“Your authenticity is your power.” I heard a clip of Oprah Winfrey saying this recently. The truth is, I’ve often struggled to believe that I could be powerful. Growing up, I repeatedly believed the message that I was too sensitive. I’ve found it difficult to be authentic in arenas where my emotional reality was inconvenient for other people. I learned to hide what I felt and self-abandon. But hiding reinforced the very message of inadequacy I was running from. It was a disempowering ...read more
My Truth?
When important, meaningful words or phrases in counseling/recovery/psychology start to take on twisted pop culture meaning, I can lose it a bit. For those who have spent time in my office, you know how I feel about the use of words like “boundaries” or “narcissist” when spoken flippantly. By repeating cultural lingo, the true power of these words and their meaning is cheapened. The same goes for the phrase “my truth”. “My truth” once meant that I acknowledge that the way I see something ...read more
Everything We Make Up
Something I help clients learn is how to utilize the phrase, “what I make up about that is.....” Much of what we think and say is “made up”. The stories we make up aren’t about lying. Lying has a different intention. The stories we make up are about how we have filled in the blanks. The difficulty is we present these details as fact. They aren’t. They are truly “what we make up”. It can seem reasonable because we are very familiar with a specific historical pattern. So, we make the ...read more
Sailing With Your Therapist
If you asked me what different parts of the boat are called, or how to tie different sailor’s knots, you’d get a blank stare in return. I have been sailing once or twice and loved it. The depth and reflective properties of water have always been a strong pull for me. When I first started working in private practice, my connection to water continued. The visual I formed of how sessions progress started off like deep sea diving. There wasn’t much to this analogy for me. I vaguely pictured that ...read more
Down the Mountain
Before my family moved away from Ecuador, my boys wanted to climb Mt. Pichincha. It's not the tallest mountain in Ecuador and not a hard mountain to climb. It's more like taking a hike at 15,000 feet. But this was the mountain we had lived under and climbed countless times for years. It was the volcano that had rained ash down on us. It was our mountain. We started off early and we're having a good time, hiking, talking, and taking pictures. We reached the top of a long sandy slope and sat ...read more
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- Next Page »