In his article “Shame and Bodywork: a Persisting Problem”, Dan Cayer beautifully relates his experience as a teacher of the Alexander Technique and the pressure he has felt to be the perfect embodiment of the result his clients are looking for. …
When we struggle with frustrations, overwhelm, anger, anxiety, our family members or keeping our socks together in pairs, there is this one advice we hear often:
Love yourself.
That is good advice. When we fully love ourselves, life becomes infinitely better. When we love ourselves every moment, we can handle…
When I Learned That Wisdom Cannot Be Force-Fed
It is not like I am constantly preaching at my husband. It is just that I often seem to come up with brilliant insights and solutions for his problems. Loving wife that I am, I happily share them. Except my husband is not interested. …
When Mind Returns to Body
My husband grew up in the Amazon rain forest.
Until he met me, he had never left the forest, let alone his country Brazil. His world is physical, raw, natural. He grew up with hard physical labor on the field and in the forest. Hunting and fishing was how he…
Why Shaming Is Not the Solution
About 150 years ago and lasting some decades, scores of women were labeled with a diagnosis of ‘hysteria’ which, as Mark Micale put it, described “everything that men found mysterious or unmanageable in women.”[1]
Fortunately, such a thing would be impossible today. What an outrageous idea! It doesn’t matter that…
Note: I’m writing this in she-form, because it is based on my own experience and I am a female. The same applies to boys, of course, I believe.
It’s probably one of the worst nightmares a parent can imagine: your child comes home and tells you about her experience of…
When I was 17, I got into a relationship with a 24-year-old man [note to U.S. readers: this is normal and not illegal in Europe].
I had not been really interested in him, but he was very insistent and I ran out of arguments. 18 months later I ended the…
How do we have difficult conversations? Any time we expect a conversation to be(come) difficult, it is because we assume that either the other person will reject what we propose or they will be hurt by what we share with them. I want to talk about the latter.
I have…
Shame spits into your romantic dinner. Shame coughs blood on the hands that reach out. Shame laughs its ugly cackle at your reflection in the mirror. Shame is the last door in your dungeon. Locked tight with a thousand padlocks, barricaded, fortified with thick chains and boarded up with massive…
Aren’t we the selfless ones?
“My husband could save so much time, if only he’d listen to me,” sighs Diane. She used to do what most of us do when the other fails to comply: she repeated her instructions. Maybe, somehow, he overheard her casually mentioning 348 times that if…
