April 22, 2024: When you’ve done everything you can think of in the striving for something—including taking the risk of being vulnerably authentic—and wouldn’t change anything about your efforts, yet don’t get the results you want, a lot of specific despair and anxiety can be (re)activated: “I’m not good enough and never will be,” “there just isn’t enough of what I’m pursuing for everyone who’s pursuing it to obtain it,” “if my best hasn’t been good enough, how will I ever get what I want or need?”

The first thought is born of shame-based black-and-white thinking, and can be softened by dialectical questions such as “how HAVE I been good enough in my life so far” and “how is ‘good enough’ different from ‘perfect?’” The second thought is an emblem of scarcity mentality, and the fact that there may be some degree of truth to the thought can make it hard to cope with. This is where gratitude practice and abundance mentality can help: What do you have enough of in your life right now, in terms of sources of contentment and/or safety that feel reasonably secure? If you are able to identify at least one answer to this question, that may also ease the hopelessness of the third thought, so that you can decide whether or how to keep going after your goals…

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March 16, 2024, by Joni Mitchell: “I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood.

Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.

But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: ‘If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.’ What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.

You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”

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March 6, 2024: Once willingness to change kicks in, it can be hard not to want to dive into all the things and do all the work and make all the changes. Not only is this typically not sustainable, it can be harmful if your willingness outstrips your skillfulness (an “eyes bigger than your stomach” kind of situation). I see this a lot with people’s desire to heal from trauma, and it’s the most understandable thing in the world: Why would you want to hold yourself back from relief once you feel able to pursue it?

But it’s important to first develop skills related to emotion regulation/returning to baseline, maintaining an adequate social support network, and compartmentalization, just to name a few (yes, compartmentalization isn’t always dysfunctional—intentional and TEMPORARY compartmentalization can be vital if you plan to, for instance, keep your job and take care of your kids while you do such intense emotional work).

So please remind yourself: It’s really good and okay for personal work and change to happen later and differently than you think it should. Consult your readiness as much as your willingness. If readiness is saying “slow down” or “take a break,” it’s important to consider whether you have the skills and resources you need to further pursue your desired changes. Ask yourself “what else might I need to work on first?” Healing from trauma and achieving all your other goals isn’t going anywhere.

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February 25, 2024: As an undergrad, my larger psychology classes typically had a few grad student TAs who, in addition to the professor’s 2 or 3 weekly lectures to the entire class, would teach their own once-weekly “section” to a subset of the class’s students. How you were evaluated in section could significantly impact your final grade, which gave these TAs some real power. And I would observe that some TAs were more generous with their tutelage than others—giving more of their time and patience, sharing more of their enthusiasm for the subject, generally being more encouraging. This breed of TA also tended not to share the “weed out” attitude common across many departments in social and physical sciences.

My observations of these grad students’ varying degrees of success in forging academic careers for themselves, plus my intuition during interactions with them, led me to articulate what I call “the grad student effect.” The grad student effect speaks to how both insecurity about your own talent/skill/intelligence as well as your anxiety about achieving status combine to influence how you treat people who you perceive as inferior/junior to you (and probably those you perceive as superior, but that wasn’t the space I was occupying as a lowly undergrad). The more at ease a graduate TA seemed to be about their abilities, the more likely they were to fall into that “generous” camp described above. The ones who graded harder, argued arbitrarily (and maybe were wrong more often than the self-assured TAs), and were less accessible/approachable very much gave off the whiff of the insecure.

Over the years, I’ve seen this effect play out in different contexts, from workplaces to adult kickball. In relation to clinical interns at some of my previous jobs, I’ve been both the stingy senior clinician and the warm mentor, with my personal sense of confidence in my performance and position being a key determinant of which one I was. When you think about this “grad student effect,” who comes to mind? How does it apply to you? If you were able to better manage your own achievement and aptitude anxiety, how do you think it would make a difference to what you offer others?

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February 19, 2024: I’ve been learning about trauma and its effects for so long now, I sometimes forget that information I take for granted can be a revelation to someone else. When this happened recently, I pulled the article/chapter: “PTSD and physiology: The long-term effects of PTSD and relation to epigenetics, physical health, and chronic diseases,” from which I’d like to share some highlights:

PTSD is linked to premature mortality, due to “a number of (proposed) behavioral and physiological pathways,” such as: “poor health behaviors” (e.g., physical inactivity, smoking); “dysregulation of the biological stress response;” and “epigenetic changes” (trauma affects one’s epigenome, which is involved in “when and where genes are expressed”).

“Research has also suggested that even posttraumatic stress that occurs below clinically relevant thresholds is associated with heightened risk of developing physical health conditions.” This means that you don’t necessarily have to have been diagnosed with, or met criteria for PTSD in order to to experience consequences to your long-term health as a result of traumatic experiences.

This is because the stress response that traumatic experiences activate in the body can result in “downstream physiological changes that…contribute to the onset of disease.” Sleep disturbance and other inflammation-causing processes are two possible culprits.

In “methodologically rigorous” studies that “account for a wide range of potential confounders (e.g., socioeconomic status, depression),” PTSD has also been demonstrated to “precede and predict incidence” of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, infections, and autoimmune disorders (e.g., rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus).

None of these possible effects are forgone conclusions for any individual, and you can mitigate (or even reverse) some of them with a number of things: therapy, meaningful connection with others, mindfulness, and anything that REGULATES/SOOTHES YOUR PHYSICAL BODY (in a healthy way).

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February 15, 2024: I remember learning, in an undergrad intro class on social psychology and personality psychology, a distinction that has recurred to me many times: “what can happen” vs “what does happen.” In psychology, this might refer to how personality psychology finds value in single case studies because they help us understand the scope of humanity, even if they only illustrate one small, rare territory of it (“what can happen”), while social psychology seeks large sample sizes and replicable results in order to more confidently establish “what does happen” on a typical basis.

This distinction was brought strongly to mind during a course on solution-focused brief therapy in my graduate counseling program, when we learned about the technique of “exception-finding;” in other words, when was a time when, somehow, the usual (often undesirable) thing did *not* happen? The idea here was that examining a positive example of “what can happen,” however uncommon or unlikely, might help a client figure out how to bring about more of something they wanted.

In some sense of the word, dreams are exceptions, and ones that we don’t have to wait for an accidental occurrence of. They are not of a piece with our daily life, and they often depict life as it is not…but maybe, in some ways, could be. To the extent that we can decide what to dream about (more so in our control when awake than asleep), I see immense therapeutic benefit in using the act of dreaming to contemplate change. Counseling is meant to help people make worthwhile changes, and as the Stages of Change model outlines, before the stage of taking action, there is a stage of contemplation (and in between the two, a stage of preparation for action). Dreaming is free, and can generate immense motivation for action steps toward change. Let yourself dream without restrictions in order to remind yourself that you aren’t stuck and create the clearest picture of what you’re wanting.

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February 7, 2024: “Enthusiastic consent” is for all decisions related solely to pleasure (not just sex). We say yes to things everyday that are, to varying degrees, not our preference, because they are necessary and responsible. We can’t, for instance, always hold out for feeling “hell yes!” when it comes to where we live or what we do for a living. But in those times—however brief or infrequent—when we just have to consider our own enjoyment, choosing only what elicits a “hell yes!” isn’t a bad standard to adopt.

What music do you want to listen to when you’re driving somewhere, what mug do you want to drink from, what show do you want to watch, who do you want to reach out to and connect with when you have the chance?

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February 3, 2024: Struggling with being able to see past the present moment (in a dreaming-of-the-future kind of way) isn’t something people with trauma histories have a monopoly on. We know “foreshortened sense of the future” is a common side effect of trauma, and that makes sense: not only does the visceral experience of trauma rivet one to the moments in which it’s happening, but the feeling of hopelessness toward stopping and/or escaping those experiences is part of what defines trauma as such.

But even in the absence of personal trauma history, it can be hard to remember that our current circumstances are temporary, and that different situations are possible for ourselves; the “daily grind” of routines can also make it hard to imagine “the next.” There will be a next thing, and we can remind ourselves that, in so many ways, “right now” is only “for now.” What else do you want and are you capable of pursuing when you stop and remember this?

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January 27, 2024: Several possible posts have occurred to me this month, but the website on which to put them didn’t exist yet ;) The most fitting one, I suppose, is about taking the idea of New Year’s resolutions and making it sustainable, when we often feel overwhelmed by everything we already have to juggle. While the thought of a new year’s potential for something better can have understandable appeal, the (perhaps founded) suspicion that you won’t be able to successfully follow through is discouraging. This was some of the thinking behind more than one client’s decision to “pick just one word” for the year to help ground and guide them, instead of setting a more elaborate resolution. What word would you choose to keep coming back to as you engage in the gradual, non-linear process of self-improvement? Would it be “just one word” for the whole year, or would you prefer to change it up each month, week, day…?

This Instagram post from CEO coach @moniquershields might help you think about 2024 in relation to the past few years, and what it all amounts to you needing now. While I’ve started sharing it with clients who are echoing what she’s saying about collective burnout, I can’t take credit for finding it in the first place; that honor goes to someone in my personal life. I love when there’s synergy among people I interact with :)

P.S. A strong contender for my 2024 watchword is “truth.”

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Photos on this website were taken in Lincoln City, OR; Ithaca, NY; Puerto Escondido, Mexico; Marinha Beach and Lisbon, Portugal. All photo credits: Kelly Strider, 2022 & 2023