PsychCentral, a leading online network for mental health resources, has for the second time highlighted excerpts from my upcoming book, Your Turn: Ways to Celebrate Life Through Storytelling. In an article by Margarita Tartakovsky “Using Writing to Help Us Process Our Grief”, the author points out how Your Turn recommends writing as a powerful tool to help process some of life’s greatest challenges. Tartakovsky includes quotes from my book and references my sentiment that writing can … [Read more...]
PsychCentral Highlights Your Turn in Article Addressing Anxiety
PsychCentral, a prominent mental health social network, recently featured my upcoming book, Your Turn: Ways to Celebrate Life Through Storytelling, in the fascinating new article, “8 Ways to Write Away Your Worries”. Author Margarita Tartakovsky outlines how writing is an effective tool for addressing anxiety and worrying. Writing disrupts the “worry cycle”, according to cited expert Dr. Sarah Neustadter, and “helps use see more clearly.” Tartakovsky referenced Your Turn as an upcoming … [Read more...]
Why Relationships Endure After a Loved One Dies
In my mother’s older years, she spent a good deal of her time writing stories about her life with my father who died at 36 of a heart attack in June 1956. At the time of his passing, she was seven months pregnant and just 34 years old. As a single mother, thanks to hard work and determination, she went on to make a good life for herself and her children. She got her bachelor’s degree and became a teacher. Later, she went on to earn a master’s degree and ultimately became the primary school … [Read more...]
Writing as a Pathway to Helping Overcome Addictions
One of the toughest challenges of battling any addiction is the feeling of isolation you experience in struggling to identify, understand and address the root cause of your behavior. For years, I struggled with alcohol, binging, purging and cutting as a means of dealing with my underlying feelings of despair, grief and distaste for myself. I justified my addictions by developing rituals to drown out the anxiety, fear and pain that enveloped my soul. My first such ritual was food, which I … [Read more...]
Storytelling and Life Lessons: Writing to Heal
For many of us, our most memorable stories come from family folklore. These are the stories that inform us about who we are and where we came from. We’ve either lived these moments or had them passed down from other generations, and have filed them in our memory boxes marked, Important Life Lessons. These lessons can be drawn upon throughout our lives, whether we are seven or 70. My very best and earliest storytelling teachers were Ida Mae, my next-door neighbor, and my grandfather, … [Read more...]
