Tag: time

I can do this because I’ve done it before…

If you’re like me, you often conveniently or accidentally forget how hard you’ve worked to make it through some of the rough times.

How you talk to yourself and what you think about yourself is extremely important. Your words and thoughts do affect you and your well-being.

It has been postured that talking to plants can help them grow. Imagine if you spoke to yourself in a way that would help you grow, what would that sound like? What would you say?

(To learn more about why talking to plants might be helpful, visit the following site: https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/does-talking-to-plants-help-them-grow)

So take some notes about your life, especially about the times you overcame what may have at the time seemed like insurmountable odds, write yourself a letter, document your successes and read it to yourself over and over again when you feel all is lost. Speak to yourself the way you would to a loved one.

Perks of being a counselor? Witnessing growth and change in others when I sit with them in therapy in that painfully uncomfortable space where their doubts and sorrows live, seeing what happens when they are fully validated and accepted for who they are without any judgment and are truly seen and heard. Then knowing that I can do exactly the same same for myself, sit with my own pain and sense of failure, have a loving dialogue with the hurt parts of myself, because while I am no better than anyone else, I am no less than them either and deserve to be loved, cherished and cared for.

Anger isn’t always bad.

Anger gets a bad rep. Counselors, psychologists and just people in general have a hard time addressing anger at its core. Often times anger is dismissed and “underlying emotions” are addressed as the core emotions. 

Sometimes it’s true that other core emotions such as fear, sadness, anxiety, and such are actually the root of the anger displayed. But this is not universally and always true. Sometimes anger is just anger. Pure, raw, powerful and full of energy.
Can we try to accept anger for what it is and instead of dismissing it, channel it into something productive and life changing? This is a challenge I want to put out there to you. Instead of dismissing the anger you feel, channel its awesome energy and power into something useful in your life and try to make a positive change using your anger as fuel for your transformation. Empower yourself by telling yourself it’s okay to feel anger as long as you use it for good instead of destroying yourself and your relationships with others. Stop believing you don’t have control over your ability to take charge of your feelings. Feel your feelings, all of them. Don’t label them as good or bad. Just feel. And take the energy each feeling produces and channel it in a meaningful way so that you can make a positive difference in your own life as well as the life of the community in which you live.
There is no such thing as a “bad” feeling. All feelings are valid and equal in their ability to be useful or destructive. You get to choose how you will use your feelings. YOU are the one in charge. Breathe. Observe. Think and reflect. And then…Carry on. 
Lesson: Anger can be used as fuel to get you to where you want to be. It’s not about being destructive. It’s about being constructive with whatever you have and whatever you’re feeling at the moment. Believe me, I’m a counselor. I get angry and it pisses me off when my anger is negated or villianized. Being pissed off is life’s way of giving you a little shot of caffeine so you can get off your ass and do something different. Don’t be calm. Rage on and conquer your life! 

Don’t wait…

We often wait for life to be this way or that way before we make a move or do something we’ve always wanted to do.

The truth is that life will never be exactly the way we want it to be, it will never be perfect.

Life is messy. The winds will blow. Your hair will be messy. The sun will come out. Live and love anyway. Take pictures anyway. Live now. Follow your passions. Follow your heart. Don’t wait.

Perks of being a counselor: knowing there is no such thing as a perfect time or perfect life. The only perfection is how perfectly imperfect we all are. ❤️

Timelines

Sometimes you accidentally run into timelines of other people that match up with your old timeline. However, their timeline continues uninterrupted while yours takes a departure from your projected and estimated trajectory. It’s always a little jarring when you see the timeline that’s uninterrupted and start comparing it to yours. You start wondering if maybe this uninterrupted timeline could have been your life and then you look for where things changed. It’s an exhausting and defeating process. It presupposes that one single act can determine the fate of your timeline. It also presupposes that one outcome is better than another.


Life is not like that. If it were, there would be an antidote or a counter action that would protect you from that other “action” that is the determining factor in the change of trajectory. (Now I’m getting into Quantum Physics, which I love by the way.) 😉

In reality, there is no way to pinpoint a single moment when things change. While there are single events that change us forever, life is a continuous flow of moments that lead from one to another. Every time I have tried to look for that single moment, I have had to look at the moment before that and the one before that and on and on and on. It is actually easier to look forward and change actions in present mode for future benefit.

So where’s the perk?

I suppose the perk of being a counselor in this situation is to know at any given moment you have the power to change the future.