We all have times we feel let down, abandoned, rejected, hurt or disrespected by someone close to us. We feel angry, sad, lonely, etc. We take it to heart. Sometimes we are conscious of our hurt feelings and sometimes they reside subconsciously because we have learned to suppress truly painful emotions. I have come to [...]
I recently read In the Realm of "Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" by Dr. Gabor Mate´. I've found Dr. Maté's philosophies and experience regarding addiction and its origins fascinating. Essentially he says pain is the fuel of all addiction. We use substances and behavior to self-soothe. He does not believe it is primarily genetic. He [...]
Things are getting serious here in the Minneapolis suburbs. Over Memorial Weekend Mark (fiancé), his two sons (ages 22 and 18) and their cat moved into the home I've been living in with my kids for 14 years. The actual move went relatively smoothly. Mark and I chipped away at the packing and unpacking. Now there [...]
The precursor to addiction is dislocation. — Bruce Alexander Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Simon Fraser University. In the quote above, dislocation is taken to mean the loss of psychological, social, and economic integration into family and culture — a sense of exclusion, isolation and powerlessness. In the much quoted book on addiction, "In the Realm [...]
If you've been reading my blog for a while, you have seen me struggle to learn and evolve into something more than an overwhelmed and at times sad, mother of three. Over the last eight years of writing, I've went from learning who I am to studying relationships with the hope of improving mine, to helping [...]
On The One You Feed podcast, Eric Zimmer (host) and his guest, Skip Prichard, talked about success and how to find it. Skip said that success is when ambition and peace exist in the same measure at the same time. They talked about how Buddhism teaches that we suffer when we want more, therefore we should [...]
