Sara Stanizai
Benefits of Choosing a Neurodivergent Therapist

When it comes to your mental health, the importance of finding the right therapist cannot be overstated. Finding someone who gets your life and empathizes with your goals can be tricky if your life doesn’t look mainstream, which is the case for most of our neurodivergent clients. Plus, you deserve excellent clinical care! A shortcut to finding a therapist that is a great fit is looking for neurodivergent affirming therapists, who are often therapists who are neurodivergent themselves. Neurodivergent therapists bring a unique perspective to the therapeutic relationship, offering a myriad of benefits for both neurodivergent and neurotypical clients.

Benefits of Choosing a Neurodivergent Therapist
Sara Stanizai
Embracing Self-Discovery in Neurodiversity

Getting to know yourself and learning how your brain works can be a tricky journey, especially when it comes to neurodivergent experiences like ADHD. There is so much information online, but it’s hard to tell what’s a trustworthy source, and some sources seem to directly contradict others, making it quickly overwhelming. If you find yourself wondering, "How do I know if I have ADHD? Do I need to see a professional or can I diagnose myself?" this post is for you, written from a neurodiversity-affirming perspective.

Embracing Self-Discovery in Neurodiversity
Sara Stanizai
Breaking the Doom Spending Cycle

It’s 2024- even on a good day, there’s a lot to feel anxious about. There’s the big picture: global warming, pandemic, human rights violations, inflation, uncertain job futures- and that’s not even considering individual stressors like difficult jobs or strained relationships.

We all feel anxiety sometimes and we all have different ways to cope with it. For some of us, we like to get a little spendy: enter doom spending. Whether it's impulsively buying items online or constantly seeking comfort in retail therapy, doom spending can become a harmful coping mechanism. In this post, we'll explore the connection between anxiety and doom spending, and more importantly, discuss healthy coping strategies to break free from this cycle.

Breaking the Doom Spending Cycle
Sara Stanizai
Exploring Stimming in Adults: Understanding, ...

Stimming, short for self-stimulatory behavior, is a term commonly associated with neurodivergent individuals, including ADHD and autistic adults.

But what is it, actually? And- does it serve a purpose?


By de-pathologizing and normalizing stimming, we can better understand its benefits for the nervous system and overall mental health. It’s super important to support/encourage stimming for those who find it helpful, and explore how affirming therapists can support ADHD adults in various aspects of their lives.

Exploring Stimming in Adults: Understanding, Normalizing, and Supporting Neurodivergence
Sara Stanizai
Managing Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria in Your ...

You may be familiar with the term Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD). It’s not gender dysphoria or being a highly sensitive person. If you spend any time on mental health channels on social media, you know these words can all start to sound the same.

What is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria?

Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) is an emotional response to the perception of rejection or criticism, which can be more intense for individuals with ADHD or certain neurodivergent traits.

It goes without saying, then, that RSD can have a huge impact on relationships. It can manifest as hypersensitivity, fear of abandonment, and emotional volatility. Unfortunately, these can easily be confused with attachment issues, personality disorders, even abuse. It is crucial for partners to recognize that RSD is not a character flaw but a neurobiological response.

Rejection sensitive dysphoria can significantly impact relationships, causing emotional turmoil and strained connections. However, with understanding, communication, and a few proactive strategies, managing RSD within your relationship is possible.

Managing Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria in Your Relationship

anxiety

Harnessing the Power of the Vagus Nerve: 7 Effective Ways to Support Your Mental Health

Harnessing the Power of the Vagus Nerve: 7 Effective Ways to Support Your Mental Health

In my quest to manage my mental health after an extremely stressful few years (who’s with me?) I’ve noticed everyone keeps talking about the vagus nerve. As the longest cranial nerve in the body, it forms a vital connection between the brain and various organs, including the heart, lungs, and digestive system.

It’s one of those things I learned about in grad school, as well as at several therapist trainings over the years. But like most things, I didn’t start paying close attention until it affected me. Here’s what I’ve learned, I hope it helps you too.

REST AND DIGEST: The Opposite of Fight or Flight

By stimulating the vagus nerve, we can enhance our vagal tone, which is crucial for supporting our mental health.

Increasing your vagal tone activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and having higher vagal tone means that your body can relax faster after stress.

If you think of stress management in terms of cultivating the opposite of fight or flight, you’ll understand why things that promote our body to rest and digest will help you not only reduce stress, but bounce back from stressful situations more easily.

How Does the Vagus Nerve Help Anxiety?

I’m glad you asked! Here are seven ways to improve your mental health by activating your vagus nerve.

Why Do I Feel Anxious For No Reason?

Why Do I Feel Anxious For No Reason?

If you notice you keep telling yourself what you “should be doing” to manage your mental health, take an honest inventory of what you’re actually doing. Many times, people say they are “working on it” but can’t name one or two things they are actually doing. This is like taking a day off but spending it worried about work: It’s not really rest!

Try a few of the things on this list, or come up with your own. There isn’t a right or wrong way, it’s just the way that works for you. But if you’re running out of ideas, talking to a trained mental health professional can help.

Perfectionism is Not Polite

Perfectionism is Not Polite

It’s natural and a sign of high self esteem to want to improve yourself. The main difference between wanting to do better and wanting to do the BEST is how you view mistakes, shortcomings, or flaws. The person striving for improvement sees their mistakes as a natural part of the process, not as a sign of failure. The perfectionist sees their flaws as cancelling out any good they have done.

The pandemic has burdened a lot of our social circles from seeing each other as often as we did in the past.

This may not be the popular opinion, but a lot of us are fine with that. For many people, less emphasis on socializing has been a relief.

Introverts, people with social anxiety, busy parents, people paying down credit card debt. A bunch of us were glad to not have to look for parking every weekend.

However, you may have been feeling lonely and isolated this whole time. And it may not be just because of the pandemic. Perhaps something deeper is at play?

If you spend so long coming up with the right thing to say that you delay interacting with anyone, your problem could actually be perfectionism. This, in fact, is great news!

While we can’t control the ebbs and flows of the world outside, we can always control how we choose to face it. Let’s talk about why overcoming your perfectionism could be the key to several ongoing problems in your life.

Anxiety After Social Distancing

Anxiety After Social Distancing

It’s OK if you’re not ready to “go back to how things were.”

As the weather warms up for summer and COVID fatigue reduces public inhibitions, many places are returning to “normal”: Kicking masks, social distancing, and isolation to the curb.

If you spent the past two years carefully avoiding face-to-face interactions with people outside your bubble, it can be pretty jarring.

You may be thinking, “What did I use to wear to work?” or “Were awkward silences after someone finishes speaking this long before?”

You might be painfully aware of people sharing drinks while watching your favorite re-runs.

And heaven help the person who coughs in public.

You’ve adjusted to an almost always virtual world, so returning to an in-person world can be anxiety-inducing.

Fret not—you’re not alone, and there are things you can do to make the transition easier.

Are Childhood Trauma and Anxiety Connected?

Are Childhood Trauma and Anxiety Connected?

You’ve been feeling anxious lately, but you know you don’t have any of the telltale symptoms of an extreme anxiety disorder, like PTSD. We know from studying PTSD that feelings of anxiety can develop because of childhood trauma. Even the classic depiction of it involves being so bogged down by anxiety from a trigger that it mentally places you right back in your traumatic past.

But what about the anxiety that doesn’t seem connected to a specific event? The kind you can’t really put your finger on? You may ask yourself: do I have any underlying trauma that’s making me anxious? Let’s talk about the connection between childhood trauma and anxiety.

What is Grounding and How Does it Help with Anxiety and Trauma?

What is Grounding and How Does it Help with Anxiety and Trauma?

If you struggle with anxiety, then you know first-hand how consuming your anxious thoughts can be. You may be totally fine one moment, minding your own business, when your brain suddenly attacks with an onslaught of anxious thoughts racing around in wild patterns- which can be totally debilitating. Anxiety is often hard to explain to others, extremely frustrating, and the unpredictability can be especially rough.

So much of anxiety and trauma is related to our experiences of the past and our worries about the future.

If you have experienced a particularly traumatic event, you can be triggered by flashbacks, memories, and reminders of the trauma, which can cause intense feelings of anxiety. This can also look like fear and worry about that event happening again or dealing with an “anniversary” of when it happened.

Grounding techniques are an incredible way to help reduce the impact of those messy icky anxious feelings in the moment.

Unfortunately, anxiety happens. Those messy feelings? Yeah, they’re gonna happen too. And as much as we want to get rid of them and feel “100% healed,” life just doesn’t work that way. While grounding isn’t a way to erase these memories or experiences, it can be a way to have them feel less intense in the moment, which will help you build resilience over time.

While grounding isn’t a cure for anxiety, it’s a useful technique to bust out when the hardest moments happen. Instead of drowning in your anxious thoughts, grounding can help bring you back to reality. Here’s how it works.

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Why High Achievers Avoid Therapy (and why they shouldn't)

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Why High Achievers Avoid Therapy (and why they shouldn't)

If you’ve been a high-achiever for most of your life, you’ve gotten used to chasing - and finding - success. It’s not an accident that you’ve exceeded in academics, your social life, and in your career. Sure, this drive often comes from a deep desire to be liked and to compensate for deficits (emotional or otherwise) from your childhood. But who wants to talk about that?

We do!

When you’re busy juggling a career, relationships, hobbies, and a social life, it’s easy to ignore emotional or mental health issues. You might not even notice there are issues to avoid in first place. Everything is fine as long as I keep saying it is, right? This is what we in the biz call super-avoidance. (No one calls it that.)

Self-described “alphas” often get that way by ruthlessly prioritizing. And therapy might not be the highest priority on your list. If everything is fine, why rock a steady boat?

While this isn’t always the case, sometimes that very success that we are so proud of, comes at the price of our mental health. What types of emotions and experiences have you given up in order to meet arbitrary milestones, to meet that long-fetishized muse named productivity, or to please someone in authority?

As long as you continue to ignore your mental well-being, it will soon affect other aspects of your life. As they say, if you don’t make time for your wellness, you’ll have to make time for your illness.

The Coronavirus Pandemic is Kicking Your Anxiety into Overdrive

The Coronavirus Pandemic is Kicking Your Anxiety into Overdrive

Your routines have been turned upside down, and no one seems to have helpful information. Think about how you usually respond to change. Do you resist it? Lean into it? Insist on keeping things the way they were as long as possible? Or abandon anything familiar and wing it? Your response is this reality is just like that, times 100.

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What is Impostor Syndrome and How Does it Affect People Like Me?

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What is Impostor Syndrome and How Does it Affect People Like Me?

Impostor Syndrome or Impostor Phenomenon s a term coined by Pauline Clance in 1978, based on her research studies of high-achieving women in university settings. It is characterized by people of all genders who are successful by reasonable external measures but have not internalized this success. Instead, they report that their success was gained either by accident, an oversight by others, or that they are generally a fraud, waiting to be found out.

While it was originally researched among college women, newer research suggests that it is experienced across the board. Which makes sense - people of all genders experience specific societal expectations, and struggle with self-image.

One of our specialties is working with high-functioning anxiety, perfectionism, and impostor syndrome, particularly in bicultural, first-generation, and immigrant Americans. There is a great deal of impostor syndrome in people who are acculturating to mainstream American culture. It’s exacerbated by the tendency that these folks are often acculturating at a rate faster than their families of origin, so people often don’t have the same “back-up” and reinforcement from their families. In this way, they may feel like they are unintentionally “leaving their families behind.”

One of the side effects of balancing your family's values and expectations with your own, is that people often feel like a failure by one set of standards (their family's), despite being successful by another set of measures (mainstream culture). And their own values are caught somewhere in the middle.

When your primary support system (your family) doesn’t know how to validate your success, you can start to believe it doesn’t count. Many bicultural people feel that their families don’t understand their work, their lifestyle, or some aspect of their identity. Compliments can feel stale or superficial. Or you might just stop sharing good news altogether because the response is disappointing.

There are other effects of impostor syndrome as well. It can cause people to hold themselves back from their goals, it can cause social and relational isolation, and can exacerbate existing symptoms of anxiety or depression. There is that self-fulfilling prophecy of not believing you are worthy of advancement, so people stop offering you opportunities, thus reinforcing your feelings of inadequacy.

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How to Forge Your Own Path When You Feel Left Behind by Your Peers

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How to Forge Your Own Path When You Feel Left Behind by Your Peers

Does it feel like no matter what you do, you aren’t accomplishing as much as your peers?

If you’re feeling left behind, you aren’t alone. It’s common for everyone to experience this mindset from time to time, especially young people. Early adulthood is a time when many people are exploring their place in the world.

What we don't hear about as often, are the people who later in life are changing careers, exploring their sexuality, or moving to a new city -- without it being framed as a gimmick, an anomaly, or some Under the Tuscan Sun BS.

The truth is, any choice you make deliberately is the right choice for you.

Why Can't I Stop Procrastinating?

Why Can't I Stop Procrastinating?

Everyone has a hard time focusing occasionally. There are often legitimate reasons that underlie chronic procrastination.

For many people, it’s easy to chalk up procrastination to laziness. In reality, those who procrastinate often aren’t lazy at all. Instead, there are merely other problems that get in the way of completing tasks in a timely fashion. One way to figure out what causes your procrastination is to pay attention to the thoughts and feelings that come up when you avoid a task.

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When Self-Care Becomes Self-Sabotage

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When Self-Care Becomes Self-Sabotage

It can be hard to tell, but sometimes our “self-care” routines are bordering on self-sabotage, and they’re not good for us at all. While it is essential to treat yourself from time to time, and also create an environment that isn’t toxic and burning you out, it’s just as important to recognize when your habits start holding you back.

Everyday self-care routines can become harmful if they’re done too frequently, or for the wrong reasons.

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You Might Be a Perfectionist

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You Might Be a Perfectionist

It’s natural to want to succeed at the things you do. But when does striving for achievement become perfectionism?

Perfectionist tendencies are the combination of wanting to do our best, while simultaneously feeling like we never actually do.

Having high standards and wanting to pursue excellence can be helpful qualities. Without them, one could argue, everyone and everything would stay mediocre.

But this is different from perfectionism, which is less about an excellent result, and more hyperfocused on not making any mistakes or having flaws.

When perfectionists make mistakes, they feel like a complete failure, fixate on the negative, and have anxiety or depression over their perceived flaws.

When people with high standards make mistakes, they forgive themselves, see it as “part of the process,” learn from it, and are not deterred from their pursuit.

How can you tell which one you are?

What Your Therapist's Fee Says About Them

What Your Therapist's Fee Says About Them

If you can’t afford groceries because of your therapy bills, you’re seeing the wrong therapist.

I don’t care how much you like them, how chunky their jewelry is, or how hip their eyeglass frames are. If therapy is taking away too much from other parts of your life, you’re going to hate the process.

But therapy should be a little bit uncomfortable for you as the client.

An exchange of resources - time, money, energy - helps you both be accountable to the process. But what’s a fair price for that work?

A good therapist should be able to answer that question.

Adulting 101: Mental Health Needs for Young Adults

Adulting 101: Mental Health Needs for Young Adults

For some people, relationships have always been easy but they have never had a job or subject in school they enjoyed. For others, they’ve always known what they would do for work, but socially they feel like the perpetual outsider. And some people don’t feel like anything comes easy—what a stressful place to start in! 

If you’re a young adult and you feel like you’re struggling, you are most definitely not alone.

Three Ways You Might be Minimizing Your Trauma

Three Ways You Might be Minimizing Your Trauma

Trauma is any experience that overwhelms our ability to cope with it.

In other words, the deciding factor of whether an experience is traumatic or not, is whether it overwhelms your ability to cope with it.

The tricky part is that frequently, one way that we try to cope with traumatic events is to minimize them. That’s our brain trying not to be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the stress. This goes for events that overwhelm us physically, emotionally, or both.

Here are three signs that you might be minimizing your trauma, and thereby actually prolonging or intensifying its effects.

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Feeling Like a Fraud? How to Identify Impostor Syndrome

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Feeling Like a Fraud? How to Identify Impostor Syndrome

Many people can be socially awkward from time to time. It’s normal to experience periods of self-doubt. It’s natural (and healthy!) to second guess ourselves sometimes, too.

The important thing about impostor syndrome (rather than just regular anxiety or self-esteem issues) is that despite fears of being inadequate, you are wholly qualified to be doing what you’re doing.

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Add to Cart: What Are You Really Shopping For?

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Add to Cart: What Are You Really Shopping For?

Sometimes, your day just really sucks. So you re-do your most recent Postmates order, put your favorite Broad City episode on for the eighty millionth time, and open up ASOS to look at the new arrivals. Two hours later, you’ve spent all your grocery money for the week on the cute shoes you felt like you absolutely needed. (They sold out last time!)

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The Only One-Sided Relationship You Should Ever Have

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The Only One-Sided Relationship You Should Ever Have

If you’re reading this, chances are your relationships often feel one-sided, like you are the only one doing the heavy lifting, listening, connecting, reaching out, being supportive, while the other person just never seems to reciprocate.

Convenient to Long Beach and Seal Beach at:

4510 E Pacific Coast Hwy, #540, Long Beach, CA 90804

contact@prospecttherapy.com | (562) 704-4736