There is often a disconnect between the convenience of the modern world and the distress we witness in many of our teens. They have so much knowledge, entertainment, and capability at their fingertips and yet, many of them seem to struggle with overwhelm and paralysis around life tasks and social emotional connection and growth. How do we support them while also helping them to be more capable, confident, connected human beings? Here are 3 ways to build resiliency in teens.
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I wake up sweaty and tense. I’ve had another dream about wandering through a hotel as I desperately try to get to my room. The catch is that the hotel keeps changing. The stairways move, levels don’t connect, elevators only go to certain floors and they constantly change course.
I’m up against terrible odds, and this seemingly easy task of going to my room has become a nightmare. No matter how much I try, the circumstances keep changing, and there’s so much that’s out of my control.
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Over the course of his tragically short career, singer-songwriter Jim Croce became famous for his world-weary love songs and comic ballads of bullies getting their comeuppance. In his public persona, Croce embodied a very particular masculine archetype in American music and pop culture: a working-class guy with high emotional intelligence, rough-hewn but romantic and with an almost religious dedication to poetic justice.
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If you’re human you probably don’t like discomfort. I mean honestly who does? But what if discomfort is where the growth is? What if discomfort is the hill we have to climb on the way to experiencing confidence? Or joy? Motivation? or Connection?
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If you’ve been in a school, at a doctor’s office, or even frequented social media lately, you may have noticed that ADHD has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. While there is a bit of controversy about whether ADHD is over- or under-diagnosed, there’s no question that it’s on a lot of peoples’ minds these days.
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There is enough to contend with being an HSP in a healthy and functioning world, but what do you do when the world feels like it’s unraveling? When it feels like every few minutes there is a news update about a cataclysmic natural disaster, ongoing conflict in war torn countries, reversals in civil rights policy, and increasing division in the world, what pressure do we put on ourselves? Do we expect ourselves to be unimpacted, to separate emotionally, to not react or respond. Being a highly sensitive person means we are highly attuned and keyed into the world around us — so naturally, an HSP would pick up on the intense emotional experience happening in the world right now and have a correlating reaction to it.
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As an older millennial, I find myself reminiscing a lot about the “before times”. Life before smart phones, before social media, before AI. I was one of the lucky ones to experience a teenhood and young adulthood smart phone free until I was about 25 years old. I often wonder if time moved so slowly back then because I was just a kid growing up in a small town where nothing ever happened. Or if it’s because now I'm middle aged and one year of my life is a tiny increment in proportion to the 40+ I’ve lived, versus when I was 12 and a year felt like a lifetime. Or if it’s because now the world around us is moving so fast. Thanks to smart phones and immediacy culture, almost anything we want is accessible with the tap of a button, we barely have to wait and we no longer get to lose ourselves in the moment without a notification ding pulling us right out of it.
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