Welcome!

“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

Recent Posts

Dr. Ted’s Mailing List

Past Posts

mm Ted

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Feb 08, 2020

“You are the salt of the earth …. You are the light of the world.” “Let there be light.” The first words God ever spoke. Since the earliest of...

mm Tom Carney

When Family Members Lose Faith

Feb 06, 2020

A recent story in USA Today says Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ family was reportedly upset by his comments about religion.  In an interview, Rodgers said religion was...

mm Ted

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

Feb 01, 2020

“Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign of contradiction ….” Lk 2:34 Everybody loves a story.  Children...

mm Tom Carney

What’s So Great about Being Poor?

Jan 29, 2020

The people with whom I worked as a priest in the altiplano of Bolivia in the 1970s were 98 percent indigenous. Subsistence farmers, they grew mostly potatoes, plus some...

mm Ted

The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jan 24, 2020

’Come after me and I will make you fishers of men.’ At once they left their nets and followed him.” (Mt. 4, 20) Following Jesus is costly.  It’s costly...

mm Tom Carney

Stressors and the Search for God

Jan 23, 2020

My father, Pat Carney, who died in 1995 at age 94, was in a nursing home his final couple of years. During that period, I spent a lot of...

mm Ted

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jan 20, 2020

“Behold the Lamb of God” (Jn. 1, 29) “A lot of church-going people never really got baptized.”  That sentence jumped out at me from a very provocative article written...

mm Tom Carney

Does God Intervene in our Lives?

Jan 16, 2020

My friend Bob, a retired lawyer, is a lifelong Christian and regular church-goer. But like me, he considers himself a skeptic. That may be why he’s a regular reader...