Brene Brown says that human beings are hard-wired for connection, and I believe her. So what happens when people, hard wired for connection, are told to keep their distance, as we are all being told to do to help flatten the curve of the coronavirus? To stay inside and away from family and friends? To […]
As part of their series, “The Other Side of Anger”, NPR science reporter Michaeleen Doucleff retraces the steps of anthropologist Jean Briggs who lived with the Inuit in the Arctic Circle in the 1970s to learn “How Inuit Parents Teach Kids to Control Their Anger”. Traveling to Iqaluit, Canada, Doucleff attends a parenting class where […]
I have a social work crush. A few years back, when I was first starting out as a social worker, I discovered this TED Talk: Not only did I completely connect with Brené Brown’s ideas, I found a role model for the type of social worker I wanted to be, the kind that could create/discover an […]
What makes a person change? This is the question that fills my life. How does a person grow and evolve? What makes them change their minds, their hearts, their views? According to Wikipedia, “a character arc is the transformation or inner journey of a character over the course of a story. If a story has a […]
I am notoriously bad at remembering the source of stories, so I can’t remember where I heard this story first. I have been using it, and telling this particular version of it, for as long as I can remember. This is the version I tell: There was a master sculptor and an apprentice sculptor, and […]
I have been thinking a lot about relative experience. “Relatively speaking” is a phrase we toss around casually, an improvised rescaling of any given comparison. Hidden in the phrase is an acknowledgement that the scale of comparison has been significantly reduced to include a limited range of possible experiences or perceptions of reality, and that […]
Everyone pushes the concept of self-care these days, but it too often feels like yet another thing people feel like they should do, and never get around to doing. First, self-care is not all yoga classes and bubble baths. Self-care of it is all those things you do to take care of yourself, your mental […]
In simple terms, frustration is the feeling of being upset or annoyed, especially because of inability to change or achieve something. Frustration tolerance is the idea that we have a capacity for how much frustration we can tolerate without having some sort of emotional breakdown. What I try to get my clients to understand is that everyone […]
The passing of a new year is of course something worth celebrating, but it is also something that can trigger grief. Every new turn of the calendar adds to the time after someone you love has passed. It causes an internal countdown — has it really been that long? Often this can re-ignite dormant grief, […]