Category Archives: Health

Anger Management, Getting Through, Health

Handling your Children During This Crisis!

As a Life Change Catalyst ™ Coach for the last 22 years, I’ve worked with moms and dads, children, teenagers, married couples, singles, abused women and men, handicapped, gay, straight, bi-sexual, and just about every other “type” of person out there.

But the ones that get to me the most are the mistreated children and the adults who were mistreated as children.

In no way is this an article on the “horrible bad people who beat on kids”.

This article is about what I see happening in our societies today as we continue with the needed isolation during this pandemic.

Most people are trying their best to comply while learning how to deal with lives that are nothing like we’ve seen before.

We are scared and worried. We read or know of people dying daily. We are stressed about our health, our livelihoods, our children, family members and friends. We are anxious and we’re tired. We’re so tired of living like this and yet we don’t know when it will stop.

This kind of juggling and adapting to the craziness of this whole thing is a huge stressor. And when people get stressed, they often act in ways they normally wouldn’t.

I’m daily seeing and hearing the fallout of this stress in the response of parents to one another and to their children. Adults are on edge and overwhelmed and their ability to respond calmly to children’s need and demands is getting stretched pretty thin. And kids are, at least unconsciously, aware of their parents anxiety which in turn fuels their fears and anxiety.

And…..because we love our kids, in our hearts we want to be the “perfect parent”.  But there are no “perfect parents”.

And we can help ourselves.

While raising my daughter, I had an epiphany during a fight with her. It was the typical fight of going over and over the same things and getting nowhere. And I was getting angry and stressed about it. Suddenly, out of the blue, the thought came into mind—what result did I want of this fight? It was like someone splashed cold water in my face. And I realized that all I really wanted was to love my daughter, keep her safe and help her.

Immediately, I calmed down. I felt like my fairy godmother had tapped me with her wand and completely changed my energy. No longer angry, my stress faded away and I calmly told her to just stop for a minute. At first, she thought I was being argumentative but realized how calm I was, and she calmed down.

From there we were able to resolve the issue with no anger or stress.

I know this situation we’re in is causing you to be stressed, upset, angry and a myriad of other negative emotions. And I know that you love your children and want the best for them. How you handle this event is teaching them how to handle things in their lives.

What if the next time you start to get mad, at the end of you rope or just tired of it all, you reminded yourself of what you want the end result to be. It takes some willpower to “be that adult” but I know that anyone who is willing can do it. Focusing on the end result is more important than trying to win a fight. As parents, our job is not to win fights but to teach our children how to handle life’s ups and down.

Take a deep breath……think of the outcome you want…..and relax. You can do this!

For more information on how to handle things in your life go to: https://www.debrafentress.com/Articles.html

If you’d like to talk, you can call me at (818) 422-2474 or email at: Debra@DebraFentress.com

Change, Getting Through, Health, Hypnosis, Self-Hypnosis

How to get through this whole and healthy

I’ve had so many calls and emails from clients about the Coronavirus that I thought it might be a good idea to put out some ideas on handling the situation that aren’t generally talked about.

There’s a lot of fear involved with this thing. It’s such an unknown, can happen really fast and we’re not used to being so isolated. It’s like we don’t have any more support systems.

And unfortunately, we’ve had contradictory and sometimes very dangerous news related to it.

One problem with fear is what happens to our bodies when we feel it. Did you know our bodies release 1400 physical and chemical reactions as well as hormones when we get stressed or fearful? And even when the fear or stress stops our bodies will still continue to produce adrenaline and cortisol, which affects blood pressure, impairs our memory and immune response, there are digestion problems, blood sugar instability and high levels of cholesterol!

There are many places you can go online and find the typical stress response and fear tips.

BUT…..instead of talking about the general things you can do, I’d like to approach this using tested methods from Neuro Linguistic Programming, Medical Hypnosis, Neural Pathway Restructuring™ and spirituality.

Even though some of these seem so simple they still work!

One of the best tips you can use if you keep running fearful thoughts in your head is to pay attention to what you’re thinking. The minute you hear yourself saying things like:

“What if I get it? (or he/she or my child or my parent) Before going any further with the thought, say very loudly in your head “STOP!” If you do it again….say “STOP!”

Then, replace that thought with another on a more rational note. For instance: “I don’t have it! I’m doing everything I know that will help keep me well. I will stay healthy!”

You might have to do this several times before you stop the negative chatter.

This process eventually stops the repetitive thoughts and it also, unconsciously, gives us a sense of control over the situation. That’s a part of the issue with this virus. We feel like so much is out of our control. So anything we can do to feel like we’re actually doing something will help us handle it.

Another thing you can do to feel in control of this is to use self hypnosis. Hypnosis has had a bad rap for awhile but now hospitals and doctors are using it, first responder units use it and many coaches and therapists do so as well.

It’s not a trick. It’s a way to talk with and utilize the amazing ability of our body and mind.

You can use this simple process to de-stress, begin to “see” your body as a vibrant healthy organism or just as a break from all the craziness.

Go somewhere you can relax and not be disturbed. If it’s not a quiet place, then if possible, wear headphones. Noise really isn’t an issue….I’ve done this sitting at the entrance to Toon Town at Disneyland!

Take a few slow deep breaths. You might try breathing in slowly and then exhale, taking twice as long to do so. After about 5 of these you’re ready for the next step. Now, as you continue to breathe slowly and deliberately, pay attention to how, when you breath in, you can feel the relaxation start at the top of your head and move down your body. You might have to do several of these breaths to get all the way down your body.

Once you’ve got the hang of it……in your mind begin imagining that as your breath moves through and down your body it’s pushing all the stress, unease and fear further and further down your body and out the bottom of your feet. Keep this imagery up until you can feel that there is no more stress or fear sitting in your body.

Then sit with it or just slowly bring yourself back to “reality”.

If you’re more inclined toward the spirituality technique, follow the above to the “next step”.  And then:

…….Focus your attention on the area just above your head. Imagine you can feel a vibrating healing energy of the universe. You might even see it as a shimmering green ball of light. Now as you continue with your slow and deep breaths, imagine this ball of green healing energy of the universe flowing slowly down into your head, neck, shoulders, arms, torso, hips, legs and feet. As you do so, notice that you can also see all the cells in your body beginning to glisten with vibrant health. Not only do they glisten with health they begin to vibrant with it as well.

You can continue this for a while, allowing the energy to just melt into your body as it becomes a greenish glistening body of healthy energy.

Focus on the idea that your cells are healthy and vibrant. Continue with this until you’re ready to come back into the room.

Just to give you an idea of how impactful these techniques can be—when I was in my twenties I was diagnosed with cancer. I had recently completed a course in some of these techniques by an amazing teacher. She had us test our abilities to alter our body’s responses by hooking us up to various machines and then having us change our blood pressures, our heart rate and also our brain waves. I figured if I could do that I could heal myself of cancer. And I did! ( much to the surprise of my doctor) To this day I never had any more cancer.

If you would like more information or suggestions or if you need some help, please contact me at (818) 422-2474 or email me at debra@neuralpathwayrestructuring.com

Stay Well!