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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 Faith Is Good for Us

Oct 24, 2019

I have a friend who is the eternal pessimist. His outlook is almost always dismal. He looks at life through the lens of Murphy’s Law – anything that can...

mm Tom Carney

Love, and Hate, of Work

Oct 17, 2019

I was fortunate to have had a career I loved. The pay was not great and the hours were unpredictable. But often during my 25 years as a reporter/editor,...

mm Ted

Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Oct 13, 2019

“… and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him. He was a Samaritan.” Lk 17:16 One of the great mystics of the Church, Meister Eckhart, once...

mm Tom Carney

The Wolf of Gubbio

Oct 11, 2019

According to legend, around the year 1220 when St. Francis of Assisi was living in Gubbio, Italy, a fierce wolf began attacking livestock. And then it began attacking humans....

mm Ted

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Oct 04, 2019

“O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save? Why do you make me...

mm Tom Carney

Can Non-Believers Be “Saved?”

Oct 03, 2019

I recently came across a moving story about a boy who was among children chosen to ask Pope Francis a question during the pope’s visit to a poor neighborhood...

mm Ted

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sep 30, 2019

“ .… a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from your side to ours ….” LK 16:26 “How can justice be...

mm Tom Carney

How Faith is Like Music

Sep 26, 2019

No matter your age, if you’re Latino/a, or like me, personally involved in the life of a Latina, you’re probably a fan of Celia Cruz, the Cuban-American diva who...