Family emotional well-being

Your emotional well-being will depend on how well you make the transition from work to other activities. This includes developing a new personal identity apart from your career, leaving colleagues behind, making new friends, developing positive relationships with family members, and getting involved in activities that maintain and enhance your self-esteem. 

Your emotional well-being is influenced by what you do with your time, where you live, and the relationships you have with friends and family. (These are all covered in later chapters in Part 4, Relationships. ) Planning for retirement gives you an opportunity to assess these issues and make whatever changes may be necessary. You can ease the trauma of retirement by attending to any concerns in advance so that there is minimal change when retirement becomes a reality. 

Through preoccupation with the abusing or addicted child s problems, parents neglect and sacrifice their own well-being (and those of other children in the family) to their physical and emotional cost. 

Cancer rising Moody, sensitive, and imaginative, you live at a high emotional pitch. You re attuned to other people and skilled at nurturing and protecting them, yet you may feel drained by their needs and resentful of their requests. You re shrewd and ambitious, but your carefully drawn plans may crumble in the face of your emotional reactions. When you feel besieged by the needs (or criticism) of others, you withdraw into the privacy of your shell. Home, food, family, and financial well-being are essential to your peace of mind. 

The early nutrition of children has major effects on the physical and mental well-being in later years. Furthermore, each young person develops important habits of food selection and consumption as he or she progresses from infancy to adolescence and adulthood. Therefore, nutrition during both childhood and adolescence is covered in this article since these stages of physical, mental, and emotional growth usually occur within the same family setting. 

One area of research related to abuse or neglect has to do with how well a person fits within his or her social environment. One researcher, Marsha Linehan (1993), has talked about how a poor fit with the social environment (viz., not fitting into the family, school life, or other important social networks) may cause psychiatric problems if the poorness of fit causes the person to feel like an outsider or to feel constandy invalidated or put down. Many of my clients have told me that they have not felt part of their families or that they did not fit well into society in general, or have described themselves as black sheep. Abuse and neglect lead to an invalidating environment, but so can mismatches of personalities within families or mismatches of behavioral patterns with social norms. Furthermore, there is evidence that the way emotion is expressed in families can be associated with a poorness of fit that can influence the course of drug problems. 

A targeted biopsychosocial developmental history from key informants should be included in the initial assessment. In addition to the information contained in Figure 31.1, a history of stress and trauma should also be gathered. In children and adolescents this includes caretaker absence, neglect, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as transfer to a foster home, divorce, or psychiatric disorder in a close family member. 

Here are 20 principles for providing therapy to deeply disturbed persons. Many of them are elaborated in The Heart of Being Helpful (1997b), and all of them draw on the Principles of Life that I present in Medication Madness (in press). While the focus is on providing help to emotionally disturbed and disabled patients who seek individual therapy in a private practice or clinic, the same principles apply to residential and milieu treatment as well. In a more general way, these 20 guidelines can also be applied to our experiences with other people in our workplace, families, and everyday life. 

Becker s writings on altruism view this emotion as an externality in the utility function, a person s utility being a function of his or her own consumption, the consumption of spouse, and the consumption of children. In some applications, the utility of the altruistic member is assumed to depend on the utility rather than on the consumption of other family members. Applying this idea within the context of a family, Becker shows that the presence of a genuinely altruistic person in a household may induce selfish or even envious members of the household to act as if they, too, were altruistic. Modeling envy as another utility externality, he shows that if the head of the family is envious, selfish family members act as if they, too, were envious. As these results are well known and do not involve emotions in more than a minimal sense, I shall not discuss them further. 

Because parents want to do so well by their only child, and often want their only child to do so well by them, it is very easy for their expectations of the child and of themselves to become unrealistic. When violations ensue, an emotional price is usually paid. Because relationships in an only child family are so sensitively close, and violations can be so strongly felt, the realistic management of expectations becomes critical to everyone s wellbeing. 

With Klonopin (clonazepam), the most common side effects are difficulty with balance and drowsiness PDR, 2(XX)). Social workers need to be aware that there may be behavioral and emotional side effects that include irritability, excitement, increased anger and aggression, trouble sleeping or nightmares, and memory loss (Dulcan, 1999). These side effects can be very disturbing to the client as well as to family members, and it is critical that families be educated about the problems that can occur and how to handle them. The most serious side effect with Klonopin is probably the interaction if this medication is combined with alcohol or other drugs, which can result in sleepiness, unconsciousness, and death PDR, 2000). 

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