Lifestyle

Despite our own mistakes, and the many we have seen, we are still believers in love and commitment. For every client we’ve helped through a messy breakup, we’ve had the privilege of hearing their story. We’ve listened, analyzed, and agonized with them, and we’ve learned a few tips that we all might want to consider before saying “I do” — and if it’s too late, if your partner has already filed divorce, we’ve got a few tips for you too, so that you remain in integrity throughout your separation in an effort to ‘consciously uncouple'(a term that we had so much affection for until Gwyneth exploited it).

Read more about five relationship insights we’ve taken to heart as divorce lawyers.

Have you ever been in conversation with your loved ones and just found it impossible to really, truly, communicate? Like, no matter how carefully you tried to explain your point of view the whole conversation seemed to go off the rails in a series of misses, and you all ended up feeling not-so-good about the contact you just had? It might have something to do with one of the four communication styles you learned in childhood.

Communication styles fall into four major categories – Passive, Aggressive, Passive Aggressive, and Assertive. Keep reading to learn more about all four.

What’s an emotional first aid kit? It’s a set of practices, behaviours, and creative interventions I’ve cultivated over the years that helps me support my body, mind, heart, and soul when times are particularly tough and I need to ramp up my self-care big time.

All of the tools in my emotional first aid kit are unique (read: wicked quirky) and super, almost inexplicably effective for me.

These are some tools you can pull out when it seems like everything’s going wrong and your standard self-care routines just aren’t cutting it for you anymore. An emotional first aid kit is an ongoing practice of self-awareness and self-care, supporting you in recognizing what you need, and getting curious and creative about how you can meet your needs through life’s many ups and downs.

For the purposes of today’s exercise, I’m going to walk you through the four areas for which we want to develop tools, and invite you to identify 2-3 creative interventions for each area. This will be the foundation of your own ever-evolving emotional first aid kit.

Body: Feel, Nourish, and Soothe
When life’s tough times hit, we want to have some tools in our toolbox that we can use to help feel, nourish, and soothe our body.

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean things like exercising for 20 minutes or drinking a daily green smoothie (though if that sounds like just what you need in tough times, rock on). Instead, what [b]I want you to start identifying are activities or practices you know that would help you get into your body and engage your five senses – smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing – in a way that feels appropriate and helpful for you and you alone.[/b]

For examples, one of my emotional first aid body go-to’s when my schedule’s overly full and I’m feeling overwhelmed by life and professional commitments is hopping on my bike and riding it along the Bay while blaring Florence + The Machine’s Shake it Out on repeat through my earbuds. And while I absolutely love yoga and getting on my mat regularly, when I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed is the feeling of freedom that comes from riding my bike long and hard. That combined with the smell of the sea (once a Maine Islander, always a Maine Islander!) and the repeated reminder from Florence to shake my stress off does wonders for me. I don’t know what your body-based tools will be, but here’s some inquiries to help you brainstorm:

-What’s the sort of stress you’re experiencing? Do you feel trapped or too uncontained? What’s a physical activity that can support giving you more space (if feeling trapped) or containment (if you’re feeling uncontained)?
-What did your 8-year old self most love to do with her body?
-What does your body crave when you’re stressed? Touch? Childhood comfort food? Stretches? Connection with the earth? Space?
-Can you combine a few activities into one to engage several senses of your body at once? (Eg: Music and movement?)
If your minds feels frazzled, what action can you take that’s soothing? If your mind (and life) feels untidy or unruly? How can you do something to help bring order to your mind?

Sign up for a free subscription to read the rest of the tools in your emotional first aid kit as laid out by Annie Wright LMFT, licensed psychotherapist.

Much has been written about the seemingly impossible standards and relentlessly full plates most of us have across all areas of our lives — and I probably don’t need to tell you how much stress, anxiety, and depression it causes when we judge ourselves constantly falling short of “expectations” and the side effects or overscheduling Every. Minute. of our day.

But what’s there to do about it? What’s to be done when you find yourself in a full-fledged meltdown because you’re JUST TOO OVERWHELMED and you have no idea how to make things feel more manageable in your day-to-day?

It’s a tough place to be in, so in today’s post I want to walk you through a three-ingredient “cure” I often use with my therapy and coaching clients (not to mention with myself) when life gets to be overwhelming.

Read on and see if this recipe for overwhelm “cure” can be applied anywhere in your own life…

One of the most common things I hear in my therapy practice goes something along the lines of this:

“I feel stuck. I just don’t know what to do or how to make choices about [fill in the blank about career, relationships, life choices in general…]. What do I do? How do I get unstuck?”

Does this feel familiar? Maybe you’ve been wrestling with a question for a few weeks or a few years now, turning choices over and over and over like:

“Is he the one?” “Do I really want to stay in this career field?” or “Do I really want to settle in the Bay Area? I can’t move back to the Midwest, can I?”
I have huge compassion for feeling stuck and not able to make a choice about something you dearly — maybe even urgently — want or need to. I’ve been there many times myself.

Feeling stuck is an often painful, vulnerable, frustrating, and vitality-draining place to be in so I particularly love working with therapy and coaching clients when they’re in this place, gently holding them through the pain and struggle and helping them to shift their stuckness and arrive at choices, insights, and decisions that feel true, tolerable, and enlivening for each of them.

Today I want to share some of these same nitty gritty realities, reframes, and inquires I use with my clients when they’re feeling stuck (the very things I wish someone had shared with me a few years back!) to help you if you’ve been feeling stuck/torn/on-the-fence/ indecisive/resistant to making choices somewhere in your own life. So pour yourself a cup of tea and read on…

Nitty Gritty Truth #1 About Choices: Making life’s big decisions actually *is* tricky business
“Personal identity is always in the process of being formed by the very business of making these endless choices. We are, so to speak, constructing the vehicle even as we attempt to ride in it and steer it. And moreover, we must construct it of materials we pick up as we go along.” — Jim Bugental, PhD
The ability to notice our impulses, imagine them into possible choices, and act on them intentionally and decisively is what gives color, shape, and form to the very identity of our lives.

Every single part of this statement — from noticing to birthing to acting — requires self-awareness, sensitivity, and courage. [b]No part of this process is necessarily easy and particularly not so when it comes to the biggest choices of our lives — how to shape our careers, who we want to partner with, how we want to live out our legacy, and so forth.

And yet, we’re called upon to do this Every. Single. Day. and moreover, as the quote above from famed psychotherapist Jim Bugental, PhD suggests, we’re often forced to do this on the fly, basically making choices (and our lives) up as we bump along the road of life. If you’ve ever felt like you were making it all up as you went along, you basically are.

So can we please just all have some compassion for the fact that making choices often isn’t exactly easy? It’s actually supposed to be hard sometimes. Making choices about the big ticket items in our lives is nothing less than the action of identity-formation.

And, to top it all off, the process is harder still if we – for whatever reason – haven’t learned how to notice, name, and honor our deepest needs and wants. For instance, if you were raised in a home where it wasn’t safe or supported for you to have needs and wants, this may add a whole other layer of complexity and challenge to your current ability to make life’s big choices.[

So if you’re feeling stuck with some area of your life right now, torn between options, sitting on the fence waiting for a sign, please be gentle with yourself. You’re not alone. Not in the least. This decision making stuff is challenging for many of us but seeking out skilled support can be a big help.

Nobody said that any of this was going to be easy, but we’re here to help you navigate tough choices. Sign up for a free subscription to read more from licensed psychotherapist and LMFT Annie Wright.

Anxiety is a normal and natural human emotion that everyone experiences at times. And, like with most things in life, anxiety exists on a spectrum — from butterflies in your stomach before speaking up in a meeting to a full blown panic attack when faced with getting on an airplane — the degree and impact and triggers of anxiety look different for all of us.

Bottom line: You don’t get out of this human experience without dealing with anxiety.

And while anxiety may be unavoidable to a certain extent, you can definitely cultivate some tools to help you more effectively manage and deal with it so it doesn’t impact your daily life so strongly or so negatively.

Sign up for a free membership to learn about our four favorite tools to ease and manage your anxiety.

A Pep Talk from Me to You…

I know you’re having a hard time right now. You’re not feeling so great, mentally, physically, overall… You’re wishing this time would pass, that things would be back to normal (whatever that is). You’re wishing for more ease, wishing this wasn’t your reality at the moment. You’re hurting.

I want you to know that I hear you, I see you, and I’m so sorry you’re having a tough time right now.

As much as I want to take away your pain, sadly I can’t. But I can be here with you in your hard time…

Maintaining your mental health is just as important, if not more important, than your physical health when you’re going through a tough divorce. Don’t get us wrong, we want you healthy and happy on the other end of the divorce tunnel when you emerge, but even a “simple” divorce can take its toll on your mental health.

We’ve compiled a 10-point tip sheet for robust mental health, and we think it’d do your body (and mind) good by giving it a read.

Asking “What if I never meet The One?” is a potentially scary, vulnerable, and often triggering question to contemplate. Imagining ourselves without The One – a romantic partner, a great love, a lifetime spouse – flies in the face of many people’s dreams and hopes for their future. It’s a possibility that, in my experience, most of us consciously and unconsciously avoid looking at and sitting with.

Let’s be honest: It’s a muddy, hard question. But what if there were gold in the mud? What if by looking at and sitting with this question there could actually be value to us and to the way we live our lives whether we’re partnered or not?

There may be some days, weeks, months, maybe even years when – for whatever reason – just getting through the day, or going to work, or putting one foot in front of the other feels hard. Really, really hard.

Maybe it’s because you’re wrestling with anxiety, depression or some other mental illness. Maybe it’s because you’ve had your heart broken. Maybe you’ve gone through a physical or emotional trauma. Maybe you’re deeply grieving. Or maybe there’s no easily understood reason for why you’re feeling bad.

Read through our 101 self-care suggestions for when it all feels like too much.

If you are thinking of divorce, you may have what I call a “training partner.” I learned this from my years of studying Aikido and martial arts. In the dojo, you can’t get better unless you have a great training partner. A training partner is the person who most challenges you—the person you feel most frustrated, challenged, angry, hurt or betrayed by. Along with your spouse, a training partner can be a boss, a co-worker, a child or a friend. These training partners are here to offer you an opportunity to grow and expand.

Training partners seem to have this unbelievable talent of triggering deep, painful emotions in us. They can make us feel inadequate. They can make us feel so angry and enraged. They can bring out our righteousness. That’s what they’re there for. It’s not a mistake. It’s an opportunity to grow.

Read on to find out if you tied the knot with a training partner and how to move forward with your life.

One of my favorite quotes about self-care comes from my friend and colleague Annie Wright, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who runs Annie Wright Psychotherapy, based in Berkeley. “Self-care doesn’t always look like sleep, yoga or green juice,” she often says. And she is SO right.

But sometimes self-care becomes this thing that you have to plan and make time for and commit to. Maybe it starts to feel like a chore because so many people keep telling you to “take care of you”. Or maybe self-care feels silly or selfish, like your time could be better spent checking items off your to-do list.

I get it. We’re all busy. But look: if you don’t make time for you, nobody else will. You’re in the driver’s seat on this one. And I guarantee that one hour a week (at least) dedicated just to you is not too much to invest in yourself.

But, how to fill the time? We’ve got you covered.

In partnership with Annie, I’ve developed a worksheet to help guide you through a decision-making process that helps you think through a decision-making process that starts with booking – and committing – to time just for you. Then, it takes you through a series of questions to help you plan and choose an activity that feels right for you, depending on what you need at this moment and as you grow toward the next version of you.

I hope you like it.

Sign up for a free membership to download this worksheet.