We all experience stressful situations in our lives, whether they occur at work, school, or in our personal lives. While experiencing stress is completely normal, if this stress has started to seriously impact any aspect of your life it may be a sign of burnout. Burnout is a state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by excessive or prolonged stress. 

Burnout can occur to anyone who is working or living in a consistently stressful environment. It can slowly creep up because the early warning signs may be innocuous. Some common warning signs of burnout include the following: 

• Feeling more tired than usual, or having difficulty sleeping
• Having difficulty concentrating 
• Increased agitation or irritability 
• Loss of enjoyment in things you used to enjoy 
• Poor work performance 

If you are experiencing any of these symptoms of burnout, here are some tips to help you manage: 

• Take care of your physical health: sometimes we can forget about eating properly, exercising, and sleeping when we are feeling burnt-out. Taking care of our physical health can also boost our mood. 
• Self-Care: take some time out of your schedule to do activities that make you happy. It can be as simple as taking a bath, talking to a good friend, or making yourself a nice meal. 
• Set Boundaries: whether at work or in your personal life, it is important to set boundaries with those around you to make sure you are not giving too much of yourself. 
• Talk to someone: whether it’s a friend, co-worker, family member, or professional, talking to someone you trust about what you’re feeling can help to reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness associated with burnout.

These strategies can help reduce the symptoms of burnout. However, if you feel the symptoms you’re experiencing have been going on for an extended period of time or feel uncontrollable, it might be time to seek professional help. At CFIR, we can help you understand where your burnout is coming from and support you in developing healthy coping and self-care strategies.

Natalie Alexov, B.Sc. is a counsellor at the Centre for Interpersonal Relationships (CFIR) under the supervision of Dr. Aleks Milosevic, C.Psych., and a Masters of Education with a concentration in Counselling Psychology at the University of Ottawa. She supports individual clients to overcome a broad range of difficulties including depression, anxiety and stress, the impact of traumatic experiences, and relationship problems.

by: Laura Moore, B.Sc. (Honours)

The media markets the holiday season as a “picture perfect” time to connect with your family; these unrealistic expectations are especially challenging while trying to co-parent. Letting go of “perfect” and working together with your previous partner during one of the most stressful times of the year may feel nearly impossible. Remembering every co-parenting situation can look different, the following tips can make it possible to keep the ‘happy’ in the holidays while co-parenting.

Plan Ahead But Be Flexible 

Create a holiday plan at least a month or more in advance of the holidays. This plan may be derived from your parenting plan or your separation agreement. While making this plan keep in mind the extended family and still encourage these connections on both sides. Although planning ahead is of the utmost importance, remaining flexible over the holidays will reduce upset for yourself, your previous partner, and your children. Believe it or not, the holiday schedule may be much more important to you than to your children.

It Starts with You

This holiday season (when you know you are going to be alone), make plans to see loved ones. Also, seek the help you need from a therapist to work through some of the grief and loss you may be experiencing during the holidays. In this process, you will begin to let go of expectations and find moments of happiness as you embrace new traditions. Allow space for you and your children to be upset and move away from the expectations surrounding the holiday season. By creating a safe, calm, and positive space for yourself, the effects will trickle down to your children as they often rely on you to help regulate their emotions and see the whole picture. Continue to collectively focus on what you do have together and not what you don’t have.

Less is More 

It’s not the presents that make the holidays so special; instead, it’s the presence of the ones we love. It is essential to communicate with the other parent about items that are off-limits for holidays and what is on your children’s gift list this year. Do not try and outdo one another; this will put a lot of pressure on you and make gift shopping and planning activities quite stressful. Try not to overcompensate with excessive activities and planning, and try to spread out the holidays. Most importantly, enjoy some of the simple pleasures of the holiday season. Doing so will allow you not to lose sight of what is most important!

Communication 

Communication should be purposeful and child-focused. When you show empathy and care to your previous partner, it allows your children to see you still have a relationship with the other parent in a positive way. Schedule a phone call to talk about the upcoming holidays. If communication is difficult for you and your previous partner, possibly invest in a gift for one another this holiday and use a communication app, either 2houses or Our Family Wizard. Most importantly, do not use your children as a way to communicate messages back and forth between you two.

Connection

Although you may experience feeling you are alone, your previous partner is probably struggling just as much as you are. Have your children buy a present and make a card for the other parent. Letting your children love and communicate with the other parent will not affect your child’s love for you. As much as splitting the holiday season is new for you, it is also a new concept for your children. Encourage your children to consistently communicate with the other parent via phone, video call, and text. Create a shared album and add pictures to it each day. Also, your children will enjoy any chance where previous traditions can still be shared with both parents.

You cannot go wrong if you put your children first and let them be your guiding light as you navigate the holiday season while co-parenting. The “good enough” holiday season will happen when we let go of our expectations and enjoy what we have created for ourselves at this moment. Remind your children that no matter who they spend their holidays with, the holidays can create a magical feeling that will be in the memories for years to come!

Laura Moore, B.Sc. (Honours) is a therapist at the Centre For Interpersonal Relationships (CFIR) in Toronto. She is completing her Masters degree in Clinical Psychology at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto. Laura works with adults and couples in therapy, to support them to overcome challenges related to depression, stress, grief and loss, trauma, and relationship conflicts. Her current research focuses on cultivating spousal attunement following traumatic experiences.

by: Erin Leslie, EQ-i Certified | Coach

Are you confused about how to bring about motivation vs. intention? It’s not uncommon to be confused about these difficulties. In our modern society, messages intended to distract us are everywhere. Sometimes these messages try to persuade us to buy into a fad or product. Getting you onto that conveyor belt of attempting to acquire and invest time and money, only to be unfulfilled in the end but to repeat the same cycle. 

Many people today tell me they are unmotivated at work and feel they’ve lost their career direction. More employees than you may think are feeling tired by the daily churn, and they don’t know how to change it! When I meet with them, I typically ask some key questions to see where the lack of interest lies. 

• Is it due to personal distractions with family or friends?
• Is it relationship-related issues with team or management?
• Is it due to pre-existing beliefs or concepts that may need to be renewed?
• Could it be depression? Have you sought professional consultation?

After some analysis, I find that it is not that many people necessarily lack motivation, but rather have difficulties with intention.

Purpose provides the compass that fuels our minds and bodies to move in a specific direction. Now how do we go about finding purpose? 

It’s quite simple.

I share two important methods of finding intention.

First, volunteer. Don’t think about it; do it. Go out this weekend and find a school, religious organization, municipal supporting event, or service and give your time. 

Volunteering allows your mind to stop focusing on itself. It opens up your thinking towards others and helps you care about an external problem that you may not have considered before. 

Volunteerism exposes you to areas of risk and need in your community and gets you instantly thinking – how can I change some aspect of this outcome into a more positive one? How can I improve the lives of others?

It also gives you the purest sense of intention. Helping, caring, and enabling another human is our foremost purpose. But we forget that sometimes.

Volunteering enhances your beliefs about what is important. It doesn’t require a lot of time or thinking. It requires you to feel and act. That renewed sense of purpose fuels your intention towards your future. 

Secondly, mentorship. I suggest entering a mentorship relationship with a peer or colleague. Mentorship allows us to focus our attention on another person’s inquiry, leveraging our own experience and knowledge to solve a problem and focus away from our own pain points. People find it highly satisfactory to support others ahead of themselves. Still, it is through an interaction of mentoring and helping that often we find the answers to our issues. 

I often say that everyone should mentor as we all have something to offer and learn in this enriching professional relationship. 

Do you specialize in a specific skill set, industry insight, or business strategy or methodology? Someone within or outside your professional circle is looking for guidance, and it only takes a few meetings a month to connect and follow up on a specific area of interest or need. Those meetings could make a real difference in a professional’s work-life. 

Are you ready to better understand and master the mental and emotional parts of striving for a successful career and a balanced life? CFIR’s Career and Workplace Service can help! 

Learning how to experience and express our emotions and needs to a partner can be very difficult, particularly if in our own family of origin, our inner feelings and needs were not addressed. Working through feelings and emotions requires adequate time and space to complete these types of interactions.  Couples often struggle and elevate distress when trying to engage in discussions of feelings and needs while multi-tasking (e.g., cooking, driving, shopping, taking care of the children). 

Discovering how to efficiently and effectively process your partner’s and your emotional experience is essential, so each of you feels understood and seen by the other. Picking the right time to have these dialogues is crucial, taking turns so that each partner feels sufficiently validated in their experience and their needs resolved is also important. Emotional accessibility and responsiveness to our partner’s emotional experiences and needs help our partners distress to lower and deepens the connection between partners. To be accessibility means to be able to be present and engaged sufficiently with your partner’s emotional experience. Responsiveness involves interest and engagement in identifying and resolving the underlying needs associated with emotions. These types of interactions are the essence of secure attachment.

The clinicians at CFIR support couple clients to develop emotional attunement through nine different steps. Learning how to complete these types of emotional interactions can lower distress and stress levels when partners have a guide to help them to process their emotions and needs. Come learn how to emotionally communicate and connect using steps developed by clinicians at CFIR’s offices.

by: Dr. Dino Zuccarini, C.Psych.

An attachment injury occurs when a partner is betrayed or abandoned, and trust is violated at a moment of critical need for support and care. The injury can be traumatic as the injured partner is left with a sense of helplessness, isolation, and intense fear about the other’s availability (Johnson et al. 2001; Zuccarini et al. 2013). These traumatic incidents occur when a partner’s belief and faith in the reliability and dependability of the partner is shattered. Examples of these types of injuries include marital affairs, emotional affairs, money mismanagement, violation of boundaries, abandonment at times of need during pregnancy, alignment with parents over partner, child-rearing conflicts, and lack of support during illness, among others. These traumatic incidences become a barometer of the offending partner’s trustworthiness, dependability, and reliability. The attachment bond between partners becomes frayed as a result of these injuries.

In these instances, clinicians at CFIR will address the lingering hurt and anger and heal the frayed bond. The emotional processing of these events is essential to the healing process.  Attachment bonds are emotional bonds.  The emotional accessibility and responsiveness to the injured partner’s experience facilitates recovery and healing.

by: Dr. Marisa Murray, C.Psych. (Supervised Practice)

You’ve prepared for weeks. Or maybe you haven’t? Your social life–at this point, is non-existent! Whether you’ve studied to the brink of reciting the material in your sleep or if your total exam prep has consisted of overnight cramming, when exam day arrives, the same thing often happens. Thoughts of uncertainty begin to kick in, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and anxious.

It’s natural to feel some butterflies in your stomach before an exam. It’s similar to the way you might feel before playing in the big game, performing on stage, or engaging in public speaking. Pre-exam jitters can be channeled to help motivate us to perform at our best. This is known as a helpful kind of anxiety. It helps us view the exam as an exciting challenge!

It’s the unhelpful kind of anxiety–the one that causes us to fear the exam, to have difficulty concentrating, to second guess ourselves or to have physical symptoms, like a headache or a racing heart–that interferes with our performance.

With exam season fast approaching, here are some helpful tips for managing your pre-exam anxiety: 

1. Use your time effectively: No matter how hard you try, it can feel like there is ‘never enough time’ around exam season. Fine-tuning your time-management skills can include: using a calendar or a checklist to set goals, avoiding potential distractions (e.g., phone, your guilty pleasure on television) during study time, and keeping a consistent yet flexible study routine while rewarding yourself for meeting your study goals.
2. Engage in self-care: Take care of yourself to manage your stress levels. Getting a good night’s sleep, taking breaks (typically ones that allow for stretching, moving around, replenishing food and water intake), engaging in social interactions, and/or practicing a relaxation activity are examples of how you can release some of the pre-exam stress. Just as you schedule your study time, schedule time for yourself!
3. Develop a study plan: Consider putting together a realistic study plan that allows for flexibility. In developing your study plan, figure out which exams require more prep time. Also, try to factor in some wiggle room for potential obstacles that might interfere with the study plan (e.g., coming down with the flu!). Most importantly, figure out what helps you reach your optimal studying – do you study better alone? Or do you better achieve your studying goals in a group setting? Do you like to study in the comfort of your own home? Or do you prefer the silence of the library? Do you learn better visually? Auditorily? What time of day do you retain information best? Try to answer these questions and incorporate the answers into your study plan.
4. Monitor your negative thoughts: Telling yourself, “I’m going to fail this exam,” can be very convincing to the powerful mind and, yes, exacerbate anxiety! Keep in mind that there will be questions you know and others you don’t. You cannot learn everything! Try to view your upcoming exam as a new experience. Perhaps the midterm didn’t go as well as you wanted – this is a new exam. Work on convincing your mind that you will “try your best.”
5. Make use of available resources: Many schools offer workshops and presentations related to stress management, test-taking strategies, and time-management. Look into what’s available on campus. Also, make use of your professors’ and teaching assistants’ office hours to get a better grasp on challenging course material. Finally, consider reaching out to a mental health professional for assistance in managing unhelpful exam anxiety.

Dr. Marisa Murray, C.Psych. (Supervised Practice) is a psychologist in supervised practice at the Centre for Interpersonal Relationships (CFIR) in Toronto, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. Cassandra Pasiak, C.Psych. Dr. Murray supports children, adolescents, and adults with psychological treatment and assessment services, including psychoeducational assessments and treatment for eating disorders and body image-related issues.

by: Dr. Dino Zuccarini, C.Psych.

Living and loving in the social margins of a heteronormative world can create complexity in the relationships of individuals from the LGBTQ+ community.  In our early years, recognition of being different than members of your family of origin and peers can create significant attachment and self fears. We all need a sense of acceptance, emotional validation, approval, and admiration if we are to develop a strong sense of self and connection to others. Individuals from LGBTQ+, in many instances, may face abandonment, rejection, punishment, and abuse just for being different. These types of traumatic experiences create fears and distrust in others, mainly when early attachment figures are the individuals who are the source of rejection, punishment, and abandonment. Rejection also fills individuals with a deep sense of shame that comes with deep feelings of unlovability, insignificance, and worthlessness.  

The internalization of these experiences can create difficulties when fears, shame, and past hurts limit the capacity to trust and connect others. The clinicians at CFIR work to build more secure, resilient identities and strengthen interpersonal relationships in the LGBTQ+.  They support you to unpack the emotional residue of early distress in attachment and/or with pears and the impact of this residue on your attachments.

by: Dr. Brianna Jaris, C.Psych.

The holiday season is an incredibly stressful time for many people. There are some things that we may not be able to avoid – congested malls, traffic and travel, holiday gatherings and parties, buying gifts, etc… but, throughout it all, the best thing that we can do is to give ourselves the gift of self-care. Here are a few things that we can do to make the best out of this holiday season:

1) Make a plan – Be prepared by making a plan. For example, make a grocery list or plan out when you can do your holiday shopping. Having a plan is the first step in preventing the added stress of forgetting something or having to do things last minute. 

2) Be proactive – Don’t wait until the last minute to shop for groceries for a holiday dinner or shop for gifts. Getting things done ahead of time can give you a great sense of accomplishment and can help avoid the stress of overwhelming yourself with having to do too much at once. 

3) Be realistic – For example, plan for there to be traffic or for the shopping centres to be busy. Also, set a budget and don’t go overboard. It’s important to realize that you may not be able to do it all yourself, so don’t be afraid to enlist help if you need to as well.

4) Set up appropriate boundaries – Establish a timeline for visitation – don’t let guests overstay their welcome. Do certain topics of conversation need to be set as “off-limits”? Don’t forget that setting up healthy boundaries also means being able to say “no” to people or demands. Remember that in order to be healthy, sometimes you have to risk disappointing other people.

5) Build time in for yourself – The most important thing of all this holiday season is to take care of you. Take breaks and build in time to relax as necessary. Self-Care is the best gift you can give.

Stay ahead of stress this holiday season by sticking to a plan, recognizing your limits, and not letting others dictate your holiday. We all want to make the holiday season special for the ones we love, but don’t forget to take care of YOU this holiday season!

Dr. Brianna Jaris, C.Psych. is a clinical psychologist at CFIR.  She has extensive experience in psychological assessment and diagnosis and the treatment of a wide range of psychological issues, including trauma, depression, anxiety.  She is currently the head of CFIR’s Trauma and PTSD service. You can visit www.cfir.ca to find out more about Dr. Jaris.

According to attachment theory, as a result of early year interactions with caregivers, we either become securely attached or insecurely attached—either anxiously or avoidantly attached.  Attachment style then influences sexuality in complex ways. Anxiously attached partners in the bedroom might be seeking out sex for reassurance of self or attachment fears.  For example, they may feel less positive about themselves (e.g., undesirable or unattractive), and/or have worries about the availability, accessibility, and responsiveness of their partner.  Strong sexual desire is fuelled by the need for self and attachment reassurance. Avoidantly attached partners are not motivated sexually in the same way.  These partners are more likely to focus on the pleasure-oriented aspects of sex only and have difficulties with feelings of closeness.  Some avoidantly attached partners will have sex for duty’s sake. Arousal and desire problems arise when anxiously or avoidantly attached partners are unable to fulfill these goals.  

The clinicians at CFIR support couple partners to discover the multiple ways in which securely attached partners experience and explore sexuality. The couple and sex therapy clinicians at CFIR use a wide variety of strategies to support couple partners to build more confidence in their sexuality, greater eroticism, and desire.

Over the past 35 years, there has been a substantial amount of research conducted to identify psychotherapy treatments that work. Research suggests that many different types of treatment approaches might be beneficial for a wide variety of disorders. It is vital that a clinician who is providing you treatment is trained in empirically-supported treatment interventions so that you know that you are getting the most scientifically investigated treatment interventions. 

Recently, evidence-based practice has come to mean more than empirically-supported treatment (Canadian Psychological Association, 2012). Evidence-based practice involves the thoughtful and informed use of the psychological research base to inform clinical treatment practice. It’s also essential that your clinician be able to attend to a wide range of individual differences and personal client factors (e.g., attachment style, coping styles, cultural factors) in treatment, as well as consideration and use of research in supporting clients in their healing process. 

The clinicians at CFIR are invested in providing empirically-supported treatments, tailoring treatment to individuals based on their needs and individual differences, and ensuring that we are kept abreast of leading-edge research related to your presenting issues.