Sietze Vanderheide, Psy.D., J.D.

Eudemonia

Living Life Well

Are you living the life you want?

Are you living your life to the fullest?

Living life well means living your life to its fullest potential.  When you are living life well, you own and appreciate yourself and the choices you have made.  You have balance in your emotional and intellectual life and you meaningfully connect to people around you.

Making good choices is critical to living life well.  Good choices are decisions that stand the test of time and add well-being to your life throughout the years ahead.

Emotional and intellectual balance allows you to utilize your feelings and to create meaning for your life.  This psychological balance allows you to learn and grow from all of life's events.

Meaningful connection to the people in your life includes  feeling empathically tied to them.  This empathy is a feeling of being understood by people and in turn you feel like you are able to understand others.  Through meaningful connection you can appreciate the role that all of us play in each other's lives.

Self-awareness, emotional and intellectual balance, and an appreciation of the people in your life are the foundation-stones of a life well lived.

Emotional health is the key to living life well.   Stress, depression, anxiety, family conflict, financial difficulties are  all indications that life is not being lived well.  Often these symptoms come to take over one?s life and self image.  These problems are symptoms, they are not a person's life or identity.

Through wrestling with the questions and challenges of life, you can begin to truly live life well.

In my work I aim to help people develop the resources needed to live life well.  My goal is to help individuals live the best life they are capable of living.

Making Choices

Making good choices is easy when we are of one mind and the path is clear.  Choices are difficult where the path is not clear and our motivations are conflicted. 

Choices are difficult when one part of us want to say yes and another part wants to say no.  Inner conflict indicates that the choice we are dealing with touch on important and opposing needs.  Understanding our motivations and how to get our needs satisfied is an essential first step towards making a difficult choice.

Often the inner conflict that arise in the face of difficult choice leaves us with a feeling of being stuck.  Feeling stuck reflects a lack of understanding one's own inner conflicts.  Often our stuckness is experienced as feelings of fear or guilt and shame about how others may respond. 

Self-awareness is critical to gaining a clear perspective on how to make a choice This includes the ability to own and understand ones strengths and weaknesses as well as to seek out advice and support to deal with the weakness.  Being in touch with the conflicted feelings can help to clarify the choices.  Being cut off from one or more emotional aspects of the choice can cloud the way to making a good choice.  Denial of your feelings hardly ever helps to make a good choice.

Thinking clearly about a problem can help us discriminate between the multiple aspects of making a choice.  Knowing  all the facts and understanding the consequences of making a choice is essential to making a choice that remains a good choice into the future.

In my work as an attorney and as a psychologist I assist people in understanding the conflicts about making a choice and the consequences of making a choice.

Emotional Health

Living life well requires emotional health.  Emotions are critical to our ability to understand our needs and to strive towards getting those needs satisfied.  When our emotional life is damaged or overwhelmed, we are unable to use our feelings to help us grow and change.

Depression, anxiety, substance abuse, phobias, insecurities, apathy, are all signs that our emotional systems are derailed.  Getting our emotions on track is critical to being able to live life well.

Emotional dysregulation can arise from many sources including abuse and trauma or a history emotional neglect.  However, repairing one's emotional systems is a process that occurs in the here-and-now of a psychotherapeutic relationship. 

In Psychotherapy, you are able to learn about what may or may not have contributed to your emotional upsets and to repair those injurers.  One aspect of the repair occurs through the relationship developed with the psychotherapist.  The trust and safety of the relationship allows you to increase you ability to tolerate and work through painful emotions.  This process is not magical, rather the relationship decreases the distress you feel and the decreased distress allows you to increase your tolerance for your emotions.

An emotional dysfunction is analogous to having an emotional allergy.  Certain feelings trigger an allergic response.  This response can be depression, shame, fear, anxiety, or just plain misery.  The allergic response prevents you from interpreting the emotional signals you are receiving.  Psychotherapy helps reduce this allergic emotional response and allows you to once again be guided by your feelings.

As a clinical psychologist, I asset people in being able to tolerate their emotions thereby allowing them to move beyond depression and anxiety and into healthy emotional life. 

Resolving Conflicts

Living life well includes being able to resolve conflicts in ways that are growth producing and not destructive.  Conflict is a natural part of life.  Each of us strives to satisfy our needs and this may result in conflict with others who are on a different path.  In the course of a relationship, people change and major differences leading to conflict may arise. 

Resolving conflicts in a healthy way requires collaboration.  Collaboration does not mean that everyone gets along or that each participant will get the resolution they desire.  Rather, collaborations is a way to resolve conflict in the least destructive manner possible.

The essential element for collaborative conflict resolution is meaningful dialogue between the disputants.  Dialogue requires discourse and empathy.  Discourse arises where individuals are engaged with each other and they have a shared interest or value that allows them to respectfully work together.  The shared interest can be general values or something as specific as children or family ties.  Empathy results when each participant has some understanding of the other participant?s situation, feelings, and sensibilities.  Empathy is not sympathy or liking the other person.  Empathy is an emotional and intellectual understanding of where the other person is coming from.

Conflict resolutions through dialogue that is discursive and empathic can help individuals attain resolution of disputes in a way that allows all the participants to move forward without feeling taken advantage of or manipulated.

In my work as an clinical psychologist or as an attorney,  I foster an environment that allows for healthy conflict resolution through dialogue.

Effective Emotional Communication

Living life well requires the ability to effectively communicate one's thoughts, needs, feelings, and desires.  Effective communication is emotional communication.  Being able to understand the emotional communication of others is vital to being able to effectively communicate with them.

When there is heightened emotional communication it can become difficult to remain focused and centered.  One's own emotions as well as the emotions of the other participants can obscure subtle and important aspects of  situation.  At such times, we are only aware of the raw emotional expression and we may not be able to effectively deal with the person or the situation.

Effective emotional communication involves expressing your intent and understanding the intent of the other participants.  This requires skills in utilizing empathy and skills in how to speak and act during an emotional exchange with another person. 

Being able to communicate effectively is essential to not only a healthy family life, but also a successful professional life.  All professionals must be able to work with people in various states of emotional distress.   Physicians, attorneys, and psychotherapists must all learn how to effectively use emotional communication.

I help people learn to effectively use emotional communication through my writing, teaching, training, and workshops.