Worry and anxiety sometimes seem like emotional demon twins, with anxious feelings following worrisome thoughts. “Worry” means “to feel uneasy or anxious; torment oneself with or suffer from disturbing thoughts; fret” (Random House Webster’s College Dictionary). In the short term, worrying may provide a temporary measure of relief. If it continues, however, it makes things worse for you because it becomes …
Turn Guilt and Regret into Something Positive
Guilt and regret are like two flowers on a single stem—intimately related, yet each with a distinct bloom. Regret looks backward, and you feel sorrow or remorse for something you did or didn’t do. You made a decision, chose a course of action, and it didn’t turn out well. “I could have handled it differently,” you think. Regret is a …
Addiction, Anger, and Breathing
“I always hit back when I got mad. Sometimes it was words but sometimes it was physical. I got mad a lot.” This young woman in my Pathways for Change class has been “clean” for 48 days now and is beginning to get a handle on her anger. Imagine how she behaved when her child was taken away because she …
Live Beyond Your Fears – Part III
As promised, here are four more ways you can live beyond your fears: Suppress your negative self-talk. Most of us are terrific at thinking of all the reasons something will fail. That little critic in our head yaps at us constantly. Reese Witherspoon uses self-talk as a way of not letting her fears take over. In that article in Marie …
Overcoming Your Fears – II
You can either succumb to your fears and live with the consequences, or overcome them. But how? As promised last week, here are the first four of eight ways you can curtail them: Put your fear in perspective. Ask yourself: On a scale of one to ten, how intense is it? As Dr. Sam said, “I’ve failed at some pretty …
Live beyond Your Fears – Part I
“Weren’t you afraid?” I asked Dr. Sam, who had left her established chiropractic practice to start a new wellness business. “Yes,” she admitted, “but I didn’t let it stop me.” We all experience fear; it’s a universal emotion, flashing a “danger ahead” signal when we’re faced with a threat, whether physical or mental. Our response to it ranges from feeling …
Godspeed, Carole
Carole’s Christmas letter has been the first one to arrive for decades, so I noticed when it wasn’t this year. Her signature looked unsteady. Reading the letter confirmed my fears: “I was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig disease, last January, and have been in a wheelchair since July.” Carole and I became best of friends when we lived at the …
Stepping Stones to Life
“Stepping Stones.” To what? To a life of purpose and fulfillment, free from addiction. In 2016, I offered to volunteer at Pathways for Change, an amazing place where men and women can get their lives on a healthy, meaningful track. I wrote down a ‘shopping list’ of topics for them to choose from – and Pat and Jackie, the program …
Fearful of Writing?
Fearful of writing. That sounds strange, doesn’t it? Yet it’s more true than I knew. At my last writers’ group, the question to respond to was, What fears do you have about writing? There were only three of us present that day, so it was intimate. We took ten minutes to write, then shared with each other. Two of us have published …
Who’s Crazy Enough to Write a Book?
Who’s crazy enough to write a book? It takes time (usually a couple years), it’s costly, complicated, requires many hours of research, the publishing business is constantly changing, and there is a lot of rejection, especially while trying to get the first one published. Who needs the aggravation? I guess I did! I’ve written and published two books now, the …