Blog
“True transformation begins when we choose to face our fears, embrace our strengths, and take the first step toward the life we truly want.”
Christopher Denzler, MA, LMHC, LPC.
Beyond Therapy: 8 Natural Habits That Heal Your Whole Life
Mental health is deeply connected to physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. While therapy offers essential tools for healing, it’s most effective when paired with daily habits that nourish the body and mind. A holistic approach to health includes eight key principles that, when practiced consistently, can prevent illness, restore vitality, and enhance emotional resilience.
Let’s explore these principles—without naming any specific program—and see how they can transform your life.
Beyond Survival Mode: How to Recognize and Reclaim Thriving
Life constantly presents challenges, and our nervous system is designed to respond. When danger or stress arises, we enter survival mode—the fight, flight, or freeze response. This state prioritizes immediate safety and basic needs. It’s useful in emergencies, but harmful if it becomes our default way of living.
Surviving means focusing only on getting through the day. You may feel stuck, exhausted, or disconnected. Joy and creativity feel out of reach.
Thriving means engaging fully with life. You feel connected, purposeful, and resilient. Challenges still come, but you navigate them with strength and hope.
Survival mode keeps you alive. Thriving mode helps you live.
Clearing the Panic Closet: Reclaiming Calm After Trauma
Cleaning out a crowded, dusty closet is messy and unsettling, but it can also be clarifying and freeing. Trauma reactions are like a closet stuffed with decades of things you grabbed in an emergency—some useful, most not—and the work of recovery is the careful process of sorting, testing, and deciding what stays, what gets fixed, and what must go.
Rewriting the Past to Free Your Future
Trauma can change how you see yourself, how you remember events, and how you tell the story of your life. The relationship between traumatic experience, self-perception, and narrative memory determines whether past pain continues to control your choices or becomes fuel for learning and resilience. When you understand how trauma reshapes memory and identity, you can intentionally re-author those memories into healthier narratives that restore agency, meaning, and hope.
The Ripple Effect: How One Suicide Can Touch 135 Lives
When someone dies by suicide, the impact doesn’t stop with the individual. It radiates outward, affecting a wide circle of people—far beyond immediate family and close friends. According to research led by Dr. Julie Cerel and colleagues, each suicide affects approximately 135 people who knew the deceased in some capacity (Cerel et al., 2018). This includes family members, friends, coworkers, classmates, neighbors, healthcare providers, and even first responders. The emotional, psychological, and social consequences can be profound and long-lasting.
Beat to the Bone: Getting Help Before You Break
In December 2023, the CDC released a sobering report detailing suicide rates across industries and occupations in the United States. The findings are stark: suicide among working-age Americans has surged by approximately 33% over the past two decades (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2023). This isn’t just a statistic—it’s a wake-up call. Behind these numbers are real people, families, and communities grappling with silent suffering.
The Silent Epidemic: Mental Health in Rural & Middle America
In the quiet corners of rural and middle America, a crisis is unfolding—one that doesn’t make headlines but affects millions. Mental health issues are rising, yet access to care remains limited, stigma persists, and many suffer in silence.
Rounding Up Support: Strengthening Texas’ Mental Health
Mental health has emerged as a pressing public health crisis in Texas, impacting individuals, families, and entire communities. From urban centers like Houston and Dallas to remote rural counties, Texans encounter significant barriers to timely, affordable care—resulting in untreated conditions, overburdened emergency services, and a growing human and economic toll. Addressing these challenges requires both systemic solutions and accessible, personalized support options.