“Stop comparing your insides to someone else’s outsides.” On Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., folks seem to live a charmed and successful lives. We compare ourselves to our family members, colleagues, friends, neighbors and folks we don’t know. These comparisons range from financial, physical appearance, professional achievements, relationships and even more specific goals. Comparing ourselves has…
The “shadow” is a psychological term for everything we cannot see in ourselves. The shadow side are essential aspects of our personality that we have learned to hide or suppress in order to protect ourselves. I understood how important knowing my shadow was when I began my journey in 12-step recovery and again in my clinical…
There seems to be a common misconception that when we stop drinking and using, out of nowhere we will become these perfect people. Alcoholics and addicts (non-alky’s too) have an inner need for perfection. From time to time in recovery, I hear this thought-process: “I was only bad when I was out there drinking and…
Hello Friends! It’s time to make 2018 a year to Reimagine Relationships! New Year’s resolutions are ultimately about our relationship with ourselves and with others. Is improving your relationship on your list of New Year’s resolutions, but you don’t know how to make that happen? What if the relationship you have with yourself is the…
Merry Christmas Friends! Many times the way forward is to look back, to read and study the wisdom of prophetic leaders whose brilliance opens us to the limitless possibilities and potentialties that reside within and between us. On Christmas day nearly a half-century ago, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood before his congregation at Ebenezer…
In the previous blog I began a conversation that addresses the complexity of the relational dynamics that lead to affairs, one that I believe is caring and compassionate for everybody involved. I do not condone infidelity, deception or betrayal of any flavor. Infidelity is painful and messy; however, as a culture, I think we…
Put yourself in this scenario: your wife leaves you alone in the room while she goes and takes a shower. You’re sitting there doing nothing until you notice it: her cell phone. It’s just sitting there innocently, right next to you. And she’s in the shower, so there’s no chance she’ll walk in. And you’ve…
It’s challenging to learn new talking and listening boundaries in recovery. In fact, it’s evolutionary. Our efforts to learn how to talk and listen to the people we want to be intimate is generally interrupted by internal signals within that get transmitted to us from our past. Many of us read these signals as we…
Join us for this *FREE community event where we will be discussing how covert dynamics of shame and grandiosity drive the old paradigm of marriage/relationship and make intimacy virtually impossible. Participants will also learn practical tools to help restore the intimacy between men and women. The idea is not to “repeal and replace” the entire…