I’m currently reading The Fourth Trimester: A Postpartum Guide to Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions, and Restoring Your Vitality, and the author, Kimberly Ann Johnson, puts forth the radical idea that the best way to heal from childbirth is… to rest. Not to hit the gym, not to get back into your skinny jeans asap, not to push yourself to exhaustion trying to prove that you don’t need help, not to keep an immaculate house… To rest. Unfortunately, I am a solid 4.5 months postpartum with Grace Girl, and only just now reading this book. I really could have used this information after my first baby was born and I headed back to grad school 2.5 weeks later. Or after Grace Girl was born and I inadvertently fooled everyone into thinking I was doing fine by going about fully dressed with brushed hair when in fact I was really struggling and crying about random stuff everyday. While I’ve considered the radical idea of taking a break before collapsing from exhaustion before and considered that just because I can push through to do more doesn’t always mean I…
This hack works for any kind of thinking/emotional pattern that you would like to stop. It doesn’t automatically stop, of course, but every time we gain awareness of our thinking, we are no longer entranced into believing everything our thoughts say. And thank God! Because while our thoughts might be brilliant while under the influence of caffeine/good art/excellent music, they can also lead us oh so very astray and make us completely miserable…
Many times I have read or heard people say that you need to breastfeed your baby for comfort because comfort is a need for a young baby. I absolutely agree. And disagree. Allow me to explain…
When something terrible happens to someone you love dearly, who most certainly does not deserve it (or to you for that matter) how do you explain it to yourself? How do you prevent yourself from falling into a nihilistic hellhole? If you are like me and most other human beings, it is probably through the stories you tell yourself about why it happened.
So why does bad stuff happen to good people…
Most of you know I work as a mental health therapist in addition to my infinite unpaid hours clocked in #momlife. Thus, in school we had to take classes on behaviorism, or essentially, how to “predict and control” human behavior (lol x infinity). Said classes involved training pigeons to peck red dots and turn in circles, but I digress.
They make it sound so simple: to increase the probability of a behavior occurring, reinforce it (preferably at random intervals rather than every time). To decrease the probability of a behavior occurring, the most effective way is to ignore the undesired behavior and continue to reinforce the behavior you do want.
Most parenting articles I’ve read take the behaviorist approach to whining and tantrums. Stay firm, they say. They just want attention, so ignore them. Or alternatively, stay firm and punish whining and tantrums.
And because I most certainly would like to decrease the probability of whining and tantrums for my kids, I have been trying to follow this advice. It has failed miserably, largely due to human error. On my part…
…If you were the type who got terribly sick immediately after the last final of the semester literally every semester in college, you might know what I am talking about…
Well I’ve fallen off the interwebs for a few weeks and I will tell you why: I have been occupied.
Occupied with trying to pull it together and be okay, occupied with facing that I am not doing so well, occupied with confessing tearfully to my husband and a good friend, and for the last couple weeks, occupied with taking action to make my life and mood more manageable (because that’s just my personality…
It’s one of the most cliche cliches out there: Just be yourself. I remember being told this once and thinking, “What does that even mean?” and “Yeah, but who exactly is this self that I am supposed to be?” Whether you are in the stage of identity-development of trying to decide on a persona to play or of slowly shedding the many personas/identities/egos you’ve accumulated, not knowing who you are is pretty normal. Furthermore, most of us (myself absolutely included) are so used to playing predefined roles in the majority of interactions that authenticity is hard to even wrap our heads around. Like what would that even look like? If you hate someone, do you have to tell them? Does it mean you shout, “please, leave the sick bastard!” in the middle of a movie theater in response to the heroine’s obviously terrible choice of a romantic partner? Because that’s how you feel? Well, responding authentically “as ourselves” is something that is fluid and cannot be easily defined. Obviously. But obviously, by the fact that I am writing this post, I…
Do you ever find yourself wishing for misfortune to befall you so that you will be forced to do what you want to do but feel that you can’t do for one reason or another? Please tell me I’m not the only one. For example, do you ever… -Wish you would lose your job and be unable to find another one, so that you would be forced to pursue your dream of becoming a famous actor/writer/comedian/entrepreneur? -Wish you would find out your partner was cheating on you so you’d have an excuse to leave them? -Wish you would survive a terrible car accident and require months of rehab so you would be forced to drop out of school/quit your job/spend more time with family/focus on what is most important to you? -Wish you would find out your house/apartment has black mold/was a meth house so you would be forced to move? We want life to force us to make the decisions we want to make, to force us to take the action we want to take. I realized I was doing this when I found…
“No regrets.” It’s a phrase I will probably never understand. All I think when I see a meme like this: this, or this is….seriously? For real, bro? There’s nothing in your past you wish you could change? On the one hand, there is the whole, “I ate 3 more tacos after I was full… no regrets” kind of no regrets. You know, or the “I danced ‘The Macarena’ in front of my entire office…no regrets” kind of no regrets. But what about times we have just plain screwed up? When I hear these inspirational quotes about how you should have no regrets, because your choices have made you who you are today, and mistakes are just lessons learned, I am left thinking, “yeah, but what about the impact our choices have on other people?” Yes, the other humans who inhabit this planet. We don’t live in a vacuum; our choices have consequences for us and for other people as well. If I could go back and change the ways I have hurt people, I would do it in…