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                 ...

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...

I want to try and tackle a complex subject that touches in a lot of areas of our lives. Most of us have seen something related to this regarding either vaccines, or diet, or exercise, or sleep patterns, or even romance--I call it the "my dumb body" myth. It is, simply put, the idea that our bodies are too "dumb," or un-evolved, to handle our present environment. Coupled with that is the idea that the intentions we place behind treatments or practices make the idea at hand more or less effective. Let's discuss! First, the idea that our bodies are un-evolved. Now what I mean by this is, for example, the idea that our colons don't clean themselves, and that we have to cleanse our colons of toxins in order to live healthy, happy lives. The reasoning behind this one is that there are a lot of processed food and non-food items being put in our bodies these days, and that maybe our bodies can't clear these things out for themselves. One trigger word we...

I've had a few conversations with friends lately that have circled the question: How do we become confident? Our ideas of confidence start pretty early on, and I think that most of us probably trip up in our teenage years. See, we associate confidence with the way that people view and respond to us. So naturally we believe that our personal level of confidence is a reflection of how attractive we are, how successful we are, how many friends we have…we don't look at the process, but rather think, gosh, if I looked like her, people would like me more, and then I'd be more confident.  "Yeah but you don't get it because you can sleep with whoever you want, so of course you're confident, because people already find you attractive." Ladies and gentlemen, as flattering as it is that several of you think this about me, I have to tell you, my ability to make someone want me has yet to ever genuinely change my confidence levels, and this is because: 1)...

Out and having dinner last night (a Carvery, my first!), I heard a lovely summation of an itch I’ve been turning back to for the past few weeks: living a life with bravery.  There are a lot of things set out there that will hold us back, but on the top of the list is our very own concept of self. If we perceive ourselves as people who cannot take risks within our own lives, and additionally, perceive ourselves as people without the possibility of community, then we end up living on a road that we never really planned; one that we just keep following until our old age, when we look back and say, where was my control? Where was my influence? The aspect with which I struggle the most is the risk of relying on created community. We are surrounded by different levels of community in our day to day: family community, customer community, city community, friendships, even similar interests. Over the past year, I am reminded of some of my feelings of isolation, being so far from a com...

I used to think of the “self” as a sort of blob of dough (poetic, I know). I saw myself as this mouldable, knead-able, cut-able thing--every action shaped me in some way, and I’d imagine it affecting the way the dough would rise, get punched down, rise...The deeper issues of life, like death or mental illness or injury, I experienced as chunks of dough being removed. The idea was that the pain of those incidents was severe enough to take a chunk out. Then the form as a whole would have to be reshaped again to become whole, and I saw this as a healing process.  The thing that I like about this image of a person is that it FEELS right. Every harsh event in our lives feels like we are being broken irreparably. After my first friend died, I remember thinking that my life had shrunk permanently. A piece had been taken out of me, and I was...less. I was less without this person as a character in my story.  The thing that sucks about that image, however, is that if you follow i...