Whoever it was who said: “With one leg in the past and one foot in the future, you can only urinate on the present” was right. With one eye firmly on her past perceived shortcomings and the other on the bleak future that she knows (and how, pray, can she know for sure?) will surely come to pass, S. is blind to all the opportunities and satisfactions that the present might afford her.
Once we felt utterly devoid of resources. But no more. We struggled, we learned and we came through. In retrospect, I could wish that we had known then that all we had to do was what we could with what we had from where we were. It would have made those early steps far easier along the journey we still travel joyfully.
Harriet*’s face had been etched into a mask of anxiety and
pain by the years spent putting herself last while she tried to make bad
relationships work. She came up to me
on the last day of the course I’d been running on Domestic Violence Recovery to
tell me how far she had come along her journey.
Most people can’t get behind the wheel of a car for the
first time and drive away like a seasoned driver. But one or two can.
Most people can’t sit down at a piano for the first time
and play a Mozart sonata; although you might find the odd one or two who can
play whatever they hear by hear.Most […]
Like many other women of her age whose marriage finally founders, she had, she said, lost her voice. She had had to defer to her husband for years on end. Her husband had made her feel small, stupid and inadequate. He was, she said, ‘a strong personality’; while she is ‘sensitive’.
That, of course, is one interpretation.
We live in a society where people habitually say rude, abrasive, sometimes clever, things to each other, which are often quite funny. But rude, abrasive words have the power to chip away at a person until they break them into small pieces.
Do you know that exciting and unnerving feeling when
different areas of your life come together in an unexpected way? It happened to me last week at a
conference. I was there in a different
capacity, as a Money Gym Coach, and the subject of the conference was Wealth
Creation.
The last couple of weeks chez Kaszina have been overshadowed by the figure of The Driving Instructor; in point of fact the
short, stout figure of ‘Kev’, as of today my daughter’s ex-driving instructor. Kev presents as a twinkly, jokey sort of bloke, short on words
but long on salt of the earth good humour.
Unfortunately the good guy veneer is […]
At some point, every one of us
has longed for that fuzzy ultimate feel-good sense of being regarded as the
perfect inhabitant of a perfect world by our perfect partner.
Whatever the problem is, love is
the answer. Love is all you need, after
all. Flimsy love stories still
impact on our psyche at the subliminal level, teaching us that […]
Denial isn’t a river in Egypt. It’s
actually a snowball hurtling down a steep slope, becoming ever bigger
and gathering momentum as it goes. Once you’ve started explaining his
bad behaviours away, you just keep on doing it, way beyond the dictates
of common sense and self-respect. Having put him on a pedestal, you’re
left in the mud and slime […]
Over the next 5 days, I'll send you some lessons and tips that I've found have really helped women to heal from narcissistic abuse. Starting with the basics.
Want daily reassurance and inspiration? Sign up to my Instagram account. @dr_anniephd
