Category: Emotional triggers

Somewhere beneath it all…

February 24th, 2026

We’re currently in the aftermath of a pretty heavy snowstorm. We ended up with about 12 or 14 inches, and so, I spent most of yesterday outside shoveling us out.

Currently, the temperatures are rising, the sun is out, and the roads and the sidewalks are clean. In fact, they’re almost bone dry. But it’s still going to take a long time for what’s left behind to melt. It’s going to be a good while before we see any green poking up in the backyard.

Looking out at that unbroken field of snow, especially when it’s this deep and heavy, it’s very easy to feel the oppressiveness and the inevitability of it all.

Winter’s a time of dying off – a time of silence, of solitude. And that can be a little hard to navigate for some of us. It’s obvious that we live in a time that’s pretty oppressive. Things are coming at us left and right. They seem to pile up. The world can feel cold and heavy. We can feel alone and isolated.

But there’s another aspect to winter that’s important to keep in mind.

Yes, there is a dying off now, but it’s a necessary dying off. It’s the removal of the old things, the removal of the things that no longer serve. And as those things fall away, they open up space for new growth.

Yes, it’s a time of quiet, a time of slowing down, but it’s also a time of contemplation – of taking stock – of allowing the blessings that we’ve received throughout the year to settle into our bones…
Good grief…

February 13th, 2026

Those of us who’ve come up in households where addiction and emotional instability were the order of the day…we know a little something about grieving. We make a partner of our grief. We carry it with us. Often, we carry it down deep, where it hangs there like a feeling we can’t touch.

But sometimes, when we’re tired – when we’re triggered – it can come rushing to the surface. And when it does, it’s good to simply be in the midst of that…
The waiting room…

February 7th, 2026

One of the hardest things to do — especially for those of us who’ve carried a lot of pain for a lot of years — is simply to sit with it. Sometimes that pain shows up as body memories, sometimes as emotions or old stories that seem to rise up out of nowhere.

They can get into our heads, start pulling the levers, and before we know it, we can start acting out into the world in ways that might not be too nice.

And then comes the aftermath…
The rest of it…

January 11th, 2026

When I get frustrated and the exhaustion sets in, my skin tends to get a little thin…and it did this morning. I’ve learned that when things get like this, it’s usually a sign that I’m pushing too hard. And so, I need to just take some time and rest.

And that’s the thing: rest is also a big part of this recovery process. Learning to sit. Learning to love ourselves enough to take care of ourselves and to just be…to just chill out, breathe, relax when we need to.

To feel these things; not to numb them out, not to stuff them down.

Because running away from our feelings – stuffing them down, hiding from them, not showing them in public – is a lot of the reason that we carry these wounds in the first place…

If you’d like to see more, please check out my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
Standing in the shadows…

January 7th, 2026

As we get older, if we’re lucky, if we’re brave enough – strong enough –
to look at these things from our past, to really, really sit with them, and to examine the consequences as we look out at the wake that we leave behind us through our lives, we begin to realize how we’ve affected others.

And sometimes, the desire to make amends comes about.

Not everybody wants an apology. Sometimes, our apologies are good, true, honest things, and other times, we just want to be left off the cross. But nobody can really do that for us; that’s something we have to do for ourselves.

And so, what’s left, then, is what’s referred to as a living amend:
looking honestly at what we’ve done – the effects of our actions –
and deciding, “I will not do that again,”

and doing our damnedest not to…

If you’d like to see more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube:
What’s yours is yours; what’s mine is mine…

December 17th, 2025

As a kid, you walk into a room and you feel anger there…well, you feel angry, so you must be angry. You feel sad, so you must be sad. We learn to internalize those things, to take them on, and to come at the world from the perspective of those things that we’re feeling – believing that they’re our own.

As we get older and lean a little heavier into our work, hopefully, we begin to sort some of that stuff out. We begin to learn what’s ours and what’s not; what we can let go of – what we can hang onto.

And this can be incredibly difficult when we see people we really love going through a tough time. One trap in particular that it’s easy to fall into as someone who’s empathic, is the fix, save, and rescue trap. We see someone suffering, and we want to fix the situation. We want to save them from it; to rescue them from their peril.

Sometimes our motivations aren’t as unselfish as they seem, whether we’re aware of that or not. Part and parcel of growing up in a house full of emotional instability is often the dance of codependence: “I love you because of how you make me feel.”

In the presence of suffering, especially when it’s the suffering of those we care for, we don’t like the way we feel when we see them suffer, and so we want to rescue them; to stop their pain in order to stop our own.

If you’d like to hear more, please check out the latest episode of my podcast, “Putting it on the wind,” on YouTube…
You don’t have to…

December 10th, 2025

One of the great blessings of my own healing work has been that I have found myself in the presence of teachers who, consciously or unconsciously, have never been afraid to show their humanity. Some of it has been extremely noble, and some of it hasn’t. But the wonderful thing about that, is that I have learned lessons along the way that I could not have learned any other way.

I have gotten to see people being completely human in my presence, and that has opened up space and allowed me to do the same…
Finger on the trigger…

December 3rd, 2025

When you’re a kid, you’re pretty much at the mercy of the environment you grow up in – and the people who inhabit that environment. You can’t pack your fucking bags and move to Podunk when you’re three, that’s just the way it goes.

And so, we learn to adjust.

We learn to eat the food that we’re given. And sometimes, that food comes in the form of some pretty negative beliefs – pretty negative realities. We get told that we’re an idiot. We get yelled at. Maybe we get beaten. Maybe we get emotionally abused, or even worse. We come to find out, sometimes, that the love that we really want is highly conditional and based upon how well we fall in line, or dance to someone else’s music.

As we get older though, we sometimes continue on with those beliefs. We can hear those stories again and again in our heads. And though the voices might sound like the people who said those things – it might even be their words – sometimes, those people have been out of our lives for years or even decades. Maybe they’re even dead.

So, the question is, “Whose voice is it, really…?”