Ongoing reflections on transformation, wholeness, and the messy beauty of the human experience. These essays are drawn from my clinical work, my coaching practice, and my own ongoing attempt to figure things out. I hope something here is useful to you.
There is a version of recovery that looks like getting back to normal. I know the appeal of it. I also know it is not recovery — it is endurance with better branding. Real recovery works at multiple levels simultaneously, and missing any one of them is how people end up cycling through the same collapse again and again.
We want to be in constant bloom — the harvest without the dormancy, the transformation without the disorientation. But living in southern Tasmania has taught me something about what the fallow periods are actually for, and why rushing through them costs us more than staying with them does.
After years of clinical practice, I've noticed that people often arrive at inflection points in their lives — not just when they've "done something to their back," but when something deeper is shifting. The body doesn't do metaphors. When it speaks, it means exactly what it says.
Most of us learned early that certain parts of ourselves were not welcome — too emotional, too intense, too quiet, too much. So we adapted. We learned to lead with the parts that got approval. The problem is that maintaining this performance requires constant energy, and it isolates us from the people we're trying to connect with.