all tomorrow role she's actually here today to speak about a number of things on mental wellness is that a mental illness and also i wanted to let you know about that that she has a radio show called counselors chat streams on facebook live and also online through the hundred county chamber of commerce radio station that is arizona noon on wednesdays so anyway thank you for being here in the thank you so much   a facility that treated some women with some challenges yeah and then you went you know your way and became you got your own practice and i moved to baltimore and then they have moved back around and now here i am and then we're here we are  shows actually and same day but it was so fun to run into her again and then to see and just be able to catch up with you and learn about what you do all day long helping people it just touched my heart i think you're you're trying to remove the stigma which we're going to talk about yes and so i'm just going to hand it over to you and you'll you'll know i'm timing him because i'm like a bowl full total supporter i want you to know i hosted an event in hunting county that you  had that brought in people who just wanted to learn more about these issues that you talk about that i wholeheartedly support knowing everybody has their challenges that all of these things affect every family they've got mine i'm straight up on in and i want you to tell more because i'm lucky i get to get like free counseling today so yes i'm a licensed professional counselor i have my master's in counseling and i'm nationally certified as a counselor have been in this field for about thirty three years and the first half of my career was working in non profits in the drug and alcohol field i was counselor program director executive director and part of being an executive director you know get counsel he get to work with the board do fund raising which you and i did together and those kinds of things in my heart really with doing counseling with that being said i've been in private practice now for eighteen years in flemington and like you said i also have a radio show which i guess since started i've pretty much been doing that and i enjoy doing that because my goal not only to help people because i my heart is is to help people and see people get through their struggles and give them good coping skills but i'm i'm really a strong advocate in removing the stigma we say mental illness people have mental illness will that equates to one of my crazy well i don't want to go into any kind of counseling or anything because i don't want to have that stigma attached right and i really that's part of why do counselors know or has really severe issues then yes but someone who is struggling with depression or anxiety i don't necessarily like to call that mental illness even though it is brain function i still want to see to it that we're opening the doors for people to come in get treatment coming get a checkup this is why i like you so much because seriously it's so refreshing to say hey i do have these struggles but i'm not crazy and i want to be able to talk about them and i don't want to feel like i have to be like high eating about it right and what i really love i want everybody to know right well we get we go every every year we go get a physical i get a blood work we want to make sure that we are cholesterols ok we go get our oil changed in our car make sure the tires are filled with air you know get the up but the you know the one thing we don't do is we don't go get a mental health checkup we just don't we don't and act like and so a lot of times we're not even aware that we've got something going on  not notice it because it's just part of what's going on in my every day it's like you know i hold something too close i can't see it one of the things that happens when you go and sit with a counselor is the counselor acts like a mirror so you know if i'm really close to the mirror i don't see but when i take a step back i get a better picture and they get an aha moment i didn't realize which oftentimes is the case someone comes into my office i do an intake with them and then i say it sounds like you're depressed and then they're you know what i never really thought of it but you know or you're struggling with post traumatic stress you know and i never consider that all of that stuff that happened to me in my childhood would end up being you know culminating post traumatic stress or some type of anxiety so i want everybody to know this is so important ok because i mean seriously i was there i was like i was reading and learning a couple weeks ago on a saturday and so stand by for this of the clarification so we're here but i also want people to know that they can contact you sure and they can actually come and see you as in anywhere from to new jersey or so on that you and you were telling me that you coun two young how old well i the youngest that i've ever counseled i think was five ok and the oldest was eighty three so full range all right i'm going to say however i'm probably most you are available in just a everybody can know that they want to reach out to you that you are taking clients yes and because i know we get into this next segment right now that there is going to be like i just need to know if i can call her so or you can call or ok let me give you my number go out of yeah it's nine  eight two three seven two eight nine nine ok got it yeah now let's get really into this because when we were having you speak that day to a group of people who are spring on our spring mental health day wellness were you specialize in addiction yes then you get into the whole range of like anxiety and depression and what's normal versus healthy and grief empathy coping and so i just let's start with  let's start wherever you want to start if you want to start with addiction and i really want to get into that difference between depression and anxiety because i thought that it was like it was ridiculous how much you taught everybody there that day on the differences because most people just lump it together don't realize it's so it's sometimes you can't have both you know you don't have to only be depressed or only having sight is sometimes it's a combination of the two but they're like so there were so many things that you listed that were like if anybody out watching those symptoms it was like so easily kind of identifiable should i just want to say being someone who's not like you a counselor i don't want our listeners to get some of those facts that they can go oh this is what i've been dealing with  has did say that it is a brain illness because it does affect the way the brain works and i'm of the same time like i said earlier i don't really like putting that illness you know on on anything people label is right that you know people because it prevents people from coming in however i do say that addiction is a disease and it's a disease because it follows the american medical associations definition of a disease which is it's chronic so once you're an addict you're always an addict or an alcoholic it's progressive that means to gets worse over time it's treatable and if you don't get treatment for you can die from it so you could put you know diabetes into that into that category so that's you know a disease but the thing about addiction is it's not just and you know we have this horrible opiate crisis going on in our and did new jersey it's over marijuana really yes wow yes so does marijuana have some medical benefits yes probably does but to use it as a recreational drug that's no you know we used to say back in the eighty's no one will ever get addicted to cocaine really oh yeah oh my god i know cocaine was an addictive first of all it was so expensive no would have that kind of money but we  yeah yeah did not like you had mentioned about the way the brain you kind of compared the way the brain to anorexia how it controls everything like it controls and eat a lot of exercise you know carrot stick and two pieces of celery for you know for the whole day and what ends up happening is yes they lose the body fat but then their body their brain needs to continue to work so it starts feeding off muscle and eventually it will start feeding off the heart that's one of the last things because the brain is the last thing that's the most important it's the most important organ that we have so you know it'll start feeding off the heart muscle and then that's when some most often that's how they die from that but it diction like i said it's it is progressive and people die from that all the time one of another point that i was learning that day was that you had talked about ninety days how your brain how after repetition of going in to have it explained that to some people who understand why there are ninety days programs to make sense right well that's i want to say that's the thing with a i think before they even started to really look at the brain and how the brain functions because i think i had said you know one of the things that we've always done in this profession is we sit and we listen and we get symptoms by what people are telling us but we're now beginning to do brain imaging it's really beginning to the sudden they got it on your brain as it was going on and that's the one thing week i have pictures that i show in my office of brain scans people who come in and are using drugs or alcohol and i show them you know how how it's affecting the way your brain is functioning versus what a healthy brain looks like yeah that's incredible and so it really it really does show up in that but addiction again it's not just drugs and alcohol addiction can also be behavioral in nature so but it is true it's right in front of us all the time they're still going on and what i was saying is that you had mentioned that you know they have been learning or i learned that ninety days of repetition your brain kind of starts to do standard operating rates what we're doing is we're learning how to start a new habit and i say this to clients i want you to go home i want you to brush your teeth with your non dominant hand and first it's really uncomfortable and you make a mess and you maybe get angry and you're going to even forget to do it but the more you practice it the easier it comes and then you know it does it can after ninety days about ninety days begins to create a new habit so something like a alcoholics anonymous success go to ninety meetings in ninety days and that really w even before that they recognize that's how long it takes to create a new habit imus i got about anything if i say you know what i want to start a new a new healthier eating routine i want to get into exercise and fight but i do it for ninety days  every day then it's going to become a new lifestyle same thing with thinking if i have a negative thinking versus positive thinking negative thinking i'm stupid i'm nothing i do sixt is just really awful all of the horrible person you know i just tracked misery all the time so i can think that way yeah and i'm going to have probably some depression and anxiety as a consequence to that or i can work actively changing the way i think so much to tell myself to stop and i want to say positive things and after ninety days and after ninety days if i do it consecutively and i do it often enough what end up happening it becomes a new habit a new way of thinking  begin to feel better about myself and about the world in general weight if i go i want to radio my joke ok because when i learned about the ninety days thing i was laughing to myself because i did not know that right anyway point being i took on this new li and i only made it to like eighty five days oh would you tell me i was not only i was like oh now that was just a joke but anyway i want you to know though are you like totally into this the way i am like i love the way ruth explains things it's like she's talking to a person i don't feel like i'm i feel like if i get my point being if you're out there and you have a venue like when she came to my place that had people come out who want to learn more about this mental wellness and get it all into this then you can get in touch with her i'm just want you to know that because honestly i learned so much that day so i just want every day no so then ok let's go into the anxiety depression because that i found fascinating  depression and i classified suppression and she accused to two different segments one is yes there is biological depression so that means the way our brain is functioning the way it's making or transmitte example ok or we hear s s our eyes you know so that that is also a uptakes in other words i might make enough but this one isn't taking enough so there's and some medication does help with that so yes there are there are medications that are antidepressants that really work sometimes it's not necessarily medication it might be looking at are you exercising enough you know what is your diet like are you getting enough vitamins and minerals i'm i'm a big proponent my own personal life i was and have had years of counseling for myself and my one counselor to me i really want you to go on prozac and i thought i really don't want to go on prozac so i started my own research and i take lots of vitamins every day and if i don't take those vitamins after five or six days i notice my depression coming back this is not something right so for me and i just want to say that for me i don't want to body sail on when we go off my medication don't do that without you know going through your your doctor your psychiatrist because that would not and you know to tell you to do that but for me that's what works for me but you also mentioned that to be a vitamin is that is biological in nature and we have depression that i say is situational depression so that means there's things in my life sad things in my life that maybe i don't really know how to cope with very well and maybe i've stuffed them so i d press them must push them down i don't talk about them i may have unresolved grief grief issues unresolved disappointment now my life is looking depressed one of the things that i say if you were in my office and i think i said this you know got the lights on in my office and i say ok let's say grew up in a family that said it's not ok to be angry so i take that feeling and i push it down  i'm never angry that i just but i'm depressed so what i do is i turn off a light switch and it kind of dims the whole room and i say so now what happens when you when you have been taught not to have a feeling it affects all the other feelings so we've got we've got five basic feelings sad mad glad afraid and disgusted so feelings are like and we say like volume so i can be just you know kind of ok you know i'm like peaceful i could be ecstatically happy or i could be just i don't know a little down or i could be in a deep state of grief so i say like volume so depends on what's going on and we've got so many words that in our language to describe those different levels of emotion that and because we're so intelligent we combine them like bittersweet you know that's emotion wow so  so one of the things that i do is i hope people talk about those things that they've pushed on and help them get in touch with their feelings and then if you can balance that back up again that it affects the other imagine and then what about anxiety because it's already down to seven minutes left i can't believe it goes so fast well anxiety and anxiety has a lot to do with now again that can be a biological you know based situation you may come from a family that has anxiety issues they suggest that about sixty percent of everything in of who we are is biological forty percent is learned so you know that nature nurture it kind of hard to say if i have an anxious mother is it in my  anxious because i got that through biology or my anxious because it's what i've witnessed and heard all my life the way if u k what if this is going to happen what if that's going to happen what if i say the wrong thing  belief systems play a huge role i use a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy with my clients and that's a it's an a b c system so a there's an activating event so i driving in road rage i'm behind i'm flashing my lights ok putting myself and him in danger because he didn't use is blinker well that behavior is triggered by a belief system so we've got the activating event the belief system the belief system says everybody should always use their blinker and i can't stand it when they don't so belief systems can cause anxiety so we've got three basic belief systems the first one is everything has to be perfect and it's not ok to make a mistake so when i have that belief system i may end up depressed fear to take action anxious lots of procrastination what if i don't get it right i got to do it perfectly rage because you didn't do it right low self esteem these are all consequences from a belief system the second one is everyone has to like me love me and approve of me that one causes a lot of anxiety because i don't know what if you don't like me what if you're going like this scarf what if you know and so i'm now i'm all those what if some very anxious about about things like that so that's that that's the consequence to the belief system and then life has to be fair easy and whole guarantees you know it's a big popular one these days because everything has to be fair but the reality is life isn't fair and sometimes we have to grieve over the things that we expected or that we wanted that we didn't get because life isn't fair and things that you know we expect them to be easy and then they're not easy and we get frustrated we get angry we you know get this contraption that we got to put together and we don't look at we don't look at the instructions you know yeah we get really frustrated with it because i think supposed to be easy to put this together we just tossed it in the corner you know but anxiety has has many different things obsessive compulsive disorder is under under anxiety even though it has its own separate classification but it's under anxiety post traumatic stress is under anxiety just you know it's just unbelievable so when someone comes in your office and you're assessing them kind of thing like we're really lucky today because we're able to listen to your side it's almost like you know you're coming in and i'm listening to you explain all these things that you do but when someone comes into your office you have to figure out all of this and put them into kind of into situations that you can kind of starman with what's going on and i just think it's fascinating because i love hearing about how something that we can all learn we're not necessarily born with the ability to have empathy really yeah but we can we can develop it something that's very human being empathetic and that really means that i can kind of put myself into your shoes a little bit one of the things that i say to people all the time the universal language is emotion so i could see somebody who's in china i don't know what the heck they're saying but i could tell by what emoting if they're happy if they're sad if they're scared if they're in grief i can tell just by looking and it can you know i can i can feel that you know so like oh i can see how sad that person is you know their news maybe saying you know the airplane crash in the lost their family and they all my gosh look at how how sad they are you know and so that empathy is is i can feel what you're feeling now sympathy is very different sympathy means that i am joining it's hard to describe i guess i'm joining you in the feeling and i want to take care of the feeling for you i want to take it away from you and also you know oh you poor thing you poor thing that you're you feel this way let me do something for you to fix it that would be sympathy empathy is that is so interesting i say is well really i could see how you're hurting ok and so when i sit with clients i listen to their story and i see i empathize with them and i listen to their belief systems because i also listen to the consequences involved and start putting together basically a treatment plan to help them ok so what i want to upgrade you know don't you feel like me don't you want to talk to her that's what i i want to talk to you i mean like i just not only because i know you but i'm telling you out there through all tamara world counselor chat is a radio show that she has it streams live on facebook from hundred county chamber of commerce office on wednesdays at noon there's all kinds of archives but she knew she was alone and just talks and gives all this interesting i mean a countless chat has a facebook page ok so you can go on there and you can see the different shows that i've done and watch them of the ones of stream live and whatever it from a show that i might put out there but there's very a very a few counselors out there that i've met that are actually only say empathetic answer but that sharing like you're saying about your life your your way of treatment not only for the thirty plus years of expertise and the fact that you're friendly and lovely