Bob Rennebohm Clinical Social Worker

06/07/2026

Worth a read:

Researchers scanned people’s brains while they named their emotions. What happened next may explain why some people stay calm under pressure while others spiral.

05/12/2026

Covers the neurobiology of some of your most unhelpful cognitive habits:

Every overthinking tip assumes the loop starts with a thought. Psychologists say it starts much earlier, and that changes everything about how to stop it.

05/06/2026

Clients sometimes ask about their diagnosis, especially if they've been doing their own research and they're suspicious that they fit the criteria for Borderline Personality. I spend time explaining that a diagnosis, in most situations, does not inform their treatment, either psychotherapeutic or for a medication choice. Identifying solvable life problems does. Here's a quote from this article that fits this issue:"And as Benji Waterhouse, a British NHS psychiatrist (and stand-up comedian), puts it, “Sometimes I wonder if the medical-sounding diagnoses, clusters and codes that I’m forced to enter on endless forms couldn’t more honestly be replaced by ‘NFI’ (no fu***ng idea), ‘SLS’ (sh*t-life syndrome), or ‘PNA’ (pretty normal actually).”. A mental wellness perspective suggest we all need to smile a bit more! You might appreciate the article.

As mental health diagnoses become more common and expansive, the labels meant to help us understand our suffering may be oversimplifying it.

04/30/2026

More clients inquire about whether the focus on the vagus nerve in popular psychology is relevant to the work we're trying to do. There isn't a short answer to that question but there are people selling technology to 'stimulate the vagal nerve', there's not much to back up the claims associated with such devices. Here's a decent look at the history of this growing g area of interest and inquiry. And Stephen Porges' book The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation is your go to if you're serious about the topic (it's a dense read, I've read it twice, I'm still learning and I'll head back for a third go one if these days.

“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”

02/28/2026

The concepts in this article can be critical in deconstructing and reconstructing your mental health! I'm often dealing with clients struggling with their important relationships. They are certain they're 'right' and they're stunned and hurt by how wilfully 'wrong' the other person's perspective is. Even worse, they've started to become suspicious that they have had this struggle in other relationships (what if it's me and not them?). It can be a hard slog forward from these moments as you realize just how fluid reality is, you construct your reality through all of your past experiences, the shaky first steps away from the certainty that your way of understanding the world is RIGHT rather than simply your best available guess is unsettling at first. When your therapist says 'perhaps there's another way to look at this', your mind yells 'how can you be on their side'. Stick with the discomfort, your therapist is trying to help you find some cognitive flexibility to carry you past a 'reality shift' that arises from your past and that has kept you trapped and unhappy.

SumiIf you’ve ever walked away from an argument thinking, “How can we have experienced the same thing and remember it so differently?”, you’ve already bumped into a strange truth: reality isn’t a fixed movie you passively watch, it’s more like a custom-made edit your brain assembles on t...

10/24/2025

In my Mental Wellness Clinician role, I review this information 2-3 times per work day with new clients. They're often looking for support/coaching for anxiety, depression, substance use comorbidities but, at the heart of their challenges is a life long dance with their ADHD. Many were diagnosed in their childhood but were never medically supported, reporting their parents response "you're not going to dope up my kid so he'll sit still at school!"
If you're still on the fence about ADHD, this is a good research summary:

https://www.additudemag.com/adhd-myths-history-evolution/?ecd=wnl_additude_251024_cons_adhd_best&goal=0_d9446392d6-124fc42eac-288704589&utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=other

10/10/2025

One of the big culprits in excessive anxiety. Figure this out, move away from your endless anxiety!

Your brain's alarm was built for predators, not texts, and this ancient wiring fuels modern anxiety. Learn 3 simple ways to retrain it and stop catastrophizing.

09/11/2025

Mismanagement of their normal anxiety processes is the single most common things that brings people to consult with me. Sorting out how to understand their mismanaged anxiety, creating and implementing an action plan is the key to a path forward. It isn't always neccessay to 'resolve' your past to use your anxiety to change your life; in fact, a deep dive into the crap we all carry is often very counter-productive.
Great article on how to understand and use your anxiety:

Most of us have learned deeply unhelpful things about anxiety, to the extent that we may not even know what this emotion does, how it works, or how to work with it.

09/09/2025

There's a form of therapy called Narrative Therapy. When I first ran across it in the 90s, I was intrigued - I knew that the language patterns (not just the content) people used to describe their lives was a pathway to understanding their difficulties. The idea seemed to be that teaching people the skills to (perhaps) 'change your story, change your life' could be part of helping people to begin a shift to a healthier, happier life. Not surprisingly, it proved a complex undertaking and, 30 years later, I'm still using the concepts in my 'mental wellness' role. This article is about your 'internal dialogue', often the culprit in folks with depression or persistent anxiety. It plays out in a related way - 'change your dialogue, change your emotional state, remove the basis of your anxiety/depression'.

Understanding and reshaping internal language empowers individuals to improve self-awareness, reduce stress, and transform negative thought patterns into purposeful, life-enhancing dialogue.

07/18/2025

I periodically post about the limited research/empirical support for antidepressants. In particular, the marketing oy that they affect your neurotransmitters is long debunked, raising the question of how (if?) the brain is the main driver of a depressive process. To complicate this picture, consider the microbiome? This article looks at the impact antidepressants have on the microbiome - what if the gut/microbiome are a bigger driver of depressive processes than is the brain? My guess would be that Big Pharma is already chasing this area, knowing full well that the ship has sailed on their lucrative antidepressant business.

A surprising new study reveals a twist in the gut-brain connection. While anxiety and depression are linked to distinct gut bacteria, commonly prescribed medications show an even stronger association with microbiome changes than the mental health conditions themselves.