Jennifer Kooshian, Richardson Christian Counseling

About Jennifer Kooshian

Jennifer Kooshian lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan with her husband of 32 years on a small homestead near Lake Superior. They have five adult children and one grandson. She also has an ever-changing number of chickens, a mellow old cat, and an aspiring farm dog.The passions that God has pressed on her heart are hospitality, giving college students a home away from home, and helping people learn to grow and preserve their own food.Jennifer spends her spring and summer months growing vegetable plants and flowers to sell to her community and for her own gardens. Her fall and winter months are spent having local college students over for dinner and board games, participating in her church’s college ministry, crocheting, and dreaming of her summer gardens. She also loves living where 15 feet of snow is a light winter.She documents her homestead adventures on Instagram and Facebook as Cooper Island Homestead and runs an Etsy shop under the same name.

How to Maintain and Improve Your Emotional Well-being

How to Maintain and Improve Your Emotional Well-being

Jennifer Kooshian2024-10-18T14:44:37+00:00October 17th, 2024|Coaching, Featured, Individual Counseling, Personal Development, Spiritual Development|

We are embodied thinking and feeling beings, and that’s just how we were made. Our thoughts and our feelings interact in complex and sometimes obscure ways that can leave us bewildered about ourselves. Sometimes our minds and reason lead the way, but at other times we are all heart, and we do things we can’t make sense of. At times, our hearts and minds are in alignment, but at other times they are not, reducing our sense of emotional well-being. Your well-being isn’t just about whether your body is okay, nor is it only about your mind or your emotions. Wellbeing is about all those elements and aspects of ourselves receiving adequate care and attention. Neglecting one affects the others. For instance, how you feel affects a wide range of things, including your ability to handle day-to-day tasks, manage your relationships, react to the circumstances you encounter, and make decisions. It is important to take care of every aspect of your well-being, including your emotional well-being. What is emotional wellness? According to the National Institutes of Health, “emotional wellness is the ability to successfully handle life’s stresses and adapt to change and difficult times.” When unpleasant or unwelcome things come your way, you can become overwhelmed. A person with good emotional well-being can roll with the punches and take those difficult situations in stride. Some things can undermine a person’s emotional health, and these include experiencing chronic stress from relationships or work, the lack of a support network, adverse experiences like trauma, negative self-talk that generates self-doubt, setting unrealistic expectations for yourself or others, being trapped in the comparison game, unhealthy or toxic relationships, and feeling unfulfilled and without a clear purpose. Every person has their capacity for what they can handle, and when that capacity is exceeded, it [...]

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Christian Counseling as a Safe Space For Your Healing

Christian Counseling as a Safe Space For Your Healing

Jennifer Kooshian2024-09-27T10:30:39+00:00September 11th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Personal Development, Spiritual Development|

It can be hard to find someone who will truly listen to you. Sometimes you can have a conversation with someone and then walk away afterwards wondering if they even heard what you were saying. People mean well, but at times they can rush to give you advice when what you need is for someone to hear you out and help you process what you’re going through. This is where Christian counseling can help. In some instances, it can feel awkward to talk to someone you know about the things going on in your life. Perhaps you’re afraid they will see you in a different light, or maybe because it’s about them you don’t want to jeopardize the relationship. There are several reasons you might struggle to confide in a friend or loved one. This, however, doesn’t mean you’re out of options if you’re looking for someone to talk to about what you’re going through. Christian counseling in brief Christian counseling is a space where a person can discuss their concerns with a trained and licensed counselor. The counseling can take place on a one-to-one basis, or in a group setting with others seeking to address the same concerns. The kinds of concerns that can be addressed through counseling will vary widely, from mental health issues such as anxiety and depression to other concerns such as relationship difficulties or substance abuse. Your counselor will use a variety of therapeutic techniques that are suitable to the situation and your concerns. You don’t have to be a Christian to benefit from Christian counseling, but if you do opt for that approach, note that wisdom and insight grounded in the Christian faith’s understanding of the human person and their flourishing will be woven throughout. Your counselor will use these insights in addition [...]

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Finding Healing from Psychological Trauma

Finding Healing from Psychological Trauma

Jennifer Kooshian2024-09-27T10:30:16+00:00February 6th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Trauma|

In life, we all encounter difficult and distressing situations at one point or another. Some of these situations are shocking to the point that they can cause harm to a person’s emotional, physical, and mental well-being. That harm is referred to as either physical or psychological trauma. What is psychological trauma? According to the American Psychological Association (APA), trauma is “an emotional response to a terrible event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster”. That response to stressful events also includes abuse, being caught in a war zone, childbirth, sudden loss of a loved one, intergenerational trauma, being trafficked, being kidnapped, or any other event that a person finds emotionally or physically harmful or threatening. However, experiencing a stressful event does not necessarily lead to trauma, and not everyone who goes through such an experience will be traumatized. Trauma can either be physical or psychological/emotional. Physical trauma is when someone suffers a serious bodily injury that may or may not leave them incapacitated in one way or another. Psychological or emotional trauma is what has been defined above, and there are several subcategories or types of that trauma, and these include the following: Acute emotional trauma, which stems from a dangerous or distressing situation. An example of this is being involved in a car accident. Chronic emotional trauma, which develops because of repeated exposure to distressing events. Included in this category would be domestic violence, child abuse, or bullying occurring over an extended period. There is a third subcategory, which is complex emotional trauma. Such trauma is the result of being exposed to several traumatic or distressing events. Trauma can also affect a person vicariously through having close contact with someone that experienced a distressing and traumatic event. For instance, people like first responders, family members, and mental health professionals [...]

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Stress Management Tips to Help You Stay Healthy and Productive

Stress Management Tips to Help You Stay Healthy and Productive

Jennifer Kooshian2024-09-27T10:30:29+00:00January 9th, 2024|Featured, Individual Counseling, Personal Development, Professional Development|

Life doesn’t always come neatly packaged and easy to handle. We often encounter situations we never planned for, and even the things we anticipated can sometimes overwhelm us. When we are in a situation that we don’t feel we can manage or control, that produces the stress response, requiring stress management. Stress is how we react when we feel under pressure or threatened, and that differs from individual to individual. Some people relish a tight deadline, while others break out in hives if they start to feel like they’re falling behind schedule. Stress is an everyday part of life, and when you encounter it, you must have strategies in place to handle stress in a healthy way that doesn’t diminish your productivity or health. Some common sources of stress. People are wired differently, so what stresses one person out, or an area of life that causes stress for one person doesn’t register for another person. Some of the more common sources of stress include: Work. This includes the nature of the work itself. For instance, some jobs like law enforcement or in the medical field have a high intensity. Additionally, if you have too much work to do, and not enough institutional support, or you’re on a tight deadline, that too is a significant source of stress. Being underemployed or unemployed can also cause stress, as can the threat of losing your job. Relationship strain. If your relationships are strained or mired in conflict, this too can cause a lot of stress. Healthy relationships are a key predictor of one’s sense of fulfillment, and strain in relationships often results in a diminished sense of flourishing Finances. Not having the resources you need to meet your obligations can be a huge mental burden and a source of pressure. Illness. Whether [...]

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Grieving Over the Loss of a Parent

Grieving Over the Loss of a Parent

Jennifer Kooshian2024-09-27T10:30:24+00:00December 28th, 2023|Featured, Grief Counseling, Individual Counseling|

One thing that most people crave is a sense of stability, to know that their world has some constants that allow them to make sense of the world and themselves. That sense of constancy may come from the house we live in, the routines we adhere to, or the people we have around us. Few relationships frame our existence quite the same way as that between a parent and child, which is why the loss of a parent and the grieving that follows is so significant. A child often comes into the world with parents around them, and these are the first people that the child knows. Their family forms the first relationships they have, and those relationships shape them in profound ways as they grow older and form relationships with other people. The loss of a parent likely marks the end of one’s longest-standing relationships, and the grief from that loss will mark a person for the rest of their life, and it can be complicated in various ways. How our grief works. You may have heard about the 5 stages of grief before. It’s something that Elizabeth Kübler Ross wrote about in her book “On Death and Dying”. In that book, she noted that while everyone can grieve differently, there are some commonalities in how grief works for different people. Grief can be divided into five stages that describe certain feelings experienced during grief. Kübler Ross’ observations came from years of working with terminally ill people. The five stages of grief are as follows: Denial. One can pretend that the loss they’ve experienced isn’t real. It may simply be too overwhelming to process and acknowledge at that moment. Anger. Feelings of anger can mask other emotions that you may be carrying at that moment. The anger may [...]

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Child Counseling for Bullying or Divorce

Child Counseling for Bullying or Divorce

Jennifer Kooshian2024-09-27T10:30:11+00:00November 30th, 2023|Christian Counseling for Children, Christian Counseling For Teens, Family Counseling, Featured|

Adults often acknowledge that people are all different. And by people, we mean other adults. Children are too often the recipients of standardized approaches that do not recognize that they are individuals, with diverse ways of seeing and reacting to the world around them. Child counseling can help shed light. The reasons each person has for requiring counseling are different. Having made that point, it is important to also notice there are experiences after which many children do benefit from counseling. If your child has experienced any of the following or is currently experiencing them, then it is prudent to consider whether the effects, fallout, and required healing would be assisted through the facilitation of a trained professional. Child counseling after bullying. Bullying affects everyone involved; the people who are the victims of bullies, the bullies themselves, and those who witness the bullying. Bullying sometimes even occurs in a child’s school friendship group and isn’t picked up in many metrics that measure poor outcomes. Bullying is a common experience for those who also abuse substances, struggle with mental health, or even consider suicide, experience depression and anxiety, have increased feelings of sadness and loneliness, experience a change in their sleep or their eating patterns, and more. Those who are bullied are likely to experience a drop in their schoolwork and participation, and in time are increasingly likely to miss or drop out of school. As with some other childhood ills, experts find that some of these issues may continue into adulthood. This makes taking steps to address it and helping your child process their experience all the more important. Child counseling after divorce. The break-up of a marriage is certainly difficult for the parents; however, it can easily be just as hard on the children of the family. There [...]

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Jennifer Kooshian

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