Tag: #Selfawareness

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Love In the Time of Corona

Did the love become the virus, or was the virus a manifestation of the love? Can anything truly be that powerful?

Is love helped or hindered by extreme passion?

One of the first loves I ever left was because I watched the movie Serendipity, and I realized then and there I didn’t feel like that and I wanted to. This book was a feature part of that movie. So I downloaded it on audiobook and listened while stocking produce on the shelves at Trader Joe’s all those years ago.

And here I am taking a deeper look at the meaning of this book. Everything truly does come full circle.

I’ve been thinking a lot about adapting lately. Historically when we think of this I would say we also think of evolution. They can go hand in hand. However, adapting can actually go in either direction.

You can adapt to things you would never want to.

I am adaptable nearly to the point of shape shifting. This is a sharp realization as of late. Something I used to be praised for, something I’m being praised for now. It’s labeled patience. But the changes that are happening to me. I’m not so sure.

As always some are good, and some are not so good.

The people of the world are so incredibly anxious right now. We are in the middle of being history. Not making it, but being it. Forced to adapt in ways we never asked for, and feeling rather helpless and scared.

The changes in my life that preceded this I thought I chose. Do we choose our destiny without even realizing it? Or is there truly certain components that go beyond logic and awareness?

I’m reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle Wambach. She says, “What I thought would kill me didn’t. Every time I said to myself I can’t take this anymore- I was wrong.” That she can use pain to become. “I am here to keep becoming truer, more beautiful versions of myself again and again forever. To be alive is to be in a perpetual state of revolution. And pain is the fuel of revolution.”

“Everything I need to become the woman I’m meant to be next is inside my feelings of now. Life is alchemy (uncanny given the entire premise of this blog), and emotions are the fire that turns me to gold. I will continue to become only if I resist extinguishing myself a million times a day. If I can sit in the fire of my own feelings, I will keep becoming.”

Glennon’s words, her warm and funny videos, her audiobook and the paperback, are a life raft for me right now. I found her because my spirit animal Elizabeth Gilbert shouted the praises of Love Warrior. I pre-ordered it purely on recommendation and I was not disappointed.

Some day I hope to join the ranks of these women. Actually I’m already in their ranks, my words just haven’t hit the shelves yet. Thus far mine have the most impact in 1-1 connection. I never met a dream I didn’t tackle. I can know it’s in process/progress now because I wake up with words swimming and begging. They beckon me from my slumber and demand of me.

As you can see my ability to try and intellectualize my feelings rather than boldly state them in the first person, is Olympic in its quality.

My entire life has been lived adapting. Surviving. I thought my word was survivor but truly it’s adapter. Because what I used to survive was to get the hell away from what was happening at home and try and find what felt/ looked healthier than what was happening. I did this by being like-able.

Even more importantly I did this by being useful. I received love in childhood only when I could be useful, never for free. No one ever just delighted in me because I was born. In fact my being born was a sin done by a sinner, and something even my grandparents couldn’t face.

I’m not sure where they went “wrong” or if that can even be put on them. That an older man (a married one I think), got their beautiful young daughter pregnant.

My mom would proudly tout a shirt that said, “good girls go to Heaven, bad girls fo everywhere.” My grandmother hated it. Mom you would be proud the jury is still out on heaven, but I have for sure been everywhere.

Funny about that I spent my entire life wondering what was the good thing, how not to be bad. I have a conscience like you’ve never seen before. Perhaps this is to do with being highly sensitive and having more mirror neurons than the average human. See article on this here: The highly sensitive brain

My good began in earnest but it required the repression of everything I was. I had to be rigid and I sensed way back then I couldn’t grow like that. So I did what Glennon says above except not having any of my resources met, add adaptability and you get a recipe for living to survive, quickly like you’re outrunning a monster (your thoughts about yourself).

Add ADHD and a component of impulsivity and you my friend have the recipe for one hell of a story. And I have 10,000 stories of all the love I have embarked on within one very sad story about a very lonely girl, who never was naturally given the ability to discover her gifts.

I have a lot of stories.

Well if Glennon’s right perhaps I haven’t had it wrong this whole time by feeling things the way that I do. I don’t feel like the humans do. I feel every second of my life in full array. If you knew what it felt like to have all your nerve endings exposed all the time.

Would life be any gentler with me? Would I want it to?

Like Glennon I will feel and I will become. I just wish I had ever been able to undertake these things without needing to keep people along the way for my safety. That I didn’t grow oddly as a product of scarce resources like those trees that grow all bent and sideways because they are reaching for the sunlight.

Nothing is safe right now, not my health, not my heart.

So for now I’m going to have to burn, and find out who I will be on the other side.

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Capital T trauma

I am going to be talking more about my trauma in the coming weeks. How very much it has impacted every corner of my life. My decision making. The way that I live and love. The choices and the way that I make them.

People my whole life have told me how strong I am. They admire what I do and how I do it. But the thing so often missed in all of that is who I am at my core and what I carry around each day.

How can someone be nearing 40 and only doing this work now? How can they not? Most people never do it. It’s almost impossible. I’m still determined to crack the code.

Right now I am researching the freeze aspect of trauma. How when I am overwhelmed I literally can’t move. I have to have a smelling salts wake up, and then I can mechanically make that call or open that piece of mail, but when I’m consumed it’s almost impossible.

I freeze all the time. I freeze when emotions are too overwhelming. And then I berate myself when I don’t reach out warmly and hug my children.

And adult is not supposed to be so scared. But when you carry a hurting child with you….. you can be either at any given time depending on the circumstances.

I present well.

On the inside I’m a tangle of coping mechanisms.

Please love me anyway. When I can’t love myself.

My way of handling my trauma was to give to everyone I’ve ever loved all the love I never was. I thought I had done journey after journey with self love. But truly I’ve done journey after journey of loving someone else so I can even feel the reflection.

Because that’s as close as I’ve ever gotten to love.

And I want to love my kids will all I didn’t have, and I have in so many ways, but connection. I still struggle with that. Because I get overwhelmed so easily.

Because I’m still a scared little girl.

I’m still a scared little girl…..

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Addicted to Love

“Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough
You know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to love” – Robert Palmer

Hi my name is Christina and I’m an addict.

I didn’t realize this until recently as a matter of fact, because it seems natural to be allowed to pursue love. Look at how many articles, books, workshops, movies. So this isn’t a strange affliction unless you look a little closer at how I do love.

Recently I’ve been going to therapy. I finally found a therapist who is seeing me well, or I was finally ready to receive the lessons and my defense mechanisms didn’t block it, however you want to look at it. So I’ve been talking about the woman who brought me into this world.

She drove a 68 Pontiac Firebird. I still remember the window crank handles, silver and polished. The vinyl black interior that my long tan legs stuck to in the summer. The unsticking sound and painful sensation when I got up after a long drive (which was rare). At that time I thought my mother was so cool. She smoked, swore, dressed cool, listened to rock music, and she was beautiful. Blond hair, blue eyes and a smattering of brown freckles across her nose that were more in summer.

I still remember how many times we listened to Robert Palmer addicted to love in her car. What a foreshadowing that was for my life. Funny of the few memories that one stands out so much and those lyrics. It would be a huge part of my whole life. And very few from the outside will understand it. Only those who take the time and effort to truly ask because they care, not just to be in the know.

Having been primarily raised by her very fundamentalist Christian parents, even the fact she would take me out to eat meat was a novelty, and the good music was probably my main draw. I wouldn’t discover til later why Melissa Etheridge caught my spirits so much. My mom was a fan too I wonder what that means 😉

My Mom was addicted to love too. She was addicted to the exciting kind. The kind with bad men. So my addiction became mixed with not wanting to be like her, so mine was to find “a good person”. Why I thought a good person would be the answer to all of whatever it was I’m not quite sure. But what I didn’t know at the time this all started is how love should have been for me, and how much of a deficit I had.

I was so deficient in love that as an adult it became a larger focus than anything, especially knowing about who I am and what I want. Do you know I’m 39 years old and I still don’t know a lot about that?

I’m a lot of things that have identifiers. I’m a counselor, I’m a mother, a friend, a lover. I have lots of things I can perform and do those well. I can be caring of my friends, considerate of the world. I recycle :p But when it comes down to investing time into me, just for me, I freeze or fly.

My immediate reaction is to quickly get near another adult so nothing bad happens. I’m 39 years old and I’m still running scenarios all the time of what bad thing could happen. I’ll live with that forever because no one protected me. So I’m protective almost to a fault, because I don’t realize that I’m lovable. It doesn’t even register someone could love me. So I need more and different and to keep on moving.

I achieve. I learned I could gain acceptance, confidence, etc by facing the many anxieties that became me, but were never my natural self. I’ve had many re-births, college saved and changed me. My children the same thing. And every relationship I’ve ever embarked on has yielded a new self, because we grow the most in relation to others. It shows us to ourselves.

But being loved for free never felt like a thing. I’ve always had to earn it. To dance around begging to be seen. I’ve had to work my way out of a thousand behaviors I had from my trauma to even have a shot at healthy love. I keep trying for it, but I was missing a few things. And every time I think I figure it out I end up back at square one, with an even greater sense of being broken and a failure, as if love is the only measurement of my success as a person, the fact I’m breathing is a success.

I didn’t know until now how much I desire love with my children that is more than utilitarian. I was both parents and roles for so long I got stuck in the working, flight, fight, freeze mode of it all. I think I thought if I could crack the code with an adult I would ensure that I would always be a safe parent. I came from such a lack of safety it was a fear my whole life.

Do you know all they ever wanted was just a second of my attention and it was so often somewhere else. I’ve been stuck inside my head trying to stay safe, be safe, keep them safe, and the result has been a distance I never imagined. And I’ve been distanced from myself, and romantic love didn’t fix that.

What I wouldn’t give to have known that. Known they loved me for free, and that love was easier than I was ever taught, but it’s hard to accept when you’ve never seen how to love yourself. I had no model. I tried to learn from so many scattered sources, movies, friends parents. I tried to learn love intellectually, but feeling love that’s another matter entirely.

I could tell all kinds of stories and say I needed the high of new love. I would be accused of that I’m quite sure by my critics. But it’s not that either….

I’m a seeker by nature, but I wouldn’t even know how to feel it when I found it because the unmet needs were so varied and so great.

Recently I came across something “I’ve never felt before”, my favorite line of course. But it wasn’t the love of another, it was the seeing of myself that naturally came in their presence. It was the recognition I love differently now, and I can’t tell you the immense sadness that I never saw this beauty in the strength of my journey before.

People have told me all the time, but I couldn’t see it. That’s the saddest story. I’m still thawing, becoming, coming out of this waging war I’ve had with myself my whole life of whether I’m a good person or not. Without needing to make sure I’m with someone that validates that all the time.

Who am I outside of this addiction?

Outside the storm I see so many things I didn’t before. I had another rebirth recently and I’ve questioned the windows, the walls, the cosmos’s, the gurus, if this makes me a bad person. Squared up with my yucky stuff again. But the finding is that this question can no longer stand. And since it can’t I have room to see other things.

I have room to see what my relationship with myself looks like. I thought I’d already done this, checked it off the list, like it isn’t an ongoing process constantly in flux. Like all relationships, we have to re up our connection, and my connection with me will always be the trickiest. And if we aren’t connected to ourselves all our other relationships have crossed wires and don’t go so smoothly.

So now I’m having moments with my children I’ve never had in this way before. I get to be the other parent too. The fun one, the nurturing one, the playful one. The one that takes them driving instead of finding someone else to do it because if anything ever happened to them it’s unthinkable. So now I am giving myself a trust I always deserved.

Coming out of the million anxieties I was blessed with and the many health issues it’s caused and the fear it will all swallow me.

I’m coming out again and I’m a newborn right now. There are so many amazing things about being one. You see the world as magical, you’re not ashamed to show your emotions or ask for your needs to be met. You delight in small things.

I’m battling my addiction and learning healthy love…. and that is bringing me moments of joy I can actually feel and not just know.

It’s been quite the ride…..

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Heaven or Hell

A good person, a bad person. Perfect, imperfect. Heaven or hell.

These are some of the conflicts and experiences I am having lately. And the fact I am having them at all means that I am allowing myself a humanity that has never been present near my surface at least before. Not like this anyway.

Why is this humanity always seemingly at another’s expense?

Does healing need to be as relational and experiential and intense as I do it? And whom am I doing it for. Myself or other.

What are the parameters?

We meet our needs with other people. We tell stories about this to make ourselves feel and or look better. But that is in fact what a relationship is, we wouldn’t have one if it did not meet a need.

Meeting both needs for two people in a way that can endure can seem impossible.

Humans are trying to meet their many needs in a variety of ways every single day.

It seems to me that the world is in such a way right now that most of our wires are crossed on even what our authentic needs are.

Take our current political climate. Divisive. Filled with distrust, anger, fear, self-righteous judgments, unrest. I could go on.

I don’t know much right now, but I know to be a human with all of those things swirling around inside you is it’s own personal purgatory.

We tell stories to feel better about our actions in a variety of ways that are primarily subconscious. What those actions are come down to a result of a complicated array of values, belief systems, and mostly are derived from our experiences. Usually within the nuclear family. I have a wide array of experiences here because I’ve been a piece of a lot of different families.

Then there is our feeling selves. That natural innate place we all began. Pure presence. The closest to an innocence (child), we can ever get. Magical thinking, open enough to explore the world in a sensory way.

Cut that process off too soon or have too little freedom in it and the person spends the rest of their life driven primarily by their senses, as a result of the repression of expression and acceptance.

“Who was I before….”

Sensory and logical mind arguing daily. Trying to meet the need. Trying to define the need to even know what to meet.

Being a human being is much more complicated than a set of behaviors and unmet needs. And that realization is aggravating to the mind of a psychologist who would wish to reduce it down to that. Or needs by the very definition of the profession to do that.

But what about what is outside of that? Unseen forces. Destiny. Is that a thing? And why do people believe in it if nothing else than to have a story that makes them feel better.

Agency gives us the ability to write our own story. So how do we trust an unreliable narrator? And someone seeking will always be unreliable wont they?

Abundance or scarcity mindset, and the ability to craft a life to allow for the experiences one chooses most. To be able to live in ambiguity. To have to readjust what security means in this world.

No one wants to be alone in sickness or in death. So what are we willing to exchange for that security?

Fear is a greater motivator than curiosity or even love …..

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Finding my Memoir

Full circle smack dab in front of the mirror facing all of my shit. My patterns, my ugly, my everything. The lights are fluorescent and unforgiving.

I have never been so lonely. That’s the irony here. I look like the one who has it all, has it all together, and that’s the worst thing, because it can’t be further from the truth.

I’m terrified to create. My thoughts are so disorganized it hurts so much all the time. The only thing that gets them to be still is being a counselor and pouring all of me into another. That’s the only thing I’ve figured out to make myself still enough to be.

To just be.

I cannot just be. It’s impossible for me. And this gets me into all sorts of trouble my whole life. I never asked for this. Worse yet no one even knows what to call it or how to see it. I am unseen, but I am not unloved, or unappreciated. So that’s something.

I want everything.

You never think you’ll get lost again, and again, and have to find a new self again and again. No one tells you this about life. And for most people I think they won’t even know or worry too much about this.

But not for me. Everything is different for me.

I wish I could find anymore words but for tonight I can’t.

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Intentions and the Cosmos

“I am not a stranger to the dark, hide away they say, because we don’t want your broken parts. I’ve learned to be ashamed of all my scars, run away they say, because no one will love you as you are.”

Lately a great many things are shaken up in my life, in ways I never imagined. I’m finding a self I didn’t know, yet again. It calls into question everything. And when everything in your foundation is shaky it’s unsteady. My stomach is rumbling like the tectonic plates of my very foundation.

I’m always so sure about my truth. It speaks so loudly to me, but what it can never know is what the next day will bring and the next. To have an adventurous life you must be willing to continuously face down your fears. For me this is necessary.

As necessary as oxygen.

I have always been a seeker. A seeker whose main objective is security is making for an interesting cocktail. Obtain security then seek, obtain security, then seek. What if I had security from the beginning? I want to know who that person was too! I need to know her. It’s not a choice.

What I am finding is a security in myself that will keep me grounded and authentic to me at all costs and this is not a path for the faint of heart. This is loving my unloved child inside more than anyone else, because she needs it the most.

This isn’t a journey most can understand. It’s cold and lonely in here and yet on the outside everyone thinks I have it all figured out. One of the largest incongruences of my life. I’m human too.

Spoiler alert. I don’t. Not at all. But I am committed to my heart and my truth and recovering that little girl who deserved a real life full of love and support. This is my recovery.

This is me!!!! I could listen to this song and watch the beautiful dancing in this video a thousand times. It’s my song for 2020.

I’ve been shamed a thousand times during my life for my wounds, shamed instead of understood. And that pain has turned me into 100 percent heart. It’s open and it’s raw and if you want to see it just sit with me for an hour I will show you.

And if you’re my friend I will hold your heart with mine. And this is me. I cannot only be loved for what I provide others. I need to be loved for the very center of me, everything that has made me the things others benefit from.

The thing that wakes you up?! That’s a product of my suffering. It did not come cheap.

So here I am at 4 am, battling my Crohn’s Disease and holding my hurting heart. Zofran, toast, ginger tea, my trusty laptop and journal by my side. I’ve lost 10 lbs since Christmas, there is nothing easy about this.

“I am brave, I am bruised, this is who I’m meant to be. I’m not scared to be seen I make no apologies, this is me.”

This last year in my 30’s is mine. I don’t want to heal at anyone else’s expense, but I’m also not willing to help someone heal at the expense of me. I’m not sure what that looks like yet, but here are my intentions.

I intend to write about trauma, in a way no one else has before….. in my way. I intend to be more connected to my children than I ever have, and give them my wide open heart and presence. I intend to be still for me when I need to figure that out. I don’t have it figured out yet, but I intend to work on it.

I intend to discover and honor the body that has carried me this far. I let it take the brunt of the world. It needs to stretch and move with joy. It needs to release years of shame and being stifled and huddled terrified. It deserves to be nourished and cherished.

I intend to love bigger and harder than I ever have, and to always include myself in that equation.

“Look out because here I come. And I’m marching on to the beat I drum. I’m not scared to be seen and I make no apologies this is me.”

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Music, lyrics, water, ice

I said to my friend this morning that I have a big family. It just fell out of my mouth, and then all of my insides smiled at the realization. How can that be?! How can all of this change have occurred and right under my nose.

I’m always vigilant for threat. But for happiness…. I can’t even see it when it was always available to me. Just some fine tuning of perspective.

This hunting, constant hunting for belonging or acceptance has left my soul tired. What I actually had to do was to let go, not hold on tight. Then everything just opened right up to me.

I’ve traversed lifetimes of growth just this morning. A time traveling warrior of light. Transcending typical chronologies and customs, and all barriers of logic and reason. A traversiamo; I’ve crossed over.

I had a beautiful line right here, and I didn’t save the draft properly, and it’s gone. It was exquisite, and I’m feeling rather heartbroken. But isn’t this just how life works? If I sit here not writing, let the whole thing ruin my mood, when all the lines come from inside me anyway, and if it’s important it will come back again.

I’m in a freeze again. I’m waiting for something, the next something, and there will be a something after that. So why wait I suppose? Write what I can right now?!

I can write that life is happening around me so fast I feel like I can barely keep up. This creation has taken on a life of its own, and some of my parts (sum of my parts by Mary Lambert, a favorite), still feel like they are in that other life. I am constantly checking the evidence and pinching myself. That must indicate some pretty radical transformation right ?!

I can’t stop thinking about that line, and I can’t stop thinking about other things… my mind just rolls it over and over in the palm of my hand like glistening agates bathed in ocean water and sunlight. Mesmerized. They could turn to dust at any moment these dreams, and I know that like I never have before. I now know what it means to have the courage to go after your dreams. I used to think what’s the big deal? That’s because I was separated from myself.

People thought I was brave. And I was but I couldn’t feel it, and they never knew that.

What direction is my life about to go?! What many directions ? What do I have to offer the world ? I am excavating, contemplating, exfoliating. Laughing. Playing.

Mary Lambert sets my soul on fire. I want to do what she does for the world. With my words. Before my child got lost she wrote. She wrote a lot. Always had a pen and paper. She wrote poetry and song lyrics and tried so sing, not well. And then people made fun of her and she tucked all that away on a mission for acceptance. She watched and became anything she could to be chosen, wanted, to belong.

It’s not all tragedy though that lost child created the very thing that helped her become found. It was effortless to have those three gems, or at least it feels that way this many years out, and within this new journey. They are effortless to love, and yet I was blind for so long. Now I see everything. I spent a small amount of time fearing it was too late, but there’s no such thing really.

It’s never too late. I want to play the piano. I want to dance with joy. I want to weave words together into a brightly colored tapestry and then sit back and see me from the outside in a way I never have before. I have dreams and a heart, that are thawed.

It’s so hard to explain this life in words. I burst with gratitude to the point only unintelligible sobs can escape. I’m nervous to show the world so much feeling, they don’t know what to do with it, and I hate anyone around me being uncomfortable.

I make people uncomfortable, just before they find themselves.

I needed enough insight to realize how to hold on through the storm so I could witness the sunlight. Most of the storms of my childhood were unbearable. So it’s taken several trips through hell to learn how to sit in discomfort.

“Don’t go looking for some kind of rescue, you are the only one who can save you. We are we are more than our scars, we are more than the sum of our parts.” -Mary Lambert

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Disconnectedly Yours….

Fun activity. Put on August’s Rhapsody from the movie August Rush. It’s eight minutes of various instrumental. Then write. I find myself writing to the rhythm and I get all different types of handwriting.

What do you think that means ?!

I’m very emotional today. I saw five clients back to back this morning and each session just filled me with humble gratitude for the human spirit. For the ability of people to keep going amidst terribly difficult circumstances.

The human spirit amazes me.

I have a blog post that’s been brewing all day, but I just haven’t had the words. Can you have words while you are also actively in reverence and awe!? Maybe the two don’t co-exist. Anyway I just keep opening up. More of the feeling parts of me that have been on ice coming to life. And with each one another blast of gratitude.

So today I am thinking of what you can boil almost anything down to. What do we all want? What is beneath all of the hurt feelings, the anger, the sadness, the numbing, the sarcasm, the protective mechanisms.

We all want to feel like we are attractive, safe, important, special, worthy. We want to belong and to be included. To feel necessary. And not knowing how to feel those things except externally keeps us oh so low and away from our true gifts. If you fear any of those things are not naturally meant for you or have a story or belief system that says otherwise, you will find proof everywhere of the opposite.

There are many ways we judge ourselves. It’s so hard to be a human being. There are many pressures, so many ways we can suffer, but the thing I keep seeing is how much of it we unwittingly cause ourselves. In an attempt to validate our experience as real and important, suffering seems to be the most logical. It’s the only thing that gives emergence perhaps to feel allowed to get our needs out.

I wonder how it could be made more natural? To talk vulnerably. If it’s possible as a human being to bypass that process. To accept ourselves, our anxieties, our flaws, quirks. To envelope the tenderness of our hearts.

We were never meant to be as hard as the world demands of us.

We are not meant for this. This much disconnect. This much overwhelm. This much busy. This much fear. Technology was supposed to be an advancement. I don’t think so. Some maybe. But this experience that’s happening, we are not meant for this.

The demands of the financial climate we are in. True human connected presence is declining and therefore so is joy, peace, kindness, warmth.

Nothing about America feels great right now. There’s more violence than there ever was when I was young. More intolerance of what we don’t understand. And at the personal level more people torturing those they love in the name of being worried about them. Without really knowing the real enemy. We are getting too much information from unreliable sources, and too little genuine education.

Kids are being tortured in terms of pressure about their futures. And social media has made an even larger romanticization of what is attractive. If you think advertising was bad, for a few minutes during a tv commercial. Imagine what endless scrolling will do.

I watch what it does to me. It’s a depressive behavior. I see the difference when I get up with only my notepad or take a walk, compared to being on my phone the first hour. Looking at other people’s lives and ideas and the sense there isn’t anything new to be done. It’s ironic because we do it to feel connected, but it does the opposite. It’s as numbing as any substance.

Anyway this kind of began to trail all over (as usual) and I have a hot date to get ready for…. so stay tuned….

My heart is raw, but it’s also ready. I am ready to find and be and speak some changes. I am ready to be brave, again, and again. Because that’s what living a full life requires.

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Musings from my 20k Client Day

It’s 9 pm and my client day just ended. I needed to pick up my daughter right after and on the way I found myself sifting through moments from my day.

What I experienced was a sense of reverence for what people share with me. For how brave they are. For the work itself.

I was thinking about that fine balance line between feeling self-important, essential to them, and being responsible for an outcome etc…. and what I landed on is that;

I don’t feel responsible for my clients, I feel responsible to them.

I feel so grateful for what this works gives to me, and such a respect for it and them, that I want to be constantly raising the bar on self-love, support, acceptance, and my own accountability.

This work makes me want to be a better person. Their strength and courage fuels me. I know what it takes to come to that first appointment. The sweating, the indecisiveness, the anxiety, and the cold hard fear. It’s the same as if we were looking in the mirror under fluorescent lighting.

I never see the way I do Client work as me being the gas station and them being the car. The way I do work I don’t burn out because it’s a beautiful reciprocity. Where I have true respect to my core for the experiences of each and every individual.

Listen I am by no means perfect. My mind can wander. Some people’s demons rattle the cages of mine easier than others. I make plenty of mistakes. I am a human. But I’m always interested passionately in their experience as a human being, down to the most mundane interaction they are describing. Because there are always clues to be had about their worldview or value systems.

I can do something with anything. And being given a challenge to push through my discomforts and self-defeating barriers, makes me feel alive!

Client work makes me feel alive.

It is important. To be allowed to process our thoughts and feelings in an arena that provides acceptance and safety is important.

I get energized by holding this special place in the world.

It is an honor.

I wish I could get out more complete ideas, or do an update like I have been wanting to. But this honor also leaves me spent at the end of the day. In the best of ways my brain is scrambled eggs. I think of my youth and that silly commercial this is your brain on drugs. Except in this case it’s this is your brain on Clients.

Except I could never keep a story that I am drained by it. I don’t need that to feel validated about how much I give or how important I am. It’s ok for me to be energized by my work, without the story.

When I’m exhausted these days it’s such a satisfied exhausted. After a days long hard work.

Which speaking of I did have a thought I want to look further into…. I wonder how many calories I burn being a therapist. So much emotional energy my heart is often high during sessions, but I’m animated and engaged. Tonight when I ate, I ate as if I had worked out for hours. I wonder how much using our mental energy burns in terms of calories etc. I wonder what other therapists out there are the same.

I often joke that some of my therapy days are so deep it’s as if I ran a 20k.

I’m curious exhausted. I’m happy exhausted. I’m fulfilled exhausted. I can feel great and tired and that’s such a cool thing to wrap my brain around. The only template I had about exhaustion before was to make a problem or make myself wrong.

I’ve thought things such as what if Client work is killing me physically. When in actuality my not loving and accepting myself fully is the root of all of my ailments. Never someone’s energy being harmful to mine. That’s such a dangerous belief system, and it makes the problem outside of us rather than inside.

Anyway my last shreds of bandwidth are rapidly deteriorating. Perhaps I’ll be able to follow up tomorrow morning.

Warmly, Universally, Cosmically,

your companion on this journey we call living…

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Anything is possible

I was introduced to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs when I was a student. This would be the very first time it occurred to me as to why I felt so undeveloped in certain areas. That there could be a reason for this that was not a short-coming or fault.

For the last several years I often say that theory and practice are very different things. But what I never realized as I was preaching this to others, is that I was really telling myself that I have become someone else than I ever thought myself to be.

As I counselor I often tell people they need to update their software, just like on the I-phone. As soon as they become aware of their “bugs” and have engaged in the process of correcting those (therapy). Ever so slight shifts happen, that often go unrecognized by the self. People from the outside will often be the first to make them aware, by commenting about these shifts, but even then… it’s hard to imagine themselves as different than the story they have formulated with the “help” of media, society, comparison, etc.

Self-doubt fueled narratives abound, especially in women as their tender nurturings are often seen as far less valuable than they truly are.

A nurturing mother is often times the difference between a fulfilling life and one of incredible struggle.

Much to my great surprise I found myself to be one. How am I here right now? I spent the first half of my life in a chaotic blather of creating before I knew what I was doing, doubting myself all the way along, and so so susceptible to the opinions of others.

I spent years self-flagellating, and I’m not even Catholic. At the time the only thing I knew how to do was beat myself into making sure I would not be the things I came from. Little did I know that behavior would be the very thing that could have turned me into that.

So here I sit…. a totally different self than I ever hoped to be. Not only did I turn out different, but I turned out better than my wildest dreams. And now I am just trying to update my software to stand in this grace and this power that I deserve and have labored incredibly hard for.

I can know I’m touching on something sacred because the tears come. Glorious tears from a spigot that was dry and dusty for so many years. My emotional self housed carefully on ice, deep deep within the innermost caverns of my soul.

I am blessed enough to have been able to preserve my child safely until I could parent her better. I’ve figured out how to do this, even under the demands of parenthood, partnership, and career.

I used to think I could only have one. Judge myself for wanting to much. More flagellation. I mean I was so good at it.

And here I stand in the realization that one feeds into the other, and that anything is possible with faith and friends. I have built my new sturdy foundation on the grace and mercy of friends who saw me for more than I was behaving like at the time. They didn’t feel the need to “call me out” or condemn me. They saw something else, so I could see it too.

Even friends who I have parted ways with under pretenses of terrible stories, have contributed such gifts to my life.

Lately I’ve been wondering if my dreams are too big. And still trying to pathologize myself as chaotic, rushed, crazy; etc.

I’m terrified of the possibility I could be safe as a foster parent. I’m guilty I think as well, that I will appear a better parent in the eyes of my children this time around. There it is. You see how when you write openly you unearth the deepest truths. This is what I do. There it is. I’m afraid to be a good parent now, because of how long I struggled and how much they endured with me.

Is it a justification to say that they are better people for having had to be part of that struggle? It feels it. But I can’t do that to myself. It doesn’t honor all of my parts and all of my story.

Family: I can only do better now with what I’m willing to create and how arduously I’ve been willing to work. I am my best self when I am of service to others. I become creative in ways I never imagined when I am in the trenches of someone else’s suffering. I am humbled daily. I want to serve the wounded souls that I feel most at home with. I want to be humbled by that experience and have it test my limits and feel terrified enough that I know I’m alive and trying at something.

I want to be broken open over and over until I am my soft child like self. So I can be gentle and warm. I want to be that calm in their storm, the calm I always starved for.

I don’t want to limit myself with fears. I want to expand myself with courage.

Anything IS possible….