Tiny Buddha

Tag: self-care

  • How I Claimed My Right to Belong While Dealing with Imposter Syndrome

    How I Claimed My Right to Belong While Dealing with Imposter Syndrome

    TRIGGER WARNING: This post briefly references sexual abuse.

    “Never hold yourself back from trying something new just because you’re afraid you won’t be good enough. You’ll never get the opportunity to do your best work if you’re not willing to first do your worst and then let yourself learn and grow.” ~Lori Deschene

    The year 2022 was the hardest of my life. And I survived a brain tumor before that.

    My thirtieth year started off innocently enough. I was living with my then-boyfriend in Long Beach and had a nice ring on my finger. The relationship had developed quickly, but it seemed like kismet. Unfortunately, we broke up around June. And that’s when the madness began.

    I believe it to be the extreme heat of the summer that somehow wrought this buried pain from underneath my pores to come up. Except the pain didn’t evaporate. It stayed stagnant, and I felt suffocated.

    There were excruciating memories of being sexually abused as a child. Feelings of intense helplessness came along. I had nightmares every night, and worse, a feeling of horrendous shame when I woke up. All of this made me suicidal.

    Before I knew it, every two weeks I was being hospitalized for powerful bouts of depression, PTSD, and the most severe anxiety that riddled my bones.

    This intense, almost trance-like experience of going in and out of hospitals seemed like the only way to cope with life. I felt broken, beyond repair. I gained a lot of weight and shaved my head and then regretted it. My self-esteem plummeted.

    I felt like I didn’t belong to society anymore. I’d had superficial thoughts like this before, growing up in the punk scene, but the experience of constantly being in and out of mental hospitals was beyond being “fringe.” I felt extremely alienated.

    With many hospitalizations in 2022, I was losing myself. Conservatorship was now on the table. I was terrified and angry at the circumstances fate had bestowed upon me.

    In my final hospitalization in December, I suffered tortuously. I was taken off most of the benzos I was on, and I was withdrawing terribly, alone in a room at the psych ward. My hands and feet were constantly glazed in a cold sweat.

    I was so on-edge that every sound outside my door jerked my head up. The girl next door would sob super loud, in real “boo-hoos,” and do so for hours on end. It eroded me. I would scream at her to stop, but she would then cry louder.

    If there was a hell on earth, this was it. I told myself, with gritted teeth, staring out the window, that this would be my last time in a psych ward. No matter how miserable I was, I would just cope with it. I didn’t want to deal with this anymore.

    So I made a commitment to myself to really try to get better. Hope was hatched by that intense amount of pain. I knew I had a long journey ahead to heal, but that there was no other way but up.

    After that final hospitalization, I joined a residential program that helped me form new habits. There was a sense of healing and community there. I felt a mentorship connection with one of the workers, who was a recovered drug addict.

    I was glad I was finally doing a little better. I realized I shouldn’t have gone to the hospital so much and perhaps should have plugged into one of the residential places first.

    This year has been easier as a result of sticking to treatment and addressing some of the issues that were plaguing me. I now have better coping mechanisms to deal with symptoms of PTSD, as well as some better grounding techniques.

    As a result, I’ve been able to go back to work, despite still dealing with intense anxiety. For the first time in a while, I feel hopeful for my life. But I can’t help but getting hit with a barrage of thoughts before I go to work.

    This whole thing I’m going through is commonly known as “imposter syndrome.” Basically, it feels like I don’t belong where I’m going in order to make the quality of my life better. I feel like a fake or a phony, afraid my coworkers will understand who I really am—someone who has struggled with PTSD and depression.

    As a result, some days are more difficult than others when it comes to showing up at work. I’ll have mini panic attacks in the restroom. There’s an overwhelming feeling of surrealness.

    Although I’m glad to have gotten out of the merry-go-round of doom, putting on a happy face and attempting to appear as a healthy, well-adjusted person is too much sometimes.

    And I know it’s not just in my situation that people experience imposter syndrome. Some people that were once extremely overweight feel out of place once they’ve lost their extra pounds. Others who are the minority in race or gender where they work can also feel like they don’t belong.

    I’ve come to realize this is a universal experience, the feeling of “not belonging.” It’s also a syndrome of lack of self-worth. I try to tackle this in baby steps every day.

    Here are some things I try to live by to feel more secure where I’m trying to thrive.

    I ask myself, “Why NOT me?”

    There’s a Buddhist quote that suggests, when you’re suffering, instead of asking, “Why me?”, you’re supposed to humble yourself by asking, “Why NOT me?” But I think this is also relevant to feelings of belonging.

    When you feel like you don’t belong, ask yourself, “Why NOT me?” Why wouldn’t you deserve to belong, when everyone else does, despite their varied challenges? This sort of thinking levels the playing field.

    I remind myself of my worth.

    I could spend hours thinking about why I’m not adequate or deserving. But I try to think about why I do have a right to be there. I deserve to get a paycheck like everyone else. I deserve to work, no matter what I’ve been through, and to value the sense of belonging offered through my coworkers.

    I try to power through my inner resistance.

    Many days this is more difficult than others, but I know if my greater goal is improving my life and feeling like I belong to society again, its worth challenging all the mental resistance I feel. I also know that my feelings will change over time if I keep pushing through them.

    Cherish the times of connection.

    There are times at work where I feel really connected to my coworkers, even though I doubt we have the same psychiatric history. I try to savor those times of connection because they keep me going. Since we are social beings, it is important to us to feel connected.

    Take comfort in knowing this will fade.

    Already, having just worked a few weeks at this job, my feelings of imposter syndrome are starting to fade. If I had known this would happen in the beginning, I wouldn’t have put so much anxiety on myself. If you’re going through this too in any capacity, just remember that the feelings are only temporary and will pass as you find your footing.

    Make peace with your past.

    Everyone has a past, some that may feel more shameful than others. But don’t conflate that with your right to belong and be a contributing member of society. Sure, some things are harder to rebound from than others, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t get past them. And that doesn’t mean you need to be defined or limited by your past challenges.

    Validate your feelings of struggle.

    Although it would be nice to just use denial to move forward, that’s not possible since you know the truth. You know what you’ve been through and how it’s affected you. I validate my experience in the struggle by going to support groups after work. That way I’m not gaslighting myself, pretending I’m fine. It’s just about knowing there’s a time and place for that unheard, marginalized part of yourself.

    —

    We all put on a brave face to be accepted, but we all deserve to belong, regardless of how we’ve struggled.

    Don’t let your struggles define you. Instead, validate the fact that they have given you the strength to get where you are now.

  • How Yoga Helped Heal My Anxiety and Quiet My Overactive Mind

    How Yoga Helped Heal My Anxiety and Quiet My Overactive Mind

    “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are” ~Carl Jung

    Yoga is often celebrated for its physical benefits: greater flexibility, increased strength, improved circulation, and so on. But nothing could have prepared me for the transformational effect that yoga has had on my mental health and well-being.

    I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression when I was fourteen, and I have struggled with both for most of my life. My mind was my worst enemy, constantly worrying and criticizing to the point where it became hard to do anything. Even the things I really wanted to do became too overwhelming.

    I knew about the positive impact of exercise and healthy living on mental health, and I had dabbled in yoga classes at the gym for years in an attempt to drag myself out of this hole I was in.

    I did notice some small changes in my mood and energy levels. I couldn’t explain it, but I would always feel a certain buzz after a great yoga class.

    So, in 2022, I decided to take this yoga thing seriously. I began practicing daily and even studied for a yoga teacher training qualification.

    Since then, I have noticed significant changes in not only my physical body and well-being but in my mental health too. Most notably, my anxiety levels have significantly decreased. Of course, I still have moments of anxiety, but I feel better equipped to cope with them and less likely to allow them to pull me into a downward spiral.

    Disclaimer: This is not medical health advice; it is simply my own experience. If you are struggling with your mental health, please seek a medical health professional.

    How Yoga Can Help with Anxiety

    Yoga helps you recognize your emotions and triggers.

    The first thing to know about yoga is that it is not a series of complicated poses used to make you look a certain way or increase your flexibility.

    Instead, it is an inner practice where we unite our body, mind, and spirit and become one with the universal life force energy that sustains all of life.

    Meditation and breathwork are just as important parts of yoga as the poses (known as asana).

    With this knowledge, yoga has the power to transform your mental state from a place of stress and anxiety to complete peace with yourself and the world around you.

    It allows you to notice how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking without judging yourself. It allows you to understand your body, how it works, and what messages it’s trying to communicate to you about your health and your needs.

    By learning to recognize when I felt anxious and why, yoga provided a safe space to release those triggers and emotions that I would ordinarily suppress.

    Yoga regulates your nervous system.

    When we experience high levels of anxiety, we are constantly living in fight-or-flight mode. The fight-or-flight response is designed to switch on in moments of danger and stress to protect you and then return to homeostasis once the threat has gone.

    However, in this day and age, many people are experiencing an overactive fight-or-flight response due to an increasingly stressful lifestyle. And many live in a constant state of hypervigilance as a result of trauma or abuse.

    Living in fight-or-flight mode takes up an enormous amount of energy, and our bodies cannot keep up with the demands long term. Over time, the body and mind begin to shut down and we get illness and disease as a result.

    This is what happened to me. My body could not cope with the pressure I was putting it under daily, so my mental health suffered.

    Practicing yoga allows you to calm your nervous system and creates a space where the mind and body feel safe to exit fight-or-flight mode and actually relax.

    One way to do this is through practicing breathwork, also known as pranayama.

    Yogic philosophy believes that the breath is how we can harness our energy and the energy of the universe. We can alter our emotions, energy levels, and even physiological responses, such as the fight-or-flight response, with just the breath.

    When I notice I am starting to feel anxious, I breathe deeply into my stomach for the count of four, hold it for four, and then slowly exhale for the count of four, also known as belly breathing.

    While this may sound trivial, it really helps me to feel calm in moments of stress and anxiety.

    Breathing slowly and deeply activates our parasympathetic nervous system. This sends signals to the brain that there is no danger here and the fight-or-flight response does not need to be activated.

    Yoga teaches you new coping mechanisms.

    Yoga taught me different techniques to cope with my anxiety and panic attacks.

    Firstly, yoga teaches that you are not your mind. You are not your thoughts, your beliefs, or even your body.

    When we study the five koshas (layers of the self) we can see our physical being is just a vehicle to navigate this world in; it is not who we are as a whole. For example, the koshas teach us that our essence cannot be entirely in our physical body because physical bodies are subject to change, yet who we are remains.

    This mindset applies to our thoughts too. Once I started acknowledging that my thoughts did not always come from me, they began to hold less weight. Most of our thoughts are just ‘re-runs’ of things we are told as a child or things we repeatedly hear from society that get internalized. They are not necessarily representative of who we truly are.

    This knowledge allowed me to distance myself from my anxious thoughts instead of letting them consume me.

    Secondly, through pranayama and meditation, both essential aspects of yoga, I learned to recognize how I was feeling and allow those feelings to exist within me, without trying to change them or distract myself from them.

    When we don’t allow our emotions space to be there, we are instead rejecting that aspect of ourselves. We push these feelings deeper and deeper down as a way to avoid dealing with them, without realizing we are actually ingraining them deeper into our psyche.

    By giving our emotions space to be felt, we can release them from our mind and body so we don’t have to carry them with us through our life.

    Yoga helps you be more present.

    To practice yoga, you need to be focused and in the present moment. To hold balance poses like tree pose or to get into the correct alignment of warrior 1, you need to be paying attention to what is happening around you right now.

    If your mind drifts while you’re holding a balance pose, you can bet your body will lose all balance too.

    Yoga forces you to be in the present moment, to be fully engaged in what you are doing, and doesn’t allow room to think about anything else.

    For me, this is exactly what I needed to get out of my anxiety-ridden head. One of my main struggles with anxiety was that I could not stop myself from thinking. The incessant noise of my own mind was exhausting to live with.

    However, when I am in a yoga flow, the noise stops. The mind chatter about future scenarios that will probably never happen is no longer there, as I am using all my focus to get into the proper alignment of the pose.

    The more you practice focusing, the easier it is to apply this in your daily life. I can now notice when my mind is overactive and instead re-direct it to the task at hand. By giving our full attention to the thing we are doing, we can quieten that anxious voice within and begin to enjoy the present moment.

    —

    Yoga has so many incredible benefits physically, mentally, and spiritually. Since sticking to a consistent yoga practice, I have noticed my anxiety decrease dramatically and I am able to live a full and happy life without my mind controlling me.

  • Workaholics: Why Staying Busy Feels Safe and How It Takes a Toll

    Workaholics: Why Staying Busy Feels Safe and How It Takes a Toll

    “The ego desperately wants safety. The soul wants to live. The truth is, we cannot lead a real life without risk. We do not develop depth without pain.” ~Carol S. Pearson

    Workaholism is the body’s wisdom in action, literally.

    Some people develop workaholic tendencies because they crave to be seen as the best through their accomplishments.

    But I’m not here to talk about people who’re obsessed over their image.

    The particular strain of “workaholism” that isn’t talked about enough is a perfectionist’s addiction to productivity.

    It has little to do with being recognized for your brilliance or achievements in the outer world, and much more to do with your own unattainably high standards for yourself and others.

    It’s not about winning a shiny trophy at the end of the day so everyone will know you’re the real deal, but knowing that you’ve improved yourself, others, or the environment around you–even if it’s just neurotically reorganizing your closet.

    It’s knowing that you made the world a better place and that you didn’t cut any corners to get there.

    Whether it’s your career, community projects, or personal to-do lists that consume your everyday life, your addiction to activity is problematic for many reasons. Once you get a dose of completing a job, an impulsive urge to drown yourself in more activity immediately creeps in. Without it, you experience a profound sense of worthlessness.

    You struggle with accepting your work as it is, and your inner critic never settles for okay enough.

    This kind of “improvement” workaholism is about self-worth and a felt sense of safety. Because idleness feels unsafe in the body of a workaholic, non-activity is misconstrued as uselessness, which feels like a gaping hole in your beingness. The wisdom of a workaholic’s body knows that not creating, producing, or improving oneself or the environment is on par with being an unlovable sack of garbage.

    So your body keeps you busy.

    Addiction to activity shows up in myriad ways. Doing your coworker’s job for them because they’re not meeting your standards. Working long hours to perfect a project that you logically know doesn’t need to be perfect. Cleaning the house when it’s not dirty. Pouring more energy than is necessary into helping your kids with their homework. An inability to rest, relax, or experience pleasure unless it’s “earned”–and even then, it’s a fleeting and rare occurrence.

    When the Body Goes to War

    My workaholic perfectionism took a toll on my body starting in my mid-twenties. It’s common for people fixated on perfectionism and activity to chronically hold tension in their bodies. I was so armored in my muscles that I injured my neck from stiffness, leading to some of the worst pain I’ve ever had.

    I was living in rural Japan at the time. Desperate for help, I drove forty-five minutes through snowy conditions down a country road to see specialists who spoke no English, and to this day I have no idea what their area of specialty is called–I’ve never seen it anywhere else. But they treated me in their home on a regular basis to bring me the relief I needed to keep my sanity.

    And that was just the beginning.

    From that point onward, I continued to injure my neck several times a year. After returning to the U.S., I saw chiropractors, physical therapists, and massage therapists on a recurring basis. They certainly treated my symptoms, but I didn’t understand why I was so chronically rigid and injury-prone.

    And then came the injury that changed the course of my life.

    In my early thirties, I developed tendonitis and a repetitive motion injury in my right arm from using the computer in my office job. I worked hard, perfecting every task, email, and spreadsheet that came across my desk. I continued to hold tension in my body, and I rarely took breaks. Desperate to keep working despite the pain in my right arm, I compensated with my left arm and injured it too.

    Different parts of my body were at war with each other–one part guilting me to stay in the hustle cycle, another part sending smoke signals to get me to slow down and rest.

    I ended up on disability for eight months.

    I struggled to take care of myself. Bathing, cooking, cleaning, and doing laundry were no longer feasible. I could not hold open a book to read. It took months to be able to return to normal activities. For someone who’s historically been addicted to staying busy, it was a nightmare to not be able to work per doctor’s orders.

    Two years later, my doctors agreed that I have a permanent partial disability. I am no longer able to work in any eight-hour desk job. A throbbing hand reminds me when it’s time to rest, and now I know to listen.

    Sprinkled through my late twenties and early thirties I also experienced episodes of suicidal ideation and general depressive states. I felt profoundly worthless even though I had my dream job in a beautiful coastal town of California.

    My monkey mind was full of chatter. I fixated on how to feel better, but I was just clinging to the same old habits of endless mental and physical activity.

    Through that difficult passage of time, I believe my psyche was taking me down the dark path of individuation, the transformative process of integrating one’s unconscious and conscious mind-body.

    It’s everyone’s birthright to return to wholeness—a magical reunion of parts that were separated and abandoned in the process of childhood. I discovered that I had banished lazy self-indulgence deep into my shadow.

    Jungian depth psychology and pole dancing opened me up. I healed through embodied sensual movement, accessing my creative inner guidance, making time for spontaneous play with no agenda, and finding peace in my deep stillness.

    Today I move with ease in my body. I find pleasure in places where I could not before. I know how to be in my deep stillness, and I have what feels like true, sustainable joy.

    It doesn’t mean I never slip into old habits. In fact, I still find new iterations of old patterns as I move through life, but I know how to work through them. It’s become my superpower.

    The Unconscious Driver in Your Mind and Body

    Often, we glorify hard work, refusing to admit the destruction it does to our minds and body when it’s become a habit.

    Many workaholics see their patterns as justified, always armed with a list of reasons why they must deliver the much-needed improvement or task despite the obvious sacrifices being made. They do not respond well to being told that they need to slow down or prioritize their well-being.

    Best case scenario, they agree that they work too hard but don’t know how to be any other way.

    If this resonates, maybe you beat yourself up for not being more present with yourself or your loved ones. And maybe you have a tendency to be your own worst critic due to your sky-high internal standards, so you’re particularly sensitive to critical feedback from others.

    The good news is that there’s nothing “wrong” with you. You’re not a bad person because you’re too busy to show up for others. You’re not a self-sabotaging idiot because you worked so hard that you injured yourself. You’re not broken because you can’t sit still.

    Just like any other addiction, workaholism is a coping strategy.

    Workaholism is a learned behavior that serves to protect you from feeling the pain and discomfort of being completely tuned in to your deep stillness without the activity. A work-oriented perfectionist unconsciously harbors a belief that they’re unworthy unless they’re busy fixing themselves or the world.

    Your workaholic tendencies have an incredible intelligence. Your body is brilliant, much more than your conscious mind and ego-persona, which think they know better. But they’re vastly mistaken.

    Five percent of your cognitive activity is conscious and the other 95% is unconscious.

    The 95% largely drives your actions, non-actions, urges, and beliefs. Your endless activity isn’t coming from your conscious thinking mind. You might be convinced that your sheer willpower and self-discipline are the reasons you’re so productive. But that’s simply not the case. You’re the result of unconscious conditioned patterns that influence your behavior in the world.

    If that isn’t humbling, then I don’t know what is.

    The urge to work longer and harder than is good for you is a felt sense in your body. Your impulses—if you pay really close attention—are a reaction to not wanting to feel a certain way. Ultimately, it’s to avoid the discomfort of being fully present to your perceived worthlessness in the midst of being idle, non-productive, and undisciplined.

    It’s so sneaky that you often never feel the first dose of discomfort because your body is so well programmed to keep you busy that it knows exactly how to keep you from feeling like a useless waste of space.

    Your body in its wholeness is so much smarter than your tiny fraction of conscious thoughts.

    It’s not your fault that you’ve never learned how to be any other way. It’s not your fault that most therapists, mentors, educators, and caregivers have no clue how to actually help you change your patterns.

    The great news is that you can change. Your mind-body is not permanently wired this way.

    Science and many different proven techniques tell us how we can change ourselves in ways that seem unimaginable. Unfortunately, these methods lag behind in formal education and the knowledge base of many healers. But, there are many entry points to working with your mind and body to transform how you show up.

    Mind-Body Practice

    While it’s not your fault that you’ve been conditioned to stay perpetually busy, it is your responsibility to do the inner work if you want to enjoy life as your best self who doesn’t need to work to feel worthy.

    If you have a conditioned tendency to avoid stillness because your body misconstrues it as dangerous, then you have to prove to yourself that endless activity is not the way to live fully in your pleasure, presence, and peace.

    Partner with your body and get lovingly curious about yourself.

    The precise activity that you avoid most, idleness, is one way to get acquainted with your inherent, non-negotiable worthiness. This will inevitably dredge up anxiety, depression, and other uncomfortable feelings.

    Learn to be in touch with what you’re feeling in your body, known as interoception. This alone is a practice that will pay you back tenfold in overall well-being, decision-making, and trusting your inner guidance.

    Observe where you’re holding any physical tension. Pay attention to places where discomfort begins to stir and notice what your first impulse is. Often, the urges that arise have a positive intention of squashing the discomfort. For someone with workaholism, that urge is productive activity.

    The body is excellent at reacting at warp speed to these signs of discomfort. Notice where the unease is showing up in your body and develop a practice of sitting with it–another practice that’s worth learning if you want to take the risk of being a human in a world of uncertainties. The treasures of life are found in the unknown.

    Over time, you will learn when your activity is exiting the healthy, productive realm and entering the unhealthy, self-sacrificing realm–so you can intervene.

    You’re incredibly capable of healing and changing your life. You’re not broken, no matter what your struggles are. Trust me, every practice I preach is one that I’ve used to transform my own life.

    Remember that you’re a beautiful creature who’s learning to exist exactly as you are—magnificent, perfect, and worthy.

  • Unbecoming the Old Me: How I’m Finally Discovering That Life Can Be Fun

    Unbecoming the Old Me: How I’m Finally Discovering That Life Can Be Fun

    “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.” ~Albert Einstein

    I woke up one morning and realized that I had no idea who I was. I realized that over the past thirty-something years I had been everyone but myself.

    I was like a chameleon molding into the people that surrounded me. Not wanting to make noise or cause disturbance to others or trigger my own inner wounds.

    My goal was being whoever I thought the person around me wanted me to be. To be accepted, loved, and liked by others. I realize now that I was searching for something external to validate what I needed to give myself. I needed to learn who I was. I needed to like, love, and get to know myself.

    Once you discover that you do not like yourself and that you don’t even know who you are or what you like, change starts to happen. You start to identify areas where you were using people and things to fill a void that only you can fill. Alcohol to numb the pain, sex to feel less alone, to feel valuable. Helping others and fixing external problems so you don’t have to look at yourself.

    I had no clue this is what I was doing. Honestly, I thought I just wanted to help people. Turns out I was projecting externally what I needed to be doing internally. We tend to do this without any awareness. If you find yourself constantly nurturing or encouraging other people but, on the inside, you feel alone, sad, or wondering if this is all life has to offer, you may be doing this as well.

    Pay attention to what you constantly give to others. It’s likely that’s what you need to give yourself. Pay attention to what you say to others because you likely need to say that to yourself. 

    The journey to discovering myself has been a long one. It has been a fun one and a difficult one. I have explored different activities and hobbies—reflecting back on activities that I enjoyed as a child and bringing those back into my life; trying new things that I have always been curious about or wanted to try. I have kept the ones that bring me joy and peace and eliminated the ones that lower my energy.

    I have also done this with people, jobs, and my own thoughts. The voices in my head have been the most challenging to discard. But after years of consistently working with them, my inner dialogue is finally much nicer.

    Yes, the criticism does still arrive, but I see it for what it is and get curious about it. I ask if what my negative inner voice says is true. Ninety-nine percent of the time it is not. I see what it is trying to teach me.

    I often will ask myself: Who said that to you and when? Oddly enough, my thirty-year-old self’s belief system was one I built as a kid, when I concluded that I wasn’t good enough and I was only valuable when I had something to give someone. It’s really funny when you realize you are an adult body carrying around beliefs you developed as a child, with zero awareness. 

    I also had to take the time to reflect on how my actions and thoughts were playing a role in my life. I had to make the decision to basically do the opposite of what I had been doing to get different results.

    For example, instead of waiting for the people around me to start respecting and prioritizing me, I had to start respecting and prioritizing myself. I had to identify my wants, honor my needs, and set boundaries in relationships.

    Instead of sleeping in, I had to start getting up early before my son so we could have a pleasant morning versus running out the door. I had to nurture myself at the beginning of the day before the world had a chance to pull at me.

    Instead of holding my truth in, I had to muster up the courage to speak it. To share my feelings, rock the boat if I had to, and trust I wasn’t “being crazy.”

    Instead of tiptoeing around everyone and trying to please them, I had to understand that this is not even possible.

    Instead of hating myself, I had to start loving myself.

    Instead of being closed off, I had to open my heart—to myself, others, and the world.

    Instead of remaining stuck, I had to start taking baby steps to discover who I am and who I want to be. Like spending time in silence in nature so I could hear my inner voice, making art, saying positive words to myself in the mirror while brushing my teeth, and meditating for just three minutes a day.

    Before I started doing the opposite of what I had been doing, I had no clue that life could be fun. I am here to tell you that life really can be fun, you’re not alone, and by taking one small step you can begin to transform your life into something you didn’t even know was possible for yourself.

    It does take courage, compassion, consistency, and commitment, but if you start today, when you look back in a few years you will not even recognize yourself or your life.

    If you start to believe bigger than your beliefs about yourself and this world, magic will start to happen.

  • 9 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self to Help Her Change Her Life

    9 Things I Would Tell My Younger Self to Help Her Change Her Life

    “You are one decision away from a completely different life.” ~Mel Robbins

    At twenty-six years old, I lost my dad to suicide. I was heartbroken and so angry.

    My dad was not the best. Ever since I was little, he would criticize everything I did. I was never good enough for him, and I was a place he discharged his anger through emotional insults.

    It never stopped, and I was always on high alert around him. Right until the moment he took his life.

    He could also be loving, kind, funny, and warm, but my nervous system could never relax around him. He was a Jekyll and Hyde. I never knew what behavior would set him off.

    Then all of a sudden, he was gone.

    I was angry because he had caused me a lot of pain growing up, and now he had left me.

    I was angry that I loved this man so much and felt such deep pain without him. It made no sense to me. Surely my life should be better now that his constant abuse was over.

    But it was just the beginning of my emotional breakdown. Children love their parents unconditionally, no matter how we are treated. But if our parents project their pain on to us, we end up not loving ourselves.

    Now that the abuse had stopped, it was time to deal with all the emotional wounds he’d inflicted over the years.

    But I resisted this and got stuck. I struggled in romantic relationships, unconsciously dating versions of my dad.

    I was full of self-hate. He may have died, but his criticism was very much alive in my head! And I was the one now persecuting myself for everything.

    I may have loved him, but I had no love for myself, as he had taught me that I wasn’t worth that.

    I felt powerless and in so much pain. I numbed this pain with the tools he had given me—wine, TV, food, and caretaking others. I had the busiest diary so I would never have to feel.

    I had no idea how to stop feeling so awful and like I was doomed for life because of this childhood trauma I had suffered. I was in denial that I had even experienced childhood trauma.

    The man who had caused me the pain had gone, so why did I feel the same, if not worse?

    I would lie in bed at night with this huge ache, longing to be loved by someone but looking for it in all the wrong places.

    I felt trapped in my emotions and like there was no way out.

    I sit in my front room now, over fifteen years later, in a life I didn’t think was possible, in a home that feels safe and peaceful. No longer abusing myself. Doing a job that I love and married to the most amazing man.

    I feel like life is a gift and there is no dream I cannot make a reality. That pain that kept me awake at night is no longer there but replaced with love for myself, and even for my dad.

    If I could go back in time, I would tell myself these nine things to get me moving forward to the life I’ve since created. If you also grew up with an abusive parent, my list may help you too.

    1. It was not your fault.

    We put our parents on a pedestal as children because we have no choice. We need them to survive. When my dad persecuted me for not being quiet enough or not pleasing him, I translated that as “I am not good enough” and that everything was my fault.

    We often take all the blame when our parents mistreat us. But what were their stories? How did they grow up? Did someone teach them how to balance their emotions?

    I see now that my dad was struggling. He was grieving the loss of his parents and a difficult childhood. He was not given any tools to manage his emotions. He was shown how to lash out and project them. He was shown how to drink to numb them out.

    He would come home from a job he felt he had to do, feeling tired and stressed, and blame others to help himself calm down.

    Realizing this helped me let myself off the hook. It has also helped me forgive him, which has brought me peace. I started to understand him and his traumas. He was repeating a pattern of survival that his parents had taught him.

    This is generational trauma, and it wasn’t his fault. But it was his responsibility to keep his children safe, which he didn’t fulfill because he had no idea he was traumatizing them!

    2. Reparent the wounded child within.

    The versions of me that still hurt and felt this ache to be loved still lived within me, many years later. The seven-year-old who was shouted at for being too loud, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t study enough, and the twenty-five-year-old that wasn’t there for my dad. All these parts of me had unmet needs and were in pain.

    We can’t change the past, but we can go back in time in our imagination and be the parent we needed.

    I have imagined taking baby-me out of the house where I was born to live with adult me. Telling my parents to get some therapy and sort themselves out before they can have the baby back.

    I’ve imagined holding her and telling her how special she is. Over time, this helped that deeper pain to heal.

    3. Work on self-love.

    I was always seeking love and validation outside of myself.

    I was never taught or shown that self-love and self-care are necessities. You have to be able to fill up your own cup in order to love others.

    I would tell my younger self to take a step back from pleasing others and finding a man. I would tell her to focus on giving herself the love she longed for.

    For example, speaking to myself with love and kindness, having quality alone time, buying myself gifts—these were all things I longed for from a man, but I needed to start doing them for myself.

    I needed to spend time every day giving myself love and listening to my needs, not ignoring them. Do I need rest? Water? A healthy meal? To just breathe? To be in nature to calm my anxiety?

    Learning to listen to my own needs and fulfill them took time. It felt unnatural. It was a new behavior I had to repeat every day, and then soon enough it became second nature.

    4. Get to know your shadow.

    We all have parts of us that are dysfunctional and behaviors that are not serving us.

    For me, it was emotional eating, drinking wine, pursuing emotionally unavailable men, and caretaking my family. The last two made me miserable.

    But I blamed the men and my family for being needy. I didn’t take responsibility for my own behavior.

    I felt powerless over how others treated me. I was trapped in this victim state, and then I would numb with food and booze.

    Getting to know my shadow and recognizing my toxic behaviors were the first two steps to change.

    When a man didn’t treat me well, I stopped trying to prove my worth and changed my behavior to move away from the relationship.

    When it hurt, I learned how to love myself instead of chasing someone else’s love.

    Ask yourself: What am I doing that hurts me? Then work on a step-by-step plan to change the behavior. Baby steps are key in this process, as you can get overwhelmed by trying to do too much at once.

    5. Get support.

    It takes time and work to change toxic behavior and heal. I would give my younger self permission to get help when I was struggling with a change. For example, giving up toxic relationships and booze was a real challenge for me. Finding people who had already been through the transformation I was seeking was so valuable.

    Sometimes this would mean listening to a podcast or reading a book, blogs like this one, or posts on social media, and other times it would be investing in working with someone who had already done the work.

    When you work with someone who’s already made the change you’re seeking, they can outline the steps they took, which saves time and energy and makes you feel less alone.

    6. Get in your body.

    I once was a floating head and very disconnected from my body. It didn’t feel safe to feel fear, so I had to be that way to survive my life!

    I would tell my younger self to slow down and notice how her body feels. That it was safe to do that now.

    For example, certain relationships made my heart race out of fear. This was a sign that they weren’t good for me.

    I would also tell her to find ways to bring the body back into balance by discharging the stress and fear.

    For example, breathwork techniques, movement, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) tapping all help us process our emotions rather than running away from them.

    7. It’s safe to speak your truth.

    I have always been incredibly loyal in relationships. Growing up with a dad who was awful meant I had few boundaries and expectations in relationships. This was the only way I could have some form of a relationship with my dad.

    I would let my younger self know it is okay to step back or walk away from relationships that don’t feel good or safe, even family.

    I would let her know that she can always express her truth in relationships and explain when a boundary has been crossed, but that also it’s okay to walk away. Especially in relationships that feel unsafe and abusive.

    8. Celebrate all your progress.

    A journey of healing and transformation takes time! It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s so important to celebrate the smallest of wins daily. For example, “I meditated every day this week,” or “I said no to an invite so I could take care of myself when I used to say yes all the time.” Change starts small and grows big.

    At the beginning especially it is so important to track everything because it feels like such a mountain to climb. It will motivate you to carry on. Seeing the little changes shows your efforts are paying off.

    Younger me didn’t have a family that celebrated small wins and growth. They focused on my imperfections and were highly critical. By celebrating myself, I help that little girl feel enough!

    9. Set intentions and dream big.

    Each month, set little goals to improve your life and keep you moving forward. This could be for your personal growth, relationships, physical health, emotional health, money, love, or work.

    Make the goal super small, for example, “In January, I will not text my ex.”

    You may want to set an intention to take better care of yourself. Break this down into daily tasks to repeat for the month. And if you don’t know what you need to work on, maybe your task for the month is to read a book to help you find out.

    With intention you can create the life you dream of. But often we don’t know what our dreams are. Get still and explore what would bring you happiness.

    I think of younger-me who looked out of her bedroom window wishing for a safe home.  I think of that little girl and the life she deserves. A full, fulfilling life, just like I’d want for my own child. This has helped me to dream bigger to create a life that is not only safe but also makes me happy.

    —

    You too deserve an amazing life! Not a life stuck in patterns of surviving and playing it small, but one where you heal and thrive. Your parents treated you the way they did not because you were not enough but because they were wounded. You were always enough, and now you have the power to take daily steps to change your reality so it is not longer tainted by trauma.

    I have the most incredible life now, and it has and continues to be a journey of healing. I wish I would have done these things sooner, but it’s never too late to take the first steps on a new path! There is hope, and I believe in you.

  • Beyond Dry January: 5 Benefits of Extending Your Break from Alcohol

    Beyond Dry January: 5 Benefits of Extending Your Break from Alcohol

    “Define success on your own terms, achieve it by your own rules, and build a life you’re proud to live.” ~Anne Sweeney

    So many people make the positive choice to have a sober start to the year in January, whether it’s a New Year’s resolution, a detox, another wellness goal, or part of a fresh start program, but perhaps it’s worth considering prolonging the benefits further into the year ahead.

    A break from alcohol is always a good thing, whether it’s a few days, a week, a month, or longer, and the bigger the break, the more you get a chance to reconsider whether alcohol is helping you to achieve your plans, intentions, or goals in life.

    There are many benefits of extending your sober break beyond thirty days.

    You’ll get more (and better quality) sleep, which will lead to you having more energy, both emotionally and physically.

    As you get into better sleep habits and patterns, with extended periods of REM sleep, you will likely find your mood improving, and you may also find that you have more time for hobbies or projects that you want to focus on. I used to enjoy reading but could never find the time to do it; now I have time in the evenings to read, and time in the early mornings before the rest of my household wakes.

    You’ll find it easier to stay focused on your other health and wellness goals.

    You will find it easier to get hydrated and eat in line with your nutrition plans when you’re not side-lined by a morning carb fest or caffeine overload. I no longer need to drink sugar-laden drinks to give me energy, and I find that I’m much more mindful about what my body needs during an average day to fuel it efficiently, while enjoying what I eat and drink.

    You might have more diverse, fun experiences with friends.

    You can plan and enjoy lots of alcohol-free activities together throughout the spring. I’ve found that some of my newer friendships are not based upon drinking activities at all. We walk, we go for brunches, coffees, movies, and day trips to new places. All social activities I wouldn’t have thought about instigating when I was still drinking.

    You’ll see progress across all areas of your life by spring or early summer.

    The habits that you formed through the first quarter of the year will really start to pay off by the time the days are longer. You will have found new and different ways to relax, to have fun, and to process your emotions, which can positively impact your work and relationships, and you will be so glad that you did.

    You may be inspired to develop a list of things you want to enjoy through the year now that you have the time, energy, and money.

    There may be simple pleasures such as watching the sunrise, hiking, baking, or creating, or more ambitious plans to execute. Perhaps you’ll discover a new hobby or direction that fills you with pride and purpose.

    Alcohol feeds your short-term rewards system (it gives you a dopamine hit) but ultimately acts as a depressant. Your brain wants immediate gratification for the least amount of effort, and alcohol can provide this, but I urge you to find some balance or a more sustainable way of living.

    I spent a considerable amount of time drinking very little alcohol before I decided to have an alcohol-free year as a little life experiment to see how I got on, and cutting down my alcohol consumption was a brilliant introduction to a sober lifestyle. I found new ways to spend my time that I never would have considered before and rekindled old hobbies.

    I now get an amazing sense of satisfaction from achieving my medium and long-term goals—these are the rewards I work toward.

    Achieving my intentions helps me develop and maintain the habits I want to keep. I work toward the long-term goals by ticking off the short term ones, which gives me immediate gratification while helping me develop my purpose on this planet. Alcohol made me act on impulse; now I act on carefully made plans, good intentions, and bold dreams.

    A sober month is a good thing at any time of the year, not just January, but please remember, we don’t have to stick to neat months or rules. We can choose whatever chunk of sober time we like to enhance our lives and find joy in the alcohol-free corners of our worlds whenever we want to.

    This year I’m choosing another year of sober living, and I cannot wait to see what I get to achieve by the end of it.

    How about you? If you started the year with a break from alcohol, can you consider extending your  intention into the spring or even into the year ahead?

  • How to Make Things Better When It Seems Like Everything Is Going Wrong

    How to Make Things Better When It Seems Like Everything Is Going Wrong

    “You can never be happy if you’re trapped in the past and fearful of the future. Living in the present is the only way to be happy.” ~Unknown

    Have you found that the local and world events of the last couple of years have taken their toll on you and your family and friends? With fires, floods, shortages of food, fuel, and medicine, illnesses, job losses, and more, all occurring in a short space of time, it can be hard to find anyone who has not been affected in some way.

    Many people are experiencing feelings of hopelessness and living in constant fear about the future. And unfortunately, if not managed, over time these feelings can lead to depression, anxiety, and numerous other health conditions.

    We’ve all heard that a build-up of stress hormones in our body contributes to illness, but how can we possibly improve our health when we are living in survival mode and feel like the situation is hopeless?

    I lived this way for most of my life, wishing I could clone myself a million times so I could get on with changing the world, but feeling sad and frustrated knowing that I could not, no matter how hard I tried.

    I was also in my own little bubble of survival, working way too many hours to prove to myself I could be a mum and have a career and save the world, all while my health was deteriorating.

    From time to time I found myself thinking, why is it that no matter how hard I try to make things better for myself and my family, something else always comes along and makes everything worse? I was always striving, not even for perfection, but to make things better.

    I really wanted a different way, to live a life without the stress, struggle, fear, and health issues.

    Fortunately, a friend introduced me to the benefits of guided meditation and how to shift your mindset, and once I understood how powerful these practices could be in helping me to improve my quality of life, I didn’t look back.

    Even though it was a struggle for a while, as I made the changes I needed to make—which included restructuring my business, moving three times in twelve months, managing my chronic health issues, and working through the trauma—I have now found a place where I can notice and find joy in the small things, and I have hope for the future.

    I learned that, if we can keep a positive outlook and focus on ourselves and how we respond in any situation, we can change how we feel about everything. But how can we do this when we are feeling stuck?

    The first thing to realize is that you can’t change others. You can only change yourself and the way that you respond or react.

    You can only alter the choices you make in your life and how you can make the world a better place. And the good news is you don’t need to do anything big to do that.

    What if you can find small ways to improve:

    • Your relationships with family and friends. (For example, by being more present and listening to their interests and needs.)
    • Your kindness and care in relating to people you meet. (For example, by questioning your judgements rather than reacting immediately.)
    • The way you feel about yourself. (For example, by expressing gratitude for everything you’re doing right.)

    What if you can change the way that you look after your environment in your home and community?

    What if doing these things has a flow-on effect to everyone else you meet?

    What if you say or do something, even a seemingly small thing, that makes others feel more love and joy?

    What if they then go on to change something about themselves that gives them more joy and happiness in their lives?

    What if each person pays it forward a little more?

    We are so much more powerful than we think. Just by changing our perceptions and our actions we have an exponential effect on the people around us.

    Did you know that your thoughts and memories are just perceptions of your reality, based on your own life experiences, with some unconscious conditioning thrown in? Every single person in this world experiences life in a different way based on their past, as well as patterns of behavior that developed from a need to feel loved, nurtured, or a sense of belonging as a young child.

    Studies have even shown that people who witness an event, e.g., a crime, will always have a different interpretation of what happened compared with anyone else, because we all have our own biases. Often, our memories, when compared with actual video footage of the crime, will be completely inaccurate.

    How does this relate to you and lowering your stress and anxiety?

    It means that in any given moment you can choose how to perceive the events going in your life, in the community, and world around you.

    You can choose to wallow in fear and frustration about things that are outside of your control, or you can choose to empower yourself by focusing on the good and all the things within your control. Like the things that make you feel better. Because when you feel better, you do better, for everyone and everything around you.

    Ask yourself, what do I need to do to feel more joy and happiness and hope?

    Be consciously aware of your thoughts and notice what comes to you. What do you want to keep and what does not serve your own happiness and joy?

    For me, I decided to stop spending as much time looking at news feeds and social media. Most of it is not positive or just made me feel like I was inadequate, so I cut it right back.

    I actively sought to change conversations with family and friends that were fear-driven, by changing the subject. Unless the person really wanted help or advice that was going to support them in moving forward.

    I also made the decision to stop working so hard and enjoy whatever time I have left on this earth. I decided to focus on things that bring me health and happiness.

    Here are some of the things I like to do to feel happier, healthier, and more hopeful. Feel free to take what works for you and leave the rest. If none of these resonate, then take some time to sit and ask yourself, what can you do differently? What makes you feel good?

    • Take a bath.
    • Call a friend.
    • Play a musical instrument or create some art.
    • Listen to music.
    • Find a space on your own, even for just a few minutes, and use some gentle background music to soothe your mind and help you gather your thoughts. Doing this can often help us release the tension, even just a little, and give us some space to work out what is important to us.
    • Spend some time creating a dream board, a bucket list, or even a list of things you’d love to have or do in your life. Even though it might seem like some of those things are impossible to achieve, writing down our dreams and desires can lift our mood and gives us hope and something to look forward to.
    • Plan a treat for yourself or your family—go out for ice cream and sit by a river, lake, or beach; find a recipe that you and your family would love and work together to make it; or take a bike ride.
    • Find a spot to sit outside and observe nature and the world around you. Notice something you’ve never looked at properly before. Observe and appreciate its beauty. Look at it like a child might, with wonder and curiosity.
    • Don’t be afraid to ask someone to support you or to help out, whether it’s for a chat or some physical assistance. Most often, people are more than willing and enjoy helping. You just need to ask.

    Choose just one thing that you can do differently to improve your mood and outlook and commit to making it happen. Trust the ripple effect will happen and be proud that you are making a difference for yourself and others.

  • 10 Highly Sensitive People Share What Helps Them Take the Sting Out of Criticism

    10 Highly Sensitive People Share What Helps Them Take the Sting Out of Criticism

    Criticism can be especially hard for highly sensitive people because we try so hard and we care so much. It’s really fascinating how much it can affect HSPs in particular.

    I want to share that because it normalizes our experience, to know we’re not alone in how we experience things. I certainly have developed some tools to help with criticism but can still be impacted at times.

    On an anonymous survey I posted, someone wrote that they find my voice so shrill that they could not stand listening to me. I felt the sting.

    But it’s important to realize criticisms are opinions that vary from person to person, and therefore, we have to be careful about what we take in and what we believe. To provide an example of that, many others have shared my voice is soothing, calm, and nurturing. Notice how opposite those opinions are?

    So the next time you receive criticism, I want you to remember this example and know that criticism has nothing to do with us personally and usually comes from a painful place inside another. People are going to have many different types of opinions. What’s important is that we don’t soak them in.

    It’s helped a lot to do my own personal growth work and build my self-esteem. When my self-esteem was low, criticisms knocked me down hard, and for a long time. When I had no personal value, I believed the criticism.

    It took time to build up my sense of self, and it will take time to build yours if that’s an issue for you too.

    When you feel the sting, acknowledge it and give yourself some compassion. Remind yourself of your value and your intentions. Also, focus on some positives about you so that negativity bias of the brain doesn’t take over. Remember, it takes eight positives to neutralize one negative.

    Not everyone is going to like us, and that’s okay. What’s important is that we learn to love and support our sensitive hearts and know our intentions come from good places.

    I don’t think anyone is completely immune to the impacts of criticism. Case in point, here’s what some HSPs in my Sensitive Empowerment Community commented after reading some of my thoughts on criticism:

    1. The power of self-compassion

    “I remember when I would be hurt when I was a kid my mom would tell me to ‘get over it.’ I remember that being invalidating, unhelpful, and actually hurt me more. I think it would be powerful to teach our sensitive children the art of self-compassion. Can you imagine a whole generation of sensitive children raised with self-compassion? I have found that skill to be one of the best things that I’ve developed. It helps me with everything now. I think that it’s probably a tool that we can constantly sharpen.”

    2. The importance of self-care

    “Criticism is still extremely hard on me to the point where it will put me out of commission for a minute (or days even). I’m working on not letting others’ criticism flatten me. I just know, when my rest and my health are in order, it’s much easier to shake it off. When I feel criticized, I’m starting to immediately make a list of people who support me and think differently than people who criticize me and speak unkindly.”

    3. It’s more about them than us

    “I find criticism extremely difficult. For me, there is a family wound around criticism, so I can have a deep, painful reaction. Self-compassion has really helped me work through those reactions. I heard something once that often comes to my mind these days—what someone says about us tells us more about them and how they see the world than it is information about us. I find this really helpful because I used to take every single thing someone said about me as truth, but seeing that people are seeing us through the lens of all their wounds and experiences takes the sting away a bit.”

    4. Perfectionism vs. our innate drive for excellence

    “What you said resonated so much with me (and a big yes to the knife in the heart analogy!)— especially that the desire to avoid criticism is what has caused or contributed to your perfectionism. I feel exactly the same way. Now I work really hard on trying to figure out when something is just my innate drive for excellence or when it’s more a perfectionism driven by fear/avoidance.”

    5. How it helps to build our self-esteem

    “I used to hold onto criticism much more when I was younger, and it hurt terribly. Working on myself and building up my self-esteem was integral to healing. I used to work with a boss who was critical of everything I did, and I dreaded going to work every day. One day I decided to begin therapy, and soon I built up enough energies to apply to graduate school. Once I got in, I put n my two-weeks notice. Going back to school was an investment in myself.”

    6. Other people’s opinions are none of our business

    “This is still something I’m working on for myself, although I’ve had huge growth in this area. I once read somewhere or heard someone say that ‘what other people think of you is none of your business,’ and I try to remember that if I get that sting.”

    7. People who criticize often lack courage

    “Criticism can indeed be hurtful. It can be good to remember that people who criticize are often either unaware of how much work you put into doing that which they are criticizing, or they are taking out their own frustration on you. For many people, it’s more ‘comfortable’ to criticize others who have the courage to do something than to actually do something themselves.”

    8. Criticism isn’t always true

    “I’ve come a long way working with the deep sting of criticism and feeling the knife in my heart. There are moments I still feel the deep sting, but it doesn’t ‘take me out’ in the way it used to. Often, I ask myself ‘is this really true what they said?’ That helps me to come back to myself, along with breathing. I am soothed when I see the criticism is simply not about me! A work in progress going forward.”

    9. Hurt people hurt people

    “Criticism is so hard, especially because everybody wants to be accepted and respected for who they are, and the judgments of others can be hard to bear. Depending on our mindset and self-acceptance/self-confidence, it can make us see ourselves as less than if we do not have the right tools in place. I always try to remember the simple truth that ‘hurt people hurt people.’”

    10. When criticism gets to you, it’s because you care

    “I found it quite emotional reading all the posts and having my intense and long-lasting reaction to criticism normalized. I have struggled with this for a long time. I had a similar thing to you, Julie, with a comment in a survey. It was a really mean, unthoughtful commentf about a presentation I gave, and coming from someone well respected in my field of work, it was hard to take and still gets to me years later. It is helping so much to reframe it as an issue they have rather than a failing of mine! It’s a very empowering feeling. I am also trying to celebrate the fact I find criticism hard knowing that it’s because I care so deeply about doing things well and with care.”

    What about you? What helps you take the sting off criticism?

    **Some of the community comments have been edited for clarity and grammar.

  • How I’ve Redefined Success Since ‘Failing’ by Traditional Standards

    How I’ve Redefined Success Since ‘Failing’ by Traditional Standards

    “Once you choose hope, anything is possible.” ~Christopher Reeve

    When I was a child, I wanted to save the world. My mom found me crying in my bedroom one day. She asked what was wrong, and I said, “I haven’t done anything yet!” I couldn’t wait to grow up so I could try to make a difference.

    At fourteen, I joined a youth group that supported adults with disabilities. We hosted dances and ran a buddy program. I helped with projects at state institutions and left saddened by the conditions for the residents. I planned to work at a state institution.

    As a senior in high school, I was voted most likely to succeed. It was unexpected, like so many things in my life. I hoped to find meaningful work that helped others.

    My first year at Ohio State, I fell head over heels in love and married the boy next door. A month after my wedding, newly nineteen, I started my first full-time job as manager of a group home for men with developmental disabilities. I never finished college.

    At twenty-three, I was officially diagnosed with depression after my first baby, but the doctor didn’t tell me. I read the diagnosis in my medical record a few years later. I grew up in the sixties with negative stereotypes of mental illness. I didn’t understand it, and I thought depression meant being weak and ungrateful. I loved being a new mom, and I wanted the doctor to be wrong.

    I was a stay-at-home mom with three young children at the time of my ten-year high school reunion. The event booklet included bios. For mine, I wrote something a bit defensive about the value of being a mom since I didn’t feel successful in any traditional way.

    At thirty, I experienced daily headaches for the first time. I tried natural cures and refused all medication, even over-the-counter ones, while the headaches progressed to a constant mild level. I kept up with three busy kids, taught literacy to residents with multiple disabilities at a state institution, and barreled on. I thought I understood challenges.

    At forty, I went to a pain clinic at Ohio State and received another depression diagnosis. This time it made sense. The diagnosis still made me feel vaguely ashamed, weak. Still, I rationalized it away.

    Which came first, the depression or the headache? Maybe it was the headache’s fault. Anti-depressants were diagnosed for the first time, which managed my depression. Until…

    When I was forty-two, I fell asleep at the wheel with my youngest daughter Beth in the passenger seat. She sustained a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed from the chest down. I quit my job at the institution to be her round-the-clock caregiver.

    Beth was only fourteen when she was injured. However, she carried me forward, since between the two of us, she was the emotionally stable one. She focused on regaining her independence, despite her quadriplegia. I let her make the decisions about her care and her future. Sometimes we need someone strong to lead the way.

    Every day, every hour, every minute of our new life felt impossibly uncertain. New guilt and anxiety merged with my old issues of chronic pain and depression. Increased doses of my anti-depressants did not prevent me from spiraling down. There was no light at the end of the tunnel. No hope of light.

    I put a tight lid on my feelings, which was a challenge by itself. I didn’t want to give the people I loved more to worry about. I also felt that if I gave in to my emotions, I wouldn’t be able to function. And I desperately needed to help Beth. That’s what mattered the most.

    I started counseling several months after the car accident. At the first session, I thought I would find a little peace, with more ahead. It wasn’t that simple. I felt like a failure, and thought I failed at counseling, too, since I didn’t improve for some time. I should have reached out for help right after Beth’s injury.

    Weekly counseling helped me, along with my husband always being there for me. However, Beth was the one who showed me how to choose hope. I watched her succeed after failing again and again, over and over, on her quest to be independent.

    Beth and I shared unexpected adventures, from our small town in Ohio to Harvard and around the world. She has had the most exciting life of anyone I know. She’s also the happiest person I know because she finds joy in ordinary life, and that’s the best kind of success.

    Since I was voted most likely to succeed in 1976, I learned that success encompasses so much more than I originally thought. Things like being married for forty-five years to my best friend. Raising three great kids. Working meaningful jobs and helping others. Volunteering and mentoring. And learning meditation to better cope with chronic pain.

    Today, my depression is mostly managed with prescriptions, which also feels like a kind of success. I’m no longer ashamed of my depression. It’s part of who I am, and I know for a fact that I’m not weak or ungrateful. There’s light at the end of the tunnel, a bright light.

    Hope is an incredibly powerful thing. And if you never give up? Hope wins.

  • A Gentle Reminder to Anyone Who’s Struggling This Holiday Season

    A Gentle Reminder to Anyone Who’s Struggling This Holiday Season

    “It’s okay to want to be alone. It’s okay to take time for yourself.” ~Kate Allan

    It’s the holiday season, the most wonderful time of the year, they say, but it’s not for all of us. For those of us coping with the loss of a loved one, family estrangement, loneliness, financial difficulties, or health struggles, the holidays can be one of the hardest times of the year.

    For some of us the holidays can feel as if we have been cast out in the cold. As if we are forced to look through a window of a happy, loving family.

    Many of us are filled with feelings of longing for things that can never be, such as more time with a loved one we have lost or a supportive family. We find ourselves swept into memories of holidays past or lost in fantasies about what the holidays would be like if we had a different life.

    We find ourselves feeling pressured to hide our problems, bake a dozen cookies, put on a happy smile and an ugly Christmas sweater, and attend that office holiday party. There, we smile and engage in exhausting small talk, and do our best to avoid the subject of what we are doing for the holidays.

    These events can leave us feeling totally depleted. We buy obligatory gifts for our friends or coworkers, and we spend hours trying to figure out what they might like. After the gift is purchased, we second guess ourselves and worry that we missed the mark.

    Some of us might host parties and obsess over making our tree look absolutely perfect in a desperate effort to please others and give people the impression that everything is fine.

    Society has filled our heads with unrealistic notions about perfect gifts, immaculate homes decorated with lavish matching decorations, endless resources to spend, and happy times spent with family. Some of us find ourselves exhausted and stressed trying to live up to social pressures or expectations of others.

    Over the years, as I have struggled with various losses in my life or felt cast aside by family members, I have learned that the most important thing we can do over the holidays is take care of ourselves.

    As an altruistic person who goes out of the way to please everyone, taking care of myself does not come easily to me. In the past I felt guilty for putting my own needs first, but over the years I’ve learned that our own needs are just as important as everyone else’s. If we sacrifice ourselves to please others, it can not only be harmful to ourselves but those around us as well.

    If you are struggling this holiday season, take time to reflect on how you would like to spend the holidays. Remember, you don’t have to buy the perfect gift for everyone, put up a tree, decorate the entire house, spend hours baking cookies, or even attend that family gathering.

    If you are worried that a friend will be disappointed that you are not attending an event, you can suggest that you meet up for coffee when you’re feeling up to it.

    In the past I worried that a friend would judge me for not attending a holiday event. However, over the years I have learned that true friends are empathetic and do not judge us for needing to take time for ourselves.

    The most important thing you can do if you are struggling during the holiday season is pay attention to your own needs and do what you feel is best for you.

    If you feel like curling up on the couch with Netflix or a good book and a pet instead of going to a party or a family gathering, give yourself permission. It can sometimes be better for our health and well-being to decline an invitation and rest.

    If you are someone who is used to keeping busy, the holidays can become more difficult because our workplaces are often closed or slower than other times of the year.

    In order to cope, I create a to-do list filled with new recipes I want to cook or bake, household cleaning that would be helpful to do, movies/shows I want to watch, places I want to go to see Christmas lights, and other things I have wanted to do. I also buy myself something that I have always wanted but don’t necessarily need as a form of self-love and self-affirmation.

    I also engage in volunteer work because when I am helping others I feel less alone and have less time to ruminate about the past or events that are outside of my control.

    I have discarded holiday traditions that did not bring me joy. I don’t go to church or make desserts with dried fruit or decorate my tree with handmade ornaments that are unsafe for my pets. I try not to buy material gifts for all of my friends. Instead, I treat friends to events such as concerts, art gallery exhibits, or museum shows we can enjoy together.

    I have held onto a few traditions that have made me happy. A childhood friend used to buy me a hallmark ornament as a gift, and now I buy one for myself. I donate to a charity, and I buy a gift for a for a child in need.

    I have also started to create my own traditions such as making my favorite cake and taking a break from digital communication. Each day I take time to feel grateful for the things that I have and the people and pets that help to make my life magical.

    I don’t force myself to do anything I am not feeling up for, and I do not spend time with people I do not feel comfortable being around. Once I started doing this, the holidays stopped being draining, exhausting, and socially challenging and started to become relaxing and peaceful.

    When I find myself feeling down, I remind myself that all situations are temporary, and the future could look very different. There may be other holiday seasons when I feel upbeat, excited, and eager to spend time with people who love me. But for now, I need to love myself, and that means doing what’s best for me.

    The best thing that any of us can do this holiday season is be kind to ourselves and take care of ourselves like we would our closest friend. This is the best holiday gift we can give ourselves.

  • How I Got Sober and What I Now Know About the Impacts of Alcohol

    How I Got Sober and What I Now Know About the Impacts of Alcohol

    “Sometimes deciding who you are is deciding who you’ll never be again.” ~Anonymous

    May 13th, 2011. I finally surrendered to the fact that I had a drinking problem and desperately needed help. The comments from acquaintances, the concern from friends, the complaints from my flatmates, the intensity of my depression, the conversations with my therapist—they all culminated in the decision that I had to break the chains from my liquid abuser.

    It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, one that entailed waving goodbye to the life that I had led before and diving into a new one where I didn’t have any points of reference and safety handles to grasp.

    At that time, the only option I thought was available to me was AA, so I emailed their helpline on that Friday at 2:43 p.m. Only an hour later I received a response from someone who seemed to care and understood my turmoil and despair, who took the time to share some of her own story, which I could relate to.

    I began going to meetings right away, and my friend Federica held my hand for the first two. I felt blessed to have her calming and loving presence next to me while I was full of fear and confusion. I will forever be grateful to her.

    Stopping

    I stopped drinking as soon as I joined AA. I started going to three meetings a week. I was aware that my levels of drinking were quite below the average threshold of most of the fellowship members, but I was advised to look at the similarities, not the differences, so I did.

    My quiver was now equipped with shimmering new arrows: I had the strength of my resolution, my meetings to go to, the opportunity to mix and match them when I wanted to, a whole community of people I could connect with, and, very quickly, a steady group of friends to go out with after our regular meetings and on weekends.

    I had found almost everything I was lacking and more in the space of a few weeks. I know that finding those people was what made it so easy for me to stay sober, because we enjoyed each other’s company and everything we did was not alcohol-related; also, I was never physically dependent. I was an “emotionally dependent” drinker.

    What I didn’t know then was that this bubble I had created was a very fragile one because it lacked my personal foundations of sobriety.

    Nine months after I quit drinking, on a dating website, I met the man that would become my beloved life companion and husband. I made space for him in my bubble, and he opened up to me the portal to his life.

    I became part of an outside world that I had not interacted with and had unintentionally kept at distance since I had quit drinking. I started to feel like the odd one out, and I began to resent everyone else who “could” drink.

    I could recognize other people who were problem drinkers but had not made the same decision as me, and I felt it was unfair that they got away with it, that they were the ones considered normal, and that I was the one with the problem.

    I was a ball of anger that was seeping out toward everyone, but I didn’t know how to process it. I had also started a job that was very demanding, and most of the time I was out of my depth.

    Gradually, I convinced myself that I could revisit that decision I made on that day in May and that I was ready to welcome alcohol back into my life, but in smaller and more reasonable doses.

    The day I decided to drink again was so uneventful that I don’t even remember it. I know it was almost two years after I had quit and that I had a small glass of wine. I didn’t even enjoy the feeling of being tipsy, and I took that as an assurance that alcohol would have never turned into my nemesis, but a presence that I could keep at bay and out of my life when I wanted to. I was proved wrong. Again.

    Breaking

    After approximately six months, those synaptic pathways had been retriggered. I was self-medicating my stress and depression caused by a job that I could not stomach, and the familiar shortcut was in a liquor store.

    What I later learned is that I didn’t start drinking again because I had a disease. I started for the same reason that I was able to ride a bike years after I last rode one.

    On one hand, I had learned through repetition that the quickest way to find relief from my problems was to drink alcohol, and that the pleasure I gained from it activated the reward circuit in my brain; this motivated me to repeat that behavior over and over again by reactivating the neuropathways that had already been established many years before.

    On the other hand, I had not built new, healthier ways to address those problems, I had not created new habits, and that’s why I was back standing in the alcohol aisle.

    I don’t know how I managed to drink heavily, still holding down that job successfully and completing a one-year life coaching training program. But I did both, and when I moved from London to a smaller town on the coast, I solemnly promised myself and my husband that my drinking would change.

    I had left the job I hated so much, and I was studying, searching for employment, and living in a town that I loved. I had no more excuses this time. But, instead of decreasing, my drinking increased because I didn’t have the constraints and responsibility of a job, and that freed up more time.

    My Way Out

    This time around, though, I knew I didn’t want to resort to AA because I felt that it wasn’t the right solution for me. I saw AA as a Band-Aid to stem the bleeding of my alcohol use, and if it were torn off, the wound would start bleeding again.

    AA also did not delve into the reasons I was making these poor decisions, nor did it prepare the future me for an alcohol-free life. I also was not comfortable with the idea of being in recovery and going to meetings forever; I wanted to be free.

    I didn’t know what my solution was going to look like, but I was open to trying other ways. I made a decision to stop and contacted a local organization. I got myself an appointment, had a brief assessment, and was invited to attend groups and activities there.

    I attended a women’s group a handful of times, but I felt in my bones that it wasn’t an environment where my sobriety would have thrived. But by contacting them, I had made the official step to accept and see my problem in full scale before my eyes, and, in my mind, I could not backtrack after that.

    The second step was to educate myself on what alcohol really was, and I dove into anything I could find—books, podcasts, courses, videos, and online communities—like a fish to water.

    I learned the impact alcohol has on our physical and mental health; the extent to which it interferes with the neurotransmitters in our brain and affects our central nervous system; how, as a consequence, it causes anxiety and depression; how it kills our confidence bit by bit under the mask of giving us “courage.”

    I understood that it’s a solution to a problem, and that the problem can be different for any one of us. And that some people decide to suppress their problem with alcohol, others with food, shopping, or other substances.

    I learned that alcohol is a toxin, a carcinogenic psychoactive drug, and a highly addictive substance, and that the reason we get emotionally addicted to it is because it taps on the reward system in the brain.

    I came to understand that the effect it had on me was the result of a chemical reaction, not a disease, and it is explained by science, and that it developed into a problem because it was the easiest shortcut I had to solve my issue.

    The third step was attending to my emotional recovery and looking at the problems that alcohol had solved for me. This, for me, was the key where freedom from alcohol truly lay.

    Setting my sobriety against something that was outside of me and being dependent on a structure to maintain it was one of the things that pushed me away from AA. So, for me, there was only one thing to do. Go back to the source, me, and understand where the pull of alcohol came from.

    A few months before I stopped drinking, as part of my endeavor to find a career that had purpose and meaning for me, I had completed the EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) certification. As part of my training, I had to carry out practice sessions with other certified colleagues.

    I met a lady who introduced me to the concept of being a “highly sensitive person” and realized that I was one too. I finally found the validation of my being “too emotional,” “too intense,” and “too sensitive,” epithets that had been used to describe me and that made me feel wrong.

    In my sessions with her, she helped me to uncover layer after layer of emotions, thoughts, and memories that were connected to my drinking and to the pain that I was trying to erase with it.

    We started with the most superficial ones, then reached the deeper and most ancient, which is the safest and recommended protocol to use EFT.

    The work I did by myself, with her, and with other colleagues along the way helped me to relieve my cravings when I had them and release the triggers that used to make me run to the liquor store like a brainless bullet. It also helped me recognize when I’d started to believe that alcohol turned me into the confident and self-assured person I struggled and strived to be.

    I experienced numerous shifts along the way. One of them is that I no longer resent people who drink. I can still recognize when someone has an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, but instead of feeling like they got away with it, my perception has changed. I feel like I am the lucky one who got away because alcohol has no place in my life, and there is not one tiny cell of me that would ever want to drink again.

    I know that there is nothing positive that alcohol can add to my life and that all I need is within me.

    I would like to show this to people who struggle with alcohol and tell them how wonderful, rich, rewarding, fun, and relaxing life is without it. And that their body has the capability to do all of the above without it, and that the fun, the excitement, or the relaxation they find in it is short-lived, but the consequences are not.

    But I know that we all have our own journeys, and it’s not my place to interfere with theirs.

    I already told the most important person I needed to tell, and that is my younger self.

    When I went to find her in my memories, I told her that she didn’t need alcohol to be the amazing and lovely girl that she was. I told her that I loved her with all my heart, and that she had all the resources she needed within her to find her way back to herself.

    She cried, then she smiled and thanked me for reminding her and for believing in her.

  • The Best Approach to Self-Care: How to Attend to Your Unmet Needs

    The Best Approach to Self-Care: How to Attend to Your Unmet Needs

    “Caring for your body, mind, and spirit is your greatest and grandest responsibility. It’s about listening to the needs of your soul and then honoring them.” ~Kristi Ling 

    There’s something I haven’t told many people. I kept it to myself because it clashed with my “identity” and the image I hoped to project (hello, ego!).

    I’ve been creating content and working in the spirituality and personal development fields for a number of years. Although I don’t strive to become like Buddha, there’s a part of me (call it my spiritual ego) that expects certain things of me, such as to remain at peace, content, and emotionally well-regulated most of the time. After all, isn’t it what meditating daily is supposed to do?

    Well, last year, I did not feel that content or peaceful. I felt quite depressed, and rarely did meditation make me feel better.

    So I turned to wine. Most evenings, I had a couple of glasses of wine (sometimes three or even four) to forget how bored and unhappy I was.

    “I’m a fraud,” I kept thinking while sipping on the red liquid.

    I tried other things (besides wine) to feel better that helped, like gratitude journaling and spending more time in nature. Although these things did improve my mood, there was still a void within me that even gratitude didn’t manage to fill.

    It was when I read an article about humanistic psychology and the use of Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs in therapy that I became aware of the real cause of my “wine habit”: unmet needs.

    “What do I really need?” I started asking myself every time the impulse to pour a glass of wine arose.

    At first, I’d still give in to the wine, probably out of habit. But eventually, using Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs as a guiding tool, I was able to identify which of my needs weren’t satisfied and what actions I needed to take to fulfill them.

    “That’s true self-care,” I thought.

    I realized that a self-care plan requires more than a checklist downloaded from Pinterest. It demands a life inventory, identifying our unmet needs, and taking the right actions to fulfill them.

    Simply put, a bubble bath isn’t the best solution for everyone or any issue.

    I’d like to share with you my new approach to self-care that aims to satisfy our deepest needs rather than providing short-lived comfort.

    Step 1: Become aware of your unmet needs.

    The first step is awareness. Although it’s not necessary to use Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs to identify what we want, it provides a helpful framework to guide our reflections.

    I recommend going through each level of the pyramid and taking the time to reflect on your life. A good way to do this is through journaling.

    Below are a few reflection questions for each category of needs to help you identify what’s missing in your life and may be preventing you from thriving.

    Physiological Needs

    These include basic physical needs like eating, drinking water, and sleeping. Self-care at this level comprises rest and giving our bodies the proper fuel and nutrients to function optimally. You could ask yourself:

    • Am I eating enough whole and nutritious food to nourish my body?
    • Do I feel rested when I wake up in the morning?
    • On a scale of 0-10, what’s my energy level most of the time?

    Although most of us have no issue feeding ourselves, a deficiency in rest and nutrients is fairly common. For example, after running a few blood tests, I discovered that my iron levels were too low, which explained my low energy. After supplementing for a few weeks, I started feeling better.

    Security and Safety Needs

    Safety includes income and job security, health, and the environment in which we live. Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Do I have sufficient financial resources to sustain myself and feel comfortable?
    • Do I often feel stressed and anxious? Do I have tools to help me relax?
    • What’s the state of my physical, mental, and emotional health?
    • Overall, do I feel safe?

    Social Needs

    These are the needs for love, acceptance, and belonging, which include friendships, romantic love and intimacy, and family life.

    The void I felt in the past two or three years mostly came from unmet needs in this category. Several people I knew moved away, and my relationship with a partner ended. Plus, after a year of isolation, I forgot how to connect with people, and the idea of socializing almost gave me anxiety (even though that’s what I needed the most).

    Here are a few questions you could ask yourself to uncover unfulfilled needs in this category:

    • Are there people around me whom I can count on?
    • Do I feel accepted and supported by the people around me?
    • Do I regularly interact and bond with people, or do I often feel lonely?
    • Overall, are my relationships satisfying to me?

    Esteem Needs

    These are the needs for appreciation and respect, which include having a healthy sense of self-worth and feeling valued.

    I worked hard in my twenties and early thirties on improving my self-esteem, but I can still remember the destructive impact of low self-worth on my quality of life when I was younger. Self-esteem needs are foundational for having healthy relationships, taking care of our bodies, and pursuing our goals and dreams.

    Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Do I feel appreciated at work, at home, and within my group of friends?
    • Is my self-talk mainly positive or negative?
    • Do I believe I have good qualities? Do others appreciate those qualities?
    • Overall, do I feel good about myself at work, at home, and in social circles?

    Self-Actualization Needs

    Maslow defined self-actualization as “fulfilling our potential.” It includes feeling a sense of purpose and growing and evolving as a person.

    For most of my life, I had “purpose anxiety.” Nowadays, living my purpose is one of the most important aspects of my life and what sustains me in difficult times.

    Doing what we love and using our gifts toward a vision that matters to us gives us fuel to move through challenges.

    You could ask yourself:

    • Do I feel like my life is meaningful and has a purpose?
    • Does the work I do fulfill me?
    • Am I using my skills and natural strengths in ways that are enjoyable to me?
    • Am I constantly growing and evolving?

    Self-Transcendence Needs

    Self-transcendence is about feeling connected to others and all life and acting accordingly. At this level, we have a desire for contribution, service, and impact. The need for a spiritual practice and connecting to a higher power are also part of self-transcendence.

    Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Am I making a positive impact on others and the world?
    • Do I feel connected to others, nature, and perhaps a higher power?
    • Am I satisfied with my spiritual practice and/or the legacy I’m leaving?

    Leisure Needs

    I’ve added this category to the list because I believe play is another important contributing aspect to our well-being.

    A lack of fun and laughter can negatively impact our mental health—at least, that’s been my experience in the past few years. Along with unmet social needs, a lack of play was my biggest source of dissatisfaction. I had become overly serious and forgot how to have fun. I couldn’t even remember that last time I had laughed.

    Questions you could ask yourself are:

    • Do I have fun at work, at home, and in my free time?
    • How often do I laugh?

    Step 2: Identify what requires your immediate attention.

    After going through these questions, I rated each category of needs on a scale of 0 to 10, assigning 10 to the areas that most required my attention. For me, those areas were leisure and social needs.

    This meant that doubling down on my meditation practice or having a daily green smoothie would likely not be enough to break my “wine habit.” Or, better said, they weren’t what I truly needed.

    I needed to have more fun, laugh, and play. I needed to bond with people more, have deep and meaningful conversations, and expand my social circle.

    Once you’ve identified which of your needs aren’t fulfilled, you’re ready to brainstorm solutions.

    Step 3: Brainstorm ways to fulfill unmet needs.

    Once we know what’s “off,” we can think of ways to improve the situation.

    “How can I have more fun?” I asked myself.

    I reflected upon times when I had the most fun in the past and wrote those down. I also wrote any other ideas that came to mind, from watching funny dog videos to going to a comedy show. I made a list of ways to have more fun in my journal and made an effort to do at least a few of them every week.

    Step 4: Choose one small action and schedule it.

    After brainstorming, it’s time to take action. I recommend picking at least one idea on your list and scheduling it.

    A few weeks ago, I decided to attend a Kundalini yoga class followed by a dinner with the teacher and fellow students. It was an opportunity to meet new people.

    I knew that, as an introvert, the risk I would cancel at the last minute was high. Therefore, I immediately purchased the ticket and scheduled the class in my planner. I’m glad I did; I met new people, laughed, and had interesting conversations.

    Self-care activities are more likely to happen when we schedule them.

    . . .

    I could summarize this article with one question: “What do you really need?”

    Taking the time to make a life inventory, identify our unfulfilled needs, and then take action to satisfy them—that’s proper self-care.

    The difficulty is that, sometimes, we don’t even know what we need! I find Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs a helpful tool to guide our self-reflection.

    I hope it can help you too.

  • How I Learned to Love My Body Instead of Hating Her

    How I Learned to Love My Body Instead of Hating Her

    “Your body does not need to be fixed, because your body is not a problem. Your body is a person.” ~Jamie Lee Finch

    I was thirty years old when I realized that I was completely dissociated from my body.

    I grew up in the height of the purity culture movement in American Evangelicalism. Purity culture was based on one primary concept: abstain from sex until marriage. But the messaging went further than this.

    I sat next to my peers in youth group while the male pastor stood on stage and told us young women to always cover our bodies. For example, two-piece bathing suits were completely out of the question for summer activities. Why?

    Our female bodies cause the young men to “stumble” and have impure thoughts. So out of love for the young men in our group, we must cover up and never do anything “suggestive.”

    The message was clear: My body caused others to sin. My body is bad.

    It would be impossible for me to accurately detail how many times and in how many different ways I received this message growing up.

    I didn’t know it was happening, but over time, I learned to dissociate from my body. My body was bad, and I was trying to be good, so I must distance myself from her.

    Thankfully, I listened to my body when she told me to leave this religious group and find my own way in the world. Yes, my body talks to me. More on that later.

    Recently, society has seen more acceptance of bodies. We see variety in body shapes represented in the media. While that’s a great sign that we are moving in a new direction, simply saying that we love our bodies isn’t enough.

    That feeling of positivity toward our body when we say that is momentary. We must take consistent action in order to make meaningful and lasting change.

    Here are the ways I was able to radically change my relationship with my body and learned to see her as my greatest ally and most prized possession.

    See Your Body as a Person

    A concept introduced to me by Jamie Lee Finch, seeing my body as a person changed everything.

    It allowed me to do one key thing: cultivate a relationship.

    Once I started referring to my body as “her,” I understood how far from her I really was. I didn’t know my own intuitive “yes” and “no.” I didn’t know what I really wanted in life.

    When was I safe? When was I in danger? These are questions that our bodies are designed to answer.

    So I learned to listen to her. And I talked back.

    A number of years ago, I noticed that I was constantly pushing people away. I really beat myself up about this, seeing myself as a cold, unloving person.

    Eventually I realized that this behavior started after a traumatic body violation that I had experienced. I understood that my body was resisting vulnerability and closeness in relationships as a way to protect me from further harm.

    I could see that my body had not been working against me, but for me. And I had the opportunity to say to her, “Thank you so much for trying to keep me safe, but I’m going to start trusting people again. I have learned from the experience and will trust my gut to alert me to danger.”

    I realized that things I thought of as “wrong with me” were in fact genius protective and defense mechanisms that my body wisely developed in order to keep me safe in my environment.

    I started talking lovingly to her, full of gratitude for all the ways she worked to keep me safe over the years. I started seeing past experiences through a different lens.

    About ten years ago, I was in a relationship with a man who wanted to marry me. I was in constant turmoil inside about the relationship, plagued with doubt and uncertainty, unsure if I should stay or go.

    I was so mad at myself for not having a clear “yes” or “no” about the situation. I didn’t realize this at the time, but I can see so clearly now that the anxious feeling in my gut was my body trying to tell me that this man was not my person.

    In truth, my body was always working for my best interests. No one looks out for me the way my body does. She has always been my most fierce protector.

    So I talk to my body and she talks to me. It’s the most important relationship I have.

    Write a Thank You Letter to Your Body

    There is a reason that gratitude practices have become so popular: they work.

    One I started to understand just how hard my body had been working to protect me, I wanted to show my gratitude.

    Writing a thank you letter can be the catalyst for a powerful mindset shift. It’s so easy to see all the things we hate about ourselves and our bodies.

    Write a letter to your body. Think about all the millions of ways your body has worked to keep you safe.

    How your body has alerted you when there’s danger, enabled you to speak truth by giving you gut feelings, and allowed you to experience the greatest pleasure.

    We can never know all the ways that our bodies tirelessly work for us. Gratitude allowed me to further cultivate a positive relationship with my body and work in partnership with her instead of against her.

    Gaze into Your Own Eyes

    If you’ve done eye gazing with another person, you know how powerful and bonding it can be. This is true when you eye gaze with yourself.

    I practice this by sitting on the floor in front of my closet doors that are large mirrors. I feel my body rooted into the ground before looking deeply into my own eyes.

    As a woman, I often look into my left eye, which is generally considered to be the feminine side. The masculine is the right side.

    This practice can bring intense emotions, so start with only a few minutes. You can grow your practice to twenty minutes or longer should you wish.

    See yourself. Really see. And feel the feelings that arise.

    It’s not uncommon for me to cry during this practice, reflecting on all the ways I’ve spoken negatively about my body and remembering how truly spectacular she is. She is beautiful, wise, and strong.

    Eye gazing will allow you to see and experience these truths. And when you embrace those truths, your relationship to your body will change.

    Try Mirror Work

    Remember when you were younger and a parent told you to say one nice thing about your sibling or friend that you were fighting with? There’s something about acknowledging the good in another person that regulates emotions and stirs positive feelings. The same can be said about your body.

    Mirror work is standing in front of the mirror and pointing out things you love about your body. This can be done clothed or unclothed depending on your comfort level.

    The thing you love can be as small as an eyebrow or as large as your torso. As you start to focus on one thing you love and sit with the positive emotions that arise, you will start to consistently feel more positive about your body.

    You’ll notice things you never saw before. Or see things as beautiful instead of ordinary.

    The sexy curve of your left thigh, the strong shape of your ankles, the color of that freckle on your shoulder. You are uniquely you and that is inherently valuable.

    Mirror work can be a ten-second practice or ten-minute practice. You can focus on the same part of your body every day or something different each time.

    I incorporate mirror work into my morning routine when I’m brushing my teeth. As I brush, I look at myself in the mirror and pick one thing I love about my body that morning. This way, it doesn’t feel like I’ve added another self-help practice, but rather I’m taking advantage of opportunities to multitask.

    When we take the time to see ourselves, what we really like about ourselves, we will learn to love what we see.

    Commit One Loving Action

    Similar to saying something nice about someone, doing a kind and loving action can also foster feelings of fondness and compassion.

    For a week, do one focused, loving action to your body. If you can’t think of anything, ask this question: What’s something I have been wanting to incorporate into my daily self-care or hygiene routine, but haven’t done?

    For me, this was moisturizing my feet. When I first did this practice, I had just moved to a new city with a much drier climate. My feet were so dry, but I wasn’t taking the time to moisturize them.

    So I committed to do this once a day for a week. It wasn’t long before I started seeing my feet in a new way.

    I was intentional when I sat on my bed and did this. I took my time rubbing the lotion in, observing new things about my feet I had never noticed before. Thinking about how hard my feet work and all the places they’ve stepped over my lifetime.

    After doing this for a week or so, moisturizing became a natural part of my daily routine. In fact, I consistently moisturize all of my skin now, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.

    Some extra tender loving care will naturally grow your love for your body and cause you to care for them better.

  • How to Live Your Dharma (True Purpose): The Path to Soul-Level Fulfillment

    How to Live Your Dharma (True Purpose): The Path to Soul-Level Fulfillment

    “Dharma actually means the life you should be living—in other words, an ideal life awaits you if you are aligned with your Dharma. What is the ideal life? It consists of living as your true self.” ~Deepak Chopra

    From the moment I finished high school until my late twenties, I had “purpose anxiety.”

    I wasn’t just confused and missing a sense of direction in life; my lack of purpose also made me feel inadequate, uninteresting, and lesser than other people.

    I secretly envied those who had cool hobbies, worked jobs they loved, and talked passionately about topics I often didn’t know much about.

    I even resented them for living “the good life” and kept wondering, “Why not me?”

    Until it was my turn.

    What it took to begin embracing my purpose—or dharma, as I prefer to call it—was one thing: love.

    Let me explain.

    The 4 Keys to Living Our Dharma (Purpose)

    The Sanskrit word “dharma” has many meanings and most commonly translates to “life purpose” and “the life we’re meant to live.” I believe there are four main keys to living our dharma.

    1. Cultivating self-worth: the essential first step.

    I was bullied in high school, and as a result, I had very low self-esteem for many years. Looking back, I realize that feeling that low self-worth prevented me from embracing my dharma.

    Why?

    It was because I was too focused on trying to be liked and too worried about what other people thought of me to be in touch with my authentic self. I put all my energy into doing everything I could to look “cool” and be accepted by others rather than what my soul wanted to do, explore, and experience.

    The essential idea is that embracing our dharma requires living authentically. As Deepak Chopra says, “[dharma] consists of living as your true self.”

    The issue is that it can be difficult to express and live your truth when you feel inadequate, unworthy, and perhaps even unlovable. The risk of being rejected seems too high, and it feels unsafe.

    So the first step to living our purpose, I believe, is cultivating radical self-love. It’s a bit of a “chicken and the egg” situation because having a strong sense of purpose increases self-esteem, but low self-esteem makes it hard to embrace our purpose. It’s best to develop both simultaneously.

    Here are a few ideas to cultivate self-love that have helped me:

    The first one is meditation.

    Part of meditation is about allowing ourselves to become aware of and observe our own thinking. When we meditate, we disidentify from our thoughts and get to experience glimpses of who we truly are—of our essence—which is loving and infinitely worthy. As a result, we naturally start loving and accepting ourselves more. Meditation has undoubtedly been the number one thing that has improved my self-esteem.

    Another thing that has helped me is self-care.

    As I said, I didn’t have many friends in high school and spent much of my time alone. So I started going to the gym after school to do something with my time and be around people (even if I didn’t talk to them). Exercising regularly led to eating healthier and taking better care of myself in several other ways.

    I find that self-care is a practical way to cultivate self-love. When you take care of yourself, you show that you care about yourself. Over time, you start genuinely feeling the self-love you are showing yourself and believing it.

    The last (effective but cringy) thing that helped improve my self-esteem is an exercise that a therapist recommended.

    Here’s how it goes: In the evening, stand in front of the mirror and—looking at yourself in the eyes—say, “I love you, [say your name]. I love [say three things you like about yourself], and you deserve all the good things life has to offer.” Try it for thirty days; it may change your life.

    2. Being in touch with and following your inner compass.

    Jack Canfield says, “We are all born with an inner compass that tells us whether or not we’re on the right path to finding our true purpose. That compass is our joy.”

    Often, we seek purpose outside of ourselves, as if it’s some hidden treasure we need to find. But, as Mel Robbins puts it, “You don’t ‘find’ your purpose; you feel it.” What feels good—expansive, joyful, intriguing, exciting, or inspiring—to you?

    That’s an important question because, according to numerous spiritual books I’ve read, those things we enjoy are clues guiding us to our dharma.

    The main difficulty is usually differentiating our true desires from the ego’s “wants” and the desires that come from conditioning. The ego wants to feel important. It’s afraid of not being “good enough,” so it feels the need to prove its worth.

    The “wants” that come from conditioning consist of what our parents and society have told us we “should” do. If we follow those “shoulds,” even though they don’t align with our authentic selves, we risk waking up one day and realizing that we’ve climbed the wrong ladder and lived our life for others instead of ourselves.

    Here’s something that helps me differentiate those desires.

    Make a list of all the things you want to have, do, experience, and become in the next few years.

    For each item on your list, ask yourself why you want it. Is it because you feel the need to prove something or want to feel important or perhaps even superior to others? That’s the ego. Is it because you think that’s what you “should” do? That’s likely conditioning. Is it because it makes you feel alive? That’s your heart.

    To live our dharma, we must follow our heart’s desires—the things we genuinely love. This requires authenticity and courage.

    3. Savoring the experience of being alive.

    Another aspect of dharma is loving life—living with presence and appreciating the experience of being alive. There are a few things I find helpful here:

    The first idea is to keep a “Book of Appreciation,” as Esther Hicks calls it. Every day, take five minutes to journal about what you appreciate about someone, a situation, or something else in your life.

    To savor life, we must also be present. In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle states that true enjoyment does not depend on the nature of the task but on our state of being—we must aim for a state of deep presence.

    He recommends being mindful when attending to even our most mundane tasks. I also like to go on long walks and observe (with presence) the natural elements around me—like the clouds passing in the sky, the smell of trees after the rain, and the sensation of the sun’s rays on my face.

    And, of course, having a daily gratitude practice is always a winner!

    4. Extending love through joyful service.

    Dharma is also about sharing—extending love. One of the best ways to contribute to the collective is to share our gifts in a way that’s enjoyable to us.

    We all have natural gifts—things that come easier to us than to others. Some people are good at writing, while others are great leaders or excel at analyzing data. Perhaps you like to create, manage, nurture, delight, support, empower, listen, guide, or organize.

    There’s also another, more profound aspect of contribution that comes from being rather than doing. I remember a passage from a book I read many years ago (I can’t remember what book it was) that went something like this:

    “Your contribution [to the collective] is your level of consciousness.”

    A higher consciousness radiates greater love, and one of the best ways to uplift others is by being a loving presence.

    Dharma: The Bottom Line

    Bob Schwartz, the author of Your Soul’s Plan and Your Soul’s Gift, says, “We are here to learn to receive and give love. That’s the bottom line.”

    This involves loving ourselves, others, and life in general, and also following our heart—doing things we genuinely love.

    I don’t know about you, but this perspective on dharma feels good to me. It has freed me from my “purpose anxiety.”

    I hope it can serve you too.

  • The Exhausted Extrovert: How I Stopped Worrying About How People See Me

    The Exhausted Extrovert: How I Stopped Worrying About How People See Me

    “When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable, we are not pretending, we are not hiding—we are simply present with whatever is going on inside us. Ironically, it is this very feeling of authenticity that draws people to us, not the brittle effort of perfectionism.”  ~Maureen Cooper

    Most people in my life would call me an extrovert, and I often refer to myself with that label as well. On the surface, I appear friendly, talkative, and enthusiastic, and those characteristics became part of my identity at an early age. I enjoy being around other people and value my interpersonal relationships.

    I also participate in a variety of social groups and remain connected to friends near and far despite our busy schedules. I have often attributed my love of people to the fact that I am an only child who always wanted to spend more time with kids my own age.

    Despite my friendly nature, I usually felt drained after social interactions, especially when they involved large groups of people. I dreaded small talk, mingling at parties, and attending events where I was the only new person in the group.

    For example, my anxiety was sky high when I met my husband’s large group of close friends for the first time. I felt intimidated because they had all known each other since preschool, which automatically made me feel like an outsider. As a child and young adult, I tended to avoid situations where I felt uncomfortable, preferring to focus on the environments and people that I already knew.

    Even in familiar social situations, I still often came home feeling depleted. I enjoyed myself during these events but required a lot of downtime to fully recover and feel like myself again. This reaction confused me because I thought extroverts craved and felt energized by social interactions. 

    I struggled to classify myself because neither introvert nor extrovert truly matched my personal experience. I often felt torn between wanting to attend social events and worrying that I would feel exhausted afterward. These conflicting desires prompted me to explore the reasons why being social fed and depleted my soul at the same time.

    This journey would hopefully allow me to develop a deeper level of self-awareness and learn how to take better care of myself. As I paid more attention to my thoughts, feelings, and behavior at social events, I noticed that I was hyper focused on how I came across to others. I wanted to be liked, make a good impression, and be viewed as fun.

    I frequently wondered what people genuinely thought of me, including friends that I had known for years. I also worried a great deal about others’ feelings and wanted to make sure that everyone was having a good time. As the host of parties or gatherings, I went out of my way to ensure that the house was spotless, the food options were plentiful, and the environment was comfortable.

    I avoided choosing group activities out of fear that people would not like my decisions and from a desire to be known as the “easy-going, chill friend.” Even when I wasn’t the host, I found myself studying everyone’s reactions to see if they were happy and had their needs met fully. I made it my responsibility to take care of everyone even though no one asked me to be the superhero.

    If someone wasn’t in a good mood or a conflict arose, I immediately intervened to be the peacemaker or crack a joke to lighten the mood. I also did my best to keep the focus and attention away from me. I acted like an interviewer, asking other people endless questions and rarely sharing about my own life.

    I hated any silence within the conversation and would quickly fill it by bringing up a new topic or giving compliments. I began to realize that even my closest friends didn’t know much about me because I was so guarded with them. My fear of boring others, seeming conceited, or talking too much prevented me from being honest and authentic.

    For most of my life, I thought these behaviors were typical and even smart ways to be a good friend. I wanted others to accept me and enjoy being around me, but my ways of accomplishing these goals left me exhausted at the end of the day. Upon realizing how I navigated social interactions, I chose to examine why I needed these techniques and how they affected my view of interpersonal relationships.

    Up until this point, I believed that my behaviors were simply proof of my strong social skills, compassion, and emotional intelligence. I also assumed that most people thought and acted similarly to me because it was so natural and automatic in my life. In reality, my behavior involved coping strategies that I had developed from an early age due to an intense fear of being left out, disliked, and alone.  

    I came to learn that as an empath, I needed to set emotional boundaries to prevent myself from becoming depleted. A healthy empath holds space for another person’s emotions and experiences without making it their responsibility to fix, save, or protect the person. In order to be accepted and liked, I became a chameleon who adapted to any environment, didn’t speak up, and focused on pleasing everyone else at my own expense.

    In doing so, I didn’t allow people to get close or learn about the real me. My outward focus on how everyone else was thinking, feeling, and acting left me exhausted and overwhelmed because I took on their problems as my own. I remained fearful to share my true opinions, make any decisions, or take up space in social settings.

    Fading into the background felt safer, easier, and more comfortable to me, but it didn’t allow me to relax and be fully present. I constantly scanned the environment for any issues, working to please others and control what people thought of me. On top of that, I made it a priority to appear easy, effortless, and relaxed so that no one would see my internal struggles.

    I didn’t want to appear stressed, tired, or unhappy because I could possibly be viewed as “needy” or “too much.” My hypervigilance only intensified when I was around new people because I desperately wanted to make a good first impression and earn their validation. After a social gathering lasting only a few hours, it was no wonder that I felt so drained and needed to recharge.

    I began to realize that while I do love people and enjoy interacting with others, these situations would be more fun if I slowed down, checked in with myself, and focused on being truly present. I needed to practice turning the spotlight on myself for the first time, making choices and doing activities that worked for me. 

    When I allowed other people to manage their own feelings rather than jumping in to fix, save, and protect them, it freed up more time and energy for me. I also allowed myself to open up and engage fully in conversations, sharing small details at first and allowing other people to carry the conversation. These behaviors showed me that it was safe to take up space and let people get to know me.

    Instead of blending in and always going with the flow, I could practice offering my opinion, choosing a restaurant or a movie for the group, and turning down social opportunities when I was tired or uninterested in the outing.

    I knew that I needed to take these steps slowly because they would require courage, and I didn’t want to give up out of overwhelm. I also begin learning to trust that people wouldn’t abandon or reject me for speaking up and setting boundaries.

    And if I did lose friendships or people didn’t love everything about me, I could handle that reality and survive. My mantra became “I am not for everyone, and that is okay.”  

    Since that time, I have made strides toward relaxing, being present, and releasing control, allowing myself to “just be.” Some days and situations are easier than others to practice this new mindset. But now that I have self-awareness and understanding, I can more easily catch myself when I engage in people pleasing behaviors to earn love, praise, and acceptance.

    I pause, take a deep breath, and remember that I am allowed to take up space, that I deserve to have fun and be myself, and that my needs, feelings, and opinions matter. In doing so, I enjoy social interactions, even with new people, more than I ever did. And that has made all the difference for a social butterfly like me.

  • Addiction Is Messy, But These Things Help Me Stay Clean

    Addiction Is Messy, But These Things Help Me Stay Clean

    “Staying sober really was the most important thing in my life now and had given me direction when I thought I had none.” ~Bradley Cooper

    I remember that exact feeling of shame that washed over me when I was filling Yeti water bottles with 100 proof vodka instead of water. Then I chugged it, all while knowing it was the worst idea. Yet, I couldn’t stop.

    Addiction is messy.

    My social outings were with the wealthiest in the town, always with plenty of other alcoholics in my midst. I surrounded myself with people who drank like me because why on earth would I want to associate with someone who doesn’t drink? It looked like I was living the life when, in reality, I was dead inside.

    The truth is, sometimes your soul has to die before you decide to actually be alive. My soul died, but my body continued living, and I wore a shield, defending myself from people. I wanted them to see the person I was projecting; the person I wanted to be.  

    I wanted to be all of the things that I was showing them, but I was truly depressed, anxious, troubled, and lost.

    My addiction started with a boy. I was addicted to him, to love, to the idea of love, and eventually, to his drugs. He became my dealer, my controller, my manipulator, and my life.

    He introduced me to hard drugs, and I immediately latched on. He completely stripped me of any sort of normal life.

    But I would do anything for him. The occasional use turned into daily use.

    At the time, I was in college, and I was still managing to do well. However, he got a job offer in another city thousands of miles away. He said if I didn’t come with him, we were done.

    I went into a depression I had never known before. I remember sleeping for days in my parents’ basement. The thought of being apart from this boy completely broke me.

    So I moved with him. My messy addiction was getting worse.

    It wasn’t long before he found someone in our new city who knew a dealer. I got excited knowing there was something else to try, so I dove right in. These drugs led to complete destruction. 

    I was now failing school. Me, a straight-A honor student. My mom came out to visit for my twenty-first birthday. She could tell something was off, but I had been lying for so long.

    I wasn’t ready to tell anyone.

    I knew I was only in the relationship because he got me drugs. I was scared to leave because he was my first love, and I didn’t know anything else. My life was a mess.

    I dropped out of college, claiming an “emotional breakdown.” I didn’t have a job. I had no idea what I was doing with myself.

    I was completely lost.

    A few months after my birthday, I called my mom and told her I needed to come home. Of course, the next morning I regretted it, but it was too late. My parents were on their way to get me.

    My soul finally completely died because of the mess I was in.

    I broke up with the boy.

    I quit drugs cold turkey. Looking back, I have no idea how I did this; I don’t remember withdrawals or cravings. I was determined to start cleaning up my life, but addiction is messy, cunning, baffling, and powerful. So I replaced drugs with alcohol.

    I always drank to get drunk. I felt that I had missed out on college life, and I needed to make up for it. I had been controlled for too long; I was finally free.

    I did what I thought was normal for someone in her early twenties. I drank every day, starting at 5 p.m. That’s what adults do, right?

    I didn’t think I had a problem until I realized how much more alcohol I needed compared to my friends. Every time we went out, they were completely hammered, and I barely had a buzz. I started bringing my own shooters in my purse so that I could have extra on hand.

    I would pour vodka into mini shampoo bottles so that it wasn’t evident that it was alcohol. I’d buy 100 proof to get the job done quicker.

    I thought it was fun. It was my secret, and I liked hiding it. It was like a game.

    When people saw me drink three glasses of wine, they had no idea about the water bottles filled with vodka that I had chugged earlier. I’d gauge how much I was drinking by counting the number of gulps I took or by seeing how many shampoo bottles were empty.

    I hid how much I was drinking very well. I was a functioning alcoholic. I had a great husband, amazing friends, and a stable job. 

    In my mind, there was no way I was an alcoholic because I had all of these things.

    There were several incidents that should have been the end, but I was never ready. It took years of looking at myself in the mirror, thinking, Ellen, this has to stop. You can’t continue drinking like this. So, I would try drinking a different way.

    Only wine during the week.  Vodka on weekends. Svedka instead of 100 proof Smirnoff.

    Anything.

    The only thing that stayed consistent was that I never allowed anyone to see how much I was truly drinking. I knew it deep down in my dead soul that I would either die drinking or that I would have to admit out loud that I had a problem.

    The day finally came, the day I had been putting off for years because I was so scared. My last drink.

    I learned later that my last day drinking was one of my “yets.” The things that make you convince yourself that you are not an alcoholic. “I haven’t gotten a DUI… yet.” Or “I haven’t lost my job… yet.” Mine was “I’ve never brought alcohol into work… yet.”

    My last drink was really a continuation of several days of drinking. I had finished everything that was hidden in the closet by 6 a.m. before heading to work.

    I took my lunch break early (like 9:15 early) and drove to the first liquor store. It didn’t open until 10:00. I thought to myself “only an alcoholic would be caught waiting for a liquor store to open; I can’t do that.”

    So I went to another one nearby. Yes! It was open!

    I went in and got my usual. The cashier rang me up and said, “Why are you here so early today?” I was so embarrassed.

    Little did he know I needed this to calm my shakes, feel better, and make it through the morning.

    I had basically woken up still drunk and was just continuing the drunk in order to feel okay. I was completely wasted by lunch.

    I knew I would be fired if anyone noticed. I had to get out of the building.

    I called my husband. I knew he’d be upset, but I have the most supportive and compassionate husband. He picked me up from work.

    He was scared, confused, and completely sad. Why was I wasted at work on a Thursday by noon? On the drive home before passing out, I finally knew that something needed to change.

    I knew that I was the only person who could make that change. I didn’t want to live this way anymore.

    For me. The only way getting sober works is when you realize you have to do it for yourself.  No one else can do it for you.

    And that was it. I started my journey in recovery that day.

    My sober life is amazing. Yes, I still have regular life problems, but everything is so much more manageable without the haze. I can do things now that I never did before, and everything makes a little more sense.

    I’m back to being Ellen.

    I have amazing things in my life that keep me clean and sober. Addiction is messy, but we do recover. First and foremost, I have a strong program of recovery.

    It wasn’t until I went to a rehab center that I learned that people in this world could teach me how to live a sober life and develop healthy coping mechanisms. I know how to soothe myself without substances and how to navigate this world without numbing myself.

    I work a recovery program that includes meetings, steps, and constant interaction with like-minded people. I have mostly sober friends and have cultivated lifelong relationships that matter.

    Secondly, I was able to get pregnant and start a family once sober; I have twins! I believe that the Universe had all of this lined up for me. I could never have done any of these things in any different order.

    Finally, I have good relationships with loved ones and peers. I am not lying to them every day, hurting them, and treating them terribly. I know I am loved, and I am not alone.

    Everything is perfectly in place the way it is supposed to be according to my journey. And now I can actually see that clearly.

    Addiction is messy, but it made me who I am today. Without this mess, I would not have this life. Now that I am clean, my soul has been brought back to life.

  • How to Release the Fear That Holds You Back and Keeps You Small

    How to Release the Fear That Holds You Back and Keeps You Small

    “The purpose of fear is to raise your awareness, not to stop your progress.” ~Steve Maraboli

    I used to hate my fear because it scared me. It terrified me that when fear arose, it often felt like it was driving me at full speed toward the edge of a cliff.

    And if I were driven off a cliff, I would lose all control, all function, perhaps I would collapse, perhaps I would shatter into a million pieces. I was never totally clear on the details of what would happen if I let the fear get out of control. That’s because I spent most of my life trying to control it.

    It’s why, when things don’t go according to plan, when I am running late or things change at the last minute, I can get snappy and sound angry. I feel rage when people come along and do things that seem to amplify my fear—like my husband using the bathroom three minutes before the train is leaving, or not locking the front door at night with all its three locks.

    Oh, I had so much judgment around this fear. I hated it, but I hated even more that I seemed to be an overly fearful person. I felt disgusted and full of shame for not wanting to do things that other people seemed to find easy, like flying, or for freaking out when I was sick, thinking I was dying.

    I carried the shame of fear around with me, hoping I didn’t have to reveal it, and if I did, if I had to show people how terrified life made me, I would be horribly self-deprecating.

    Because I had this sense that I shouldn’t be like this. It wasn’t normal. So I blamed it on myself as a character default.

    That’s why I wouldn’t want to walk toward scary things. That’s why I avoided things that brought up the fear because if I didn’t, it would have driven me off the cliff so freaking quickly, and I’d think, how stupid could I have been to allow it?

    I see now that my fear lived at such a low-level frequency in my body that I didn’t notice it was there. It was on a low buzz all the time, like a refrigerator noise—not really in my awareness but controlling how I made decisions.

    I know this because, when I was really paying attention, I realized I was always trying to pick the least scary option. But when I kept choosing the least scary option, the least challenging to me, my life got smaller and smaller.

    I was not even really aware that I was doing this. It just felt like I was being sensible.

    But sometimes I would get this glimmer of another world where I did the most interesting and exciting things, like exploring alone somewhere new or taking a belly dancing class. Where I lived unleashed and unbounded by fear. I said what I meant, I did what I wanted, and I didn’t worry all the time about terrible things happening to my loved ones.

    Living a life immersed in fear felt like being bound with invisible rope that no one could see. And because people couldn’t see this rope, they would ask me to do things that I couldn’t possibly say yes to.

    Things started to change when I didn’t just ask how I could get the fear to stop, but I started to learn why there was so much fear in my body, where it came from, and how it was affecting how I experience life. So much of my fear came from a lack of emotional safety, and sometimes physical safety, as a child and young woman.

    When I learned to start being curious about the fear that confined me and not judge it as a character defect, I started unraveling it. This, along with some powerful emotional processing and nervous system regulation, transformed how I now experienced fear in my life.

    Here’s the thing: We don’t intentionally create bodies that can’t handle emotions like fear. We don’t intentionally create nervous systems that are jumpy and hyper-vigilant. We don’t create sensations of immense doom for pleasure.

    How we were taught to be with emotions, how we were taught to allow or not allow them, how we were cared for when we were in the midst of emotions—this all informs how we now deal with fear.

    It makes sense that fear feels too much for our bodies to handle when we have lived with too much fear; when we haven’t had enough emotional support of someone helping us hold that fear; when we’ve had experiences that have terrified us down to our very bones, that have stayed trapped in our bodies; when our lives have been rocked by tragedy; when sudden life-changing events shake any sense of stability from us; when fear has just been too much for too long.

    We need to learn how to provide deep emotional support, a sense of safety, love, empathy, and validation, to our bodies that have held so much pain and discomfort. We need to learn how to tend to and meet our needs.

    Emotions need to be seen, felt, and heard. When we haven’t learned how to do that, how to hold emotions and really be with them, we get pushed into a part of our brains where things feel deeply overwhelming and urgent—our survival reactions.

    It’s a part of our brain that uses primal methods for dealing with emotion—meant to be utilized in emergencies and when our survival is under threat, but too commonly used to discharge uncomfortable emotions. And none of these survival reactions feel good.

    When we are in our survival reactivity, we can feel doomed and trapped; we can feel like there are no options; we can feel the red mists of rage or a deep-freezing panic. We can go into overdrive doing too much, or sometimes we just slow down and shut off. Everything feels like too much.

    That’s why we feel we could go over the edge. That’s why we don’t feel safe. That’s why we desperately try to stay in control. Because we have this sense of an unknown, dark, and terrifying force in our bodies that feels like something beyond what we can handle.

    We don’t know how to deal with this part of our brain, these survival reactions, so we spend our lives attempting to control our fear, hoping that it won’t rear up and push us over the cliff edge.

    But there is another way. And it’s not by feeling the fear and doing it anyway. I couldn’t dislike that piece of advice more because of how wildly misunderstood it is. You can only feel the fear and do it anyway if you have a comfortable relationship with fear and it doesn’t push your nervous system into overwhelm and survival reactivity—where you feel like you are actually fearing for your life.

    If you are in survival mode, you don’t want to be pushing through anything.

    In fact, quite the opposite.

    You want to be doing everything to reassure yourself that you are physically safe, that there is no emergency, that all is well.

    And that is step number one. That’s the first place I go to when I feel the escalating sensations of fear.

    It’s learning to look after yourself and meet your needs in ways that maybe you have never done before. You learn to build your own safety, and to repair all the damage that has been done to that solid feeling of protection that others seem to have but you sense you deeply lack.

    There are several things you can do for this..

    1. Stop the overwhelm.

    My first suggestion is an exercise you can do when you feel you have entered that survival mode of things feeling like way too much—when you are overwhelmed, feeling doomed or trapped. This is an exercise called regulating breath. The aim is to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is where you are “resting and digesting.”

    It’s super simple—short, quick inhale, long exhale. Then repeat this until you are moving away from that deep overwhelm. It’s a signal to the brain that you aren’t unsafe; this isn’t an emergency; you are safe to move out of survival mode and back into your body. I use this breath daily to keep my nervous system regulated and feel a sense of physical safety.

    2. Be curious about why the fear is here.

    The fear didn’t just show up unannounced today. If the fear feels like too much, there is definitely a history that you can trace back. And when you know your history, it can help you drop a lot of the judgment that you feel about it.

    Ask your fear: Where have you been showing up in my life, and how far does this go back?

    3. Ask your fear what it needs.

    Uncomfortable emotions like fear are expressions of needs that have been unmet perhaps for all of your life. Needs like clarity, structure, peace, or consistency. When you can learn to really connect with your emotions and hear what they have to tell you, you can then start meeting those needs.

    I love to talk to my fear. I ask it questions on a regular basis. I ask my fear: What do you need? Why are you here? What are you trying to tell me?

    When I am able to really sit with the fear and hold it in my body, it will tell me things like: I’m just trying to keep you safe. I just want you to be protected. I don’t want you to do unsafe things!

    When I know that the fear just wants to keep me safe, I can then reassure it, and myself, that I can provide the safety that I need. That I know how to make good choices; I know, as an adult, how to look after myself.

    4. Offer empathy and validation.

    Give yourself the deeply nourishing support of validation and empathy. Fear is a normal emotion that manifests as physical reactions in the body because of how we’ve learned to be with emotion, or due to the limited support we have received around big, challenging experiences.

    When you recognize this, you can start to not judge your reactions. You can say to yourself: It makes sense that you feel like this. It’s okay, I’ll stay with you. I will support you through this. 

    You can give yourself the tender validation and empathy you would offer to someone you deeply love—your child, a friend, your partner. You can treat yourself as someone deserving of being wrapped in beautiful, loving empathy.

    When you do things like double-check the locks at night or keep checking your phone to see if your teenager has messaged, when you are asked to take a trip to a place you haven’t been to before, instead of getting lost in the fear or loading yourself down with shame about it, offer empathy and validation instead.

    “You know what? This is bringing up a lot of fear. And it’s understandable that I have fear around this; it’s completely okay. So I am going to support myself through this feeling. I am going to tend to my needs around this feeling. And I am only going to do what feels best for me. What feels right for my body right now.”

    By meeting the needs your emotions are expressing we start to change our relationship with the emotions we find most uncomfortable. When we try to white-knuckle through, we often end up more rattled, more exhausted, more overwhelmed, and sometimes with more trauma than if we had actually taken tender, gentle care of ourselves.

    And by taking loving care of ourselves, by showing up and giving our feelings—and our sense of overwhelm—attention, we can end up naturally starting to want to do those things that maybe we were too scared to do before.

    By giving ourselves the empathy that our emotions so yearn for, we create a much deeper, more loving and trusting connection with ourselves. When we know how to emotionally support ourselves then we can learn how to emotionally support other people.

    My relationship with fear is a work in progress. Sometimes it slips out of my grasp and escalates before I have the chance to process it. But I know now that I can always bring myself back from that edge. I can always bring my nervous system back into regulation, even when it feels a bit messy.

    When we know that we can handle any emotion that comes our way, we have so much more freedom in our lives to make the choices we want to make instead of just choosing the least scary thing.

    Fear is a normal part of life. It’s there to help us stay safe and protected and make good choices. But sometimes, when we have had experiences that have intensified our fear, we can end up keeping ourselves small. Changing how we take care of ourselves to support ourselves in these big emotions is a great first step to living a more exciting, fulfilling life. I hope these tips have been helpful.

  • Coping with the Grief of a Layoff: 5 Tips If You’re Looking for a Job

    Coping with the Grief of a Layoff: 5 Tips If You’re Looking for a Job

    “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” ~Seneca

    We are in such a hard season of the economy, and the implications of people getting laid off are so real and unfortunately painful.

    No matter how competent or qualified you are, the job search process is hard. And even when you know your layoff was due to reasons completely outside your control, it still hurts.

    The fear, instability, and uncertainty about what your next job will be or when it will come to fruition are emotionally unsettling, and our collective toxic positivity conditioning isn’t always helpful.

    Yes, it’s true that most of us have more to be grateful for than we can feel in the moment, but our hard feelings are valid and need space to be felt.

    I was recently let go from a role that felt like a dream job when I signed my offer letter, and yes, I have healed from that pain, but I had to feel my way through all of it versus simply “thinking positive.”

    I had multiple layers of emotions even before I was let go. First, there was the disappointment that the job wasn’t what I thought it would be, then there was the grief over a chapter of my life ending without knowing why and the lack of closure.

    Despite our difficult feelings, we have the capacity to heal, reconnect with ourselves, and rediscover what needs to come alive during these often-painful seasons of transition. But we have to give ourselves permission to be real—to be honest with ourselves more than anybody else—and we also need tremendous amounts of self-trust and self-belief in a season that feels rife with self-doubt.

    Here are some thoughts that may be helpful if you were let go and are looking for a new job.

    1. Acknowledge what you are feeling.

    You have full permission to feel whatever you’re feeling right now. Feeling your feelings doesn’t make you weak; it makes you brave. And there is a difference between giving yourself permission to feel and move through them versus getting stuck. I am advocating for the former.

    Maybe you had a vacation planned that will now need to be canceled and you’re feeling disappointed, or you may be the sole breadwinner of your family and you’re feeling scared. Maybe you never had a chance to say goodbye to your coworkers, and you’re grieving the loss of those daily connections. Maybe you had the world’s best manager, and you are heartbroken to no longer be working for that person. All of your feelings are valid.

    2. Take care of yourself.

    It can be very tempting to spend every waking minute tweaking your resume, applying to jobs, or doing informational interviews. Prioritizing a few simple self-care basics can go a long way to sustaining your momentum. A thirty-minute walk, some mindfulness practice, and coffee with a friend in real life are all simple but powerful ways to help you stay grounded in what truly is a hard season.

    This can feel obvious, but during our hardest times especially, with uncertainty in the environment, it can be easy to go into a narrative of “I don’t deserve rest” or “I haven’t earned a break.” But here is the truth: Rest, downtime, joy, fun, and play are your birthrights. You don’t have to earn them, and they can actually be effective components of your achievement strategy since they all help you feel and be your best.

    3. Audit your learnings.

    Being a bit distant from the day-to-day work grind can be a good time to reflect on your learnings, who you are as a person, employee, and leader, and what’s truly next for you versus what you think you should be doing next.

    There is a difference, and even if you can’t go for the former, there is power in naming what you want so that you can find components of the “want” even in your “shoulds” and potentially build toward something that will be even more fulfilling.

    Take a moment and think about your peak moments of aliveness in your journey and how can you bring more of them where you go next. What skills do you most enjoy using? What contribution would you feel most proud to make? What are the environments and who are the leaders that bring out the best in you?

    As for me, I had long wanted to work for myself and start my own small business. Being laid off meant I could take something that I had been doing on the side and turn up the dial to do more of it full-time.

    4. Build a solid strategy.

    Once you have a sense of what you want for your future, create a routine and strategy to give your day structure and ensure you’re putting your energy in the right direction.

    There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. It all depends on your field, aspirations, personality, the season of your career, and more. There are lots of areas where you can invest your time—job fairs, informational interviews, cover letters, job applications, resumes, networking events, and more, so make sure you have a plan while also leaving room for some serendipitous wins so you can prepare for any new opportunities that come your way.

    The important thing is to be proactive instead of reactive. It’s easy to let your fear-based brain run the show, as you scroll through social media and see what other people are doing. Focus on your goals, create a solid plan to work toward them, and stay patient and committed. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon, so be intentional, have a plan, and stay focused so you don’t get discouraged or burnt out.

    5. Invite support.

    And finally, my favorite, invite support, not because you are weak and can’t do it alone but because we all do better in community and connection. Find a friend in a similar situation so you can support each other and hold each other accountable. Or hire a career coach or a therapist if you can or join an online support group. Surround yourself with other humans who want to lift you up and are skilled at bringing out the best in you.

    I hope you know that you are not alone on your journey. There are so many humans across the globe navigating this uncertainty every day, unsure of when our economy will recover, when they will find a job, or how long they will be able to hold onto the job that they have at hand. Know that you are doing real hard work with everything happening in our world and the collective grief and trauma we have all experienced as a human species over the last two-plus years.

    I hope you can see your own brilliance, talent, and wisdom and build up the courage to share it bravely with the world.

  • How I Stopped Chasing Men Who Hurt Me and Found Healthy Love

    How I Stopped Chasing Men Who Hurt Me and Found Healthy Love

    “There are two things you should never waste your time on: things that don’t matter and people who think that you don’t matter.” ~Ziad K. Abdelnour  

    “What is wrong with me?” I asked myself. Crying in the dark of the night. “Why doesn’t he love me?”

    I’d tried to fold myself in all the ways I could to be loved and accepted, but it was never enough. I found myself repeating patterns of chasing men who just didn’t want me. Same cry in the night, different men.

    The more I chased them, the more they ran away, and the deeper I lost my self-worth. 

    I was addicted to them. They were my drug. These men who were wounded and just needed a loving, caring woman to come save them. I wanted to be the answer to their pain so then finally, a man would choose me. Finally, I would get the love I had longed for and chased my whole life.

    I always chased men that were unavailable in some way. They may have been addicts, in other relationships, or just not ready for a relationship. The more they didn’t want the relationship, the harder I would chase.

    I would be up late in the night, full of anxiety, obsessing about them. So preoccupied with trying to make them love me that I forgot to take care of myself.

    I had no boundaries and would accept any kind of awful behavior. It would break my heart and I may pull back for a moment, but then they would notice and come toward me, so the pull-push cycle would begin again.

    I lacked self-love and self-worth, and this pattern was destroying what little I had. I felt like nothing and like there was something fundamentally wrong with me.

    My happiness, my everything, was tied up in receiving validation from these unavailable men. The older I got, the worse it got, and the more obvious it was that something was not right. My friends were getting married, having children, and moving forward. But I was stuck ruminating about my latest obsession.

    I even drove my friends mad! No matter what they said to me, it wouldn’t stop me chasing a fantasy. When they stopped listening, I rang a psychic line multiple times a day for validation that the man I wanted was ‘the one.’ So not only did my self-worth disappear but my bank balance with it.

    It was exhausting and brought me to my knees in my mid-thirties.

    Then I noticed something. If someone was interested in me, available, and wanted to move forward, I would feel suffocated and tell myself there was no chemistry. But if someone showed some interest but was not available, I would want them more than anything.

    I felt like there was something really wrong with me because of this pattern, but I was determined to change, so I could have healthy, loving romantic relationships.

    I read You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay, and decided to change my beliefs.

    Here are the five things I did to heal so I could open up to a healthier relationship:

    1. I adopted a daily self-care practice.

    It became painfully obvious to me that I knew how to love others but not myself. So I began with adding some practices to my day to help me build self-love.

    I listened to affirmations on Spotify and read them to myself looking in the mirror. I tried meditation and hot baths to begin my journey. I was always researching new ways to show myself love. In addition to developing a self-care practice, I invested in support to help me get better, including therapy.

    2. I began doing inner child work.

    I went back to my earlier story through meditation and discovered that younger-me was always chasing after my dad’s unavailable love. Trying to help him, to be seen. Trying to fix him so he would tell me I was enough. Seeking his validation, his connection, because he was unavailable due to his own childhood trauma. My inner child had internalized this to means I was unlovable.

    I began to say affirmations to a photo of my younger self. “You are loveable,” “You are enough,” “You are worthy.” I would literally talk to her and ask her how she felt and what she needed. I would imagine playing with her and showing her love.

    I explored my inner child’s story and learned lots about attachment theory. I realized that I had disorganized attachment from my father’s inconsistency, and that this was not my fault but just part of my old programming. The great news was I could change this! A book that helped me was Healing Your Attachment Wounds, by Diane Poole Heller.

    When I recognized why I sought love from men who couldn’t give it to me, that ache for unavailable love lessened.

    3. I set clear intentions.

    I grew up on my dad’s little crumbs of love. It made me feel starved for love and attention, so later in life, I would accept them from any man who showed me interest. Even if they weren’t the right fit for me. I had no idea what that was!

    When I realized this, I compiled a list of what I didn’t want. I tuned into what brought me pain and unhappiness growing up. Things that made me feel unsafe. These became my red flags. For example, emotional unavailability, anger, shouting, gaslighting, denying my reality, and addiction were a few items from my list.

    I became conscious about what I didn’t want so I wouldn’t blindly go into a relationship that made me feel unsafe again.

    I also compiled a list of things I did want—must-haves like kindness and safety.

    4. I ended contact with unavailable men.

    This was a hard one and felt very uncomfortable. I took a step back from my ‘drug.’ I even unfollowed people on social media to allow myself space to heal. Sometimes I would have a bad day and make contact, but slowly my addiction lessened.

    To support myself through this process, I read books, listened to podcasts, and even trained for a marathon to give me another focus. Books like Father Therapy, by Doreen Virtue, and Facing Love Addiction, by Pia Mellody, helped me to understand my pattern. I also found communities where I could share my story and not be judged.

    I learned how to stop numbing the pain from my past with these unhealthy relationships by learning how to soothe myself and let my wounds heal.

    5. I dated myself.

    I stepped back from dating and focused solely on learning to love and date myself. To start, I took myself on a trip for three days in Italy. I took my books, went on tours on my own, and journaled about my story. I  regularly spent time with myself and even found new hobbies. Before, I had been so obsessed with these men that pleasing them was my hobby.

    I found ways to enjoy my own time and have fun! To feel whole and enough on my own. I took myself to restaurants and treated myself to gifts. I became the person I always wanted. Validating, attentive, kind, and fun!

    Sure enough, in time, I found an emotionally available man who chose me and was everything I wrote on my intention list. He had no red flags, unlike any of my previous partners. He makes me feel safe every day, and most importantly, he gives me space to continue the most important relationship in my life. The one with me.

    If you can relate to this pattern of choosing emotionally unavailable partners, just notice the behavior. It is not you. It is just a behavior you are doing to keep safe. Thank this part and know that it is possible to change and find your healthy love.

  • 4 Anxiety-Calming Techniques I Wish I Used When I Freaked Out on a Plane

    4 Anxiety-Calming Techniques I Wish I Used When I Freaked Out on a Plane

    “When thinking about life, remember this: No amount of guilt can solve the past, and no amount of anxiety can change the future.” ~Unknown

    I was buckled in on a small, twenty-person airplane, and we were heading toward the runway, when I looked out the window and saw the airplane wheel was wobbling.

    I gathered my courage, unbuckled my seatbelt, and approached the flight attendant, who told me to sit back down.

    “I think there’s something wrong with the wheel,” I said.

    He looked out the window and said, “It’s fine.” But then he radioed the pilot, who turned the plane around.

    They checked it out, and it turns out the wheel was fine.

    In retrospect, I recognize I wasn’t responsible for the pilot turning the plane around. That was his decision, based on the information I’d provided. But the wheel wasn’t, in fact, wobbling. My anxious mind was just playing tricks on me.

    I felt guilty that one passenger, a surgeon, had to miss his scheduled surgery and that others were delayed. And the ironic thing was that I was on the flight to attend the somatic psychotherapy program where I was learning to reduce my anxiety and how to help others.

    I learned a lot from this experience and wanted to share the techniques that have helped me calm my anxiety since then.

    1. Move your body.

    Anxiety is part of the fight-or-flight response, which is designed to keep your body safe. The trigger for the anxiety is external, but you must complete the stress cycle on the nervous system level.

    In her New York Times bestselling book Burnout, Dr. Emily Nagoski shares that the stress cycle has a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you get stuck in the middle, you need to help your body complete the stress cycle.

    In the past, you would be chased by a lion, and then hopefully a neighbor would open the door and you’d run in, slamming the door behind you.

    It may seem like you’d feel better because the lion was gone, but on a scientific level, we now know you’d feel better because you ran and the endorphins helped you complete the stress cycle.

    If you’re feeling anxious, go for a walk around the block or put on your favorite song and dance. Even on the plane I could have pushed my feet into the floor and squeezed the arm rests to process some of my anxiety physically, but I didn’t.

    2. Feel your anxiety

    As best you can, detach from the thoughts and welcome the physical sensations of anxiety into your body. Notice where your anxiety is located in your body and what it feels like. Describe it: “I feel a buzzing in my chest.” “I feel a tightness in my throat.” And as best you can, welcome this vibration into your body. All humans get anxious; nothing has gone wrong, and you can handle this.

    When you believe that anxiety shouldn’t be happening, you actually create more anxiety about your anxiety. Welcoming it in reduces that.

    On the plane, I wasn’t at all aware of what was happening in my body. I was stuck in my mind, worrying about whether or not to say something. And thinking that I’d really regret if I didn’t say something and the plane crashed. I was completely detached from my body and fully overwhelmed by the feeling of panic.

    If I’d noticed where the anxiety was in my body, perhaps I’d have made a different decision. Or maybe I wouldn’t have; it’s hard to know…

    But what I know for sure now is, when I welcome the sensations in physically, I feel better afterward. So try this out.

    3. Voice your anxiety.

    Simply saying “I’m feeling anxious” can help you feel calmer. A recent study showed that putting your feelings into words reduces activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that regulates emotions and stress.

    On the plane, a classmate had been sitting right behind me but moved so she could have her own row. After the plane landed, she wondered, if I had been able to tell her that I was feeling anxious about the wheels, would that have been enough for me to regulate my nervous system? Again, we can’t know for sure, but according to the research, that’s probably true.

    So if you’re feeling anxious, say out loud to yourself or someone else, “I’m feeling anxious.” This will help you observe and detach from the emotion just a little bit so it’ll feel less overwhelming.

    4. Make physical contact.

    If a child was scared or anxious, you’d instinctively hold their hand or pick them up to soothe the fear. And there’s research that hugging and self-soothing touch, like putting a hand on your heart, can lead to lower cortisol levels after a stressful situation.

    If I’d had a loved one to hold my hand or give me a hug, this would have soothed my anxiety to a degree.

    So hug your friend or your dog. And if you’re alone, put a hand on your heart to assure your nervous system that you’re safe.

    —

    After this incident, I had to process the shame around making this mistake. At first I felt completely terrible, like a total nutcase and an out-of-control loser.

    But now I see it differently. I see myself as someone who experienced trauma in her childhood, who was on her healing journey and genuinely doing her best at that time. I’m proud that I stood up and used my voice and did what I thought was right in the moment.

    And also, I regret the negative impact it had on some of the passengers and crew. The surgeon was understandably upset. And others were probably too, even though they didn’t say anything.

    The pilot was super friendly and talked to me after checking out the wheel to reassure me that everything was fine. And one passenger came up to me at the end of the flight and thanked me for keeping an eye out and being brave, even though in this case everything was fine. His stance was that it’s better to be safe than sorry.

    Life is complex. I now fully forgive myself this even though I do see it as a mistake. I know I was doing my best at the time and I’ve learned from it.

    I still get anxious sometimes, but it’s reduced significantly. The more I get to know my body and the different techniques that help complete the stress cycle, the less my anxiety controls my life.

    I’m happy to report I haven’t turned around any airplanes or cruise ships since applying these techniques, so I wholeheartedly recommend you use them to reduce your anxiety too!!