New Directions For Life

11/07/2025

Yes, if it’s actual therapy, which is also an alchemical process. Therapy (and grief work) can only happen when there is both a therapist who is able and willing to offer it, and someone else who is willing to accept the help and risk entering that wild, feral territory with the therapist as a stabilizing presence and compassionate witness.

Because these two things must come together, sadly, therapy isn’t a guaranteed outcome from “going to therapy.” But therapy—when it happens—is a truly awesome and most incredible experience!

Perhaps in the end, all therapy is grief therapy.

Not only grief for that which we have lost, but for everything that has remained unlived.

For the love we needed but never received.
For the words we never learned to speak.
For the instincts we had to bury.
For the creativity that was shamed or forgotten.
For the joy we could not trust.

And also the grief that moves through wider, ancestral and collective fields — the unlived life of our culture, the losses our lineages never wept, the ruptures our world has not yet metabolized, the grief of the Earth herself, aching in our bones and breath.

Grief lives in the soma — in the belly, heart, throat, and nervous system. It takes up residence as tears, as numbness, compression, exhaustion, emptiness, as wild undomesticated rage.

As a figure in a dream, a wave of longing, a homesickness that has no map. Its timeline is not found in psychiatric manual or insurance panels, nor is it found in disembodied therapies and spiritual techniques.

The heart is endless and grief may be a companion for the duration of a life. It is not so much a process as a non-linear, unfolding partner. It moves not by way of straight line, but by circle and spiral.

It is an invitation into relationship, one that is alive with the activity of death and rebirth, washing us out from the inside and preparing the field for new life.

Grief is not an obstacle to the path. It is the path.

10/29/2025

Like everything, positive psychology has its place (sports, stuck in traffic, and my favorite: goal-setting on long backpacking trips where I wanted to quit miles ago), but it’s used too often where it does not belong (i.e. almost always in the therapy room), as this illustration wisely suggests.

👀👀👀👀

10/29/2025

Excellently stated!

The root of control is fear.

And when we're trying to control it's because of the fear that comes with the vulnerability of exposing the parts of ourselves that we don't accept or that are in pain.
It's self-protective.

And we don't accept those parts of ourselves because somewhere along the way we were taught not to; that part wasn't accepted by someone else and we learned that part of ourselves needed to be hidden.
We were shamed out of our humanity.

And that "someone" could just be the larger narrative society is always telling women about how we need to be thin and "nice."

Or it could be a parent who mocked or shamed or ignored you for crying.

Or it could be that you didn't get any love, validation or attention unless you were getting straight As and being the BEST at everything.

Somewhere along the way we learned to reject parts of ourselves; important, human, normal, completely lovable parts of ourselves.

We learned to reject curiosity, anger, sadness, femininity, masculinity, sexuality, creativity, tenderness, being loud, being vocal, being "weird," - there's an endless list of things we were shamed out of expressing.

But if you want to release your need to control, you have to learn how to safely get in touch with the parts of yourself that you're trying to hide.

The EQ School can also send daily texts to your phone - which is great if you're trying to spend less time on social media but still want pointed reminders that help you check in with yourself.
https://hdly.me/theeqschool

10/28/2025

Amen!🙏

Choosing to heal when you have no blueprint for what healthy looks like requires a courage that people from functional families cannot fathom. Your narcissistic mother never modelled emotional regulation, so you're teaching yourself to feel without drowning. She never demonstrated healthy boundaries, so you're learning to say no without the guilt she weaponised. She never showed you what secure attachment looks like, so you're building it from scratch using therapy, books and the terrifying work of trusting your own judgment. Like an architect designing a house having only lived in ruins, you're constructing something beautiful with no reference point except knowing what didn't work.

The bravery isn't just in choosing to heal, it's in trusting that you're capable of becoming something your lineage never produced. Every woman before you in your family line likely replicated some version of the dysfunction because it was all they knew, passing down trauma like heirlooms nobody wanted but everyone accepted. You're the pattern interrupter, the cycle breaker, the one who looked at generations of emotional unavailability and manipulation and said "this ends with me." That decision doesn't just heal you; it heals backwards and forwards through your family tree, liberating children you haven't even had yet from inheriting wounds that were never theirs to carry.

Becoming your own example means parenting yourself with the compassion she withheld, validating your own experiences when nobody else will and showing up for yourself with consistency she never managed. You're simultaneously the wounded child who needs healing and the wise parent providing it; holding both roles because nobody else volunteered for the job. This internal reparenting feels impossible some days because you're giving from an empty well, yet somehow you keep showing up, keep choosing growth over familiar dysfunction, keep believing you deserve better even when her voice in your head insists you don't.

What makes this particularly heroic is that healing without a model means countless mistakes, wrong turns and moments where you question whether you're doing it right. There's no instruction manual for unlearning everything you were taught about love, worth and relationships. You stumble through therapy modalities, try boundary scripts that feel foreign on your tongue and practise self-compassion that initially feels like lying. But every awkward attempt, every imperfect boundary, every moment you choose differently than she did, these are acts of creation, building a version of yourself that your family system never imagined possible.

You are simultaneously the student and the teacher, the survivor and the guide, the one who needed an example and the one becoming it. That's not just brave, that's transformative work that ripples beyond your individual healing into every relationship you'll ever have, every child you might raise, every person who witnesses your journey and recognises their own possibility within it. You're not just healing yourself; you're becoming the ancestor your lineage needed but never had.

10/28/2025

Very well articulated, and quite sadly… very common as well. I would add that this isn’t a dynamic exclusive to partners, as I’ve seen it with parents as well; in fact, that is often a common precursor to finding one’s self in this horrible bind within a significant other relationship. As the wise, late therapist, Sheldon Kopp said, “We will often choose known misery over unfamiliar insecurity.”

10/15/2025

Wise words and excellent advice.

Today, about 50% of the requests I get are from parents looking for therapy for their child, usually a teenager. When I tell them I will do my best to help their child by working with them directly (and not their child directly), I rarely get takers, but, I happen to have two right now who both recently said some version of, “My kid seems so much better now,” with a bit of shock and surprise as to how it could work that way. This is what I’m doing/what is happening in those cases. 🙂

Parenting becomes softer when you heal the child within you.”🩷

10/13/2025

At a foundational level, many people fail to realize progress because evaluation of one’s strategies stops at intention. There are many areas where this can happen, but I encounter it most when working with parents—the majority of whom are very well intended but lack awareness and/or capacity regarding the impact of their strategies and better courses of action. Here, the calculous is generally: "Because I mean well, I must be doing okay, and certainly not harming anyone if I mean well."

For example, most parents I’ve worked with carry concerns surrounding chores and schoolwork, and they engage in practices that are intended to motivate in those domains. More often than not, however, the motivational strategies end up producing unnecessary psychic harm that manifests as increased symptoms of depression and anxiety, which only further decreases motivation in the process. Often, when this happens, instead of initially seeking to understand why the outcome was opposite of what they intended, they increase the same efforts that didn't work initially. If nagging and criticism didn't work the first time as the strategies of choice, perhaps more will, and the hole gets dug deeper.

Where the majority of psychic injuries are concerned—as will be evidenced by corresponding mental-health symptoms—intention will not the problem, the capacity and/or the strategies employed will be. Unfortunately, moving our evaluation to outcome is very difficult business because we may find one of the most uncomfortable of all truths there: that we are capable of causing significant harm, even when we do not intend to do so, and even to those that matter most to us in life. To date, I have not found many pains greater than when we catch sight of perpetrating harmful behaviors against those who matter most to us (which is also why we unconsciously prefer to focus on intention over outcomes). But it is equally the case that this is the only capacity that leads to any genuine growth, change, and liberation, and also the only way to begin unwinding the intergenerational patterns of traumatic wounding that continue to plague modern-day humans.

10/12/2025

I’ve been granted the high honor of officiating two weddings. And while the most recent one (a couple years ago) was among the scarier public moments of my life, the many teary-eyed compliments that followed left me feeling deeply touched and pleased with how it all went. However, despite the “success” of the event, and how incredibly special and touching the reception afterward was, I felt certain I would decline any future requests, should they come. Now that I’m more aware of the potential at stake, I hesitate.

It is also the case that I try and never recommend “good” books or books that I haven’t finished yet. I consider both a little wreckless. In a time with so many potential readings around any particular topic, only the excellent and necessary make my recommendations list in the narrow band of study where I’ve acquired some useful knowledge over the decades.

Well, after only 40-pages in to this one, here’s what I can say: 1) The first five chapters are worth the investment alone, and while those are all I could responsibly vouch for at present, I’ll be shocked if I don’t wholeheartedly endorse this work when I am finished. 2) Don’t be fooled by the title: I guarantee this is a book applicable to all—married or not—in a deeply troubled time such as ours. And 3) If I’m ever asked to be an officiant again, I might just say, “yes,” and if I do, it’ll certainly incorporate all that I now know was missing from the last two opportunities.

And with that, I highly recommend this cultural masterpiece from one of the few elders alive in our time!

Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work

10/12/2025

Sounds true, and it is, but it also fails to describe what causes these opposing reactions and therefore is of little use as written.

Hurt people will hurt people until they develop sufficient skill with grief. This is a non-negotiable prerequisite in order to move from hurter to healer: I have yet to witness a single exception.

09/29/2025

09/28/2025

There are more, but here are three things you can count on: 1) time does NOT heal all wounds, 2) intention does NOT equal outcome, and 3) overreactions are always related to #1 and an invitation to locate and engage with the unmetabolized grief that will be found underneath every overreaction (hence the name).

I had been SO looking forward to this weekend, as it’s my favorite time of year, and particularly beautiful where I live. Yesterday started out terrible and was quickly going downhill with almost every attempt to make it better. A bike ride had been in the plans, and that didn’t happen. I knew today would offer another opportunity, but it didn’t matter and the disappointment was heavy and unshakable… much more so than it should have been (which, thankfully, I knew to be a clue to look deeper, asking myself the same question I’ve asked hundreds of times in the therapy room whenever I spot overreactions: “When was the first time you felt something similar?”

By evening I found it. When I was five, I missed Halloween/trick-or-treating. I was tired and fell asleep in my costume on the couch. My first best friend and neighbor had stopped by with his parents and a couple other kids to get me. My mom tried to wake me and couldn’t. I remember it well, despite all the excitement leading up to it, I couldn’t be brought to wakefulness and my mom decided to stop trying (given the constant chaos of home life, I’m sure she knew if I was that tired and could sleep, I should. When I woke the next morning, it was crystal clear what happened, and what it meant. I was devastated!

Like many parents, my mom meant well, and with no understanding or capacity for grief, she tried to sooth the pain instead of helping me process it, and despite being poor, she took me to the gas station and let me pick out three pieces of candy, which I knew to be a big deal. Sadly, it didn’t help, which only made it worse.

And so, I eventually found the root of the overreaction and the heavy disappointment that had been triggered from very long ago. But now, 43-years later, I could listen and honor what that five-year-old boy went through, this time offering back: “I feel your broken heart. It makes sense. That was a huge loss for a young boy and I’m sorry!”

Today’s ride was really special, and I carried a little less weight up the hill.

09/26/2025

Having just finished this, I went back and forth with whether or not to add it to the Resource Library. Overall, its excellent, with some chapters including more than 100 citations, and somewhere between 500 and 600 in total (I did not count them exactly), adding even more evidence to the growing mountain of data presented by other incredible research-based books like Gabor Mate’s recent one, The Myth of Normal.

Taken together, the data is overwhelmingly clear: the root cause of mental illness and addictions in almost every case are well known (there are a few, very rare exceptions), which offers a very necessary starting point for getting out of this mess, and while this book offers some very good personal exploritory exercises, most of these authors and books (and certainly these two), don’t have much of a solid grasp or subsequent recommendations regarding what has to happen next (now that the damage has been done), and instead offer starting points more than ending points when it comes to “the work.”

I guess thats okay, because the incredible work they did provides a necessary starting point as mentioned, and years ago that prospect alone prevented me from writing mine for a while (as this type of research-based writing is a huge undertaking), and with these out there now, I feel able to let that objective go and focus on what is still mostly missing from the conversation. But because writing any book is harder than I’d like to admit, I still get upset that someone else hasn’t filled in the holes so I can quit the effort again! 🙂

Lastly, in fairness, there’s understandable reason why this stuff stays hidden, even to these incredible, well-meaning authors. It is devastating and very difficult to reconcile with such painful truths, and interestingly, this author spoke to that with what he bravely penned as the final paragraph of the book. As such, yes, it’s worth the read and will be added to the library when I update it next.

https://www.amazon.com/They-You-Up-Survive-Family/dp/1569243239/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2P3B4U7Y7ZDYI&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hGDkfLihU3QgZd3MRTaGKq0BesPmod-v-12GASIBOJxqjt1sy3m0btiW74v_TzPtKXEVNA7iaS0VlVmZnzbwR-uRVo_arCht5_ivDxss_TE.a8cPCW4lccbsCnmQQ6ppvi_IT14qyiNxCvQzphDadsk&dib_tag=se&keywords=they+f**k+you+up&qid=1758910432&s=books&sprefix=they+f**k+you+up%2Cbooks%2C85&sr=1-1tlnfnme

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