If you’ve been visiting Rewire Me regularly, you know we’ve been focusing on stress this month. As it happens, I’ve had a very busy month, filled with hosting a dinner party for 30 people and a workshop for 15, along with the responsibilities of my job, being a mom, and the usual household upkeep. Drawing from the articles we’ve been…
The Rewire Me team is really getting into our Stress Less theme for the month of August. During one of our recent editorial meetings, we started talking about how we stay productive and deal with stress. Some of the ideas were so good I’d like to share them with you: Always have a plan. Map out each day’s schedule the…
We all know stress can be harmful, but to a trauma survivor it can be excruciating, even life-threatening. Not everyone who lives through an extreme emotional trauma develops post-traumatic stress disorder, but millions do. An estimated 8% of the U.S. population—about 24.4 million people—have PTSD at any given time. PTSD is difficult to diagnose, in large part because its symptoms…
Brené Brown, an academic researcher, was going to spend a year “deconstructing” shame, fear, and vulnerability. It turned into six years and a life-changing revelation. She interviewed thousands of people and found they could be divided into those with a sense of love and belonging and those who wished they felt that sense. The former group held certain surprising things…
I came into this life stuttering. My mother had three false alarms on three consecutive days. On the fourth trip to the hospital, my father said he wasn’t going back home again. Once admitted to the maternity ward, she was in labor for 36 hours. My starts and stops exhausted her. My mother was 40 years old. By the time…
As a child I was never fond of classical music or opera, though my father used to blare opera music throughout our home. He would sit on the floor with my sister beside him, singing and explaining what the arias were all about. I had no patience for it. In my early 20s a cousin took me to see Turandot,…
The goal seemed completely ridiculous. Though an avid and dedicated Girl Scout in my youth, able to light fires and pilot my own canoe, I had been queried in my twenties concerning an upcoming camping trip, “What are you going to wear, a cocktail dress?” I was not an athlete, to put it mildly—more comfortable at poetry readings and pubs…
At the end of an essay on the American painter David Salle in Janet Malcolm’s new collection, Forty-one False Starts, Salle asks the author, “Have you ever thought that your real life hasn’t begun yet?” It’s a sentiment many of us share. Increasing numbers of my psychotherapy clients complain of a life in which they play a bit part. They…
