Tiny Buddha

Category: change & challenges

  • 5 Surefire Signs You Grew Up with an Emotionally Immature Parent

    5 Surefire Signs You Grew Up with an Emotionally Immature Parent

    “There’s no such thing as a ‘bad kid’—just angry, hurt, tired, scared, confused, impulsive ones expressing their feelings and needs the only way they know how. We owe it to every single one of them to always remember that.” ~Dr. Jessica Stephens 

    All children look up to their parents from the moment they enter this world. They have this beautiful, pure, unconditional love pouring out of them. Parents are on a pedestal. They are the ones who know what’s best! They are the grownups showing us how to do life!

    We don’t think for one moment that they could be showing us the wrong way.

    I, like many others, adored both my mum and dad. I could not see their flaws, their pains, or their trauma. I just loved them and wanted to spend time with them. If they shouted at me and told me I was wrong, I trusted that they were right, no question.

    When I had non-existent self-esteem, anxiety, and suicidal ideation because I believed I was not good enough, I blamed that 100% on myself. I had unconsciously recorded all those moments when their behavior had made me feel not good enough as my own fault for being ‘bad,’ not considering they could have had something going on themselves.

    When I struggled in romantic relationships, always chasing unavailable men, I held myself responsible and never for one minute thought that this pattern of behavior stemmed from my relationship with my parents. I believed what they had told me in different ways—that I was the problem!

    The reason I struggled in relationships, I later discovered, was that my parents were not actually okay when they were parenting me because of their own traumas and were emotionally immature.

    Here are five signs you had emotionally immature parents and how may it impact you.

    1. Their feelings and needs were more important than yours.

    Emotionally immature parents can be incredibly self-absorbed and distracted by their own feelings and emotions, and they want their child, you, to regulate them.

    For example, when my mum was upset, I would be affectionate toward her and soothe her. As I got older, she would be angry with me if I was not there to soothe her when she needed it, saying I was selfish and she had no one. I believed her.

    I was off playing with my friends and being a child, but this was not allowed if it meant I couldn’t meet her needs and calm her emotions. As a result, I learned it was not safe to choose my needs over hers, as she would withdraw her love from me, which felt so scary. My heart would race, and I would feel terror take over my body.

    As an adult, this meant I believed I was responsible for other people’s emotions, and if they were angry or upset, it was my fault. So I would always walk around on eggshells just in case someone might attack me for upsetting them. Because I believed everyone’s pain was my fault, I attracted more relationships like the one with my mum. These relationships made me feel powerless.

    2. Expressing your feelings or needs was not safe.

    When you expressed a feeling and it was met with a negative reaction from your parent, it created a world of panic inside your body. For example, sharing how you were struggling could have been met with a comment about how their lives were so much worse and you should stop being so dramatic.

    Expressing a need, like asking for a ride somewhere, could have launched an attack about how selfish you were—and didn’t you realize how hard your parents were working!

    So what happened? You stopped expressing your feelings and needs and buried them deep. (For me, I topped them with ice cream and sugar for comfort.) As an adult, you may now be so cut off from your own emotions and needs that you act as if you don’t have any.

    3. They did not take responsibility for their actions.

    They’d say or do something that really hurt you, but they wouldn’t acknowledge it, nor apologize. In fact, they may have just carried on as normal.

    Your relationship with them was not repaired as a result. You may have tried to resolve the situation, but you were the only one trying, and you may even have found yourself blamed for something you didn’t even do. The whole situation would leave you feeling crazy and like you didn’t know what’s true. You may even have started thinking it was your own fault.

    As an adult, you might repeat this dynamic in other relationships, feeling powerless to repair and resolve issues that arise. This leads to resentment and staying in unhappy relationships because you don’t know it can be any other way.

    4. They have no idea how to regulate their emotions.

    They walked around triggered by their emotions all day. They had no idea how to bring themselves back into balance. They’d come home exhausted from work, but rather than doing something to discharge from the day, they’d get stuck in their chores and then take out their emotions on others due to resentment over being so tired.

    They also might have had no idea what they were feeling. Maybe they were constantly angry because they lacked the self-awareness to recognize they were really feeling sad or anxious or overwhelmed. And because they didn’t know what they were feeling, they had no idea what they needed to do to feel better.

    5. You were forced to grow up before your time.

    It wasn’t okay for you to be a child. They found it way too stressful, so you were encouraged to be a little adult. Maybe even a little adult that parented them. It was also not safe for you to be a child. You couldn’t be loud or silly, as they could have lost their temper, so you walked around on high alert waiting for this. You may have learned to be the calm one because your parents weren’t.

    I found myself getting involved in their very grown-up arguments as a child just to try and keep the peace in the house. This is not the role of a child. If you had the same experience, you may find yourself attracting similarly codependent relationships as an adult.

    —

    If this childhood sounds like yours, you are not alone. There are many of us. There is an inner child within you that missed out on so much love, nurturing, encouragement, and balance, which could be the reason you are struggling now as an adult.

    It is not because you are not good enough or because you are to blame for everything. It is because you were raised by emotionally immature parents. Effectively, you were raised by children in adult bodies.

    You could still be dealing with these patterns as an adult with your parents, as they could be children in even older bodies now!

    Learning how to be emotionally mature yourself so you don’t repeat the patterns with your own children is a wonderful gift to be able to give them, but also it means you can have healthy relationships and find peace within. Healing and reparenting your inner child means you will be able to express your emotions and have boundaries so others don’t think it is okay to do the same to you.

    I used to feel powerless when people treated me like this, not just with my parents but in other relationships too. I would try to be whatever they wanted me to be, but they would still react in the same ways no matter what I did. Stepping back from them and focusing on healing my inner child, understanding her feelings and needs, and holding space for her has changed my life. I was able to become the parent I always longed for.

    I understand now that my parents were emotionally immature, as they were raised by emotionally immature parents too. They were mature with money and jobs, but with emotions, they were out of their depth because no one showed them how to manage them, and unfortunately, they never learned.

    But we can be the generation that breaks this pattern by being the emotionally mature parent we needed. We can be the example of healthy relationship dynamics that we never had.

    **This post was originally published in 2022.

  • How Avoiding Painful Emotions Can Lead to a Smaller Life

    How Avoiding Painful Emotions Can Lead to a Smaller Life

    “Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer.” ~Gabor Mate

    Most of us avoid experiences not necessarily because we don’t like them or want them, but because we don’t want to feel how we will feel when we go through that experience.

    Our lives become altered by the emotions we don’t want to feel because we don’t want to move toward the thing that could bring strong emotions like fear, shame, sadness, or disappointment.

    We don’t want to go to that party because we’ll probably feel awkward and embarrassed.

    We don’t want to chase that work opportunity in case we feel disappointed if it doesn’t work out.

    We don’t want to take that trip because it might feel scary.

    We don’t want to slow down our busy lives because it feels too terrifying to contemplate emptiness and quiet.

    And then we get this idea about ourselves that this is just who we are. We are just:

    • People who don’t like parties
    • People who don’t travel
    • People who are fearful
    • People who are procrastinators
    • People who are just busy but intensely stressed

    We have this idea that this is just who we are, and therefore, this is how we should live. Perhaps we feel an anger or an anguish at being “this type of person.” Or maybe it just feels so unconscious, so embedded in our personality, that we don’t do certain things, that we accept it as just the way we are. 

    For most of my life I thought I was a nervous, cautious, fearful person. That was just how I was born. I thought I couldn’t change it, just like I couldn’t change my hair color or my deep love for mashed potatoes. It felt biological. Some people were brave and courageous; I was fearful and afraid of almost everything.

    I carried this with me, this idea about who I was, until I learned that emotions like fear and terror, anger and rage, and despair or sadness are just emotions that we need to learn how to be with. And if we don’t learn how to be with them, they can create an outsized influence on our lives—creating this idea about who we are and what kind of personality we have and causing us to avoid things that trigger these feelings.

    But what we are actually avoiding is not the experience, people, or things but the feelings we feel when we think about that thing or try to do it. The feelings around meeting new people, starting a new work project, being in the thick of the uncertainty of traveling, etc.

    It’s the feelings that are so difficult for us, not the experiences. So we start to make choices on what we are prepared to do and what we are not. We mold our lives around the things that generate emotions we don’t know how to be with. And we don’t head toward things we don’t like because of how we will feel and what we think will happen when we walk toward that feeling.

    Because our body isn’t used to really being with the emotion we are avoiding, or it has proved problematic in the past.

    This is because a lot of our emotions activate our survival network. And when our survival network has been activated, things feel urgent, maybe even dangerous, unsafe.

    Maybe we have sweaty palms, a feeling of doom in our bodies, a racing heart, a desire to escape quickly, panic, or even an abundance of uncontrollable rage.

    So our brain starts to associate this emotion with survival being activated. It’s like it labels “new work opportunity” or “traveling” as an undesirable or unsafe experience because of the emotions that generate around that experience.

    We just don’t know what to do with these emotions.

    Our brains say, “Don’t go near that! It’s dangerous!”

    So we become like a player in a video game, running around avoiding falling boulders, jumping over pits of snakes, maneuvering out of the way of giant fireballs.

    But what our brain perceives as threats are not actually threats but emotions it doesn’t know what to do with.

    The pits of snakes aren’t snakes but fear around traveling. Or the boulders are the fear of disappointment or despair. Avoiding the fireballs is trying to avoid shame.

    The harsh thing, though, is that even though we are trying to sensibly avoid these emotions, these survival reactions, we don’t get to avoid them completely.

    The shame, the fear, the rage, the terror—they are there in our body and popping up in other places. We can’t avoid them completely, and by trying to avoid them, we simply make our lives smaller and smaller and smaller.

    Are we doomed to spend our lives in avoidance mode?

    Do we just have to accept that some things are just  “too hard,” “too stressful,” “not for people like us”?

    No. Way.

    That is the really exciting thing about our brains. We have learned to be this way because of how we learned to deal with emotions. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a new way. That we can’t ‘rewire’ the responses we have learned.

    By working with my own fear, by learning how to be with it, I stopped feeling so scared about everything in my life. I totally changed how I saw myself.  I no longer believe myself to be a fearful, overly cautious person.

    I gave myself time to learn to be with the energy of the fear in a way that was so gentle and slow that it helped me to feel safe around the emotion in a way I never had before.

    I realized that the problem is not that we are avoiding our emotions on purpose; it’s that we don’t understand them.

    This is what is so hard about how so many of us learn to live our lives.

    We aren’t given the tools to work with our emotions (most of us aren’t anyway), and then we are cast out into the world to just ‘make a life.’

    Have good relationships!

    Be successful! Get a good job!

    Cope with work colleagues / clients / stressed-out bosses.

    Deal with grief, aging, health problems, loved ones dying!

    Be a good parent, even if your parents were a little shoddy, absent, authoritarian, unloving.

    How are we supposed to navigate the world when it generates so much emotion for us and we never learned how to deal with emotion? When we feel constantly pushed hither and thither either by our emotional reactions or other people’s?

    Awakening the act of self-compassion and empathy for the emotions we struggle with is one of the most powerful steps we can take when we start this journey.

    Deciding: Wow, I wasn’t given the tools to navigate the whole myriad of emotions that I encounter every day! And that is tough!

    Giving ourselves a little grace, a little tenderness, a little understanding around this is such a powerful step away from how we normally respond to emotional activation.

    Can we offer ourselves some kindness and understanding instead of blame and judgment? It makes sense I feel like this—I haven’t learned how to deal with emotions like shame, fear, grief, etc.

    Offering compassion in the face of strong emotional reactions is a powerful step because normally we are in the habit of trying to dismiss/justify/vent our feelings: I shouldn’t feel like this! It’s all their fault! I am such a terrible person! Everything is so terrifying! They made me angry!

    Instead, can we decide to start walking toward being on our own side? Can we accept the challenges we have faced with emotions? And instead of blaming and shaming ourselves, can we decide instead to move toward kindness, understanding, empathy, and compassion?

    When we allow our emotions to exist and meet them with empathy, creating a sense of internal safety around them, it’s much easier to support ourselves through experiences that might activate them.

  • Why I Love My Sober Life: Everything I Gained When I Quit Drinking

    Why I Love My Sober Life: Everything I Gained When I Quit Drinking

    “Sobriety was the greatest gift I ever gave myself.” ~Rob Lowe

    I tried and failed to have a fabulous relationship with alcohol for many years.

    When my children were tiny, I drank far more than was good for me, thinking I was relaxing, unwinding, socializing, and having fun. I’d seen my life shrink down from a world with lots of freedom and vibrancy to a socially restricted void, and I wanted to feel normal. I wanted to join in with everyone else.

    All my birthday cards had bottles of gin or glasses of fizz on them, all the Friday afternoon memes on social media were about “wine o’clock,” and I wanted to be part of that world.

    The opening of a bottle in the evening had me thinking I was changing gear, moving from stressed to relaxed, and treating myself to some self-care. Nothing could have been further from the truth; the alcohol made me wake during the night and gave me low-level anxiety and an almost permanent brain fog.

    I’m not proud of the drinking I did when the kids were small. I now feel a deep sense of shame about that time. I’d created such a happy life for myself—lovely husband and kids, nice house in a great town, wonderful friends. What was I drinking to escape from?

    On the outside I looked like I had it all, but I didn’t—I had overwhelm.

    I was a wife and family member, a mum to two small children, an employee, and a freelancer… I had all the roles I’d longed for, and yet it was all too much.

    I didn’t know how to let go of some of my responsibilities, and I didn’t know how to cope with everything that was going on in my life. Alcohol felt like the treat I deserved. It took me a while to figure out that alcohol was the common theme in my rubbish decision-making, tiredness, and grumpiness.

    I’d spent a long time feeling trapped and stuck. I knew I wanted to stop drinking, but I was worried about what others would think of me, how I would feel at parties without a drink in my hand, and whether I’d be able to relax properly at the weekends.

    I kept going back and forth, deciding I’d stop, then changing my mind, thinking I wouldn’t or couldn’t. It was a hellish merry-go-round. When I was forty-one, I finally made the decision to quit alcohol for a year as a little life experiment. I wanted to see how I would feel without it for an extended period of time.

    I decided to take a bold action in autumn 2019. I told a group of online friends that I was not going to drink alcohol for the whole of 2020, and once I had said it out loud, I knew I would have to do it.

    This step toward accountability really helped me to move forward with my sober mission. I started to count down to 2020 (still binge drinking), wondering how this experiment was going to go!

    Toward the end of 2019, my mindset began to shift. Instead of dreading the start of 2020, I started to look forward to it. I made plans that I knew would lead to a successful sober year. I read books about quitting, listened to inspiring podcasts, and watched films or documentaries that didn’t show alcohol consumption in a glamorous light. I followed people who were a few steps ahead of me on their sober journey. I asked questions and I followed advice.

    I had my last drink on Dec 8th, 2019—nothing monumental, out with a few friends and no hangover the next day. It was a total non-event!

    I wanted to have a year without alcohol to know if life would be stressful, lonely, or boring like I’d led myself to believe, or if it was possible to relax, connect with others, and have fun without a drink. The hangovers and brain fog were getting worse. In my late thirties and early forties, I just couldn’t get away with it like I had in my twenties.

    I wanted to be a more patient parent—no more selfishly rushing the kids through bedtime because I wanted to get back downstairs to my drink.

    I wanted hangover-free weekends to enjoy my time away from work.

    I wanted to maximize my nutritional choices—no more rubbish food choices dictated by low-level hangovers, or high-level ones for that matter.

    I wanted to sleep deeply and wake up feeling rested and ready for the day ahead.

    I wanted to know I was giving myself the best chance at not getting high blood pressure, heart disease, liver disease, cancer, dementia, or a compromised immune system.

    I went through the whole of 2020 without a drink. There were some tough days to navigate, some challenging events to negotiate, and awkward conversations to have with friends, but I did it all, and I did it all sober.

    When 2021 rolled around, I knew I wasn’t going to go back to how I’d drunk before. I had changed my relationship with alcohol for the better. I was physically, emotionally, and spiritually a different person, and I didn’t want to go back to numbing my feelings.

    It’s easy to name all the benefits to our bodies and minds when we cut alcohol out—deeper sleep, clearer skin, better mood, more energy, and less anxiety, to name a few—but for me, the real shift has come a couple of years down the line. I feel more spiritually open than I’ve ever felt before, and I cannot wait to see what unfolds next for all of those of us on this sober-curious journey.

  • Handling Lifequakes: How to Navigate the Storms of Change

    Handling Lifequakes: How to Navigate the Storms of Change

    “How you revise, rethink, and rewrite your personal narrative as things change, lurch, or go wrong in your life matters a great deal.”  ~Bruce Feiler

    It’s happened to all of us.

    Just when life is going smoothly, a big, scary event comes along that threatens to ruin everything.

    A frightening diagnosis, a relationship breakup, the death of a loved one, a job loss, or the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Your life gets turned upside down when you least expect it.

    I don’t know about you, but my life has been full of significant life changes over the last ten years: my husband’s retirement and chronic lymphocytic leukemia diagnosis within a month of each other, the death of a beloved old pet, and my husband’s six months of chemotherapy. This was followed by him breaking his back plus having heart surgery only a few months later.

    After that, we spent a year going through a highly stressful move. And then the pandemic started. Earlier this year, we had to move my parents into assisted living after Mom broke her hip and Dad had to stop driving.

    I’ve come to the realization that learning to master these types of daunting challenges may be the most crucial skill we need, regardless of our age.

    So I’m always on the lookout for helpful advice.

    Navigating Lifequakes

    Bestselling author Bruce Feiler spent five years talking to people about the most significant transitions of their lives. Spurred on by a series of personal crises, he traveled the country, gathering the life stories of hundreds of Americans from every state.

    He then spent a year combing through those stories, unearthing patterns and insights that can help us all handle challenging times more effectively. His efforts culminated in his excellent book Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age.

    Feiler learned that massive life disruptions, what he calls lifequakes, strike us at the core of our being. We feel scared, overwhelmed, and stuck, leading to a “meaning crisis” (a feeling of meaninglessness). But a transition is what helps us break free and move forward.

    A lifequake can come in different forms—a choice we make, like leaving a bad marriage or starting a new venture, or something that happens beyond our control, such as losing a job or facing illness.

    Regardless of how it comes about, the key is that the transition itself must be voluntary. We must work to turn our fear and anxiety into something positive and life-affirming.

    “As long as we all have to go through these tumultuous periods; as long as we have to experience all this stress and distress, heartrending and heart-mending; as long as we have to readjust our personal narratives; why do we insist on talking about these periods as something dire and defeating? As long as life is going to be full of plot twists, why not spend more time learning to master them?”

    Based on Feiler’s research, here are five tips, with examples from my own life, to make the transitions you experience go more smoothly.

    Use Your Transition Superpower and Get Help with Your Kryptonite

    Feeling all over the place or stuck in one spot during significant changes is normal. But Feiler discovered there’s actually some order to these times.

    Transitions can be broken down into three phases. There’s the long goodbye, where you leave the past behind. There’s the messy middle, where you stumble toward a fresh identity. And there’s the new beginning, where you embrace your new way of being.

    But these phases don’t always happen in a straight line, and the order is different for everyone. Also, they rarely begin and end in a clean way. We go in and out of them in highly unique patterns. And it’s easy to get stuck in one phase for a long time.

    Each person has their own strength in one phase (their transition superpower) and may struggle with another (their transition kryptonite).

    For example, I’ve noticed that my husband’s superpower is the messy middle of things.

    He has trouble with goodbyes and letting go of the past. But when he finally does, he demonstrates tremendous patience and perseverance in dealing with the ongoing chaos of the messy middle.

    For instance, when his leukemia flares up every few years, it requires more frequent visits to the oncologist and treatment for as long as it takes to get back to the desired state of remission. I think he handles the uncertainty and discomfort of this relatively well.

    My husband’s superpower is my kryptonite. The messy middle of things always feels never-ending and draining to me. I am frequently impatient and must work hard to keep my energy up.

    Over time, we’ve learned how to help each other through transitions. I give him extra support with his goodbyes, and he’s a caring cheerleader through my messy middles.

    Accept and Balance Your Emotions

    Feiler asked everyone he interviewed about the most potent emotions they struggled with during their transitions. Fear was the top emotion, with 27% of people feeling that one the most. Sadness and shame were also common reactions.

    People dealt with these emotions in different ways. Some wrote down their feelings, while others threw themselves into new tasks to keep busy.

    But nearly eight out of ten people turned to rituals to cope. They sang, danced, hugged, got tattoos, and skydived. They changed their names and went to sweat lodges.

    These rituals are super effective, especially during the long goodbye phase. They serve as statements to ourselves and others that we’ve gone through a change and are ready for whatever comes next.

    Supporting my elderly parents through their decline and suffering this year has been a new life stage for me. In many ways, the experience reminds me of the demands of parenting. Selflessness, on-the-spot problem-solving, patience, and resilience—all constant requirements.

    And the emotions have been intense. One of the rituals I use is my early-morning journaling practice. Over the last several months, writing my truth about this has helped me reach a state of acceptance, reducing my fear and sadness.

    Let Go of Something

    When we reach the messy middle, we start getting rid of things—like old ways of thinking, bad habits, false beliefs, and even dreams that no longer suit us. It’s like animals shedding their outer layer to grow bigger or prepare for their next life stage.

    When Loretta Parham, a librarian from Atlanta, lost her daughter in a car accident and took on the responsibility of raising her granddaughters, she had to let go of just indulging them and become more of a disciplinarian.

    When I was in the middle of that season of one health scare after another with my husband—it went on for sixteen months—I had to let go of how he used to be.

    He had been hale and hearty, “large and in charge.” Making our life work had been a 50/50 partnership, but he only had maybe 10% to give, so I had to step up and provide 90%.

    This shedding process allows us to do away with what no longer serves us and make space for a new reality.

    Do Something Creative

    Many people Feiler talked to during his interviews found comfort in being creative during times of change. They turned to dancing, cooking, painting, writing poems, thank-you notes, and diary entries.

    When faced with chaos, their response was to create something meaningful.

    After leaving her husband, Khaliqa Baqi set up a sewing room in her home and “started making beautiful creations with fabric.”

    Gayla Paschall started building hand-painted birdhouses after getting caught up in a faculty scandal at Emory and losing her research position. Soon, she was selling her creations at a gallery.

    While accompanying my husband to the cancer center for chemotherapy years ago, I saw the nurses bring out warm, hand-made throw blankets for the patients who were feeling cold. The nurses said the patients loved them and they could always use more.

    So I dusted off my crochet skills and made throws to donate to the center. I enjoy the meditative nature of crocheting and love giving my creations away. Other creative practices that help me through chaotic times are coloring mandalas and nature photography.

    This desire for renewal through creativity has been a part of humanity since the beginning of time. It’s as if we instinctively know we can find a fresh start by creating something new.

    Compose a Fresh Story

    Going through a life transition is like writing a new chapter in our story. We can find meaning in our lifequake and the resulting changes we go through.

    Whether our experience was positive or not, we can choose to end the story with positivity and hope. One of my favorite teachers, author Martha Beck, calls this writing into light.

    I now make sense of lifequakes by viewing them as spiritual practice and asking, “What can I learn from this?”

    We have the power to shape the stories of our transitions. Feiler says that instead of seeing them as tough times we must struggle through, we should view them as healing periods.

    They give us a chance to mend the frightening parts of our lives, helping us move forward in renewal and growth.

    ——

    We all face those moments when our world turns upside down and the road ahead seems uncertain. But it’s during these very times that we discover our inner strength, resilience, and creativity.

    We can embrace change as a chance to rewrite our story, shed what no longer serves us, and dream a new dream.

    May we all have peace of heart as we go.

  • Accepting Fear and Sadness as Normal Parts of a Good Life

    Accepting Fear and Sadness as Normal Parts of a Good Life

    “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.” ~Naomi Shihab Nye

    I knew it was around that time. When I opened my eyes, it was pitch black outside and I couldn’t yet hear the chickens in the distance waking up. It was 4 a.m. again.

    In the past few days, I have loved this gift of jet lag; transitioning to a thirteen-hour time change has afforded me this dark, mysterious quiet that has woken up inside of me the place from which I write—a place that spontaneously arises when the conditions are such that something flows through me.

    However, next to me in my bed, my daughter slept soundly. I lay there, paying attention to and feeling my body breathe, sensations arising and falling, and thinking about life—the past, present, and future.

    As I lay there, I noticed the sweet ebb and flow of my breath and the glorious feel of the air from the fan washing over my warm and rested body.

    Yet on this particular morning, I noticed my belly rumbling and my heart tensing. I placed my hands on my body and noticed.

    Nothing in that moment could provoke anything but peace, calm, and gratitude, and yet, wherever you go, there you are. Regardless of how far I am from my physical home, I know that what lives inside of me, travels with me.

    I asked these sensations in my body, what do you want me to know? Without hesitation I heard a voice, I am scared.

    There was nothing to be scared about in the moment. I was completely safe in every possible way other than being away from home. I didn’t feel any imminent threat or danger to provoke fear.

    I stayed curious and started seeing images of my father.

    Earlier in the day while on a boat with my teenage daughter, a memory washed over me with an image of him. He loved taking us places and giving us opportunities to explore life. As a teenager, I often and unfortunately remember rolling my eyes at him.

    When I was in the seventh grade, he took me and my brother rafting in the Grand Canyon. To get to our raft boats we took a helicopter into the canyon. That summer there had been massive rains, and the water was brown from the mud. This made the canyon waters muddy, which meant that my hair for five days was basically a brown ratted nest. I complained throughout the exquisite adventure that my hair was a mess.

    But what I thought about today in that moment on the boat was that he had gifted me curiosity, a little adventure, and a love of life in the moment. I felt a wash of gratitude and appreciation for him. The moment passed.

    I continued to lie in bed and stayed present to the sensations in my body. Memories and feelings started coming of when things started changing.

    I remember noticing there wasn’t as much food in the pantry, he began sleeping on the couch, he had more doctor’s appointments, and bill collectors started calling. And there were more fights between my parents and between us. Things slowly began to fall apart.

    The money from my college savings was gone. My wish for where I wanted to go to school wasn’t possible. And it wasn’t just me that was feeling all of this. It was all seven of his children.

    In the course of ten years, my father’s business had crumbled. My dad was an amazing people person and a fantastic salesman, but he wasn’t the best at administrative things. When the economy suffered a setback and changes in his industry began happening, he didn’t have the wherewithal to get support and ask for help.

    So we watched the unraveling of his business and felt the impact with no exact words to describe what was happening. Nobody talked about it. We just felt it.

    That stirring in my belly was familiar. That ache in my heart was also familiar.

    It was a mixture of fear and sadness.

    We are told to think positively and everything will work out. Everything will be okay. It sounds good to have that beacon of light as hope. But that wasn’t my experience. He never recovered financially; his health deteriorated over the years and life was exceptionally difficult for him and for his family; his body suffered terribly until he passed away at sixty-five years old.

    We don’t often talk about the fact that life sometimes doesn’t work out: people get sick and die early, businesses fail, marriages end, children get sick, and people change. We say that there are lessons in those failures; we will learn and something positive will come of it.

    Yes, there is truth in all of that. I live in the life lessons, see the positive in hardships, and trust that blessings are also a part of life, but we don’t also hold that life can be hard and that leaves an imprint inside of us.

    On this particular morning, as I lay in bed, I was reminded again of something important. The experience of watching my father lose his business and his health deteriorate over twenty years was scary. He told me in our last conversation before the fall that led to his death that he had entered into a dark hole many years prior.

    It was terrifying. It was also sad.

    What I continue to learn is that fear and sadness are not independent of each other but are related; it’s not just that I was scared, but I was also sad.

    Everything can be lost.

    We often want to heal what hurts and feels uncomfortable so that it will go away. Or we pretend that it doesn’t impact the way we live, see the world, are in relationship with others, or even raise our children. But the truth is that hurts like that, experiences like that, alter us. They change the trajectory of our life.

    I continue to learn to hold with love and understanding that fear and sadness are sacred parts of me. They ebb and flow. They are welcome to have a home inside of me. I am not flawed or any less human because I carry them with me; in fact, they probably influence my curiosity and my awe for our capacity as humans to heal, grow, and make peace and live with pain in our heart.

    Fear still comes. Sadness still comes.

    I get scared sometimes when I let uncertainty of the future get the best of me. I can worry too much about what’s to come. Fear that I, too, can lose everything.

    I feel my heart ache at what could have been. The grief of all that was lost.

    Life can be scary, and life can be sad. It can also be beautiful.

    Despite all my father went through, he always looked at the positive. He never complained even when he could barely walk, when he couldn’t take care of his body or afford basic things. He thought that it could always be worse and harder than his situation. 

    I think that it was a gift for him, that he could see the positive, because it helped him live with the pain and losses in a dignified way.

    The last phone call that I had with my dad, not knowing just a week later he would fall and lose consciousness, I told him, “I am so sorry that life was hard for you.”

    He replied, “I lived a good life, Carly.”

  • How Feeling Out of Control as a Kid Led Me to an Eating Disorder

    How Feeling Out of Control as a Kid Led Me to an Eating Disorder

    In many cultures, food is an expression of love. Sometimes, as was the case for me growing up as a child of immigrants, food might be the only expression of love.

    My parents were not very affectionate or communicative about love. My dad gives classic awkward-dad hugs, where he pats your back with self-conscious uncertainty from a good foot and a half away. My mom hit me so frequently and unexpectedly that my body learned to flinch anytime she got too close.

    My childhood was punctuated by seasons of my mom’s depression. Ramen and Pizza Hut boxes marked how long a particular bout of depression was. My mom would sometimes go weeks without changing out of her pale pink nightgown or opening her bedroom blinds. During these dark days, if she did get out of bed, she moved zombie-like through the house, no sign of vibrancy in her eyes.

    And then something would somehow shift. I would always wait in desperate hope for this shift.

    I would know the tide was turning when the kitchen would come back alive. The little tabletop stove would be back on the kitchen table for sizzling jjigaes and kalbi, the familiar smells of doenjang and kimchi filling the house again. The click of the rice cooker would tell us it was almost time for dinner.

    We never spoke about what it meant when my mom was cooking and when she wasn’t cooking, but we all understood the significance.

    I have a very distinct memory of myself at about ten years old. I can see myself sitting at the table in our kitchen on a summer’s day. A half head of iceberg lettuce sits in front of me.

    This was my entire lunch. It would continue to be my entire lunch for many years to come.

    My mom tried to entice me to eat more. I didn’t understand this explicitly then, but as a mother now, I completely do—you cannot force your child to eat. Food was something, perhaps the only thing, I could control.

    I didn’t know I was doing this at the time, but in being difficult about my food, I was unconsciously demanding that my mom show me that she loved me. I was trying to force her mental illness to stay away. I was sending the threatening message that if she were to disappear into her depression for weeks, I would have to survive on half heads of lettuce, and then what would happen?

    But the frightening oppression of my mom’s cycles of depression and suicide attempts continued. When the worst was being thrown at me, I could at least control food.

    Many times, I couldn’t eat at all, a common reaction that happens when someone is going through shock or sadness. When I did eat, I had an unmovable need to be very strict and particular.

    My controlled eating intensified as I became a yoga teacher. “I can’t have a full stomach when I’m doing my practice,” I would say.

    To an extent, this was true. It would be physically uncomfortable to wolf down a bowl of pasta and then hang out inverted in Down Dog. But what I didn’t say was that I was also extremely concerned with how I would look in my yoga clothes.

    I equated any perceivable imperfections in my body with failure, shame, and ugliness.

    I lost so much weight that on one visit home, my mom forced me to stand on the scale. She was mortified at how little I weighed. I, on the other hand, realized I was secretly ecstatic, even proud.

    I was often lightheaded and had low energy. My blood pressure was too low, but I credited it to all the yoga and meditation I was doing.

    I went through various phases of food limitations. I returned to vegetarianism, which morphed into veganism, which further morphed into a raw diet based on eating “only what you could catch with your bare hands.”

    I read that in eating anything that came from an animal, you were taking in their karma, and if an animal had been brutally slaughtered, you were consuming that energy of pain and suffering. I learned about the blood type diet and eating based on what your ancestors ate. I of course learned about the evils of gluten.

    The more I read about food, the more I wanted to read about it. In lieu of consuming food, I consumed information about it.

    I didn’t notice when the language of diet culture shifted to “clean eating,” and I blindly jumped on the bandwagon. How could I eat in the cleanest way? How could I avoid all toxins?

    I did juice cleanses throughout the year. I lead “Detox Flow Yoga” workshops, teaching sequences that targeted the digestive organs, as if they would not be able to function without our manipulation.

    I was a complete mess. I had so much information—much of it false and rooted in diet culture—swirling in my head that I would find myself paralyzed. What was safe to eat?

    A steak would be approved by Atkins, but red meat was bad for my heart and karmically cursed. Too much raw food seemed to give me stomachaches. Anything with sugar was out.

    I would open the fridge and stand there, staring hopelessly. When you’re trying to follow low or no carb and vegan andraw and gluten-free, there is hardly anything that is safe to eat. I read about great yogis who lived in caves and survived on oxygen and a few twigs and berries.

    I stuck to my list of “clean” foods and kept my quantities as small as possible. I was constantly restricting, which is an eating disorder, but I just thought I was “disciplined.”

    After having my first child, I turned to severe food restriction to lose weight. I tortured myself with clothes from when I was eighteen years old, trying on old jeans as a barometer of my bigness. When I went back to teaching, I practically hung my head in shame saying, “I just had a baby. I’m still working on losing the last ten pounds.”

    Not eating affected my milk production, which I somehow did not understand would of course happen with low caloric intake. Not eating, also, was a major trigger to my anxiety and panic attacks.

    I was diagnosed with eating disorders.

    When I was pregnant with my second, during the pandemic, I was determined to be healthy. Pregnancy already makes most women feel like we can actually eat. Being in lockdown, not seeing anyone I knew, and changing from sleep sweats to daytime sweats gave me an even more expansive license to eat and to actually eat what I enjoyed.

    It felt like everyone was embracing a more liberated lifestyle. We all started making bread from scratch.

    I made a conscious choice to carry this food freedom forward. I knew it meant I would be carrying the baby weight with me for a while. I willed myself not to get caught up in this.

    I wanted to retrain my brain from thinking that being as skinny as possible equaled being good, lovable, and worthy.

    I’ve learned that for me, there is a connection between my disordered eating and my anxiety. That feeling I would get at 4 p.m. that seemed to just be low blood sugar was also the initial niggling of anxiety—anxiety that would cause symptoms and that could trigger panic attacks.

    I started paying closer attention to my eating habits. One of the most surprising things I noticed was that when I hadn’t eaten for too many hours and I would finally take a bite of something, I would often burst into tears, as if my body was crying in relief.

    I decided to let go of rules and rigidity around eating. I stopped waiting as long as possible to not eat. I asked friends how frequently and how much they ate and learned that one boiled egg does not count as a full meal.

    I recognized my disordered habits, such as spitting out food and simply forgetting to eat. I set myself the goal of eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner, something that sounds so simple but has been shockingly difficult for me to adhere to consistently.

    I’ve realized that continuing to restrict food is only going to worsen both my physical health and mental well-being. I’ve accepted that I am battling a deeply embedded disorder that is wrapped up in my childhood, in being my mentally ill mother’s daughter.

    Food was not simply sustenance. Food also indicated the state of mom’s mind, of whether things were safe or scary. Food was how I tried to control the uncontrollable.

    As with any healing journey, my path is not direct or linear. For every step forward there are at least an equal number of steps back. I think what matters is that I pay attention to the steps that I take and that I continue to refine my goals and priorities.

    I want to be mentally and physically well so that I can be there for my family and so that I can enjoy this precious, ever-fleeting experience of being human. I want to be a healthy example to my children so that they inherently absorb as truth the importance of loving, accepting, and taking care of yourself. I want us all to be able to eat for nutrition and sustenance and also in joy.

    I wish I could go back and sit with the little me eating the half head of lettuce and give her a big hug. I would ask her if she was okay. I would tell her that I was there if she wanted to talk about anything, that life could feel quite scary sometimes, that I loved her, and that I would help her.

    This is how we break harmful cycles: Face what has been done to us and consciously choose what we will not carry forward. Remember how it felt to be a child, think about what we needed but were not given, and do our best to be that for others as well as for ourselves.

    My therapist explained to me that the part of the brain that holds deep emotional imprints doesn’t know the calendar. It doesn’t discern that the thing has already happened at a different time, in a different place. So when you remember something painful, the emotional self feels it as if it is happening right now.

    We think thoughts such as: “The emotions came flooding back” and “It was like I was right back in that moment.”

    I think this is why the instinct is to repress, to deny, to pretend. Who wants to go back to times when they felt terrified, helpless, and hopeless? It is no wonder people turn to all forms of distraction and busyness or become addicted to various coping mechanisms.

    And sometimes we just need to do what we need to do to survive. I don’t believe there’s anything to be ashamed about in that. Because it means we wanted to survive, to live.

    It’s just that we—our bodies, our minds, our hearts—can only take so much. You cannot infinitely escape facing your terrors and your trauma. When the time comes, they will insist on being seen, heard, felt, and with determination and work, eventually processed and healed.

    Hopefully when we hit our breaking point, we have access to support. A professional, partner, family member, or friend… sometimes support shows up in the most unexpected of places. It is necessary to reach out to others and to allow yourself to be heard, helped, and held.

    It can feel like there is nobody out there who will catch you, but I’m willing to bet that that is simply not true. There is always someone. At the very least, there is me.

  • 30 Reminders for Sensitive People Who Feel Drained, Ashamed, or Judged

    30 Reminders for Sensitive People Who Feel Drained, Ashamed, or Judged

    “Highly sensitive people are too often perceived as weaklings or damaged goods. To feel intensely is not a symptom of weakness, it is the trademark of the truly alive and compassionate.”~Anthon St. Maarten

    There are some words that get painfully etched into our memories as if with a red-hot poker. For me, growing up, those words were “you’re too sensitive.”

    I often caught this phrase in the fumbling hands of my shame after someone chucked it at me with callousness and superiority as a means to justify their cruelty.

    They may have said something vicious or condescending in private, or told embarrassing stories or outright lies about me in public.

    Either way, the results were the same: I’d take it personally, get emotionally overwhelmed, then either explode in anger or sob.

    But it wasn’t just cruelty that evoked my sensitivity, and I didn’t cry only when obviously provoked.

    Well-meaning people, who generally treated me with kindness, would gently remind me I’m too sensitive when I overanalyzed the smallest things other people did—like taking a while to call me back or “making a face” after I said something I thought sounded stupid.

    Or they might pull out this sage observation of my character when I took criticism to heart, struggled to let go of something painful, or experienced someone else’s pain deeply and intensely, as if it were my own.

    It was as if the whole world could see that there was something glaringly wrong with me. But I couldn’t seem to change the way I perceived, experienced, and reacted to life.

    Little did they know how deep this sensitivity ran, far below the surface.

    They had no idea that my mind was a web of constant reflection, pertaining to not only my own experiences, but also the suffering of everyone around me.

    They had no idea how frequently I felt drained and over-stimulated, and that just showing up to a crowded or loud environment took monumental strength (which I had to muster often growing up in a big Italian family).

    They had no idea how often I felt stressed, anxious, and jumpy because my nervous system was so dialed up.

    And I had no idea there was a biological explanation for all of this. It wasn’t until years later—decades, actually—that I found the term “highly sensitive person” and finally understood that my brain actually processes information and reflects on it more deeply than non-HSP brains.

    Over the years, I’ve learned to accept that some of my traits and behaviors are just part of being a highly sensitive person.

    I’ve learned that HSPs:

    • Are highly perceptive and empathetic
    • Feel everything deeply
    • Absorb other people’s emotions and can tell when something’s wrong
    • Pick up on subtleties other people might miss
    • Have heightened intuition
    • Easily feel drained or overwhelmed in loud, chaotic, or otherwise over-stimulating environments

    I’ve also learned that some of my former behaviors were responses to my sensitivity, for example:

    • Overanalyzing things other people said or did
    • Internalizing judgments as truth
    • Judging myself for my needs instead of honoring them
    • Drinking to numb myself in over-stimulating environments instead of simply avoiding them or making efforts to ground myself
    • Ignoring my intuition about people or situations that weren’t good for me
    • Taking on everyone else’s pain instead of setting boundaries

    Though I am by no means an expert on navigating life as a highly sensitive person, I know I’ve come a long way over the years. I still experience the world and my emotions intensely. But I feel less like a rag doll in a roaring tornado and more like a deeply rooted tree that may lose some of its leaves but can ultimately endure one hell of a storm.

    I’ve learned to take good care of myself, honor my needs, and worry less about what other people think of me. And I generally don’t judge myself as harshly as I once did.

    It helps that I not only have a toolbox for self-care—including meditation, walks in nature, and long baths—but also an arsenal of lessons to remember whenever my sensitivity gets the better of me.

    If you can relate to any of what I’ve shared, and if you frequently feel drained, ashamed, or judged, perhaps these reminders may be helpful to you, now or some time in the future.

    When You Feel Drained

    1. You are only responsible for your own emotions. You can’t take away everyone else’s pain, and if you could, you’d be robbing them of the chance to grow.

    2. You don’t need to fix anyone else’s problems. Just listening is enough—but you can only listen for so long before it gets to be too much.

    3. You don’t need to put yourself in environments that over-stimulate you, and choosing to do something different doesn’t make you weird or any less fun.

    4. It’s not worth forcing yourself to do something if you know you won’t enjoy it and you’ll end up feeling drained.

    5. You can choose to listen to your instincts instead of your anxiety. If you feel you need to leave but you’re worried about how you’ll be perceived, focus on the voice that knows what’s best for you.

    6. Other people and external situations can only drain you if you let them. You have the ability and right to set boundaries at any time.

    7. It’s not selfish to take care of yourself. As the saying goes, you can’t pour from an empty cup.

    8. Sleep isn’t a luxury; you need to get sufficient rest to handle the many parts of life that are emotionally exhausting.

    9. The most important question you can ask yourself, at any time, but particularly when you feel overwhelmed, is “What do I need right now?”

    10. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. Even five minutes of a calming practice, like deep breathing or yoga, can make a huge difference.

    When You Feel Ashamed

    11. You can’t control or change that you have a highly sensitive nervous system, and you can’t help that you process everything deeply and experience emotions intensely. You wouldn’t feel ashamed of your hair or eye color, so why feel ashamed of something else you were born with?

    12. Sensitivity isn’t a weakness; it’s the source of your understanding, compassion, depth, and creativity—which means it’s actually a strength.

    13. There is nothing “wrong” with you, and you’re worthy of love and respect just as you are.

    14. You are not alone. According to psychologist Elaine Aron, who wrote the book on HSPs, highly sensitive people make up fifteen to twenty percent of the population.

    15. If someone else shamed you for your sensitivity, or for coping with it ineffectively because you didn’t know any better, you didn’t deserve it.

    16. Your shame comes from the story you’re telling yourself about yourself—and you can change that story to be more compassionate at any time.

    17. You don’t have to “fix” your emotional intensity. You simply need to observe your emotions so you’re less likely to get caught up in them.

    18. You are not what you do. If you act in a way you regret when you’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed or over-stimulated, you can simply apologize, forgive yourself, learn from the experience, and move on.

    19. Crying isn’t something to be ashamed of. It actually helps release stress and pent up emotions, and it’s a sign of immense courage if you let yourself cry instead of resisting vulnerability.

    20. If you sit with your shame instead of trying to numb it, it will eventually move through you. No emotion lasts forever.

    When You Feel Judged

    21. For every person who might judge you, there’s someone else who’d love, value, and accept you just as you are.

    22. You don’t need everyone to understand or like you; you just need to understand and have compassion for yourself.

    23. What other people think of you is their business, and their opinions and judgments can only hurt you if you let them.

    24. Just because someone else says you’re “too sensitive,” that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong or you need to change.

    25. If other people don’t value you, they’re missing out on the chance for a deep, meaningful relationship with someone who’d always be there and would never hurt or judge them.

    26. If someone judges you, it’s a reflection of where they are in their life and development, not who you are as a person.

    27. Just because someone minimizes your feelings, that doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t valid.

    28. You have the right to end a conversation at any time if someone dismisses your feelings or violates your boundaries.

    29. It’s okay to walk away from a relationship if someone consistently devalues, disrespects, or hurts you.

    30. Just because you think someone is judging you, that doesn’t mean they are. Their silence, distance, or mood may have nothing to do with you.

    —

    Of course, it’s far easier to jot down a list of lessons than it is to remember the most useful one in the moment when it can be most helpful. I’ve struggled to recall these insights many times, both in the distant and recent past. But it’s not about perfection; it’s about awareness and practice, as is everything in life.

    Read this, print it, put it somewhere you’ll see it often, and perhaps you can etch these ideas into your memory, as deeply but not as painfully as the criticisms you’ve likely heard over the years.

    And if you only take one idea into your day, let it be this:

    We are not defective. We don’t need to get harder or grow a thicker skin. We don’t have to “man up” or “suck it up” or stop caring so deeply.

    The world doesn’t need more guarded people, weaponized by apathy and bitterness. The world needs more people who aren’t afraid to reflect, to feel, and to love with hearts so open they overflow with empathy and kindness.

    The world needs us sensitive souls to see beauty others might not see and create beauty where it might never exist if we hadn’t filtered life through the kaleidoscope of our own unique perspective.

    But we can only give the best of ourselves if we take good care of ourselves, even if other people have different needs; if we value ourselves, whether others do or not; and we remember that judgment is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to control or define us.

  • The Hidden Reasons You’re Stuck (And What to Do When Conventional Advice Fails)

    The Hidden Reasons You’re Stuck (And What to Do When Conventional Advice Fails)

    “The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers.” ~M. Scott Peck

    Have you ever been in a situation or a stage in your life where you’ve felt physically stuck, as if you’ve fallen into some kind of invisible quicksand that you can’t get out of?

    Or maybe it’s felt more like you have a thick, invisible elastic band around your waist, and no matter how hard you push forward, it pulls against you, holding you in place? Or maybe it’s like a sky-high brick wall that you can’t find your way through, around, or over?

    Getting stuck in life can feel frustrating, annoying, upsetting, and confusing. And if you’ve been stuck for too long or at a time when you really need to move forward, you’ve probably found yourself panicking and feeling afraid because if you don’t take action, it may seem like your life will collapse—that you may end up financially destitute, homeless, alone, or a failure.

    The Place Where You Are Stuck is Your Growing Edge

    Everyone gets stuck at times. It tends to occur when you arrive on the threshold of a new direction, taking a risk, doing something new, or needing to leave something behind and launch yourself into the unknown.

    I’ve been stuck many times in my life, sometimes briefly and sometimes for longer periods when I’ve had to accept that I needed to make big changes to my life and along with them, make choices and difficult decisions or learn something deeply and powerfully.

    This place where you are stuck is your growing edge. It is the threshold between the known and the unknown, who you are and who you’re becoming.

    Sometimes you might have no idea why you’re stuck, only that you can’t move forward. It’s a place that you may consciously or unconsciously try to escape by either avoiding your stuckness or trying to get over your edge and out of the discomfort too quickly.

    Sometimes we get stuck unnecessarily for way too long because we keep hitting the edge and avoiding it or keep applying strategies to get unstuck that don’t address the real cause.

    We often think of getting stuck as a problem to solve, but in my experience, it usually holds a bounty of insight, gifts, power to reclaim, and healing. It can even serve the unfolding of your life by keeping you aligned with your destiny and soul’s callings (or greater purpose, if you don’t believe in those things).

    Why Conventional Advice Didn’t Help You Get Unstuck

    Much has been written about how to get unstuck, but I’ve found that a lot of the advice is based on unnamed assumptions about the reasons you are stuck.

    A common assumption is that it is a mindset issue, so a lot of the advice relates to changing your thoughts and conscious beliefs, cultivating different attitudes and positive mindsets, or using willpower to keep going and find the next step.

    If you have followed any of this type of advice but failed to get unstuck, you may feel like something is wrong with you. But I want to lovingly tell you that there isn’t anything wrong with you. The problem is in the solution that simply didn’t address the root of your stuckness.

    My Experience of Being Stuck

    My most recent bout of stuckness was pretty painful and at times frightening in the context of my life. After pushing hard over several days to write a heap of content for my business, I woke up the next morning feeling depleted, empty, and sad. And I couldn’t write again for weeks.

    If I was writing for fun, then maybe I could have just completely surrendered and waited for the words to return, but as a self-employed business owner, writing forms a large part of my work. I write all of my own website, blog, and marketing content. Not being able to write was scary because it put my business at risk.

    Initially, I tried all the usual things: surrender, acceptance, movement, doing something fun, positive self-talk and encouragement, believing in myself, and looking for the next small step I could take. While these things were helpful, especially in terms of alleviating stress, they didn’t help me get unstuck because when I came back to writing, I was still blocked.

    The Real Reasons I Was Stuck and How I Discovered Them

    When the usual things didn’t help me get unstuck, I sat down with my journal to start inquiring in a loving, gentle way about was happening in my experience and inside me.

    To begin, I did some slow, deep belly breathing with one hand on my heart and the other on my belly. This is a polyvagal breathing exercise that helps to bring your nervous system into a state of relaxation and increases your sense of safety.

    Then I sat with my experience of stuckness and the uncomfortable feelings that arose and noticed what was happening inside me. A conversation with my body and soul unfolded that continued on and off over many days.

    This is what I discovered about why I was stuck.

    1. I had become too immersed in masculine energy in my approach to my writing: linear, direct, and factual.

    I had made it a problem to be solved, a task to be completed. While I cared about writing well and my audience, I had disconnected from the deeper voice within me that held the poetry, beauty, and wisdom of what I truly wanted to say. I call this my soul voice. Essentially, I was trying to write from my head and not my heart.

    2. I was trying to write what I thought others wanted to know or read, in a way I thought I should do it, which wasn’t congruent with what my soul wanted to express through me.

    I believed that I had to write in a certain way to connect with people and be liked rather than just write as myself. I was trying to people-please, which is an old trauma response.

    3. Different parts of me were in conflict, and their conflict needed to be listened to and resolved.

    My sensitive parts didn’t like my overly practical approach to writing and were actively pushing against the “let’s get on with it” part that was trying to get it done. You could think of it like my heart pushing back against my head in opposition, saying “this isn’t the way to proceed.”

    4. Less obvious was an inner critic that redirected me to write from my head.

    Its voice was quiet, blended in my thoughts. It was trying to stop me from writing as my true self to protect me from the risk of criticism that a young innocent part of me would find devastating—an old trauma.

    Once I recognized and sat with all of my insights about why I was stuck, I was able to hear my deeper self and find my way back into writing by listening to what my heart and soul wanted to express, while reassuring my anxious parts.

    I shared little chunks of writing on social media that I felt inspired to share, not because I thought I should or wanted to please anyone but myself. This trickle eventually found its way to become a greater river. My writer’s block ceased. My stuckness was gone.

    The Hidden Reasons You’re Stuck

    The reason you’re stuck is not necessarily a result of your mindset, attitude, or willpower, or solely because of your beliefs. The reasons you are stuck are deeper than that.

    They’re often hidden, obscure, or unobvious because they’re hanging out in your unconscious where you haven’t looked or been able to see them. They can be entangled and intertwined.

    We get stuck because of deep inner conflicts between parts of ourselves that we aren’t aware of or listening to, limiting beliefs created and held by young parts of ourselves, and trauma that has been protectively pushed down but may surface.

    We get stuck when we try to ignore or avoid difficult feelings, or when we’re scared of going for the thing that we want or need to do that our nervous system perceives as dangerous, sending us into a fight, flight, freeze or even fawn response to try and make unworkable situations work.

    Your conscious mind might think you want what you say you want, but unconscious parts of you say no.

    You might have inner critical figures meanly berating you or quietly discouraging you in a way that seems helpful or loving but isn’t. You might not have enough inner or outer allies to help you take the step you want to take or cultivate the skills you need to cultivate.

    You can also get stuck when the thing you’re trying to do isn’t aligned with your destiny or soul’s calling and your stuckness is a symptom of higher intervention.

    How to Find the Hidden Reasons You’re Stuck

    1. Offer yourself love and compassion, coupled with gentle curiosity about your stuckness.

    This will help your body relax and feel safe. You won’t discover what you are looking for by being forceful or unfeeling toward yourself.

    2. Befriend it.

    Before you can get out of your stuckness you must be willing to be with it and relate to it. Even if you try to detour your way around it or avoid it, the lessons that lie within it will appear again at another time in your life because you’re here to learn and grow.

    Life lessons we need to learn repeat. What you learn will serve you for the rest of your life.

    3. If you feel stressed and anxious about your situation, try some polyvagal breathing exercises to bring your nervous system into a state of rest and digest so you’ll feel safer.

    It’s hard to think and see clearly if your body is very activated or stressed or even in a freeze or shutdown.

    4. Find time to consciously hang out with your stuckness, breathe with it, and if you are able to, tune into your body.

    Ask, listen, and see what bubbles up and what you notice is going on beneath the surface. For me, meditation and journaling worked, but they’re not for everyone. Maybe intentional walking, dancing, praying, or talking into your phone is better for you.

    Here, you must be kind, gentle, and welcoming. Digging for answers and clues, especially in a forceful or problem-solving way, can make your sensitive inner world and young parts freeze up and not reveal anything because they feel unsafe.

    5. Hang out and breathe with your insights so you feel safe.

    This can often be enough for your stuckness to unfreeze or for you to form insights about your next step.

    Other times you will need to do some work to process emotions, work through inner conflicts and limiting beliefs, and heal your young parts and traumas. You may need therapeutic support for this.

    6. If you’ve tried the above and you’re still stuck, seek the help of a therapeutic practitioner or safe, compassionately honest loved one.

    We all have blind spots where we can’t see things clearly about ourselves. It’s human nature.

    You may have painful experiences kept out of your conscious awareness that need healing.

    Sometimes you just need help and a safe space to discover what you can’t see and to be held safely with your experience and what arises.

  • How I Embraced Alcohol-Free Living: 4 Things That Made It Easier

    How I Embraced Alcohol-Free Living: 4 Things That Made It Easier

    “What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself.” ~Abraham Maslow

    A few years ago I decided to take a break from alcohol, and I also decided I would probably be lonely, miserable, and boring for the duration of my break.

    I’d allowed a lot of social conditioning to affect me, and I was sure people who didn’t drink either had no friends, had hit a drastic rock bottom, or had no fun. I didn’t know if I was going to find happiness or even contentment on the other side of my drinking career, and this worried me.

    I began to examine those thoughts and feelings around my drinking and brought my behaviors into a sharper focus. It led me to…

    Awareness (of my drinking habits)

    I look back and can now clearly see that I was, for a very long time, a gray area drinker.

    A gray area drinker is someone who falls into the bracket between never drinking and physical alcohol dependency.

    Society tends to view problematic drinking in black and white terms. “You’re an alcoholic and you need to be fixed, or you’re not an alcoholic and are therefore okay.” Well, I think it’s more nuanced than that. There’s a spectrum between the extremes of rock bottom and every now and again drinking, and it’s a long spectrum.

    A gray area drinker could be consuming a couple of glasses of wine each evening or could be someone who binge drinks on the weekend or someone who can abstain for a month at a time to prove they haven’t got a problem.

    I was capable of any of those behaviors, and, looking back, I fit the description of a gray area drinker very neatly. I wasn’t physically dependent on alcohol, but I might have been emotionally dependent. I used it to help me alter my state of mind into relaxation/fun on a regular basis.

    This can be a confusing place to be when you first start to see alcohol for what it is. I’d say, “But I’m not doing anyone any harm. I’m sinking a couple of glasses of wine on the sofa, and then I’m going to bed—what’s the problem with that?”

    In the past I moved along the gray scale; different ages, different friendship groups, different jobs, different circumstances, different seasons, and different living arrangements all led to different drinking patterns. Apart from the periods in my life where I was pregnant or breastfeeding, I didn’t ever choose to have a really extended time (more than thirty days) away from alcohol.

    Acceptance (that I wanted something different)

    I came to realize that the more I moved along the grayscale, the more or less colorful other areas of my life became. If my joy was a rainbow, the vibrancy of that rainbow either faded or shone brightly depending on how much I was drinking.

    I stopped myself from making a change around my drinking for a long time because I didn’t want anyone to define me as “having a problem.”

    The movies would have you believe that the end of your drinking career needs to be very dramatic, with a family intervention and a massive rock bottom, but this doesn’t need to be the case.

    What if you chose for your drinking days to end with a quiet fizzle out instead of a big firework or massive drama? That’s how it was for me.

    My gray area drinking changed shades of gray over a couple of years, and by the time I was ready to try my alcohol-free life experiment, I was moderating my drinking and never drinking more than two drinks at one time. However, the shades of gray no longer felt good, and I wanted a full-on technicolor rainbow, and I knew that to get one I had to do away with the other—so I did.

    Those gray clouds parted, and one by one all the other areas in my life that had, up until then, been a bit less than joyful started to shine a bit brighter.

    Action (taking steps toward what was next)

    Once I had made the decision to have a break from alcohol for one year, I took action steps to make it more likely to happen.

    I set myself up for success by choosing a time frame I wanted to work toward, educating myself on the harm alcohol does, downloading an app to help me to stay focused, looking for other inspiring people who were already doing what I wanted, and asking for support where I needed it.

    I had assumed that once I made the decision to have a break from drinking, it would be easy to execute, but I was surprised to find it wasn’t. I realize now that this is one of the reasons there are so many amazing sober communities out there—we need each other, and we want to look out for those who we can serve.

    I used to joke that the early days of sobriety constituted a full-time job because I got very focused on a morning routine that supported my needs, I read more than I ever have, I listened to podcasts, and I used distraction techniques in the early days. But actually it wasn’t a full-time job; it was simply learning a new way of being.

    Alignment (and a feeling of contentment or peace)

    Now that I don’t drink, I’ve had to face some truths. Some of them have been uncomfortable. Some have become less uncomfortable over time, and some, well, they are still uncomfortable.

    Deciding to have an alcohol-free year threw me into a bit of an identity crisis. I was mostly okay about changing my home drinking identity but really struggled with my social identity. Shared boozy experiences were a big part of my life and of who I was, or who I thought I was.

    I’ve ended up piecing together a bit of a new identity over time. I’ve reflected not only on who I had been but also on who I wanted to be in the future. I took time to explore what I enjoyed and also consciously began to move away from activities I had stopped enjoying.

    I also looked more closely at my relationships. Who did I want to see more of, and who did I need to move away from a bit? Some of the most surprising support came from the least expected places.

    I discovered that chaos had been a default position for so long that calmness was too unfamiliar. To start with, I had to move slowly toward the identity that I wanted. I’ve accepted that some friendships have changed and some have stayed the same. I’ve also made new friends since becoming sober and a business owner.

    Who am I sober? I’m just someone who chooses not to drink alcohol. I want that to be the least interesting thing about me.

    Who am I sober? I am an improved version of myself, more relaxed, more peaceful, more patient, kinder, and more content. These were not words I would have used to describe myself when I was drinking. Internal chaos reigned.

    Who am I sober? Well, probably the most surprising thing for me is to find myself working as a coach. I spent twelve years as a youth worker, and a large portion of my time was spent talking to young people about their substance use without ever considering my own. When I had gotten sober and completed my coach trainings and certifications, I couldn’t believe what I had achieved. None of this seemed possible a short time ago.

    I recognize now that a large part of the “woohoo, let me lead the charge to the pub/bar/dance floor” part of my personality looked like an extrovert but was indeed an introvert using alcohol as a coping mechanism in situations where I didn’t feel comfortable.

    I’m really happy to lay claim to my more introvert nature now—let me have all the fun, but please can it be in pairs or small groups, please can it be in the morning or afternoon, and please can I go home and have a lie-down afterward? Thank you!

    If you’re struggling to visualize/think about who the sober version of you might be, then follow good role models to get ideas—read books, listen to podcasts, and take action. If you’re thinking of taking someone’s advice, consider if they are currently where you might like to be. Have they been in a similar place to you now, and have you seen them act with care and kindness toward others they are helping?

    Sobriety hasn’t been a ‘one and done’ experience for me; it’s been a process over the last few years, and I’m so grateful to acknowledge that I’m still a work in progress, as I believe we all are.

    Bring awareness, acceptance, action, and alignment into focus as you go, and it might just make things a little bit easier for you.

  • Choosing to Smile: When Life Is So Ridiculous You Can’t Help but Laugh

    Choosing to Smile: When Life Is So Ridiculous You Can’t Help but Laugh

    “The body heals with play, the mind heals with laughter, and the spirit heals with joy.” ~Unknown 

    Today, I want to give thanks for two of the special God-given gifts I feel grateful to possess: my sense of humor and my sense of optimism.

    Every time I’ve tripped and fallen or have been kicked down into the dirt during my life—when I’ve landed on my bottom, or my face, covered in muck, with bruises throbbing and scrapes stinging—I’ve always been able to crack a smile and let out a laugh. 

    In 2018, I found out that my husband of twelve years, with whom I had created four beautiful little lives, had been having an affair with a co-worker. He had left the family abruptly the year before, with no explanation. But on Valentine’s Day, of all days, the truth was revealed. 

    I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of it all. It was like something out of a Lifetime movie, except it was my life, and there were no cameras. Rather than succumb to the sorrow I felt, I chose instead to laugh at how ridiculous every Valentine’s Day would seem from that point on.  

    A few months ago, I was running late leaving an appointment, in the middle of this snowstorm, and was trying to load kids into my minivan. The side door got stuck, and in an attempt to pull it shut, I pulled the entire door off of the van.

    There I was, looking at my nine-year-old daughter, who was looking back at me, getting covered in big fluffy snowflakes, wide-eyed at the site of her mom holding the van door, and I just started to laugh.

    It was most likely going to be an expensive fix, and I had no idea how I was going to remedy the situation by myself, but I couldn’t help but laugh, again, at how silly it must have all appeared to someone looking in at the situation.

    I tried to get the door back on, if even temporarily, so I could move the van across the street and get the side with the broken door to the sidewalk, rather than out in the travel lane.

    I pulled across the street, in front of a local bar, and two of the men who were inside came out and mentioned that the door didn’t look quite right. They proceeded to help me zip-tie the door to the van seats, and we slowly tried to make our way up a slick, snow-covered hill.

    Thanks to physics, gravity, and nature, it wasn’t going to happen. So I laughed the entire gentle slide back down the hill. (No one was in danger, as we were the only vehicle on the road at that moment.)

    I could have broken down in tears and showed my kids how to fold under pressure. And although I know that sometimes tears are warranted, and it’s totally appropriate to show vulnerability and emotion, at that moment, I chose to laugh. And just keep trying. When I’d fail, I’d simply try something else, while I smiled.  

    Just last week, as I approached one of the busiest weeks, where I had committed to two public speaking engagements and to work a high-end wedding on the weekend, two of my four kids came down with the stomach flu…because that’s how life works. I laughed, shook my head at the timing of it all, pulled up my bootstraps, loaded up on anti-nausea meds, and went on with life.

    The laughter usually comes from a ridiculous thought that flashes across my mind. 

    A lot of times, that thought is simply how ridiculous a fall must have looked. Or even better, how ridiculous the events that led up to the fall were if you line them up sequentially! 

    Sometimes what makes me chuckle at it all is simply reciting, out loud, what just took place; a verbal account of the disaster, spoken out loud, can be the thing that inspires not only a shake of the head but also a palm to the face and an exasperated giggle. 

    I think there are people who look around, see the carnage, and cry…because, I mean, why wouldn’t you?! 

    But then there are the people, like me, who definitely want to cry at it all (and maybe in the still, small moments, we do) but who default to jokes and laughter. 

    We do this because laughing not only feels better to us than tears of pain and frustration, but it also helps lessen the impact of the hurt ripples that travel out from us, toward those who would empathize or sympathize with our plight. 

    The second thing I am grateful for is that I still have a sense of optimism, despite the number of times I have fallen or been pushed. 

    If you have the knowledge that it could always be worse, that lends itself to the jokes as well. 

    Sometimes you feel like your situation couldn’t possibly get worse, but your brain knows that there’s always lower to go, so that juxtaposition makes you laugh. And in that realization, there is hope—hope that you won’t go lower; hope that you will be able to get back up and rise above it. 

    Both those qualities, though, serve as perpetual lifelines that keep us from sinking too deeply in the muck—because it’s hard to sink when you’re surrounded by a thousand buoyant laughs.  

    I say all of this because I think people often mistake the choice to be positive and hopeful and to laugh with a lack of either emotional depth and grasp of a situation, or a lack of care. 

    To choose laughter and default to the positive takes tremendous concentration, effort, and care. It’s making a conscious decision to get up, smile, grow, and seek joy again. And when one is surrounded by negativity, it would be so easy to choose bitterness and despair instead. 

    So, I give a high five to those with a good sense of humor and optimism, and those who choose laughter. 

    Keep moving forward, with a smile. Even if you end up on your a$$.

  • Releasing Fascia: A Simple Way to Reduce Tension, Pain, and Disease

    Releasing Fascia: A Simple Way to Reduce Tension, Pain, and Disease

    “Take care of your body, it’s the only place you have to live.” ~Jim Rohn

    I hear this happens to so many, but when it happens to you, it’s unsettling. I didn’t know what was going on with me, and I wasn’t getting any satisfying answers either.

    Most days were good, and I felt fine and went about my regular routine wearing my many hats: mother of two young kids, human mom to three fur babies, a household-manager-of-all-the-things and full-time dental hygienist. And then out of the blue, it could hit me like a ton of bricks… the backache, neck pain, jaw pain, tension headaches, and even migraines.

    I would wake up in the morning with tension or pain in my body, but I had no idea how it got there! Sometimes it was pretty intense too, It would drive me bananas because I couldn’t put my finger on the reason why.

    Didn’t do any yard work yesterday. Didn’t hurt myself. Didn’t trip or fall. Didn’t shovel snow the last few days either. It was so strange. I had no idea what was going on.

    I remember that the first time it happened, I was about thirteen years old. It was a summer morning, and I wasn’t able to get out of bed to go to my babysitting job. Another time, in my late twenties, my lower back seized as I was bent down shaving my legs, so I dropped to the floor unable to get back up. There were many times like these.

    When I had one of those unexplained episodes, I would feel off for a few days and then it would settle. Luckily for me, most days I just felt my regular minimal tension at night. It wasn’t intense, but it was enough for me to notice.

    Other times, I’d have migraines or tension headaches that would last for days at a time. It wasn’t fun for anyone, including my young family. I also felt guilty and stressed out with my list of errands getting longer by the minute. I wanted to avoid this at all costs because it would stop me in my tracks when it happened, and everyone around me suffered.

    During medical visits I was told I had muscle spasms, tension headaches, or migraines. And was told to relax (right!) or prescribed something for the pain or given a topical cream to rub on the affected area. It helped, but I still didn’t understand why it would happen out of the blue like that.

    In my circle, I was hearing things like: “Wait till you hit thirty or forty, that’s when all the problems start!” or “Wait ‘til you’re my age!’ or ‘Welcome to the club!” or my favorite one: “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” To be honest, it was upsetting and depressing to hear that things would get worse as I aged.

    Ever have an ultrasound, scan, or MRI only to be told that everything looked normal? That it must be muscular, or even worse, it’s all in your head? It’s a very frustrating diagnostic for most people, as they are left feeling puzzled and still looking for answers. They’re hoping to find anything that could help, to alleviate some of the pain and tension. They’ve done many things, but nothing seems to help…

    As it turns out, it’s all about fascia!

    What is FA-SH-EE-AH? It is a connective tissue in our body. Picture one continuous piece of a three-dimensional spider web, from head to toe. It’s a semi-opaque membrane, thicker in some areas.

    This tissue does not only wrap or divide our organs, muscles, and other body parts, like previously thought, but it actually interconnects every single one of our cells, all 100 trillion of them! Fascia is everywhere! It protects us, it supports surrounding tissues, and communicates with our entire being. It is the only system in the body that connects to every other system in our body.

    The magic of our precious fascia doesn’t stop here, as it also has a memory! It records our entire life, but it’s the traumatic events—the physical, repetitive, and emotional stresses (every fall, burn, bruise, surgery, repetitive movement), the viruses (hello, Covid!), and infections… plus unprocessed emotions, negative thoughts, limiting beliefs, and unhealthy habits and behaviors—that affect it the most. From the 3rd trimester in the uterus to our last breath, our fascia keeps track and memorizes everything.

    Our beautiful body does have the potential to auto-regulate, and so does our fascia. But we live in a world where productivity is a sport, our to-do lists are never-ending, and our over-scheduling is a badge of honor. This absolutely takes a toll on our body and mind! Therefore, our fascia doesn’t always release like it’s supposed to, and it starts accumulating tensions.

    Tight fascia, that is unreleased, clamps down on its surrounding tissues and gets worse with time. Left unreleased, it can get rock hard. Plus, since it’s like a 3D blanket, it starts affecting and pulling other parts of the body… just like when you tug or pull on a corner of a blanket, it pulls on the entire thing. The fascia in our body is the exact same!

    This is why the root cause of our symptoms may be coming from a completely different place in our body. And it explains why many therapies don’t work, as they treat the location of the symptom and not the cause.

    Bound fascia creates havoc on our health and wellness and has a domino effect on our body and mind. It impacts all our cells (every tissue that makes up the muscles, organs, bones/joints, and all the other systems).

    As an example, clamped fascia that is tight around and inside an organ (remember, fascia is in every cell) will affect this organ so much that it won’t be able to function properly.

    The pain in your neck that keeps coming back, your tight shoulder blades and digestive issues, could all be from tight fascia from that time when you fell off your bike when you were learning to ride at the age of five years old. Your fascia protected you in the fall, but it’s been tight all this time and is now pulling on your 3D fascia blanket.

    The TMJ issues you’ve been experiencing, the acid reflux, and reduced range of motion in your shoulder could be from when you had your appendix removed as a child. With scars, we only see a tiny scar on the skin, but inside, it’s an iceberg of adhesion and it’s pulling constantly!

    That nagging hip tension that’s been around for ages, the ringing in your left ear, and your weak bladder could all be from your high-risk pregnancy and stressful delivery. Those babies take up a lot of room, and our tissues should go back to their original place, but sometimes they don’t, and that starts pulling too! Not to mention the impact of all that stress of having a high-risk delivery; this too could very well be the root cause of your issues!

    Healthy fascia is the missing piece to health and wellness! A holistic approach is needed to release this complex tissue, which impacts us in so many ways. For optimal health, gentle movements are best to release bound fascia and relax your nervous system, which go hand-in-hand.

    If your intention is to release your fascia, you’ll want to avoid anything that is too intense or that jacks it up like HIIT, spinning, and marathons.

    Other than body work (osteopathy, energy work, massage), walking, swimming, yoga, and meditation are great options that you can do without an appointment. Every bit counts! Here are some things you can add to your daily routine to keep your fascia happy and pliable:

    First, stay hydrated! Drink water throughout the day. The general rule of thumb is to drink your weight in pounds, divided by two. That’s the number of ounces your body requires daily to function properly. Therefore, someone that weighs 200 pounds could benefit from drinking 100 ounces of water per day. Some exceptions apply, but for most people this is a good guideline. Remember, we are mostly water, and that includes our fascia!

    Stretching is a must! To stretch a muscle, it takes twenty to thirty seconds, but to stretch and release one layer of our dysfunctional fascia, it can take around three to five minutes, sometimes more.

    Yoga is a great fascia therapy, as it’s wonderfully designed around fascia lines; for example, downward dog stretches the posterior line of fascia. Thread the needle pose stretches the arm line. Fish pose stretches the anterior line.

    Hatha is the style of yoga that most of us think of when we picture yoga. Downward dog, warrior pose, child’s pose, lotus, to name a few poses, are all great options to try.

    In yin yoga, we hold the poses longer, about three to five minutes, which is long enough to release the fascia. That’s when all the magic happens! These poses are gentler. As we hold them, we can feel a little flutter or a soft release somewhere else in the body. It’s all connected!

    Another kind of yoga that is great for our fascia health is restorative yoga. This one is a very passive yoga done with many props. It’s all about supporting the body and feeling safe. This creates immense healing, as it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s incredibly powerful and utterly relaxing! So, let’s not discredit this type of yoga because it’s more passive than the others. The benefits are exponential!

    EFT/Tapping Meditation is also a great option to release tension in our fascia. As we tap on specific acupressure points on meridians in the body (hint: meridian and fascia lines are in the same places!), we release stored unprocessed emotions, limiting beliefs, and negative thought patterns, which all impact our fascia.

    It’s an amazing body-mind release technique! Tapping also activates the vagus nerve, promoting rest and relaxation, which is what we want, as the happiness of your fascia depends on the state of your nervous system, and vise-versa.

    Fascia health is a journey, and it’s so worth it! Do yourself a favor and start releasing your fascia today. Caring for it has the best return on investment and undeniably impacts your health and well-being. You totally deserve it, and your future self will thank you!

  • 4 Things to Try When You Want Change but Don’t Know What to Do

    4 Things to Try When You Want Change but Don’t Know What to Do

    “If you get stuck, draw with a different pen. Change your tools; it may free your thinking.” ~Paul Arden

    For a year and a half, I could feel a career shift coming. I had worked hard to cultivate a career I loved, but I began feeling disconnected from my work. The meaning I had originally felt from it was no longer there. Each time I started a new project, I felt tired and unmotivated.

    At first, I thought it might be burnout. So I took a few weeks off to see if I could reset myself into feeling excited about my work again. But when I returned, I felt the same. The things that I had built my career around, that previously gave me energy and meaning, no longer resonated.

    I thought about the type of work I did daily and couldn’t imagine myself still doing it ten years from now. But what could I imagine myself doing? I had no idea.

    I struggled and strived to figure out what a career shift might look like. I read several books, including Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis (Ph. D.), but while I resonated with the ideas in several of them, I still felt no closer to an answer.

    I became very intentional about noticing when things gave me energy. At one point, I went to a dinner party where someone brought tarot cards and gave me a reading. It was so energizing! I went home and immediately ordered the same set of tarot cards. I began learning about them and started doing readings with friends and at parties.

    “What does this mean? Should I become a tarot card reader?” I thought. But that didn’t resonate for a variety of reasons.

    By this point, I was telling everyone who would listen that I was “directionless.” It was a new label I used often. When someone asked what I did for work, I would say, “Meh, I’m directionless.”

    Well-meaning friends and acquaintances started offering their opinions of what I should be doing next. I even googled, “How to make a career change.” I felt like I was walking around in a black fog where I could barely make out what was ahead of me. Sometimes I could see a slight shape—a glimmer of something that gave me energy. But what did it mean? And how could I use that information for what was next?

    I went through a cross-country move to a location where I had no friends. Because of this, I had more time to myself than usual. I spent each day going inward and connecting to my body through meditation, simple somatic practices, like stimulating my vagus nerve, and parts work.

    Finally, I realized that the answer was never in my head. It was in my body—wisdom that had been blocked by all the thoughts and old beliefs that had formed, and parts of me that wanted to protect me and keep me safe.

    I found that a part of me didn’t want a career change because it was too scary and unstable. Instead, it wanted to stay with what was known, dependable, and safe. I befriended this part and worked through the fears. As I spent more and more time going inward, the answer appeared clearer and clearer. It had been there all along, and finally, I was able to access it.

    If you’re feeling stuck, here are a few things to try.

    1. Identify parts that may be trying to tell you something.

    If you are feeling stuck, there may be a “part” of you that is keeping you there to protect you. These parts are often created during childhood when we might not have had as many resources as we do now.

    For example, maybe you learned during childhood that being seen by others can be unpredictable and dangerous. So a “part” of you could have been created that helped you make decisions based on that information. Now, as an adult, you likely have more resources, but that information never got to the “part” that was created.

    So, let’s say that you want to write a book and you just can’t seem to move forward. No matter what you do, you’re staying stuck. Why? One reason might be because this “part” knows that if you write a book, you will be seen by others, and based on experience, that can be unpredictable and dangerous. So it prevents you from stepping out and taking risks where you might be seen. You may not even be aware of this part consciously. Yet it could be there, working day and night to protect you.

    2. Meditate.

    Being stuck can sometimes prompt negative thoughts, such as “What if I’m stuck forever?” or “I’m not good enough.” These thoughts can then lead to negative emotions, which can then make us feel even more stuck and overwhelmed. It’s a vicious cycle. Meditation can help you break out of this cycle and receive clarity, which can help you find direction and move forward.

    Set a time each day to meditate. It doesn’t need to be that long—even just ten minutes is enough. If you have trouble sitting silently, you could search for a guided meditation on YouTube.

    Make it part of your routine and do it at the same time each day to keep momentum going. Doing it at the same time each day will help it become part of a habit and make it easier to remember.

    If you start thinking while you’re sitting silently, that’s okay! Just come back to your breath. You don’t need to be perfect. You just need to cultivate some stillness and silence. This practice helps you drop out of your mind and into your body, where so much wisdom lives.

    3. Stimulate your vagus nerve.

    Your vagus nerve regulates your entire nervous system. When your vagus nerve is activated, it helps calm your nervous system, which helps shift you into a more creative, open state of being. It is from this state that you can more easily access wisdom within yourself.

    There are a variety of ways to stimulate your vagus nerve. Because the vagus nerve is connected to your vocal cords, humming or singing is one way to achieve this:

    1. Focus on your breath and notice anything you feel in your body. Maybe you feel pressure on your chest, a pain in your neck, a burning in your throat, etc.
    2. Breathe in deeply.
    3. As you exhale, say “Voo” out loud for the entire length of the exhale.
    4. Sit and notice how your body is feeling now. Is there any difference?
    5. Continue steps two through four until you feel a shift.

    4. Change your environment.

    Have you ever taken a trip to a new place or gone on a great hike and felt a sense of renewed inspiration, clarity, or presence? The reason for this is because we grow when we’re out of our comfort zone.

    Being in a new environment, meeting new people, and having new experiences takes us out of our comfort zone, opens our minds, and provides us with the opportunity to grow and learn more about ourselves. It shakes things up from our normal day-to-day experiences.

    Get out into nature or go on an overnight getaway. It doesn’t need to be something fancy—anything that will get you out of your current space can help shift the stuckness.

    Is there an area of your life where you feel stuck or don’t know what to do? Which of these actions most resonates with you? Or, do you have an action you typically take that works best?

  • How Pain Can Be a Teacher and Why We Need to Stop Avoiding It

    How Pain Can Be a Teacher and Why We Need to Stop Avoiding It

    “The strongest hearts have the most scars.” ~Unknown

    I always hated pain when growing up. For as long as I can remember I tried to avoid it. Physical pain was uncomfortable, but emotional pain was the real torture. It was sometimes easier to have a fight and stop communicating than to have a challenging conversation.

    Disconnecting emotionally and withdrawing from painful experiences was my de facto subconscious strategy. I still pursued goals and succeeded, but this didn’t feel painful to me because I used my passion and bravado to drive through the long hours and grueling work.

    If I wasn’t avoiding pain, I was in denial. It cost me. Ignoring a painful feeling made me numb all over. Denying an unpleasant emotion made me oblivious to the whole spectrum of sensations.

    Avoiding dentists created more issues and massive bills down the road. Dodging challenging scenarios and boredom cost me passions and hobbies that could have led to a different career or a creative outlet.

    This continued until one day I found myself without busy work and distractions when taking a career break. Not being able to hide behind time fillers, a whole army of emotions and feelings came at once. The bottled-up monster escaped, the dam broke, and the castle fell under attack.

    It was overwhelming and frightening. Remembering from my coaching training that sensory adaptation will kick in at some point, I let it all play out. I meditated for hours observing the emotions rising and falling like an ocean tide. Eventually, the monster deflated and the flood dried out.

    Recognizing that there is an issue is the first step to resolving it. I realized that this was not the way I wanted to continue living. After learning more about mind machinery, I became aware of my behavioral patterns. Enneagram type 7, called Enthusiast or Epicurian, perfectly described how I ran “Me”—motivated by a desire to be happy and avoid discomfort.

    Before that, I accepted my pain avoidance patterns as an unchangeable status quo. I did not see reality in any different way. With time, I learned that pain was not the bogeyman to be afraid of.

    Pain became my teacher, an early alarm that something was not going well, and a motivator. Getting praise and encouragement for good behavior isn’t the only way to learn. Our participation prizes-driven society creates a false sense of entitlement, preventing us from personal growth.

    Teacher pain can fix unproductive behavior or an issue almost instantaneously. As cruel as they can be, these lessons are long remembered and followed sometimes our whole lives. A perfect example of this is how Tony Robbins made his early mark as a quit smoking coach by making clients associate nausea and fear of his booming voice with cigarettes.

    To be clear, I’m not suggesting we should knowingly hurt ourselves or others as a teaching tool; just that we need to stop avoiding pain and discomfort because they can both lead to growth.

    When I became appreciative and respectful of pain, I was able to slow down and learn more about what it taught me.

    Our bodies communicate through sensations. Pain is one of the common languages that the body uses to make us understand in a split second that something isn’t right. It also can speak for both your body and mind, as our emotional and physical circuitry is interconnected. Taking Panadol can ease the pain of social rejection in the same way it can fix your headache.

    It is the language that bonds us with other humans. Shared painful experiences do not need to be explained. They are understood on a deeper level. Compassion is born from the language of pain, as it makes us appreciate what another person is going through.

    What would our lives be like if we never experienced pain? Without an early alarm system, a broken bone would not hurt, eventually causing a deadly infection. A serious illness would go unnoticed until a person perished. Congenital insensitivity to pain is a very rare condition affecting 1 out of 25,000 newborns. It is also very dangerous, and most affected people do not survive their childhood.

    When we strip away pain from its emotionally excruciating quality, it is essentially a sensation. Experienced meditators can attest that knee and back pain during long seated meditation sessions eventually lead to the emotional context fading away, showing pain for what it really is.

    It took time to learn the language of pain. Running out of breath, having sore muscles, or feeling anxiety before a performance is good pain. Sharp pain in joints or feeling of discomfort, leading to a crippling flight-or-fight response, is a different animal.

    Good pain keeps us wanting more of the experience. It motivates incremental growth by forming a habit of seeking that familiar feeling. Its bad cousin will cripple us if left unnoticed or overwhelm us, teaching hopelessness.

    The school of pain can’t be skipped. We can’t call in sick or cheat our way out of it. The teacher pain will keep calling our names until we show up for the lesson. Avoiding it would eventually cost more. It is feeding a bottled-up monster that one day turns into a formidable Godzilla.

    It’s pointless to hide from it. Just like Buddha found out about death, sickness, and old age despite his parents’ best efforts to shield him, we will all have to accept that it is ever-present in our lives.

    Walking a life journey made me realize that sometimes there is no other option but to face pain. As uncomfortable and frightening as it may be, if I don’t square up to the monster, it will never go away.

    The saying “the only way out is through” holds true. The next level of personal growth has to happen through discomfort. Though these victories may be invisible to everyone else, they are uniquely valuable to us.

    It may sound like I’ve mastered the art of facing the uncomfortable and I am no longer concerned about pain. That is not true. The lessons I get from pain are still challenging.

    As much as I don’t want to sit through hard lessons, I’ve learned to respect and heed pain’s presence. Knowing that becoming invincible to it is impossible, I’ve learned to recognize the challenge and see it as a catalyst for growth.

    Anticipating pain keeps me motivated to avoid its visits and learn on my own. I will probably never tolerate pain as some people do. I am probably wired that way. But nature can always be complemented by nurture. Resilience, acceptance, and embracing the suck make it valuable learning.

    In her influential book The Upside of Stress, psychologist Kelly McGonigal challenged conventional thinking that stress kills. The research shows that how we perceive stress can turn a negative into positive. Pain can be seen in the same way.

    We can’t pick and choose which parts of human experience we want to face. As tempting as it is to only eat the cherry on top of life’s cake, this will never make us appreciate life wholly. We need to accept all of it. Without pain, we do not know pleasure. Without the discomfort of ignorance, there is no bliss of knowledge.

  • Learning to Speak Up When You Were Taught That Your Feelings Don’t Matter

    Learning to Speak Up When You Were Taught That Your Feelings Don’t Matter

    “A proper grown-up communicates clearly and assertively.”

    This is something I have heard many people say.

    By that definition, I wouldn’t have classed as a proper grown-up for most of my life.

    There was a time when I couldn’t even ask someone for a glass of water. I know that might seem crazy to some people, and for a long time I did feel crazy for it.

    Why couldn’t I do the things others did without even thinking about it? Why couldn’t I just say what I needed to say? Why couldn’t I just be normal?

    Those questions would just feed into the shame spiral I was trapped in at that time in my life.

    But the question I should have been asking myself was not how I could overcome being so damaged and flawed, but how my struggles made sense based on how I was brought up.

    Because based on that I was perfect and my behaviors made perfect sense.

    I was the child that was taught to be seen and not heard.

    I was the child whose feelings made others angry and violent.

    I was the child whose anger got her shamed and rejected by the person she needed the most.

    I was the child that got hit again and again until she didn’t cry anymore.

    I was the child whose needs inconvenienced those who were in charge of taking care of her.

    I was the child whose wants were called selfish, attention-seeking, or ridiculous.

    I was the child who was made wrong for everything she felt, wanted, or needed.

    I was the child who was called a monster for being who she was—a child.

    I was the child that grew up feeling unwanted, alone, and entirely repulsive.

    So why would that child ever speak? Why would that child ever share anything about herself? She wouldn’t, would she? It all makes sense. I made sense. It was a way of living. A way of surviving.

    I had been taught that I didn’t matter. That what I wanted or needed and how I felt was something so abhorrent it needed to be hidden at any cost. And I did it to avoid getting hurt, shamed, and rejected. Even when I was with different people. Even when I was an adult.

    That pattern ran my life. I just couldn’t get myself to say the things I wanted and needed to say. It felt too scary. It felt too dangerous. It was too shame-inducing.

    So if you struggle to express yourself and feel embarrassed about that, I get it. I did too. But I need you to know this: It’s not your fault. It was never your fault.

    And yes, life is harder when you didn’t get to be who you were growing up. When the only way you could protect yourself was by being less of you. When you could never grow into yourself because that would have gotten you hurt. When you couldn’t learn to love yourself because that was the biggest risk of all.

    But today, that risk only lives on within you. In your conditioning. And that’s where the inner healing work comes in.

    For me, that meant getting professional support to help me learn how to safely connect to myself and my truth, and how to banish the critical, demanding, and demeaning internal voice that told me my feelings, needs, and wants were wrong.

    It meant learning to regulate my nervous system so that I could get past my fear and be honest about what worked for me and what didn’t. This was a major turning point in my relationships because I started to represent myself more openly and assertively, which meant that my relationships either improved dramatically or I found out that the other people didn’t really care about me and how I felt.

    It also meant opening up emotionally and learning to understand what my feelings were trying to tell me. Since I’d learned to avoid and suppress my emotions growing up, I knew it would be challenging to truly get to know myself.

    I had the great opportunity of reparenting myself—giving myself the love, affection, and attention I didn’t receive as a kid.

    And that’s what ultimately allowed me to finally feel safe enough to express myself.

    The relationship I had with myself started to become like a safe haven instead of a battleground, and my life has never been the same since.

    Everything on the outside started to align with what was going on inside of me. The safer I became for myself, the safer the people in my life became, which allowed us to develop deeper, more meaningful and intimate relationships.

    So I know that that kind of change is possible. Even if it doesn’t feel like it right now. I know that it is possible because today I am the most authentic and expressed version of myself I have ever been.

    Just look at everything I am sharing here with you. That’s a far cry from asking for a glass of water.

    Today I no longer choke on the words that I was always meant to speak. I speak them.

    Today I no longer hold back my feelings. I feel them. I share them. Freely.

    Today I no longer deny my needs and play down my desires. I own them. I meet them. I fulfil them.

    Today I own who I am and I don’t feel held back by toxic shame in the ways that I once did.

    Back then I would have never thought this was possible for me.

    I hope that in sharing my story and my transformation you will follow the spark of desire in you that wants you to express yourself. To share your thoughts and desires. To express what it’s like to be you. To finally get to meet more of you and eventually all of you.

    That’s what you need to listen to. Not the voice of fear or shame. Not your conditioning. Not anything or anyone that reinforces your inhibitions or trauma.

    You were born to be fully expressed. That was your birthright. That is the world’s gift.

    Just because the people who raised you didn’t understand you as the unique miracle that you are, that doesn’t mean that you have to deprive the world, and yourself, of experiencing you. More of you. All of you.

    It’s never too late to open your heart and share yourself in ways that feel healing, liberating, empowering, and loving to you.

  • Anxiety Sucks, But It Taught Me These 7 Important Things

    Anxiety Sucks, But It Taught Me These 7 Important Things

    “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” ~Soren Kierkegaard

    Let’s be clear:

    This isn’t an article about positive thinking.

    This isn’t an article about how silver linings make everything okay.

    This isn’t an article about how your perspective on anxiety is all wrong.

    The kids call those things “toxic positivity.”

    No toxic positivity here.

    This is an article about my lifelong relationship with anxiety and what I’ve learned from something that won’t go away. At times the anxiety spikes and feels almost crippling. I have a hard time appreciating the learning at those times, but it’s still there.

    That is what this article is all about.

    Please do not confuse me learning things from something that won’t go away with me endorsing that thing or saying it’s a good thing. I would trade everything I’ve learned from anxiety for less anxiety. I don’t even like writing about it because focusing on it this much gives me anxiety. But I want to write things that help people.

    How a Bare Butt Sparked My Anxiety

    Stranger Things has shown how cool the eighties were. For the most part, this is true. I miss arcades and the music. I miss the freedom I had as a kid that I don’t see kids having these days. I miss some of the fashion. I don’t miss people not knowing anything about mental health.

    We used to play football every day after school at a baseball field/park in our little town. This was unsupervised tackle football with kids a lot older than me.

    I remember one time a guy broke his finger. It was pointing back at him at a ninety-degree angle. He took off sprinting toward his house. One of the older kids said, “He’s running home to mommy!” and we all went back to playing.

    Oddly enough, possibly breaking my finger didn’t worry me. What did worry me was one day when a kid was running for a touchdown, and another kid dove to stop him. He only caught the top of his pants, pulling them down and exposing his bare butt. He made the touchdown anyway, but while everyone else thought it was hilarious, it scared me to death.

    What if that happens to me?

    I started tying my pants up with a string every day, pulling it tight enough to make my stomach hurt (remember, this was the eighties—I was wearing those neon-colored pajama-pant-looking things). I started to feel sick before we played football, before school, and before everything.

    You would think it was obvious that I was dealing with anxiety, but you have to remember that in the eighties and nineties, we did not talk about mental health like we do now. We didn’t throw around terms like anxiety and depression. I was just the weird kid that threw up before he went to school.

    The anxiety has gotten a little more noticeable over the past few years. It seems to have gotten worse since having COVID in 2020 and 2021. I don’t know if that’s a thing, but it feels like it is. It has forced me to deal with it mindfully and with more intention. It’s never pleasant, but I’ve learned a few things.

    1. Anxiety has taught me to be present.

    The crushing presence of high anxiety forces me to be exactly where I am at that moment. I’m not able to read or write. I cannot play a video game or watch a movie with any kind of enjoyment. There’s nothing I can do.

    This roots me in the moment in a very intense, authentic way. That might seem bad since I’m anxious, but there’s another layer to it. When I can be completely present with the physiological sensations of anxiety, I recognize that they are energy in the body. When I’m super present, I can see how my mind is turning those sensations into the emotion we call anxiety, and that’s where my suffering comes from.

    2. Anxiety has taught me about control.

    I’ve been told that my hyper-independence and need to be prepared for anything is a trauma response. I was a therapist for ten years, and I still don’t know what to do with this information. I do know that anxiety gives me a crash course in what I can control and what I cannot control.

    The bad news is that I can’t control any of the things that I think are creating anxiety. The good news is that I can control my response to all those things. Anxiety forces me to do this in a very intentional way.

    Anxiety also puts my mind firmly on something bigger than myself. Maybe it’s that higher power we hear about in AA meetings and on award shows. It’s good for me to get outside my head and remember that I’m not in charge of anything. It’s helpful to only box within my weight class.

    3. Anxiety teaches me to have good habits and boundaries.

    I’m bad about allowing my habits and boundaries to slip when times are good. I start eating poorly, I stop exercising, I stay up too late, and I watch a bunch of shows and movies that beam darkness and distraction directly into my head.

    I also start to allow unhealthy and even toxic people to have a more prominent role in my life. This is all under the guise of helping them because people reach out to me a lot. Over the years, I’ve learned I have to limit how close I let the most toxic people get to me, no matter how much help they need.

    When I’m feeling good, I start thinking I can handle anything, and my boundaries slip. Anxiety is always a reminder that the unhealthiness in my life has consequences, and I clean house when it spikes.

    4. Anxiety reminds me how important growth is.

    Once I clean house, I start looking at new projects and things I can do to feel better. I start taking the next step in who I want to be. This has been difficult over the past three years because the waves of anxiety have been so intense, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel as the good habits I put in place and the new projects and things I started are beginning to come to fruition.

    I chose to let my counseling license go inactive and focus on life coaching because it’s less stressful, and I’m better at it. This would not have happened without anxiety. I have changed my diet and exercise in response to blood pressure and anxiety, and these are good habits to have whether I am anxious or not.

    5. Anxiety taught me to be gentle.

    I’ve written and spoken a lot about my desire to be gentler with people. I’m not unkind, and I have a lot of compassion for people, but this is often expressed gruffly or too directly. It’s how I was raised, and I often feel like I am patronizing people if I walk in verbal circles when I’m trying to help them with something.

    When I’m experiencing high anxiety I feel fragile, which helps me understand how other people might feel in the face of my bluntness. I started working on being gentler around 2018, and I was disappointed in my progress.

    It was also around that year that anxiety began to become a fixture in my life again. As I look back now, I can recognize that I am a lot gentler with everyone around me when I’m anxious. Being a little fragile helps me treat everybody else with a little more care.

    6. Anxiety taught me to slow down and ask for help.

    When I started experiencing increased anxiety, it led me to make quick decisions and change things to try to deal with it. This makes sense. Evolutionarily, anxiety is meant to prompt us to action.

    The problem was that these decisions rarely turned out to be my best ones and often led to other consequences I had to deal with down the line. Because of this, I’ve learned that an anxiety spike is not the time to make big decisions.

    If I have to make a decision about something, I slow down and try to be very intentional about it. I’ve also learned I need to talk it out with somebody else, something I’ve never been inclined to do. Asking for help is a good thing.

    7. Anxiety helps me speed up.

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the opposite of what I just said.

    Let me clarify.

    One of the most important quotes I’ve ever read came from the folk singer Joan Baez: “Action is the antidote to anxiety.” (Years later, I learned she might have said despair instead of anxiety, but I heard it the first way).

    Some tasks bring anxiety that I do not want to deal with. These usually involve phone calls or emails to bureaucratic organizations or errands that I find unpleasant and anxiety-inducing (avoiding these also makes sense—our evolutionary legacy cannot understand why we would do something that may feel dangerous).

    Over the years, I’ve learned that anxiety diminishes if I take the steps I need to take to address these tasks. The cool thing is that this has translated over to many of my day-to-day tasks.

    By acting in the face of anxiety, I’ve gotten pretty good about doing things when they need to be done. I mow the lawn when it needs to be mowed, take out the trash when it needs to be taken out, put the laundry up when it needs to be put up, and get the oil changed in my truck when it needs to be changed.

    Once we start addressing tasks immediately, it becomes a habit. Anxiety helped me do this.

    Anxiety Still Sucks

    So there you go. Seven things anxiety has taught me. I’m grateful for these lessons, but they don’t make anxiety any less difficult in the moment.

    Anxiety is meant to suck. It’s meant to make things difficult and uncomfortable for us until we do something to address the problem. The problem, unfortunately, is often un-addressable these days.

    We worry about things like losing our job, not having enough money, divorce, and the general state of the world. Anxiety did not develop to address any of these things, so sometimes being comfortable with discomfort is the best we can offer ourselves.

    Maybe that’s the last thing anxiety is teaching me.

  • How I’ve Stopped Letting My Unhealed Parents Define My Worth

    How I’ve Stopped Letting My Unhealed Parents Define My Worth

    “Detachment is not about refusing to feel or not caring or turning away from those you love. Detachment is profoundly honest, grounded firmly in the truth of what is.” ~Sharon Salzberg

    A few months ago, my father informed me that he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Although he seemed optimistic about the treatment, I knew that hearing such news was not easy.

    After a few weeks, I followed up with him. He ignored my message and went silent for a couple of months. Although his slight ghosting was common, it made me feel ignored and dismissed.

    In the meantime, I went to India for a couple of months. A few weeks before I returned, he reached out, saying he needed to talk. Although he wasn’t specific, I knew something was happening and immediately agreed to speak to him.

    It was Sunday afternoon when he called. After I picked up, I immediately asked about his health. He went on to explain the situation and the next steps of the treatment.

    The call took one hour and twenty-six minutes. I learned everything about his health, where he goes hiking, what food he eats after the hike, what time he wakes up, the fun he and his girlfriend have, what his relationships with his students is like, and where he goes dancing every Saturday night.

    The only thing he knew about me was that my trip to India was great. He didn’t ask me what I did there or why I even decided to take such a radical step.

    Right after the call, somewhat discouraged because of his lack of interest, I received a call from my mom.

    Since my parents are divorced, I must divide these calls and often keep them secret in front of each other.

    The call with my mom went pretty much the same way. The only difference was that she repeated things numerous times without realizing it since she is on anti-depressants, often accompanied by alcohol.

    After both calls were over, thoughts of unworthiness started hitting me. At first, I judged myself for expecting my father to care about my life and used his health as a justification for his treatment. Then I realized I always made excuses for my parents. It was the way I coped with their behavior.

    Although talking to them was more of a duty than anything else, I knew not having contact wouldn’t resolve the issue. However, I didn’t know how to deal with these feelings. It felt as if every phone call with them reminded me how unworthy and unimportant I was to them.

    While growing up, my mother struggled with alcohol, and my father abused the entire family. When I began dating, I naturally attracted partners that reflected what I thought of myself: I was unworthy and unlovable.

    Although I wasn’t sure how to handle it, I knew there must have been a solution to this emotional torture.

    Typically, when I ended my calls with my parents, I would reach for thoughts of unworthiness and inadequacy. However, this Sunday, I chose differently. For the first time, I stopped the self-destructive thoughts in their tracks and asked myself the fundamental question that changed everything: How long will I let my unhealed parents define my worth and how lovable I am?

    After sitting in awe for about ten minutes and realizing the healthy step I just took, I asked myself another question: How can I manage these relationships to protect my mental health and, at the same time, maintain a decent relationship with them?

    Here is how I decided to move forward.

    1. Setting boundaries while finding understanding

    I always dreamed of how it would be if my mom didn’t drink. I remember as a fourteen-year-old kneeling by the couch where she lay intoxicated, asking her to please quit drinking. As a child and as an adult, I believed that if she could stop the alcohol abuse, everything would be better. She wasn’t a bad mother but an unhealed mother.

    Today, I understand that this may not be possible. Although watching someone I love destroying themselves almost in front of my eyes is painful, after working through my codependency, I understand that it’s impossible to save those who have no desire to change their life.

    Therefore, emotional distance for me is inevitable. I decided to use the skills I learned as a recovering codependent when appropriate. If I feel guilty that I moved far away, stopped financially supporting my mom since she drinks, or that I am not there to deal with her alcohol issue, I pause. Then, I forgive myself for such thoughts and remind myself that the only power I hold is the power to heal myself.

    If I find myself secretly begging for the love of my father, I reflect on all those loving and close relationships I was able to create with people around me.

    Another self-care remedy I use when feeling sad is a loving-kindness meditation to soothe my heart, or I talk with a close friend.

    2. Accepting and meeting my parents where they are

    Frankly, this has been the hardest thing for me to conquer. For years, the little girl inside me screamed and prayed for my parents to be more present, loving, and caring.

    Because I secretly wished for them to change, I couldn’t accept them for who they were. I wanted my father to be more loving and my mom to be the overly caring woman many other mothers are.

    When I began accepting that the people who caused my wounding couldn’t heal it, I dropped my unrealistic expectations and let go.

    I also realized that instead of healing my wounded inner child, I used her to blame my parents. Therefore, I was stuck in a victim mentality while giving them all the power to define my value.

    Today, I understand that expecting change will only lead to disappointment. Frankly, my parents are entitled to be whoever they choose to be. Although it takes greater mental power and maturity, I try to remind myself that this is what their best looks like while considering their unhealed wounds. This realization allows me to be more accepting and less controlled by their behavior. It allows me not to take things too personally.

    3. Practicing detachment

    Frankly, I felt exuberant when I chose not to allow my parents to define how I felt about myself when we last spoke. It wasn’t anger or arrogance; it was detachment. I remember sitting there with my phone in hand, mentally repeating: “I won’t let you define my worth anymore.” After a couple of weeks of reflecting on this day, I can say that this was the first time I took responsibility for my feelings concerning my parents.

    Although this story doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, it feels empowering, freeing, and unbelievably healing. Breaking the emotional chains from the two most important people in my life is the healthiest decision I could have made.

    After my first victory in a years-long battle, I feel optimistic that this is the beginning of immense healing. Although I know that thoughts of unworthiness will creep in when interacting with them in the future, now I understand that I hold in my hands the most powerful tool there is—the power of choice.

  • To All the Highly Sensitive Souls Out There – The World Needs You

    To All the Highly Sensitive Souls Out There – The World Needs You

    “Highly sensitive beings suffer more but they also love harder, dream wider and experience deeper horizons and bliss. When you’re sensitive, you’re alive in every sense of this word in this wildly beautiful world. Sensitivity is your strength. Keep soaking in the light and spreading it to others.” ~Victoria Erickson

    I am lying next to my son in his bed before turning the light off one night, in that relaxed space between awake and asleep where he allows himself to feel and share. He tells me that he feels very lonely at school.

    He shares his loneliness in the middle of kids that are not seeing him for who he is, and that are not being nice to him. He shares his feelings of being invisible, always a bit different and unable to create deep friendships. He discloses that the mockery of others calling him names causes him a great deal of pain.

    I immediately relate to the sadness he feels and feel this deep tightness in my heart. A profound sadness and grief as I listen to him. A need to stop his pain immediately and protect him forever from all the cruelty of the world. A deep mother’s pain. A screaming motherly protective instinct.

    In addition to feeling his pain, I feel my own shadows and fear of being rejected. I feel my wounded younger self being isolated, mocked, and lonely as well. I don’t want that for him. I numb the feelings and go in “fixing mode,” telling him what he has to do—stand up for himself and put his foot down.

    Obviously, fixing mode is not what he needs right now, and he just retracts … and indignantly says, “I don’t get it.” I pause and thankfully get that this is not what he needs right now. He needs me to hold space with empathy. I breathe. I allow the next essential step to unfold.

    I let myself feel his pain, I let myself feel my own pain, and we both cry. Wounded son. Wounded mother. No separation.

    After a while, when the energy has moved, I tell him:

    “My son, it can feel lonely out there. It can feel lonely in there” (showing him my head). “Especially for highly sensitive souls like you and me. I have been there. I feel your pain. I feel my own pain as a mother, and my wounded child feels it too. You are not alone.”

    My son and I are quite alike. We are highly sensitive beings. It is a bit of a cliché these days, but I am not sure how else to describe our uniqueness.

    We have food, sensory, and emotional sensitivities. We are both highly sensitive to loud noises. We had to leave a theater twenty seconds after the start of a kids’ play, as it was too loud for him, when he was three years old. I am highly sensitive to any type of noise, small or big, and I can hear things that other people can’t, like electricity, and other faint noise that would bother no one but me.

    We both get migraines with aura from artificial lightings or certain screens. He is highly sensitive to the texture of clothes and food. We both get highly affected by what is happening in the world or injustices in the communities—to the point that some days I can’t even function if I listen or watch atrocities or sad stories on the news, and I have to take a day off to nurture myself and realign.

    We are both highly empathetic and can feel what others can feel. We are both highly in tune with what others can’t see, on a human level and in the energetical and spirit realms.

    It almost feels like we come from a different planet; like we’re trying on a human space suit and visiting a place we don’t fully understand, finding it hard to adjust here amongst other humans, amidst the noise.

    So that makes life hard to bear some days. We have many triggers, and we feel the whole and wide spectrum of emotions… on a daily basis.

    We are highly reflective and constantly observing, analyzing, in our heads, so we are prone to self-doubts, leading to paralysis and procrastination.

    We have social anxiety when we are in bigger groups and tend to feel uncomfortable, invisible, awkward, and easily exhausted in such a setting

    But our sensitivity also makes life majestic when we are living in alignment with what makes our hearts sing. Theo loves nature, exploring, mountain biking, playing the piano, and being with and learning about animals; and he can get lost in all of that—utterly joyful, captivated, and happy.

    I love playing music and singing, yoga, hiking, and spending time in nature, and it’s all equally magical for me.

    We are also super creative when we get into a state of flow.

    We don’t go with the status quo, and we can make our own way, being a seed of change in a family, organization, or the world.

    Above all, being highly sensitive enables us to connect with others on a deep level, knowing what is going on emotionally for them, having observed humans for a while and being highly intuitive.

    So, to all of you highly sensitive people out there, you are needed. Don’t ever think that you are not good enough because you don’t fit nicely in the world around. You are uniquely positioned to be a seed of light to the world around you.

    You have a gift for understanding and empathizing with people. Your creative talents can bring joy to others and help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. And your passion for the things you enjoy can inspire other people to stop merely surviving and start getting the most from their days.

    Use your strength, be yourself, and release the limiting belief that you are not good enough. This is simply not true; you are more than good enough. So get out there, do scary things like being visible, and shine your light.

    Because you are highly sensitive, it takes a bit more work to effectively take care of yourself—your body, your mind, your emotions, and your energy. Eat nourishing foods that are good for your gut, sleep at least eight hours, exercise, spend time in nature, meditate, set boundaries with other people. And above all, do the things that light you up daily: create, sing, write, journal, paint, play music, dance… whatever it is for you!

    I was lucky to find yoga and neuro-linguistic programming early enough in my life, and they saved me in the moments of hardship and loss, when I met the darkness of my soul.

    I had ways to approach life, manage my emotions, and see the bigger picture and the world in a different way. I had approaches to relax my nervous system and move my blocked energies. I am hoping my son will find his path and healing approaches that work for him. Of course, I will do my best to guide him along the way, but I know he will be the one to find his path and do the work.

    To all the sensitive souls out there. I hear you. I feel you. I understand you.

    Share your light with the world. You are truly needed.

  • One Thing We Need to Survive Crisis, Loss, and Trauma

    One Thing We Need to Survive Crisis, Loss, and Trauma

    “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.” ~Viktor Frankl

    A couple of years ago, I was sitting in my little mountain cottage, writing away on a new novel. It was a cold and dark February afternoon. So, first, I felt pleasantly surprised when I saw something bright lighting up behind me: I thought it was the sun coming out. But when I turned around, I noticed that my porch was on fire!

    Before I knew what was happening, I was standing out in the snow in my slippers, looking back at the entrance and facade completely engulfed by flames.

    It was like a near-death experience. My mind quickly took an inventory of all the things that were inside the cottage now burning down—pretty much all of my personal belongings. However, in that moment, I realized that nothing else mattered but the manuscript I’d been working on.

    Hours later, after the fire-brigade had left and I took one last look at the charcoaled ruins of what used to be my home, I finally got into the car with Marius, my border collie. (The car key survived by nothing short of a miracle.)

    I was on my way to my mother’s house, nearly 100 miles away, where I would, or so I thought, crash, cry, get drunk, whatever. Any sort of self-care—bathing in chocolate or drugs, massive allowance for self-pity— seemed justified under these circumstances.

    Luckily, it occurred to me that some meditation and self-hypnosis may be a good idea also. And as I tried, I immediately received some deeper intuition about what to do.

    A voice of inner wisdom (or Higher Self, if you want to call it, that has access to cosmic intelligence) gave me some rules to follow in order to remain in a high state of mind, despite the misfortune that had happened.

    These were the rules given to me:

    • Do not, under any circumstances, drink alcohol.
    • Eat a vegan, fresh fruits and vegetables-based diet. Cut all sugar. Your system is under shock and won’t be able to eliminate the toxins without further damage.
    • Go to the gym every day and work out for an hour, vigorously. That will flush out the stress hormones and make you stronger.
    • For now, forget about the house. Live as simply as you can and concentrate on the project that carries the highest energy and greatest hope for the future; i.e., writing your novel. Make it your highest priority, give it regular time and attention, and protect the space in which it is happening.

    For sure, these were words of tough love. Wouldn’t it be, in moments of a great crisis, loss, or trauma, only natural to seek comfort and distraction? However, I’ll remain forever grateful to have received this different kind of inspiration at the right time. Otherwise, it would have been too easy to fall into a dark pit of self-pity, victimhood, and destructive patterns.

    In Andersen’s fairy tale The Little Match Girl, the orphaned child is trying to make a livelihood by selling matches on the street. It’s winter and she’s suffering from the freezing cold, so eventually gives in to the temptation to light one of those matches to warm her hands.

    In the moment of ignition, she feels like being back in her late grandmother’s living room, cozy with a fireplace, roast dinner, and a luminous Christmas tree. Her short-term escape, however, has a price. She gets addicted to lighting the matches; eventually, she wastes all her merchandise and dies. So can we, if we give in to temporary temptations of relief, live up all our resources, and slowly waste away.

    There is, however, a high path out of a crisis. Etymologically, the word crisis goes back to the Ancient Greek κρίσις, which means decision. In moments of great danger, loss, or threat, we are forced to focus our attention and see what really matters

    To me, it was in the moment when I stood there out in the snow, watching my house burn, that I realized what was the most important thing. Even before that, I took writing seriously, but only in the crisis did I learn to prioritize my soul’s calling against all odds.

    The essential question of decision that arises from the crisis is:

    Do we let our lives be determined by the trauma of the past, or do we have a future vision strong enough to pull us forward?

    Once I was at a conference on consciousness where a very interesting idea was brought forward.

    Many of us have heard of entropy: the tendency of closed physical systems to move forward in time, toward increased levels of chaos. (For example, an ice cube being heated up to liquid water (increased entropy as molecules are freer to move) and then brought to a boil (as the molecules in the vapor move around even more randomly.)

    It is, however, less often discussed that—following from the mathematical equations—there also must be a counterforce to it.

    This counterforce is called syntropy. Being the symmetrical law, it moves backward in time toward increased levels of harmony.

    It has been suggested that if entropy governs physical (non-living) systems, syntropy must be true for consciousness (life), which hence, in some strange and mysterious way, must be (retro-) caused by the future.

    Although intriguing, first, this sounded very much like science-fiction to me…

    However, when I began to think about it deeper, I realized how much practical truth there was in this. Psychologically, the future indeed can have a tremendous harmonizing and organizing effect on our present lives.

    Think, for instance, of an athlete who spends several hours a day swimming up and down the pool. When you ask them why they do that, they say because they are training for the Olympics. The Olympics is in the future, but it causes the swimmer in the present to follow an organized and structured training regime instead of just fooling around all day long.

    The life-saving effect of having a worthwhile future goal has been documented ever since the early days of psychology.

    World famous psychotherapist Viktor Frankl observed his fellow sufferers while incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps. Later, he taught that those who had a purpose to keep on living (e.g., a study or manuscript to complete or a relationship to rekindle) were also the ones most likely to survive even under those horrendous circumstances.

    Having worked for years with battered women, I made similar observations. In hypnotherapy we have a set of techniques under the umbrella of future life progressions, which gives the subconscious mind a chance to explore alternative futures. In one exercise, the women were asked to just imagine that overnight a miracle happened, and they were now waking up in their best possible future.

    Shockingly, the individuals most resistant to change were the ones who could not imagine any future day different from their current reality. As it turned out, even more important than healing the trauma of their past, was to teach their brains to imagine a new future. 

    If we want to take the high path out of a crisis, we must learn that—to imagine our future in the best possible way. It begins by focusing not on the trauma, the pain, and the past, but on the single thing that feels most valuable and worthwhile to pursue in our lives. Once we have found that, our worthwhile goal will serve as a light tower for us to safely sail into the future, no matter how obscure our present circumstances are.

    And what is my most worthwhile goal, you may ask. Ultimately, as Viktor Frankl also said, that is not something we must ask, rather realize that in life it is we who are being asked: “In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”

    What will your best response be?

  • How I Learned That My Pain is Valid and Worthy of My Own Empathy and Love

    How I Learned That My Pain is Valid and Worthy of My Own Empathy and Love

    “Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Even though you want to run. Even when it’s heavy and difficult. Even though you’re not quite sure of the way through. Healing happens by feeling.” ~Dr. Rebecca Ray

    It’s July 2022 and I’m in the middle of a red tent at Shambala Music Festival in British Columbia.

    I sit elbow to elbow, knee to knee, heart to heart with a group of women who I am meeting for the first time.

    It’s hot and we’re sweaty.

    A teacher is leading a healing womb meditation, and she prompts us to identify a person that has caused us pain, so that we can release that person and the power they wield over us.

    I am coming up short, thinking…

    “No one has caused me any real pain.”

    “I don’t have any real trauma.”

    “The pain I have experienced isn’t bad enough.”

    So I directed my healing energy to two friends who I believed were in need of more healing than me.

    I instantly realized what I was doing. I was defining my friends by their perceived abundance of pain and trauma and defining myself by my supposed lack of pain and trauma.

    I knew in that moment that this was probably not fair to my friends or to me, but this way of thinking had been familiar to me throughout my thirty-two years of living.

    Over and over again, I have found myself feeling guilty for the fact that I don’t think I have any “real” trauma.

    I come from a stable home with parents who love and support me. Growing up, I had everything I needed and most things I wanted. I have a big brother who is one of the best men (best humans) I know. I grew up in a middle-class part of Maryland. I have white skin in America. I can see, hear, and move my body.

    I used to constantly wonder how the challenges I have experienced could possibly stack up against those of my friends. She who experienced the deepest sexual trauma at a young age; or she who had an alcoholic father who was physically and emotionally abusive; or she who is regularly profiled when she walks home to her apartment because of the color of her skin.

    Or how my challenges could stack up against students I’ve mentored…like a ten-year-old boy from Syria whose legs are decorated with shrapnel scars; or a fifteen-year-old boy from Eritrea who was a child soldier; or a sixteen-year-old young woman who is the caretaker for her sick mother and five younger brothers and sisters.

    Luckily for me, and for you, I have detached from my struggle story that my pain is not enough. I have learned quite a few things and shifted away from this unhealthy way of thinking about pain and trauma.

    First, I have learned, and will continue to re-learn, that there is no competition for who has suffered the most. Trauma and pain are not a comparison game. 

    All experiences, emotions, and feelings are valid. And we all get to practice empathy for and awareness of the experiences and heartache of others, and of ourselves.

    I have also learned that people are not defined by their trauma. 

    And I am deeply sorry to the people in my life who I have ever defined in this way.

    My final learning is that the things I have experienced are valid and enough to warrant my own empathy, healing, and love. 

    Like…

    The countless times having sex with a previous partner, even though I didn’t want to, because it was just easier to go along with it. Which resulted in a period of my life where I really didn’t like sex. I told myself, it’s not that big of a deal, it’s just sex.

    The pressure from a friend to mess around with her boyfriend while she watched. Even though I said, “I don’t want to.”  I told myself I was just being a prude. This should be fun. What’s wrong with me?

    The grabs and gropes on the street, in the club, at the bar. I told myself this just came with the territory of being a woman.

    The unwanted touch and advance from a friend. I told myself I’ll just forget this and move on.

    The shame of one-night stands, even though I knew he, whoever he was, felt not shame but something more akin to glory. I told myself it was my fault for having a one-night stand. I brought this shame upon myself

    All of these experiences, and more, have been buried deep within me for years and I had barely been aware of them, until recently, as I have embarked on a very intentional journey of self-excavation.

    For me, this journey has included meditation, prayer, journaling, somatic healing, and experiences like the one in the red tent.

    I embarked on this journey thinking I would unpack a few insecurities and move on with my life with relative ease.

    But what has actually happened is that I have uncovered so many hidden treasures in myself.

    These treasures are sometimes in the form of past pain. Other times they take the form of nuggets of ideas that I buried long ago for a rainy day. And yet other times, they are in the form of things that I used to love as a child but forgot about as I grew up and was told by the world what I was supposed to love and who I was supposed to be.

    And now I get to excavate even further to see what each of these treasures is here to teach me. For the ones I shared above, there is a clear theme of sexuality, and that theme has led me to deep dive into this space with myself. This looks like self-pleasure, dancing naked in the mirror, loving every part of my body, and speaking my desires out loud to my partner.

    This journey has plunged me into the depths of my own darkness. And in that plunge, I have been reminded of my own strength—of my ability to bask in the darkness, all while knowing I will be okay.

    I also get to remind myself that I am enough. My pain is valid. I am worthy of taking up space.

    Guess what. The same goes for you, love.

  • One Missing Ingredient in My Recovery and Why I Relapsed

    One Missing Ingredient in My Recovery and Why I Relapsed

    “The Phoenix must burn to emerge.” ~Janet Fitch

    Many people were shocked when I relapsed after twenty-three years of recovery. After all, I was the model of doing it right. I did everything I was told: went to treatment, followed instructions, prayed for help, and completed the assignments.

    After returning home from treatment, I joined a recovery program and went to therapy. Once again, I followed all the suggestions, which worked when it came to staying sober. I had no desire to drink or do drugs—well, at least for a long while.

    When I went to treatment, I was an emotional wreck. I would have done anything to get rid of the pain. But substances only intensified the pain and prevented healing.

    The worse I felt, the more I needed to medicate those emotions, but it was only causing the ache in my heart to be prolonged, driving me to suicidal thoughts. The moment I stopped using substances, the pain immediately subsided. I’d gone from struggling to get out of bed to engaging in my life fully.

    But going to treatment was only the tip of the iceberg. There was something much deeper underneath my addiction that I wrongly thought a relationship could fix. There was an underlying malaise and sense of shame I couldn’t identify. I knew something was wrong, so I kept searching for answers but couldn’t find the magic formula.

    Without the solution, relapse was inevitable.

    Most recovery programs address a single addiction, but I had many. After two years of sobriety, I stopped smoking but then started compulsive exercising. I didn’t eat right, spent too much, was codependent with needy people, and went from one addictive relationship to the next, never healthy enough to attract someone who could problem solve with me.

    I didn’t realize I was still substituting addictions for love.

    I wanted to make up for my troubled childhood, and I thought getting married and having kids would fix the problem, but after several attempts, it only made me feel more inadequate. Worse, I was a therapist and felt like a hypocrite. It wasn’t like I didn’t work at getting better; self-help was like a part-time job

    I spent decades in different kinds of therapy, not only as a patient but expanding my education in other modalities. I attended dozens of workshops and seminars doing inner-child work. I fully immersed myself in over twenty years of therapy, including psychoanalysis. My toolbox was overflowing, but I still felt disconnected for some reason.

    I didn’t realize those tools weren’t teaching me how to love myself.

    My journey took me on a lifelong spiritual quest. I found a higher power in recovery. I attended various churches and did some mission work in Haiti. I went to Brazil to be healed by John of God (later convicted of multiple cases of sexual abuse), on to a spiritual quest in Peru, on a visit to the Holy Land in Israel, and to Fiji to find my destiny but still felt something was missing.

    I read every spirituality book I could get my hands on and studied A Course in Miracles, but I was still disconnected from myself and others.

    Discouraged, I began to drift further away from all sources of help. I resigned myself to being an unhealed healer.

    I didn’t realize that all the therapy and spirituality were simply another form of addiction for me.

    Relapse began when I got breast cancer and was prescribed opiates after surgery. I got a taste of that forgotten high and made sure I took all the pills, whether I needed them or not. I also forgot how mood-altering substances affected my judgment.

    Instead of facing my fears about being ill and moving forward with my life, I reconciled with my ex-husband. I had little to no regard for how this affected my children. Like a piece of dust suctioned into a vacuum, despite feeling uncomfortable, I allowed my thoughts to suck me back into unhealthy choices—all the while in therapy.

    The next seven years were dark. Another divorce was followed by my former husband’s death, though I was grateful to bring him to our home and care for him until he passed. Then, a fire turned our newly renovated home into a mass of black and burnt-out walls, forcing another relocation for myself and youngest. Soon after, one of my businesses suffered severe damage from another fire resulting in six months of work and restoration.

    Three devastating hurricanes over two years damaged our home and business. One caused the foyer ceiling to cave in, another landed a large tree on our roof, and the third made our yard look like it had been run through a giant blender. One of my businesses was twice flooded and everything had to be thrown away.

    Soon after, our home was ransacked and burglarized. The stress of managing repairs, insurance claims, child-rearing, and working full-time felt like I was repeatedly set on fire and drowned.

    I kept trying to get better but felt emotionally shredded from the struggle. Desperate for support, poor decisions kept me in a whirlwind of insanity—more bad relationships. I was tired of trying, sick of hurting, and anger brewed within me.

    I stopped therapy, recovery meetings, and my spiritual quest, and decided to throw it all away. I went on a rebellious rampage. I’d been married at age sixteen and had a child, and now I was entirely alone. I decided to return to my pre-recovery lifestyle and live it up.

    Looking back, I lived a dual life of selfishness and a thirty-year career of helping others. I was self-will run riot but couldn’t see myself. I’d lived a life of making things happen and simultaneously wondered why my higher power didn’t deliver everything I wanted.

    Spirituality is a tricky thing. It’s so easy to think that God or some higher power is in control, but I believe, with free will, it’s a collaborative effort. Do the footwork and wait… if only I’d waited; impatience was my Achilles heel.

    My party life added a new heap of problems: disappointed children, bad judgment, and wrecked relationships. It didn’t take long to wind up in the same place that took me to treatment twenty-three years earlier, an emotional bottom. But this time, I was ready for the miracle of change.

    I finally found the missing ingredient to a happy life.

    The night was pitch black as I drove around emotionally deranged from grief and substances. After a near accident, I pulled into a parking lot and sobbed uncontrollably. I railed, “Whatever you are out there, why did you abandon me? Why haven’t you helped me? Why don’t you love me?”

    Immediately, a thought shot through my brain like an arrow through a cloud. “It’s not me that doesn’t love you. You don’t love yourself.” And for the first time in my life, I realized two things: I didn’t love myself and didn’t know what loving myself even meant.

    How would I learn to love myself? It never occurred to me that I didn’t. But now, I was armed with the missing ingredient to my happiness, and I intended to figure it out.

    Psychoanalysts are taught the importance of an infant’s basic needs for nurturing and bonding, but I’d never applied any of those concepts to myself. There were some missing parts in my childhood, so I had to learn how to provide for my physical, emotional, and spiritual needs,  as well as get proper nutrition, rest, and activity, in addition to responsibilities, play time, creative and quiet time, gratitude and appreciation, and loss of tolerance for unkind behavior (to and from others), all of which places I started the journey to self-love.

    I let go of what I wanted and focused on doing the next right thing for myself and others. The results were miraculous; peace engulfed me for the first time. By being the love I’d always wanted, I felt loved.

    I was always a doer and thought that spirituality was like getting a degree. Follow the steps, and everything will be okay. Whether or not that’s true, there’s a lot more to staying sober than following a set of directions. It’s important to find a higher power, clean up our act, apologize to those we’ve hurt, and stop using, but that won’t keep us sober if we don’t know how to love ourselves. My higher power became love.

    Correct behavior and self-love are not the same. Loving oneself starts with giving thanks to the sunrise and the sunset, cuddling with your pillow and those you love, acknowledging a universal intelligence and trusting guidance from your conscience, discovering and loving your mission, and nourishing your body, mind, and soul.

    Feed your body with nontoxic food; feed your mind with positive, stimulating information; and feed your soul with nature, good friends, healthy partners, and a higher power (of your own understanding) that inspires and uplifts you.

    If you’ve struggled with staying sober, you probably haven’t learned to love yourself. It’s never too late to start. When I started loving myself like a small child, I lost all substitutes for that godly love, and I finally began to blossom and grow.

    It took decades of failure to discover the missing ingredient to staying sober. I had to learn that love isn’t something I get. Love is an action I give to myself and others.

    Through being the love that I want, I then receive love. There’s a difference between staying sober and recovering. For all like me, who failed to stay sober, learn how to love yourself and then you will recover from the lack of self-love at the root of this tragic disease.

    It’s not enough to just stay sober, and life without happiness makes no sense. You were meant to have a life of love and joy. If you’ve tried everything and something’s still missing, try learning how to love.