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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 Tom Carney

How Doubt Prevents Smugness

Aug 06, 2020

My friend, Terry Bruce, recently reminded me of a sort of tongue-in-cheek creed of journalists: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Those words, in fact,...

mm Ted

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Aug 03, 2020

 “… you give them something to eat.” Mt. 14: 16 Today’s gospel tells the story of the most important miracle Jesus ever performed – a miracle so profound and...

mm Tom Carney

Resilience and the Search for God, Part II

Jul 30, 2020

A few years ago, Eilene Zimmerman decided she wanted to help her estranged husband who obviously needed it. But she was shocked when she went to his home and...

mm Ted

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jul 25, 2020

“Jesus said to his disciples: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure buried in a field, which a person finds and hides again, and out of joy goes...

mm Tom Carney

The Problem with Generosity

Jul 23, 2020

Padre Blas Escobar is the parish priest in the town of Tamanique in El Salvador. I began communicating with him only a few months ago because though the church...

mm Ted

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jul 19, 2020

“Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where have the weeds come from?” Mt. 13:27 “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” Many of...

mm Tom Carney

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Jul 16, 2020

A monk at Conception Abbey in Missouri told this well-known story in a homily at a Mass I viewed online. In a rite of passage, a native-American father takes...

mm Ted

Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jul 13, 2020

“The seed sown on rich soil is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields a hundred or sixty or thirtyfold.” Mt....