After a particularly long day of work, I recently shared with my wife: “Some days it feels like people just want to feel sorry for themselves,” and her response surprised me: “Yeah, but who doesn’t?” The topic of feeling sorry for yourself had come up before, so she’d had time to consider it, and on … [Read more...]
Am I a Failure?
I was recently asked, “Am I a failure?” (A much better question to be asked then, “Are you a failure?”) As a therapist, this question comes up more often than you might think, and the people most likely to ask it are good people whose brains are being mean to them (notice I wrote “most likely”). … [Read more...]
Worse than a Pandemic
One of the best things we can do in our life is create a spirit of thankfulness. It’s important to have hope, to dream, and have things to look forward to, but we need to balance that with feeling thankful for what we currently have and where we’re at in order to be happy. Finding a way to be … [Read more...]
A Great Story (Taken from a great person)
For the last four months my family has been regularly going to church... yes, I’m bragging... I’ve never been good at it. I’ve been loosely connected to this church for twenty years largely because the pastor is such a wonderful person (a pastor who’s a good person, weird, I know). He’s the … [Read more...]
10 Things that have Helped Me Find Happiness
I was recently driving home and I felt completely at peace; it was like life was exactly the way it should be. It was like the feeling you get camping when you’re looking at the stars or at a beach listening to the waves, but at this moment there weren’t any stars or waves. I wasn’t listening to a … [Read more...]
Are you limiting your happiness?
This week a wise woman said to me that a major reason for the lack of happiness and the emotional struggles we face in our society are based on first world problems. She explained that our culture is a breeding ground for over thinking things and making the small stuff huge. She shared a story … [Read more...]
Happiness: Sam the Shoe
(A Story) Sam the shoe, as the name suggests was a shoe. Sam liked being a shoe; she just wish she was a different shoe. In her mind every other shoe was better off than her. She was a “running” shoe, but I say running in quotations because she was a Velcro running shoe, and no one with Velcro … [Read more...]
How Do You Live Your Life?
Whether you realize it or not, you live your life pursuing one of these four goals: fun, happiness, status, or survival (you’ll find more information on the difference between fun and happiness in last week’s article). The good news is you get to choose how you live your life, which means you can … [Read more...]