Transitions Counselling

07/02/2026

Sharon at Transitions Counselling – Your local counsellor providing compassionate, confidential support in the Selwyn area.
Get in touch to book an appointment or to learn more.

05/02/2026

When asked why she does not ask her child for opinions, a Chinese mother gave an answer that challenged many Western parenting beliefs. Her explanation was not about control or dismissal. It was about development and responsibility at different stages of childhood.

She explained that young children are still building the mental tools needed to make informed choices. Their brains are focused on emotional regulation, safety, and learning from guidance. Asking for too many opinions too early can place pressure on a brain that is not yet ready to lead itself.

Neuroscience supports this view. Decision making skills develop gradually as the brain matures. When adults hold structure and direction, children feel secure. That security allows the brain to grow confidence without anxiety. Too much responsibility too soon can feel overwhelming rather than empowering.

This approach does not silence children forever. It delays decision making until the brain is ready. As children grow, opinions are welcomed and respected with increasing responsibility. Structure first builds safety. Safety builds confidence. Confidence later supports independence. Parenting styles may differ across cultures, but the shared goal remains the same. Raising emotionally stable, capable, and confident adults.

05/02/2026

Manners maketh a man (or woman).
How much disrespect do you tolerate?
Why?
Why not?
🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿🌿

Manners matter because they’re the *visible language of respect*. They’re how we show who we are without having to explain ourselves.

**Why manners are important**

* They make social life smoother. Simple courtesies reduce tension, misunderstandings, and conflict.
* They signal consideration. Good manners show you’re aware that other people exist and that their comfort matters.
* They build trust. People feel safer and more willing to cooperate with someone who behaves respectfully.
* They create fairness. Manners set shared expectations so interactions don’t turn into power struggles.

**What manners convey**

* Awareness: *I notice others and their needs.*
* Self-control: *I can manage my impulses.*
* Respect: *I value you as a person.*
* Cultural understanding: *I know how to function in shared spaces.*

**What manners say about a person**

* Their upbringing or learning: Not wealth or status, but whether they were taught empathy and accountability.
* Their character: Politeness often reflects patience, humility, and emotional intelligence.
* Their intentions: Good manners suggest cooperation, not domination.
* Their reliability: People who practice manners tend to be seen as dependable and professional.

At a deeper level, manners aren’t about rules like “say please” or “don’t interrupt.” They’re about **how much space you allow for others to be human**.
Someone with good manners says, without words: *You matter, and I know we share this world.*

02/02/2026

💣A sensitive topic.....but a very important one to consider💣

CONDITIONAL RELATIONSHIPS fail because they impose identity while provoking control conflict, producing compliance at the cost of agency, stability, and connection.
Why conditional relationships don’t work
What is a conditional relationship?
A conditional relationship is one in which acceptance, care, or connection is dependent on MEETING CERTAIN EXPECTATIONS, behaviours, roles, or emotional states (e.g. “I’m okay with you as long as you’re calm / successful / agreeable / improving”).
________________________________________
1. Conditions of worth fracture the self
Carl Rogers proposed that when people receive acceptance only under certain conditions, they internalise conditions of worth. This leads to:
• Self-evaluation based on external approval
• Incongruence between the real self and ideal self
• Anxiety, shame, and loss of authenticity
Instead of asking “What do I genuinely feel or need?” the person learns to ask “WHAT DO I NEED TO BE TO STAY ACCEPTED?”

2. Conditional relationships block growth
PCT holds that people have an innate actualising tendency. This process requires:
• Psychological safety
• Freedom to experience and express the full range of emotions
When acceptance is conditional, the person:
• Suppresses parts of themselves
• Avoids vulnerability
• Prioritises performance over authenticity
GROWTH BECOMES DEFENSIVE RATHER THAN ORGANIC.

3. Relationship becomes evaluative, not therapeutic
Conditionality introduces judgement:
• Progress is measured
• Emotions are ranked as acceptable/unacceptable
• The person becomes an object to be improved rather than a subject to be understood
This undermines empathy, congruence, and UNCONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE.
________________________________________
1. Conditional relationships reinforce problem-saturated stories
Conditional acceptance often aligns with dominant cultural narratives:
• “You are valued if you cope.”
• “You are lovable if you behave well.”
• “You belong if you don’t cause discomfort.”
These stories become internalised identity conclusions, such as:
• “I am too much.”
• “I am a problem.”
• “I must manage myself to be acceptable.”
RATHER THAN SEPARATING THE PERSON FROM THE PROBLEM, CONDITIONAL RELATIONSHIPS FUSE IDENTITY WITH BEHAVIOUR.

2. Conditionality is a form of relational power
From a narrative lens, conditional relationships operate through implicit power:
• One party defines what is acceptable
• The other adapts to maintain connection
This mirrors broader social control mechanisms and can silence:
• Resistance
• Anger
• Grief
• Alternative ways of being
NT TRIES TO DECONSTRUCT THESE POWER DYNAMICS, NOT REPLACE THEM.

3. Conditional relationships limit alternative stories
Narrative therapy relies on:
• Thickening preferred identities
• Noticing unique outcomes
• Expanding meaning
Conditional relationships narrow the story to:
• Compliance
• Symptom reduction
• “Good client / good partner / good child” narratives
THIS RESTRICTS THE PERSON'S ABILITY GROW INTO A FULLER, MORE ROUNDED SENSE OF WHO THEY ARE.

________________________________________
Both PCT and NT reject conditional relationships because they:
• Undermine authenticity
• Privilege external standards over lived experience
• Create fear of disconnection
• Silence parts of the self
• Interfere with agency and meaning
BOTH HOLD THAT CHANGE COMES FROM SAFETY - NOT PRESSURE

________________________________________
In simple terms :-

“Conditional relationships stop people from becoming who they truly are.”
“Conditional relationships tell people who they are allowed to be.”
They say,
“You are acceptable only if you meet X / you do this or that won’t happen / you must meet my needs or you won’t get …...”

Conditional acceptance is not compatible with healing or growth.

The relationship stops being a site of meaning-making and becomes a site of norm enforcement. The person is positioned as an object to be corrected so compliance may occur, but connection degrades — because REGULATION REPLACES RELATIONSHIP.

Rogers, C.R. (2012). Client centred therapy. (New Ed). Robinson.
White, M. (2007). Maps of narrative practice. WW Norton.

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30/01/2026

28/01/2026

28/01/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1JV9tgnKsm/

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26/01/2026

25/01/2026

Sharon Stone - a true story of resilence and overcoming 🌸

In 2001, one of Hollywood's biggest stars collapsed at home. When she woke up, she'd lost her career, her money, her marriage—and parts of her brain.
September 2001. Sharon Stone was 43 years old and living the life she'd fought decades to build.
She'd clawed her way from small-town Pennsylvania to Hollywood superstardom. She'd survived being typecast, being underestimated, being told she was just a pretty face. Then she'd proven everyone wrong with Casino—earning an Oscar nomination that showed she could actually act.
She'd become a mother, adopting baby Roan just months earlier. She had wealth, fame, a family. Everything had finally come together.
Then, in one instant, a blood vessel in her brain exploded.
Sharon doesn't remember the exact moment the vertebral artery ruptured. What she remembers is the sensation—like being struck by lightning from the inside. One moment she was standing. The next, she was on the floor, the world spinning violently.
Brain hemorrhages don't announce themselves like heart attacks. There's no clutching your chest, no obvious "call 911" moment. Instead, there's confusion. Numbness. A terrifying sense that something is profoundly wrong, but your oxygen-starved brain can't articulate what.
Sharon felt her leg go numb. Her thoughts scrambled. But instead of calling for help, she tried to drive herself somewhere—anywhere her failing brain thought made sense.
Neighbors found her wandering outside, disoriented and crying. They brought her home. Someone gave her aspirin. Nobody called an ambulance.
She wouldn't reach a hospital for days.
Think about that. One of the most famous women in the world, having a catastrophic brain hemorrhage, and nobody recognized it was happening.
By the time doctors finally scanned her brain, blood had been pooling inside her skull for over 48 hours. The first CT scan missed it entirely—the bleeding had stopped and started intermittently, making it nearly invisible.
The second scan revealed the disaster.
Surgeons performed emergency endovascular coiling—threading a catheter from her groin all the way up into her brain to seal the rupture with tiny platinum coils. The procedure worked. Technically, she survived.
But survival and recovery are not the same thing.
Sharon Stone spent nine days barely conscious. When awareness finally returned, she discovered her body had become a stranger to her.
She couldn't walk without stumbling. Words came out wrong—stuttering, jumbled, nothing like the confident voice that had commanded movie sets for years. She couldn't read; the letters wouldn't stay still on the page. Her right ear had gone completely silent. The left side of her face drooped.
Her own body had to slowly reabsorb the internal bleeding over two agonizing years.
"Everything changed," she said later. "My body type changed. My food allergies changed. Even my brain physically shifted position in my skull."
This was 2001. Modern stroke rehabilitation programs barely existed. There were no specialized recovery protocols for younger patients, no playbook for someone whose entire identity had been built on physical beauty and razor-sharp wit.
Sharon was on her own.
Hollywood doesn't wait for anyone to heal. Seven years of recovery meant seven years of irrelevance in an industry that replaces you the moment you're gone.
By the time Sharon could work again, everything had changed. Younger actresses had taken the roles she would have played. The studio executives who'd championed her had been replaced. The momentum she'd spent decades building had evaporated.
"You're no longer the flavor of the time," she explained bluntly. "You no longer have box office heat. People move on."
But losing her career was only part of the devastation.
In 2003, while Sharon was still relearning basic cognitive functions, her husband Phil Bronstein filed for divorce. The custody battle over Roan turned brutal. Court proceedings dragged on for months. Legal fees mounted into the hundreds of thousands.
Sharon was fighting to keep her son while simultaneously fighting to regain control of her own brain.
The financial damage became catastrophic. Medical bills from the hemorrhage and years of treatment. Massive legal fees from the divorce and custody battle. People who'd taken advantage while she was incapacitated. Money just... disappeared.
By her own account, Sharon Stone—who'd once earned millions per film—found herself paying her children's school tuition on credit cards, praying they wouldn't get declined.
"I lost my place in line in the business, lost my money, lost custody battles," she said. "I was broken."
Rock bottom looked like this: permanent brain damage, divorced, financially devastated, and fighting in court just to see her own child.
Most people would have disappeared. Retired quietly. Accepted that life after catastrophic brain injury meant settling for whatever small peace you could find.
Sharon Stone refused to disappear.
She fought in court until she eventually won primary custody of Roan. Then, impossibly, she adopted again—two more sons, Laird in 2005 and Quinn in 2006. She built a family as a single mother while still recovering from an injury that had fundamentally rewired her brain.
She discovered painting became essential to her survival. "If I didn't have painting, I don't know how I would stay standing."
She threw herself into activism, particularly AIDS research through amfAR, channeling her Hollywood connections into something meaningful beyond herself.
And she learned to live with permanent brain damage that most people couldn't see but that affected every single aspect of her existence.
"I chose to work very hard to open up other parts of my mind," she explained. "The injury forced me to become more emotionally intelligent in ways I hadn't been before."
She also became blunt in ways that made people uncomfortable.
"I can be abrasively direct now," she said unapologetically. "That scares people, but that's not my problem. I have brain damage—you'll just have to deal with it."
The vulnerability became strength. The catastrophic losses brought clarity about what actually mattered.
"I don't hang onto bitterness," she said. "If you bite into the seed of bitterness, it never leaves you. But if you hold faith, even faith the size of a mustard seed, you survive."
Slowly, impossibly, she rebuilt not just a career but an entire life.
In 2019—eighteen years after the hemorrhage—her son Roan, now a young man training as a chef and glassblower, filed legal papers to add Stone to his legal name. Roan Joseph Bronstein became Roan Joseph Bronstein Stone.
The son she'd fought so desperately to keep chose to carry her name forward.
During COVID, when Roan's best friend suddenly lost his father, Sharon took the young man in too. "Now I have four boys," she said simply.
Today, Sharon Stone is 66 years old. She still takes anti-seizure medication every day. Her brain still sits differently in her skull than it did before 2001. She still lives with the invisible aftermath of catastrophic injury.
But she's also still here. Still acting. Still painting. Still raising her sons. Still fighting for causes she believes in.
Still standing when everyone expected her to fall.
Twenty-three years after a blood vessel exploded in her brain and took away her career, her money, her marriage, and parts of her cognitive function, Sharon Stone has proven something remarkable:
Losing everything doesn't have to be the end of your story. It can be the beginning of a different one—maybe even a better one.
"I know what it's like to go from the top of your field to absolutely wiped out," she said. "And I know what it takes to come back from nothing."
She came back. Not as the same person—that was impossible. But as someone stronger, clearer, more purposeful.
Someone who survived the unsurvivable and chose to keep building a life worth living.

Author unknown

21/01/2026

“We are not defined by what is done to us.
We are defined by what we choose to do with what remains”
Viktor Frankl - what an incredible man!

In 1942, a psychiatrist arrived at a N**i concentration camp with nothing that could save him. No influence. No protection. No future anyone could see.

The guards worked with practiced speed. They shaved his head. They replaced his name with a number, 119,104. They searched his coat and found what mattered most to him. A manuscript sewn into the lining. Years of research. The work he believed would define his life.

They tore it apart and fed it to the fire.

To them, the act was complete. The man had been erased. His profession, his dignity, his past, all gone. What remained was only a body waiting for the end.

They were wrong.

By destroying everything he owned, they forced Viktor Frankl to confront the one thing they could not touch.

Months earlier in Vienna, Frankl had been offered a way out. A visa to the United States. Safety. A future. He was already a respected psychiatrist with a growing practice and a wife he loved deeply.

But the visa was for him alone. His parents were excluded.

If he left, they would almost certainly be taken. If he stayed, he would go with them.

As he weighed the choice, he noticed a small piece of marble on his father’s desk. It had been salvaged from a synagogue the N**is had destroyed. Carved into it were words from the Ten Commandments.

Honor thy father and mother.

Frankl let the visa expire.

Soon after, the knock came at the door.

He was sent first to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz, and later to Dachau. The camps were designed not only to kill the body, but to hollow out the mind. Prisoners slept crammed together on wooden planks. Food was thin soup and a scrap of bread. Work meant freezing mud, endless hours, and punishment for any sign of weakness.

As a doctor, Frankl began to notice something that did not fit the usual logic of survival. The strongest men often died first. Others who looked barely alive somehow endured.

People were not only dying from hunger or disease. They were dying because they had nothing left to live for.

The camp doctors even had a name for it. Give up illness.

It followed a pattern. A prisoner would stop washing. Then he would stop standing straight. Finally, he would do something that signaled the end. He would smoke his own ci******es.

Ci******es were currency. They could be traded for soup. Soup meant another day. When a man smoked his own cigarette, he was declaring that tomorrow no longer mattered.

Within days, he was gone.

Frankl remembered a line from Nietzsche. A person who has a reason to live can endure almost anything.

So prisoner 119,104 began a rebellion no guard could see.

Since his manuscript was gone, he rewrote it in his mind. While marching through snow in torn shoes, he imagined himself standing in a warm lecture hall, explaining the psychology of the camps to students who had not yet been born. His body was present. His mind refused to stay there.

He thought constantly of his wife. He did not know whether she was alive. Still, he spoke to her silently. He pictured her face. The love he felt became something solid inside him, untouched by barbed wire or blows.

He began to help others find their own reasons. He would kneel beside men who had collapsed and ask a simple question.

What is waiting for you?

One man spoke of a child in another country. Another of research left unfinished. Frankl reminded them that their lives still contained obligations, even here.

Sometimes that was enough to get them through one more roll call.

In April 1945, the camps were liberated.

Frankl emerged weighing eighty five pounds. His body was ruined, but he was alive.

Freedom brought the news he had feared. His wife was dead. His mother was dead. His father was dead. His brother was dead. Everyone he had stayed for was gone.

He was completely alone.

Instead of surrendering, he sat down and wrote.

He wrote with urgency, reconstructing the manuscript the N**is had destroyed, now shaped by what he had lived. In nine days, he finished a book he did not expect anyone to read.

Man’s Search for Meaning.

He wanted to publish it anonymously, signed only with his prisoner number. Publishers initially rejected it. They said it was too painful. They said the world wanted to move on.

But the book found readers anyway.

A widow found a reason to get out of bed. A ruined businessman found the will to begin again. A student on the edge of despair found a reason to stay.

The book spread across countries and generations. It sold millions of copies and was translated into dozens of languages. The Library of Congress later named it one of the most influential books in American history.

Frankl lived until 1997. He earned a pilot’s license in his sixties. He climbed mountains throughout his life. He remarried and raised a daughter. He built a life shaped by meaning rather than loss.

His legacy was never just the book.

It was the truth he carried back from the camps.

Everything can be taken from a human being. Possessions. Health. Family. Freedom.

But one thing remains.

The freedom to choose how you respond to what happens to you.

The N**is tried to reduce Viktor Frankl to a number. Instead, he transformed suffering into a lens that helped millions understand how to live.

We are not defined by what is done to us.

We are defined by what we choose to do with what remains.

18/01/2026

A hint of things to come....