Forgiveness Always Wins

I've struggled greatly with forgiveness in my years as a human being, and continue to do so to this day. There are some experiences that are just hard to accept and that just stuck with me and hurt so bad and I held onto that hurt to no end with blame against the other person. Throughout this, all who was really hurting was me.

When you're hurting, forgiveness can feel like the stupidest thing to even think about. However, the way forward can often lie in how we actually understand forgiveness. Imagine that you hold resentment towards someone, but have no interaction with them and never plan to. In that scenario, it's very clear that the only thing being hurt by your lack of forgiveness is you. 

Now move that into someone you have a lot of contact with. You're still hurting you, and it gives you no gain to keep blaming them. So forgiveness isn't "letting someone off the hook" for bad behavior, and we can still hold people accountable and forgive them, because forgiveness is about you, not them. It means you can let go of the hurt you feel for them in your heart and soul, not that you'll let them hurt you again with no consequences.

When we hold onto grudges, we often trap ourselves in the past, replaying hurtful moments, keeping wounds fresh and preventing healing. When we choose to forgive, we create space for growth and self-compassion.

The journey to forgiveness starts with self-reflection. Ask yourself, "What am I holding onto, and how is it affecting my well-being?" This process can bring clarity, allowing you to see the bigger picture and understand that we’re all imperfect. Forgiveness is also a practice of empathy, as it helps you recognize the humanity in others and in yourself.

One helpful approach is to start small and begin by forgiving minor offenses, such as misunderstandings or accidental slights, before working up to deeper wounds. With time and patience, forgiveness can become a natural and useful part of your emotional toolkit.

No Better Place Than Here

So I've really accepted that I'll never be a consistent blogger, but there are just times where I need to write some things and have them out in the world. I still write a bit, but most of it isn't for an audience....this feels different.

These past couple years have been transformational for me in way more ways than one. 

• I've found a job that is very settled and calm and I can accept as good for me right now. It's not so social worky, but that's more than okay right now.
• I've mostly let go of my constant striving to achieve more and more and am settling into who I am and what that means. I get small bursts of this now and again, but it settles quickly.
• Most of my anxiety has left me, and I've made peace with my understanding of any depressive tendencies that I might have. There's a few reasons for this that I'll offer later.
• My wife and I have a lovely home and are mostly settled. We do struggle with possibly wanting to move to a house again, but that might not happen.
• One of my parents passed recently and I've had to come to terms with what that means for me, as I have a mostly removed relationship with most of my family.

So the biggest catalyst for some of the work and personal changes started early last spring. That was when I re-discovered the research behind psychedelics and mental health. I remember studying in my undergrad how psychedelics were researched in the 60s and 70s, then shut down by government and it always stuck with me a little bit. A number of years ago, I had a call to pursue ayahuasca ceremony, but chose not to at that time.

So last spring, I started a string of interactions with psychedelics and related medicines that progressed from psilocybin microdosing to ketamine therapy to a bufo molecule experience and recently to an ayahuasca retreat. All this, in tandem with a lot of therapy and inner work, has been truly transformative in many ways.

I'm still formulating how I want to lay this all out and will probably just go chunk by chunk...possibly working backwards...but I do think it will be helpful with my integration process overall.

I look forward to sharing more.

Boundaries in the Workplace

From when I first started training as a social worker, all the way to now, I've always had a pull towards the importance of boundaries in my work, whether I mean in helping people with them, or working on them myself. As a social worker, boundaries are hugely important in so many ways. We work with people whose lives may be in shambles and we can't own that in any major way, or we're screwed. We're asked to do more than we can handle and if we give in a little, again, we're screwed. We have an obligation to have an awareness of our boundaries, as well as our own boundary issues.

I can't say the amount of times this has been a focus on my therapy with someone else, but for myself, it's an ongoing issue. Sometimes the boundary issues are very clear. Someone is rude and annoying and you set the boundary that you want them to retrain from speaking to you like that. Simple (haha, really?). Others are not so easy. For example, when someone is rude, they're rarely rude to just one person, right? So say I set my boundaries with this person, but my friend and co-worker, Fred, doesn't. My day after day, my friend is annoyed and offended by this person and who do they talk to about their annoyance? Their friend (me), of course. That is just simply a more difficult boundary to set, in my experience.

However, it must be done. Sigh.

Someone Needed to Say It....We All Do

Is it about gun control or mental illness...

Great article HERE

Obviously, the much bigger issue is that Liza Long is not Adam Lanza's mom. The similarity begins and ends with the having of mentally ill sons. That's all we know, and it's dangerous to assume more than that. We can't lump all people with mental illness together into one big "crazy" pot, it stigmatizes the ill and disconnects us, as a society, from their humanity.

Sometimes it's a chicken and the egg kind of thing, and this is definitely one of those areas. However, one of the ends really sticks out like a sore thumb on this one. The SIZE of the damage could have been much smaller.