When people are facing crises or major life transitions, it’s not uncommon for them to feel that they “don’t know what to do next”. Sometimes, you just don’t know… (PHOTO:Stock Photo Secrets) When we’re dealing with complex unfamiliar situations in our lives, it’s very easy to feel that we don’t know what to do next. To feel that we can’t evaluate and make decisions about the various options before us. Or else, that we can’t even identify an option that seems workable or viable. Sometimes we can feel that we are completely in the dark. It’s not uncommon for people to find that their life situa ..read more

Over my years as a Jungian analyst / depth psychotherapist, I’ve heard a lot of people ask “Am I making the right decision?” It’s often a crucial question. Am I making the right decision? (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets) When we find ourselves asking, “Am I making the right decision?” there can be a great deal at stake. We may find ourselves looking very closely at a life choice we have to make. In fact, we may be on the cusp of making a choice that will affect the whole rest of our lives. Such choices may arise when we are in the midst of a major life transition, or when we are confronted by unex ..read more

Coping with uncertainty is a theme I’ve explored before, but it seems to have a lot of relevance for the end of our current year, 2022. (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets) As we come to the end of this year, we certainly seem to be coping with uncertainty. In our post-modern world, things often seem pretty precarious, Yet, this year seems to take the cake! We seem to have just barely cleared the pandemic. We have a very strained medical system, and a crisis situation with children in need of care for respiratory diseases. We also seem to have an economy that is giving very mixed messages. We still ha ..read more

The yearly arrival of the Holidays reminds us of both continuity and the passage of time. What does this mean for tending the soul, the essence of ourselves? (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets) As we go through the repeated cycle of the year there is something that is comforting and reassuring in its recurrence and stability. Yet, there is something else as well. As we see the years go by, we are reassured to see the seasons pass in their regular ways. But then, we are also haunted by an awareness of something else. That is the passage of time, and its meaning for our particular, individual lives. Th ..read more

“Tending the soul through the Holidays” is the theme I’ve chosen for a series of blog posts for the period leading up to the Holidays at the end of December. (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets) Now, for those of us living in 2022, “tending the soul” and “getting ready for the holidays” can seem like complete opposites! I hear many stories from clients about how stressful and anxious it often is to deal with the Holidays. There are plenty of reasons for this. Not least of these is the huge sense of expectation the Holidays create, in children, certainly, but often no less in adults. Another major issu ..read more

In recent years the phrase “on my bucket list” has come into popular parlance. This isn’t surprising; it’s a phrase we often find useful! PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets What do we use this phrase to indicate? Well, if something is “on my bucket list”, it usually means that this is something that is so important to me, that I want to be absolutely certain that I do it before I die (or, “kick the bucket”). You now often hear people use this expression when they are describing travel destinations, e.g., “going to the Amalfi Coast is on my bucket list”. At least in the part of North America that I inh ..read more

“Real life after retirement?’ some might ask, “Is that a thing?” It most certainly is, but you’d never know it from the messaging we get around retirement! What can we expect from life after retirement? (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets) A lot of messaging around retirement in our culture has very little to do with “real life after retirement”. The vast majority of the retirement messaging we get falls into the “freedom after age X” category. “Age X” may vary, but one famous example that permeated the media for a very long time was an insurance advertisement that extolled the freedom that individual ..read more

It’s common for we humans to find that we have unfinished business in later life. We all carry different things that cry out for some kind of resolution. What wants to take shape? (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets) “Unfinished business in later life”: this is one of the fundamental things we experience through the midlife transition and the whole second half of our lives. We can encounter this sense that there is a lack of completeness in different areas of our life in so many different ways! It may have to do with where things stand in our most important relationships. Or perhaps there are aspirati ..read more

People pleaser personality traits are pretty common in our world. Many of us strive to meet the needs of others at all costs, even when we hurt ourselves. (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets) What exactly do we mean when we refer to a “people pleaser personality”? Well, we’re referring to people who keep the peace and avoid conflict at all costs—even when it really hurts them. People pleasers are usually people who have a fair bit of capacity for feeling and for empathy. Because of that, they often give other people’s needs a higher priority than their own. They are often people who really want to be ..read more

Should I quit my job? Here we are, on a beautiful sun-filled summer day. Perhaps you’re on summer vacation. Work may be far from your mind! And yet… Should I stay or should I go? (PHOTO: Stock Photo Secrets). And yet, there’s something about the summer vacation period that leads us to look at our jobs from a different angle. When we get away from the patterns of daily work routines, we often can see our work or career differently from how it looks when we’re right down in the trenches. Over the years, hundreds of people in stressful jobs have told me how hard it can be to focus on anything oth ..read more