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Do you apologize before asking for help? Do you preface requests with "I know this is a lot" or "sorry to bother you" even when you are asking something entirely reasonable of someone who cares about you? Do you find yourself trying to take up as little space as possible; shrinking your needs, dismissing them before anyone else can, insisting you are fine when you are not; because stating what you actually need feels dangerous, presumptuous, or simply too much? For many traum

You worked hard toward something; a promotion, a completed project, a degree, a personal milestone; and when it arrived, you felt almost nothing. Or the feeling lasted for a moment and then disappeared, leaving something closer to flatness than satisfaction. People around you were excited on your behalf, and you found yourself performing a version of happiness you did not quite feel. If this sounds familiar, you are not ungrateful, and you are not broken. This is one of the q

You need to reply to an email. It is a simple email; a question about scheduling, or a social invitation, or something equally low-stakes. And yet you have been putting it off for three days, turning it over in your mind, drafting responses and deleting them, feeling a low hum of dread every time you think about it. Or you are standing in a grocery store, looking at two nearly identical options, and you cannot make yourself choose. Not because it matters; but because somethin

Every child will face moments of embarrassment; the stumble in front of classmates, the wrong answer given confidently, the friend group that suddenly seems closed off, the performance that did not go as planned. These moments are a normal and inevitable part of growing up. But for many children, and for the parents watching, they do not feel small. They feel enormous; and how a child learns to navigate them can shape their relationship with vulnerability, failure, and social

If you have heard of EMDR therapy but are not quite sure what it actually is or why it works, you are not alone. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and even that name raises more questions than it answers. What does eye movement have to do with healing from trauma? Why does following a light or a therapist's finger back and forth help someone feel less distressed by a painful memory? The answer lies in how the brain stores and processes difficult e

Have you noticed that small things have been setting you off more easily lately? A slow website, a minor disagreement, a change of plans; things that would not have bothered you much before, but now feel disproportionately frustrating, even infuriating? If so, you might be tempted to chalk it up to a short temper, or simply having a bad week. But for many people, this shift is actually a sign of something else: depression, showing up in a way that often goes unrecognized. Dep

You finally say no to something. And then immediately feel guilty about it. Maybe you spend the next hour replaying the conversation, wondering if you were too harsh. Maybe you find yourself softening the boundary before you've even seen how the other person reacts. Maybe you say yes anyway, just to make the discomfort stop. If this sounds familiar, you're in very good company. Setting limits with others is one of the things people struggle with most — not because they don't

If you have spent most of your life feeling like you were working harder than everyone else just to keep up; studying people carefully to figure out how to act, rehearsing conversations before they happen, exhausted at the end of social situations in a way that others do not seem to be, and never quite sure why; this post is for you. You may have been told you were too sensitive, too intense, too much, or not enough. You may have learned, early and thoroughly, how to be whoev

Anxiety is remarkably convincing. When it tells you that something terrible is about to happen, it does not present that as a theory; it presents it as fact. When it insists that people are judging you, or that you will not be able to handle what is coming, or that the worst-case scenario is the most likely one, it does so with a certainty that can be very hard to argue with. This is not a character flaw. It is how anxiety works. And understanding why it does this is often th

If you have come across Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and found the terminology a little puzzling; defusion, acceptance, the observing self; you are not alone. ACT uses some language that sounds abstract at first but points to something surprisingly practical. One of its core concepts, cognitive defusion, is worth understanding in plain terms; because once it clicks, it can genuinely change how you relate to your own mind. What is cognitive fusion? To understand def

Most of us have had the experience of feeling sad; genuinely, sometimes deeply sad; and then, eventually, feeling better. A loss, a disappointment, a hard week, and then, gradually, the weight lifts. Life moves forward. That is sadness doing what sadness is supposed to do: responding to something difficult, and then releasing. Depression is different. And understanding the difference matters; not to gatekeep who deserves help, but because the two experiences call for differen

For many people, the habit of overexplaining is connected to trauma: a learned response to environments where simply being yourself was not enough, or was not safe.

Open your phone on any given day and there is a good chance something feels urgent. A policy change, a disaster, a crisis somewhere in the world, a local story that hits close to home. Then tomorrow there is something else, and the day after that, something else again. If you have noticed a low hum of dread that never fully goes away, or a sense that you cannot quite relax because something new might happen at any moment, you are not imagining it. Many people are describing t

Losing a job is one of the most destabilizing experiences a person can go through. Whether you saw it coming or it arrived without warning, the impact of a layoff reaches far beyond your bank account. It touches your sense of identity, your daily structure, your relationships, and your belief in what comes next. If you are navigating job loss right now, what you are feeling is not an overreaction. It is a completely human response to a genuinely difficult situation. Recent la

June is Pride Month — a time to celebrate the resilience, joy, and diversity of LGBTQIA+ communities, and to reflect on how far we have come and how far we still have to go. At Stone Soup Counseling, Pride Month is also a time to think about something that sits at the heart of so much of the work we do in therapy: identity. Who we are, how we understand ourselves, and what it means to live authentically in a world that does not always make that easy. Identity exploration is n

Caregiving is one of the most profound and demanding things a person can do. Whether you are caring for an aging parent, a partner with a chronic illness, a child with complex needs, or another loved one who depends on you — you are doing work that is often invisible, rarely praised, and almost never truly finished. And if lately you have been feeling more depleted than devoted, more numb than nurturing, you are not alone. What you may be experiencing is caregiver burnout, an

There is a graphic that circulates around the internet from time to time that captures something most therapists wish they could tell every new client before their first session. The top half shows how we want therapy to be: a clean, straight line from "struggle" to "start therapy" to "feel better." The bottom half shows how therapy actually is: a winding, looping, doubling-back journey through confusion, feeling worse, relearning, introspecting, feeling better, getting trigg

Thinking about therapy but not sure if you really need it? You are not alone. One of the most common things people say when they finally start therapy is some version of: "I wish I had done this sooner." The barrier is rarely that therapy is unavailable; it is that most of us have been taught, in one way or another, that we should be able to handle things on our own. That struggling quietly is just part of life. That things have to get really bad before asking for help is jus

Every May, Mental Health Awareness Month invites us to pause and reflect on something that touches every single one of us: our mental and emotional wellbeing. At Stone Soup Counseling, this month holds special meaning. It is a time to speak openly about mental health, to push back against the stigma that still keeps too many people from seeking support, and to celebrate the courage it takes to prioritize yourself. Why Mental Health Awareness Month Matters Mental health condit

Autism Acceptance Month encourages us to move beyond simple awareness and toward something more meaningful: genuine understanding, inclusion, and respect for autistic people and their experiences. At our practice, we believe that starts with listening — to autistic individuals, to families, and to the growing body of research that continues to reshape how we understand autism. ​ What Is Autism? Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that affects how