What is love anyway? "There's a hundred shades of love, and a million in-between, if you can't get enough, then there's more you haven't seen" ~Andrew Donovan “I LOVE YOU” What does that mean? What does it mean to love someone, what does it mean to be loved? What is love anyway? I started to ponder these questions when I noticed this gap between someone telling me they love me and how I felt in relationship to their [...]
FOUR ESSENTIAL KEYS TO SETTING AND MANTAING HEALTHY BOUNDARIES1Step 1- Know and learn exactly what your boundaries truly are.This can change day to day and moment to moment even. You must learn what matters to you, respect your feelings, know what is comfortable and acceptable for you, what you truly desire. This may take some work and practice! 2Step 2 - Learn to recognize the signs and signals of giving up your boundariesso that you can prevent giving [...]
Are you an Empath?!? Maybe you KNOW you are or maybe you're new to the concept and wonder how it might apply to you... And whether or not you define yourself as one, you might still feel the affects of your sensitivities and like to have an easier time navigating this journey and this life. Do you ever walk into a room and just start feeling "off"? Are you easily affected by the emotions of others, even if [...]
Happy Holidays?!?Or are they? For many people this time of year can be stressful and or challenging on many fronts. What would it take for you to have a truly happy holiday that you enjoy and that works for you? Here are some tips and tools for helping you truly have a Happy Holiday:1Stop taking on other people's stuffHow much of the stress, anxiety, discomfort etc. that you are aware of during the holidays is actually yours? Could you [...]
Four things you need to stop doing if you want to feel like you and your needs matter: Do you feel like you don’t really matter? And that no matter what you do or give, or how much you show up for other people or sacrifice yourself for the greater good it doesn't even matter?And when it comes down to it and you really need someone to help or be there for you no one really is?I struggled with [...]
WHY IS SETTING AND MAinTaiNING HEALTHY BOUNDARIES SO HARD?(even though your emotional health and happiness depend on it?)Most people who struggle with setting and maintaining healthy boundaries: Have been trained throughout our lives in one way or another to ignore our boundaries, accept their violation or blame ourselves when it happens.As a result, we don't have a really clear sense of what our boundaries are.Often don't recognize when or how they are being crossed and instead internalize the [...]
People-Pleasing Archetypes and their Positive and Negative Qualities: You might not think you’re a people-pleaser at first glance.You see, people-pleasing can take a lot of different shapes and forms and show up in a lot of different ways.Here are five Archetypal people-pleasing roles:Rescuer: Always trying to save other people, rescue people from their own poor decisions or crisis situations they find themselves in. The rescuer feels powerful, important, and needed and derives value from others distress… The main problem [...]
Why Loving Yourself Isn't EnoughDo you get told when relationships are challenging, or you're not exactly receiving the love that you desire that you just need to love yourself more? And that somehow, self-love is the magic ticket that will solve all your relationship (and life!) problems? I've been hearing for a long time, and maybe you have too, that in order to have love you just need to love yourself... more. While I DO believe that loving yourself is [...]
Re-writing your love story You might not realize it, but you have a love story. I'm not talking about your fairytale-princess version of love, your knight-in-shining-armor kind of story- what I'm talking about is a whole lot more personal and a whole lot closer to you and your life. The love story I'm talking about is the story that has been written into your subconscious through your lived-experiences in life, starting with your family. Our childhood experiences of [...]
Love and Not Love I recently saw a post on facebook about a study showing that spanking is harmful even if the parent has a warm and loving relationship with the child. Wow, ok, so this really set some wheels spinning for me... Inflicting physical harm or pain on other human beings is considered violence, aggression, assault or abuse. Nowhere else in our culture do we sanction inflicting physical pain/harm on another human being, not even on violent [...]
Subconscious Family Patterning Have you ever noticed that family relationships can be some of the most challenging? This is often because there is a lifetime of history we are bringing into each interaction, history that often includes painful experiences of not having our needs met from people who we have an evolutionary expectation to meet them... history that often includes struggles for power in one way or another, struggles to meet those needs, or get the people we [...]
Looking Beyond Family Labels to Find the Truth of Your Experience I have found it to be a very powerful experience to realize my freedom in relationship to my family of origin. Many of us even as adults feel bound to our families in some way. We feel obliged to participate or engage in ways of relating that we do not enjoy. Something about the realization that I am no-longer obligated to be part of their lives, to [...]
Finding who you BE beyond your family Through some deep work and exploration with one of my clients, what I'm coming to see as a real step into adulthood is being able to create yourself and your life beyond your family. That is, to choose for you your own beliefs, thoughts, ideas, or ways of being. To make choices about how you spend your time and run your life based on what you want and what works for you, [...]
Emancipating Your Anger So, I recently spent the whole day super duper depressed. That doesn't happen to me very often anymore but when it does it can be super intense. There are those days that I experience a little wave of depression and easily find my way out of it, (Hint: Who does this belong to?) and then there are those days when nothing seems to help. This was one of those days. What I discovered at the end [...]
Lessons from Depression Lesson Number Two: There's some part of me that I'm denying Another discovery I'm having around depression is that when it is mine, it usually means that I'm cutting myself off from some part of myself- that I am engaging in some form of self-denial. This could be something I don't want to be aware of- like how angry I am- or having lots of judgment and wrongness toward myself rather than space and acceptance. How [...]