Take your time getting to know someone, give it several months of time to explore how they treat you and make you feel to ensure they are on the level. Beyond that, make sure you are doing the “controlled descent into vulnerability” where you both are being vulnerable a little at a time, and in fairly equitable ways

It is not about partnership and respect; it is about control to them

May the Fourth be With You, and also provide some therapeutic insights.

For so many of us, the lesson we are taught from an early age is that we SHOULD forgive people. The problem with forgiveness for most of us is that we treat it as a thing we give to other people to make their lives better.

What if I told you that maybe acting childish isn’t such a bad thing after all?

Mindfulness is not just us sitting in a corner in the traditional meditative pose, but rather it is being so deeply focused on a task that we are able to truly be in the moment.

I want to challenge people to no longer perpetuate these thoughts and to just appreciate that our bodies are different and can do different things. In the meantime, maybe I will fuck around, get hella strong and start wearing crop tops to trigger people, even though my confidence is not yet there, maybe it will get there.

Grief is a deep sorrow and sadness, and the act of grieving is the process of allowing ourselves to feel that, related to loss. For us, loss can be losing a thing just as much as it can be losing a person. That is the context we want to explore here, is how grief and the act of grieving can allow us to move forward.

For many of us we may excel at celebrating others and being an outstanding cheerleader for them whether they are winning or struggling. We can be supportive and compassionate to them and validate their experiences. However, in our own lives we fall short. We beat ourselves up and are overly critical of who we are, what we have done and what we are capable of.