Posts tagged with “healing”
When You Lose a Loved One to Suicide: Healing from the Guilt and Trauma
“You will survive, and you will find purpose in the chaos. Moving on doesn’t mean letting go.” ~Mary VanHaute
I was ten years old when I discovered the truth. He didn’t fall. He wasn’t pushed. It wasn’t an accident.
He jumped.
Suicide isn’t a concept easily explained to a six-year-old, much less her younger siblings, so I grew up believing that my father’s drowning was an unfortunate freak accident. It was “just one of those things,” the cruel way of the world, and there was nothing anyone could have done about it.
This explanation more than satisfied me and, other …
The Fascinating Reason We Sabotage Ourselves and Hold Ourselves Back
“Sometimes we self-sabotage just when things seem to be going smoothly. Perhaps this is a way to express our fear about whether it is okay for us to have a better life.” ~Maureen Brady
Have you ever decided to try something new—like getting into a new relationship or doing something that would help you experience success in your career/mission or offer you more vibrant health and well-being—and you were able to follow through for a bit, but then you stopped? Was this self-sabotage? Was it procrastination?
Did you know that self-sabotage and procrastination can be survival mechanisms, and …
Learning to Honor My Grief When the World Has Become Desensitized to Loss
“The answer to the pain of grief is not how to get yourself out of it, but how to support yourself inside it.” ~Unknown
Since losing my husband Matt over eight months ago to cancer at the age of just thirty-nine, I have noticed so many changes happening within me, and one of those changes is a fierce sense of protectiveness that I have over my grief.
We are living in a unique time in history. The world has turned upside down due to the coronavirus pandemic, and at the time of writing this the UK had just passed 100,000 …
How I Finally Healed When I Stopped Believing a Diagnosis of Incurable
“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” ~Rumi
The quarantine has felt oddly familiar. That’s because I spent thirteen years largely homebound with a mysterious, viral-like illness. It even started with a cold on a flight back from Asia in 2005.
My nose was an open faucet, and my head felt like the cumulus clouds outside my window. When I returned to San Diego, I was so weak and exhausted, I could hardly get out of bed. My brain and body were on fire.
I couldn’t focus or recall names of coworkers. Although I’d previously been …
How I Reclaimed My Life When I Felt Numb and Unhappy
“All appears to change when we change.” ~Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The biggest life-changing moment in my life would have looked unremarkable to an outsider looking in.
I was at a point in my life (my late twenties) where everything seemed to look good on paper. I had a great job, I was living in downtown Seattle, and I enjoyed the live music scene. Aside from not being in a relationship, I thought I had “arrived.”
The only problem was, I was miserable, and I barely acknowledged it. A part of me knew that I wasn’t happy, but I tried to …
How to Get Through Your Darkest Days: Lessons from Addiction and Loss
“You are never stronger…than when you land on the other side of despair.” ~Zadie Smith
In the last years of my twenties, my life completely fell apart.
I’d moved to Hollywood to become an actor, but after a few years in Tinsel Town things weren’t panning out the way I hoped. My crippling anxiety kept me from going on auditions, extreme insecurity led to binge eating nearly every night, and an inability to truly be myself translated to a flock of fair-weather friends.
As the decade wound to a close, I stumbled upon the final deadly ingredient in my toxic …
7 Things You Need to Know If You’re Going Through a Painful Breakup
Last year my uncle died shortly after someone I love went through a pretty traumatic breakup. I love all my family, but I wasn’t really close to my uncle and didn’t know him all that well, so I was more grieving for my mother and aunt than myself.
As I bore witness to the deep pain around me, I started thinking about the expectations we often hold of people when grieving a breakup, as opposed to grieving a death. We often expect them to feel sad for a while and then just get over it. Because the person didn’t die, …
The Magic of Rewriting Our Most Painful Stories
“When you bring peace to your past, you can move forward to your future.” ~Unknown
It amazes me how things that happen in our childhood can greatly impact our adult lives. I learned the hard way that I was living my life with a deep wound in my heart.
My father was a very strict man with a temper when I was little, starting when I was around seven years old.
He had a way of making me feel like all my efforts were not enough. If I scored an 8 in a math exam, he would say, “Why 8 …
Congruent Depression: What It Is and How to Overcome It
“Not all of the depression that people experience is an illness… Unlike clinical depression, congruent depression is actually appropriate to your situation.” ~Dr. K
Every day is the same. Every day I’m stiff. Every day I’m tired. These are the two main things that people with fibromyalgia deal with. It’s been like that for a couple of years now. Six to be exact.
I’ve faced so much hardship all at one time: no job, no income, no friends, dealing with an emotionally immature/narcissistic mother, and not living where I want to live. All of this is making me sleep poorly.…
He Broke My Heart But Taught Me These 5 Things About Love
“Sometimes the only closure you need is the understanding that you deserve better.” ~Trent Shelton
I’ll never forget the day we met.
It was a classic San Francisco day. The sky was a perfect cerulean blue. The sun sparkled brightly.
I ventured from my apartment in the Haight to Duboce Park to enjoy the Saturday. Dogs chased balls in the dog park. Friends congregated on the little hill. They giggled, listened to music, and ate picnic food. Kites flew high in the breeze. Adults tossed Frisbees in their t-shirts and bare feet.
And I sat, bundled up in my scarf, …
If You’re Insecure and Afraid of Rejection Like Me…
“How brave the moon shines in her skin; outnumbered by the stars.” ~Angie Welland-Crosby
I have this reoccurring dream where I am about to teach a yoga class. I stand to teach, and no one is paying any attention to me. They are all distracted or in deep conversation with one another and have no interest in engaging in the class.
As I begin, one by one the students get up and leave. I am mortified and discouraged, though I continue to teach anyway.
I wake up from the dream with a sinking feeling in my stomach and heaviness in …
What If There’s Beauty on the Other Side of Your Pain?
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” ~Albert Einstein
“I don’t want to live anymore. I don’t want to be here. I can’t do this. It hurts too much. It’s too hard.”
I’m curious how many times I’ve heard these words over my lifetime. From different people, ages, genders, ethnicities, and walks of life. The words the same, the heaviness no different from one to the next. Hopelessness has a specific tone attached to it. Flat, low, and empty.
Being the child of a parent who committed suicide, there is a …
Healing from the Conflicting Loss of a Difficult Parent
“Deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.” ~Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
I had a tumultuous and interesting relationship with my father. He was a strong, proud man in his spirit as well as in his physical appearance. In my younger years, I …
Tips from a Former Addict: How I Made a Change for Good
I was a drug addict. Yes, I did it all. No, my childhood was not full of abuse, I was actually a pretty lucky kid, and I had it no worse and no better than anyone else, except for maybe some “daddy issues.”
I am not much for blame. I know who was smoking, sniffing, and popping, and it wasn’t the bad angel on my shoulder who made me do it, it was just me.
I can give you the exact reason why I started doing drugs. I was afraid to just be myself, simple enough. Everyone else’s thoughts …
The Unexpected Impact of Growing Up with a Difficult Mother
“Difficulties in your life do not come to destroy you, but to help you realise your hidden potential and power, let difficulties know that you too are difficult.” ~Abdul Kalam
Do you sometimes daydream that your mom is gone, and all your troubles disappear along with her?
I used to imagine that, too.
When Mom was in intensive care, swaying between life and death, I sat outside, shell-shocked, trembling all over my body, trying to comprehend the doctor’s words: “Her condition is critical, and only time will show if she will make it. I’m sorry.”
For a moment, I …
Hate Your Life? 4 Ways to Boost Your Happiness
“Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” ~Desmond Tutu
I hate my life. Does this statement ring true to you at all? Do you feel like you’re at rock bottom? The good news is, it might not be as bad as you fear.
I spent a lot of time feeling afraid of everything.
I had an emotional collapse, and it made life suddenly seem terrifying. What had happened? Had the town I was living in changed? Had my country suddenly become different?
No, I had changed the filter through which I saw …
If You Think There’s Something Wrong with You…
The root cause of suffering for many of us is believing that there’s something’s wrong with us. Psychiatrists’ and therapists’ offices are filled with people who are carrying this false belief, most often stemming from traumatic or painful childhood experiences, or even people telling us this directly.
Sometimes we inferred this idea because we were treated badly as children and/or we didn’t get our physical or emotional needs met. Perhaps we were called selfish or bad because we “asked for too much,” or we were told we couldn’t have what we wanted because we didn’t “earn or deserve it.”
Maybe …
Healing from Abuse and Reclaiming My Dreams
TRIGGER WARNING: This post mentions sexual abuse and may be triggering to some people.
“Along the way I stopped into a coffee shop. All around me normal, everyday city types were going about their normal, everyday affairs…In spite of which—or, rather, all the more because— here I was, sitting in this coffee shop, drinking my coffee, feeling a desperate loneliness. I alone was the outsider. I had no place here… Here I had no ties to anyone. Fact is, I’d come to reclaim myself.” ~Haruki Murakami
“You don’t have any goals.”
“I wondered why someone your age and …
How Marijuana Was Great for My Anxiety and Why I Stopped Using It
“When solving problems, dig at the root instead of just hacking at the leaves.” ~Anthony J. D’Angelo
This is an account of my experience using marijuana as a device to help my anxiety, why I’m glad I had it, and why I no longer need it.
This story isn’t an advocation for or against smoking pot. It’s a story to shed some insight into how and why it helped certain ailments and my journey to lasting change without it.
How Smoking Pot Helped My Anxiety
For most of my life I was a closet anxiety sufferer.
That’s mostly because …
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