Kim Holsbeke If you've ever owned both a dog and a cat, you know how wildly different their personalities are. Dogs are enthusiastic, in-your-face, loyal shadows. Cats? They’re independent, unpredictable, and tend to show affection on their terms. Funny enough, this contrast is a useful metaphor for understanding the parenting journey from infancy to adolescence. For the first 12 years of your child’s life, you’re a dog. You're everywhere they are. You sniff out danger, clean up messes, hover at playdates, and bark at anything that threatens their well-being. You’re in it. Fully, loudly, lovingly in it. But then, somewhere around age 13, something begins to shift, and if you’re not prepared, it can feel jarring. Suddenly, the parenting style that once felt natural starts to backfire. The tighter you hold on, the more they push away. Welcome to the teenage years, where effective parenting often starts to look a lot more like being a cat. The Transition: From Dog Read more [...]

I didn’t know that Yoga was such a place to suffer. My preconceived notion of it was that it was a place to stretch and relax—it’s not. Yoga is hard for me. As a big, tall and admittedly inflexible guy, yoga kicks my butt. Yet, I find myself continuing to go while also encouraging many of my clientele and friends to join me. According to Bessel Van Der Kolk’s landmark book on Trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, yoga can be more efficacious in the healing process for trauma than any medication we’ve studied in the context of treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Yoga isn’t just for people with PTSD though; in fact, you do not need to have a mental health diagnosis to benefit from yoga and I’d say that yoga studios actually need to lean into the trauma piece more to bring out the trauma community.  Yoga comes in many forms and variations. Some classes lead you through positions at a quick tempo resulting in a more cardiovascular workout while other classes Read more [...]

Scratching the creative writing itch. Here we go…  Your eyes are closed. Now open them.  You’re in large rectangular prism or “box”. You can’t see outside of the Box. Scattered randomly around the floor, walls and ceiling of the Box are buttons. Big, red, plastic, arcade-style looking buttons. And you notice your scale. You realize that you are quite small in this box as if Rick Moranis pointed his shrinking laser at you and you shrunk to the size of small flower petal. Your height doesn’t quite reach across the diameter of the red buttons when you lay next to one. And now, the Ball. A large sphere slowly glides through the air within the box. It’s moving so slowly that you can walk beside it when it’s near the floor, and underneath it once it bounces towards the ceiling. The Ball moves in straight lines and its angles are predictable after it makes contact with the Box’s surface. The perfect sphere looks like a smooth boulder and it continuously and predictably Read more [...]

As parents, it’s tough when your child struggles with emotions but cannot find the words to explain what’s happening or how they feel. Whether it's a tough time at school, changes at home, or something else, children sometimes have a hard time expressing effectively or calmly themselves. Often times, expression can look like emotional outburst because they don't know what else to do with the thought or feeling that they might be having. Then, we as adults, can often fall into the trap of merely addressing outburst or unwanted behavior rather than helping the child address the feeling that's driving the behavior. That’s where "play therapy" can help. Play therapy is a form of therapy where children communicate and work through their feelings using play. Instead of talking, children use toys, art, and imagination to express what they are going through. In this blog, I'll explain what play therapy is, how it works, and how it can benefit your child. So, What is Play Therapy? Play Read more [...]