About twenty years ago, before there was the Internet, before I owned a computer, I had rich, complicated and sometimes frustrating friendship with a woman named Barbara. I have no idea what happened to her in the years since I knew her, and appropriately enough, I cannot find her online anywhere. Back when I knew […]
Learning to love yourself can be a messy, painful business in general, but even more painful and seemingly impossible if you were abused or neglected as a child. If you grew up in this way, you grew to believe that certain parts of yourself were unlovable, undesirable, even disgusting or dangerous. When you are raised […]
When I was too little to appreciate the message, my mom read me the Hans Christian Andersen story The Fir Tree. It’s a story that drives its point home in a dark and visceral manner. It left an ugly impression on me as a child, but as an adult I can appreciate the message in […]
We used to have unruly Dalmatians, one in particular who was extremely insecure and nervous. She was aggressive and she barked a lot and sometimes she would bite. We spent quite a lot of time, energy, and money on dog training. Our trainer told us that in the world of dogs, the Alpha dog does […]
When I see a client for the first time in my therapy practice, I ask questions about their daily life and habits to help both of us get started. If a person spent weeks in advance of therapy thinking over these questions and trying to address any issues they illuminate, therapy would get a nice […]
When I met my husband, he was going through a divorce. He’d recently moved with multiple pets into an old, crumbling house that had been a college rental for years. The pets were insane and both the house and yard were a wreck which nobody had attended to for years. The hedges were overgrown, the […]
I’ve written extensively about the silent treatment on this blog. I wrote my first post about it because I was receiving the silent treatment myself, and I felt that my energy would be better spent writing about it than trying to get the attention of the person who was giving it to me. The person […]
When I was a little girl, probably about 8 years old, my friend and I were running around in the grocery store, completely oblivious to our surroundings and the people in those surroundings. We were tearing through the aisles laughing loudly in a fun, wild bubble of our own, when suddenly from outside of our […]
Years ago, a friend and I were walking across a street because the light was green and we had that little walking symbol saying it was our turn to walk. Midway through the intersection, the car we were walking in front of started forward for no apparent reason; the light had not changed. We yelled […]
When I was in college, I shared a house with roommates, some of us a bit crunchy and wacky, on a street where we were the only college students. The man across the street from us sent a clear message that he did not want us there, from the moment we moved in. He posted […]