Category: Communication

For years I often heard people say that you have to go through grief and pain, you can’t go around it, you can’t go above it, you have to go through it. For years I didn’t understand what that meant. We live in an incredibly emotionally avoidant culture which then leads to chronic mental emotional health struggles, high addiction and disconnection from self and others among other symptoms. 

In order to move through grief or pain a person must create a safe space for emotions to build. Like a wave on a beach, emotions need to be able to build and crash safely on the shore before they can recede out and become calm again. Instead of allowing the natural flow, we often dam up the water as high as we can to keep it from crashing, but then when it inevitably breaks the dam, and the lifetime of suppressed emotions can come cascading and flooding ...

“It’s fine.”  “Everything is fine.”  “I’m fine.”  Have you ever strung together these three sentences and thought to yourself, “shoot, I think I might not be fine”. 

About a year ago I was in a car accident that resulted in emergency surgery, a stay in the trauma center at the hospital, and a long recovery (in addition to other challenges). It was the most challenging and scary time in my life. I didn’t think that I was going to make it, and yet I would find myself telling my loved ones who came to visit me, “It’s fine.”  “Everything is fine.”  “I’m fine.” 

Why is it so hard to admit that sometimes we are not fine? It has taken me a while to figure out why I was so desperately pushing myself to be fine. Though I wanted those words to be true, what I wanted more than anything was for my loved ones to think and feel that those words were true.

Whet ...

The idea of boundaries is one that has been talked about so much in the past few years, many of us throw around the term in our daily conversations. If you need a refresher, a common definition of boundaries is: “guidelines, rules, or limits that a person creates to identify for themselves what are reasonable, safe, and permissible ways for other people to behave around them and how they will respond when someone steps outside those limits.”  

I often discuss the topic of boundaries with clients, yet it is still something that I struggle with navigating in my personal life. I could use this space to share education on the different types of boundaries and the possible impacts of setting boundaries, but instead I’d like to share something that has been meaningful to me. A few years ago I heard a quote by Glennon Doyle that said, “every time you’re given a choice between disappointing someone else and disappointing yourself, your dut ...