New Directions For Life

12/24/2025

Nothing more impressive and necessary: the willingness to engage in honest self-reflection. There is no growth without it and no practice more important, as this sharing demonstrates.

🫣 I'm so embarrassed to talk about this, but my kids remind me of it every. single. year. I can laugh about it now, but I wasn't laughing then.

As a young mom, I always got SUPER uptight right before the holiday. (Right about NOW.) I made detailed lists, big plans, and carefully stocked our pantry in advance for a huge Christmas Day feast.

One notorious day right before Christmas, I went to the cabinet to grab a stash of baking chocolate... only to find that my kids had found it and eaten most of it.

Apparently it had been "one of those days"—or I was in "one of those moods"—because I had a complete melt down right there in the middle of our kitchen. And I mean a bigger-than-your-toddler-or-teen's kind of tantrum.🔥

I don't remember if I ended up making the candy or not. I do remember my husband went to the store and bought more baking chocolate. But by that point, I was mortified by my behavior and had completely lost the urge to make Christmas treats. (I'm sure my kids were too scared to eat them, anyway.)

I hate to go on with the confessions, but I had a pattern of right-before-Christmas melt downs for quite a few years. Most episodes were just as ridiculous as the baking chocolate fit; but what seemed trivial in hindsight felt like the proverbial last straw in the moment.

Eventually, I became aware of the pattern and began doing a bit of self-reflection to figure out WHAT triggered my pre-holiday breakdowns.

In a nutshell, I desperately needed to silence the guilt-driven voice in my head and learn how to live from a place of grace and abundance.

🩷 Grace: I have a house full of people. Things are going to go wrong, go missing, or get messy. Expect it (and scale down the holiday plans).
🩷 Abundance: There's enough time to do what actually needs to be done, but NOT enough time to do everything. "Do what matters and forget the rest." (Emily Ley)

Guilt has always been my biggest nemesis, even at Christmas. But there's grace even for stressed-out, grumpy, over achievers.

(And it's been years since my last holiday tantrum, praise Jesus.)

Relatable? Drop a ❤︎ below so I know I'm not alone!

12/24/2025

…and, a danger to others.

The good news, however: This is where it all starts and where it all will end (if we ever decide to stop arguing/fighting with reality and the human condition at scale).

You were praised for keeping it together. For not crying. For being “the strong one”. Somewhere along the way, you learnt that the safest thing you could do with your feelings was bury them so deep even you could barely find them. Tears made her uncomfortable. Anger made you “ungrateful”. Sadness was “dramatic”. So you swallowed it all down; every hurt, every disappointment, every moment you should have been allowed to fall apart. On the outside, you looked composed. On the inside, your body was paying the price.

Unfelt feelings don’t disappear because you refuse to acknowledge them. They reroute. What you weren’t allowed to express started showing up as anxiety, insomnia, chronic fatigue, tension headaches, stomach issues, that constant tightness in your chest. Your nervous system has been holding everything you wouldn’t let yourself feel, like a pressure cooker with no release valve. You’re not “overly sensitive” for feeling unwell; you’re carrying years of emotional backlog that never had a safe way out.

Suppressing emotions is often framed as maturity; especially in toxic families. Staying quiet during chaos. Smiling through pain. Not reacting when you’re being disrespected. People call that “being the bigger person” or “not letting things get to you,” when what’s really happening is self-abandonment. You disconnect from your own experience so convincingly that even you start to believe nothing’s wrong. Meanwhile, your body keeps sending signals that something is very wrong and those signals get louder the longer they’re ignored.

Letting yourself feel doesn’t make you weak; it makes you honest. It’s the emotional equivalent of lancing a wound so it can heal instead of fester. That might look like crying when you’d usually shut down. Admitting, even just to yourself, “that really hurt me.” Feeling anger towards someone you were taught you’re not allowed to be angry with. At first, it can feel like you’re getting worse because everything you’ve been holding back starts to surface. In reality, it’s your system finally having a chance to move what has been stuck inside you for years.

You don’t owe anyone the performance of being “strong” if strong means silent and slowly sick. Your body has carried enough for you. The most courageous thing you can do now is let your emotions exist, be heard, be released, so you don’t have to keep sacrificing your health to maintain a lie.

12/23/2025

Heartbreaking the amount of times I’ve heard parents describe their children this way without having any idea of their role in creating said “laziness.” 😞

If your child suddenly stops trying, pause before calling it laziness.
Often, it’s a quiet sign of self-doubt growing inside them.
Children fear failing more than they fear effort.
Pressure makes them freeze, not improve.
What they need most is safety, not comparison.
Encouragement builds courage where criticism breaks it.
When effort feels safe, confidence returns.
See the fear. Support the child.
This is how resilience is gently rebuilt.

12/23/2025

When both parents stay grounded, the home feels safe. 🌟💕🏠

12/19/2025

Good analogy.

12/18/2025

Excellent examples and recommendations. And, “help with communication” is perhaps the most common reason for seeking therapy I’ve heard from couples. And in all cases, examples like these were unknown and unconsidered; however, once shown, most still could not apply them. Later I learned that most required more than education alone to employ these techniques.

A closer look reveals the necessary prerequisites that go beyond education: self-regulation and the capacity for vulnerability. And developing those capacites requires interpersonal work, not couples work or education alone, in almost all cases, in my experience.

12/13/2025

This ended up being longer than intended, but because a few people have inquired over the years (and I have not found a way to describe it quickly when asked), I felt the personal case history belonged in this post as well.

And because everyone on my caseload currently is using something within this repertoire of addictive-compulsive defense strategies, I knew I needed to do my best to comment on the subject more specifically than I have in past posts.

I hope those who read it will find it uniquely informative and helpful in understanding a commonly misunderstood topic.

Within a field largely astray, there are few individuals whose overall body of work has been of the caliber necessary to right the ship long…

12/13/2025

As a whole, the field has a long way to go; however, this level of awareness, which is increasing, is wonderful to see! And I often wonder how much I could have saved myself had such information and insight been so accessible when I was first trying to figure this stuff out decades ago…

12/04/2025

And… this is why not much happens, even still, despite knowing that the intellect has its limits, as many of these “experts” now admit.

This is all great, and then… you’ll get to the paragraph of lies: “Release isn’t dramatic…,” which is only true if the wounding wasn’t dramatic (HIGHLY unlikely if you’re seeking therapy). But, for everyone I’ve ever worked with who made lasting progress, the release was a painful, terrifying hellscape! Sorry, the real work is HARD, and there are no short-cuts!

It makes sense if you have spent years trying to understand what happened to you. When something overwhelms you, the mind believes that clarity will bring relief.

You replay moments. You look for patterns. You try to understand the story so you can finally feel free.

But here is a part of healing most people never hear: Even when you finally get the explanation you always wanted, peace doesn’t always arrive.

Someone can apologize. They can give you their reasons. They can tell you everything you wish you knew then. And you can still feel unsettled afterward.

That’s not because you are unforgiving. It’s because your system is still holding the impact.

Trauma often shows up in the body before you can put words to it. When something is too intense to process in the moment, the brain struggles to integrate it, and the body absorbs what the mind couldn’t hold.

Understanding can organize the story, but it may not release what got stuck in your physiology.

Insight brings clarity, but it doesn’t automatically undo the tension, fear, or activation your system learned to carry.

This is why healing isn’t just about knowing. It’s also about helping the body let go of what it’s been holding.

Through somatic awareness, memory processing, and other integrative practices, your system learns how to complete what it couldn’t complete at the time.

Release isn’t dramatic. It’s often slow, gentle, and felt in small shifts that tell the body the danger has passed.

So if understanding hasn’t freed you, nothing is wrong with you. Your system is asking for a kind of support that reaches both the mind and the body.

When the story makes sense and the body can finally release what it carried, healing becomes possible in a different way.

11/26/2025

…and almost all of the “experts,” including the highly regarded ones, will tell you that talking about it is ill advised and re-traumatizing. 🤔

Secrecy, silencing, and repression keep trauma going. It affects every aspect of everyone's life in the entire family, and it ripples out from there.

Talking about it is the only way to make it stop, and empathy, compassion, and validation are crucial. They heal our nervous systems.

11/19/2025

As true as the sunrise. Now, that said, I recognize something here that I did for far too long with clients: I didn’t fully describe what it meant to “face,” which means accept and feel, and back the then, sometimes a gentle argument would ensue which went something like this:

Me: “you have to feel it.”
Client: “I am.”
Me: “no you’re not.”

What I later realized was that they were recognizing the feeling without expression and suppressing that aspect of feeling, and clearing emotional material requires the direct encounter with the full, physical experience of the emotional material, and that’s the only type of “facing” (intellectual alone will not do it for long by itself), that leads to stopping the passing down to future generations. And, it’s true: there is nothing harder in life!

It sounds harsh — and it is.

Because this work isn’t gentle. It asks you to look at the parts of yourself you’d rather ignore.

The anger that comes too quickly.
The control that shows up when fear creeps in.
The silence you learned to survive with.
The wounds you carry from when you were small.

And if you don’t face them — not blame them, not hate them, but face them — they don’t disappear.

They simply pass down, shape the tone of your voice, guide your reactions, become the lens through which you see your child.

Your child doesn’t just inherit your smile.

They inherit your patterns.
Your fears.
Your unfinished business.

That’s why this work matters so much.

Not to be perfect. Not to “fix” yourself.
But to pause long enough to ask: Is this mine? Or am I about to hand it to them, too?

Because when you dare to meet your pain with honesty, your child gets something different...

They get a parent who chooses awareness over autopilot.
A home where emotions are felt, not feared.
A legacy that doesn’t pass on the hurt unexamined.

So no — we don’t have to be flawless.
But we do have to be brave.

Because the things we avoid...
They don’t vanish.
They just get handed down.

And our children deserve better than that.

They deserve us. Whole, aware, evolving.

One conscious choice at a time. ❤️

Inside Parenting