by Marina Edelman, LMFT | Jan 29, 2018 | Blog, mediation
Counseling and Mediation services in Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks
Hello, My name is Marina Edelman, founder of Marina Edelman Counseling & Mediation. I would like to introduce you to my staff and let you know that we are now offering family mediation. My associates and I provide professional guidance you need to effectively resolve life issues, address mood disorders, and help find solutions/options to general problems. Our therapists are experienced & well trained to listen, guide, and respectfully challenge you. Our team is made up of
extremely passionate clinicians who enjoy providing counseling and mediation for people in need. We work with
individuals,
couples and families to help them acquire healthy coping skills in order to improve relationships, refine communication skills, and achieve greater overall happiness. We also work with families on parenting and marital issues as well as provide
mediation services.
On our staff we have therapists that are Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists that are Certified in Family & Divorce Mediation and Parenting Coordination. To accommodate all incomes we have pre-licensed associates. Our therapeutic approach is holistic (that involves mind, body, and spirit) and our techniques are evidence-based modalities such as DBT, solution focused & CBT. We have specialists who treat depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADD/ADHD, Trauma, and relationship issues. We also have support groups for Mindfulness and Addiction.
by Marina Edelman, LMFT | Jan 25, 2018 | anxiety, Blog, focus, holiday
Guest blogger and associate Maxcy Dancy shares tips on how to keep your New Years Resolution.
How many New Year’s resolutions have you made over the years and how many have you actually accomplished? Are you like so many of us who start the year off being super optimistic about our New Year’s resolution, whether it’s to conquer a fear, get in shape, eat healthy, be more productive, quit smoking, etc., only to find ourselves back at square one within weeks after the New Year? If so, then what you need are a few simple techniques that will enable you to create lasting change and fulfill the goals that you have set for yourself.
First: Don’t set vague goals like “I’m going to be healthier.” Instead, be specific. Set behavioral goals based on measurable outcomes. So, in terms of wanting to be healthier, your specific behavioral goal might be: Lowering cholesterol by five points. Eating five servings of fruits and veggies each day. Losing 20 pounds. Running 5k in 30 minutes. You get the idea. Decide what your goal is in measurable, specific terms and then write it down.
Second: Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Instead of deciding to change twenty things, pick one thing to change that is a top priority for you because it is much easier to accomplish something when you only have one thing to focus on. Many people make the mistake of trying to do too many things at once and instead of accomplishing them all, they just end up overwhelmed and giving up. So pick one thing to be focused on, one thing you have a burning desire to achieve.
Third: Success creates success. We are more motivated to persevere while tackling difficult challenges when we have first succeeded at smaller, easier to accomplish challenges. Consequently, it is best to start with mini-goals. When you succeed at them, this will inspire you and enable you to go the distance when you are dealing with your main goal and the going gets tough. So take your main goal and break it down to bite size, mini-goals that start out easy and become more challenging.
Fourth: Set a realistic deadline for accomplishing your goal. Having a deadline tends to keep people moving forward at a solid pace rather than slowly plodding along. A deadline encourages consistency, strengthens motivation and creates a sense of urgency. Additionally, when the task is difficult, requiring a lot of time and energy, people can remind themselves that there is a deadline and that the struggle is not going to last forever. Knowing that an end is in sight tends to increase motivation and decrease discouragement.
Fifth: Keep the feeling of accomplishing your goal in mind. A way to stay positive should discouragement set in is to imagine how wonderful it will feel when you accomplish your goal. Similarly, if you start to procrastinate, telling yourself you don’t need to do it today, you can start again tomorrow, by focusing on how exciting it will be when you have succeeded, can get you back on track, full steam ahead!
Sixth: When you set goals, be very clear as to how much they matter to you and the overall positive impact your goal is going to have. Think about how they’re going to change every aspect of your life in a positive way: your self-esteem, your relationships, your work, your health and vitality, including the impact the changes you make will have on your family, your friends, your community, and your world! Visualize yourself living your life with your goal accomplished and what your life will be like. Research also shows that visualization helps us reach our goals as well as motivates us.
By staying very aware on a daily basis of what you want and why you want it, you increase your odds of keeping your New Year’s resolutions and effecting permanent, positive change in your life! If you need additional help, working with a coach or a therapist can be useful to create the changes you want to see in your life.
by Marina Edelman, LMFT | Dec 21, 2017 | Blog, parenting
Guest Blogger and associate Fred Rosenbloom shares his experience in bringing a newborn home during the holidays.
We were looking forward to bringing our newborn home during the holidays, until we actually did and regretfully declined one holiday soirée after another.
When the doctor told me and my wife that her due date for giving birth was going to be November 21st, just before Thanksgiving, we were very excited at the idea of bringing a newborn baby home just in time for the holiday season. As this would be our second child, my wife felt that having the baby before Thanksgiving would allow her to be present with friends and family from out of town instead of worrying about going into labor at the dinner table. Meanwhile, I was looking forward to being able to enjoy all the yummy food at Thanksgiving, and at the Hanukkah and Christmas parties that would follow.
As it turned out, our baby boy was born six days before Thanksgiving and my wife and new baby spent three days in the post partum recovery room, leaving only three days before Thanksgiving for us to adjust to life back at home with a new baby and a toddler. We had already been mentally preparing to lose sleep, change a lot of diapers, and drink extra coffee, especially to keep up with the energy level of our two year old daughter during the day. What we weren’t prepared for, and didn’t expect to happen, was missing out on the family Thanksgiving dinner, followed by saying no to almost all of the Hanukkah and Christmas party invitations.
On Thanksgiving Day, unfortunately my wife wasn’t feeling well and spent most of the afternoon and evening at urgent care to make sure she was ok, while I stayed home with our two children. Thankfully, our family brought us food, but we felt lonely and sad to miss out on spending the holiday with them. Two weeks after Thanksgiving, we decided we would try to attend a formal Hanukkah gala in the evening. Unexpectedly, our babysitter got sick the night before and we couldn’t find a backup. We decided we’d try bringing both children to the gala. Luckily we were seated at a table in the back of the ballroom, but between socializing with family and friends, my wife breastfeeding our newborn, and me chasing our daughter around the hotel lobby, when we finally arrived home at midnight, we looked at each other and decided that maybe we should just be homebodies for a few months, at least during the night time.
Saying no to family and friends during the holidays has been perhaps more difficult than any other time of the year, maybe because it’s considered by many to be a time of giving and a time to be with family. Whether it’s giving gifts, or giving of our time, we feel obligated to say yes, and feel guilty when we say no, especially when family members express disappointment that we won’t be at family gatherings, and family from out of town wants to see the new baby. Perhaps the fear of missing out on good times and feeling isolated if we say no, combined with worry about future invitations, only adds to the challenge of saying “no” this holiday season.
In order to accommodate seeing our family and friends, we’ve decided that they will have to come visit us during this holiday season. In doing this, we’ve set clear boundaries to help us manage those guilty feelings and fears while at the same time created realistic opportunities to see friends and family. Rather than responding to an invitation by saying “we’ll try to be there”, which is basically avoiding and postponing saying “no”, we let them know we’d love to be there, explain our situation, and suggest that maybe in a few months we can meet outside of our home, and also to please come over as it is difficult for us to go out to socialize right now.
Saying “no” isn’t easy, and, in general, there are many things to which we say “yes” during the day in order to avoid conflict and uncomfortable feelings. Thankfully, there are some good books to help with feeling more assertive and comfortable with saying the dreaded word, “no”.
Boundaries Updated and Expanded Ediction: When to Say Yes, How to Say No To Take Control of Your Life, by Cloud and Townsend
The Power of No: Because One Little Word Can Bring Health, Abundance, and Happiness, by Altucher and Altucher
As our children grow, we anticipate that our boundaries will change and that we’ll be able to say yes to invitations more often than we currently say no. Hopefully next year, we look forward to being able to gather around at the Thanksgiving table with our children, family, and friends, but maybe we’ll skip the holiday parties for just one more year.
by Marina Edelman, LMFT | Oct 17, 2017 | Blog, mediation
Most people are drawn to mediation because they believe it is a means to dissolve relationships such as divorce or to resolve conflict amicably.
Meditation can help individuals, families, and couples in the following ways:
- It can help all parties better understand what they want
- It can help them clearly communicate their preferences in a non-polarizing manner
- It can help resolve conflict efficiently and effectively
Most people believe that accomplishing these goals will allow people to achieve closure and move on in life. They now see it as an alternative to therapy when they don’t want to seek treatment from a mental health professional. Therapy usually involves multiple sessions where as mediation can be as brief as one visit. Therapy helps bring awareness to an individual or group of individuals where as mediation is more focused on solutions, communication, and implementation.
Our society is now a place where every problem is directed to a mental health professional. Whereas a lot of problems have absolutely nothing to do with mental health. Rather, most of them have to do with uncertainty, confusion, lack of communication, expectations and goals, problematic societal dictates, conflicts between social norms, conflicts between personalities, conflicts between individuals, prejudices against personality types, orientations, racial groups, and temperaments, etc.
A lot of people are looking for alternative ways to address their issues without going to a mental health professional for “treatment,” but they don’t know where to go. Mediation by skilled and trained mediator can provide these people with what they are looking for. Mediators that maintain the principles of being solution focused, empathic and neutral encourage individuals to problem solve, freeing them from their preconceived notions about what is possible and facilitate communication among both parties. Mediators can even do one on one meditation with individuals. It can be referred to as coaching, or it can be seen as mediating within the conflicted mind of an individual.
Mediation can be seen as a process in which a neutral helps individuals come to a resolution; it can also be seen as a process by which a neutral helps parties move to the next step, whether it’s communicating with others, clarifying a thought, or organizing logistics. Mediator can be a sounding board, brain storming partner or voice of reason. Providing solutions is one part of mediation, another is facilitating clean communication between all parties, and lastly helping identify options and negotiating implementation of them.
Through out the mediation process one feels empowered to unlock their beliefs and confident to share them with others who they are negotiating with. The mediator can focus and support thinking of the individual, couple, or family but the parties are ultimately in charge of what they are comfortable living with.
