WELCOME TO BLUE TREE!
Blue Tree Team: Marisa, Angela, Anna and Jillyn
I see you've found your way to our blog! This will be so much fun in creating and maintaining a line of communication with people like yourself. Maybe you're a parent looking into ways to help your own child manage behaviors that are impacting your lives. Or you could be a teacher looking at resources or activities that you could use in your classroom with your students. Perhaps you're another therapist wanting ideas or additional perspectives in how to assist your clients. No matter who you are, you are bound to walk away gaining something that is helpful to your life in one way or another just because you've found yourself here. So, welcome!
The brilliant thing about therapy and working in the mental health field is that we all as humans have mental health. Good, bad, terribly symptomatic... it all exists as we as humans all have thoughts, feelings and experiences that make up who we are as individuals. So when I say everyone who visits the Blue Tree Blog can benefit in some way, I mean EVERYONE.
For instance, a shared experience that we've all had recently is living during a global pandemic. Of course, I'm referring to COVID-19. No matter what your beliefs are about this particular pandemic, I'm willing to guess that it has impacted your life in some way. There have been profound effects to our global health care systems, the American economy and how family units function in neighborhoods around the world.
Since we've identified a unified problem of increased stress levels due which could be caused by working from home (if you're lucky enough to still have a job), having to socially distance (if not, completely isolate) for our protection and the protection of our loved ones, having school aged children out of school and learning from home, wearing masks in public, and/or the under lining fear that you could catch a potentially deadly virus lets focus on a solution. Now you may want the solution to look like COVID-19 just going away, or never having happened to begin with, but both of those things are outside of our control. So let's look at the things we CAN control: avoiding or limiting media use (yes, this includes social media too!), making a schedule and sticking to it every day to ensure that we're not avoiding tasks while also being productive and efficient with our time, taking breaks for ourselves when we're feeling overwhelmed... the list goes on and on.
However, the most important piece to all of this is to be kind to ourselves throughout this process. To have patience with ourselves, and to accept that we are human. We make mistakes, we are flawed. We all deserve grace.
What you've just read through above is just a glimpse into therapy. At Blue Tree, our therapists work with our clients to identify problems and find solutions that work best for them, helping client's build a more fulfilling life. Our goal is to create an environment that fosters a trusting relationship where our clients can share their own thoughts, feelings and experiences with their therapists. We can problem solve solutions, teach coping skills, highlight previous successes, and encourage clients to reach out to the people in their support network- and yes, with our child clients too. These clinical skills are used in such a way that allow the clients to feel empowered and gain insight into areas of their lives that they previously had not had or had not been ready to face. Ultimately, being able to accept their mental health as humans and work toward living a more fulfilling life.
This is therapy.
This is Blue Tree.
