Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong anywhere? Do you have a ‘sacred space’ where you do feel like you have membership? For many of us, we have our family. Whether or not we truly feel comfortable in that space, there is a membership based on genetics or time spent together. It is a difficult thing to simultaneously exist as separate and together. We are individuals. Our skin is a boundary separating us from…
But can lead to bigger problems if misunderstood. How do you feel about terms like, We use these terms to describe when we are not ‘being ourselves’ in the presence of other people. This phenomenon reminds me of a quote attributed to comedian Chris Rock: When you meet somebody for the first time, you’re not meeting them, you’re meeting their representative. So this isn’t something I’m making up, it’s in the human vernacular. It is…
Or, how we grow to deserve our planet again. I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees for the trees have no tongues. Dr. Seuss, The Lorax Do you have an opinion about climate change? How about abortion? Or universal basic income? We all have our concerns and our hills that we’ll die on. This week I will use climate change as an example of a polarizing issue and…
What is your experience with therapy? Have you tried it? Wanted to try it? Hesitant to try it? Overwhelmed? Did you have a bad experience? Recently I have noticed some neurodivergent people have had negative experiences with therapy. Here I want to clarify my own story about how both therapy and neurodivergence are helping me heal and become the person I want to be. Briefly, I have been in therapy, counseling, or coaching (I use…
You have to love yourself first, they say. Have you ever been asked if you love yourself? Since the beginning of my healing journey over a decade ago, I have interacted with more than ten counselors, therapists, and coaches. Every single one has asked me if I love myself. Or, they have explained to me that I have to love myself first. You have to love yourself first This could just be my trauma speaking,…
Do you love yourself? I know, it’s an extremely personal question. When a counselor first asked me this question I was taken aback. It’s offensive and puts one in a defensive position. And who likes feeling defensive? But therapy is about healing and I answered as best I could. Again, and again. I’m fairly certain every counselor, therapist, and coach I have worked with has asked me some form of this question. I do love…
Have you ever felt like the only person who didn’t receive a ‘How to Live Life’ handbook? Did you think everyone else understood what was going on except you? I’ve felt like that my whole life. And it isn’t that I don’t like myself. I love myself. Everything breaks down when I move from my ‘inner world’ to the ‘outer world’. I struggle to understand human interactions. I always feel like I’m different. And don’t…
I ask this question as part of my journey to demonstrate that diversity is better than conformity. The idea, briefly, is that Life facilitates variety or diversity, yet we humans seem to resist this. We are all different, yet we do everything in our power to reduce this variation by trying to force each other to be the same. This journey was influenced recently by my exploration of neurodiversity and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD or…
Have you ever thought about how complex our brains are? Or about how little we seem to really know about the way we think? Like, how can we simultaneously love our family but also they annoy us to no end? I think this dissonance, this capacity to hold to two seemingly oppositional thoughts at the same time is just something we are able to do. What’s weird it that we try to not do this. When we have two…
My raw, early stages of self-diagnosis Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash Do you know someone who is autistic? Do you picture someone like Rain Man? Or someone like me? I’m Chris. I’m a smart, smiley, eye-contact-making, happily married father of four. Do I seem autistic? The answer is no. I don’t think many people would suspect me of being autistic. During thirteen years of therapy, counseling, and coaching no one even mentioned autism or ASD (Autism Spectrum…