Do You Know How to Be Yourself?
In the introduction to Free from Lies, Alice Miller describes a survey she commissioned in 2002 that asked 100 mothers at what age they thought “they might begin impressing the necessity of good behavior on their children by giving them…
“I Love You” is a Complete Sentence
This post is for each of my children: Luke, Bridget, Henry, Sam, Jack, and Stella. And it is the most important thing I have ever written. Three-and-a half years ago, I began a healing journey that would shake up all…
God, Love, Gratitude, and My Own Soul
My therapist told me that the reason I never stop trying to help people is that I keep hoping someone will help me. While she is absolutely right, there is more to the story, and it’s a funny thing, but…
An Unleashed Life
My husband refers to life prior to the Plandemic of 2020 as “The Before Times.” I think of my own life as being split in a similar way, with the point of divergence being February 2022, when I began reading…
Love is Not the Answer
Assuaging fear is, because we are all filled with it, even when—especially when—we tell ourselves that we’re afraid of nothing. In fact, the farther back in the closet we shove the fear, the more powerful it becomes, because it grows…
One Line Leads to This
Well, the post in my email inbox was only one line long and it intrigued me: “I really don’t like cagey people.” Celia Farber wrote it, and I had a feeling I knew exactly what she was talking about, so…
The Importance of Being Heard and Acknowledged
Yesterday I shared a few paragraphs from Alice Miller’s The Body Never Lies. Today you get different writers, but the focus is the same: the conflict between the unconscious mind and the conscious mind that threatens to break us. In What My…
Free Yourself
Early in life, we build cages to protect ourselves. From the inside they look the way Wonder Woman’s jet does from the outside: invisible. Sometimes other people see what we’ve built and furnished and comfortably live inside, but in order…
What State Do You Live In?
My writing used to be characterized by perfect first sentences. Dennis would marvel at the way I’d struggle until a deadline to write something, then, at the last minute, craft the perfect opening line and have all the other words…
What We Carry
The biggest digital camera I own, an Olympus E-M1X, is on my desk (it even has a flash attached) because I didn’t put away last night after downloading the memory card. I had brought the camera to my son’s place…
Are You Patient or Just Acting that Way?
Sitting at my computer with coffee still in my cup, I scrounged for a good title, telling myself all the while to just chill. You’ll probably change it anyway. That’s true, but I need to name the file so I…
Do You Speak a Dead Language?
“The source of life which you create lies in the power of the language which you have.” —Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building How many of us think about and analyze the language we have—the one we were given…
