Clearview Counseling

11/19/2025

Stoic Reflection on Grief:

You do not lose someone once.
You lose them in fragments —
in doorways and photographs,
in the sound of a laugh that isn’t there.
You lose them when mornings come slowly
and the quiet is louder than any storm.
Grief doesn’t knock.
It remembers where you live
and lets itself in.

You do not lose someone once.
You lose them every time the world continues
as if nothing changed —
when everything changed.
Grief hides behind familiar corners,
waiting for your guard to drop
so it can strike without warning.
It does not fight fair.
It hits when you are tired
and whispers that you deserve the pain.

You do not lose someone once.
You lose them in birthdays with no candles,
in dinners with empty chairs,
in victories with no one to call.
You lose them in moments of joy —
because joy was once shared.
And the heart remembers what it used to have.

But grief is not a punishment.
It is the cost of having loved.
It is the echo of loyalty.
And one day — not quickly, not easily —
you learn not to outrun the waves
but to stand in them.
To breathe while the water rises.
To say “Yes, it hurts… and yes, I will live anyway.”

There is no end to grief —
but there is growth within it.
You learn not how to forget,
but how to carry.
How to speak their name without drowning.
How to live so the love outlasts the loss.

You do not lose someone once.
You lose them again and again,
until one day you realize —
you are still here.
And that is its own kind of courage.

Hold the line.

11/18/2025

Stoic thought of the day: (BJJ themed)

“Vice and abundance are easy to get. The road is smooth and begins beside you. But the gods have put sweat between us and virtue—on a road long, rough, and steep.”- Hesiod

On the mats, you learn quickly: the easy path teaches you nothing. Anyone can show up, slap hands, and cruise through rounds with weaker partners. Anyone can chase comfort, avoid pressure, tap early, blame fatigue, or pick the drills they already feel good at. That’s the smooth road.

But the climb toward virtue? That’s found under pressure. Inside the choke. Pinned beneath a heavier opponent, your lungs burning, your mind begging for a way out. Round after round of being the nail.

Jiu-jitsu humbles the arrogant, breaks the lazy, and sharpens the willing. You don’t “earn” virtue—you bleed for it. You grind it out from bad positions, inch by inch, breath by strained breath.

So choose the harder roll.
Seek the rounds that scare you.
Climb the steep road of discipline where your ego dies but your skill evolves.

On the mats, just as in life, vice is the easy escape.
Virtue is the pressure test. And the gods always side with the one who refuses to quit the fight.

Hold the line.

11/10/2025

Stoic thought of the day:

“I should have liked to cure this disorder early… but now that it has been confirmed by time it cannot be beaten without a struggle.”- Seneca

Take a step. A small one. A pathetic one. A necessary one. The chains of addiction groan, pulling tight, trying to drag you back into the pit they call home. You take another step. Then another. You stumble so hard it feels like falling. But you drag your body forward inch by inch, minute by minute.

In contempt of the demon you fed for years, you move.In defiance of the hunger, you move.
In the slow gathering of strength, you move.

Vires acquirit eundo.

Hold the line.

11/06/2025

11/06/2025

Stoic thought of the day:

“We are only as sick as the secrets we keep.”-Recovery proverb

“Sin is not harmed by concealment. It only gathers strength.”- Augustine

“Beware of no man more than of yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.”- Charles Spurgeon

What we refuse to confront becomes what controls us. Paul’s confession in Romans feels too familiar : “I do what I hate.” It’s a quiet horror to realize your greatest opponent isn’t fate or fortune, but the part of yourself that keeps choosing the same trap with familiar relief. I’ve walked that path more than I want to admit. I’ve preached standards to myself like commandments, then marched straight into the very behaviors I swore off. Why? What steers the hand in the moment when the mind knows better?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the influence is usually the part of us we ignore. The wound we pretend healed. The addiction we deny. The emotion we don’t slow down enough to feel. The self we avoid because it doesn’t fit the story we prefer.

Asking the real questions means inviting answers that shatter whatever comfort we’ve made from denial. So most of us never ask. We drift. We repeat. We drown by inches in choices that look small from far away but feel like chains when they tighten. Willful blindness is easier than disciplined vision, but it costs far more.

If anything in me is ever going to change, I have to stop pretending the old structure can stay standing. Some walls must be torn down. Some doors must be welded shut. Some shadows must be faced until they lose their teeth.

To build a new thing, I must first unmake the version of myself that keeps sabotaging the future I claim to want.

Hold the line. But hold it like your life depends on it, because in the quiet places where no one sees you, it does.

11/03/2025

Stoic thought of the day:

“We have much suffering to get through.”-Rilke

“Some days I get dragged through hell. Other days I walk it like I own a key.”- Unknown

“We draw maps of pain; but the roads of enduring are walked alone.”- Sylvia Plath

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”- Albert Camus

Suffering isn’t poetic when you’re in it. It’s not noble or clean. It’s wet-grit misery, soul consuming and waking up at 3 a.m. with the taste of fear on your tongue. It’s trembling hands and hollow prayers. It’s telling yourself I’ll be fine while a part of you mutters, Liar.

The strange thing: suffering does not hunt you to kill you. It stalks you to wake you. To carve out all the fragile bits that never belonged, to peel away the weakness that survived by hiding and to leave something new.

Nobody comes out of hell the same. Some people crawl. Some walk. A rare few march out with fire in their eyes and a spine built like iron spear-rails. Those are the ones who learned something on the burning floor. Who stared down into the darkness and embracing their past and determined a new future.

Suffering is not a curse. It is a corridor. Long, narrow, and echoing with the ghosts of who you once were. You step through it. You breathe though it. You bleed through it. You emerge.

We have much suffering to get through.

Hold the line.

10/28/2025

Stoic thought of the day:

“No citizen has a right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training… for what a disgrace it is for a man to grow old without ever seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.” - Socrates

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire.”- Seneca

You are afraid of dying — but come now, is the life you lead really any different from being dead?”
- Seneca

There’s a ghost that lives in the mirror. Not a specter of the dead, but of the man you might’ve been.
The one forged in sweat and discipline, in mornings you didn’t hit snooze, in nights you didn’t drink away. He waits behind the glass, watching you soften, watching the years carve weakness where there should have been proof that you lived with purpose.
You were given muscle and sinew, bone and breath, a machine built for resistance. To never test it is to disgrace the gift. The Stoics called it virtue through struggle; the body was never just flesh, but rather a proving ground.
So train.
Not for vanity, but defiance. Not for youth, but remembrance — to remind yourself that there’s still time and breath and resistance. Because the real horror isn’t death. It’s looking back and realizing you lived like a ghost long before you died.

Hold the line.

10/13/2025

10/09/2025

The horror isn’t in the chains. The horror is in realizing you forged them link by link with your own hands.

The “why” doesn’t matter—the origin story won’t loosen what binds you. What matters is the crawl, the struggle, blind and gasping, dragging yourself forward inch by inch while the thing inside screams for you to stay.