By Paige Zuckerman, Clinical Director

It’s a new decade, a new year, and a time that can feel daunting for many reasons. Maybe you’re reflecting back on 2019 with a few grunts and squirms. Maybe the past year (or decade) has been predominantly kind…maybe they’ve been a balance of struggle and success.

New Year’s resolutions can lead to unrealistic expectations for magical thinking, internal pressures and unsupported self-imposed imperatives. Perhaps it’s not about meeting ‘that goal’ this year; I’ve discovered for myself that focusing on the present and the process rather than the outcome creates the space I need for myself to grow and change positively.
Early in my counseling career, one of my beloved supervisors said “there is no arrival time.” I struggled with that concept for a while, until I came to comprehend it at a deep level. I began to understand that my attachment to ‘completion’ or ‘arrival’ was an unhelpful tether. This new understanding did not mean that I would not or could not benefit from clarity of values and coordinated goals. It meant that I could give myself space to be truly honest with myself about what really mattered to me, while accepting myself today regardless of where I’m at on my personal journey.

The notion that we may ‘miss the mark’ in expecting answers or outcomes is explored in the British sci-fi classic, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. In the series, on a planet called Magrathea, a species of “hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings” decided they simply must create a computer to find the answer to “life, the universe & everything.” Ten million some-odd years ensue, and said beings finally create the computer they name “Deep Thought.” They ask Deep Thought (with wringing hands and anxious anticipation) to provide the answer they have so desperately sought for millions of years. After a lengthy pause, Deep Thought asserts that the answer is “42.” Naturally, these beings are aghast at the response and grapple with their sentient creation. Deep Thought assures them, the answer is certainly 42. The intelligent beings become all the more dejected by this information after many millennia of striving. Deep Thought tells them they asked for the answer, without understanding the question.

I love this parable, for me, it encompasses the path of genuine and sustained well being and resilience. This time of year, we can become somewhat culturally obsessed with resolutions we hope will give us peace, stability, sobriety, etc. I invite us to allow this year to be a season of curiosity rather than allow it to become a ‘season of answer seeking’. Maybe we can focus on asking a lot of very meaningful, powerful questions and staying in the practice of curiosity. Maybe then, we’ll find out what our own “42” really means.

I hope you all had a moment or more of peace, joy, rest and love this past season, and that you have space to ask heaps of brilliant questions in this new year!

By Paige Zuckerman, Clinical Director

There’s a lot of chatter lately about ‘finding your why’ in the world of business. Catchphrase aside, this idea is not only applicable for entrepreneurs and Fortune-500 CEO’s.  In mental health and addiction recovery, asking ourselves ‘why?’ is both challenging and critical.  It can be a guiding inquiry that leads us to deeper purpose in our healing process.

“Why” is a word counselors are often discouraged from using in sessions with clients.  If not posed with tremendous care, ‘why?’ may elicit defensiveness or feelings of shame; yet the significance of what the question can reveal within us keeps us asking. Beyond language, the idea of ‘your why’ is about locating within yourself the core of what motivates you.

Victor Frankl said “between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”  I love this quote; to me it’s a reminder that when we find in ourselves the anchors of what is meaningful to us, we find the power to engage clearly and purposefully with our circumstances. Your ‘why’ is a compass; a tool that, when located and calibrated, can guide you through life’s inevitable ordeals and joys.

‘Why?’ isn’t just about the things you want, goals you have, or outward changes you would like to make. That is merely the tip of the proverbial iceberg. What’s below all of those external affirmations is the invitation to know yourself deeply, to examine your deeply held values.  I like to think of it as coming home. Goals and behavior changes are the eventual benefits, but none of that matters until you find home in yourself. Maybe that’s the biggest ‘why?’ of all.

Here’s a little exercise I like to do to ‘come home’ to my ‘why?’ from time-to-time: make a “Loves List”.  Write out a big, beautiful list of everything you deeply love, cherish and feel gratitude for.  There’s no limit to your love, write to your heart’s content!  Now, hold onto it. Keep it somewhere you can revisit it regularly. This is a doorway to your ‘why.’

Happy holidays, however you choose to connect to them, and we’ll be back at the turn of a new decade! 

By Paige Zuckerman, Clinical Director

I’m going to start this month by acknowledging that the idea that we can choose to find meaning in pain is borne from deep personal and professional experience. I’ve enjoyed the privilege to be invited to sit with folks through incredible, sometimes unspeakable struggle and loss, as well as to see them thrive in the face of it. I’ve also had my life upended, shredded, dismantled and reformed in ways I could never have anticipated. I’ve had the honor to abandon my expectations and discover new paths, sometimes through violent, whiplashing change. 

So here’s my statement for the thawing winter and forthcoming springtime regrowth; pain is inevitable. Suffering is not. Let’s sit with that for a moment. 

Maybe you’re irritated by that notion. Maybe you’re curious. Maybe you think I’m an idiot (feel free to any such responses.) Here’s my philosophical pitch to you-life will undoubtedly bring us all great and possibly enormous pain through all our years. That’s a fact. Physical, emotional, psychological…all of the above in one big nasty cookie-dough mishmash. Pain will happen. But what relationship will we have with our inevitable pain? What association and eventual meaning will we make of it? What if the relationship I have with my pain is where my power lies? What if I have a choice?

Now don’t misapprehend; I am in no way dismissing, minimizing or discarding pain in its ability to debilitate, destruct or disturb. Those are all potential truths of the powerfulness of pain. However, the reality of pain does not necessitate the response to it. I can feel incredible pain, yet choose not to mire myself in judgment, combat or detachment from it. I can honor my pain, attend to it with loving kindness, and allow it to move through me until it naturally shifts and maybe even subsides. Perhaps that is the path of non-suffering.

Let me offer an example; a female-identified (she/her/hers) person in her early thirties gets a call from a doctor with bad news…exceptional, life-altering, incurable bad news. For years she sees doctors, imbibes combinations of medical concoctions. Her partnership begins to fall apart alongside her health. The goals and expectations she had for a family, for certain assumed markers in life fall by the wayside. By her later thirties she’s lost a marriage and hopes for her own family, her home, her pets, her able-bodiedness. Yet she’s never suffered, and she has felt great and hefty pain of all fashions. How did she not suffer? Because she chose to acknowledge her great, hefty pain, learn from it, face it with   boldness and vulnerability, learn to say no and ask for help, and to find new meaning: a new, creative sense of self in the dream indefinitely deferred. Now, her life is very, very different than the one she’d planned, and yet she has joy, purpose and love in that different life nonetheless. Do you want to know why I know that pain is not a choice but suffering is? Because I am her.

Think today on how you might choose the non-suffering relationship with your pain. May we all see a few warmer days and sprouting things coming forth soon.