Annelisa

A woman sits across from me and says her husband is a narcissist. She has done the reading. She can list the criteria, and she can match each one to an incident. The way he speaks about colleagues who have disappointed him. The way a conversation about her day becomes a conversation about his. The birthday when the gift was so precisely wrong that it seemed almost deliberate. His absolute inability, in twenty-two years, to say the words I was wrong about that without appendin

The word "narcissist" and the topic of narcissism comes up a lot lately. The word is engaged in a variety of ways and contexts, to the point now where the true usefulness of the term seems greatly diluted. There is clearly great pain, trauma, neglect, and abuse that are the result of narcissistic injury. This is an incredibly important (and heartbreaking) topic, and those who have fallen prey to the devastating effects of narcissistic behavior in all its forms deserve attenti

More Vocabulary Before going further in the anger excavation, I wanted to clarify four more words, because they get used almost interchangeably, at least categorized similarly, and that imprecision will sink this exploration if not addressed first; assertiveness, aggression, rage and hostility. Assertiveness is direct, undisguised expression of a need or boundary. It isn't anger at all, necessarily. It's clarity. The word comes from Latin asserere, ad- (to) plus serere, to jo

The previous post raised the question: if anger is a kind of fusion or perhaps a complimentary pairing of grief, fear, confusion and unbearable madness. . . rather than discreet or sequential stages of emotion, does “anger” even belong as one emotional category? I’m exploring the possibility that, while it is convenient and even helpful to differentiate and delineate feelings for the sake of understanding ourselves and our reactions, it may also do anger a disservice to isola

We tend to talk about anger as though it were a single thing. A mood. A reaction. Something that shows up, does its damage, and eventually passes. But the word itself is telling a different story, one we've largely overlooked or misunderstood for a very long time. Anger comes from the Old Norse angr, meaning grief, distress, sorrow, affliction. Not rage. Not hostility. Grief. The English sense of “wrath” didn’t attach itself to the word until centuries later. Before that, to

By MC Yogi Spotify https://open.spotify.com/track/2guY382Y6t5I0NsUUnku7y?si=20ecdb20e5cf45e7 YouTube https://youtu.be/mLWFFaiDNkQ?si=X5MScclPLI54sPBm

The sapling believed the wind had come for it. The old tree did not disagree. "The wind will come," he said. "It will ask for more than seems fair. Bend, if you can." The old tree did not lean toward the sapling. It leaned with the wind. The sapling, certain that bending meant surrender, held itself as stiff as it could. Until one morning, after a great storm, the sapling noticed the great trunk had never tried to escape the weather. "Beloved," whispered the old tree, "God

Most people begin healing with a fantasy. It is rarely spoken out loud, and often not even conscious, but it is there, nonetheless. The fantasy is that somewhere in the future there exists a version of us who no longer hurts; a version who no longer gets triggered, feels abandoned, becomes anxious when a partner pulls away, or finds themselves overwhelmed by grief, fear, disappointment, or despair. We imagine healing as a kind of arrival. A destination where the difficult fee

The Child Knows A mother, sitting with me in session, describes, almost as an aside, something that happened the week before. Her son is six. They had been reading together, the way they do most nights, and partway through he stopped her and asked, out of nowhere, whether she was going to be okay. Not whether he was okay. Whether she was. She laughs a little when she tells me this, the laugh people use when something has unsettled them more than they want to admit. "He's six,

Couples rarely come to me because they've fallen out of love. The most common reason they come is to repair what has ruptured between them, the slow accumulation of misunderstanding and defense that builds in any long partnership. But close behind it, almost as often, is something else entirely: their children. A nine year old who has stopped listening to anything either parent says. A fourteen year old who is dissociating, lying, hiding in a room with the door locked, cuttin

By Kurt Cobain Performed by Moontricks, Frase & Fawna https://open.spotify.com/track/0PSmLCIIH7M5NHbS76NSWl?si=f5615c808a944d43 https://youtu.be/daROfl5it48?si=S2tDhm_y6K_whvyS Come as you are, as you were As I want you to be As a friend, as a friend As an old enemy Take your time, hurry up Choice is yours, don′t be late Take a rest as a friend As an old memoria Memoria Memoria Memoria Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach As I want you to be As a trend, as a friend As a k

Come. Do not wash the grief from your hands before you reach for me. I am waiting for you in the unwashed place. You have traveled so far with your candles and your practices, the old thirst disguised as devotion. But your body knows what the pilgrim has forgotten . . . Spirit descends to be met. _______________________________ The beloved beside you is not an obstacle. They are the reflection of the one face you don’t want to see. Unaware, they carry the map to you

There is a particular and special quality to the moments when something genuinely shifts in a long partnership. It does not tend to announce itself. It may not arrive as a breakthrough, or a peak experience, or the resolution of the central conflict the two people have been circling for years. It may arrive quietly, in the middle of something ordinary, and it tends to be recognized only in retrospect . . . as a moment when something that used to be unbearable was, somehow, bo

There are moments in long term partnership that arrive without announcement, usually in the middle of something ordinary that most couples can recognize. A conversation that begins reasonably enough and then shifts, almost imperceptibly, into something charged and familiar. A moment in bed where one person reaches and the other, for reasons neither can quite articulate, is not quite there. A silence at the dinner table that carries, for reasons that seem disproportionate to t

There is a particular kind of person who tends to find their way into serious spiritual work. They are, almost without exception, genuinely earnest. They want to grow. They want to be free of the patterns that have limited them, the reactivity that has cost them relationships, the persistent sense that life and love should feel more alive than it currently does. They meditate. They go on retreat. They do the workshops, read the books, sit with teachers, explore plant medicine