How to Navigate the Holidays and Season Change By Clay Hightower, LICSW Around this time every year, I start having a familiar experience. I begin to have lower…
The Changing of the Seasons By Clay Hightower, LICSW We have now entered a season that in many ways signals transition between one year and the next. The changing…
“Meaning-Making Helps Make it Better” By Clay Hightower, LICSW One of the most difficult aspects of grief is how limiting the emotional experience can be on my behavior…
“What We Do With Our Pain Matters” By Clay Hightower, LICSW Sometimes my difficulty with feeling excited about the holidays and connecting with the meaning is not simply…
“What Does It All Mean?” By Clay Hightower, LICSW As I discussed last week in my post, many holiday symbols and traditions have shared meanings but may…
“We Are Not a Dressing Family” By Clay Hightower, LICSW This year, I joined my partner’s family for Thanksgiving for the first time, after doing it…
A plan is ever changing so accountability must be ever changing also. What works for a person the first year will not work in year two. Likewise what worked in…
Steve and Pam have taken their years of experience both clinically and through the research conducted by The Addiction Research Foundation and have co-authored their first book on recovery…
An opportunity to let go of 2020 and community rituals to bring in 2021 An opportunity to let go of the resentments towards self and others and bring in forgiveness….
Throughout this entire series on boundaries, I have reaffirmed and will continue to reaffirm that it is my right to set boundaries that ensure my safety, and that others do not get to dictate if they are reasonable or valid. While this remains true, it does not acknowledge the other side of that coin, which is that maintaining boundaries in relationships can create consequences in those relationships. As I stated in my first post, maintaining boundaries can create feelings of fear, responsibility, obligation, guilt, and shame (FROGS) for me. Being on the receiving end of boundaries also creates feelings. The most commonly expressed experience is rejection, which comes out as anger or sadness.