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But, Why?

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My 4 year old started pre school at a new school today after spending 2.5 years at the same daycare. We made the choice to move him to prepare him for Kindergarten next year and to provide him with a different, richer experience. Two of his best friends go to his new school. It’s a warm, caring, nurturing and playful environment to learn in. But explaining why something is changing to a 4 year old is really hard. With every answer we responded to his questions with we have been met with “but, why?” Hearing that question over and over got me thinking about change and how we, as human beings, are such creatures of habit. I drink coffee out of the same mug everyday. I sleep on the same side of the bed every night. I sing the same songs to my kids at bedtime. We like the comfort of stability because we know on some level there is more about life that is out of our control than in our control. We cling to rituals and the expected because the unexpected feels scary. But as much as we feel fear in the face of the unknown, we are also resilient and adaptable. Life is hard. Change is even harder. The two are interconnected and essential to one another. How can we grow if everything stays exactly the same?

Brene Brown talks about the power of “courage over comfort” in her work researching shame and vulnerability. She says it is the people willing to rumble with failure and who choose courage over comfort that are the real heroes in the world. I couldn’t agree more. Humans love being comfortable. It’s easy. It’s a way of avoiding shame and guilt and embarrassment and all of the emotions we consider “icky”. The cost of living only in comfort is great. It costs us our self worth, joy, and the experience of growing through change.

I dropped my son off and he was scared, sad, and didn’t want me to leave his side. When I picked him up he burst out of the classroom with a huge smile on his face and enveloped me with a hug. The pride he felt for doing the hard thing was so evident, as was his relief that it was over and he was back in his safe place. I have no doubt he will continue to feel all the icky feelings as he gets used to his new school and his new teachers. And when he’s comfortable and settled, another change will come his way. That’s the way life works. It makes us stronger. It makes us braver. It makes us better able to face the inevitable pain and suffering that comes with being human. It’s in the struggle that we learn what we are made of. We learn just how worthy we are of love and joy and the comfort that comes after having the courage.

My son came home and ate lunch and watched an episode of Paw Patrol. He was peaceful. And he will go back to school on Friday and do it all over again…

We do the hard thing and then we curl up in the comfortable place resting up for the next hard thing.

When Your Only Child Becomes Your Oldest Child

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I’m sitting here staring at my darling baby girl who was born a few months ago and feeling the paradigm shift that I am going through emotionally. Since entering the world I have felt a near constant mix of euphoric joy, overwhelming love, and heavy grief. I didn’t understand the grief part until I had left the hospital and entered back into my “normal” life at home with my husband and our 2 1/2 year old son. It then began to sink in—we now had to create a new normal that includes the life we had just welcomed into our family. But still I ached and wondered why I felt so heavy. As the hours and days passed I was met with questions from my son about nursing, why baby Darcy cries, and I began to watch my loving and observant boy take in the new normal we were entering into in which he was no longer the center of attention. When he asked me to play with him I had to tell him I would after I finished nursing Darcy. When he wanted to climb all over me in bed I had to tell him to be careful because I was still healing from having baby Darcy. The heaviness surrounds my heart as it blends ever so delicately with the joy I am also experiencing on a daily basis as I embrace having two beautiful and healthy children.

The loss in the story is that of my son’s reality of no longer having our sole attention. My thoughts are now split between him and Darcy and will be forevermore. And what a wonderful gift for him as he continues to grow and thrive in the world. He has a partner now, someone who will always be there and understand where they both came from. Someone who will be there in the world long after his father and I will be to support him and love him and vice versa. I am so cognizant of the importance of their relationship as siblings and also of how that relationship can go awry due to many factors including parenting. Even at this early stage, I deeply honor and respect the gift we are giving him in his sister.

In studying family behavior and patterns both in my professional life and personal life I have developed a deep understanding of what can go wrong in the sibling relationship and it most often has little to do with the kids themselves and everything to do with parenting and the marriage at the core of any family. Siblings fight. This is not only a reality but an important part of learning to engage with and accept differences. But as our children grow older it is important that their relationship is fostered as being what will carry them forward through life and tether them to their family of origin.

Now that brings me to the importance of parenting and the people behind these little beings. If a marriage is suffering, broken, or toxic, so too will be the sibling relationship. Children are far more likely to take out repressed anger on one another than on a parent whom they may fear will abandon them. If children feel they are more important than the parents’ bond to each other and feel that they can wedge themselves in between and claim mommy or daddy as their own this will lead to a fractured sibling bond due to the lack of emphasis on its importance.

Family therapy doesn’t just treat one individual or one problem, it treats the system as a whole. Families come in all shapes and sizes. What matters the most is how the family engages and interacts with one another. There is an inherent misunderstanding that couples therapy is meant to avoid divorce. While in many cases that is true, there are plenty of other cases where couples therapy is meant to help people move forward in learning how to co-parent and how to define a new, but equally healthy, balance in their relationship and how they engage with each other and their children in that balance.

Let the Weeds Grow

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Does your to-do list look something like this most days?

  • Meal plan for the week
  • Grocery shop
  • Finish laundry
  • Prepare kids for the week of school/daycare/babysitter/etc.
  • Mow the lawn
  • Fall clean up/leaf blowing
  • Finish weeding flower beds
  • Make vet appointment for the dog
  • Send emails that are waiting in drafts at work
  • Dentist appointments for family
  • Organize summer clothes and store for winter

This list could go on, and on, and on. Yours might look a little different and you may have a different stress threshold than someone else. But the point remains—most people are overbooked, overwhelmed, and over tired. Especially when they are raising children. We exist in a culture that puts emphasis on perfection and makes it nearly impossible to achieve. We live in a culture that fosters comparing ourselves to others whether it be how much money we make, how smart our children are, or how tidy our yards are. We fill our homes with quotes that are meant to remind us to slow down, breathe, enjoy the little things, but still get buried with feelings of not being good enough or worthy enough.

The first thing I do when I get a patient who is suffocating by their to-do lists and feelings of low self worth is help them to stop. Just stop. You see that list above? What is missing from it? How about these things…

Self-care
Family-time
Fresh-air
Playtime

I know, I know, THERE’S NO TIME! But the thing is, we all have to make time because the other stuff just doesn’t matter if we aren’t checking off those boxes that feed our souls and nourish our relationships. I have to remind myself of this as much as anyone else does which is why this post is titled what it is. This summer after having a child, being away from work but still working at home to maintain my business, and having all of those other nasty to-dos build up week after week I finally had to make a decision. I decided to let the weeds grow. Because in order to take care of myself, be present for my husband, children, and friends and family, something had to give. So my house isn’t as tidy as I would like it to be and my yard isn’t going to win any green thumb awards. But my kids are happy, healthy, and we are moving through this season as a family with as much grace as we can.

"Stop Crying"

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My husband had a business trip in Florida this past week and I decided to pack up my 18 month old son and myself and tag along for some sun and warm weather. I am so glad I did as it was just what we all needed as we eagerly await the real arrival of spring. Traveling back home is never as much fun as traveling to wherever you are going. We got up at 4:30am to pack up and head to the airport for our 7am flight. While my husband and I could rationalize and understand and drink coffee to cope with the feeling of being ripped from our beds and our vacation at an ungodly hour, our 18 month old couldn’t do any of those things. For the most part he was a dream and the whole travel experience seemed to be more exciting than anything else for him. But there were moments when I could see in his eyes and hear in his consistent repetition of saying “mama” over and over that he was cooked and needed to be back home surrounded by familiarity and structure.

Our flight was full of families as Florida is such a wonderful and convenient trip from the northeast. The flight was rather turbulent and I think we were all relieved to touch down at JFK and have our feet on the ground again. In making our way through the airport out to our car with all of our bags, tired, hungry, and missing the sun and palm trees, I noticed another family that had been on our flight with two kids a bit older than mine. The little girl who was probably around 5 was crying loudly, hysterically, dramatically, and without ceasing. I saw the look on her parents’ faces, they had another little boy in tow younger than she was, bags hanging from each shoulder, a look of sheer exhaustion on their faces that I am sure mirrored ours. And then the father stopped them, looked his daughter in the face, and screamed loudly “stop crying, stop crying, STOP CRYING!” Which in turn, and without surprise, made her cry even harder, to which he rolled his eyes and they continued making their way through the airport. For a moment I could relate to every single member of that family. I could relate to the little girl that was crying, tired from traveling, probably hungry, sick of walking and carrying her small backpack full of treasures. I could relate to the mother carrying the little boy, her arms aching from the weight of everything she had been lugging around since before dawn that morning. And I could relate to the father screaming at his daughter, desperate for some quiet, to be done traveling, and to have the crying JUST STOP.

Being a parent takes more self restraint than any job I have ever had. It pushes me through a maze of emotions on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. In the midst of the most ethereal joy I have ever known there are also moments of complete frustration where I question myself and life and everything in between. As a therapist and a person who has overcome my own personal battles throughout life I am keenly aware of the toll that emotional neglect has on a person’s life and psyche. I am more aware of this in the moments where my son is literally hanging from my leg as I try to make dinner, go to the bathroom, or fold laundry, than I am of my frustration. There are far too many people in this world who were told at a small and most impressionable age to “stop crying”, sending the message that feelings are not ok unless they are acceptable and comfortable. So they learn to stuff their sadness, their disappointment, their hurt, their anger, and their fear. They stuff it and it festers and grows and becomes a lump that never goes away. It manifests as headaches, stomachaches, dry skin, insomnia, depression, anxiety, insecurity. How is one supposed to shut off the negative feelings that are a part of being human? The only way to do it is to also shut off the positive ones. So people numb. They numb instead of communicating, instead of feeling, instead of embracing the dark along with the light. They end up living half a life.

But there is another option, especially as parents. We can teach our children it is ok to have all of their feelings. That doesn’t mean giving them exactly what they want when they cry, it doesn’t mean catering to their every disappointment and whimper to ease their discomfort. It means sitting with them in their discomfort and allowing them to feel their feelings. It means normalizing their experience and teaching them that it is ok to cry. This is true and equally as important in adulthood as it is in childhood. We must give one another permission and space to feel, even when it is uncomfortable.

My toddler has temper tantrums, just like any other, and what I always choose to do is to sit with him in it, wait it out, and make sure he hears me calmly say I am here and ready to comfort him when he wants it. Eventually he stops crying and crawls into my lap, exhausted from the surge of feelings he has just experienced and knowing he is not alone. It’s what we all need sometimes. In the darkness when the world feels cold and lonely, we need to know we aren’t alone and our feelings are our road back to the light.

Top 10 Reasons To Jump Into Psychotherapy

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Psychotherapists can help people of all different ages and lifestyles live happier, healthier and more productive lives.

1) Better Communication. We need to learn how to communicate better. Period. Regardless of whether or not you grew up in a healthy family with excellent communication skills or not, we can all benefit from learning better communication skills.

2) Stress/Anxiety/Depression Relief. Psychotherapy sessions provide an opportunity for individuals to be able to discuss the causes of the stress, anxiety and/or depression in their life as well as gain valuable tools from a professional.

3) Objectivity. Psychotherapy provides a supportive environment that enables one to discuss his/her issues openly with someone who is objective, neutral and nonjudgmental.

4) Chronic Pain Relief. According to the study of bioenergetics, we humans hold emotions, trauma and stress in our bodies. Through the use of psychotherapy to relieve stress and anxiety, clients can experience a reduction or complete eradication of their pain symptoms.

5) Self Care. Through the work of psychotherapy, clients can begin to see ways to take better care of themselves emotionally, mentally, and physically that will result in more balance in their lives.

6) Combat Self-Defeating Thought Patterns. Psychotherapists help clients peel back the layers of the client’s inner self, while helping him or her identify and replace negative thought patterns that stand in the way of their living happier, more satisfying lives.

7) Healthier Marriages/Relationships. Even the most united couples sometimes need assistance to maintain healthy communication with each other. Psychotherapists can work to help couples identify and move beyond roadblocks through various methods to enable them to love and respect each other more fully and find more fulfillment in their relationship/marriage.

8) Happier Families. We all just want to get along! But sometimes family dynamics can be challenging and too difficult to overcome “in house”. Psychotherapists are trained to help family members identify and learn how to meet and respect their own needs and the needs of family members in order to create a more loving family environment.

9) Parenting/Discipline Issues. Psychotherapists can work with parents to help them to create healthy boundaries with their children and work through other challenges of parenting, offering tools to help foster better parenting skills and hence healthier and more satisfying parent/child relationships.

10) Joy! Once a client begins to believe and trust in the therapeutic relationship, he/she can have confidence that they will work toward successful issue resolution that will also serve as a model for other healthy relationships. Once clients can truly engage in this process, they begin to recover the child-like joy for life within themselves that was always part of them. Often this joy is buried under stress, trauma, worry and the inability to provide a release through beneficial communication with another person.

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