Living Fully By Julie Roberts, Ph.D. We are born into this world with one thing—ourselves. So how do we make the most of this thing called our life? We can start by asking good questions, like: Who am I? What are my gifts? What do I love doing? What do I want to do and who do I want to be? How do I want to be with myself, my friends and my career? Is my career aligned with my true gifts? These are the questions related to how we do this life, not just what we do. This process…

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”  Rumi Black and white thinking occurs when we believe there is a right or a wrong view or a good or a bad way of behaving and we split by taking sides. We are closed to learning and to others who do not reflect our view. We may attempt to strengthen our position by nurturing our dislike and even hate of the other who is wrong and we alienate one another and often refuse to interact with those who do not express our views thus…

I believe that most of the violence in society comes from our aversion to our emotions. We fight the reality of what we feel because we don’t like the feeling. We try to make it go away by resisting what is. We battle with our feelings by drinking, running, eating, refusing to feel. When we have feelings we don’t like, we battle with others by blaming them for how we feel. When we resist our feelings, the emotions get stuck in us and then when something comes along that resembles that stuck emotion, we get triggered and respond as though…

Growing up with developmental trauma* can cause patterns of learned helplessness where we shut down, get small, space out, disassociate and eventually get depressed. Another response would be to go into the big one where we puff up and present ourselves as bigger than we are (see “Being the Big One” article https://www.changeworksinc.com/being-the-big-one/). And we can alternate between being the big one and helplessness. This article is dealing specifically with “learned helplessness” and how to shift that pattern. When we grow up with developmental trauma, we are helpless. We cannot leave our situation because we are children and we have…

Repetition compulsion* is a pattern we get stuck in where we are trying to ease the pain that manifests because our needs as a child were not met. The pain occurs when we are younger and because our feelings weren’t acknowledged, the emotions (of fear, anger and grief) are not resolved and we get stuck in a loop of recreating the pattern in an attempt to resolve the feelings that get triggered in us. As children when our pain is not seen, it is traumatic and we often end up questioning if there is something wrong with us and we…