hope. You can release the past and move forward from it. Your traumatic childhood does not have to define who you are or how you participate in life. We understand the need to take time to work on issues from the past. Avalon By The Sea offers a private and comfortable residential treatment program focused on trauma treatment and healing. For a private consultation and more information on our programs, call 1 888-958-7511.

George Bernard Shaw once said, “Progress is impossible without change,and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Change is inevitable. In fact, as it is philosophically said, change is the only constant we have in life. Sometimes it can feel like life is constantly changing. The truth is, we only get a glimpse of some of the smallest changes. For example, the earth is constantly rotating and making incremental adjustments to its tilt on the axis. Cells are constantly regenerating, right before your very eyes. Things are changing all the time that we can’t see and certainly beyond what we can control. Yet it is the changes which make themselves obvious to us which are the most difficult to cope with, especially living with a mental illness. Unpredictable or unchangeable moods, childhood experiences rooted in trauma, fears of abandonment and rejection- all of these things can create an uneasy relationship to change. For many people, change was a constant which was right in their face. Living in an unstable environment which might have come with abuse can make coping with change hard. Most people will experience traumatic events in their life which can make it hard to feel like there is any security in the world. Since change is unending, that means we have to learn to live with it and cope effectively.