Dr Paul Jenkins

Jan 13

6 Strategies To Control My Temper With My Child

By DrPaul M-Power

People Before Problems Relationships Before Rules Values Before Valuables Making Memories Before Messes Babies Before Business Humor Before Hassle Paul: It’s not the first time we’ve taken this one on, Vicki. How often does this come up for us? Vicki: All the time, I think. Paul: We get requests. We get comments. We get people asking all the time “How do I control my temper?” Vicki: Yes. Because parenting is such an emotionally charged and important thing we do and so when we lose our temper, well, nobody really wants to do that. They don’t want to be the parent with a bad temper. So, let’s give parents some steps. Paul: People before problems. One of my colleagues told me recently, “Paul, every problem that we face is a problem with thinking,” Vicki: Okay. Paul: Now, he’s a psychologist so of course he’s going to go that direction. But you…

Jan 05

Love0

How To Help A Teenager With Anxiety

By DrPaul M-Power

Paul: Vicki, we’ve had a lot of parents asking us how to help a teenager with anxiety. So, let’s jump into that today. We’ve done a number of videos on our channel at Live On Purpose TV on YouTube about anxiety and what causes it. The short version, your brain loves you. It’s true. Your brain does not want you to be in danger or to experience any kind of threat because well that wouldn’t be good for your brain. So, it tries to take care of you. And the way that it does that is through the fight-or-flight response. This fight-or-flight response is what we subjectively experience as anxiety. It’s where the feelings come from. This is a normal thing that your brain does. And it happens to everybody. Kids, teenagers, adults, everybody has this mechanism built-in. So, maybe the first thing is let’s normalize the experience a little…

Jan 04

Love0

How to Parent a Child with ADHD

By DrPaul M-Power

ADHD tends to be a very complicated constellation of symptoms. There’s no blood test that we can give to examine whether your child has ADHD. It’s really a diagnosis that is based on symptoms and what we observe in children. The funny thing is when you look through the system list, all of them are things that most children do at least occasionally to some level. So, when we make a diagnosis of ADHD, it’s because many of these symptoms are appearing at a level that is higher than we would expect from most kids. Having said that, I think we over diagnose of it in our society, and there are cases that we miss. But either way it’s a challenging constellation of behaviors. Now, this article is not intended to be diagnostic. If you are a parent of a child with ADHD or if you suspect that or if…

Jan 03

Love0

How to Deal With Toxic Family Members

By DrPaul M-Power

Toxic. That brings to mind poisonous, right? Time to call poison control? I went on the internet and did a little search for how to deal with poison or toxin. As we talk about toxic family members, I think that there’s some overlap here that might be helpful. 3 different strategies or approaches. So, let’s just say that you’ve been exposed to something toxic. Sometimes, when we’re out hiking we might brush up against some stinging nettle or some poison ivy. Those are toxic plants and they cause a sting. At this first level of intervention, let’s talk about how to rinse, cleanse and dilute or diffuse. This is what you would want to do if you run across some stinging nettle. For example, you want to rinse it off or somehow cleanse the exposed area to minimize the initial effects of the toxic exposure. In a relationship setting, the…

Jan 02

Love0

Anger Management For Mothers

By DrPaul M-Power

Hey moms, you probably never feel angry at your kids, do you? Of course you do and there is nothing wrong with you. There are ways to understand and manage the anger. Let’s put this in a top ten list, it will help us put some organization around it. Number 10 is a basic understanding of anger. What is anger and how does it work inside of the human psyche and in interactions with other people? The quick version is our brain is designed to watch out for and monitor and pick up on threat. Anything that threatens us, kicks us into fight-or-flight mode. Can you see how that relates to anger because usually with anger it’s a fight mode of taking on a threat. This is not helpful when we are talking about parenting and being a mom because if you are fighting the problem gets bigger. Understand how…

Dec 31

Love0

How To Forgive Yourself For Hurting Someone

By DrPaul M-Power

As a professional psychologist, I work with people all the time on how to forgive others. Today, is a twist on that, how to forgive yourself for hurting someone. I think the first thing that you want to do, get good at forgiveness. In general, I mean. This is a tricky subject especially if we don’t fully understand what it is. Forgiveness is not saying that what happened was okay. You know, we kind of learned that as kids, right? “Oh, it’s okay.” No, it’s not. It’s not okay to hurt people. So, don’t say that it is. This makes it easier to forgive actually because you aren’t lying. Forgiveness is not letting someone off the hook for their misdeeds. It’s not eliminating the consequences of those misdeeds. Forgiveness is not allowing someone to continue hurting you. So, as I throw out a few of these things that forgiveness is…

Dec 28

Love0

How To Handle An Interfering Mother In Law

By DrPaul M-Power

Do you ever wonder where all of the mother-in-law jokes and all the mother-in-law stories come from? It’s because people actually have these experiences. You know what, though? Most people don’t want to be that person. That’s going to be really important as we come back to how to handle it in just a little bit. First, let’s review our 5 key relationships. Now, this is Dr. Paul’s opinion, okay? Over almost 3 decades of clinical experience working with people just like you I’ve come to this conclusion about relationships. There are 5 key relationships. In this order: Number 1, your Creator. I’m not here as your spiritual guide or as your ecclesiastical leader. I’m just acknowledging that it’s really important for us as human beings to come to some sense of where we came from. Our source. Our Creator. Whatever that is for you, connect with that. That’s your…

Dec 27

Love0

Ending Nighttime Battles

By DrPaul M-Power

The top 10 ways to stop the bedtime battles – number 10 is lay off the caffeine and the sugar. That seems obvious, doesn’t it? It can be really challenging but especially after about noon or 2, you really don’t want to introduce any caffeine into their diets. Really, we want to limit the caffeine intake anyway and kids become very fond of things like sodas and things that might have a high caffeine content. The research of Stanford University suggests that caffeine is one of the top 3 culprits for disturbing sleep. Number 9 on our countdown is blue light, like the kind of light that emanates from electronic screens. Tablets, laptops, and televisions are very high in blue light content and the science behind this is that blue light as opposed to other parts of the spectrum, trigger the arousal sequence of our brain. It’s like when the…

Dec 26

Love0

My Child Doesn’t Want To Go To School

By DrPaul M-Power

Doc, helped me, my child doesn’t want to go to school. I’ve heard it from other parents too. We want to talk more about principle than specific techniques. I believe if you have the right principles down, that’s going to help you come up with the right application or the techniques to support those principles. So, principle number 1 is – diagnosis before treatment. Sounds like an appropriate thing for the doc to say, right? We have to appropriately diagnose what’s going on before the treatment makes any sense. What if you were to go to the eye doctor and you said, “Doc, I can’t see very well.” And he says, “Oh here, try these and he takes his own glasses off and hands them to you. No, that’s not going to work because he needs to diagnose what’s going on with your eyes and then treat appropriately to that…

Dec 24

Love0

Aging or Ageless

By DrPaul M-Power

I just had a conversation with one of my clients that I really wanted to share with you. You know how we make a big deal about exercise and getting enough sleep and eating a balanced diet because we are taking care of our body? Her comment to me today was, “I feel better emotionally when I’m exercising.” It reminded me of an experience I had a couple of years ago with Ron Zeller. Ron is the author of Aging or Ageless. He is a world-class leadership expert. I got a chance to interview Ron just a few months before he passed away from cancer and this wasn’t the first time he had cancer. He had lots of experience dealing with the body and health. As I was going into his home to interview him Ron said to me, “Paulie,” and he is the only person on the planet that…

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