Personal Growth Resources

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Peaks & Creeks is Here For You

A large part of the counseling experience is collecting tools for your emotional, relational, resilience and spiritual health toolbox, and receiving help in how to use them. These resources are tested and proven articles, descriptions, exercises and necessary information to be healthy. Some will be helpful in just reading and applying the truths, while others will be better experienced in the context of a therapeutic conversation or group.

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Grief Resources

Loss of Child

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Loss of Child

Anger & the Loss of a Child

Feelings of anger will be inescapable with the loss of a child. You cannot avoid being angry at some level but identifying the source of the anger will go a long way in helping you unpack and find a healthy expression for it. Your anger may be a below-the-surface, low boil frustration or resentment rarely surfacing but never going away,…

The Impact of Grief on Marriage

Initially drawn together by the shock and pain of loss, couples can find themselves disconnecting as the grief journey progresses. The divorce rate is high for couples who experience the loss of a child. There are reasons for this and ways to address your grief so as not to lose your marriage relationship in the process. We all grieve differently…

The Journey of Grief

Each person’s journey through grief is unique. measure your success at facing each one and determine what is needed to move forward.

Loss of Parent

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Loss of Parent

Might Not Expect women grieving loss parent

What You Might Not Expect

When we lose a parent, we expect to be sad and we expect we will miss our parent, but what catches us by surprise are the things we do not expect when we lose a parent.

Healthy Healing

We live our entire lives knowing at some point we will lose our parents. In the natural order of things, children outlive their parents. We can live decades with this knowledge and still be devastated when loss occurs.

The Journey of Grief

Each person’s journey through grief is unique. measure your success at facing each one and determine what is needed to move forward.

Loss of Partner

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Loss of Partner

Missing My Reflection

Loss reminds us of the power held by significant people in our lives. When our loved one dies, we are overcome with emotion. We feel the deep sadness of loneliness engulf us like an impenetrable fog, and we have trouble imagining a future without our person. For those people with considerable impact on our life, there is an even deeper…

Making It Through Year One

You lose your partner and suddenly your entire world has changed. Life has come to a screeching halt and you feel nothing will ever be the same again, except maybe for this deep sadness, excruciating emotional pain, and intense feeling of emptiness.

A Good Reason to be Angry

Losing your partner, the person you have shared your life with is a good reason to be angry. During the grief journey there may be times when anger rises within you without warning. Many times, it is a reaction that just appears, usually uninvited and unwelcome.

Loss of Friend

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Loss of Friend

Acknowledging Your Loss

One of the first responsibilities we face with grief is to accept the reality of our loss. Many people find they come to despise the word “accept” when it comes to grief. It has connotations of being okay with the death, or quickly moving on from the person we lost. You will need help with ways to accept your loss…

A Healing Formula

You’ve probably heard the story of the man who went to the doctor and rotating his arm at the elbow said, “Doc, it hurts when I do this...” The doctor glanced at him quickly and said, “Then I suggest you don’t do that!” Professionals will tell you there is no simple or quick fix to healing from the pain of…

Stronger When You Lean

There is nothing wrong with being strong, but with grief that approach can leave you simply stuffing the pain deeper inside and securing a future of physical pain, poor health, anxiety, and resentment.

Loss by Suicide

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Loss by Suicide

The Social Stigma of Suicide

Stigma is defined as “a mark of disgrace or infamy; a stain or reproach, as on one’s reputation.” Our society does a good job of saddling suicide with stigma. In an effort to make sense of it, perhaps, we label the person who ended his or her life. He was selfish. She was crazy. They took the easy way out.…

Complications with Suicide

The stigma of suicide in our culture today may likely keep you from feeling the freedom to reveal the cause of your loved one’s death, much less talk about how it happened.

A Suicide State of Mind

What were they thinking? This is unimaginable! I cannot even begin to understand what he could have been thinking when he chose to take his life. Why would he do this?

Loss of Connection

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Loss of Connection

Connecting in a Disconnected World

What is connection? Connection is not simply a social media post, text, a ‘like’ on your page, or even receiving a letter or gift in the mail. A connection is how being in a relationship makes us feel.

Are We There Yet?

The pain of anxiety and fear are a result of our inability to establish equilibrium between our expectations of like and the realities of life.

Loss of Connection

Loss of connection in the We Grieve community is not loss resulting from the death of a person. loss of connection may result from a relational breakup, divorce, or estrangement.

General Grief & Loss

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General Grief & Loss

Suffering – What It’s Not About

We do not know the reason God allows evil and suffering to continue, or why it is so random, but now at least we know what the reason is not. It cannot be that he does not love us. It cannot be that he does not care. He is so committed to our ultimate happiness that he was willing…

Suffering – Three Reasons God Allows It

BECAUSE GOD WON’T ROB US OF FREE WILL The problem of suffering is usually posed as a question: ‘If God is all-powerful and all good, why does he allow evil to exist in the world?’ Perhaps the most common response is known as the ‘free will defense’. After all, where does most of the evil in this world come from?…

HeartMath Quick Coherence Tool

Would you be interested in a tool that would allow you to take back control of your response to stress? Instead of fight, flight or freeze, and the 1400 biochemical reactions that take place when your emotions shift from calm to stormy, it is possible to self-regulate your response to stress. You are not a victim to the upsetting circumstances…

What a Grieving Person Needs

TIME Time alone and time with people they trust and who will listen when they need to talk. Grieving people need months and years of time to feel and understand the feelings that accompany loss. REST–RELAXATION–EXERCISE–NOURISHMENT–DIVERSION Grieving people need extra amounts of things they have always needed. Hot baths, afternoon naps, a trip, a “cause” to work for to help…

Truth vs Lies – Scripture Support

Throughout our lives the truths planted in our core are crowded out by lies told to us by people and circumstances, and we can often become confused about what really is the truth about life. We find this important when grieving because what we believe about ourselves has been rocked to the core and we need to know the truth…

Things You Never Say (to a grieving person)

In an effort to offer comfort, people often say hurtful things to grieving people. • Don’t be sad, they’re in a better place now • God doesn’t give you more than you can handle • You need to be strong like your sister, brother, or cousin • I guess this was just God’s will • At least you have other…

Relationship Resources

Marriage

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Marriage

Cycle of Anger – Thermometer

Understanding how to deal with anger begins with a knowledge of how it starts and progresses. Use this resource to identify where you are in the process and learn ways to stop the anger before it becomes unhealthy.

List of Emotions – Info

This resource is a comprehensive list of emotions you can use to help you improve your emotional intelligence. Scan the pages to find and point to the emotion you have been feeling.

Emotion Signs and Behaviors – Info

For those who struggle with emotional awareness, this resource helps with lists of emotions you can view and connect with. Print a copy and keep it handy if you are trying to increase your emotional intelligence.

Pre-Marriage

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Pre-Marriage

Cycle of Anger – Thermometer

List of Emotions – Info

This resource is a comprehensive list of emotions you can use to help you improve your emotional intelligence. Scan the pages to find and point to the emotion you have been feeling.

Emotion Signs and Behaviors – Info

Family

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Family

Cycle of Anger – Thermometer

List of Emotions – Info

This resource is a comprehensive list of emotions you can use to help you improve your emotional intelligence. Scan the pages to find and point to the emotion you have been feeling.

Emotion Signs and Behaviors – Info

Resilience Resources

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Resilience Resources

Resilience Assessment – Exercise

This resource will help you understand what resilience really is and how resilient you are in the seven areas of resilience that are measured. After completing the questions and scoring it, I can help you interpret the results. The Resilience Assessment is from the work of Reivich & Shatte, The Resilience Factor, 2002.

Life Balance – Exercise

The Life Balance Exercise is designed to be take several times a year as you move through transitions of finding a better balance to all the important elements of your life. The genius of this tool is in its incremental approach to change. As opposed to huge wholesale changes that require massive amounts of energy, the Life Balance Exercise actually…

HeartMath Quick Coherence Tool

Spiritual Resources

Spiritual Formation

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Spiritual Formation

Relationships are Circles of Sufficiency

In the Kingdom of God, relationships function as “Circles of Sufficiency”. This means that in a circle of relationships, any believer in that circle has a Kingdom view of his relationship with every other person in that circle whether that person is a believer or not. The believer’s goal is to encourage others to feel sufficient – in other words,…

Waking Up in the Kingdom Changes Everything

Waking up in the Kingdom Changes Everything

Faith Studies

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Faith Studies

Equipping for the Kingdom Way

Changing My Nature – Exercise

Changing My Nature

Guided Circle of 4 Study – Galatians 5:16-25

Galatians 5.16-25 - Guided Circle of 4 Study

Deeper Dive

Deeper Dive Diagrams

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Deeper Dive Diagrams

Kingdom Mantra

The Entire Human Self – Spiritual Formation

This diagram from Dallas Willard's book, Renovation of the Heart is a useful resource for understanding how spiritual formation takes place in our inner person.

Dimensions of Spiritual Formation – diagram

This diagram was edited by Karl Shackelford and taken from Dallas Willard's book, Renovation of the Heart, and is especially useful for understanding how Christlike character is developed in the inner person and influenced by the various dimensions of the human self.

Season One - Deeper Dive Notes

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Season One - Deeper Dive Notes

Season Two - Deeper Dive Notes

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Season Two - Deeper Dive Notes