The Healing Power of Girlfriends: How to Create Your Best Life Through Female Connection

Women thrive on connection, and research studies continue to show that we are happier and healthier when we share close connections with other women. In this engaging combination of personal anecdotes, scientific research, and therapeutic advice, you’ll learn

• why connection, communication, and intimacy are the three pillars of healthy friendships.
• how friendship between women leads to longevity, health, happiness, and well-being.
• why some friendships are only for a specific “season or reason.”
• how the Olson Friendship Framework can help you understand the levels of all your friendships from casual to intimate.
• tips for nurturing your current friendships and creating new ones.

Each chapter also includes a list of thought-provoking discussion questions that will help you further examine the heart and soul of your own friendships with women.

The Healing Power of Friendship will help you avoid toxic friendships, understand the role expectations play in women’s friendships, and learn how power dynamics can hurt or heal these special relationships.

Deborah Olson, MA, LPC, is a women's emotional health specialist. She has provided counseling services for nearly two decades in the greater Houston, Texas, area through Galleria Counseling, her private practice. As a specialist in women's issues, parenting concerns, and marital struggles, she offers life enrichment seminars and retreats and provides hands-on solutions to enhance life in meaningful, purposeful, and emotionally healthy ways. Her workshops are specially designed for women, and topics include depression, anxiety,
life transition issues, empowerment, parenting matters, and romantic relationship problems.

As a mother of four adult children, Olson knows firsthand the challenges women face while balancing the many roles of mother, wife, and professional. She is keenly aware of the struggles that couples face in their marital relationships, and after being married for 40 years, she understands the hard work involved in keeping a marriage healthy.

Prior to going into private practice, Olson was a registered nurse specializing in obstetrics and gynecology, labor and delivery, and the newborn nursery. This professional tract has served as a strong foundation for her current career in counseling women, and she has received advanced training and certification in women's emotional health, qualifying her to treat perinatal mood disorders such as postpartum depression and anxiety.

Olson holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of St. Thomas and a master's degree in clinical psychology from Sam Houston State University.

She lives with her husband in a suburb of Houston, Texas. The mother of two daughters and two sons, she is also the proud grandmother of five and a frequent pet sitter for two granddogs. Her favorite leisure activities are spending time at the beach, shelling, boating, traveling, scrapbooking, golfing, writing, and being with her family. Learn more at GalleriaCounseling.com.