When A Parent Needs Too Much: What Is Enmeshment and How Does It Hurt A Child
Being a parent is a complicated job. Healthy parenting includes doing your best to create a loving environment, supporting your kids so that their talents and interests help you guide them to build their own life. Parents are still going to make mistakes that impact our kids. The parent who does...
119 SelfWork: Why Risk Telling Your Truth? Why Risk Vulnerability?
Vulnerability is a topic near and dear to my heart because I believe it’s so important to true change and growth. As prominent researcher and author Dr. Brené Brown says, “You can’t get to change without vulnerability.. period.” Vulnerability requires opening up, letting others in and...
Four Ways To Get Emotional Closure In A Relationship — By Yourself
I’ve been divorced twice. And there was no emotional closure either time. Neither parting was easy. There was a lot of hurt on both sides, and I shared in the responsibility of the failure of both marriages. I felt tremendous shame. Later, I hoped for some kind of closure. Both of those men...
118 SelfWork: The Incredible Power of Journaling
I was caught off guard the other day when in my FaceBook group, I asked them to journal about a specific topic, and someone wrote that they didn’t know what journaling was. So let’s talk about journaling. What is it? How is it helpful? Are there specific problems where journaling is...
How To Understand When You Love Someone With Recurrent Depression
Patricia brought her husband, Dan, into therapy a couple of years ago, ”Can you try to help him understand what it feels like to have depression? He thinks I could stop the cycle if I was more positive, or exercised more.” Patricia worked at a huge church, where she helped run their...
117 SelfWork: A Three Step Guide to Making Decisions You Won’t (Likely) Regret
Have you made choices you terribly regret? How do you evaluate the decisions you make? Most of us might say that a choice was “right” if in five days, or five months or five years. we still feel that it was. If it stands up to the test of time, we can reassure ourselves that it was a...
What Pushes Your Buttons? How To Manage Your Insecurity
During my years in elementary school and well into junior high, while the other kids were in gym class or at lunch, I had to go home. I had a neurological problem that made it dangerous for me to be too physically active or get too hot, and so my mom picked me up in the middle of the day to rest....
116 SelfWork: Do You Have Perfectly Hidden or High Functioning Depression? And Why Does It Matter?
What’s the difference, or is there one, between Perfectly Hidden Depression and what’s called high-functioning depression? I’m particularly motivated – in fact very sadly motivated – to talk about it because of an email I received this week from a woman whose husband killed himself. He...
4 Ways To Create Kindness With Your Partner – Before Your Words Lead To Divorce.
Your reality is created with your words. “I can’t take much more of this.” “I can’t believe I ever married you.” “I’ve had it with you.” These words may be said in jest, or in a heated moment, or perhaps they’re repeated in exasperation....
115 SelfWork: The Awesome, Frustrating, Complicated Job of Step-Parenting and How to Avoid Common Mistakes
Step-parenting may be one of the hardest jobs on earth, second only to parenting. It’s complicated, awesome, frustrating and sometimes downright irritating. Blending families successfully takes much more time than people want to think. There can be lots of personalities involved, old wounds...
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