Should I try mental health medication?

The decision to try psychotropic medication for mental health symptoms can be a hard one. There are so many factors that come into play when we are deciding to try Western medicine including ethical dilemmas, side effect fears and emotions connecting with seeking medical help.

As a therapist and a person who has had my fair share of mental health struggles, I have seen first hand how challenges this decision can be.

I have seen clients who desperately need a solution for crippling depression, anxiety, trauma, who aren’t able to find enough relief with holistic and therapy measures alone. I have also seen folks who take medication and find the side effects are so severe that it has negative consequences past the time they stop the medication. Some people are able to fully heal from holistic measures and therapy alone.

Whether to try mental health medication to help cope with symptoms is completely a personal decision. I’d highly recommend listening to your doctor’s requests as well as your own intuition/research.

Here’s five questions to consider if you are wondering if mental health medication is for you or not…

1. Are you in therapy? Research proves that for the most effective results: people need therapy alongside mental health medication. Consider this in your decision and if you are not currently addressing symptoms with therapy, it is important to add that to your self-care routine in a way that feels manageable to you.

2. What messaging have you received on mental health medication? Your decision needs to be based on your own mind/body/spiritual needs and not the judgments or needs of others. There is a whole lot of unsolicited advice out there and when it comes to this important decision: leave the final call up to primarily you and then your doctor.

3. Do you have judgment against yourself for “needing” medication? This is a common belief I’ve heard from folks as a barrier for medication treatment. It is okay to ask for help, it is okay to take medication if you’re experiencing a chemical imbalance. It doesn’t mean that medication is the right decision for everyone, but we definitely shouldn’t let self-judgment be the barrier in our healing.

4. Am I basing my opinion off online reviews from others who have taken medication? This can be really tricky because the majority of people who leave reviews on online platforms such as Reddit have extreme experiences with medications. Most of the folks that go out of their way to post their medication experience unfortunately ends up being biased. I would base your opinion on medication based on your own experiences and doctor recommendations. Each medication will affect each person differently.

5. Am I ready to change? This can be really scary. We may fear that if we get better that we will lose parts of ourselves that we have grown to embrace or at least be comfortable with. Who would I be without my anxiety? Without my depression? Without my ADHD symptoms? It’s a good question to consider.

Each person has the right to make the decision for themselves if medication is right for them. There is a stigma in our society around mental health medication but it doesn’t have to affect our decision for ourselves. Some people choose to try therapy first. Some people decide to try holistic measures only. There is no right or wrong answer for most people. I’d ask yourself some questions and then trust yourself to know the right answer for you!

PS this isn’t medical advice and I’m not a medical doctor 🙂

If you have any more questions about your feelings about mental health medications please reach out via the Metta Holistic Therapy contact page or email me directly at reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading until the end! You are worthy of wisdom, healing, and being LOVED.

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Do I need Psychotherapy with Ketamine Treatment?

Are you interested in seeking ketamine treatments to help you overcome depressive, anxious or trauma symptoms?

Have you already started on the path of ketamine infusions and find yourself seeking to properly prepare or integrate those experiences?

If your answer is yes to one of these questions, you are in the right place. I am a psychotherapist who specializes in working with psychedelic integration as well as treating mental health issues.

I’m going to give you the top five reasons why it is imperative that if you seek Ketamine treatment, you must also prepare with a therapist beforehand and integrate with a therapist afterwards.

1. A therapist can help you with setting the right intention. Preparation is so very important when it comes to getting the most you possibly can out of Ketamine treatments. Setting the right intention could be a game changer when it comes to the results of ketamine infusions. For example, if you go into the ketamine therapy with no intention whatsoever, your mind may go where it typically does which may be a dark place. It doesn’t mean the treatment wouldn’t work at all, it just means it wouldn’t work nearly as well. Ketamine has a way of getting us into our subconscious mind which is a place where incredible change can take place. But if we are going into our subconscious and just implanting more of the same depressed, anxious and self-critical thoughts, it won’t allow for as much as a shift to happen.

2. A therapist can also help you develop mindfulness. There is so much that is brought to the surface in a ketamine infusion, and if you haven’t learned mindfulness skills… you just might miss transformative information. Learning to pay close attention to what comes up will provide valuable pieces to the process of healing moving forward.

3. A therapist can help you develop maybe the most important skill of all: self-compassion. During a ketamine infusion, you have control to set an initial intention and with mindfulness can have a bit of sway in how the experience goes but overall the journey will take you where it is meant to go. With that being said, regardless of what your brain and body present during the ketamine treatment, you will have learned how to treat yourself loving regardless. I can’t emphasize this enough, self-compassion could make all the difference in having a “positive” or “negative” experience. It is all a matter a perspective and how you treat yourself with whatever it is that comes to the surface.

4. A therapist can help you integrate the experience. There are so many therapeutic connections from the past, present and future that will be presented in a ketamine experience. It is very important that you have a trained mental health professional to help you properly integrate these experiences in a healthy, positive and long-lasting way.

5. A therapist will help you continue to process what the Ketamine journey brought to the surface. Even though Ketamine is incredibly effective – it is not an instant and forever fix. Sometimes it brings to the surface what we have needed to heal in order to begin the process of peace. That means we need to continue to utilize therapy to finish the work that our Ketamine journey began. We can do this with evidence-based therapeutic modalities such as EMDR, IFS, mindfulness and somatic-experiencing.

As a trained masters-level therapist who has also tried first-hand the experience of medically supervised ketamine treatments for stress reduction, I have discovered how truly important these top 5 reasons to prepare and integrate with a therapist are.

As time goes on, we will continue to see psychedelic therapy rise. The research is indisputable and incredibly hopeful. I encourage you to consider to talk to your doctor about what they feel is best for your medical symptoms and I also encourage you to reach out to a therapist to work on your mental health symptoms if you are interested or already involved in Ketamine treatments.

I would be happy to answer questions or talk about a free consultation for therapy for Ketamine preparation or integration! Please reach out via the Metta Holistic Therapy contact page or email me directly at reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading until the end! You are worthy of wisdom, healing, and being LOVED.

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Signs I have Outgrown my Friendship

Friendships are one of the biggest gifts we have in life. Finding quality friendships can take just as much time, effort and energy that finding romantic love does. All that being said, it’s very important that we keep quality friendships in our lives and begin to recognize signs if we are outgrowing that relationship.

Here are the top five signs that you are outgrowing your friendship:

1. The values that you hold dear, don’t mean much to them. For example, if you find service to community and adventure to be important values to you and your friend doesn’t value those at all, it may be a sign you both are going in different directions. It’s okay to have a few values that don’t align as long as they aren’t the ones you hold most dear such as morality or honesty. When most of your values start to go in different directions, that’s a sign you may be growing apart.

2. You continually grow whether it’s physically, spiritually, mentally or emotionally and they aren’t growing at all. There is nothing wrong with staying the same but if you are growing and changing and the other person is not- it’s only a matter of time before you outgrow the friendship.

3. You are clearly putting in more effort or vice versa. It is a definite sign that two friends are growing apart when it is obvious that one friend is putting in more effort than the other. This can look like one friend is the one that always reaches out first or calls to catch up.

4. They use the past against you. If we have been friends with someone for a significant period of time, history can either work for the friendship or against it. A sign that you may be outgrowing the friendship is if the other friend continually uses the past against you.

5. You begin to be competitive towards each other. This is one of the major signs that either one or both parties have outgrown the friendship. Competition is like poison to a friendship instead of the water of collaboration that allow it to prosper and feel supportive.

It is sometimes heartbreaking to discover that you have outgrown a friendship, especially one that has a long history. Give yourself time to grieve if you realize this is the case between you and your friend. Letting go is never easy.

Let me know in the comments what comes up for you when you read this list. Good job for reading and see you back here soon! Email me with any questions reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com

Do I Need EMDR Therapy?

EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is an effective type of therapy that aids in reprocessing traumatic memories in the past.

If you’ve heard a loved one who has had incredible healing experiences from doing EMDR with their therapist, you may be wondering if EMDR therapy is right for you.

I’ve compiled a list of common trauma responses below to help indicate whether EMDR therapy may be right for you.

1. You find yourself having a fight response. There are various forms of trauma responses but the flight response is one of them. This means, if there is a situation in the present, you find yourself getting angry beyond what the current situation would have called for. For example, your partner forgets to call to tell you they are running late for plans and your instant response is to yell at your partner. After you get off the phone you may feel guilty for “letting your anger get the best of you”.

2. You find yourself having a flight response. This is another trauma amygdala response. This means when you are feeling stressed or overwhelmed that you have the impulse to run away or avoid the situation altogether. For example, you’re having a fight with your partner so you decide to go home to your parents for the weekend instead of staying in town to work the personal conflict through.

3. You find yourself having a befriend response. This is another trauma response. A befriend response will often show in the form of “people pleasing”. For example, even though you may not want a certain type of food for dinner, if your friend is in town, you may agree to that type of food just to avoid feared conflict or abandonment.

4. You find yourself having a freeze response. This is the last trauma response. The trauma freeze response may feel like you are shutting down completely. For example, your family member is trying to express hurt feelings over something you did and you end up zoning out, turning inward and not responding in any real way.

There are a tremendous amount of other more specific trauma symptoms that may show up for you. If you are noticing you are having a flight, fight, freeze or befriend response EMDR is definitely right for you.

Let me know if you have any questions and please feel free to reach out at reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com !

What is Somatic Therapy?

Somatic therapy has gain popularity over the last 2 years in the therapy realm and beyond. The reason for this is because more and more research is discovering the connection between our brain, body and experiences. Traumatic experiences, anxiety and depression can “get stuck” in our body and nervous system. Therapy that values somatic healing will not only focus on cognitive processes but also emotions and sensations present in the body.

Below I’ve created a list of the top three few benefits of somatic therapy.

  1. We can begin to feel safe in our body. Many of us who experience depression, anxiety, and trauma symptoms can feel like an outsider in our own skin. We can feel like we are crawling out of our skin, dissociating from our body, or just feeling an overall sense of discomfort in our body. Somatic therapy addresses these emotions and sensations by allowing us to gently turn inward and process what valuable information our body is trying to tell us.

2. We can clear out old negative memories without having to think about them. When old sensations and emotions get stuck in our body, we need to tap into our body to clear them out. In other modalities, the focus in purely on thought but that doesn’t address the underlying uncomfortability existing in our body and isn’t an effective way of clearing it either.

3. Lastly, it can help relieve physical symptoms as well. Emotions and physical pain are so connected and cannot be separated. When we are holding anxiety, stress, grief or trauma in our neck for example, we may experience neck pain often. Utilizing somatic therapy to clear out emotional blockages, we in turn begin to help heal physical discomfort as well.

Somatic therapy is my passion so please feel free to email me if you have any questions reneeminxtherapy@gmail.con

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is a work that has been thrown around in popular culture more and more in the last decade than ever before seen in history. I believe the reason for this is because people all around the world have begun to see the effectiveness mindfulness has on their emotional, mental and spiritual health.

Below I will list a brief and easy top 3 descriptors to help you better understand what mindfulness is…

  1. Mindfulness is all about coming back to the present moment. We often get stuck in reliving the past or worrying about what might happen in the future. Mindfulness reminds us that we really only ever need to live in the present. The past has already happened and the future has not happened yet. Thinking about the past gives us depression. Thinking about the future gives us anxiety. Therefore, the only way we can only find empowerment and peace in living in the present moment.

2. Mindfulness is all about paying attention. What that means is simply to notice what is going on within you and around you in the present. Begin to notice what kind of thoughts you are having, what emotions you are experiencing, what sensations are existing in your body as well as noticing the five senses (sounds/tastes/visuals/touch/smells) in your surroundings.

3. Mindfulness is about complete non-judgement. This is another extremely important aspect to understand about mindfulness. It is not just about coming back to being aware of the present moment, but also about being non-judgemental to what we notice. There is no need to develop anger, hate, judgement or be critical of what kind of sensations, emotions and thoughts we are having. The goal is just to simply notice them without judging or trying to change them.

If you have any more questions about mindfulness, mindfulness cognitive based therapy and psychotherapy please reach out via the Metta Holistic Therapy contact page or email me directly at reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading until the end! You are worthy of wisdom, healing, and being LOVED.

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Do I have trauma symptoms?

Read below to learn about how trauma may show up in your day to day life.

We may hear the word trauma and think to ourselves… what the heck does trauma even mean? Trauma is an experience that feels so overwhelming that we cannot process it at the time. Trauma is extremely specific to the person who experienced the event. It all depends on the level of distress it caused that person.

I felt it might be helpful to list some trauma symptoms below and you can read through to see how many of these symptoms apply to you.

1. Hyper-vigilance response meaning that your body becomes “jumpy” when someone slams a door, for example. You notice you are on edge much of the time.

2. You tend to be “waiting for the other shoe to drop” or have a sense of impending doom and don’t necessarily know why.

3. You find yourself pushing people away either by feeling too anxious about the relationship or feeling to suffocated by the relationship.

4. You have nightmares with intense emotions at least once per week. When you wake up, you find that these emotions stay with you for a little while.

5. You avoid reminders of the trauma. For example, if you experienced sexual assault you find yourself not wanting to watch movies with rape scenes in it.

6. You have negative beliefs about yourself and the world. Beliefs such as “the world is unfair” or “I am unloveable” .

7. You find yourself sexually aroused by the same traumatic experience that haunts you at night. This is a very common trauma response.

8. You minimize your past experiences and question if “it even happened”. Downplaying your trauma can help us maintain an illusion of control.

9. We find ourselves wants to numb our intense emotions by using substances, people, food, shopping or any other addictive behavior.

10. We experience intrusive thoughts or memories about the trauma even when we are not trying to think about it. It seemingly comes out of nowhere and really affects us.

I hope this list was helpful! By no means was this an all encompassing list but it is a helpful starting guidepost. If you have three or more of these trauma symptoms above, it is time to seek some professional help.

If you have any more questions about trauma, PTSD and CPTSD please reach out via the Metta Holistic Therapy contact page or email me directly at reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading until the end! You are worthy of wisdom, healing, and being LOVED.

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Can trauma be healed?

In short, the answer is yes trauma can be continuously healed.

Trauma is as complex as people are. Each person’s situation in unique yet as clinicians we know there have been proven ways to help improve trauma. Below I list the top four reasons why trauma can be healed.

1. Our brains are always changing. Each new experience changes our neural networks which is just a fancy way of saying that they change our brain. Yes, it is true that trauma changes our brain as well. The good news is that as we have new healthy attachment experiences, begin to put in the therapeutic work and begin to relate to ourselves differently we begin to “pave new roads” in our brain so to speak. What we focus on grows and what we let go of begins to cease having as much control over us.

2. There are proven therapies that work. Research experts have been evaluating trauma based interventions for over 30 years and what they have found is that certain interventions really work. Some of those interventions include EMDR, mindfulness, IFS, and Brainspotting.

3. It’s all about healthy relationships. What research has also proven to us is that although we can become the most traumatized within relationships, we can also find the most long-term healing for trauma within healthy relationships. The most important part of therapy in terms of effectiveness is the therapeutic relationship.

4. Human beings are resilient. We have learned that humans can withstand unbearable pain and come out the other side more compassionate, stronger and wiser human beings. Trauma, although painful, can also give someone incredible knowledge of how to help others going through the same thing. We are never alone and we are capable of more than we think.

If you have any more questions about trauma, PTSD and CPTSD please reach out via the Metta Holistic Therapy contact page or email me directly at reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com

Thanks so much for reading until the end! You are worthy of wisdom, healing, and being LOVED.

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Welcome Metta family!

My name is Renee Minx. I am a masters level mental health therapist as well as a person in long-term successful recovery from complex trauma and addiction.

Please feel free to reach out if you want to work together for individual therapy or if you have any questions reneeminxtherapy@gmail.con

What will your blogs be about?

This blog is about all things trauma, wellness, recovery and health. My clinical expertise is in trauma, abuse survivors, somatic techniques, inner child work and holistic healing.

Why read this blog?

  • Because you will learn new ways to help cope with your mental health symptoms
  • Because improving your own symptoms will also improve your relationships
  • As you learn more, your awareness will grow and so will your power to change

I am extremely passionate about trauma and mental health healing because I know that a happier life is possible.

I want us to connect with each other like a community would. So if you have any requests that I write on a topic please let me know! I’m also very open to questions as well.

I want this to be a free and helpful resource from an expert + survivor to you. Cheers to this journey of life together!

If you have any more questions about psychotherapy please reach out via the Metta Holistic Therapy contact page or email me directly at reneeminxtherapy@gmail.com

Thank you so much! You are worthy of wisdom, healing, and being LOVED.

#mentalhealth #traumatherapy #cptsd #ptsd