Murray Center for Behavioral Wellness

Murray Center for Behavioral Wellness Serving up bite-sized mental health tips for families who’ve said “WTF is happening?” at least once this week. (Us too.) Therapy-ish tips for life’s chaos.

Kid meltdowns? Teen eye-rolls? Your own? We got you—no judgment, no jargon, no couch required.

09/12/2026

Try this for yourself or with your kid: make a worry map.

Draw a simple body outline, then think of a few different moments when worry showed up. For each one, mark where you felt it in your body: chest, hands, stomach, legs, or somewhere else entirely.

You might notice the same spots coming up again and again, or that worry moves around depending on the situation.

The goal isn’t to make the “right” map. It’s just to get curious about your own patterns and start building awareness of what worry feels like for you.

Save the map and come back to it later, it can become a useful visual reminder of your body’s early warning signs.

Resting and feeling guilty about resting is... not particularly restful.If your brain has learned that being productive ...
09/10/2026

Resting and feeling guilty about resting is... not particularly restful.

If your brain has learned that being productive means being responsible, useful, or “good,” doing nothing can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. Even when you desperately need it.

And unfinished tasks don’t exactly help. Your brain has a tendency to keep incomplete or important things mentally active, which is why you can be sitting perfectly still while your brain is doing laps around the laundry, the email you forgot, tomorrow’s schedule, and the 14 other things you could be doing.

So here’s something worth practicing:
Let the task be unfinished.
Notice the urge to get up, check something, accomplish something, or justify why you’re allowed to stop.
And then, sometimes, don’t.
Because the goal isn’t to finally get enough done that you can rest guilt-free.

There will always be something else to do.

The skill is learning that the presence of an unfinished task does not require your immediate participation.

You don’t need to earn rest by completing life first.

09/10/2026

Apparently there should be a word for being incredibly happy for someone while also wishing their incredibly happy life choices involved living down the hall from you.

So I’m calling it joyache.

I think a lot of parents feel like we’re supposed to pick a lane when our kids leave for college.

We’re proud! This is exciting! This is what we wanted for them!

So why are we standing in their empty bedroom feeling personally victimized by a laundry basket?

Because two things can be true at the same time.

You can be thrilled that your child is building a life they love and deeply miss the version of your life where they were physically part of your everyday world.

That sadness doesn’t mean you’re not ready for them to grow up.

It doesn’t mean you’re too attached.

And it definitely doesn’t mean you should start texting, “Just checking in!” every 10 minutes.

It means your brain and your heart are adjusting to a huge change in a relationship that matters enormously to you.

The goal isn’t to stop missing them.

It’s to make room for the missing without making them responsible for fixing it.

Stay connected. Build new routines. Let yourself be sad sometimes. And keep cheering while they build a life that increasingly belongs to them.

Because maybe one of the hardest parts of parenting is getting exactly what you worked so hard for:

A kid who is ready to leave you.

And being so damn proud of them while wishing they’d come home for dinner.

That’s joyache. ❤️

Changing your mind isn’t a failure of character. It’s often a sign that you’ve taken in new information, reconsidered wh...
09/09/2026

Changing your mind isn’t a failure of character. It’s often a sign that you’ve taken in new information, reconsidered what you believed, and updated accordingly.

Cognitive flexibility means being able to revise your thinking without treating that revision like betrayal. Sometimes integrity looks less like staying consistent and more like being willing to say, “I know more now than I did then.”

You don’t owe an old opinion lifelong loyalty.

09/05/2026

Ever notice that worry can make your whole body feel different?

Your heart might race. Your breathing might speed up. Your muscles might tense. You might get butterflies in your stomach or start to sweat.

Those are all ways your body can respond when it thinks something might be wrong, even when there’s no real danger.

Learning your own worry signals can make it easier to notice when your body is sounding a false alarm.

Sometimes the hardest part of feeling overwhelmed is knowing, on some level, that your reaction is bigger than the situa...
09/03/2026

Sometimes the hardest part of feeling overwhelmed is knowing, on some level, that your reaction is bigger than the situation… and still not being able to simply turn it off.

Insight can help us recognize what’s happening, but regulation is what helps the nervous system actually come back down. When we’re highly activated, reasoning with ourselves often isn’t the first thing we need. A pause, a slower breath, a change of environment, or a little distance from the situation can give the body time to settle before we decide what to do next.

You don’t have to prove that your feelings are “wrong” in order to respond to them differently. Sometimes the most useful question is: What do I need to do before I respond?

Healthy relationships still include disappointment.Someone can care about you deeply and still be bad at texting. They c...
09/01/2026

Healthy relationships still include disappointment.

Someone can care about you deeply and still be bad at texting. They can love you and still say the wrong thing. They can be dependable in one way and frustrating in another.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore harmful patterns or stay in relationships that are unsafe, manipulative, or chronically disrespectful. But ordinary imperfection is different from incompatibility or harm.

Sometimes the goal isn’t finding people who never let us down. It’s finding people whose patterns are safe enough, caring enough, and repairable enough to build something real with.

08/29/2026

Worry doesn’t always show up as a thought.

Sometimes it looks like a racing heart, tense muscles, a stomach that suddenly feels off, shaky hands, or just a sense that something in your body has shifted.

Learning to notice those signals can make anxiety feel a little less mysterious. The earlier we recognize what our body is telling us, the easier it can be to pause, check in, and choose what might help.

In the next Worry Shmurray episode, we’ll look more closely at some of the common ways anxiety can show up in the body. 🦥💛

08/28/2026

Middle school changes the job description. We can’t make every choice for them anymore. We can help them build a voice of their own before everyone else gets louder.

Address

29500 Southfield Road
Southfield, MI
48076

Website

,

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Murray Center for Behavioral Wellness posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category