Anger is an emotional state that has a bad rap. It can be a sign of serious psychological diagnoses such as major depression or bipolar. People who have been experiencing anger for a long time may have lost the ability to see that there are different levels of anger and a professional will help you readdress this imbalance and recognize the difference between, for example, irritation and fury.
Psychotherapy is a valuable tool for people who need help controlling their anger. With psychotherapy, a person who struggles with anger can learn what lies at the root of their frustration and rage. It empowers a client to face uncertain and stressful circumstances with control and emotional balance that benefits their mental and physical health and the well-being of those around them.

Negative effects of anger

• It hurts your physical health. Chronic anger makes you more susceptible to heart disease, diabetes, high cholesterol levels, a weakened immune system, insomnia, and high blood pressure.
• It causes lasting scars in the people you love most and gets in the way of your friendships and work relationships.
• It consumes huge amounts of mental energy and clouds your thinking, making it harder to concentrate, see the bigger picture, and enjoy life.
• It can also lead to stress, depression, and other mental health problems.

How to manage anger

• Simple relaxation tools, such as deep breathing and relaxing imagery, can help calm down angry feelings. Deep, slow breathing helps counteract rising tension
• Identify the negative thought patterns that trigger your temper
• Avoid people, places, and situations that bring out your worst
• In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to say something you’ll later regret. Take a few moments to collect your thoughts before saying anything
• As soon as you’re thinking clearly, express your frustration in an assertive but nonconfrontational way. State your concerns and needs clearly and directly, without hurting others or trying to control them.

The benefits of psychotherapy for anger

• You may feel happier and more confident
• It helps to improve relationships
• It enables you to learn specific skills to help you manage triggers for anger effectively.
• Gain  understanding which enables you to act more effectively in challenging situations
• It teaches you how to relax, how to stay calm and be peaceful when you feel a surge of anger.
• It helps you learn some problem-solving techniques.
• It fully embrace your life

Through anger psychotherapy you can experience a non-judgmental, honest clear and supportive approach which opens the door to experiencing yourself in a different way and using anger constructively, in a way which empowers you to live your life.

Anxiety is an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behavior, such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints and rumination. Anxiety disorders include obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder (PD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder/social phobia, and specific phobias, such as fear of the outdoors (agoraphobia) or confined spaces (claustrophobia).

Anxiety disorders can severely impair a person’s functioning in work, family and social environments.

Two common forms of psychotherapy utilized for treatment of anxiety disorders are:

• Behavioral therapy – It examines how you behave and react in situations that trigger anxiety. The therapist will help the patient to combat undesirable behaviors which often come hand in hand with anxiety
• Cognitive therapy – It examines how negative thoughts, orcognitions, contribute to anxiety. The therapist helps the patient to adapt his or her problematic thought patterns into those which are healthier.

Other forms of psychotherapy, include emotion-based psychotherapy (EBT), psychodynamic therapy, or “talk” therapy, deal more with the roots of anxiety and usually, although not always, require longer treatments. They include interpersonal therapy, supportive psychotherapy, attention intervention, and psychoanalysis.

Treatment needs to be tailored to the needs of the patient and to the type of disorder, or disorders, from which the individual suffers. The psychotherapist and patient should work together to assess whether a treatment plan seems to be on track. Anxiety disorders are chronic and recurrence is common, even after successful short-term therapy. Some patients with anxiety disorders may require long-term or intensive therapy of at least a year or more.

There are processes and techniques to improve decision-making and the quality of decisions. Decision making techniques can be separated into two broad categories:

• Group decision making techniques
• Individual decision making techniques

The method used depends on the nature of the decision to be made and how complex it is.  The method described below follows seven stages.

The stages are:

1. Listing all possible solutions/options.
2. Setting a time scale and deciding who is responsible for the decision.
3. Information gathering.
4. Weighing up the risks involved.
5. Deciding on values, or in other words what is important.
6. Weighing up the pros and cons of each course of action.
7. Making the decision.

When trying to make a good decision, a person must weight the positives and negatives of each option, and consider all the alternatives. The decision maker(s) may face a problem when they try to rank alternatives in terms of how attractive they are when all the criteria are considered simultaneously. Time and emotion also play a role in the quality of decision making – the more time, the more deliberate the decision making process. Secondly, the more that is at stake, emotion will come into play, rising as the decision making timeline is reached.

Psychotherapy is often the first form of treatment recommended for depression. The role of psychotherapy in treating clinical depression is to help the person develop good coping strategies for dealing with everyday stressors.

Benefits of Psychotherapy for depression

• It can help reduce stress in your life.
• It can give you a new perspective on problems with family, friends, or co-workers.
• It can make it easier to stick to your treatment.
• Regain a sense of control and pleasure in life.
• Helps to learn how to cope with side effects from depression medication.
• You learn ways to talk to other people about your condition.
• It helps catch early signs that your depression is getting worse.

Types of Therapy for Depression

• Individual therapy– This therapy involves only the patient and the therapist. You can discuss new strategies to manage stress and to prevent your depression from worsening or coming back.
• Group therapy– 2 or more patients may participate in therapy at the same time. Patients are able to share experiences and learn that others feel the same way, and have had the same experiences.
• Marital/couples – This type of therapy helps spouses and partners understand why their loved one has depression, what changes in communication and behaviors can help, and what they can do to cope.
• Family therapy – Because family is a key part of the team that helps people with depression get better, it is sometimes helpful for family members to understand what their loved one is going through, how they themselves can cope, and what they can do to help.
• Interpersonal therapy– It focuses on how your relationships with other people play a role in your depression. It focuses on practical issues.

Who Are The Victims?

Domestic violence can happen to anyone of any race, age, sexual orientation, religion or gender. It can happen to couples who are married, living together or who are dating. In general, anyone can be a victim of domestic violence. Male, female, young, old, Asian, African-American, Jewish, Catholic, rich, poor, highly educated or not, everyone is a potential victim. Some people have a higher risk than others. It affects people of all socioeconomic backgrounds and education levels. Men are sometimes abused by partners, but domestic violence is most often directed toward women. Domestic violence can happen in heterosexual or same sex relationships.

Domestic violence is not limited to obvious physical violence. Domestic violence can also mean endangerment, criminal coercion, kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment, trespassing, harassment, and stalking. Domestic violence can be physical, sexual, emotional, economic, or psychological actions or threats of actions that influence another person. This includes:

• Physical Abuse: Hitting, slapping, shoving, grabbing, pinching, biting, hair pulling, etc are types of physical abuse.
• Sexual Abuse: Coercing or attempting to coerce any sexual contact or behavior without consent is sexual abuse.
• Emotional Abuse: Undermining an individual’s sense of self-worth and/or self-esteem is abusive.
• Economic Abuse: making or attempting to make an individual financially dependent by maintaining total control over financial resources, withholding one’s access to money, or forbidding one’s attendance at school or employment.
• Psychological Abuse: Elements of psychological abuse include – but are not limited to – causing fear by intimidation; threatening physical harm to self, partner, children, or partner’s family or friends; destruction of pets and property; and forcing isolation from family, friends, or school and/or work.

Domestic violence is a major public-health problem. It affects millions of people and often results in physical and emotional injuries and even deaths.

Eating disorders are serious health conditions that can be both physically and emotionally destructive. Certain psychological factors predispose people to developing eating disorders. Most people with eating disorders suffer from low self-esteem, feelings of helplessness, and intense dissatisfaction with the way they look.

Psychotherapy as treatment for eating disorders will most often be delivered by a psychologist however; psychiatrists, psychotherapists, counselors, and social workers may use aspects of these approaches in their treatment of eating disorders. the psychologist identified important issues that need attention and developed a treatment plan. It helps the patient replace destructive thoughts and behaviors with more positive ones.

To ensure lasting improvement, patients and psychologists must work together to explore the psychological issues underlying the eating disorder. Psychotherapy may need to focus on improving patients’ personal relationships. And it may involve helping patients get beyond an event or situation that triggered the disorder in the first place.

Many different types of psychotherapy have demonstrated effectiveness in treating eating and food issues. Some of them are:

• Cognitive analytic therapy – it can gain insight into how eating disorder fits into their experience of life and their early relationships.
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) – it aims to adjust unhelpful patterns of thinking and behavior in people with eating disorders.
• Interpersonal psychotherapy – it focuses on a person’s relational skills and how they contribute to their eating disorder
• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) – it is based on an emotion regulation model of eating disorders.
• Ego-oriented individual therapy – it focuses on building coping skills and developing the identity and autonomy of the adolescent with the eating disorder.

Gambling consists of making a bet on the outcome of some event. Gambling has been a popular source of entertainment for many centuries and across many cultures. Gambler is someone who is unable to resist his or her impulses to gamble. This leads to severe personal and, or, social consequences. The urge to gamble becomes so great that tension can only be relieved by more gambling. The main symptom of this is denial and the major characteristic is loss of control. There is also a tendency to take bigger and bigger risks as time goes by.

People may go on to develop mental illnesses as a result of their gambling, most commonly depression as they lose control of their finances, relationships fail etc., which can put them into the next classification.

Depression and a deterioration of physical and emotional health are general signs and symptoms of a gambling. The gambler becomes moody, withdrawn and irritable and preoccupied with gambling, winnings of the past and getting hold of more money with which to gamble.

Here are some suggestions to keep gambling from becoming a problem in your life:

• Allocate money for necessities first
• Budget your income
• Never use more than 2% of your income for gambling
• Avoid temptation – do not go to casinos or associate with gamblers
• When you gamble, do not carry with you more money than you can afford to lose
• Never borrow money to gamble
• Don’t lend money to a gambler

The more significant the loss, the more intense is the grief. However, even subtle losses can lead to grief. For example, you might experience grief after moving away from home, graduating from college, changing jobs, selling your family home, or retiring from a career you loved.

The five stages of grief:

• Denial – In the denial stage we refuse to believe what has happened. We try in our mind to tell ourselves that life is as it was before our loss
• Anger – The anger can manifest itself in many ways. We can blame others for our loss. We can become easily agitated having emotional outbursts
• Bargaining – Bargaining can be with ourselves or if you are religious with your god. Often we will offer something to try to take away the reality of what has happened.
• Depression – Depression is a very likely outcome for all people that grieve for a loss. There can even be thoughts of suicide.
• Acceptance – it is the final stage of grief. It is when you realize that life has to go on. You can here accept your loss. You should now be able to regain your energy and goals for the future.

Some people have found the stages to be a helpful way to think about grief; others have not. Grief counselors and researchers point out that the stages describe grief as a passive process. In the decades since Kübler-Ross’s work, people who work with the bereaved have learned that grief is an active process. Many people find it empowering to know that they are resilient. They take comfort in actively processing their feelings and memories and creating ways to honor and celebrate their loved one.

Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being characterized by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. The emotion of happiness is not caused simply by entertaining your obstacles. Happiness is not merely a life lived by accumulating moments of pleasure. On the contrary, happiness is a long lasting enduring enjoyment of life; it is being in love with living. It is your reward for achieving a good character and personal rational values in life. Some important values are a productive career, romance, friendship and hobbies.

Benefits of happiness

• Happy people manage their money well.
• Happy people spend their money on life experiences instead of material items.
• Happiness is good for our relationships
• Happiness is good for our health
• Happy people think about the past fondly.
• Happy people live in a great community.
• Happy people are more creative and are better able to see the big picture
• Happy people “catch” the emotions of others.

Once you learn to have confidence in your own mind and once you discover the virtues that make it possible for you to achieve your values and that make your life worth living, then you will experience the result – an earned pride and a genuine self-esteem and of course happiness.

Intelligence has been defined in many different ways such as in terms of one’s capacity for logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness, communication, learning,emotional knowledge, memory, planning, creativity and problem solving. In the popular sense, intelligence is often defined as the general mental ability to learn and apply knowledge to manipulate your environment, as well as the ability to reason and have abstract thought.

Measuring Intelligence

The measurement of intelligence is dogged by controversy and disagreement. While there are a number of different methods for measuring intelligence, the standard and most widely accepted method is by measuring a person’s ‘intelligence quotient’ or IQ. Based on a series of tests which assess various types of abilities such a mathematical, spatial, verbal, logic and memory. The results from such tests done on a group that is representative of the wider popular shows the classic ‘bell-shape’ distribution, meaning that most people are of average intelligence with a few at the extreme ends of the scale.

Successfully intelligent people discern their strengths and weaknesses, and then figure out how to capitalize on their strengths, and to compensate for or remediate their weaknesses. Successfully intelligent individuals succeed in part because they achieve a functional balance among a “triarchy” of abilities:

Within the discipline of psychology, various approaches to human intelligence have been adopted. The psychometric approach is especially familiar to the general public, as well as being the most researched and by far the most widely used in practical settings. Intelligence is most widely studied in humans, but has also been observed in animals and in plants. Artificial intelligence is the simulation of intelligence in machines.

Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the aspects of raising a child aside from the biological relationship. Parenting is to be positive always. If parents adapt positive parenting styles, the reaction will be positively responding, mature and responsible kids.

Tips for positive psychology of parenting

Parenting is perhaps one of the most difficult responsibilities most adults face.  Here are some of the tips for good parenting.

• Be optimistic – Losing hope and becoming angry for even minor mistakes of children and trivial failures is the wrong way of parenting. Constantly train the kids and be optimistic to expect the results in the long run.
• Positive emotions – Control negative emotions like anger, violence etc when dealing with kids. Be graceful to children when communicating.
• Communication – Listening and talking is the key to a healthy connection between you and your children. Focus on your child’s feelings rather than your own during your conversation.
• Respect your children – Children have feelings and their feelings are easily hurt. Saying ‘sorry’, ‘please’, ‘thank you’, and ‘excuse me’ work wonders on building our children’s self-esteem.
• Empowering children – empower children with positive attitudes and essential values of life. Academic skills and knowledge, artistic skills, problem solving abilities, arguing, defending and protecting self dignity etc… are few of the aspects where parents need to empower kids with valuable real life lessons.

Improve your parenting and provide your children with the tools they need to succeed so that they can enjoy a strong sense of well being and contentment throughout life.

Shyness is the feeling of apprehension, lack of comfort, or awkwardness especially when a person is in proximity to other people. This commonly occurs in new situations or with unfamiliar people. Shy people often desperately want to connect with others, but don’t know how or can’t tolerate the anxiety that comes with human interaction. If you are shy you will tend to avoid talking or interacting with people as much as possible so as not to get embarrassed or say something that people may not like.

Shyness is most likely to occur during unfamiliar situations, though in severe cases it may hinder an individual in his or her most familiar situations and relationships as well. Shy people avoid the objects of their apprehension in order to keep from feeling uncomfortable and inept; thus, the situations remain unfamiliar and the shyness perpetuates itself. Shyness may fade with time; e.g., a child who is shy towards strangers may eventually lose this trait when older and become more socially adept.

Symptoms of shyness

• Blushing
• Sweating
• Upset stomach
• Tendency to withdraw from social interactions

Shy people think more than all other people. They analyze everything that happens, keep thinking about the comments they hear and over think everything.

Shyness can be treated. The following is a list of tips that can help you overcome shyness:

• Build your self confidence
• Control your self talk
• Get rid of inferiority
• Practice talking to people that you don’t know well
• Seek psychotherapy

• Lack of judgment
• Problems with memory
• Worrying all of the time
• Inability to concentrate
• Negative thinking
• Trouble thinking clearly

Psychological stress also has a physical impact on your body. Headaches are common for people under a lot of stress. People often feel muscle tension and stiffness, nausea, insomnia, chest pain and rapid heartbeats, hives, loss of sex drive, and frequent colds.

Stress can be reduced and even eliminated before it becomes a chronic problem. There are many things you can do for natural stress relief. The two primary ways to relieve your stress include:

• Exercise – Exercise is known to make anyone feel better after they have a good workout.
• Eat healthy – It is important to eat healthy and get all of the supplements your body needs in order to have proper stress relief.

Psychological stress may also have evolved from a real event that caused an emotional disturbance in the past. Counseling and psychotherapy can help people to accept the initial stressful event and rationalize the subsequent stress inducing thoughts.