Blog - Dr. Joan Rosenberg

Book Series 27: Conscious Vulnerability Part 2

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Do you make the conscience decision to be vulnerable? Conscious vulnerability is a vulnerability we choose to lean into. When we get serious about taking a personal, professional, or social risk, we open ourselves up to being hurt (laughed at, ridiculed, teased, or embarrassed). Think about public speaking, engaging in athletic competition, acting, singing, playing…

Book Series 25: How do we learn to tolerate frustration?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

When you are frustrated, do you react with a fight reaction or flight reaction? Physiologically, frustration is associated with high levels of arousal or activation of the acute stress response or the fight-or-flight system. The fight-or-flight reflex enables us to respond quickly to perceived life-threatening situations by either fighting off the threat or fleeing to…

Book Series 24: When You Feel Disappointed, Here Are A Few Distinctions to Consider

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Disappointment is experienced when we are faced with unmet needs, desires, and expectations. What does disappointment highlight? How do you handle disappointment? We hope, expect, or anticipate something positive yet we are met with an unwanted and unfavorable outcome. Disappointment highlights our helplessness and lack of control over certain situations. Disappointment is often contrasted with…

Book Series 23: Embarrassment: How we all wish we would have done that one thing differently

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

HOW TO GROW AS A PERSON AFTER SUFFERING EMBARRASSMENT This week we get to talk about embarrassment. Trust me, we’ve all had moments of extreme embarrassment, myself included! But as uncomfortable as it is, it’s an important feeling that helps you grow as a person. Embarrassment is an acknowledgment to ourselves and to others that…

Book Series 22: What Are The Two Primary Functions of Anger?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

How is anger a protective response? Welcome back! I hope you found some answers in last weeks topic of “Feeling Helpless”, and I’m glad that you are continuing with our discussions on the Eight Unpleasant Feelings. This week, we are going to talk about anger.Anger is a protective response. You need to have it available…

Book Series 21: How Does Feeling Helpless Motivate Change?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

How can feeling helpless motivate change? Helplessness is frequently tied to feeling small, powerless, and vulnerable and is often occurs when you are unable to have an impact or influence on an individual, event, or situation. It might leave you with a sense of being on edge or waiting for whatever is coming, which may…

Book Series 20: The Difference Between General Shame and Core Shame

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Did you know there are 2 types of shame? Just wanted to give you the heads up, this weeks topic is a bit heavy. However, you may learn something you didn’t know and hopefully it will be helpful to you.Let’s talk about shame. There is a parallel distinction between general shame, which serves a social…

Book Series 19: Sadness. How It Serves You

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Have you ever considered how sadness can serve you? Seems like an odd thing to say or contemplate. Sadness can be especially painful because it often brings up sad memories from the past, which can feel overwhelming. We associate it with situations caused by circumstances or people over whom we believe we have little impact…

Book Series 18: What Are Feelings For Anyway?

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Feelings are for a threefold purpose: protection, connection, and creativity. When you feel safe and secure, both alone and with others, your mental, emotional, and physical resources are not required for protection or basic survival needs. At this point, your feelings are available for connection and creativity, often in the form of relationships, risk-taking, and…

How Parents Effect How We Handle Feelings

Book Series 17: How Parents Influence How We Handle Feelings

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

How Our Parents Effect How We Handle Feelings Did you know that challenges in facing difficult feelings generally start in childhood. (To a lesser degree, they can begin with very painful events experienced in adulthood.) There is an extensive body of research on how infants and children bond with parents or caretakers that describes the…

Book Series 16: Lingering Feelings

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

LET’S TALK ABOUT LINGERING FEELINGS I hope you are enjoying my weekly emails, covering ‘90 Seconds To A Life You Love‘. If you’ve finished the book, these weekly reminders can be really helpful! For those of you who have not purchased the book yet, remember the weekly ‘chats’ so to speak are only a small…

Book Series 15: Riding The Wave

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Experience The Wave At the end of last week’s discussion, I suggested that the next time your feelings emerge, pay attention. Take a moment, breathe, and really notice what is taking place inside of you on a physiological level. Experience the wave. Let’s talk about ‘the wave’. Neuroscientist and author Jill Bolte-Taylor describes when an…

How to move through and experience emotions

Book Series 14: How To Experience and Move Through Your Emotions

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

We all love ‘how to’ lists. It feeds our go to need to get things done quick. Working through our emotions to create a better life is a life long ‘How To’. However, knowing that each one of our emotions can be addressed in one or more ‘90 Second’ waves is not just a ‘thing’…

Book Series 13: How Is Vulnerability Your Greatest Emotional Strength

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Choosing vulnerability means you can tolerate the other seven feelings. That is what it takes. I believe that we are at our greatest emotional strength when we make the choice to be vulnerable. When you know that the most likely unwanted outcome of being vulnerable (assuming that the outcome is not success) is that you…

Book Series 12: Are You An Emotional Flatline?

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Do You Address Emotions Like Dr. Spock? Because of the intensity and overwhelming nature of unpleasant feelings, many of my clients have expressed a desire to be a bit more like Star Trek’s Dr. Spock, moving through life in a robotic and unfeeling manner. While this can certainly seem appealing when we think of what…

Book Series 11: Do Your Feelings Come Up or Come Down?

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Heartfelt, Gut Feeling or Gut Instinct … Is it science? Did you know that the terms “heartfelt”, “gut feeling” or your “gut instinct” are grounded in science? Our bodies contain vast amounts of information – far more than most of us realize and the brain and body constantly feed information back and forth from the…

Book Series 10:Your Sixth Sense – Increasing Self-Attunement

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

The first step of the Rosenberg Reset is intended to help you stay aware of and connected to your experience (“knowing what you know”) as opposed to distracting from and avoiding your experience (“trying not to know what you know”). Knowing what you know necessitates self-awareness and self-attunement, which leads to greater emotional strength and…

Book Series 9: The Rosenberg Reset – One Choice

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Let’s talk about the ‘ROSENBERG RESET’ and the first of the 3 steps – One Choice. The Rosenberg Reset is a strategy that enables people to more fully lean into those unpleasant emotions. It is one simple formula. You make the decision to allow yourself to fully feel your feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations. It…

Book Series 8: The Rosenberg Reset – Coping with life’s challenges in healthy ways

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Let’s talk about the ‘ROSENBERG RESET’ and learning to cope with life’s challenges in healthy ways. While working at the UCLA student-counseling center 25 years ago, I drew a diagram that became my blueprint for counseling clients. I can look back now and recognize that this drawing marked the beginning of the Rosenberg Reset. Essentially,…

Book Series 7: Asking for Help & Relying On Others

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Let’s talk about ‘asking for help and relying on others’ this week. Being resourceful is the second defining element of emotional strength. Particularly important in being resourceful is having the ability to depend on others. It involves being comfortable with your need for both independence and dependence, as well as your feelings associated with both.…

Book Series 6: Feeling Capable – Relying on Yourself

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Let’s talk about ‘relying on yourself’ this week. You might be thinking ‘I do that every day Dr. Joan!”. Let me be clear … if you are avoiding unpleasant feelings, that is NOT relying on yourself. In my tens of thousands of hours as a therapist and studying how I could help clients deal with…

Book Series 5: Redefining Emotional Strength

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

In my book ‘90 Seconds To A Life You Love’, I talk about emotional strength meaning ‘feeling capable and being resourceful’. Feeling capable of facing life’s challenges emerges out of your experience of effectively handling the eight unpleasant feelings. Though it may seem obvious, many people maintain a faulty perception regarding emotional strength; they believe…

Book Series 4: How To Achieve Emotional Mastery – Emotional Strength and Weakness

Confidence, Emotional Strength

Over my three and a half decades of counseling, I came to recognize a pattern among many of my clients that involved common-yet-destructive misconceptions about emotional strength and emotional weakness. I found that individuals with the lowest levels of self-confidence generally held tightly to the beliefs or behaviors described below. In my book ‘90 Seconds To A Life You…

Book Series 3: How To Achieve Emotional Mastery – Building the Framework

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Over recent weeks, I’ve been talking about the importance of managing your feelings well. I’m not really one to beat around the bush, so, if you’re good with it, let’s just jump right in. Have you ever heard the term “emotional management disorder”? Think of it as the inability to comfortably manage your everyday emotional reactions…

Book Series 2: The Gift of Unpleasant Feelings

Confidence, Emotional Strength

In my book ‘90 Seconds To A Life You Love’, I start off by talking about the skills that have to be built to reset your ability to absorb and deal with unpleasant feelings.Did you ever think that unpleasant feelings were a gift?Most of us want to avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings either because they…

Book Series 1: Living a Life by Design

Confidence, Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Now that my book is out, I want to start going through the ways you can live a life you love, actually by design. This book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity, is my life’s work and it’s full of the…

Diving Deeper Into The Rosenberg Reset

Confidence, Emotional Well-Being

Last week, I told you about how there’s two pathways you can choose for dealing with life’s challenges: avoidance and awareness. Yet, most people don’t realize that managing difficult feelings relates to confidence, resilience, and authenticity. Let’s dive deeper into the Rosenberg Reset. 1 choice, 8 feelings, 90 seconds. Step 1 – You make the…

Is Avoidance Sabotaging You?

Emotional Well-Being

I hope your January is off to a wonderful start. I’m gearing up for the launch of my new book, 90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity. You might be wondering about my title. How is it possible to change anything, much…

Need help crushing your 2019 goals?

Emotional Strength, Emotional Well-Being

Happy New Year. Have you set goals for 2019? One of my goals this year is to speak more so I can get the key messages in my book out to more people. Yet, in the process of setting goals, we can get anxious about meeting them. My book is chock full of strategies to…

How To Deal With “Comparison-itis”

Confidence, Emotional Well-Being, Name of Site Category

Perhaps you, like many others, use the new year as a time for reflection and planning and for making changes to enhance some aspect of your life. Yet when people consider making changes, they often compare themselves to others, like one reader who recently wrote me. Check out what she said: “By all appearances, I’m…

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