Helina Blogs

You deliver more than anyone in the team, but it’s your well-connected colleague who wins over your difficult boss and gets the promotion. You work hard and are the brains behind a successful new innovation, but you find out your boss has taken credit for your work and feel defeated. You try to be a team player, but this one team member is always cozying up to the boss and sucking up all the oxygen in the room. You think that if you do better work it will be acknowledged, but it turns out that feeding your boss’s ego means more than any of your accomplishments. If any of this sounds familiar, you may be working for a narcissistic boss.   According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V (DSM-V), a person with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) displays long-term signs of a grandiose sense of importance, a lack of empathy towards others, and a constant need to be admired and unique. When it comes to identifying someone with narcissism, the clinical...

  Bekhal, a Kurdish woman in her early twenties went missing from Zakho. Kurdi was a mentally disabled woman who lived on her own. She became pregnant after she was raped and that was when she went missing. Rumors circulated that her father had committed an honor killing to stop the shame she brought upon her family. Bekhal and her unfortunate situation lives with me to this day. It was not until two years ago, that I woke one morning with an epiphany, realizing how my whole life has been consumed by the destructive power of shame! Shame ruled me like a substance ruling the life of a person with substance use disorder.  Shame has made me lash out at my loved ones. I would go into hiding for fear of being exposed and the pain I would have to endure once exposed. Though I am a pharmacist, shame made me go to the extent of thinking and behaving irrationally to justify some of my missteps in life. Shame has caused me to be untrue to myself. Because of shame, I have learned to co...

The COVID19 pandemic has amplified work-life challenges for many work-from-home employees as boundaries between work and home life become blurred. In these difficult times, the reality is that we need to make a living, but also need to make sure that we are still “living” to avoid becoming burned out.   To address these new challenges, many companies have focused on employee well-being and have associated a work-life imbalance with excessive work demands. Efforts to address these needs that often include initiatives such as: bring your pet to work day, a day of wellness, hiring consults to coach staff on work/life balance, encouraging a healthy diet, and practicing yoga, and mindfulness. However, these approaches treat the symptoms of work-life imbalance and ignore the root causes of staff burnout. It is usually not work demands that result in burnout, but a lack of passion for what we do on a day-to-day basis and psychological safety. The Wall Street Journal notes that more th...

The term “co-dependency” was initially coined by Alcoholics Anonymous in 1950 to describe those individuals whose unhealthy choices enable and encourage their partner with addiction. While this is still true, co-dependency more recently has a much broader definition. Although it is not recognized as a clinical diagnosis or a personality disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), co-dependency is an unhealthy and potentially toxic relational dynamic. Commonly known as “relationship addiction”, co-dependency involves emotional, spiritual, physical, or mental enmeshment with a loved one. Enmeshment simply means growing up in a family system that lacks boundaries (e.g., how you feel about me is how I feel about myself, what is yours is mine and what is mine is yours, and if one family member is in trouble, the whole family is, sound familiar?). Dr. Renee Exelbert, a clinical psychologist, classifies an adult relationship as co-dependent when one partner ...