I want to thank you—for all the support and belief you’ve shown me this year. It has meant the world to me and I deeply appreciate you. I am feeling extraordinarily grateful to be able to share my thoughts, fears, successes, confusion and other exciting experiences with you. It’s been a hard year! We’ve seen hearts…
Thich Nhat Hahn wrote, “Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.” In the conundrum of being human…
I have worked with Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) throughout my professional career as a therapist and I am an Adult Child. Today, I want to offer adult children and those who love them a positive message … a message of hope. Adult children are typically sensitive folks, sensitive to the feelings of others, loyal, humble…
After the initial parabola of passion, infidelity can be a crashing into a particular kind of hell. A roller-coaster ride that burns our heart. Infidelity scalds us with guilt and grief in the after-shock of transcendent bliss. In virtually every marriage code in virtually every society, infidelity is unequivocally prohibited. In a lot of places…
I was 25 years old when I met the original Reggie; it a was time when “just staying away from a drink” was not enough to soothe my incarcerated spirit; and the psychic and emotional pain grabbing me by the throat. In the turbulence of confusion, I didn’t know what to do or what to…
I am swinging to the other side of the relationship pendulum in this article because I think it’s important to talk about how we are being seduced into believing that our holy dance is a dance of Fear. Well, it’s not. However, there are impulses and evil forces in contemporary society promoting separations rather than…
We live in a culture that is skeptical and talks cynically about love relationships as if it can be compartmentalized into a neat and unchanging … static life. Best-selling books with titles like, “Getting the Love You Want,” mirror a fast-food culture where love and relationships are commodities that can be ordered, gotten, or kept. We use…
When sexual abusers and perpetrators of sexual assault are exposed, they quickly go into damage control mode. Damage control tactics helps them reinforce their own denial and distance them from the accuser’s pain. Damage control also helps them to protect their families and their family’s image of who they are in a myopic way as if the…
Do you see patterns? Do you see your patterns? Do you see how helpful those patterns were at one time? Do you see the patterns that are working against you? Do you see the patterns tripping up your relationship? Old patterns can emerge within a conversation prompted by a simple glance at a watch. What drives…