Happy And Healthy Lifestyle

“Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Sit with it. Even though you want to run. Even when it’s heavy and difficult. Even though you’re not quite sure of the way through. Healing happens by feeling.” ~Dr. Rebecca Ray I’ve spent much of my life resisting my true feelings. Anger made me feel wrong. Sadness made me feel weak. Neediness made me feel “girly.” Love made me feel scared. I became an expert at hiding when I was feeling any of the above. Some people numb their feelings with alcohol, drugs, shopping, or sex. I numb with control. Being in control. Exerting control. Maintaining iron-will control over everything in my life, including my emotions. The thing about the  illusion of being in control is that it really only works for so long before emotions bubble up to the surface, erupt like a dormant volcano, and explode onto someone or something unintended. And trust me when I tell you, that ain’t pretty. One of the most famous quotes of every twelve-step program is: “You got...

“The word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” ~ Carl Jung My two-year-old son looked up at me with his big, blue, beautiful eyes. He wanted me to play. I took a toy car in my hand and rolled it along the wooden living room floor we were both sitting on, making an enthusiastic VROOM as I did it. He smiled. He appreciated my effort at sound effects. The streetlights standing on the road outside our living room window were already glowing warmly, even though it was barely 4:30 p.m. and the sky was black. I miss the summer evenings , I sighed to myself. I stared up and out at the darkness briefly before Henry demanded my attention and I found myself looking down, playing cars again. I smiled up at him, doing my best to appear happy . To make him feel like I was enjoying playing cars with him. The truth is, I didn’t feel enjoyment playing with him. For a few weeks at this point I hadn’t felt much enjoyment from anything. I was going through the motio...

“The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself.” ~Maya Angelou My newest friend ended our three-month-long friendship on a July day when I’d just returned from a dreadful summer vacation. Her Dear Jane email read, “It’s not you, it’s me.” The lever had been pulled, I was dumped, and I thought, “Ha!” I’d spent the last three months trying to help her fix her problems. I knew she had more problems than me. But then an anxious, obsessive thought loop began. What did it really mean? How could it not be about me? This wasn’t the first time I’d lost a friend, so of course, I needed to diagnose, dissect, and determine the origin of this unhappy pattern. My anxieties were ramping up, and I needed to fix something before this reoccurred. So I made an appointment with a therapist named Dr. Mary. After an hour’s drive through big city traffic, I arrived late and shaken to that first therapy session. Within fifteen minutes, Dr. Mary helped me recognize the parallel between ...

“There’s no such thing as a ‘bad kid’—just angry, hurt, tired, scared, confused, impulsive ones expressing their feelings and needs the only way they know how. We owe it to every single one of them to always remember that.” ~Dr. Jessica Stephens   All children look up to their parents from the moment they enter this world. They have this beautiful, pure, unconditional love pouring out of them. Parents are on a pedestal. They are the ones who know what’s best! They are the grownups showing us how to do life! We don’t think for one moment that they could be showing us the wrong way. I, like many others, adored both my mum and dad. I could not see their flaws, their pains, or their trauma. I just loved them and wanted to spend time with them. If they shouted at me and told me I was wrong, I trusted that they were right, no question. When I had non-existent self-esteem, anxiety, and suicidal ideation because I believed I was not good enough, I blamed that 100 percent on myself. I had...

We are truly free when we let go of the hope that the past could or should have been any different than it was. This is so hard. The challenge is born from our desperate need to validate our feelings and experiences. It often feels like we are invalidating ourselves if we let go of the hope that the past should have been different. We have been through hell, experienced things most people don’t know about, and it initially feels so devastating to think of just letting it go like it never happened. Where is the justice in that? I know; I have been there. Honestly, I still have moments where I pick up this thought and carry it around for a while because it just feels like the right thing to do. To honor myself and my experiences, I have to stay connected to the injustice of the choices that others have made—choices that dramatically impacted my life and created immense amounts of pain. After almost nineteen years of marriage, my husband, my high school sweetheart, told me that he was...

“When things change inside you, things change around you.” ~Unknown   I had been having problems with my email lately. I dreaded calling technical support, since my experience in the past involved sitting for a long time on hold and listening to someone reading from a script instead of thinking creatively about my problem. However, since I could not fix the problem myself and felt I had no other options, I called my internet service provider’s technical support line. True to form, after thirty minutes on the phone we had barely moved past the point where I had repeated my name and account number to four different people. Then, after another hour on the phone attempting to solve my problem, the technical support representative actually lost some of my emails. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. I went ballistic. Like most people, I’ve spent many hours of my life on the phone with technical support representatives, attempting to fix something that is very important to my life and my li...

“Once you choose hope, anything is possible.” ~Christopher Reeve When I was a child, I wanted to save the world. My mom found me crying in my bedroom one day. She asked what was wrong, and I said, “I haven’t done anything yet!” I couldn’t wait to grow up so I could try to make a difference. At fourteen, I joined a youth group that supported adults with disabilities. We hosted dances and ran a buddy program. I helped with projects at state institutions and left saddened by the conditions for the residents. I planned to work at a state institution. As a senior in high school, I was voted most likely to succeed. It was unexpected, like so many things in my life. I hoped to find meaningful work that helped others. My first year at Ohio State, I fell head over heels in love and married the boy next door. A month after my wedding, newly nineteen, I started my first full-time job as manager of a group home for men with developmental disabilities. I never finished college. At twenty-thre...

“Literally every person is messed up, so pick your favorite train wreck and roll with it.” ~Hannah Marbach You’ve probably heard this before: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” A beautiful saying, based on what Nietzsche wrote in one of his books ( Twilight of the Idols ). It always makes me feel like life can’t go anywhere but up. Forward and up. According to Nietzsche, suffering can be taken as an opportunity to build strength. No matter the pain, sickness, or trauma you experience, you will come out stronger for it — as long as you take the opportunity to grow. But what if you fail to seize that opportunity? What if suffering and emotional trauma don’t result in strength but instead make us weaker? I lost my dad to suicide a bit over twenty years ago. His disease and death left their marks on me. Even now, on some days, I feel insecure, not good enough, weak. This usually happens when I’ve been way too stressed. On those days, I forget that all I need to do is rela...

“It’s okay to want to be alone. It’s okay to take time for yourself.” ~Kate Allan It’s the holiday season, the most wonderful time of the year, they say, but it’s not for all of us. For those of us coping with the loss of a loved one, family estrangement , loneliness, financial difficulties, or health struggles, the holidays can be one of the hardest times of the year. For some of us the holidays can feel as if we have been cast out in the cold. As if we are forced to look through a window of a happy, loving family. Many of us are filled with feelings of longing for things that can never be, such as more time with a loved one we have lost or a supportive family. We find ourselves swept into memories of holidays past or lost in fantasies about what the holidays would be like if we had a different life. We find ourselves feeling pressured to hide our problems, bake a dozen cookies, put on a happy smile and an ugly Christmas sweater, and attend that office holiday party. There, we sm...