Handling The Hard Stuff

Tag: Relationships

  • Boundaries do not Mean Beef

    Drawing boundaries does not mean you are picking a fight. It is not an adversarial thing. You are not doing this at someone, you are doing it for yourself. Choosing to unfollow someone on social media does not mean you dislike them or don’t wish them well. It means that your mental health is negatively…

  • Quiet Quitting

    This is a phrase that’s come about in the last few years that essentially means you’re not “giving your all” to something. It is mostly used in relation to your work identity. It goes hand in hand with someone over the age of 50 grumbling “no one wants to work anymore”. That’s true Jim, no…

  • Don’t Mistake Peace for Boring

    Let’s be honest, we love the drama. We listen to all the true crime podcasts and audiobooks, we make celebrities out of housewives and Jersey Shorers who spend all their time gossiping and fighting among one another. Every other show on television is about emergency services or surgeons or crime investigations. We thrive on trauma.…

  • Don’t Require an Apology

    In so many of my divorce cases, my client will spend so much time and energy being angry at the way their soon-to-be ex has treated them. That anger often dissipates after the first month or so – people learn to cope with their new life, they figure out what it’s going to look like…

  • Loneliness

    It’s the time of year when the weather makes a lot of us unmotivated to do anything other than hunker down at home. We also don’t see the sun and don’t have a lot of daylight to look forward to and it’s when we’re more likely to feel deep loneliness and isolation. It’s hard to…

  • Forgive Yourself

    So much of what we do when we are young follows us into adulthood. Decisions we make about schooling, working, relationships, and how we solve problems as young adults has ripple effects that we end of dealing with for the rest of our lives. As an older adult the consequences of your young-self’s decisions can…

  • People are Rooting for You

    It’s hard to trust when you’ve had family, friends, and relationships that have let you down. We develop lots of baggage and chips off of our heart that leave us more fragile than we once were. We assume that people are secretly speaking ill of us or we assume that we are a burden or…

  • Be Honest with Yourself

    This time of year we all seem to find ourselves reflecting on the year that’s ending and setting big goals for the year to come. I always have these ambitious plans that I’ll then end up ignoring or sabotaging somewhere along the way. Admitting the sabotage is the thing that gets me. We all have…

  • Behavior is a Language

    How often have you been frustrated because a child or a partner or a friend isn’t behaving in a way you think they should? They’ve ignored you or they’ve shown up belligerent, or they haven’t shown up at all? That person is telling you something with their language. We’ve all heard “If someone shows you…

  • Decision Fatigue

    If you’re in charge of a household or raising children or recovering from a relationship ending, you don’t have a lot of extra mental space. This is when decision fatigue comes into play and you find yourself overwhelmed by everything by the end of the day and ordering pizza for dinner but making someone else…