At a very tense Mother’s Day gathering in 2016, I learned that my niece’s graduation was less than four weeks away and on the same night as a concert I had already committed to. The tickets had been a Valentine’s
Something does not become untrue because somebody more influential tells the story differently. I have spent a lot of my life attempting to reconcile the version of events that prevailed with my lived experience. Influence seems to determine which version
A person can know something experientially long before they can articulate it. They might know, for example, “After X is upset with me, I end up confused. I initiate communication thinking I had a legitimate concern, and somehow I leave apologizing
For more than 40 years, I didn’t really know how to exist inside a relationship unless I was the broken one, bowing in reliance to anyone gracious enough to let me hang around, no matter the quality of treatment. Could
Something began when I was four years old, and it was reinforced, repeated, normalized, and sustained over the course of decades. The injury wasn’t only the abuse itself. It was also the fact that the person who harmed me was
Sheesh. How many more times will I have to navigate this particular circuit before I have learned everything I can from it? The turth is in the pattern, not the explanation. It almost feels as though I have been given
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the c-word….”conflict ” and also–avoidance and repair. The archetype, to whom I have gravitated to like a moth to a flame, seems to have little room for either. Being non-pleased feels unacceptable.
Memory Memory can be unreliable. Interpretation certainly is. Two people can experience the same interaction and leave with very different narratives about what happened. What feels more meaningful to me now is paying attention to patterns that could have been