Real Resolutions Counseling Blog
Gain insights and take charge of your life.
It’s a New Year!
Setting new year mental health goals works better than it has any right to, because a new year is a genuinely useful psychological marker. Researchers call it the fresh start effect — a dated boundary makes it easier to separate the person you were from the person you...
5 Helpful Tips for Career Hunting
Looking for work is one of the few things that combines high stakes, no timeline and constant rejection. Job search stress is not a sign you are handling it badly — it is what that combination does to most people. Here are five things that help, both practically and...
Navigating Anxiety During Family Holiday Events
The holiday season is supposed to mean joy, celebration and family. For anyone dealing with holiday anxiety, those same gatherings can be a fortnight of low-grade dread — the social demands, the expectations, and the sheer scale of a big family event all stacking on...
What’s OCD?
What is OCD? Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a mental health condition defined by intrusive, unwanted thoughts — obsessions — and the repetitive behaviours or mental acts performed to neutralise them, called compulsions. It affects millions of people, and although it...
Feeling Stuck
Feeling stuck in life is close to universal, and it is unusually good at convincing you it is permanent. Whether it shows up in your relationships, your career, or a general sense that the years are passing without much changing, the trapped feeling can be genuinely...
It’s an Odd World Right Now
Coping with uncertainty has become a daily skill lately. Are you feeling the oddness in the air as much as I am? It is hard to put a finger on, but the world seems to be changing at a pace that is difficult to absorb. Politics, human rights, the climate, the economy,...
What to Talk About in Therapy
Working out what to talk about in therapy is a more common problem than people admit. When a few weeks pass between sessions it gets hard to remember where you left off, and things that felt urgent at the time quietly drop away. Sometimes the opposite happens. Nothing...
Anxiety and Depression in Teenage Girls
Anxiety and depression in teenage girls rarely announce themselves. Middle school and high school are a stretch where everything feels new — living in a changing body, feeling things they have never felt before, working out who they are, finding new friends. Some...
Marriage Maintenance
We service the car before it breaks down. We go to the dentist without waiting for a toothache. Marriage maintenance is the same idea applied to the relationship most of the rest of life depends on — and almost nobody does it. Roughly half of marriages end in divorce....