THE DECONDITIONING OF SCHOOL School was never my favorite place. Although, in my lifetime I’ve managed to spend nearly 24 years in school, practically back to back from preschool through graduate studies. Add professional licensure and that’s about 3 more years. I’m a few months shy of my 47th birthday, so that equates to more than half my life that has been organized around school. I’m not unique in this math and simply put, that’s an enormous amount of time for anyone to do anything. I love learning, but what I have come to understand from my own experience combined with years working in schools as a psychotherapist is that school and learning are two completely different things....
HOW TO HEAL FROM HEARTBREAK Joy is Now listeners will remember an illuminating conversation I had last March with artist, writer, and founder of People I’ve Loved Carissa Potter Carlson about Schadenfreude (you can listen to the episode here). Carissa speaks so beautifully to thorny and often overlooked topics of all kinds, facing them head on in a beautiful and loving way. She is so gifted in this process of illuminating the difficult to decipher. It's magical. While Carissa approaches a variety of often messy topics regarding the human condition in her art and newsletter , her newest musings HOW TO HEAL FROM HEARTBREAK (or at least feel less broken), explored with writer Vera Kachouh, take us on a new and deeply empathic exploration of heartbreak. Heartbreak is...
I want you to know, YOU ARE ALLOWED TO NOT FIND JOY IN FREE WORK. More on that… My essay a few weeks ago,The Cost of Free definitely struck a chord. I am still receiving emails from readers and also, DMs and comments on IG in response to the idea of true receivership. Much of the response feels like a release. A letting go of the need to churn away in agitation. Permission to stop being part of what has come to be an expected endless cycle of free. A reevaluation of what true receivership means for each of you. I’m glad those points hit home. Along with those thoughts shared, were also comments about the joy that...
In 2010, shortly before my daughter was born, I received a really valuable piece of advice from a hairstylist. I was getting my haircut while talking through an internal conflict I had about not really wanting to return to my psychotherapy practice as a mom. I had spent months going over the data of what returning to my private practice would look like. On paper it was dismal. With paying for my office, insurance, childcare and transportation, along with what I imagined to be a manageable caseload with a new baby, I was looking at clearing $75 a week. I should add that at the time I was charging $150 an hour, which was at the higher end of the ...
Last week I enjoyed a lovely vacation. Being fully away from work is kind of a new thing for me. After years of running a product based company I spent many vacations communicating with customers here and there or doing back end work as orders continued to come in while I was elsewhere. Luckily technology made that possible, but to be honest it never really felt like I was fully stepping away from work. Even when I had handed everything off to someone else I would still get pings when I made a sale or had to reply to an urgent media request. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but after stepping away from work last week, I...
