We live in a world that is moving at breakneck speed. Change is all around us and our individual choices about how to live our lives are greater than ever before. This can be both exhilarating and immobilizing. I talk to clients everyday who are trying to create positive changes in their lives and are looking for the best ways possible to break through their limiting thoughts, beliefs and actions so as to create the lives they imagine and desire.
As a psychotherapist and life coach who has been in private practice for over 10 years, I have searched diligently for the most effective tools and techniques to help both my clients and myself navigate the sometimes treacherous terrain of personal transformation and healing.
In the last month, I have put to test some of the tools I study and recommend. The decision to make some big changes in my life was made over a period of time, yet in the last month I closed my psychotherapy practice in Providence, RI, and moved to Denver, CO. I sold my home, drove 2, 000 miles, moved into a new place, left behind a stable income, said good-bye to friends and family and walked into a new life.
I’ve had a strange assignment the past seven years. It was a tough one of going into the darkness and chaos of having my life fall apart on so many levels I didn’t recognize myself or my life anymore. My self-identity was battered and bruised. I went through a divorce. I found myself living somewhere that didn’t feel like home on any level.
I’ve been working with a client for several weeks now who is in an ambivalent marriage. One of the ways he deals with it is by having affairs. He saw a therapist prior to me who actually supported this behavior and saw it as a way to explore his feelings and help him decide if he wanted to stay in his marriage or not. Several years later, he’s still doing the same behavior and is as stuck as ever.
One of the ways that I choose a topic for a blog post each week is to look at my library of photos and choose a photo that I feel drawn to and let it inspire a thought for a blog. I know that may be a bit strange for anyone primarily left-brained, but it is how I let my inner guidance take the lead. Plus, I find it more fun than “thinking up” a topic. I also look for themes during the week in terms of what my clients tend to be talking about a lot or other topics in the media or news related to personal growth.
As a holistic psychotherapist and life coach, I work with clients all week long who are going through major transitions of one kind or another; relationship endings and beginnings, career changes, geographic changes, death or loss of a loved one, health challenges, etc.