“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
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
Ask a Guy
Tara Hedman (yep, the lady who runs this show) and I have been friends for years. A few years ago she asked me to help with what she calls, Ask a Guy Night. Prompted by the blank look on my face, she explained, “As I work with women, sometimes they ask me questions like, ‘Why do men do that!?!?’ to which I reply with something like, "Well, I'm not a man. So..." As a result, periodically, she began hosting, Ask a Guy Night. She bills it as an evening where you can learn, "Everything you ever ...read more