Anthony Botrus, LMFT

Appreciating Sorrow?: How Adversity Can Be A Path To Happiness By Anthony Botrus, LMFT Early 20th Century poet, Khalil Gibran, once wrote “Sadness is but a wall between two gardens.” Many readers might be puzzled about the meaning of this. How can you compare sadness to something so benign? Those of us who have struggled with a period of depression, adversity, or hopelessness might be able to see the profundity in these words. Like a garden, life can be full of beauty. It can be peaceful and satisfying, and we often believe that it should be this way all the time. And then...we walk right into a wall. The wall can be that turning point in life where we have lost that sense of peace. Beauty fades and we see nothing but the drab stone of obstacles that block our journey. Depression, anxiety, fear, and loss all give us the sense of despair and hopelessness. We can’t see the beauty of life, only the tragedy. When we become stuck in these uncomfortable emotions, they become ...

Positivity By Anthony Botrus, LMFT What does it mean to be “positive?” We often think of the idea of being positive in terms of it’s antonym, “negative.” To be negative is to focus on the worst aspects of a particular person, situation, or even life itself. People often have a tendency to gravitate towards a negative bias, and that can cause problems. We can become undesirable to those around us and drain the energy out of a room by constantly pointing out the bad and neglecting to recognize the good. We can also create a detrimental pattern of negative thinking that obscures how we analyze the world around us and makes us less happy. Since we often think of positivity as the opposite of negativity, we can rethink how we see and experience the world by getting into the habit of doing the exact opposite of the natural tendency of leaning toward a negativity bias. We can teach ourselves to correct the errors in our thinking by practicing pointing out the best, rather than the ...