Toggling from Calm to Crazy
How We Toggle from Calm to Crazy I’m fascinated by how quickly we humans can toggle from calm to crazy — and back again. We’re calm one minute, and crazy the next. We can toggle back to calm as well, though it happens less often. Even though it can happen quickly, once we get our […]
An Old Friend I’ve Never Met
Online Friend The video platform Zoom, which probably saved the world from a much-worse-than-it-was economic meltdown, has brought a strange and wonderful phenomenon to life. This may have happened to you. You “meet” someone via Zoom and get to know them through repeated contact. It doesn’t take long before you feel like you’ve spent enough […]
I Wish I Felt Well Enough to Enjoy This Beautiful Day
“I wish I felt well enough to enjoy this beautiful day.” — That was my first low-mood thought of the morning… ten minutes after a strong thunder shower swept the sky clear of anything but blue. The humidity was gone, the temperature was in the high seventies and there was a cool, fresh breeze. And […]
Identity After Retirement: More Than What You Did
“This is the morning view from my own front yard — a place that reminds me daily that we are more than what we’ve done.” Without having looked for it, I seem to have drawn clients who are either nearing retirement or have recently retired. As much as people look forward to retirement, when it […]
Patience is a Form of Surrender
For the last four-plus months, life has placed me in a master class about patience. I’ve had to admit my expectation about how long, debilitating, and painful knee replacement surgery recovery was going to be had nothing to do with the reality I’ve been experiencing. And I’ve had to repeatedly readjust my expectations. When is […]
Your Imaginary Self
The Self We Think We Are There’s a “person” you’re intimately familiar with, probably more familiar to you than any other. An Imaginary self. Strangely, as real and ever-present as this “person” seems, this creature doesn’t exist in real life. It only exists as a thought—one you likely spend a great deal of time with. […]
Which is more Interesting? The Historical You? Or the Emerging You?
During a talk with a client, it occurred to me that, like many of us, she was a prisoner to the way she’d learned to think about herself. In other words, she’d spent a lifetime believing a self-image, that like all self-images had almost nothing to do with who she really is. It was obvious […]
Do You Know Exactly What You’re Looking For?
Do you know what it is you’re looking for in your life? It’s a strange question to ask, but what’s stranger still is that we often don’t have any idea how to answer the question. The closest we can come is often some version of, “I’m looking for something different from what I have; something that will make me feel better than I do right now.”
What if Anger is the Only Emotion You Can Feel? (Part Two)
In part one of this blog, I wrote about how when anger is your primary emotion (as it is for a lot of people) it cuts you off from the world, and from the best parts of yourself. I also talked about how anger can only arise from one source. The source is fear, and whether we call it by that name, or by any of its other name (anxiety, insecurity, etc) anger isn’t possible with a substrate of fear.
What if Anger is the Only Emotion You Can Feel? (Part One)
Something very familiar caught my attention in a public space the other day. I watched someone get very angry over what seemed like very little. The place where I saw this was crowded enough that I was able to watch this person over a period of time without drawing attention to myself.