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“Do Not Be Afraid … You Are My Dearest Friends”*

Toxic Fear is perhaps life’s greatest hostage-taker. One psychiatrist calls it a “disease of the imagination.” Fear and disabling Worry can start off like a tiny seed and, watered by thoughts that emphasize worst-case scenarios, grow into a virus-like fiend that ends up dominating our mental state. It then holds us back from our ability to enjoy nearly every dimension of our life: our talents, our work, our love, our play, and our approach to a life in the Spirit.

This website is dedicated to three major Defense Systems that can be effective in helping us overcome the insidious nature of fear, as well as other mental health demons like depression. It will also focus on how we can better live out our lives free of those persistent foragers that roam throughout the corners of our minds… relentlessly haunting us.

Those three Defense Systems are: Spirituality, Psychology and Addiction. All three of these provide newly developed means of delving into the root causes of fear and depression and other mental health disorders, and assisting people in finding improved pathways to freedom, joy, and peace.

“Do not be afraid” – a phrase found 365 times in Sacred Scripture!

*Luke 12:32; translation found in The Bible in Contemporary Language, Eugene H. Peterson

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Past Posts

mm Ted

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Feb 08, 2021

“He cured many who were sick with various diseases, and he drove out many demons.” Mk 1:32 Super Bowl Sunday! This weekend millions will gather around TV-s for the...

mm Tom Carney

How God Sees Us?

Feb 04, 2021

In this country, because of the pervasiveness and power of social media, people who are relatively unknown can suddenly become media stars. That’s the case with America’s Youth Poet...

mm Ted

The Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jan 30, 2021

Come out! …. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.” Mk. 1:26-27 Mark was the inventor of a whole new literary genre that came to be...

mm Tom Carney

Has the Pandemic Changed Us?

Jan 28, 2021

One of the most shocking and saddest stories of the pandemic era was reported in a brief story in USA TODAY a few weeks ago. “A COVID-19 patient at...

mm Ted

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jan 25, 2021

The Old Testament is filled with remarkably memorable stories: Adam and Eve, the Flood, Moses, the Flight into Egypt – and dozens more. But perhaps the strangest and most...

mm Tom Carney

Spiritual Atrophy

Jan 21, 2021

My spouse, Amparo, and I have a grandson, Leo, who is 20 months old. Because of the pandemic, we’ve seen him only once in the past year. He and...

mm Ted

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time “Behold the Lamb of god” (JN. 1,35)

Jan 15, 2021

“A lot of church- going people never really got baptized.” This sentence from a very provocative article written by a Catholic priest startled me.   What he was proposing was...

mm Tom Carney

“Toxic Individualism”

Jan 14, 2021

Ten years ago, Dr. Kristina Darnauer and her husband moved to tiny Sterling, KS. so their kids would be raised with “small-town values.” “The values of hard work, the value...