How To Get Free Marriage Counseling

How To Get Free Relationship Therapy

First Published: February 25, 2009 ADawnJournal.com

Therapy can be very expensive. If your budget allows it, don’t think too much about these fees and spending a lot of money. This is not an expense; think of this as an investment towards your future. If your budget does not allow it, paying for therapy can be really challenging. However, there are ways you can find therapy for free or for cheap.

1. Try group therapy – If you don’t mind sharing your differences with others. Group therapy can cost $25 per hour, while typical individual therapy can run from $100 to $200 per hour. To find group therapy in your area, search for group therapy your area on line.

2. Sliding Scale – Ask your therapists if they can change according to income. This option is called sliding scale. Many therapists offer this nowadays. Don’t be afraid or shy to ask.

3. Government Programs – There are many free government programs available to help with counseling. Call your social services office and they will be able to find you an appropriate agency.

4. Employee Assistance Programs – If you are employed, most likely you have these programs through your work. These are confidential, free, and good quality therapy programs. There may be some restrictions. Check with your HR.

5. Charities and Religious Organizations – Many charities and religious groups (churches, synagogues, mosques etc) offer free or low-cost therapy services. Some of these organizations have their own therapists and some of them can help you find free or low-cost therapists according to your needs. Don’t be afraid to check with different faith than yours institutions. It’s unlikely that they will refuse you to serve because you are from a different religion.

6. Friends and Family – Another option would be to talk to someone you highly regard as a well-knowledgeable person on this marriage/relationship/family issues. This person can be your friend, an elderly member of your family, or someone in your neighbourhood. Although this person may not be able to provide professional counseling like a licensed therapist, it is good talk to someone rather than no one at all.

7. Try This – If you are not able to follow any one the five tips I mentioned above, doing the following should get you a free therapist.
Search online by entering these keyword phrases:
A. Free marriage Counseling Resources in Toronto
B. Toronto free marriage therapy community services

NB – Replace Toronto with your own city name.

Why Optimism Is Important?

The Importance of Optimism

When you are trying to develop yourself personally, one of the most important things to do is to be optimistic. If you are not optimistic, you are holding yourself back and doing yourself no favours. You are not helping yourself and you are not aiding your development in the least. Probably the biggest reason why people begin to suffer in personal development is because they are not optimistic. As a result, you need to learn how to be optimistic so that you can achieve the most out of your life.

1. First things first, you need to get rid of the thought that the world is against you, that you have bad luck, or that you are not going to succeed at what you try. If you are pessimistic, you are not doing yourself any help and the sooner you get rid of this thought, the better off you are going to be.

2. Just because you have had difficulty in the past, that does not mean you are going to have trouble in the future. If you have failed at something before, does that mean you are going to fail at it in the future? No, not in the least. All you do when you think that the past will influence your future is create a self-fulfilling prophesy for yourself.

3. Probably the most difficult thing for a person to do is to take responsibility for their life. Often a pessimistic person will say they are the result of bad things, not the cause of it. If someone is not happy with their life, they will say that fate is against them, rather than taking responsibility for their own existence. If you are optimistic, you know that you, and only you, have the power to change things in your life. To develop yourself personally, you need to take responsibility for yourself.

4. Carpe Diem. This means “Seize the Day” in Latin and it is very important that you do seize the day in your life. You want to remember that life is short and when you do that, you will stop thinking about the things that go wrong and you will want to take advantage of the time you have left and enjoy life. To be optimistic, you have to accept that the end will come, and by doing that you will be able to appreciate life you have and feel happy about it.

5. Keep it all balanced. You do not have to be a total optimist, because if you believe nothing bad will happen then you may be a bit surprised when it does. Instead, be optimistic but be ready for things not to work out. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. This is what being an optimist is all about.

Being optimistic is important if you want to be happy and successful and if you are going to develop yourself personally, then you need to be positive about the future. The minute you get pessimistic, you have lost all the headway you made being optimistic.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on Apr 18, 2010

How Personal Development Articles Can Motivate to Change

Personal Development Articles

Have you ever taken time to wonder why some people succeed in life, why some people are more self confident than others, or why some people adhere to their resolutions while others cannot? Well, these are just but examples. The point here is that people are different in nature, weaknesses and motivations. Having known this, experts long realized that it is possible to change people’s opinions and mentalities by writing articles. Such kind of an article which aims to motivate and change people’s attitudes and behavior for the better is called a personal development one.

 In most cases, a personal development article is written by a life coach, an expert in a certain field, or by someone who has experienced a certain situation and feels that he can share it with others. For example some people have problems with confidence while speaking in public, while others have difficulty kicking awful habits like drug addiction and so forth. Such a person may visit rehabilitation centers, get medication, but the fact of the matter is that a life development article may do wonders for him. Such a development article may contain information on how to do away with the habit, resist the urge to opt for drugs again and how to move away from the habit. In a nutshell, there is something about a personal development article, which makes people associate its content with their lifestyles and gives them morale they would not even get from a life counsellor. A personal development article is a strong too l for behaviour change and if used well, can greatly enhance your chances of succeeding or overcoming a weakness.

 The most fantastic thing about a personal development article is that it has no age barrier and each age group will find an article that relates to their present predicament in life. From personal development articles on how to communicate and manage your anger in marriage, to how you can kiss a girl for the first time or how not to give up in life, these articles are tailored in a way that suit people from all walks of life. These articles are hinged on the fact that in life, no one is perfect and that we all have spiritual, emotional, and physical needs. As such, what one has in abundance, the other may be lacking miserably and there has to be an avenue for exchanging ideas and sharing experiences. This avenue is the personal development articles.

 A personal development article may cover the various aspects of human life. For example they may talk about how to be true to yourself, how to boost your self esteem, how to nurture your children or how to please your partner in bed. Yet other articles may talk of how one can overcome alcohol, live with being overweight, how to stop over-eating and so forth.

 However, for one to gain anything out of personal development articles, they have to accept their weaknesses, and acknowledge that there is need for change.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on Apr 4, 2010

How Not To Be Depressed

Beat the Blues – With Natural Optimism

One of the most common causes of people today failing to achieve their best potential is a tendency to become depressed. With global recession, manmade and natural disasters wreaking havoc every day, and the many irritations of living your life in an increasingly complex world, no one can be blamed for occasionally heaving a sigh and wondering if things will ever improve. Fortunately, for most, something comes along to distract you from such gloomy thoughts, you get back on track, and life goes on.

For some people however, they seem to have had too many blows, too many things go wrong all at once, and they feel the classic symptoms of depression – locked in a place that they feel will never improve, they feel worthless, hopeless, guilty and sometimes angry at the situation they have got themselves into.

Perhaps everyone has had this type of feeling on occasion, but most will somehow pull through, and find for themselves, in the midst of the gloom, something positive and useful to do.

It is this ability to find the worth in a negative situation, and to be able to turn a bad experience into something from which you can learn and grow that will separate the world’s survivors, from those who will simply become depressed and go down in the undertow. 

People have different ideas about what is depressing and what might be a disaster for one person might be easily managed by another. That in itself gives a clue to the fact that all experience of depression is in fact subjective – there are no universal events or factors which will give you depression – only your attitude to them. Even events such as bereavements, job losses, loss of your home, major injury or illness do not need to cause you to have depression. You might have grief, and anger or pain, but you will find that depression is not the same as these most natural emotions, depression happens when you get stuck in a place where how you want things to be, simply is not going to happen.

People such as sportsmen, entertainers, salespeople or anyone who is focused on a goal, will often feel depressed if the goal cannot for one reason or another be achieved. If that failure continues to be the only focus of a person’s life, then they will continue to feel a failure and depressed. When a person meets with a failure, in order not to become depressed, they need to move on from the moment, and look for what they can do next. It has been said that it is not how many times a man is knocked down that forms his character – but how many times he gets up. That is the key to beating depression – no matter how low you feel, reach out to others, take what help you can get, realize that life is not about what happens to you, but how you deal with it, and you will start to get your life back on track.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com site. This article originally published on the above website on Feb 4, 2010

Do We Really Reap What We Sow?

Many of Us Would Argue Not

Much of human behaviour in this world is predicated on one of the maxims we all know: “You reap what you sow”. This is a saying which drives many people’s consciences and troubles others only after they have “sowed” whatever they suspect will eventually come to be their comeuppance. To many it is a rule to live by, to others a meaningless piece of cod philosophy that simply guilt-trips those who are naïve enough to believe it. Is a maxim of any value if only half of the world seems to believe it? Or should we all look out for number one and happily allow other people to take what life throws at them – potentially as a consequence of our actions?

Karma is an interesting thing. We can probably all think of at least one individual who has, as a result of at best questionable actions, risen to a position of privilege on one level or another. They may head up a major corporation and be able to write their own pay checks as they see fit. They may be extremely sought-after romantically. One way or another, there are people benefiting from not following the standard rules of morality. Do they reap what they sow? Many of us would argue not.

It hardly sets a good example. We will, if we have a commitment to bringing the best out of those we influence, try to promote a message of good actions bringing forth good rewards. Then we let our protégé see a world where people who lie, cheat and bend the rules non-stop are rewarded with money, prestige and often influence. How can they possibly marry the advice we give with the picture they see? The only conclusion they can have is that some people are not living by the rules.

How do we then make a lesson from that, for ourselves and for others? How do we say that the people who ignore the rules of common decency are not a model to be followed? It is a very difficult question to answer, and one which gives parents, teachers and other concerned individuals a few sleepless nights. If we have a belief in an afterlife, we can say that these people will eventually pay for their sins – but we cannot see the afterlife and we cannot see that they are going to be any more troubled then than now.

Therefore, it really comes down to a message that is perhaps more complicated than “we reap what we sow”. We should behave decently to other people because there is much more chance that people will remember what we did wrong than what we did right. We should behave decently to others because, if we have a conscience, eventually a transgression will turn into a sleepless night. But more than this, we should behave decently to others because it is the right way to behave, and in the end we have to face the world with confidence that we did the right thing – even when evidence suggested that the wrong thing may have had greater material benefit to us.

To streamline and minimize blog maintenance, I will be discontinuing maintaining the Simplepersonaldevelopment.com website (however, I will still hold the domain). I will gradually move all articles from this site to Ahmed Dawn Dot Com. This article originally published on the above website on Oct 12, 2009.