Recently Sam Richardson spoke at the Better Relationship Summit hosted by Purvi Tantia. Check out her website at https://www.purvitantia.com/ or you can click the image below.
Here is a Podcast that Sam Richardson was on
In this episode, hosts Austin Peterson and Landon Mance welcome guest Sam Richardson, owner of Las Vegas Therapy.
Las Vegas Therapy provides help with individual therapy, couples counseling, and family therapy in a safe & comfortable setting.
Las Vegas therapists have experience and training to help you or a loved one overcome PMADS (Perinatal Mood or Anxiety Disorders), trauma, relationships, and grief or loss, depression and anxiety.
Tune in to hear Sam Richardson share his mission for helping others while growing his business of therapists. He expresses his main focus of helping as many people as he can and explains how he plans to do that.
Like many business owners struggling to balance family life and business growth, Sam shares the truth behind this and Austin and Landon give advice on how to achieve this balance successfully. Hear how Sam grew his business from one therapist to 15.
Feeling More Socially Awkward Because of COVID-19?
You’re Not Alone
“Two weeks to flatten the curve!” That was just about one year ago, or 52 weeks, or about 25x what we were expecting. Two weeks seemed manageable; there was a general consensus that it would suck, but we could manage and then life would go back to normal.
Obviously, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent safety precautions have become “the new normal.” While adults are adjusting to their new work from home lifestyle and children, teens, and young adults have grown used to virtual and hybrid learning, there is an often unknown, but very uncomfortable shift happening.
What’s this shift? Well, our social skills are worsening. Because of this, we are feeling more and more awkward in social situations. This awkwardness, in turn, is leading to more social isolation, loneliness, anxiety, and depressive episodes and symptoms.
Social Skills: If You Don’t Use It, You Lose It!
See, social skills are like muscles; they need to be used to stay strong (let alone get stronger). The problem is that working from home, virtual learning, social distancing, and mask wearing are all things that prevent us from flexing those social skills muscles.
Working from home means you don’t need to worry about the social niceties with that coworker you can’t actually stand.
Virtual learning prevents students from connecting with their friends in-person. Students also don’t need to practice the skill of turn-taking and patience by raising their hand in the classroom.
Social distancing might impact our sense of appropriate personal space when that regulation ends.
Wearing masks has led us to be less mindful about our facial expressions.
Social Fatigue Is A Real Thing
Over your lifetime, you built up a tolerance for people and their bullshit the demands of social interactions. This leads to what I call “social fatigue” with my clients. Social fatigue is the feeling of mental exhaustion from being in social situations.
Social fatigue can feel a bit different for each person, but many of my clients express it as feeling anxious to the point where they just need to “get up and go home”, feeling overwhelmed by all of the noise or people, and general tiredness way earlier than they expected.
So What Should You Do?
Here are some tips and tricks to help overcome some of that COVID social awkwardness.
Take it slow. As restrictions on social interactions ease, it’s important to take it slow. It might sound silly, but if you haven’t been going out or having much of a social life over the past year, you need to reacclimate yourself.
Turn on your camera. Whether you’re in work meetings or the virtual classroom, turn on your camera. Turning on your camera will keep you accountable for your facial expressions. Side bonus – it will probably keep you more engaged too
Spend time with those you can. If you have people in your life that you can spend time with, without socially distancing or the other COVID precautions, do it. Don’t isolate yourself in your room playing video games, watching TikToks, or staring at the ceiling. Go interact with your family, friends, or loved ones that are in your bubble.
Be kind to yourself. Guess what, you’ve never been through a pandemic before and you’re doing the best you can. Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s okay if you didn’t start working out, learn to make bread, or master some random hobby. It’s okay if this has been really hard for you because it’s been really hard for a lot of people too.
If you or someone you care about is struggling with any of the above, don’t hesitate to reach out. Ally Psychological Services is here to help you navigate whatever it is you’re experiencing.
The Traumatized Brain: Examining Our Fight, Flight, or Freeze Response
Most people will experience some form of trauma throughout their lifetime. There are many experiences that can be traumatic, including: an accident, a natural disaster, abuse, neglect, or emotional manipulation. When attempting to understand trauma from a therapeutic perspective, it is helpful to recognize what happens in our bodies as we live through a traumatic event
Grief and Loss During Pregnancy
EMDR- What is it and Why you need to care about this groundbreaking therapy!
Why do we care about mommies?
Jillian here! ***Trigger warning*** I am talking about my experience with birth, PPD, and other things— if you are feeling raw just skip on over this.
As I’m sitting down to write this blog—thinking about how much I care about mommies and where this started from—it feels a long time coming. I have the privilege of being the clinical director here at LVT, but my passion for mommies started almost 15 years ago.
I was a very young mom and did experience a moderate bout with postpartum depression after my son was born. When he was born he had trouble breathing and ended up in the NICU for about 5 days. I think adrenaline was helping me through that difficult time, I was worried that he was still vulnerable to what landed him in the NICU, so my adrenaline kept pumping for a few months. 3 months after that was when things finally got settled, and that’s when the depression kicked in.
My doctor offered me a common antidepressant which I started taking for about 2.5 months. I recognized that it wasn’t helping me like I had hoped it would, so I stopped taking it. As I look back on that experience, I wish that I would’ve felt like I had a voice and that I could’ve advocated for myself to my OBGYN that this medicine wasn’t working and I wasn’t getting what I needed. Instead, I kept it all inside and hoped that it would pass. It did eventually pass about 3 or 4 months later.
Right around that time I heard a local story of a mother taking the life of her child. That was a turning point moment for me because I knew that moms that are well don’t take the life of their children. That birthed in me a desire to do something for these moms, and to be that supportive person for them, that I hadn’t had during that postpartum season.
I continued on my path to a master’s degree in marriage and family therapy so that I could start my work to help these mommies. I definitely came across other passions along the way; I love EMDR (blog to come!), I also am super fulfilled and energized by helping couples, in particular couples where the mom is pregnant and I can help them to feel more connected before their baby comes. However, this perinatal population still sticks out for me and feels really important because there are so few providers locally and there are so few resources to help moms out of these dark places.
Fast forward to my most recent birth which was much worse…
I had a lot of challenges with this birth: a vaginal tear that wouldn’t heal (blog to come!), a baby that wouldn’t stop crying (blog to come!), and medical challenges with the baby. The first two years were an absolute blur. That whole experience proved to reinforce my passion for helping moms and understanding what a particularly difficult and vulnerable time of our lives motherhood is. Whatever the situation is, whether it’s a traumatic birth, a miscarriage, the loss of a child, even a seemingly “healthy”, uncomplicated birth and postpartum time can be incredibly stressful, and typically is, from what I hear… Although I don’t have experience!
We’re here for you, we want to help, we got extra training so that we can help you and bring you back to the people you love.
