Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
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Darcy Thiel is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor. A Family's Journey with Cancer and most recently Life After Death, On This Side of Heaven.
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
2y ago
Top Working From Home Survival Tips for Parents of Babies and Toddlers
When the pandemic first hit the nation in early 2020, many had to adjust to working from home. For parents of babies and young children, there was a huge adjustment to work habits and the daily routine. Working from home when you have babies or toddlers with you takes some finesse and creative planning. Courtesy of Help for Healing, here is how remote working parents can survive working from home with young ones at home.
Design a Distraction-Free Workspace
Start by focusing on your workspace. If you work from home, you nee ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
2y ago
Caregivers Must Take Care of Themselves, Too
Photo credit: Pexels
Caregiving is one of the hardest but most rewarding jobs you can have. Taking care of a family member who needs it is important and demanding work. But many caregivers have a hard time taking care of themselves in the process. Your self-care is as important as your care for your charge. After all, if you’re not there, you won’t be able to care for someone else.
More than 39 million Americans provide unpaid care to family members and loved ones. Most of them have little to no help from family members, meaning they take on the ro ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
2y ago
Budget-Friendly Strategies for Planning the Ultimate Couple’s Adventure
Are you feeling some serious wanderlust but concerned you don’t have the funds for the adventure you crave? When you and your beloved are working toward healing and want to seal the deal with an epic adventure, you don’t want money worries to spoil the fun.
Here, Help for Healing shares some tips on how to plan a trip you’ll never forget, without big bills you’d wish you could forget.
Pick Your Passion
Deciding on your priorities is a great starting point for ensuring your adventure is all you’re dreaming about. Some trav ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
2y ago
How to Teach Children to Practice Self-Care
Self-care is an important factor in mental health. A 2018 study by Aetna showed that over one-third of people had goals for stress reduction or mental health. Teaching your kids self-care activities gives them better coping strategies to support mental health.
Crank up the Tunes
Listening to music can have psychological benefits. It can help you relax, feel energized, deal with stress, and simply feel happier. Cranking up your kids’ favorite songs, whether you sit and listen or dance along with them, is an easy form of self-care you can do anytime.&n ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
3y ago
I’ve been watching Little House on the Prairie nightly. I don’t remember it being so intense, but almost every episode is loaded. The books were written in the 1800’s, the television show was produced in the 70’s, and most of the topics are completely relevant in 2021.
The Ingalls and most of the folks in Walnut Grove are pretty great people (Mrs. Olsen and her brats excluded). They have high expectations of themselves and an extremely strong faith in God.
Sometimes though, I find myself getting pissed off at Reverend Alden. I’m pretty sensitive to Christians who preach “turn the other cheek ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
3y ago
This blog is NOT about any controversial views of what restrictions are or are not appropriate. I have chosen to stay out of all that and will continue to. This is simply about my sporadic (and unpredictable) near panic attacks when I am suddenly hit by the state of affairs.
Why things hit me one day and not the next I have no idea. I doubt it’s important anyway.
Before this weekend, the last one I remember was a day in the fall. I made an appointment at the DMV. I pulled in to the plaza to see masked people along the entire side of the building. West Seneca was without electricity. Of course ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
3y ago
I try very hard to do whatever I am doing with ethics and passion. Sometimes, though, that has to be balanced with realism. Watching out for burnout is also important.
My cousin challenged me to push the system this week and I told her, “Girlfriend, are you kidding me? I do almost every week of my life!” She is younger than me and in graduate school. She is fired up to fix this broken world and all of its broken systems and I will be her loudest cheerleader! There is no way I am going to damper her enthusiasm by suggesting she get a helmet so she doesn’t get concussions from beating her head o ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
3y ago
Life is a big yo-yo most of the time. Most things are little up and downs and some things are a bit more dramatic. I was having a really rough time for a few weeks in December and then a few weeks in January. It hit me this weekend though that I actually had a decent week!
Getting to see your busy therapist an extra session during the week
Having your meds tweaked just a bit but it seems to help
Seeing a dear friend from high school who I really admire
Getting feedback from my consulting job that my dumb jokes are “making a difference” for staff and patients alike at the cancer hospital. (This ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
3y ago
A trip down memory lane. Yes, that was a pun. I can’t go to some sunny destination so I thought maybe I would remember a really amazing trip I made in 1991 with my former husband John, my parents, and my aunt. The latter three are now deceased.
It was one of those opportunities that only come once in a lifetime for most of us. Six weeks in an RV traveling around the west. The scenery and experiences were incredible.
It started in Colorado when we went to the Garden of the Gods. We visited a great-aunt there who I had only vaguely heard of. It was beautiful. One day we drove around in the car a ..read more
Help for Healing | Bitter & Sweet, living daily with grief
3y ago
I don’t know if you have ever heard of The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, but it basically says that the millions of ways we show love boil down to five basic groups. One of them is “gifts”, which I scored a big, fat zero on it when I took the test.
I feel bad for the people whose love language is gifting if they have to interact with me. Some people are truly great at it. They give thoughtful, loving gifts that are personal and meaningful. It hurts them when they are unable to express love in their language.
I keep trying slowly take gifts out of Christmas. Besides my small efforts to b ..read more