Integrity Counseling Services

Pennsylvania's Premier Center for Catholic Counseling and Spiritual Direction

Category: Family Counseling

The Difference between Excuses and Explanations

The Difference Between Excuses and Explanations

By Gian Milles, M.S. — I sometimes have people come into my office saying they “don’t like excuses.” “This is great! Me neither,” I usually retort. However, it can be a problem when people conflate “excuses” with “explanations.” I see this when people respond to my questions of “why?” (e.g., Why did you use alcohol for years despite the harm that it caused you and your family?) by stating that they “don’t like excuses.”

I respond by telling them that the difference between excuses and explanations may be subtle, but in reality, they are completely different. Put simply, excuses are used to avoid taking personal responsibility for a wrong action. They may include truthful information, but they always misuse it. The subtext is usually “it wasn’t my fault.” For example, someone might say, “I used alcohol because my wife was not intimate with me as often as I wanted.” It may be true that your wife was not intimate with you as much as you’d like, but it is not her fault that you used alcohol. We can be influenced by circumstances and other people, but we cannot be controlled by them. Of course, there are certain exceptions, such as if a person is threatened or coerced into a certain action, in which case they bear little to no culpability for their action.

On the contrary, explanations are thoroughly rooted in facts, context or circumstances. They admit guilt while still telling the full picture of what happened. An example here is: “When I am away on business, I often wind up drinking.” This presents the fact of using in the context of a situation where the person likely feels lonely while refraining from blaming someone or something for their actions.

Excuses keep us stuck. They put the blame on someone or something we cannot control. They do not offer freedom and hope for a way forward with a better outcome. Conversely, explanations help us grow in self-understanding and self-awareness. They help us develop insight as to how we got to a certain place in our lives where we did something that caused ourselves and our loved ones significant harm. Excuses make things less clear, while explanations make them clearer.

This insight is a necessary ingredient for change. When we do not understand how something happened, we cannot take the required steps to make sure those circumstances do not happen again. Excuses rob us of the ability to change for the better, while explanations are tools that allow us to forge a new way marked by integrity, wholeness and love. They allow us to repair the harm we have caused and prevent it from happening again. They are our ticket to a better future.

We have a God of second chances. No matter what we have done, the opportunity for change and reconciliation is available to us. We only need the courage to take it.

Woman grieving during the holidays

Grieving During the Holidays

By Neal Niznan, MSW, LCSW — The grief process is challenging any time of the year. Grieving the loss of a loved one around the holidays provides its own challenges that can magnify the intensity of grief you feel. As we move towards the end of the year, two short months and four major holidays, Halloween to New Year’s can be extremely hard to navigate. Planning in advance what you want to do during the holidays is one way to maintain a sense of management of the grief process.

The holidays embody an inherent sense of joy, happiness and peace. You, however, may not experience any of those feelings, and feel completely out of step with everyone else. It is hard to put on your happy face and make the holiday joyous when you do not feel that way at all. You may think it will just be easier not to do the holidays this year as a way of coping.

I would suggest avoid isolating yourself during the holidays. There may be a way to manage the emotional demands of the holidays and not throw yourself into a tailspin trying to navigate the demands on one’s time and wellbeing. Consider what you need for yourself and what parts of the holidays are important for you to participate in. This may be a year where you do not include all the family traditions. Review what you normally do to celebrate and select the most essential elements. Think about what the most meaningful parts of your traditions and see if you can incorporate them into your revised holiday plans. You may not have the energy to decorate the whole house or prepare all the family’s favorite dishes like you always did. Do what you have the energy for.

The grief process should be embraced not avoided. It is impossible to get together with others and not mention the deceased, or their absence. Try not to make it the elephant in the room. Include your loved one in the celebration by setting a place for them at the table, playing their favorite music, cooking their favorite dish, or including them in a prayer before the meal to honor them. Be proactive about how you would like to celebrate and include the deceased in the festivities.

It is important to have a plan for stepping away from, or even not attending, a holiday gathering. Despite your best efforts and intentions, give yourself the option, at the last minute, not to participate in family gatherings or parties if you are just not up for it. Give yourself space to participate in the way you can. Let others know that you may leave early or not join in certain activities. Others will understand this is a challenging time and you need space to be by yourself.

It may seem easier to avoid the holidays this year and hide until they are over. With a bit of reflection and planning, you can create for yourself a safe space to grieve, honor your loved one, and celebrate the holidays with family and friends. Everyone is grieving and missing the deceased loved one. We provide support to one another through our presence, our words and our touch. A message of love and support is expressed through an embrace with someone who understands our loss. Allow yourself to be the recipient of support from others and provide comfort in their grieving.

If The Empty Nest Makes You Depressed

By Teri Love, M.S. — When my son was one-year old, he loved to stand by the open dishwasher and “help” unload the clean dishes. One day, he dropped a glass, and it shattered at his bare feet. I was right beside him and swooped him up before he got cut. Later that day, I told my friend about the incident, and she said, “Our kids don’t realize how many times a day we save their lives.” I laughed because it was a little dramatic but also a little true.

Fast forward 17 years, and my husband and I dropped off that same son for his freshman year of college. How quickly the child we raised and protected since birth grew up and set out to begin his next phase of life. It was beautiful and exciting but also heartbreaking.

It is late August as I write this, and I see evidence of that same heartbreak in posts all over social media. There are college goodbye photos, tear-jerker parenting poems, and terms like “momancholy” in memes about the deep sadness we feel when adult kids move out.

What do we do with that deep sadness? It can be confusing because it often sits side-by-side with joy, relief and pride. It can also be complex if our kids don’t seem to be headed in the direction we hoped and prayed for. Because I’ve reckoned with oodles of these feelings myself, waded through them with friends and family, and addressed them in the therapy office, I would like to offer encouragement along with three ways to manage emotions during this phase of life:

  1. Care for yourself. Recognize this is a colossal change, and practice self-compassion. Self-compassion might include a short break from work or other responsibilities while you grieve the empty room, empty chair at the dining table, or quieter house. It’s okay to cry and not apologize for it or criticize yourself. (“I’m being silly;” “I should be happy;” “Everyone else seems to be getting on with life.”) If there is something nice you would do for a friend going through a rough time — do that nice thing for you!
  2. Talk! First, talk to God. God knows you and loves you and understands the details of your pain. Second, talk to people who’ve “launched” adult children before or are going through it along with you. This is the perfect time to invite another parent you know out to coffee or for a walk. It is surprisingly healing to be reminded you’re not in this alone. Third, if things seem too weighty to manage on your own, talk to a therapist. A good therapist can accompany, validate and help you navigate your way through this giant shift in your life and into the next phase. And speaking of the next phase . . .
  3. Assess your life and dream a little about the next phase. Some parents might start this process well ahead of their adult child’s move-out day; others need a few months or longer to observe how things go and adjust to their “new normal.” When you’re ready, be intentional. Brainstorm things you’d like to do that match your personality, budget and energy. I’ve seen everything from turning a son’s room into an elaborate walk-in closet to taking sailing lessons, selling the house, and preparing for a trip around the world. The point is, life is not over and there are endless ways to invest in yourself, others, and your newly-adult child.

Six years have passed since our oldest son’s freshman drop-off at college. It doesn’t take much effort for me to recall the exact feelings I had as we drove away from him. It was (and still can be) a hollow ache and I don’t like it at all. If you are dealing with that hollow ache, I pray you will feel the consolations of God’s goodness and His promise to bring good things out of difficulties; the awareness that you are not alone; and the strength to talk about your experience with a trusted friend or therapist.

time management

Managing Everything But Time

By Michael Kastelnik, Psy.D. – “Time management” is a funny phrase. To see what I mean, take the concept of management as largely understood in a business context. Companies all over the world spend a lot of time and effort to make sure their laborers can get the job done. Sometimes the mere presence of managers helps to keep people honest and ensure they are actually working and not slacking off or engaging in some other activity that is bad for business. This all makes sense with managing people that you can influence, but it makes less sense with such an invaluable yet intangible resource such as time. Nevertheless, there are other aspects of our lives over which we have more obvious control, albeit some of us more than others. I’m talking about things such as energy, stress and attention.

Like with many aspects of life, managing energy levels is relevant to the conversation. As such, any advice on improving time management will include the usual components of self-care such as proper diet, exercise or comparable activity, adequate sleep, maintaining wholesome relationships and stress management. In fact, stress management is a complex skill in itself and it may be fundamental to time management inasmuch as you need to have just the right amount of arousal to complete a task, according to the Yerkes-Dodson model of productivity. Too little concern for a task will literally get you nowhere, while too much concern can lead to progressively worse outcomes. Mistakes can occur. Burnout is an outcome when people are putting in more effort with no more output in the product. And, of course, health problems occur in the short term and over time when people get too stressed. Physiology is simple enough to regulate with activities such as slow, deep breathing or jumping jacks, while mental stress relief may involve something like journaling about concerns.

Attention is another resource that may require more discipline to regulate. We all tend to focus on things we find interesting and space out on boring tasks. Becoming your own behavioral therapist and limiting the interesting things to serve as a reward for the more mundane tasks could not only help you get your work done but could also build a resistance to forming unbalanced habits with things that exploit our attention, such as electronic devices.

In addition to short-term tactics to stay on task, it is also necessary to step back and make sure we are balancing efficiency, the ability to do tasks using less time, money or energy, with effectiveness, which is a positive contribution to our goals.

For example, let’s say you have a goal to build a stone wall on the front of your property. If you know you have a lot of large stones in your backyard, you may decide to start by gathering those stones and bringing them to the other side in the most efficient way possible. You could figure out how to reduce the likelihood of injury by lifting the rocks with a certain technique. You might utilize a simple machine, such a wheelbarrow, to do it quickly with simple machines like a wheelbarrow. You may be tempted to feel so proud of your method that you move the rocks to the backyard again because you can. Maybe that last activity sounds far fetched, but the point is that if the emphasis falls too much on efficiency, you may lose sight of other important things such as implementing the rest of the steps needed to complete the wall, maintaining it, and having a rationale why you are building it that you can instill in your children, who could in turn maintain or improve the wall when their time comes. The point of this example is to show how we need the ability to pause from our work periodically or even regularly to make sure we are growing in virtue and working towards worthwhile goals and not simply keeping busy.

So, what can we do if managing our time seems like such a complex task? We can pray that the Holy Ghost enable us to use His gifts such as wisdom. We can ask for counsel from respected elders and mentors on how to grow in prudence regarding particular problems we would like to solve. We can start where we are and acknowledge what we have some control over, such as self-care and attention, as well as those that we don’t control and could therefore benefit from avoiding worrying about, such as the passage of time. This is the Serenity Prayer in action. While we may not control time, there is a lot we all can do to make the most of it.

Hope for Teens with Specific Strategies

By Gian Milles, M.S., L.P.C.  — We hear a lot today about the mental health crisis in teenagers. While it is true that teen mental health in America has been declining since the early 2010s, there is also reason for hope. According to research from the CDC, about 3 in 5 children ages 6 to 17 exhibit indicators of flourishing, including showing interest in learning new things, staying calm and in control when faced with a challenge, and working to finish tasks they start. Sometimes, with sensationalistic news and no shortage of geopolitical instability, we can be tempted to focus only on the negative. Depending on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist, you may see the 3/5 figure as comforting (over half of our children are healthy!) or worrisome (nearly half of our children are unhealthy!). Either way, I want to share some good news with you.

If you are one of those people who are happy to hear that 3/5 of children are healthy, I rejoice with you. This is certainly a wonderful thing that so many children are doing so well despite the adversity they are facing in our tumultuous times. On the other hand, if you are concerned about those that are not or if you know a young person who is struggling, there is reason for hope.

Psychologists have defined hope as willpower + waypower. What does this mean? It means that having hope consists of having the mental energy or motivation to achieve clear goals and specific pathways, or mental plans, for being able to make these goals happen. With proper coaching, the 40% of children and teens who are experiencing significant anxiety and/or depression can grow in the virtue of hope, and hopeful people are protected against strong, persistent emotions such as anxiety and depression. Helping teens to stay motivated by offering them incentives (e.g. taking them to a sporting event or a trip to Rita’s Water Ice) can be helpful. If it appears that they are motivated, but are having trouble with follow-through, It can also be helpful to help them problem-solve with specific ways they can achieve their goals. This may involve guiding them through building more effective study habits, improving their diet, or helping them to join a sports team or get a gym membership.

In the context of these strategies, the most powerful force for good in a child’s life is unconditional love. Kobe Bryant advocated for this in one of Bryant’s  last interviews. When you tell a child that you love them no matter how they behave, and, what’s more, that God loves them no matter how they behave, this gives teens the freedom to take risks, knowing that failure does not threaten their inherent dignity and lovability.

This combination of unconditional love along with specific goals, motivation, and pathways to success are the resources that allow teens to effectively experience the freedom from anxiety and depression that God and we desire for them.

Integrity Counseling Services

Difficult Conversations

By Cynthia G. Dowling, MA, LMFT, Integrity Counseling Services — Many clients come to me experiencing anxiety after exploring relationships in their lives, whether they are personal, work or community-based. Together we often find that they are feeling stuck in certain aspects of their lives because of a fear of having difficult conversations. Very few people enjoy hurting someone they love and care about. This fear or apprehension — holding one back from having a difficult conversation — can lead to feelings of anxiety, resentment and frustration. Identifying strategies for having these important conversations can lessen anxiety and increase the likelihood of people overcoming their fear.

Here are strategies I’ve outlined below:

Be mindful of your approach. Choosing your words thoughtfully, and making sure you speak in a kind tone, can start your conversation in the right direction. If one starts a conversation in an angry, frustrated or blaming tone, the other person will immediately feel defensive.

Stay on topic. Think about what you are hoping to accomplish in your conversation. Then, decide what your talking points will be and stay focused on them. During this process keep in mind what you feel you need to say to feel heard. Make sure to only bring up one or two topics in the conversation. More than that could cause the person you are confronting to feel overwhelmed and attacked.

Refrain from insults or putting the other person down. Whatever the issue is, it is causing you to feel a certain way. Make sure to speak using “I” statements, owning your feelings. “I” statements are a helpful way to take responsibility for how you feel or what you believe, and they help the listener to not feel blamed.

Think about possible outcomes. What would be the best-case scenario for the outcome of the conversation? What could be the worst? Know that the outcome will most likely be in the middle of the two scenarios.

In person vs. a letter/email.  Sometimes people feel they can be more to the point and less emotional by writing a letter or email vs. an in-person conversation. A letter/email can also be helpful if the person you need to speak to has a history of being reactive or defensive. The downside of this option is the possibility that you won’t receive a response.

Be open to compromise and hearing the other person’s perspective. Having difficult conversations opens us up to receiving feedback that could be positive or negative. Having knowledge of this going into the conversation is important. It is important to be open to finding a compromise moving forward. Having the ability to see our own imperfections or faults is hard; however, it is part of the process of growing and healing.

Having difficult conversations can be scary. The reality is the conversation will never go exactly as planned and that is OK. If you are holding back from addressing an issue and it is resulting in anxiety or frustration, it is important to vocalize what has been bothering you. The more you have these difficult conversations, the easier they become. Speaking the truth to someone in a kind and respectful way can result in feeling as if a weight has been lifted off you. The results of speaking your truth can be life changing.

Cindy Dowling Therapist Integrity Counseling Services

Integrity Counseling Services Welcomes Cindy Dowling, MA, LMFT

Integrity Counseling Services welcomes licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Cindy Dowling, MA, LMFT to the ICS team. Cindy’s background includes 15 years of experience in the field of psychology. She has worked in private practice, taught undergraduate psychology, and helped many individuals, couples and families as a family-based therapist.

With a masters degree from La Salle University focusing on marriage and family therapy, Cindy helps individuals, couples and families learn how to break unhealthy patterns and communicate effectively. Her work focuses on seeing the struggles in one’s life through the context of their relationships.

She believes individuals are shaped through their life experiences, and those life lessons influence much of how one presents in other relationships.

Cindy is passionate about working with her clients. She works with couples and families, providing a safe and neutral space to express emotions, promoting compassion for each person, and helping each individual feel heard.

Cindy is a practicing Catholic and feels that faith is an important component to the therapeutic process. She is married and the mother of five daughters.

If you’re interested in scheduling a consultation with Cindy, please call Integrity Counseling Services at 610-601-9781 or email our office to set up an appointment.

Sidebar