Becoming conscious of your racial identity is a process that cannot be explored in darkness and isolation. In our experience, the process of challenging the myths of white superiority (whiteness) and Black inferiority (Blackness) has tremendous healing effects and the potential to create social equality. A few weeks ago, Paula and I facilitated our first in-person Getting the…
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…
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…
Many of us struggle with Validation and/or Validating others because we have a “Fear of Difference.” The fear comes from: The belief that there is a RIGHT way of seeing, describing, understanding, and valuing everything – i.e what is going on. The limited capacity to be aware that others are different, or to respect, appreciate, or…
Do you know what keeps conflict and the power struggle in place? Yep! Criticism. Criticism kills love. Criticism can kill a marriage. There is no such thing as constructive criticism in intimate relationships. When we criticize others we hurt them and we hurt ourselves. When we criticize our partner we freeze them in the very…
My husband walked out on me and our children six months ago. He sad he loved me but he was not in love with me, no passion, no spark, and no click. He said he was unhappy and felt I was too controlling. He also said he felt like he had a chain around his…
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…
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…
It is ugly! It hurts; it’s toxic; it’s destructive. It threatens our joy and it gets in the way of us deeply connecting with others. When I was gripped by it, I wanted to die because it made me feel that I wasn’t good enough. So for years I was engulfed by it. Men walk…