Gary Chapman has written a number of practical books on what he calls The Five Love Languages (including books relating the “love languages” to teens and to children.) He suggests that there are five love languages, each with various dialects:

Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, Physical Touch

Seldom do a husband and wife have the same primary love language. Less seldom do families share the same primary love languages. And, our primary love language may change over time. We have “love tanks” that need to be regularly filled. We need to learn to speak our loved ones’ primary love languages to fill their tanks. When your spouse feels secure in your love, they will be happier and more fulfilled. When their love tank is empty, they feel used and worthless; their world feels dark and oppressive.
A person’s criticisms and complaints can be major clues to what their primary love language is. In other words, a spouse’s criticisms about your behavior can provide you with the clearest clue to her primary love language. People tend to criticize their
spouse most loudly in the area where they themselves have the deepest emotional need. Their criticism is an ineffective way of pleading for love.

Questions to consider when determining your primary love language, in addition to the formal assessment:
How did your parents show you love? When did you feel most loved by them?
How do you express love to your spouse (or a close friend)?
How do you express love to your children?
What does a loved one do or not do that hurts you most deeply?
What type of things do you most often request of your spouse?
In what way do you most regularly express love to your spouse?
What first attracted you to your spouse or made you think that he or she cared for you?

Clues for discovering your spouse’s (or a child’s) primary language:
Pay close attention to how they express love to you and others. People tend to try to show love in ways they want to be loved.
Listen to what they request most often.
Consider what they complain about most.
Ask them. Or ask them to do the assessment.
*Do not “peg” them into a box. Remember, an adult’s love languages can change, and children’s languages may change as they grow.

Run an experiment. If it is still hard to understand what most communicates love, make a best guess of what their primary love language is. Attempt to practice showing love in specific ways in this language for the next two weeks. See if it makes a difference. If not, try another language for another two weeks.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past… we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.  And so it is with you… we are in charge of our Attitudes.

- Charles R. Swindoll

Educate yourself on the dangers.

Did you know…?

• it takes your body a week to recover from one night of sleep deprivation
• sleepiness slows down your thought processes, impairs memory and makes learning difficult
• poor sleep habits have been linked to poor eating habits, obesity, diabetes and heart disease
• lack of sleep reduces your response time so that driving drowsy is as dangerous as driving drunk
• lack of sleep can negatively impact your mood, causing irritability, anger, and poor stress coping
• chronic sleepiness puts you at greater risk for depression
• adolescents who stay up too late are more likely to use alcohol and drugs
• sleep deprivation is a method of torture in some countries?

Don’t torture yourself physically or mentally. Follow these sleep hygiene tips to promote healthful sleep habits for a healthy body and mind.

Sleep Hygiene Tips

The US Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) suggests the following for good sleep:

Tips for Adults:

• Go to bed at the same time each night and rise at the same time each morning.
• Make sure your bedroom is a quiet, dark, and relaxing environment, which is neither too hot or too cold.
• Make sure your bed is comfortable and use it only for sleeping and not for other activities, such as reading, watching TV, or listening to music. Remove all TVs, computers, and other “gadgets” from the bedroom.
• Physical activity may help promote sleep, but not within a few hours of bedtime.
• Avoid large meals before bedtime.

Tips for Adolescents/Young Adults:

• Avoid caffeinated drinks after lunch.
• Avoid bright light in the evening.
• Avoid arousing activities around bedtime (e.g., heavy study, text messaging, getting into prolonged conversations, including online conversations).
• Expose yourself to bright light upon awakening in the morning.
• While sleeping in on weekends is permissible, it should not be more than 1–2 hours past your usual wake
• time, to avoid disrupting your circadian rhythm governing sleepiness and wakefulness.
• Avoid pulling an “all-nighter” to study.

Stress is the “wear and tear” our bodies experience as we adjust to our continually changing environment; it has physical and emotional effects on us and can create positive or negative feelings. As a positive influence, stress can help compel us to action; it can result in a new awareness and an exciting new perspective. As a negative influence, it can result in feelings of exhaustion, distrust, rejection, anger, and depression, which in turn can lead to health problems such as headaches, upset stomach, rashes, insomnia, ulcers, high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke. With any life change (positive or negative), we experience stress as we readjust our lives. In so adjusting to different circumstances, stress will help or hinder us depending on how we react to it. The goal is not to eliminate stress, but to better manage it.

Consider the following story: A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised a glass of water and asked, “How heavy is this glass of water?” Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied, “The absolute weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you’ll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it’s the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.” He continued, “And that’s the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won’t be able to carry on. As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we’re refreshed, we can carry on with the burden.”

Below there are many suggestions for coping with stress. Read through them and highlight the ones that might work best for you. Give them a try.  Managing stress effectively makes life much more enjoyable!

Ways to Manage Stress

• Reward coping behavior—anything that is an attempt to effectively deal with your child’s anxiety should receive praise. For example, any steps toward facing the fear should be commended.
• Extinguish excessive anxious behavior—parents should ignore or respond minimally to their child’s anxiety. Long discussions about fears are not usually helpful.
• Manage their own parental anxiety. Healthy parents are more likely to have healthy children.

In general, parents should develop family communication and problem-solving skills. And parents should use an authoritative parenting style, combining love and connection with appropriate limits.

Parents can reinforce (and potentially INCREASE) their child’s anxiety with the following behaviors:

• Over-control—don’t be too controlling, doing everything for your child because it’s easier. Instead, encourage independence in your child. Help her learn to do things for herself.
• Overprotection—don’t be too cautious without cause. Allow your child to make mistakes and learn from them.
• Modeling anxious interpretations—don’t agree with your child’s exaggeration of risk in certain situations thereby reinforcing the idea that scary things should be avoided. Help your child realistically determine the risks involved in any given challenge.
• Tolerance of avoidant behavior—don’t suggest or tolerate not trying something difficult. Instead, gently encourage him to face his fears, while you are helping provide the necessary supports and anxiety management skills.
• Rejection and criticism—this, of course, isn’t helpful. Instead, be positive and loving.
• Conflict—work toward creating an overall sense of harmony in your home.

Adapted from Freeing Your Child from Anxiety, by Tamar Ellsas Chansky*

You see things in black and white categories. If a situation falls short of perfect, you see it as a total failure. A woman on a diet ate a bigger bowl of ice cream than she intended, and decided that she had completely ruined her diet. She then decided to go ahead and eat the entire carton, instead of brushing off the mistake and moving on.

Overgeneralization

You see a single negative event, such as a romantic rejection or a criticism from your boss, as a never-ending pattern of defeat by using words such as “always” or “never” when you think about it.  A depressed salesman became terribly upset when he failed to meet his quota one month. He told himself that he always misses his quotas, instead of realizing this as one not-so-good month out of many good ones.

Mental filter

You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, so that your vision of all of reality becomes darkened, like a drop of ink that discolors an entire beaker of water.  You receive many positive comments about your presentation to a group of associates at work, but one of them says something mildly critical. You obsess about his reaction for days and ignore all the positive feedback.

Discounting the positive

You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count.” Discounting the positive takes the joy out of life and makes you feel inadequate and unrewarded.  If you do a good job, you may tell yourself that it wasn’t good enough or that anyone could have done as well.

Jumping to conclusions

You interpret things negatively when there are no facts to support your conclusion. There are two ways of doing this:  Mind reading–Without checking it out, you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you. For example, you tell yourself, “He didn’t smile and say hi when he passed; he must not like me.”  Fortune telling–You predict that things will turn out badly. Before a test you may tell yourself, “I’m really going to blow it. I’ll probably flunk!” Or if you’re depressed you may tell yourself, “I’ll never get better.”

Magnification and Minimization

You exaggerate the importance of problems and shortcomings, or you understate the importance of the positive.  A friend arranges a wonderful surprise birthday party for you, but you cannot appreciate or enjoy it because you are so focused on the fact that one of your friends didn’t show up.

Emotional reasoning

You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are.  “I feel terrified about flying on airplanes; therefore, it must be very dangerous to fly.” Or “I feel inferior. I must be a second-rate person.” Or “I feel angry, and this proves I’m being treated unfairly.”

“Should” statements

You tell yourself that things should be the way you hoped or expected them to be. You have rigid rules that you think should apply no matter what the circumstances.  “Should” statements that are directed against you lead to guilt and frustration: After playing a difficult piece on the piano, a gifted pianist told herself, “I should have played that better!” This made her feel so disgusted that she quit practicing for several days.  “Should” statements that are directed against other people or the world in general lead to anger and frustration: “He shouldn’t be so stubborn and argumentative.”

Labeling

You explain behaviors or events merely by naming them. Rather than describing the specific behavior, you assign a label to someone or yourself that puts them in absolute and unchangeable terms. Labels are useless abstractions that lead to anger, anxiety, frustration, and low self-esteem.  Instead of saying “I made a mistake at work today.” you tell yourself: “I’m a loser,” or “a fool,” or “a failure.”  You may also label others. When someone does something that rubs you the wrong way, you may tell yourself: “He’s a jerk.” Then you feel that the problem is with that person’s “character” or “essence” instead of with their thinking or behavior. You see them as totally bad. This makes you feel hostile and hopeless about improving things and leaves little room for constructive communication.

Personalization and blame

You hold yourself personally responsible for an event that isn’t entirely under your control.  When a woman received a note that her child was having difficulties at school, she told herself, “This shows what a bad mother I am,” instead of trying to pinpoint the actual cause of the problem so that she could be helpful to her child.  Personalization leads to guilt, shame, and feelings of inadequacy.  Some people do the opposite. They blame other people or their circumstances for their problems, and they overlook ways that they might be contributing to the problem: “The reason I got a speeding ticket is because that cop was a jerk!” Accepting responsibility appropriately allows us to improve ourselves.

• Here are some questions you should answer when considering a particular therapist:
• Is the therapist licensed?
• Does the therapist have training and experience in the issues of interest to me?
• Does the therapist show an interest in and understanding of my concerns?
• Is the therapist able to talk to me in language I can understand?
• Is the therapist accessible and responsive?
• Does this therapist feel “right” to me-do I feel understood and safe.

• Find new ways to cope with stress and anxiety
• Manage anger, depression, and other emotional pressures
• Improve communications skills–learn how to listen to others, and have others listen to you
• Get “unstuck” from past relationships and family issues–break old patterns and develop new ways of dealing with old issues
• Heal old psychological wounds–repair damage from the past
• Discover creative ways to problem-solve
• Reach full potential in life
• Improve self-esteem and boost self-confidence
• Increase ability to love oneself and love others–enrich relationships with a greater capacity for respect, compassion, and joy.

• Define problems and underlying issues
• Learn what is “normal,” “natural,” or expectable in current circumstances
• Discover misconceptions or conflicts that may be blocking action or change
• Change self-defeating behavior and dysfunctional patterns of interaction
• Gain tools, along with hope or courage to take charge of life.

There is nothing mystical or “weird” about a therapy session. We simply sit and talk. My clients tell me that while they may arrive at their first session feeling a little nervous, they are comfortable with the process moments after we have begun talking.

A person may seek therapy for themselves or a loved one because:

• It has become difficult to cope with one of life’s changes, for example, a divorce, a move, a health crisis, a new school or job, a new marriage, or having a child.
• A child is having difficulty managing his or her behavior at home, or school, or both. The child may be angry or aggressive, or just not do what adults tell him or her to do.
• A marriage is in crisis, or just not as close as it used to be.
• A child isn’t living up to his or her academic potential in school. Or, an adult isn’t performing as well in life as he or she should be.
• A child or adult feels depressed and can’t seem to “snap out of it.”
• A child or adult is feeling nervous or anxious too often, either about something specific or just in general.
• A person can’t shake a particular addiction, whether it be drugs or food or exercise, or a particular habit such as hair pulling or hand washing.
• Parents may want advice and suggestions about handling a difficult or “different” child.

Individuals seeking therapy have different kinds and degrees of psychological discomfort. What they have in common is that they often feel like what they’re doing now isn’t working. New perspectives, tools and strategies are needed to produce different outcomes.