Category: Mental Health

Categories
Mental Health

PTSS vs PTSD

At Villa Kali Ma, we talk a lot about healing women’s trauma. Healing women’s trauma is central to our mission of helping women recover lives of joy and meaning.

Unhealed trauma is a root cause of severe addiction and mental illness. We know from our own stories, and from the lives of women we have helped to recover, how important it is to recognize and have respect for the powerful role of trauma in human life.

These days, many people have heard about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but did you know there is also a diagnosis called Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS)? In this article, we will talk about the differences between these two kinds of trauma.

What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS)?

Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) refers to a normal, healthy, and short-term stress response. PTSS is characterized by the following symptoms:

  • quickened heartbeat
  • trembling
  • sweating
  • muscle tension
  • agitation
  • sense of danger
  • a mental replay of events

PTSS is a form of acute, uncomfortable stress that can feel like impending doom. PTSS is triggered automatically, set off unconsciously by parts of the brain responsible for our physical survival.

PTSS is triggered when the body has perceived some kind of danger to its own survival, or the survival of another person. Perception of danger results in a cascade of neurotransmitters from the brain down into the rest of the body.

Neurotransmitters are the messengers in the body, and in this case, they tell the muscles, heart, and lungs to prepare the body for physical action. This is for the purpose of mobilizing the body to respond to the life-threatening event.

The acute stress response is also known as fight-flight-freeze. When we experience terrifying danger or shocking violence, the nervous system responds in a specific way, designed by nature to protect us and move us into instinctive, life-preserving action.

We can recognize the fight-flight-freeze response whenever our muscles have tensed up, we are breathing faster, and our heart is pounding. We may feel hot and sweaty, and feel like we need to move. We may notice tunnel vision and a strangely heightened awareness of specific details – fight-flight-freeze is a kind of altered state.

At the emotional level, it may register as fear, panic, dread, agitation, or rage. What’s going on is that the body has been primed for quick action, so that we can make a split-second decision to fight off an attacker or to move out of harm’s way, as may be necessary to protect ourselves or someone else.

A common source of PTSS is car accidents, injuries, surgeries, muggings, and similar kinds of experiences which can be perceived as harm or threat to our physiology.

PTSS is, generally speaking, a set of uncomfortable symptoms that are linked to something that happened very recently. With appropriate psychological processing of the experience, PTSS symptoms will fade and discharge out of the body within 30 days or so.

What is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a serious condition with heartbreaking effects on human life, can develop when fight-flight-freeze symptoms don’t get fully processed and released out of the body.

Symptoms of PTSD include:

  • Hypervigilance
  • Exaggerated startle response
  • Easily frightened
  • Easily agitated and irritated, low frustration tolerance
  • Intrusive memories of a scary event
  • Reliving a scary event as if it is happening again now
  • Insomnia
  • Nightmares
  • Depression and anxiety
  • Emotionally numb
  • Rage
  • Disconnected from people
  • Avoidance of people, places, and things that remind you of a scary event
  • Survivor guilt
  • Shame, negative thoughts, and self-destructive tendencies
  • Substance abuse
  • Eating disorders and self-harm

Like PTSS, PTSD is a neurobiological disturbance, caused by people being exposed to shocking and life-threatening events. Combat, natural disasters, and horrific collective events, such as bombings or school shootings, are the types of events that often give rise to PTSD. It is also possible to develop PTSD in response to childhood abuse, sexual assault, bullying, neglect, poverty, and other kinds of chronic adversity.

Both PTSS and PTSD have to do with the biology of survival, with fight-flight-freeze. There is nothing wrong with fight-flight-freeze, it is a life-protecting state of activation. However, if this activation in the physical body doesn’t get released through the resolution of the issue (a full return to safety), the energy of being rattled and riled up can get stuck in the body, where the cascade of hormones and neurochemicals turns toxic.

Although it is life-preserving, stress is hard on the body’s other systems, such as our organs of digestion, and the parts of the body responsible for healing, immunity, and restoration of our energy levels.

During stress, the body decides to prioritize safety and survival, but at a cost that it will need to recuperate later. If “later” never comes, because we do not get the help we need to be able to understand and psychologically resolve what happened, then the body and psyche may get sick with PTSD.

PTSD is a nightmarish state of experiencing and re-experiencing the terror, dread, and horror of a psyche-shattering experience. This state of permanent or recurrent terror, dread, doom, and deep lack of safety is one of the hardest psychological experiences for a human being to endure.

What is the difference between PTSS and PTSD?

PTSD is a temporary traumatic stress reaction, whereas PTSD is chronic and recurrent.

It is normal to experience symptoms like shakes, heart pounding, and psychological disturbances after having been deeply shocked or scared by something. If your shock symptoms arise and fade within 30 days of a traumatic experience, you may be given a diagnosis of PTSS. PTSD does not fade after 30 days; it may still affect a person decades after the original shock.

It is normal to feel guilty, scared, angry, ashamed, numbed, and confused after a shocking event. It’s also natural to have some nightmares, ongoing dread, to feel that your life outlook has changed, or to have some obsessive thoughts of the event, as you figure out what happened, why it went the way it did, and so on.

If you get appropriate therapeutic support for these feelings and for the resolution process, the disturbance doesn’t have to stay with you over time. You may be able to heal the wound in a way that it doesn’t turn into a scar.

What doesn’t help is numbing feelings, avoiding the mind’s meaning-seeking questions, or inducing the nervous system to relax artificially with substances. That’s how people end up with a double diagnosis of PTSD together with SUD (substance use disorder).

Trauma can affect women in several ways

Trauma is surprisingly prevalent. The more research is done on the subject, the more it turns out that wide swaths of the population are getting by in life while enduring semi-nightmarish states of being.

Very many people do not recognize their own traumatized state, because it is hidden behind substance use, behavioral disorders like compulsive internet and phone use, spending, or overeating, and plain old denial. Since numbing is a symptom of trauma, people may feel disconnected or unimportant, and not realize that without their trauma, they would feel more alive and well.

Women in particular are prone to traumatization, due to many factors that make the mainstream culture unsafe for us at multiple levels. Childhood sexual abuse, early sexualization, objectification, harassment, assault, and other forms of subtle or dramatic violence that affect women disproportionately, are major sources of serious traumatization.

Women with substance abuse problems very often have underlying trauma as a root cause. The majority of women entering treatment for substance abuse will end up tracing the self-medication habit to a need to deal with a disturbed nervous system and psyche, engendered by early experiences of not feeling fully safe, loved, and valued in this world.

It’s important to understand that trauma is the underlying condition, but the outer expression can look quite different in each woman. We all have different ways of coping, but what we’re coping with is the traumatization itself. Depression, anxiety, perfectionism, obsessions, compulsions, self-sabotage, negative thinking, guilt, shame, self-harm, narcissism, and overeating are all adaptations to a damaged psyche.

For more about women and PTSD, we share more detailed information on the topic.

Villa Kali Ma addresses women’s PTSD

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we acknowledge the central role trauma plays in the lives of women. Since we are dedicated fully to healing women’s hearts, minds, and bodies, we address trauma as a top priority.

When core trauma is treated in parallel, lasting recovery from substance abuse is much more likely. When trauma is resolved, mental health symptoms are no longer fortified by the body and nervous system. The unholy trinity of trauma, psychological disorders, and substance abuse can be unraveled and removed.

We have a holistic approach that makes use of the most effective clinical treatments in combination with the ancient, soul-repairing practices found in yoga and other alternative modalities. Read more about how we help women recover from PTSD.

We are also very proud of our dedicated trauma treatment center, lovingly dubbed The Retreat – a pioneering trauma-healing facility for women. Read more about why we’re excited about The Retreat.

Whatever your story is, dear reader, we honor you and your path of recovering from harm and all its many implications and effects. We’re here, cheering you on.

Categories
Mental Health

January is Self-Love Month

How is your self-love today, dear reader? Have you treated yourself with kindness and regard? Have you nourished the unique flame of your own life? Have you fed your body and thickened your spirit? Have you allowed yourself to feel how humanly lovable you are, just as you are right now?

If you have, well done. We know how much this goes against the grain. Love fights the deeply etched grooves of habit, our ancient training to treat ourselves with disregard. Every act of self-care is a true and lasting victory for all women.

If you have not managed to actively give love to the woman you are, today, that’s ok too. We can always begin again.

We here at Villa Kali Ma know how compelling shame can be, how strangely difficult it is just to love ourselves even a tiny bit. Self-dislike is the hardest habit to break.  It is linked to the heaviest burdens women carry. The burdens of trauma, addiction, and mental illness are all connected to the absence of self-love and lack of self-care.

Yet here we are. January is a month of new beginnings. Serendipitously, January is designated “Self Love Month”. This January, we over here at Villa Kali Ma lend our support to Self Love, by way of this blog post in its honor.

What is Self-Love Month?

Self Love Month is a national awareness campaign, a celebration designed to keep our minds on the topic of caring for ourselves.

Why do we at Villa Kali Ma care about self-love? You can say that self-love gives rise to self-care, which is an important tool in all healing.

Through self-loving actions, we can walk our way into experiencing true love. We wouldn’t ask our loved ones to “just know” that we love them if we never behaved in loving ways, would we? We must behave towards ourselves in loving ways, through acts of care, and then love will find a home within us.

We women need self-love and self-care, both.

What is the history of Self Love?

The modern concept of self-love as a conscious choice started in counterculture. Following the appalling revelations of World War I and II, people began to question the way we live, and whether or not we really have to comply with what our rulers want from us, given how little regard they seem to have for our lives.

Beginning in the 1950s, small but important subcultures, such as the Beatniks, began to loudly question and push back against social authorities. Once unassailable organizations of church, state, money, education, and culture were examined with more scrutiny. People began to notice all the ways we are taught to treat ourselves with a lack of respect and love.

In the mid to late 1960s, the hippie generation and civil rights movement added to the growing wave of opposition to violence against humanity, waged inside and outside of the United States. People began to object to violence against our own population and against foreign nations.

Into the 1970s, different minority communities more openly questioned standards of beauty, lovability, masculinity, and femininity.

In the personal terrain of self, ruled by psychology, spirituality, and philosophy, significant changes took place as well. In every aspect of our life, from the outermost political expressions to our innermost privacies of thought, a new idea was taking place, which is the deepest revolution any of us could ever imagine: that perhaps we can “rule” ourselves. Not as tyrants who hate all that is truly human, but with love, kindness, and respect for human life.

Self Love Month timeline

A few centuries back, before the Renaissance, Western culture did not have an idea of self-love, because there was no strong sense of an individual self at all.

We were more collective in our identity and did not yet have a theory of a personal right, let alone responsibility, to live out the story of our own life. We were more tribal, communal, and familial.

Through sweeping changes brought about by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the notion of personhood gained a foothold. Philosophy (and eventually the newborn field of psychology) began to gradually explore the idea that each individual life has meaning and dignity of its own. These paradigm changes were connected to geopolitical shifts, like the end of the slave trade and the dismantling of colonialism.

The term “Self Love” entered American thought around the 1960s, when people who were working with trauma victims needed help handling secondary trauma. It was discovered that first responders are more resilient if they actively care for their own needs.

Fast forwarding to the year 2024, self-love has, in our opinion, gotten wildly confused with indulgence, narcissism, and materialism. In this sense, we may have gotten a bit off track, as though it is self-loving to go shopping or to spend a lot of time doing our make-up. (It might be, but it also might not be).

No. Self-love has very little to do with glamor (though we admit comfort can be a part of love). Self-love is a deep embrace of all that is genuinely human. Our sorrow, our ordinariness, our imperfect skin, our follies, and our inner flame, our true shine, are all to be loved.

We may have gotten a bit off the path, but the revolutionary root of self-love is here, and can’t be fully removed. It is a thorn in the side of all who, for whatever their reasons are, hate humanity and can’t stand the idea of us loving ourselves as we are.

Self Love FAQs

How can I give love to myself? Don’t I need another person to love me?

It’s natural to want to love and be loved by others. We can have that too. However, we also can and should learn how to love ourselves, that’s necessary too. How to do that?

Start with thinking about your love language. How do you show your love to other people in your life? And how do you like other people to show their love to you?

Everyone has a slightly different way of showing love, but if we really want people to know that we love them, we have many ways to get the message to them. Once you know your love language, start using it on yourself. You can use the other love languages too, but the ones that really mean something to you will have the most impact.

Think about whether you could set up a self-care routine with many opportunities to use your love language on yourself. A self-love schedule, that will ensure you take loving actions regularly.


How can I tell if I love myself or not?

If you love yourself, you will feel that you are loved and lovable, no matter what. There will be no questions of undeserving, nor on the other hand of inflation or entitlement.  Self-love doesn’t mean thinking we’re better than others, that we deserve more, or that others owe us their energy, attention, and love.

Nor does it mean that we are less than, that there is something that makes us inferior or unimportant – that’s not true either!

The challenging truth is full and true equality – all human beings are equally deserving of love, we all partake of love, or have a right to, anyway.

Self-love does mean that we let ourselves receive our own love, first. We make sure that we are filled to the brim with the vibrations of love, knowing that when we are well-fed with love, we will naturally share it with others too. We ideally do not love another person more than we love ourselves.


How can I tell if I am missing self-love?

For those of us with addiction histories, we needn’t even ask this question. Addiction is perhaps the fiercest form of self-hatred. It’s not our fault – we didn’t mean to end up like this, but we did abandon ourselves to forces that mean us no good. We treated ourselves with great, great disregard. If you have a history of addiction, you have a self-love issue.

Even after we enter recovery, and even if addiction never was part of our story, we may have a pattern of codependency, in which we subtly or obviously feel that pretty much everyone else is more deserving of our love and care, than we are.

If we feel guilt, shame, negativity, victimhood, and sabotage ourselves from receiving basic recognition and love, we need to work on loving ourselves. If this is you, don’t feel bad. It is tragically common among us women!

For more about learning to love ourselves, check out this post from Villa Kali Ma.


What are Self Love Month activities?

Self-love activities are actions we take that help us feel in our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls that we are genuinely loved, and worthy of our own love. These activities will be different for different people, as meaning is highly personal.

Why not take the month of January to try a nourishing routine of new self-love activities? Draw up a plan made from activities that you know will transmit love to yourself.

Self-love activities may address any and all layers of a woman’s being: physical body, emotions, thoughts, friendships, creativity, romance, vocation – the possibilities are endless.

How could you show your body that you love her? Healthy food? Going to nature spots she likes? Dancing once a day?

How could you show your tender emotional self that you love her? Journalling about your love every morning for a month? Letting yourself read a book that nourishes your inner child? Playing around creatively in a new medium?

Think about all the sides of the human being you are, then think of ways that you could communicate love to that aspect of your being. How could you show love to your working self? To your romantic self? To your friend self?

Give yourself the gift of dreaming up, and then living out, one heavenly month of loving you most of all.

Important facts about Self Love

1. Human beings need love to be healthy physically?

Love boosts immunity, boosts energy, regulates the nervous system, and helps the body thrive. It is a wonderful thing that with practice, we can give ourselves the love we need. As wonderful as it is to give and receive love from and with other human beings, the most powerful generator of love for the unique being we are is right here within us.


2. Children need love to develop normally

People who for whatever reason aren’t fully loved and cared for appropriately in childhood grow up with mental, emotional, and physical deficits. Luckily, we can restart our growth process by applying self-love later on. As the saying goes, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. It’s also never too late to be loved. You as your adult self can adopt your past child, bringing her forward in time to live in the present with you as a loved, cherished little girl.


3. Self Love is the key to healing trauma, mental health disorders, and addiction

It’s necessary to apply love to the self in order to be able to recover from serious injuries to the psyche, body, and brain. In fact, lack of love has been part of the problem all along.

Deciding to get help and to heal ourselves might be the greatest self-love act of all. And make no mistake, though we call it the inner healing power, observer mind, and even presence, these are nothing if not alternate names for real, true love.

Why we love Self Love Month at Villa Kali Ma?

Villa Kali Ma is devoted to healing women from the many injuries and burdens that seek to weigh us down in pain. These places within us, parts of the oneness that have been cut off from love through traumatization, can keep us from releasing our unique gifts into this world.

This is tragic because each and every one of us is needed. Every woman’s life is felt as a missing or present vibration in the world.

Self-love is the real holy grail. A magic potion, an elixir, a cure for pain. It is produced, amazingly enough, right here in the chambers of our own hearts.

Since we have come to know this truth inside and out, we over here at Villa Kali Ma join in this January celebration of Self Love. Let it be applied to heal all the wounds known to womankind.

Villa Kali Ma can help women with Self Love

Villa Kali Ma’s unique treatment program helps women recover from addiction, trauma, and mental illness. We strengthen women’s hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits by teaching them how to love and care for their own life force, to keep the flame of their own being lit. If this is something you need, come join us in the healing halls of recovery. Our circle is growing every day!

Categories
Mental Health

Impact of Mental Health Resolutions on Mental Health

Many centuries ago, a decision was made that the start of each year should fall just ten days after the winter solstice. Before Julius Caesar’s Roman calendar, and in some cultures still, the start of the new year was celebrated in springtime instead, on the spring equinox.

For the body, certainly, springtime is when feelings of newness, freshness, and possibility tend to arrive. Tender leaves on branches, singing birds, blooming flowers, and warming days pair well with hope and creativity.

Why would the Romans choose to honor fresh starts and new beginnings right in the dead of winter, in our coldest and most inward months? It is into this frosty, pale terrain that we are expected, to this day, to send forth our hopes and dreams for the next year. Could these cold environs be part of why so many of our resolutions fail?

Whatever the wisdom or folly of our traditions, New Year’s Day is loaded with expectations for women. We may try to honor them or try to ignore them, but either way, they affect us. This is the day that marks annual renewal and recommitment, to do better and to become better.

How does the New Year affect mental health?

The New Year can be a rough time for people with pre-existing mental health conditions. While we’re still recovering from the psychological whammy of the holidays, who should come knocking but the New Year, with all its unanswered questions about how we’re turning out? Are we who we’re supposed to be?

For some of us, pressure, expectations, and the pain we carry around past hopes and dreams rush to the forefront for our attention at this time. People who have depression may struggle with their moods more during the winter months in general. Whatever our particular way of suffering may become more intense in these times. If we are anxious by habit, we may be more so around this day.

Overall, the question of “Can I improve myself this year?” is an unsettling one for anyone who lacks complete and total self-love and self-acceptance as a starting point.

While to some people, the New Year represents a fresh start and a fresh chance to begin again, for many people it represents a danger of reflecting on the self in an unkind way, with perfectionism, self-doubt, and disappointment looming large.

If this is you, you are not in any way alone. The month of January was named for the Roman god Janus, a difficult character, a two-faced god of doorways, passages, and transition. That description about sums up January, for many of us. An awkward moment of shifting weight, stepping from a suddenly ended year into an unsettlingly open future.

Why do we create New Year’s resolutions?

The practice of creating New Year’s resolutions is traced back more than 4000 years to the Babylonians, who made promises to gods and kings in exchange for divine or imperial favor and protection.

The root of “I will be good this year, I promise” is directly linked to guarantees of personal safety and hope of reward for our good behavior. In a dangerous world, we may find comfort in magical thinking: if I am good, bad things won’t happen to me. If bad things happen to other people, maybe it’s their fault.

This magical thinking, a fallacy of cause and effect, lies at the heart of one of the most painful mental illnesses, OCD. The person obsessed with purity, ritual, and perfection believes, in their confusion, that the world turns around their own morality alone.

This childlike mechanism of being good for the pleasing of parental-feeling authorities, in hope of it earning us what we need to have a good life, is deeply at play still for many of us when we draw up our New Year’s resolutions.

How many of us attach a feeling of morality to our resolutions, when we succeed and most especially when we fail? Are people who manage to keep to their diets somehow imbued with virtue, too, as well as societal approval of their physique? Is it inherently a sign of being a superior person if we manage to change ourselves dramatically? If so, why? Why are we not allowed to be as we are already? Why do we have to change into something else? Aren’t we changing all the time anyway?

What is the psychology behind why New Year’s resolutions fail?

Most New Year’s Resolutions fail within the first month or two. The surface reason for this is that people’s goals are too broad and undefined.

If we truly want to accomplish something, we need to perform a series of tiny acts, and incremental changes. One step at a time, as long as we keep walking, we will get to the end of the trail we meant to walk.

But underneath our poorly defined goals, there often lies a bigger complexity: ambivalence about change. As everyone says, where there’s a will, there’s a way. If we felt fully lined up with the changes we say we want to make, then we would make them. We would break those changes down into tiny steps and take those steps.

When we don’t do that work of breaking a desired change down into a realistic change plan,  sometimes it’s because we actually aren’t fully sure about the change.

How to work with change ambivalence? Here are three ideas to ponder, from us over here at Villa Kali Ma.

1. Pressure to Change Makes it Hard to Change

If we place pressure on ourselves to change, before really understanding and honoring why we are how we are to begin with, we will hit big waves of inner resistance.

For example, we may pressure ourselves to lose weight and set an ambitious resolution, but not understand what we get out of being a little bit overweight. When we understand all the benefits and pay-offs of our existing overeating and avoidance-of-exercise habits, then and only then can we make a fully informed choice and commitment to change. And we may very well realize that all things considered, we’d rather stay the way we are! To understand more about how that could be, read the next section: Perfectionism and Self Rejection.


2. Perfectionism and Self Rejection

Deep within us is a wounded child, who is still mourning the fact that we were never completely loved and accepted in our full nature, but rather loved only for our conformity to what our parents asked us to be for them.

Depending on the type of environment we grew up in, we may have been fully deprived of our right to be an individual person with our own impulses and dreams, instead expected to fulfill other people’s expectations, or else. We may have been abused, neglected, and mistreated, instead of loved.

A part of us is still mad about that. This inner part has a lot of psychological power, and she kicks back against perfectionistic standards and expectations to change to fit some imagined ideal. When this is the case, inner parts are at war with each other. The perfectionist who wants to be beautiful wants to put us on a diet, but the child who wants to be loved unconditionally no matter what she looks like is not on board with the latest scheme for making us conditionally lovable. This inner conflict has to be resolved before any change will be possible.


3. Unrealistic Expectations About How Much Change Can Happen, How Fast

When we do decide to make a consciously chosen change, we often get lost in polarities and black-and-white thinking, thinking we must conquer our past self rather than work with her. In reality, change is slow, and it must be incremental, or else it will not stabilize. Successful change happens one tiny little step at a time, without pushing, aggression, and forcing. Most of us try to run before we can walk because we want so much to be different from what we are now that we skip over the very basic wisdom, that change takes time and each change must be integrated by the existing system, or else the whole thing will fall apart.

What are psychological factors contributing to resolution-related stress?

Almost all of us are narcissistically wounded, which means that we have pain related to our sense of self. Who we think we are, that person we imagine other people perceive when they interact with us is some kind of a problem.

It is true that some people have an inflated sense of their value and importance, and these people may feel entitled to excessive admiration. This narcissistic patterning, looking like self-esteem on the outside, is actually the worst kind of low self-esteem, in which one so devalues themselves that they project all of their own less flattering qualities on everyone else, keeping all the good qualities for themselves.

These people are the most afraid of change, since any change may cause them to lose their fragile grasp on imagined superiority. For the rest of us, who may wonder how it is that such people are so confident while we are crippled with insecurities, may be more prone to a deflated self problem, in which we imagine that we are truly inferior to other people.

In reality, we may have areas where we think we are superior and other areas where we think we are superior, but whether we’re at the top of the Ferris wheel or the bottom matters little – wherever we are in this consciousness trap, we will find resolutions stressful.

It’s either our chance to improve ourselves (implying that we are not good enough as we are), or it’s our chance to prove again that we are the best (implying that were we to fail, we would no longer be valuable).

This pressure of the entire question of what makes a person “good” or not, is the core of the dilemma for any of us who grapple with it.

How can past traumatic experiences affect New Year’s resolution stress?

Whatever our core trauma, New Year’s resolutions will touch into those. Here’s how.

Setting aside for a moment our negative self-image and the fact that we may be judging ourselves unfairly, it is also true that pretty much all of us have non-ideal behaviors too.

For example, no matter what anyone else thinks about our body, it really is a problem, most likely, if we never exercise and only eat bad food. It makes us unhappy, stifles our life force, and deadens our spirit.

But whatever problematic behavior we have, it is a trauma response. It is a coping mechanism, a way of not having to directly confront a problem that we are scared we don’t know how to solve. We do not avoid feeling life energy coursing through our bodies (a result of good exercise and diet) because we are lazy, no-good people, but because we fear the activation of our hearts and nervous systems. This is trauma. When the trauma is healed, we have nothing to avoid anymore.

What are strategies to alleviate New Year’s Resolutions Stress?

Rather than approaching the New Year with a sense of pressure and stress to change, let’s lighten it up a little.

Here are three questions to journal on that can help with New Year’s Resolution Stress:

  1. What about me is already great, that I would like to simply carry forward into the next year?
  2. What did I do in 2024 that was fun, easy, light, and positive? What was great about those highlights of the past year?
  3. What comes easily and naturally to me at this point?
  4. What qualities and habits do I have, that I deeply approve of?
  5. What would delight me, if it should happen all on its own, without any forcing and effort?

Tips for effective goal-setting

If you have something serious and life-threatening going on, like addiction, then neither self-acceptance alone nor New Year’s Resolutions will help you. Rather, you need to surrender the whole question of trying to manage and change yourself and get help. This is not a personal failure, this is an important psychological emergency.

But if you are stably sober already, or not struggling with addiction at this time, you may want to reframe your resolutions as goals. In general, making SMART goals is the key: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely.

In addition to breaking your intentions into concrete actionable items which can be checked off your list without major struggle, we suggest the following approach for a gentle approach to change.

1. Start with honoring and understanding what is in place in your psyche already

When you reflect on yourself and how you are, try on the lens that everything you do actually makes perfect sense and has its advantages. Try to find out what the advantages are. For example: “If I am a little bit fat, fewer people hit on me and I don’t feel as scared”. Look for a secret payoff that makes you understand why you may be living as you live now. Listen to yourself and believe in yourself. Everything you do and are, is for a reason.


2. Get Buy-In From All Parts of You

When considering changing something, check in with all parts of you to see if they have any objections. Do not expect any inner part of you to give something up without supporting them with a different way to meet their need. For example, if you currently eat ice cream and watch TV every night to relax, but you want to stop eating ice cream, what will you do instead, that will still meet the need for pleasure and comfort?


3. Make A Conservative Plan of Tiny, Easy Changes

If you have buy-in among your inner psychological parts to make a change, then make a reasonable, slow, cautious plan for changing.

The first few goals will be for building feelings of success and confidence first and foremost. Starting with something very, very easy can be the foundation. For example, instead of running for 20 minutes three times a week, start with going for a 10-minute walk times a week. Once that easier habit is anchored in, and all parts of you are still ok, you can gradually and incrementally raise the bar.

It is better to think of these as “willingness test runs” more than failing or not. If you set an intention to go for a walk three times a week for a month and you fail in the second week, that doesn’t mean you’re bad or weak-willed, it means that some part of you wasn’t on board with the idea. Find out why not and do what you can to create inner consensus.

Villa Kali Ma can help women set effective mental health resolutions

Here at Villa Kali Ma, we are committed in full to sharing what we know about the self-change process, with all women who are ready to heal themselves. Across our multidisciplinary team of clinicians, practitioners, and healers, we represent a wide range of expertise that helps women discover true transformation and lasting change. We do this not only to help women, and to help ourselves, but to help create a future that’s safe and positive for women to live in. Each woman with a lit torch brings light to all of us and also lights many more women’s torches.

If you’re curious about changing yourself this year, consider joining us!

Categories
Mental Health

How to Overcome Post-Holiday Depression

Happy New Year, dear readers! Thank you for your attention to Villa Kali Ma and what we have to share about how women can heal from addiction, mental illness, and trauma. We are wishing you a very bright, expansive, and beautiful 2025, full of inspiration, connection, and joy.

At the end of last year, we wrote a post about how to take care of yourself if you experience depression during the holidays.

Holidays survived without sinking into a pit of gloom? Congratulations, it’s truly no small feat! Take a moment to be happy about yourself, you are a treasure and you deserve it.

Now, for some of us, fortunately, or unfortunately, it’s on to the next challenge: post-holiday depression! Here are some thoughts on how to pass through this next phase, with kindness and care.

What is post-holiday depression?

As the name suggests, post-holiday depression kicks in as we come down from the holidays and all that they were or were not for us this year. Post-holiday depression has all the same symptoms as regular depression: lowered energy and mood, loss of enjoyment, bleak outlook, and feelings of sadness or mourning.

The key difference between post-holiday depression and regular depression is that post-holiday depression is seasonal, and will fade as the holidays recede further into the rearview mirror.

What causes post-holiday depression?

Depression is a call to go inwards. When we have been giving a lot of attention to the outside world, and perhaps neglecting our inner world, depression may appear as a psychological messenger who beckons us inward. Come home, she says, come back to me. I am your person.

Once we go back into our own psyches, pulling our attention and thoughts away from other people and what they think of us, we may find emotions that we have not yet had the time to process.

These were feelings we put on hold during the holidays because it wasn’t the right time or place to mourn, flash with anger, or tingle with creative inspiration. But now that we’re back in our routine again, we can make time and space to catch up with ourselves. Just as a child might need extra time with a parent who has been traveling, after that parent comes home, your inner child may need some extra time with you, after you have been “away” from her.

All of this takes time and space. We may need to rest, get out into nature, and do soothing manual tasks like cooking, baking, or cleaning while our mind free roams, in order to sort through what we took in during the holidays.

Why do women experience post-holiday depression?

Women experience depression for lots of reasons. One factor that affects us in particular is how we feel about loved ones, family, and togetherness.

Most of us have complicated feelings about our family of origin relationships, and the temporary reunion with family brings up a lot. The holidays can be a bittersweet combination of longing, nostalgia, anger, bitterness, sadness, joy, and who knows how many other emotions. Once they’re concluded, we may find the holidays have left us with a bag of surplus emotions to feel.

Also, it’s simple but it’s true: at the body chemistry level, a lot of us overeat during the holidays. Overeating anything, but sugar, in particular, is linked to depression.

Finally, if we have been away from routines we rely on for sanity-saving, such as exercise routines, morning journaling, and so on, we may also just be out of balance. The best way to get back into balance is to gently return to routines that we know to be helpful and stabilizing.

How long does post-holiday depression last?

By definition, post-holiday depression is a temporary state, and it will fade within a few weeks of returning to our normal life.

If we are depressed for months after the holidays, it is probably not really the holidays that got us, or at least not only the holidays. Rather, we may also be affected by seasonal affective disorder or topics that are surfacing in our psyche for witnessing. Whatever the reason, if depression is lingering on, then we may need to get some support for clearing it out.

What are post-holiday depression statistics?

There is little formal research available about post-holiday depression, perhaps because the symptoms tend to resolve on their own naturally by early spring, latest, and therefore do not necessarily represent a serious issue for humanity.

That said, it is anecdotally evident, at least to those of us who work in mental health, that the entire span of the year from November to the end of January is a difficult time for many people.

Whether that’s because of the shortened daylight hours, pressure about the year’s end, the holidays, or getting over the holidays, remains to be explored in clinical research. More information would need to be gathered.

But rest assured, if this happens to you, you are not alone. Many women do experience these months to be the hardest time of their personal yearly cycle.

How to overcome post-holiday depression?

The way to overcome post-holiday depression might be different for each woman.

In general, it always works to start with feeling better physically, and trusting that emotions and mind will follow.

Eat fresh green food (or whatever clean nourishment your body is asking for), sleep abundantly, turn off your devices, connect with nature, and get the body moving.

In addition to letting the body guide you back to feeling good, start taking some self-loving actions. Use your tools.

Wherever you’re at, you can start right now by making a list of all the tools you already possess, which you know work to make you feel better.

Just brain-dump all the things you know help, in no order:

I can go for a walk around the neighborhood every day. I can make some green juice. I can start intermittent fasting again. I can drink a big glass of water with lemon. I can cook myself a nourishing vegetable soup. I can turn the phone and the computer off. I can read my book. I can make and send thank you cards, including one to myself for staying sober. I can pay for the coffee for the stranger behind me in line. I can cuddle my cat. I can get into my pajamas early. I can go to the botanical garden. I can collect eucalyptus leaves at the park.   

Depression is cured in part with kindness and caring for yourself, and remembering to do the self-loving, self-caring things that you have already discovered.

For further inspiration, we offer the following journal exercises:

1. Say Goodbye to Last Year

Sometimes depression is just mourning. If you haven’t yet done it, take some time to mourn, honor, and release what you have been through. Reflect on all that you experienced, discovered, and worked through in 2024. Say goodbye.

Dear 2024 me, I am writing to say goodbye to you. There were many experiences I had with you that were really great. A highlight was in the summer, I am still so amazed we managed to complete that project, we really pulled it off!… A difficult moment that I endured and learned from was…I am grateful for you because…


2. Welcome the New Year

If you haven’t yet done it, take some time to welcome in your new life. It is unknown to you now, a surprise. But imagine what highlights and interesting surprises may be in store. What will come to you this year, if this is a good year for you?

Dear 2025 me, I am so excited to meet you! I hope I will be ready for you. I know that you will be brighter and bigger than any past version of me. I am a little scared, I don’t want to let you down. I’m excited too, though. If it were up to me, I would wish for some really great traveling to happen, maybe we could go to Hawaii or someplace like that. Even better, I hope I make some new friends, I want to laugh a lot, and feel tender and connected, and feel like I am a good person….

 

Dear reader, whoever you are and however you’re feeling today, lots of love to you from us over here at Villa Kali Ma. May your 2025 be full of magic, meaning, and transformation!

Categories
Mental Health

Tips for Dating Someone in Recovery

There are many beauties and benefits of recovery. To sustain recovery, we have to approach some aspects of life with more delicacy and deliberateness. Romance is one such area, where greater clarity of intention is required of us. Dating, falling in love, and starting partnerships are all a little different in recovery than they are in ordinary circumstances.

In this post, we here at Villa Kali Ma go over some topics to be aware of when dating someone in recovery. This information can be helpful whether you’re the one who’s in recovery, you’re dating someone who’s in recovery or both!

Tips for dating someone in recovery

The most important mindset shift about dating in recovery is to understand that the blissed-out, woozy, and mind-altering aspects of love, romance, intimacy, and sex can be dangerous and confusing zones for people who are new to sobriety.

Intimacy, infatuation, obsession, fantasies, crushes, and even falling head over heels in love are regarded as potential pitfalls to look out for and steer clear of in the early days especially.

This is because the boost in mood brought on through these experiences can be euphoric and addictive, a state of being that a newly sober person cannot tolerate easily without relapsing.

Likewise, too much intensity of feeling may also mean that a person is heading for the roller coaster ride of drama, which is not a safe or fun zone for someone trying to achieve basic stabilization in their life.

It is very common, therefore, that people are advised by elders in the recovery community not to date at all in their first year of sobriety. If dating, a person in recovery will be encouraged to go very slowly and carefully, paying attention to avoid extremes and to resist the “urge to merge” until they’ve had the chance to really get to know someone.

It is not at all unusual to be given the advice to delay getting involved sexually until you are reasonably sure that they would like to bond with the other person in a more lasting way, for example. This is for the recovering person’s own protection and is, in the long run, certainly better for the other party, too.

All of this runs counter to expectations people who aren’t in recovery may have about love and dating. A need to take it slow and steady can be mistaken for a lack of passion or heart, but this would be a misunderstanding of the situation.

There are also certain communities and subcultures within which having many partners, or other liberalities of sexual expression, are considered almost de rigueur. Here the contrast becomes even sharper since a recovering person needs to be relatively cautious with sex.

Whatever your scenario, here are some tips which can help you understand how dating in recovery goes best.

1. Slow it down and space it out

In recovery, dating takes a lot longer. That means more time between dates, less happening on each date, and allowing for a gradual build-up in natural intimacy, versus plunging into the deep end. This may mean waiting several dates before having intimacy, or even before kissing.

This should not be mistaken for a lack of passion or heart, as it most likely isn’t, and may mean the opposite – that this person takes you seriously enough to do the work, emotionally, of making sure they’re not losing their footing, which would be bad for both of you.

Have patience, if you can, for this trust-building phase. If they keep showing up, they’re interested, even if they take longer to do so. If you can allow another person to come and go as they need to in order to keep steady and to take the time they need to be safe, it is building a better foundation.


2. Contain the Fire

Passion and attraction are beautiful aspects of love. On the other hand, sexual energy, obsession, fantasy, mind games, and feeling incomplete without the other, are not love.

Attraction, endorphins, and, not infrequently, emotional drama are often misidentified as being the same as love. But while these are sometimes present when we fall in love, they are not always signs that it is love – these things are often present when it’s love addiction, in which we avoid ourselves or manage our trauma through sensation-seeking. It’s important to know whether we’re dealing with love or love addiction because one is healthy and the other one is very risky for people in recovery.

We here at Villa Kali Ma are not so cynical to say it can’t possibly be love, perhaps it is. Even so, containing the fire is a wise practice.

It is a normal part of the process of falling in love to experience merging, which entails a temporary loss of boundaries. When we’re in love, we may want to be around the other person all the time, and forget our distinct self-hood for a while. The sweet togetherness is part of the love experience.

However, to sustain and also get the benefit of this union over time, it’s necessary that each person is also able to return to their own individuality, to enjoy their own intactness of being again, before going back for more union.

This is a good rhythm to establish and will come in any case at some point, whether relatively consciously or with explosions of drama. Even the most committed relationships will always require both parts of the dance – coming together into the shared space, then returning back to individuality for a while.

All in all, it’s best to keep fire in the right place and to tend it in consciousness. Allow the energy to build, take it slow. Date at a pace which allows steady integration of changes and adjustment to higher levels of intimacy or connection. It is far better to shoot for a steadily burning smaller passion connected to heart-centered love than to go recklessly into a blazing bonfire.


3. Learn about addiction and recovery by going to meetings

It will be enormously helpful for both people if everyone is fully educated about addiction and its cure.

How to get up to speed, if you’re the one who is not in recovery? There are two steps which are recommended, in this order.

a. Go to Al-Anon Meetings. Go for yourself, not your partner, and learn what is helpful for people in your position. We recommend that you commit to a pre-determined number of meetings, such as 12 over the span of a month. It will feel like a lot if you are not used to it, which in and of itself will help you understand the level of dedication which is asked of your partner.

Al-Anon will help you understand what is your part, and what is not your part. The reason this is important is because it is very easy to get confused and over-involved in another person’s recovery, which is actually destructive for sobriety.  Al-Anon will teach you to focus on your own area of personal power and to not get overly triggered into codependent modes of over-caring, over-doing, and over-protecting.

b. Go to open AA meetings. Again, shoot for about 12 before you stop and think about what you learned. Listen to the experiences of people who have experienced addiction and, even more importantly than that, recovery. You will understand more about the “wisdom, strength, and hope” which can be found inside recovery circles, which no individual person, not even a romantic partner, can provide.

4. Face the Truth Together

At an appropriate point in the relationship formation process, the recovering partner should share their addiction story. As the non-recovery partner, it may shock you, spur you into fear, or cause you to feel a desire to protect or control them.

And yet, you won’t be able to protect or control them. At best, your commitment to self-possession and integrity in doing your own emotional work may make it easier for the recovering person to do the right thing. But there will be times when you can do nothing at all, only witness.

Together talk about the very real possibility of relapse, because truthfully, although it’s not inevitable, it’s relatively common. Then get practical and make a plan. Ask your partner what their triggers are, and to let you know what you should do if they relapse. Have a realistic discussion based on likely outcomes.


5. Understand that sobriety is always priority number one

Finally, both parties have to understand through and through, that recovery comes first, no matter what, for the simple reason that sooner or later everything else, including the relationship itself, will be destroyed if someone relapses. The non-recovery partner absolutely cannot take this personally, or be offended that their love and help is not enough, but rather that recovery circles are where the cure is. It isn’t personal, it’s just how it is.

How to adapt when dating someone in recovery?

Recovery is a total lifestyle. It requires much more of us than just refraining from substances. Recovery also has implications about where, how, and with whom we spend our time. It means certain kinds of self-discipline, such as avoiding emotional dramas, taking responsibility for courageously airing resentments sharing tender feelings, and being mindful of thoughts. It requires active participation.

In the end, recovery is not all that different from other positive lifestyle choices such as a serious commitment to meditation, yoga, exercise, and diet, though it has a heavier component of community involvement than may be required with those other changes. It’s not unusual to, for example, go to meetings several times a week, if not daily, to have voluntary service positions, and to make many phone calls a day with other recovering people.

All in all, recovery works just fine in tandem with another person’s healthy lifestyle, as it is mainly about structure and repetition, and has a beauty and rhythm which can be stabilizing and helpful for others, too.

The recovery community is also, generally speaking, warm, loving, non-judgmental, wise, and full of some of the most loyal, committed, and emotionally-available people alive.

If you like the idea of having a life centered on community, giving and receiving emotional nurturance and connection, laughter, and activities, as well as a priority on personal growth, you will not have to adapt too much to your partner’s recovery focus.

If you are using substances yourself, however, and enjoy participation in the types of activities which are dangerous for your partner, you will likely have a hard time accommodating the central role that recovery needs to have in your partner’s life.  If you are very attached to using drugs or alcohol, you may not want to date someone in recovery at all.

When to begin dating someone in recovery?

It’s best for both of you not to date during the first year of either person’s recovery, for many, many tried and tested reasons. A person has a hard enough time getting through those first months of turmoil, new habits, and trekking the steep incline in self-responsibility, without any other changes.

If you feel a strong emotional or romantic connection with someone who is newly sober, wonderful! If it is genuinely meant to be, that strong connection will still be there one year from now. To get involved earlier, no matter how strong the feeling, represents a risk for them and is therefore not a kind or loving thing to do. It also represents a risk for yourself, as nothing is worse than being in love with someone who is destroying themselves and you too, with drugs and alcohol.

It’s also good to remember that especially in early recovery, someone may be seeking out the highs of romance, fantasy, sex, and other euphorias for the simple reason that they are still going through post-acute withdrawals and are looking for a way to numb, distract, avoid, or have an excuse to hate themselves into a relapse.

People with addictions are often charming, charismatic, passionate, and vulnerable, and their intensity can be attractive. So try to remember that any addict in their first year of recovery is not reliable quite yet.

What are the risks of dating someone in recovery too soon?

If you date too soon, the risk is relapse. Relationships are tricky, intimacy is triggering in and of itself, and the highs and lows of adventures of the heart are destabilizing enough, even when we have a solid footing in sobriety.

Relapse means having to start all over again. The tragedy is, to even have the chance to start all over again is not a guarantee. A desire to be sober, and any days of sobriety strung together, are precious, not to be taken for granted. Quite simply, it’s not worth the risk.

Drugs are People Too: Love addiction

It is extremely common to have a tendency towards sex, love, and relationship addiction, as well as codependency, alongside substance addiction. We may not notice it while active in our addiction, or it may be hard to detect underneath all the other dramas, but they often go hand in hand.

At Villa Kali Ma, we have a group which centers on healing love addiction, since so many women find they need support learning a healthier understanding of what love is actually supposed to be like.

If you are in recovery, or you’re dating someone in recovery, remember to look out for love’s pale imitation (sexy drama). Check with your deepest wisdom whether this love connection is good for you before you get involved.

Advice on how to navigate healthy relationships

The single most important piece of advice to pass along to anyone dating a person in recovery would be, to do your own emotional work.

If you are in a relationship with someone in recovery, make sure you know your own story, too. Your love and attachment style may not be totally healthy yet.

Especially if your parents were addicts, and/or if you come from a background of neglect or trauma, the chances are very high that it’s the wounded child inside you who is hoping to redo her childhood by saving another person.

You may be suffering under the idea that you can rescue, heal, or even just live through, another person. The reason we say this, with love and from one recovering codependent to another, is that it is so incredibly common and widespread to confuse caretaking, over-responsibility, and self-sacrifice with love.

This confusion comes from our own trauma, our own heartache, unmet needs, desires for intimacy, healing, and maybe even a craving for the good feeling that comes from knowing that we are helping someone.

It’s a common temptation for all tenderhearted folks to consciously or unconsciously avoid the tasks of our own lives through helping someone else. We might have the best of intentions – to take the pain of another person away, for example – but still, we would do well to understand our own personal motivations. Only with total self-honesty can we avoid the accidental harm of enabling.

Falling for the trap of enabling doesn’t make you, or any one of us, bad or wrong. What it makes us is confused about how life works. Because in the end, we can only ever play in our own sandbox. Any sandcastles we build for someone else are ultimately doomed to fall apart. We can’t ever take away another person’s agency, right, and requirement to create or destroy sandcastles in their own box. And we have a duty to look into our own and work with what’s there.

Villa Kali Ma can assist women in recovery

At Villa Kali Ma, we help women recover from addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma, through a combination of cutting-edge Western clinical approaches and alternative, holistic modalities.

If you’re in recovery, or looking to start your recovery path, consider one of our many inpatient and outpatient programs that help women. Learn to recover your native strength, dignity, and beauty. You can free your body, mind, and spirit through love, kindness, and compassion.

Categories
Mental Health

How Can Women Overcome Guilt and Shame in Recovery?

Shame and guilt are some of the most difficult emotions we experience. It is very distressing to feel like we don’t deserve love and belonging, or that we have been very bad and need to be punished for it.

Women are especially prone to guilt and shame, in part because many aspects of our nature, qualities we cannot help but embody, are looked down upon by the larger culture. Guilt and shame are also residues of traumatization, to which women are more vulnerable.

In this post, we at Villa Kali Ma will look closer at guilt and shame, and how recovering women can learn to transmute and transform them into healthier energies.

What is the difference between guilt and shame?

In popular psychology, the difference between guilt and shame is offered as “I did something bad” (guilt) versus “I am bad” (shame).

Guilt is more limited, and it suggests a different choice could be made in the future. A sincere apology and changed behavior can and often does repair a past mistake. Shame is more condemning and final, conferring the sensation that no matter what we do, we will always be bad.

Shame is, curiously, not absolved with a sincere apology or changed behavior. We continue to be convinced that we are rotten to the core, even when we behave like good people. When someone says to us, “I see you as a kindhearted person”, we think, “You don’t know the real me”.

Another way to look at the difference is to say that guilt centers on a specific action we did, a choice we made, an event or sequence of events limited to their own time and place. Guilt has a time stamp, and may be healed with time. Shame is boundless and forever, therefore that much harder for the human soul to bear.

What is the connection between guilt, shame, and addiction?

Shame and guilt are primary sources of addiction. They are very painful feelings to sustain over time, and shame in particular is noted to be highly correlated with addiction.

Children who grow up in shame-based family systems, where punishment and disapproval are dispensed in response to “who you are” rather than “what you decided to do” have many emotional problems they must learn to overcome through life.

For those of us raised in the shame mindset, a life-long sense of unworthiness accompanies us and must be dealt with in every scenario.

When we fail in life in some instance, which life gives us many opportunities to do, then that failure is not a reflection of specific actions we took, which we might learn from, and do better next time, let alone a reflection of the situation being challenging, but instead confirmation of our unworthiness.

Negative results seem typical of us, rather than typical of such situations. Shame makes everything personal. We become self-absorbed and narcissistic by way of shame, not because we love ourselves, rather because we cannot find anything inside of us to love. Shame is linked to despair and hopelessness.

Guilt, while it is easier to tolerate than shame because it contains a shred of hope that we could behave differently next time, is also fairly toxic.

Guilt implies responsibility, and false responsibility is easily transferred in dysfunctional families. When a small child is blamed for what other people are actually responsible for, for example, the child’s development is arrested by this inappropriate weight of responsibility. This easily happens when a child is made to feel unduly responsible for their parents’ feelings, such as Dad’s irritability or Mom’s sadness.

One reason the child is arrested in her development by being blamed is the fact that the child isn’t actually the origin of the parental stress or failure, and can be confused for the rest of her life about how her own actions do and don’t lead to effects in the world.

Both guilt and shame are precursors of addiction and are further amplified by addiction. Addiction compels people to behave in ways that really do hurt others, which creates more guilt. Addiction is also highly pathologized, moralized, and misunderstood, so it is easy for someone who has an addiction to feel that they are unworthy of love, approval, and connection.

Why do women sometimes feel guilty in recovery?

When we get sober, we have to look at all the things we did while we were under the spell of addiction. It’s never pretty. It’s disturbing and upsetting, and it represents a crisis of identity: if I did all that, how can I also still be a good person? Do I really deserve love and belonging? And if we have a core of shame to begin with, well, we knew it all along that we were bad, and this just proves it.

The good news is, that through the portal of this personal crisis, we have the opportunity to discover true, and genuinely unconditional self-love and self-forgiveness which extends far beyond any love we have known before.

We realize that all the pain we shared with the world was not ours alone to begin with. How did that pain get into us in the first place? We begin to understand how the wounds of others caused them to behave in ways that wounded us. Not because we were bad, not even because we did something bad, but because of things that happened to them that broke their hearts and spirits, long ago, by someone else entirely.

If we want to stop spreading this ancient pain around, we have to heal it within ourselves, which means to restore our original innocence and goodness.

Why do women sometimes feel shame in recovery?

Women feel shame in recovery because it is hard not to identify with the addict we have been. Because the addict within is amoral, selfish, hurtful, and destructive, we think that that is who we are.

All the evidence suggests this is so. The people we hurt tell us we are hurtful people. After all, who else is to blame? We may try for a while, to blame anyone or anything else for our use, but in the end, we know it is us, and no other, who can genuinely be held accountable.

An extraordinary opportunity lies in this pain, which is that we can break the basic pattern of ego-identification. Without lessening responsibility – after all, it is only we who can let the addict in the door of our personal being, or keep that door shut – we can understand that while addiction itself is a very, very negative thing, we are not our addiction.

Addiction is an illness, which can take hold of a person. That is all. No more, and no less, than a serious, but totally impersonal, kind of madness.

Villa Kali Ma can assist women in overcoming guilt and shame in recovery

At Villa Kali Ma, we offer a healing program for women to recover from addiction, mental illness, and trauma, which includes effective clinical modalities from the West in tandem with enduring holistic modalities like yoga, Ayurveda, and acupuncture.

Healing guilt and shame are top priorities for any woman on a recovery path because these two toxic emotions are the gatekeepers that guard the exit out of hell.

If you are ready to find out how each of these gatekeepers can be transformed into the positive guardians of innocence, kindness, and self-loving humility, reach out to see if we might be the right place for you to do your healing work!

Categories
Mental Health

How to Deal with Depression During the Holidays

What is holiday depression?

Holiday depression is another name for the blues, a special kind that comes around starting with Thanksgiving and peaking around Christmastime or New Year. The melancholy among us can have a rough go over these weeks, and even the cheeriest among us might feel it too.

There are many reasons why the holidays surface emotional pain. The stress of travel, end-of-year work deadlines, finances, and pressures of hosting and attending family gatherings are all valid reasons that some women find this to be a demanding time of the year.

Whatever your feelings are, trust us, if you’re not feeling merry, it’s ok. We get it.

What are the causes of holiday depression?

Holiday depression can be caused by any number of things. The most common sources are pre-existing mental health conditions, substance abuse history, seasonal affective disorder, stress, grief, and financial trouble.

Here are three additional ways to think about the holiday blues.

1. Compare and Despair

The holidays can highlight ways in which we feel we aren’t up to snuff. Someone else’s job, children, house, appearance, whatever, can steal away our own sorely-needed self-approval.

A little cure for this holiday blues-maker:

Write up a list of everything you are proud of yourself for, large and small. Acknowledge yourself, for your courage, your best intentions, and all that could be looked upon kindly and lovingly. Put the list in your purse and take it with you to your gathering. In a moment when you need it, go to the bathroom and read your list to yourself.


2. Boundaries and Depression

Due to stress, limited time and space, and large groups of people, something will probably happen during this season that crosses our boundaries. We will feel, whether we recognize it or not, angry.

Depending on our anger skills, we may lash out (saying something we regret, for example), or feel guilty about our anger and turn it inward. The latter will instantly create depression.

How can we stay in witness observer mode as much as we can, taking note that we are angry or that we feel our boundaries are being crossed, and yet not turn against ourselves?

A little cure for this holiday blues-maker:

Choose a subtle, self-soothing action that you will do every time you notice crossed boundaries. For example, you could wrap the fingers of your right hand around the thumb of your left hand and hold it for as long as twelve full breaths.

This is a little body-energy hack that will activate the parasympathetic nervous system and help you stay calm, but also soothe yourself. If you know something positive that will work better than this, good! Do that instead.


3. Stress

Finally, it seems pat, but stress is really bad for humans! Like anger, stress needs to be released almost immediately from the body or it turns into depression or physical illness.

Everyone knows the holidays are stressful, whether it’s because of financials, getting gifts in time, managing family schedules, finishing work projects before the end of the year, being responsible for cooking and hosting, or just the horrors of winter travel. So what could you do to prevent stress from turning toxic for you?

A little cure for this holiday blues-maker:

Pre-plan what you will do every time you notice a stress spike, whether in the weeks during the run-up to the holidays or during the actual days. For example, you could pause to do four rounds of box breathing. Box breathing is like this: four-count breath in, four-count hold, four-count breath out, four-count hold; and all of that four times total.

Again, maybe you have a better hack. Would you rather stop what you’re doing for a 5-minute stretch break? Dance break? Step-outside break? The important point is to plan to use a specific tool and use it.

What is the difference between holiday and seasonal depression?

Seasonal affective disorder is connected to all times of the year in which there is a lack of sunlight and would be diagnosed no matter when it shows up. Holiday depression is linked specifically to the winter holidays themselves. Both of them have similar symptoms, of what would ordinarily be diagnosed as depression, including lowered mood, lowered energy, and bleak thoughts.

The connection between preexisting mental illness and holiday depression

It’s not fair, but it makes sense, that people who already have depression or another mental illness, tend to feel it extra during the holidays.

Whether it’s because so much of our mental illness is tied up with family topics, because the winter offers less of the healing relief of sun and outside time or another reason, the connection between the winter holidays and an uptick in mental health symptoms is strong.

This is especially true of the period of time after the holidays themselves, such as the latter days of December or the first days of the new year.

What are signs of depression in women?

Women and men show their depression slightly differently. Men may show their depression more in behavioral terms, for example by isolating, and to experience it more consciously as negative outlook and bleak thoughts about the world. Women may be more likely to feel their depression emotionally, as sadness, and to cry and to feel bad about themselves.

For both, depression is about feeling low, in terms of mood and energy, and is often paired with stopping certain activities that made us feel good. There are many vicious cycles paired with depression, such as eating food that makes us feel worse, poor sleep patterns that give us even less energy, skipping exercise routines so our endorphin levels drop even lower, and overindulging in entertainment, which makes us feel even less connected with what matters in life.

Common signs of depression are:

  • Appetite changes, including weight gain or weight loss
  • Loss of enjoyment in hobbies or creative activities
  • Feeling very exhausted, needing to oversleep, or be physically lazy (beyond normal levels of winter laziness)
  • Moodiness, crying, feeling sad, and thinking about the past too much
  • Crying without really understanding why you’re crying or what you’re sad about
  • Negative thoughts about yourself and your future

How to cope with holiday depression

Why not make a plan for coping with holiday depression? If you don’t end up needing it, great, but if you do, you’ll be happy you had enough self-love and foresight to prepare.

We suggest the following ideas be part of your holiday self-care plan:

1. Exercise, exercise, exercise

Exercise is nature’s most potent antidepressant, right here in our own bodies. It’s so simple it’s silly: if we just move (enough to get sweaty and energized), we’ll feel better.

What can you do to make sure vigorous exercise is part of your holiday season?

Our suggestion is to commit to some kind of daily challenge, such as 30 yoga sessions in 30 days, or to make December your month of dancing til you’re sweaty, once every day. Exercise doesn’t have to take all that much time – just 20 minutes of HIIT or another activity that gets you sweaty and out of breath will give you a cascade of good feelings.


2. Go outside every day for 20 minutes

Nature is also nature’s most potent antidepressant! (It’s a tie with exercise). Find a way to be around plants, gardens, trees, beaches, mountains – whatever you have.

20 minutes outside in the natural light, air, and sounds of nature will deal a powerful blow to the holiday blues. If you have to put on rain boots, lots of sweaters, or a giant jacket and it seems exhausting to do even just that – good. Fighting some opposition for the sake of your happiness actually helps create happiness.


3. Go to Meetings

If you are new to 12-Step, why not make this the year you find out what all the good fuss is about? If you’re not new, then you know why this tip works.

There are 12-step meetings for nearly every kind of trouble, and all of them have Christmas Day meeting marathons.

For those of us with addictions, there are the classics: AA, NA, PA, and so on.

For those of us with food issues, codependency, or love addiction, we have options too.

Finally, 12-step programs exist even just for helping us deal with our emotions. Isn’t that amazing?

You don’t have to identify fully with the description to get the benefit of attending, just go with a spirit of curiosity and open-heartedness. Sit close to the warm fire of honesty-based heart connection offered in these groups.

Managing and coping with stress

Managing stress has two aspects. One is ordering your life so that it unfolds in a less stressful way, and the second is to provide yourself with mechanisms for releasing stress (detoxifying and relaxing the body).

We suggest you do both. Here is our guide to managing tasks so that your life feels less stressful, in the first place!

Project Manage Your Holiday Season

This process, called Personal Kanban, can save your sanity. If this is hard to get from reading, there are short videos online. It’s worth a look up – it’s actually really simple.  Here’s our explanation:

Step 1: Collect Your To-Dos

On Post-its or small slips of paper, brain dump all the things that need to be done (one to-do item per Post-it or slip of paper).


Step 2: Order and Prioritize Tasks in A Visible Way

Somewhere you can see it easily, such as on a whiteboard, corkboard, or just a big piece of paper taped to the wall, make three columns into which you can divide your tasks. These three columns are: To Do, Doing, and Done.

Start with putting all your post-its/tasks into the To Do column. Place the tasks in that column, in order of priority and actionability. The tasks which are most ready to be tackled right now are most towards the top of the list, and anything which is bigger or needs more time will be more towards the bottom.

For example, “Christmas present for Brian” might be above, “Last grocery store run before Christmas” for chronological reasons, and “Christmas present for Brian” might be below “Respond to Molly’s email” because email is easy and can be done right away.

The most time-sensitive and important tasks, but which are actionable, are the tasks that should be towards the top. If a task is time-sensitive but doesn’t feel actionable, try breaking it down into smaller chunks of task and see if that helps.

For example, maybe “Get presents for everyone” is too big to be completed as one task, whereas “Order coffee maker for Jake” is a tiny task that surely could be done right now.


Step 3: Move Tasks through the Pipeline

Now begin tackling your tasks. The way to do this is to take a limited number of tasks from the big, first To-Do column, and move them into the Doing column.

Only put the number of tasks that you think you can get done now or in this particular window of task-doing. The Doing column should never have too much in it at once, literally only the tasks you are essentially doing right now, which will be completed shortly.

Every time you have time to work on your tasks, clear the items in your Doing column, moving them into the third column, Done. When your Doing column is empty, take a few more from the To Do column, reordering and shifting remaining tasks, as well as adding new ones to that column, as needed.

 

This little life hack goes a long way!

More about this process can be found on this website.

When is it time to seek professional help?

If you’re suffering, get help. There is nothing wrong with getting help, in fact, it can also be considered the kindest thing you could do for everyone else, to take care of yourself first. No one does well when any one of us is not ok, that is a universal truth, though it takes a whole lifetime to learn it.

If you know the holidays are hard for you, then do yourself and everyone else a solid and talk to a professional healer or therapist about it. Short-term help for getting through a season is something that can be done any time.

If addiction is on the table, and you’re worried you’ll slip, then take action and get help right away, because relapse is a serious world of hurt for you and your loved ones, both.

Much heartache can be avoided by having enough self-love to prioritize how you feel over all the other expectations that may be loaded onto the holidays.

You do matter, dear reader, enough to protect and support. We can tell you that without even knowing who you are.

Villa Kali Ma can help women overcome holiday depression and enjoy this holiday season

Villa Kali Ma helps women recover from the many miseries of addiction, mental health disorders, and trauma.

We use clinically effective, evidence-based treatment models and alternative holistic practices such as yoga, mindfulness, and nutrition, integrated together as one treatment course. We treat each woman as the individual she is and approach healing with sensitivity, compassion, and a wakeful heart.

The holidays are hard for many of our clients, and we’re prepared to help. If you’re staring down some darkness that you don’t have the heart to face alone this season, then come to us and we’ll do it together. A problem shared is a problem halved.

Either way, we send you our biggest wishes for sane, healthy holidays, dear readers!

Categories
Mental Health

National Depression Screening Day 2024

National Depression Screening Day is October 10, 2024

National Depression Screening Day takes place annually on October 10th. This year, we at Villa Kali Ma are sharing our support for the advocacy campaign, as we recognize the importance of raising the profile of depression in the light of public attention.

Depression is a very painful form of mental illness affecting millions of people. Sadly enough, reports indicate that depression is on the rise, with no small number of sufferers succumbing to suicide as a result.

We know the heartache of depression from the inside, and we know that there is a cure. It is possible to reconnect with the spark of life, even after we and everyone else have started to think our flame has gone fully out. No one is beyond help, and that’s the truth.

But to get that help, we have to know that there is a name for what’s wrong with us and that there is a solution for it. Depression, as horrible as it is, is actually not a death sentence (or need not be). Depression is, compared to some forms of mental illness, rather responsive to treatment. When the right kind of contact is made, human to human, and the right kind of help for a depressed person is able to be administered in the way they need, things can be turned around into their opposite (a life of joy!).

All in all, this October 10th, we here at Villa Kali Ma are very interested to further explore and reflect on how we can all participate in healing depression, nationwide.

What is National Depression Screening Day?

National Depression Screening Day is an action campaign dedicated to the topic of depression, the debilitating and deadly mental health condition affecting more and more Americans each year.

Since not everyone manifests depression symptoms in the same way, it sometimes takes a screening for the condition to be recognizable to a sufferer or their loved ones. Testing can validate and support a person’s ability to have compassion for themselves and to take their own suffering seriously.

Teenagers and adults, men and women, and people in different population categories around the globe may experience and express their depression differently, based on many biological and social factors. Therefore diagnostic tools like a depression screen can be helpful as one measure to potentially indicate the presence of a serious mental health condition.

How to observe National Depression Screening Day?

In our opinion, the best way to observe National Depression Screening Day is to participate in the dialogue about the topic.

Are you familiar with depression yourself (we are!)? If yes, what was it like for you? If you’re no longer depressed now, how did you turn it around? What did you do, who helped you? What did you need to realize about yourself, the world, and your place within it, to be able to come back to the surface of life?

Or maybe you have loved and been close with someone who had depression. What was that like for you? How did you try, succeed, or fail to help them? What feelings does the chronic, unchanging sadness or low spirits of another bring up for you?

If you’re a mental health practitioner or even just a willing ally, you may want to take a depression screening yourself, to learn more about the signs and symptoms.

We always suggest a deep dive into the positive, too: look into the many cures both holistic and mainstream, which are currently used for depression. Ponder the world of solutions, the promising data, for example coming out of the trauma research field, or the use of so-called “nutraceuticals”.

What conclusions you reach are yours, but form a personal opinion about the topic, and engage!

What are the signs to know it’s sadness, not depression?

Depression is different from mourning, grief, and sadness. Although they can feel very similar, and depression can involve many of the same symptoms as grief – sadness, crying a lot, isolating, halting self-care, and needing to sleep more – the key difference is that depression is not a temporary feeling or mood in reaction to circumstances.

Rather, depression is a lingering, or chronic state in which we become trapped in lowered levels of mood, with less energy, loss of hope in the future, and diminished enjoyment in the now. It is frequently accompanied by a desire to die or to commit self-harm.

One way to check whether it’s depression or sadness is to see if there is a life circumstance present, in which it would be expected to feel that way, such as after a loss of a loved one or a serious life change. When we feel blue, sad, low-energy feelings even when we “should” be feeling ok, or when that is essentially our baseline no matter what’s going on externally, that can be a sign that it’s depression rather than sadness.

Why is National Depression Screening Day important?

The painful truth about untreated depression is that it can and often does end in death by suicide. This is a risk we cannot afford to ignore, nor to minimize. When symptoms of depression are not noticed nor taken care of, the deep troubles within, which are currently coming out as depression symptoms, can become more dangerous and turn into violence against the self.

Screening for depression can save lives. As the saying goes, “Name it to tame it”. Screening for depression can help name the darkness, which begins the process of healing it.

Villa Kali Ma Supports National Depression Screening Day

At Villa Kali Ma, we are in favor of screening for depression more frequently, especially in vulnerable populations like teenagers, people with addiction, and the elderly, to help raise awareness and understanding of depression, and to help find a cure.
There are many remedies to depression, ranging from exercise to diet to psychotherapy, which can help touch a person and bring them into the circle of light from out of their dark isolation.

It is heartbreaking to consider how many people feel the way depressed people feel. We are deeply motivated to help shift this, as a part of our mission to support and protect women’s mental health.

Categories
Mental Health

World Mental Health Day 2024

World Mental Health Day is October 10, 2024.

This October, we honor World Mental Health Day. October 10th is the day set aside annually to reflect on mental health, and how we can support it to shine and thrive all over the world. This year’s theme is “It is Time To Prioritize Mental Health in the Workplace”. It sure is, isn’t it?

What is World Mental Health Day?

World Mental Health Day is an awareness campaign intended to raise consciousness and educate about mental health topics around the globe. Its goal is partly to help share stories and experiences of people with mental health struggles, and to reduce stigma and isolation through creating conversations and making connections.

The day is also intended to help share ideas and solutions for how to live with more mental health on the whole, as a collective – something we can all continue to work on, as the madness of the world plainly shows!

The day is also purposed to help raise the standard of care applied to those with serious and chronic mental health conditions, the people most affected by the field of mental health.

What is the history of World Mental Health Day?

World Mental Health Day was established in 1992 by the World Federation of Mental Health. Led by then-deputy secretary general Richard Hunter, the purpose of the day of awareness and action was to advocate for mental health, globally.

In recognition of substandard treatment of those with mental health struggles in some portions of the world, as well as a global level of mental health crisis affecting humanity, plus widespread ignorance about mental health issues, the idea was to focus on the topic and bring solutions to the fore.

For the first few years after its founding, World Mental Health Day was honored by way of a multinational broadcast sharing information and messages related to mental health advocacy. Starting in 1994, World Mental Health Day had annual themes. The first theme was “Improving the Quality of Mental Health Services throughout the World”.

Over the years, more and more countries have participated through advocacy related events and action plans. It is in large part a result of efforts related to World Mental Health Day that understanding and acceptance of mental health concerns has grown around the world.

What are some FAQ’s about World Mental Health Day?

Here are some questions that people commonly have about mental health.


What causes mental illness?

Mental illness is currently believed to be partly biological or genetic in origin, and partly caused by life circumstances and experiences. In particular, the role of trauma – not only from singular shocking experiences but also from more chronic conditions like neglect and abuse – in creating mental health disorders later on in life is receiving more and more attention.

Poor nutrition from the modern American diet, the stress of poverty and living in polluted areas, and exposure to environmental toxins through agricultural practices and other use of chemicals to manufacture products we use daily, is also being studied as a possible factor in mental health conditions.


How do I know if I have a mental illness?

Consult a professional. It is fine to do preliminary research on your own, of course, but we do suggest that you be mindful that many symptoms of mental illness are relatable to all. We all experience some problems focusing our attention, some mood struggles, and chronic tension, for example.

However, when your thoughts, feelings, and struggles to stay balanced represent a serious disruption to your life, (including your ability to make a living for yourself and have relationships with others) something may be out of balance, which could be addressed holistically and/or clinically.

It can be very helpful to be given a diagnostic name for your particular kind of struggles, such as Major Depression or Generalized Anxiety Disorder, as long as you don’t overidentify with the diagnosis and take it to define you totally.

How can I help someone who has a mental illness?

Follow the golden rule of “how do I like to be treated?” Most people would like to be treated the same as everyone else, and not to be marginalized or made out to be overly fragile or different.

You cannot lose when you apply empathy, curiosity, and show willingness to learn more about what a person is experiencing, without applying judgment or attempting to fix them.

It’s generally best not to give advice or to tell someone to look on the bright side, or that everything will be ok, as this tends to give the message that we are not comfortable with their suffering. Connect, engage, and show that you have no need to judge someone, and the person will most likely feel safe to tell you more about what it’s like to be them.

How to observe World Mental Health Day?

The best way to observe World Mental Health Day is to do our best to have good mental health ourselves. Once our own mental health is relatively secure, we can speak and share more with others about what it takes to have healthy thoughts, emotions and bodies. Here are three things we can try, this year, as a part of celebrating World Mental Health:

1. Double Your Self Care

This year, see what you can do to strengthen your own self care practices. Can you eat cleaner, exercise more, spend more time outside? Can you turn off your phone, clean your clutter, or take an art class? With whom in your life can you connect, heart to heart? With whom can you play or laugh? What is that makes you feel balanced, centered, whole, alive, and heart-awakened? Do that, more!


2. Practice Boundaries

Mental Health thrives in an environment of healthy interpersonal boundaries. This year, what can you do to strengthen the lines that helpfully differentiate you from another? Where can you say no more? Where can you allow yourself to stop taking responsibility for another, but instead take more responsibility for you? Boundaries are the golden ticket to mental health.


3. Practice Self-Responsible Communication

Mental Health does best in an environment of kind observation of the mind and emotions, rather than acting out our impulses and behaviors without knowing our motivation. This year, practice self-observation through meditation or journaling, then practice communicating your truth to another! How can you talk about what you need, what you want, and what you’re feeling as a result of those wants and needs? To learn more about communicating cleanly, dig into non-violent communication.

Why is World Mental Health Day important?

Although a lot of progress has been made in raising awareness about mental health epidemics we are facing, collectively, we are still a long way off from being healthy and happy in our species at large.

It is important to continue to cultivate compassion and create spaces of dialogue around the variety of human experiences, what is different about us and perhaps even more importantly, what we have in common.

We all want to be free and sufficiently supported to live life in the way that we personally would define as “happiness”. How can we ensure that right for every single member of the human race, whether we personally approve of their choices or not?

How might we improve our ability to include, to embrace, to recognize our own self in the other? What will it take to stop marginalizing, splitting, and dividing into groups that turn on each other?

These are questions to ponder, that will help lead us to the unity of heart and spirit that is necessary to grow past mental illness and into health and happiness as a collective.

Villa Kali Ma Supports World Mental Health Day

As a holistic mental health care provider dedicated to serving women, Villa Kali Ma supports World Mental Health Day fully. We encourage everyone to participate in whatever way speaks to them, to spread awareness and raise consciousness. For us, this year we carry on walking the long, meaningful road towards total health in the minds, bodies and spirits of women everywhere.

Categories
Mental Health

Herbs for Mental Health and Addiction

Did you know that most medicines used today were originally inspired by ingredients found growing naturally in the wild? Many commonplace seeds, fruits, leaves, roots, bark, flowers, resins, and other parts of plants, trees, and mushrooms carry powerful healing properties.

Before the rise of Western medicine, humanity relied heavily on nature’s pharmacy for cures, remedies, and ways to lessen our ordinary life pain, discomfort, and imbalances. In those days, it was understood that nature could help not only with physical illnesses but also with disturbances of the soul, like melancholy or agitation.

Today, science has helped us to understand more about how the active ingredients in certain plants work together with our bodily chemistry, neurotransmitters, and hormones, to help us recover a state of mental health. When we’re depressed, anxious, possessed by an addiction, or otherwise disturbed from our naturally happy state, we can look to nature’s many medicines for help.

What are the best herbs for mental health?

Many good types of herbs and plant extracts can help improve mental health. Which herbs to use depends on the imbalance you are hoping to correct. Lavender, for example, treats anxiety, while St. John’s Wort is used for depression.

Adaptogens represent an important class of natural medicines for mental health. Adaptogens include a variety of plants: roots like rhodiola and ashwagandha, mushrooms like Lion’s Mane, and herbs like Holy Basil are considered adaptogens. Adaptogens help the body respond to stress and normalize, generating more resilience in the face of life’s demands.

What are complementary and alternative medicines?

Complementary and alternative medicines are paths to approaching illness that lie outside of the mainstream Western medicine model. They work well in tandem with Western medicines most of the time and are generally not considered to be replacements for Western medicine, especially in emergencies. They are generally applied best in reasonably healthy bodies, to improve functioning and strengthen.

Some commonly used complementary and alternative medicines are herbs, often prepared as a tea, such as calendula flower tea, vitamins like Vitamin D, minerals like selenium or magnesium, nutritional supplements, such as fish oil, as well as certain nutrient-dense whole foods or superfoods, like sauerkraut or blueberries.

For people who are basically healthy, these natural medicines are often sufficient alone to correct imbalances, strengthen immunity, and improve neuronal and hormonal pathways.

It’s important with any medicine, natural or synthetic, to pay close attention to the body’s reaction, to listen to one’s intuition and feeling, and to stop a cure if it is creating pain or having bad effects. Every person is different and not all cures are right for everyone. Healing is always a somewhat exploratory path and should be engaged in with caution and presence.

How have complementary and alternative medicines helped with mental health?

Complementary and alternative medicines are often anecdotally reported to be effective for a range of mental health disturbances. Anecdotal evidence is offered by people speaking to their own experience, as well as by alternative health practitioners. These reports suggest that what was once known by all to be self-evidently true, that plants can help by lifting one’s mood, calming one’s nervous system, and helping the body to release stress, is still true today.

From a data perspective, however, it must be said that most natural medicinal cures have not been studied at scale nor with scientific rigor, for example with double-blind tests and a control group. The funding does not exist for such studies to be conducted, and there is little financial motivation to prove the beneficial effects, given that other medicines are more lucrative.

Of the existing studies and anecdotal evidence, we know the most about how herbs can support people with depression, anxiety, sleep disturbances, and stress.

How to use the medicines safely?

Although complementary and alternative medicines are natural, they are still potent. It is important to be careful to pay attention to dosage and to monitor your body as it responds to the cure you are introducing.

Ideally, work with a knowledgeable, experienced natural medicines practitioner, and consider all context clues and possibilities. Interact with your body as you would with a friend you love and care about.

When the body is manifesting an imbalance, even something like anxiety or depression, understand that the symptoms themselves contain a lot of information pointing to a deeper concern that we would like to resolve, not suppress or brush off.

Most natural medicines are relatively safe, with very few side effects, but nevertheless, you do not want to overload the body with a new chemical agent, even a natural one.

Apply common sense – don’t try creating natural medicines on your own without being sure you are sufficiently trained, follow instructions, be wary of wonder cures (if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is), learn from the experiences of others, and don’t give remedies to children without consulting someone experienced and knowledgeable.

Also, it is important to be aware that some self-help or alternative health gurus push their products for financial gain, rather than for your best interest. Listen to your gut and don’t fall for pushy sales tactics.

The best natural medicines are widely available and do not need to be very expensively produced. That said, pay attention to things like whether or not the product is organic, wild-harvested, how it has been extracted, and whether any chemicals have been used or added. We can only ever do our best, but it stands to reason that what we put in our bodies should be the highest quality we can procure, ideally.

What are herbal medicines and supplements?

Herbal remedies are natural medicines made from plants. Examples of herbal remedies are echinacea (commonly used to support the immune system to fight off colds in winter) or Valerian root (a preparation used to help calm the nervous system, aiding with anxiety).

Depending on the herb, remedies may be taken as a tea, as a powder (usually dissolved in water or juice), as a tincture, or as a topical balm or cream.

The term supplements refers to a category that includes minerals, vitamins, and animal-derived products like bone broth or cod liver oil.

Natural medicines usually have a recommended daily maximum, and it is important not to exceed that amount unless you are working with a practitioner whom you trust, and who believes it necessary for your case. Anything used in excess could have negative effects on the body.

It’s important to be aware that some natural medicines interfere with or negatively interact with some conventional medicines, so please be careful with supplements and do your research if you are taking a conventional pharmaceutical, and vice versa.

What herbal medicines and supplements assist with brain function?

There is a class of herbal medicines and supplements called cognitive enhancers, which support the brain to stay healthy. These are used for supporting memory functions and normalizing other brain pathways, to help us stay mentally sharp and flexible.  Ginko (ginkgo biloba) and ginseng (Panax ginseng) are two herbs that are commonly used for this purpose, and sage is another option.

Ginko

Ginko is an extract made from seeds and leaves of the ginkgo tree, originally Chinese. It is used to help improve concentration, focus, and memory, and has an application in supporting those with dementia or other forms of cognitive decline.


Ginseng

Ginseng is a plant grown in many corners of the world. Korean ginseng, or Panax ginseng, is the kind of ginseng most commonly used as an herbal remedy. It is believed to help with memory and mental performance.


Sage

Sage is a wild shrub also grown domestically, the oils of which are frequently used in aromatherapy. Sage is used as an herbal remedy to help with brain function, but it is also believed to help with both anxiety and depression.

What herbal medicines help with anxiety and insomnia?

Anxiety is commonly treated with herbal remedies, as are sleep problems. The body may respond well to the relaxing effects of many of nature’s medicines.

There are many choices when it comes to soothing anxiety with herbs, roots, and flowers, including passionflower, valerian, Rhodiola, hops, German chamomile, lemon balm, holy basil, gotu kola, ashwagandha, and lavender.

There is a certain subtype of herbal medicine called flower remedies, which some people have found to be very helpful, particularly for anxiety. Rescue Remedy, a popular flower remedy, is used to help with stress.

Many of the natural remedies for anxiety are also helpful during drug withdrawal, such as lavender and passionflower.

What herbal medicines help with depression and bipolar disorder?

People seeking support for depression and bipolar disorder have a variety of options in the natural medicine category.

One herb, St. John’s Wort, is commonly used to help to protect against low mood.

Minerals are usually also recommended for those struggling with depression, as selenium and vitamin D in particular have been reported to help stabilize mood and lessen the severity of lows, perhaps related to their role in the reduction of inflammation.

Folic acid is a vitamin that is almost always recommended for people struggling with depression, and an animal-derived supplement (also available in vegan form, from flax seeds) to help with boosting Omega-3 fatty acids (fish oil supplementation) is often advised and found to be helpful, as well.

Dramatically improving diet and nutrition (alongside exercising more) is one of the clearest paths to improving depression and bipolar disorder naturally. Many herbal remedies come in the form of superfoods, such as blueberries, nuts and seeds, and salmon.

A promising area of research includes supplementation with amino acids, like L-tryptophan and 5 hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), as these substances are precursors to serotonin, an important neurotransmitter that is believed to affect depression. Some patients and practitioners of functional medicine report positive results using these amino acids to target mood disorders.

Finally, many of the same herbs recommended for anxiety are also advised for people struggling with depression, as the two conditions are related. In particular, adaptogens like ginger, turmeric, holy basil, Rhodiola, and ashwagandha are believed to be powerful in the treatment of both depression and anxiety, through the way that they reprogram the body’s response to stress, thereby building resilience.

Which herbal medicines help with addiction?

Drugs and alcohol must be eliminated from the body before any kind of healing can take place, natural or otherwise. Some herbs help with the withdrawal process, relieving anxiety and distress, and strengthening certain key organs, like the heart and the spleen, to recover after the many stressors of addiction.

Valerian, passionflower, and St. John’s Wort are believed to help emotionally during withdrawals, through the same mechanism that makes them good supports for healing depression and anxiety. Kudzu, or Japanese arrowroot flowers, may help stay calm during withdrawal from alcohol.

Addiction to alcohol, as well as the withdrawal process, is very rough on the body. Several herbal remedies are recommended for helping the body to recover after prolonged use of toxic substances.

A tincture of hawthorn berries can be taken to strengthen the heart, during and after withdrawals. Dandelion is another herb that has many health benefits, in particular, due to its detoxifying effects. It is useful during detoxification from drugs and alcohol for that reason, supporting the spleen to be cleansed.

The liver is another key organ affected by drugs and in particular alcohol – for cleansing the liver milk thistle is a supportive herbal remedy. Burdock root is a powerful detoxifier, helpful in particular for the kidneys.

Villa Kali Ma Supports Herbs for Mental Health and Addiction for Women

At Villa Kali Ma, we are big believers in the many abundant cures offered by nature to help us recover lives of meaning and purpose.

Our unique program offers addiction and mental health recovery paths for women who suffer from substance abuse and co-occurring disorders, and we integrate natural health into every aspect of our program. From diet to nutrition to herbal remedies, we make the best of what nature gave us, to help us find our way back to connection with all of life.

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