an espresso shot of thoughtful guidance
Raise your hand if you don’t feel some twinge of anxiety about the family dynamics during the holidays. If you’re honest, you feel pretty conflicted about having your parents or siblings over for Christmas dinner, much less visiting your childhood home. And you likely feel somewhat reluctant about going to Read More
When you’ve been alive for only five thousandeight hundredand twenty-nine days. The pathways are rarely clearhere wherethe roads keep changing. What makes senseon one daymakes nosense the next. And soto avoid exhaustionand to deepen restask yourself these questions.How would you describe today?And Have you seen anything interestingon the way?And Is it working?Is it Read More
Fundamentally we humans are all asking two questions about each other: Do you like me; and Are you going to leave me. Both questions reveal the fragility of our identity, and to what lengths we will go to to avoid the disastrous answers to those questions. These questions have been Read More
Change: noun. A transformation or modification; alteration: Transformations happens when something, or someone, new is introduced into a relationship. Pearls grow because of bacteria entering into a clam, the Amazon rainforest gets the majority of it’s nutrients from Africa, and people transform when they accept a perspective from someone who Read More
When we talk about ourselves or others as being “broken,” we begin to treat them like an object to be fixed, not a Subject to be known. We are people with stories and souls, not an object to be used. Objects are made to do things. A vase holds flowers. Read More
My office sits about 30 yards off of some very busy train tracks. I’ve yet to count out how many different trains pass by each day, but I’d guess it is 15-20. In the Spring and Fall seasons, I enjoy opening the windows in my office to let the fresh Read More
Creating an environment that is “us vs them” is fine for a sports team, but when that starts showing up in organizations and family systems, you are entering the category of narcissism in the leadership. Evidence of this in organizations and families can be seen with those that have left Read More
Now that you’ve named your parenting style, created a SWOT+, and identified some goals, it’s time to put some structure into place about how to bring all of this together. Boundaries are the lifeblood of relationships because they provide guidelines for our needs to be met. Boundaries are what make Read More
What is your goal for parenting during this quarantine? Is it to just “survive” the process? Or perhaps might it be to “make sure I don’t screw them up too bad?” I often joke with friends that I don’t have a college savings fund for my kids, I have a therapy savings Read More
Last week I wrote about your parenting style, which is pretty well tied into your attachment style. While these styles don’t paint the entire picture, they do give a good baseline for how we relationally approach parenting our kids. We parents carry so many stories and libraries of information around Read More
