A Shiny, Resilient Hold

 I want to talk about teaching and affirming our children's rights to boundaries in their own lives and in others. Kids thrive on boundaries (though it may not seem like it at times). Those kids that you see misbehaving to the extreme, up into their teenage years, are often the children who have not been given boundaries to meet in the first place. Boundaries provide stability; they are an indication of care. Saying that your teenager no longer has a curfew seems like a good way to make you a cool parent, but it's also a great way to subtly tell your teenager that you don't care about when they're home...which often translates into, I don't care. It's from this translation that we derive the instability of a lack of boundary. That being said, absolute authority shouldn't be confused with boundary setting, and this is a topic over which I believe there is significant conflict, particularly in community settings. Raising your child to believe that you

 I have, for many years, taken a path of self-dismissal. A good score? Well that’s expected, so it’s nothing to be pleased about. Dramatic weight loss? Cool, but that was really just you pulling yourself together from being so pathetic, so it’s nothing impressive so much as it is, I’d say, ABOUT TIME.  Somehow, somewhere, I got some key personality traits jumbled up. I took on humility so intensely that it became a special form of low confidence, self-disgust. I’ve also been guilty of mixing up intimacy with self-love, and co-dependence with both. It comes from the concern of the direct reaction of others to nearly everything I do. What will my parents think? What will my friends say? And nearly always, this is the term we know as “Shame.”                           My incomplete list of issues that I both desperately want to and will not openly talk                                 about because of shame:  -In some cases of relationships, I have let people come to me overly m

Our lives are being shaped without our understanding all the time. Daily little events, large memorable ones, large ones we've forgotten. I had a recent run in with a connection I'd never made on my own recently, through a conversation with a friend.  Though I have a history of being bullied in the past, I had never identified those specific experiences in high school as being linked to my core personality traits these days. It was something that happened, I moved beyond it, and then life moved beyond that, and somewhere in that jumbled mess of movement, I figured the effect had pretty much petered out.  My experience with bullying was with a group of girls when I first went into high school. We were becoming a tight-knit group, as girls at the age of 14 do. We listened to the same music (Evanescence, Dashboard Confessional), we hung out in each other's basements, we were "alternative" together (watching Rocky Horror Picture Show and reading books about s