The heart of my professional work is about helping people to connect with their own goodness and to heal the barriers to connecting with others. As a somatic trauma therapist working with individuals, couples, and families, this often means holding space for long-buried emotions to be expressed and old stories to be experienced through a new lens. My work as a therapist incorporates a focus on building resilience - our innate capacity to bounce back from difficult or overwhelming experiences.

My last two posts have discussed the problem so many of us have of spreading ourselves too thin and strategies to find our way back from the stress of over-committing. This week I want to continue sharing resources that have helped me to reduces stress and find more joy and ease in my life. I recently started training in a somatic (body-centered) treatment for trauma, and one of the trainers described a resource as anything that brings you closer to yourself.  This concept resonated deeply with me, and I immediately began to see so many of the simple practices I engage in regularly as having much more significance than I was giving them credit for. The flip side of this was the realization that there are many more simple practices that I convince myself I don’t have time for or haven’t “earned” that could be bringing me into greater alignment with myself and my values. Here are some resources that work to bring me closer to myself...when I allow myself to practice them....

A few weeks ago I talked to you about ways to notice that you’re spreading yourself too thin or over-committing. I came out to you as a recovering over-committer and shared some of the ways I recognize my tendency to try to be all things to all people. Most of these red flags involve paying attention to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, or noticing how stress is affecting your body. Many of you told me that you saw yourselves reflected in that post and see many of these red flags in your own lives. So what do you do about it? How do you put on the brakes when you’ve jumped on the train to burnout and think you might want to hop off?

I have a confession to make: I am a recovering over-committer. There have been long seasons of my life when I have spread myself so thin that I made myself physically sick. (The image of me at one particularly stressful job scratching a rash that only appeared when I was at said job comes immediately to mind.) Saying "yes" to every request for my time or attention or trying to focus on every project I found interesting made it impossible to be successful at any one thing. Just when I put out one fire, another would crop up. Just when I would start to get some traction in one area of my life, I would get distracted by a real or perceived (and sometimes self-induced) crisis in another area. Living this way left me feeling mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted, and it wasn't sustainable. But try telling that to an overachiever with a serious problem with perfectionism. I was fully engaged in what Brene Brown calls the "hustle for worthiness." I was attempting to be all things to all people and feeling deeply inadequate in the process. And inadequate was what I was hustling to try not to feel in the first place. 

Parents often ask me how to talk to their kids about gender, especially in a way that creates space for fluidity or creativity in gender expression. Sometimes they seem as intimidated about this topic as they are about “the sex talk” (which, by the way, isn’t just one conversation!). I can empathize with the desire to not say the wrong thing lest your child repeat it in the wrong place and raise eyebrows in public. (“Mommy says boys can have vaginas if they want to.”) Even parents who do their research on the language to use about various gender identities and expressions worry about being misunderstood or creating more confusion about a potentially complex topic. But here’s the thing, like with everything else, if you don’t talk to your kids about your ideas of masculinity, femininity, and everything in between, they’ll learn about it from someone else. Here are some tips to get the conversation started on the right foot: