Trust Your Gut. (Or Don't.)

“Can someone help me understand why people keep telling me to trust my gut?” He was asking the group in earnest. “First off, my gut is cranky - it can’t be controlled. Second, it sometimes disagrees with my heart. AND, last time I trusted my gut (and the time before that) I was, you know, gutted - it did not turn out well. And I don’t want to go back there again.” 

Sounds about right.

As anyone with anxiety will tell you, the gut is not always the source of wisdom.

Just as our literal gut reacts to the countless things we feed it, so too does our metaphorical gut – our intuition. Influences from our parents, grandparents, cousins, friends – and even our internal voice: our critic, hopes, desires, dreams, fear – all churn in our mind/body and create a confused sense of what may or may not be best for us. (Or what’s best for us in the moment, but not in the long term?)

It’s exhausting to consider all the possibilities.

That’s just one of the benefits of therapy: to help you slow down, ground, tease apart the voices that have contributed to your gut, while also clarifying your values and helping you build the muscle that will allow you to own and embrace the imperfect consequences of your decisions. In short: to stay vital instead of falling back into habits that no longer serve you.

Therapy seems to work for a lot of people, but don’t listen to me: trust your gut. (Or don’t.)

That Moment of Clarity (That Lasted a Moment)

Like views from the metaphorical mountaintop, moments of clarity are soul-quenching. They give you an idea of the magnitude of the landscape around you. You see the path behind you and before you, you see both the joys and obstacles ahead, and you revel in what you’ve experienced, overcome, or been changed by.

There are moments in life – days, weeks, but more likely fleeting seconds – when we feel this way…as though we are standing on the mountaintop of our life. In these moments, our journey is put in perspective; the sweetness, our suffering, our longing, the closed doors, the wishes denied. We see our lives through the compassionate, long lens of understanding. “This is what I needed to learn in order to achieve that thing,” we kindly tell ourselves. “This was what I needed to experience in order to meet that person.”

And then the views from the mountaintop leave us. We are interrupted by our children, our partners, our loneliness, some powerful feeling we can’t articulate, our work; we are interrupted by the realities of life. So difficult, then, the return to the little things – the people and things we must attend to – the struggles we approach or try to avoid.

For those of us (all of us) consumed by the little things of life, therapy is a nice reminder that the mountaintop exists, somewhere (perhaps closer than we know), and that we are not dammed to traverse the journey alone. Help has not arrived, but is here, because we have claimed our right to experience the majesty of our mountaintop.

What can you do to claim that experience for yourself, today?

Naming Our Position to Racism

Racism is real, and our position to it differs based on our lived experience. This position informs the way in which the world relates to us, the opportunities available to us, and the extent to which we encounter and must navigate barriers – or blockades – on our path to health, happiness, peace, or justice.

If you are in America, and you are white, there are ways in which you have benefitted from your position in overt and covert ways – ways that may be uncomfortable to recognize and perhaps even outside of your conscious awareness. This reality may be difficult to navigate, particularly as the country undergoes a critical reckoning on the impact of race and individual contributions to racism. (Raises hand: this is ongoing work for me, it’s rarely easy.) Experiences of pain and discomfort in this case, like all others, are opportunities for reflection, growth, and eventually, action. These experiences are also an opportunity for retreat - an action taken by far too many for far too long.

While race is just one in a long list of salient identities that informs the trajectory of our life, such as our economic social status, the place of our birth, our sex assigned at birth, sexual identity, gender identity, or apparent or non-apparent disability, if you are in America, and you are Black, Brown, and/or belong to other oppressed racial or ethnic groups, your identity has likely been contrasted against an outsized and unexamined influence of whiteness. There is pain here, too, but a prolonged pain compounded by systemic and interpersonal invalidation dating back to the very formation of this country.

There is no quick fix for what is entrenched, however contact with our position to racism must first be acknowledged. This is an entry to our work, but not the start; lasting examination of our position to racism begins with a willingness.

Parenting in the Pandemic

You’re a parent. That’s an incredible role and responsibility – you’ve known this. But wait. You’re also a teacher now. And a chef in demand. And a chauffeur. But also, an emotional support/guide and entertainer. In addition to being an employee, a coworker, a peer. And a friend to others, let us not forgot. A partner, perhaps, too. And…you’re doing all this while remaining sequestered and sane? Hardly.

There’s no playbook for parenting, particularly in a pandemic. In these times, your roles and responsibilities have likely increased, along with your stress (financial, work, home – the list goes on), and all this while you lack access to the coping outlets you have historically enjoyed.

If you’re feeling frayed (at best) and depleted, you’re not alone. There are a number of resources to help – guides for creative activities with your kids, coping outlets in consideration of our current restrictions (like poetry). More than anything, however, coping in this time relies primarily on compassion – the ability to be “good enough” in any one role while keeping your head above water. Compassion may sound like a self-statement that goes something like this:

With all that’s on your plate, and all the roles you’ve had to play, you survived the day. And that, today, is more than enough.