Tyler March, MS, LMHC

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Pressures List — Tyler March Counseling No one escapes the impact of pressure on our lives. Pressures can run from the minor to the major and the collective impact of these pressures is usually something we are not fully aware of. Much life the Suffering Inventory I have posted previously, the Pressure List is the groundwork for benefici

If you don’t have the time, energy or financial circumstances that permit you to find a therapist or would like an efficient serving of insight, answer the following questions in as much detail as you possibly can. What emotions where permitted in your home as a child? What roles did you have to play within the family? What did you feel you had to do to earn love and/or acceptance? Spend a week and visit these questions daily. Challenge yourself to reflect on them as you go about your day and jot down ANY thoughts, feelings or emotions associated with the questions. No wrong answers. When you feel you have fully answered these questions notice where you see similar patterns showing up in your current life and relationships. Let’s talk implicit messages, I can help. ✌🏼

One of the difficult truths that comes up often is my office is that “unmet needs find a way of being met”. When our needs go unmet chronically we run the risk of meeting those needs with less than functional patterns of behavior leading to disruption and potentially the opposite of what we desire. This is further complicated when we have never taken a real honest inventory of what our specific needs are. We are all born with and develop certain needs over a lifetime. They can shift and change but, our basic needs and deep desires are often closeted or repressed due to all sorts of complicating factors. In what can be a nostalgia for infancy, when our parents hopefully did their best to anticipate our needs and read our minds, we run the risk of projecting those same assumed mind reading powers onto our partners or loved ones. The basic mistake here is “if they loved me or REALLY knew me that would know what I want”. This is rarely if ever the case, those around us need to be taught and told how to meet our needs with patient repetition. Think about the best teacher you ever had in school, did they assume you would know what the lesson agenda was? No, they kindly engaged us in a creative application of active listening and compassionate direction. A return to infancy is not available, therefore a step towards taking the responsibility to become the best teacher we can be is the way forward to a deeper connection not only with others but within ourselves. Let’s talk a needs inventory and a lesson plan for our loved ones, I can help. ✌🏼

I’m listening to .studies.academy new book on how to become for resilient to stress, or what he calls “antifragile”. Ben-Shahar introduces the acronym SPIRE as a way we can assess, prescribe and address aspects of our lives that lead to
more happiness and greater tolerance of chaos. I find these 5 aspects of our human experience to be a brilliant and efficient way to find areas for growth we can address to increase our felt sense happiness and peace. You can simply give yourself a score on a scale of 1-10 in each of these areas and ask yourself how can you increase your score by 1 point over the next week/month. This can mean starting a 3 minute meditation practice, cooking yourself one meal a day, setting up a coffee with a buddy, going for a 5 minute walk, having a weekly social media sabbath, whatever. Nothing too big or small to start taking an honest inventory on ways you can become more “anti-fragile”. We can’t control certain life events but, we can sandbag for the storms ahead with regular purposeful attention invested in these 5 realms. Let’s talk anti-fragility, I can help. ✌🏼

https://www.presenceandperspective.com/blog/you-are-your-own-worst-enemy

You Are Your Own Worst Enemy — Tyler March Counseling

Attention is a trainable skill. ADHD is real and the symptoms that define that mental illness can be debilitating. However, looking for pharmaceuticals to due to work of attention training for you only does so much to eventually heal from the circumstances that created symptoms. The use of stimulant medication doesn’t mean you’re lazy or weak but, to use the medication responsibly is to also train the skill ALONG with the use of pharmaceutical assistance. ADHD symptoms are often the result of lack of attunement to our needs as children or lack of a felt sense of safety within the home environment. When this attunement is limited the brain orients itself to a fear/discomfort of the present moment. This is why meditation or attention training can feel so overwhelming to beginners. The untrained mind finds comfort in the prediction of the future or the rumination of the past, anywhere but the present moment. We then default to a felt sense of scatter or anxiety that defines our experience of the world. We can start by first becoming aware of where our attention goes thematically by choosing a sustainable mindfulness practice. Then start to flex the skill of choice by shifting your attention to the thing(s) you find most valuable. There are plenty of terrible things that we can make an argument for deserving our attention. This isn’t to say we should ignore those things. However, to act as if you don’t have the power to choose where you attention goes is to ignore the benefits of the brain we all evolved. When you find yourself trapped in catastrophe, stop and recognize where you are by scanning your 5 senses. From that present moment awareness you can then seize a moment to choose where our attention is best invested. This doesn’t mean, “only focus on the positive”, it does mean recognize the consequence of your focus and it’s impact on how you define your life. Lets talk attention and ADHD, I can help. ✌🏼

I have recently been listing to .hari new book “Stolen Focus: Why You can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again” and the idea that multitasking is a myth has been introduced to me. The oversimplified idea here is that no one is able to multitask, no one. What we are actually doing when we think we are multitasking is rapidly switching our attention from task to task. Humans are factually incapable of multitasking and the concept never applied to us, it is a metric developed in computer science not human psychology. This rapid switching depletes our ability to pay attention to the things we truly value, increases irritability and the felt sense of stress and drains the skill of creativity so important for problem solving. We are all drinking from a firehose of stimulus everyday with implicit and explicit demands that our human attention will never be able to keep up with. The call to action here is to forcibly single task everyday, putting away the phone and start by picking one task to due for 10 minutes straight, pay attention to your minds impulse to start doing something else and return back to the task at hand. Once that 10 minutes becomes easier, increase the time you spend on this single task to strengthen your ability to focus. This is far harder than it might seem but, doing so is worth taking back control of your ability to focus fully. Attention is the key ingredient to any process of healing mental health issues and without practicing this skill we are robbing ourselves of connection to who we truly are. Lets talk focus, I can help.✌🏻

https://www.presenceandperspective.com/blog/becoming-antifragile

Becoming Antifragile — Tyler March Counseling

It’s undeniable that to this day you have survived every single hardship and overwhelming feeling that has ever come your way. However we lose sight of our resilience when insecurity takes the driver seat of our predictions. Insecurity is amplified when we get stuck in the narrative of “I won’t be able to handle this/I can’t do this or that”. Life is truly chaotic there are many unknowns about what our future will bring. Yet, if you have not been obliterated by the hardships of your past, why would you assume you won’t be able to survive the ones of the future? Reminding yourself of your resilience takes strategy and creating a resiliency timeline is a good way to increase the felt sense that you will be ok, no matter what. Create this timeline by starting with the day you were born and think about all the hard days and seasons on your life. Try to list them on the timeline in chronological order. If you give this intervention enough time, you’ll see that you have been through quite a lot I’m sure. Don’t discount the small struggles, let this be an exhaustive list. From the embarrassing school dance situation to the death of a partner, if it was hard write it down. We all have a basic human need for reassurance or a felt sense that “it will be ok” and being able to provide that to yourself is quite a useful skill. Let’s detail your resilience, you deserve it. ✌🏼

I am listening to a book that mentions many great concepts in psychology and this one really stood out. When it comes to our primary reactions to experiences there are three: positive, neutral and negative. We then splinter off a into a wide array of more detailed emotions based on these three reactions with the story we tell ourselves about the experience and data we have collected throughout our histories. Kornfield goes onto highlight that we are conditioned to only seek highly sensational positive experiences all the time and that this obsession saps our ability to enjoy the aliveness of nuetral experience. We often attribute a neutral experience as boredom to be fixed with a distraction. This creates a problem because most of our living hours consist of nuetral experience, not necisarilly pleasureable, but not painful. Developing an awareness to our primary responses and learning to embrace our nuetral experiences allows us to shift towards an appreciation of the mundane and banal and therefore expands our attention to a possibility of not swinging the pendulum of our mood based reactions to cisumstnaces. Let’s talk neutral, I can help. ✌🏼

One of the ways I approach my therapist role is to act a salesperson for self love. When I pitch to a client that “love is the answer” it is often met with visible cringe and at times outright palpable repulsion. Unfortunately, love being the answer to mental health struggles is a solution regularly dismissed due to it’s coupling with a hippie counter culture thought of as gang of drug seeking irresponsible idealists lacking real world perspective. Both due to personal practice and empirically validated research, I can assert that there is no more beneficial real world application to managing psychosocial stress than a commitment to learning to love yourself radically. A major obstacle in the way for starting this hard work is not having a person we were exposed to early on in life who modeled what it was like to love themselves fully. What is usually modeled is to only love yourself after accomplishment or external validation of appearance and status. Modern influences have made it more and more difficult to love ourselves for the uniquely flawed and imperfect animals we are. To work on self love is to accept that you will be a salmon swimming upstream to what society would like you to feel about yourself. Family members, people on social media and random groups/individuals you come in contact with want us to join them in their self-loathing so to validate its legitimacy, think“I hate me, so you should hate you”. Here in lies the paradox though, the aspects of self that we deem unlovable are exactly where we can start to learn to accept responsibility for change while also honestly accepting the limitations of who we truly are and what we truly value. Love is work, you are capable and I can help. ✌🏼

Most of us want to be a considered successful and aim to accomplish things that prove our value. However, there can be issues when we are unaware of how success is defined and the history of how the definition formed. There can be many influencing factors that impact our internalized idea of a successful life, relationship and profession. Creating some separation between our internalized narratives with reflective journaling and/or honest exploration with a therapist can prove useful in moving away from a deficiency model of success. When we set ourselves up with metrics for success that are unrealistic and only external we guarantee that “never enough” will be the default mode of our emotional lives, perpetually always wanting more. A sustainable model of success is authentically defined by a life congruent with your values, which no one can ever take away from you. Let’s talk success, you might already have it. ✌🏼

I recently came across this definition of love and it really resonated with me. When I introduce self-compassion or self-love to clients there is often a confusion into what that practice would look like and at times a confusion to what love really means. This definition is really comprehensive in that it breaks down some of the more powerful aspects of genuine love. I believe we confuse love with passion or infatuation and although those as deserved aspects of love, they do not fully encompass a full spectrum love that transcends the dopamine flood of novelty. A lasting healing foundation of love trusts the transience of all experience. It furthermore honors that mixed emotions are unavoidable, that kindness is the true bedrock of strength and that not liking the person you are or not liking the person you are with is typical situation that proves ripe as an opportunity to exercise radical love. Love is always going to be something personally defined and this is not to say that is the right definition of it, but is a valuable one. Let’s talk love, you deserve it. ✌🏼

This idea comes from a yoga teacher training that I did years ago and it proved personally very powerful for me. The exercise was to spend a week really paying attention to when you were apologizing. Increasing the awareness of when we apologize formally or say a passing “sorry” is very valuable. There are many times when our sorries become reflective, as we mindless apologize for any minor inconvenience that we could have possibly created for another person. This impulsive “sorry” is easier to identify in other people so you might want start there and work your way inwards. The exchange of “sorry” and “no need to apologize” has become a domesticated social dance based on the value of civility yet, it comes with the potential cost of lowering self value as we grovel lower and lower to avoid any negative impact on another person. Take on the challenge of really paying attention to your sorries over the next week, using it as an opportunity to pause and reflect on what you are really sorry for. Many times we are apologizing for our basic humanity and not some real social faux pas that deserves apology. Let’s stop apologizing for who we are and what we do if we did not cause true harm to anyone. This shift away from reflective apology can make room for embracing the natural mistakes and inadequacies we all demonstrate, ushering in space for self love and appreciation. We can become more aware of what we are really saying when we say “sorry”, I can help. ✌🏼

I have seen the varying effects of pharmacotherapy intimately in my career. There are times when antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs are very helpful and necessary. However, these drugs are assuredly overprescribed when one looks at the meteoric rise in psychiatric prescription coupled with an ever increasing rise in depression/anxiety. Without the above mentioned qualities, the promise of pharmacotherapy is more of a marketing illusion than a reality. In their ideal application psychotropic drugs provide a decrease of the severity of the mental illness that then allows for real work to be done regrading explorative insight, experimenting with actions plans and exercising one’s will to create useful change. If you have been on antidepressants or anti-anxiety drugs for a long period of time (6 months - 1 year) without any noticeable change in the symptoms those drugs where prescribed to treat, it might be time to work in tandem with a therapist that can honor the use of drugs while simultaneously holding you accountable to your personal ability to change circumstances and behaviors. I understand that complexities of each persons struggle with mental illness and do not mean to disrespect the use of drugs. The effort here is to reinforce the responsibility we all have in managing the illness that impacts our lives. Let’s talk insight, will and understanding, with or without pharmaceuticals. I can help. ✌🏼

I do not believe there is a person on the planet who does not get pleasure when they are considered “the right one” in a argument. Intellect and the ability to debate is a skill that is considered highly valuable irregardless of it being a noticeable dynamic within our specific family of origin. From the advent of modern civilization one of the greatest drivers of advancement in thought and technology has been both formal and informal debate. Gas has been thrown on the fire of this thirst for debate with the advent of social media algorithims delivering perfectly tailored villains anytime we want. A skill that we can practice when we find ourselves consumed with drive for being “right”; whether it be an argument with a partner, a twitter battle with whoever or upcoming holiday meal powder-keg of conflict, is to not even try to be considered right and to not consider your opposition wrong. Rather, if we are able to focus on the logical consequences of their and/or our behavior we are given a foundation for empathy and connection that might breed the understanding we so desperately want from our villains, family, partners and peers. This shift towards letting go of “right and wrong” also applies to our own personal shame. We free up so much more possibility to change the behaviors we wish to manage if we identify the consequences of that behavior and let go of the definition of said behavior as “good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy”. Lets’s talk conflict, shame and letting go of being right all the time. I could be wrong, but I believe I can help.✌🏼

Selfish behavior is typically assumed as villainous and rude behavior. Sure, this is true about certain types of selfishness that disrespectfully disregard how one’s behavior might impact another individual or larger group. Further evidence of our knee-jerk repulsion to perceived selfishness is how we weaponize the identification of selfish behavior in another by throwing a negative judgmental tone when delivering the accusation “You are being selfish!” or a command of “Stop being selfish!”. I recently had the chance to listen to new book where he outlines how certain selfish behavior is actually a hallmark of a psychologically healthy and adaptive person. SBK has developed a “Healthy Selfishness Scale” (available on his website) for us to assess where we fall on this paradoxically understood characteristic. No one reading this (or writing this) is an ideal selfless person who always thinks of others first, we need regular selfish behavior to allow maintain the bandwidth to be selfless when truly helpful and/or necessary. The call to action is to complete the Healthy Selfishness Scale and reflect on the potential for more righteous selfishness in your life. You deserve it, I can help. ✌🏼

There is nothing necessarily wrong or evil about efforts to improve certain aspects of ourselves. Being able to identify areas for growth in the ways we think, behave, feel and manage health can be tremendously useful. However, none of these efforts to self-improve will be sustainable without a large helping of regularly practiced self-acceptance. The idea is that most of our desires for self-improvement are sparked by comparisons to others who have different genetics, upbringings, support systems and temperaments. We therefore get frustrated with our efforts to self-improve because we are trying to cram and square peg into a round hole. Finding a give and take between efforts to strive towards realistic avenues of improvement and reinforcing a genuine acceptance and appreciation of the genuine person you are in the moment creates a much more sustainable engine for growth and development over a lifetime. If forced to choose between improvement an acceptance, I think the latter beats any gains of the former. Good this is, you do not have to choose between the two and, I can help. ✌🏼

We all live in a world where many things go under the process of gamification. We are inundated with constant comparisons and the idea that there are levels to life. If you choose to walk into this game of status seeking and external validation unaware you may fall into some difficult circumstances. Life is not a video game where you unlock a new level when you get a “real job”, graduate college, get married, start a family, buy a house, make 6 figures or have a salary with benefits. A life well lived does not have to be a life well achieved, rather it can be an ongoing forward and backward process. No levels, no final bosses, no power ups and no extra lives. The destination model of happiness is sold to us by a society ignorant to the possibility we all have to accept what is radically ours and learn to manage a mindset that allows for the complexity and chaos inherent to everyone’s experience. Let’s talk stepping away from the game and moving courageously into the chaotic process, I can help. ✌🏼

There are many useful insights within the theory of evolutionary psychology. It can be liberating when faced with frustrating thought patterns and behaviors to realize that our brains evolved in certain environments that selected for particular behaviors and mindsets. An issue that I hear consistently in the office is the struggle that of wanting to “not spend so much money on stupid things” or have a more financially sound life. To address this struggle we must first acknowledge that our minds have been programmed over evolution to desire and not appreciate. For reasons related to mate selection and providing safety for our tribe, we are hardwired to want. Knowing this allows for an awareness of our ability to upgrade that programming with a new software of practiced appreciation. By learning to pay attention to the impulse to purchase or have we are met with a opportunity to replace that purchase with an investment in gratitude for what it is we already own, both material and intangible. This practice of less material makes room for a meaningful lifestyle and moves us in the direction of simplicity that will always afford us more peace. Let’s talk wants and needs, I can help. ✌🏼

No one comes into a counseling experience wanting to stay the same. The desire for change is usually the engine that drives us to the couch. Where that desire for change get tested is with the demand for practice. There is no change without the repetition of a new behavior and consistent action based on the awareness gained in therapy. It’s not about a light switch moment where the new behavior becomes the norm overnight, practice always takes time. Being kind to yourself when the practice falls off and recommitting is the formula that leads to incremental change with the compliment of conditioned self-compassion skills gained the way. Let’s talk practice, I can help. ✌🏼

You would be hard pressed to find someone interested in health and wellness who has not heard about the new wave of excitement surrounding the therapeutic use of psychedelics. It has become the most talked about intervention in our field and although it deserves the excitement it also deserves a significant amount of education. My work as an integrative therapist and clinical training in Psychedelic Assisted Psychotherapy affords me insight into the powerful impact that clinical use of substances like psilocybin, ketamine, M**A and L*D can have on the mind and body. I have had the honor of being placed he therapist directory for MAPS and the Psychedelic Support Network for years and get many emails asking about how psychedelics can help heal trauma, depression and anxiety. It is paramount to stress that the use of psychedelics is NOT for everyone, most of these substances are currently illegal to acquire and their unsupported use can be very dangerous in how they potentially increase the mental health pathology many claim they miraculously cure. With that being said my clinical work with Ketamine Assisted Therapy and Integration work for those having had experiences of their own outside of my office continues to show me that their use is valuable and can expedite insights and assist in the healing of treatment resistant depression and substance abuse. I am contracted with which is the premier clinic in Florida for the infusion of Ketamine in a safe, ethical, legal and therapeutic environment. If you should be so inclined to explore the therapeutic use of psychedelics I stress the importance of finding as clinician like myself who has formal training and experience to assist in the legal application of their use into your healing journey. One of my trainers calls psychedelics “benevolent disrupters” and I think there is no better and poetic way to describe their benefit. Let’s talk risk reduction integration and potential for growth, I can help. ✌🏼

In what can be a hyperfocus on health in our society, overwhelm and confusion are inevitable. Everyone from liscensed health professionals, armchair gurus to well intentioned coaches have their opinions on what makes someone healthy and well. We can approach a challenge by beginning to define these concepts for ourselves, knowing that doing so requires regular exposure to many opinions from voices your feel have an authority. Welcome in the idea that there is no right to wrong definition of health, just ones that work or do not work for you. Furthermore, we do ourselves a service by having these definitions of health be as simple as possible. So here comes just another opinionated definition; a healthy mind is an editing mind. A healthy mind is not one that only thinks about the positive or is never irrational or never makes mistakes of projection and never reacts emotionally. Rather, a healthy mind acts as a benevolent teacher grading a term paper, editing thoughts from a place of distance and consideration. Sometimes the mind gets too wordy, sometimes to attached, at times too emotional or too rational and yet it is always a work in progress. The mind is a live document that both deserves and requires a compassionate editor who considers the past, connects to the present and peppers in necessary preparation for the future. If this definition works for you let’s drop the red pen and begin to develop a kind editing style, for your “health”. I can help ✌🏼

What I mean my “the work” here is the work of therapeutic exploration and committed change. Therapy provides us with the opportunity to begin taking a radically honest inventory by looking into the multigenerational impact of our families behavior and both the implied and explicit messages held within. This work is hard to do and made even harder when the members of your immediate and extended family continue to operate with avoidance and ignorance. As unfortunate as a situation like that might be I assure you that there is a massive benefit to you and you alone being the only one who is able to look at things with eyes wide open. This work allows us to learn to accept our responsibility within the dynamics and our agency to accept the limitations of our families ability to grow and change. Even if we are only ones to change, that shift in awareness and behavior can be a linchpin that leads to a felt sense of safety within the chaos and satisfaction within the struggle. Lets talk doing this work, I can help. ✌🏼

Truth is many of the concepts in therapy can be very cheesy, kinda corny and a bit crunchy. Concepts like self-love, genuine journaling, affirmations, non-violent communication skills, purpose and story telling are but a few of the useful tools in a therapeutic process that many client cringe heavily towards when they are introduced. A lot of us are resistant to the softer side of healing and growth and my experience time and time gain proves that this resistance gets in the way of the desire for satisfying change. This is not to say that all of therapy is a sentimental cringe fest but, it is to assert that soft sentiment and corny cheesy concepts are often needed to breakthrough towards new ways of being a powerful healing. So, I challenge you to welcome a figurative plate of corny, cheesy nachos into your process, it’ll taste good if you give it a try. Lets talk nachos, I can help. ✌🏼

Although it might not be a comforting phrase to read for everyone, “come home” or the feeling of coming home can be very reassuring. The coming home feeling is something that can be created within yourself with a practice of mindful self compassion. For many of us, especially those with traumatic histories, we are precluded from feeling safe within our bodies and minds and therefore we constantly look for distraction from feelings of unease. This perpetual distraction keeps us from knowing the wisdom we hold just by actively listening to the thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations in our experience. Much like anything worthwhile the practice of coming home to yourself requires effort and consistently. To have access to the reassurance of safety within your own body and mind is something we all deserve. Let’s talk home base, I can help. ✌🏼