Psychotherapy and Counselling Articles

Articles related to psychotherapy and counselling.

To Change Or Not To Change

January 17, 2023 by Juanita Leave a Comment

“Imagine that at the bottom of the mountain is your lover. As you ski down the mountain, keep your torso always facing your lover. You want to keep showing your best-side.”

That was probably the best advice I got to improve my skiing over the holidays from one of my best friends. I don’t have a lover (i’m not that exciting), but the point was taken. And voila! My skiing improved over the course of the day.

I have a family that loves to ski and I’ve been along for the ride. Each year when I go I stay fairly intermediate at my level of skiing. Most years, I’m fine with that level, but this year as my kids started to get better than me, I had a choice to make – stay at my comfort level, or intentionally try and get better.

I reflected that this is true for so many areas of our life – do we want the status quo or do we want a change?

Reflection

Am I happy with the status quo in this area of my life or do I want to make a change?
Do I have the energy, space, and/or time to make this change?
Where/When can I create some time/energy/space to move towards the change I want to make?
Can I break this big change down into smaller steps? What’s the first one?

The Status Quo

In the culture that values growth and change, I think that embracing the status quo gets a bad rap. Sometimes there’s power in saying, “I need to make a change in this area, but I’m not ready, so I’m not going to.”

You may worry that I’m enabling bad behaviour, but the purpose of this is to release the layer of shame and guilt we have about not making a change. This layer of guilt/shame often makes it even harder to make a change. No one needs that. There is a power in being truly honest with oneself. If this feels too edgy for you, try saying, “I commit to not making a change in this area for 1 month. I’ll revisit this on _____________”.

The Power Of Small Steps

Small steps for big goals can be powerful. Sometimes when we look at big goals or changes we’d like to make, we want burrow away and hope tomorrow looks better.

I get like this when I think of the environment. I greatly admire people who make bold changes and lead in this area and often think I should be doing something much grander than what I’m doing. Instead, it’s been more powerful to pause and pick one area I want to make a change – e.g. buy more local produce.

Often, as I give myself permission to make small changes, I naturally start to do more in that area. But I can’t do it from a place of self-judgment or overwhelm.

The same can be said for any other areas we want big changes – the momentum of starting with small steps leads to less judgment/overwhelm and naturally gets the process moving towards the change we want to make.

Make It More Enticing

The example of facing my best side towards my lover is way more exciting than saying “face your torso towards the bottom of the mountain”. Is there a way to add a little spice or excitement to the thing you want to change?

Sometimes, it’s making a change with support – having a friend or group join you or just congratulate you on doing the first step. Sometimes it’s changing your environment while you brainstorm how to break a big goal into smaller steps. It could be adding a reward for yourself after completing the first step. Maybe you’ll just change the wording around your change and it’ll feel more interesting to you.

What kind of changes or goals do you want to make this year? What changes do you know you’re not ready to make and need to be a little kinder to yourself about it?

10 Ways To Self-Soothe During The Holidays

December 12, 2022 by Juanita Lepage Leave a Comment

The holidays are a bit of a set up for everyone. There is this expectation that we will have a magical experience together with our families. Everyone’s tired and stressed out and then we add more stress with a big dinner with everyone together. We then have a million different opinions about COVID, politics, and then a group of people with a variety of coping strategies from quietly repressive to giant and explosive. Really, it’s a miracle if you have a family Holiday get-together full of peace and joy.

One of my favourite Christmas traditions with my husband’s family was getting an annual Smuckers Jazzy Christmas (SJC) album from his brother and family. For 19 years, my brother-in-law would burn a CD with a selection of Jazzy Christmas songs and frame it with a cheeky photo of their cat Smuckers. The annual CD is the reason we still have a CD player. Sadly, Smuckers passed away a few years ago, but he still lives on every Christmas. Last night I was listening to SJC #16 and I was sipping a glass of wine and listening to Leslie Odom Jr. sing F avorite Thing s, and I could feel my heart open and I started to relax. The song was so enjoyable and soothing and I reflected that (say what?!) this song was about self-soothing. If that voice is familiar – he’s the original Burr in Broadway’s Hamilton.

CD cover album of Smuckers Jazzy Christmas

Overwhelm

I’ve been seeing a strong theme of emotional overwhelm this past month, and when we’re overwhelmed, it’s hard to problem-solve or see a path forward. For those times when our nervous systems are stuck in fight-flight or freeze, self-soothing can be a great tool to provide even an iota of ease into our lives.

I was listening to Abby Wambach and Glennon Doyle chat with Alex Elle about How To Heal on their podcast – We Can Do Hard Things. Besides being a great conversation about the ups and downs of healing, this podcast also talked about self-soothing. What is it? What has been shown as culturally appropriate self-soothing and what’s not? Do you even know how you self-soothe? They share their own journeys with self-soothing and how it’s helped them in times of overwhelm.

During the holidays and/or times of overwhelm, self-soothing is a practical tool to have with you.

10 Ideas for Self-Soothing

The easiest way to come up with ideas is to use your 5 senses. Which senses are you most drawn to – taste, smell, touch, sound, or sight? Here are 2 ideas for each sense for the month of December.

Taste

First off, taste is always a tricky one – it requires a little self-reflection about what’s actually soothing to you and what’s actually numbing. When in doubt about it’s impact on you, don’t choose anything with caffeine or alcohol.

Drink a cup of herbal tea or something cool and refreshing
Eat something slowly – e.g. one holiday sweet or a clementine

Smell

Pick an essential oil or perfume and smell it. Or put a small amount on your wrist so that you can discretely smell it when you need to.
Go for a walk and smell the fresh air

Touch

Wear something that feels soft and cozy
Pet a cat or dog

Sound

Listen to one song by one of your favourite artists
Listen to nature sounds on YouTube or wherever you get your music

Sight

Look at a piece of art
Look at photos on your phone that make you smile

Getting to know what is soothing for you is a personal journey. Sometimes our preferences change over time. One thing will be soothing for one person and soul-grating to another. Experiment.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take 60 seconds and ask yourself, “What do I need for the next 5 minutes?” Go with your instinct. Or just close your eyes and see where your finger lands on the selection of ideas in this post.

Bonus if you can find things where you can soothe yourself in multiple ways – e.g. a walk outside can touch multiple senses.

Whether you’re having a family get-together this season or you’re at home alone, what can you bring to your day that’s self-soothing for you?

The Healing Power Of Art

November 28, 2022 by Juanita Leave a Comment

Just before the school year started, my husband and I took our 2 boys to New York City for a quick 3 night visit. We walked in Central Park, saw Hamilton on Broadway, and made plans to walk the Brooklyn Bridge.

On our way to the Brooklyn Bridge, we decided to get off at the World Trade Centre Subway Station, without plans to spend too much time there. The last time my husband and I had been there, was a few years after 9/11 and we saw the giant hole in the ground. We were curious to see how the place had been transformed.

I really wasn’t expecting to have an emotional reaction, but then we encountered this.

You can’t hear it from this photo, but if you look closely you see that each side is a waterfall. The entire ledge along the perimeter was covered in the names of those who died. And in that moment I started to cry.

Sometimes a piece of art or architecture captures something so perfectly, that words aren’t needed. Nothing needs to be explained or said.

Growing up, my parents took us to a variety of art galleries, and this tradition is something I’ve continued with my kids. It’s always interesting to see what pieces they’re attracted to. Even better if it’s a place that kids can actually touch or interact with the artwork. When they were little, we’d just ask them to look for the weirdest piece they could find.

When we lived in the south of France for 2017, we had access to all kinds of art. We enjoyed taking them to the Louvre (bonus it was in January and it was warm inside) and they wondered why the Mona Lisa was so famous. We took them to a Contemporary Art museum in Nice and had lots of interesting conversation over the broad range of art. And there were also places we took our kids that they had zero appreciation for any of the art and were happy to be done and eat some ice cream or visit a park.

Here’s a photo of a piece that we saw while walking the many paths of Venice, Italy.

This piece about climate change by Lorenzo Quinn, doesn’t need much explanation.

Recently on Netflix I’ve been enjoying the docu-series Abstract. It gives you 45 minutes a piece with 12 different artists. So far I’ve enjoyed seeing how Ilse Crawford presences well-being with her interior design. She creates spaces that allow individuals to feel relaxed without realizing why they might all of a sudden feel that way. Olafur Eliasson talks about his pleasure creating large-scale abstract art that can be experienced with little to no explanation.

Art As Part of the Process In Healing

Sometimes as a psychotherapist, there are times when presence is the most impactful thing I can give a person as they process something deep within themselves. This post is an invitation to explore art as another avenue to experience healing. It’s a way to be present with feelings a piece of art evokes in you.

And I’m not even saying you need to create any art – it’s more about going out into the world and interacting or being present with some art. Contemporary art galleries are wonderful – they will bring out irritation at some pieces “This is art?” and sometimes you’ll find something that captures something so much more. Kids are great at telling you what they think about a piece too. Art is everywhere – have you looked around your neighbourhood? What kind of art are you surrounded by?

Visiting the 9/11 memorial spoke volumes to me. Art has a way of capturing wonder, grief, playfulness, well-being, and so much more.

Have you ever seen a piece of art that moved you?

Healing The Inter-Generational Trauma Of War

November 10, 2022 by Juanita Lepage Leave a Comment

When I was 16, my parents decided to take my three sisters and I on a 6 week camping trip throughout Europe one summer. They had just sold their dairy cattle. My Dad found a way to ship a van to Europe and then make his money back by selling it afterwards. My parents borrowed camping gear from extended family in the Netherlands. It was an incredible trip where we saw and stayed in places that left a mark from the northern most part of Scotland to the Coliseum in Rome. We camped in downtown London at Tent City, next to railroad tracks in Rome, in places with views of the Alps and Loch Ness.

The most serious destination we visited was Dachau, a concentration camp in Germany. After smiling for all of those other photos, we did not smile in this place. It was a place of tremendous pain and sadness.

Remembrance Day

With Remembrance Day coming up, I’ve been thinking about how most of our lives have been shaped in some way by family members who’ve experienced War. Certainly many with a connection to the Ukraine, Russia, Hong Kong or Afghanistan are just a few places that are currently living this experience.

Whether it be this generation or previous generations, I think we’d be hard-pressed to find someone without a connection to war. I’ve been reflecting on both the experience of those in wars, their surrounding family and friends, and also the impact of those wars experiences on future generations.

One of my Family Stories

In my family and extended family, the pain of war was too much for them to acknowledge Rememberance Day in a way that acknowledged their own losses. As a kid I don’t remember connecting to any emotion about Rememberance Day, often just another thing like church that left me feeling bored. Like many kids, I didn’t have a lot of interest in asking my parents about their history and connection to war. They didn’t talk about it either. Rememberance Day felt like it was for other people.

Over the past few months, I’ve been doing some learning and reflecting on inter-generational trauma. There are some things in myself that I instinctively have felt that I carry that are not fully my own. This led me to explore some of my own family lineage. I started with my maternal lineage and that led me back to Dachau.

Incredibly, my mother had books about her maternal genealogy, all in Dutch from the 1600s until after WWII. All of them were in Dutch, and google translate made it incredibly easy to translate the parts I wanted to read.

For the first time I really connected to my great-grandfather who was a police chief and war-resistor during WWII and was betrayed and then shot. My great-uncle was also a war-resistor who got caught and spent the bulk of the war in various concentrations camps before dying in Dachau a few months shy of the end of the war in 1945. He was 28 and left behind a family who loved him and a fiancee.

My grandparents and their two young boys moved to Canada shortly after the war and then had my mother here in Canada.

If I actually stop and really connect to those words I’ve written, I can’t help but feel my own sadness about my family’s experience at that time. I can only imagine the ways they all tried to cope with that much sorrow.

And this is just one of my 4 family threads – who all have a connection to war.

Deep Sorrow

The book Bitter-sweet by Susan Cain recently crossed my path. She shares how acknowledging sorrow and longing can make us whole.

I can’t help but imagine what it must have been like for all of my extended-family to have to process that experience in the 1940s. I think of my my great-uncle Marcelis who spent years in concentration camps. I think of their surviving family members and those who stayed in the Netherlands, and those who left everyone behind for another country very far away.

I’ve been noticing more of what parts dripped down into future generations. Indeed Susan Cain talks about science of epi-genetics in her book and that past trauma has been documented in impacting the genes of future generations to carry some of these wounds. Fortunately, epi-genetics has shown that as people heal, they can shift their genes too.

The Process of Healing

In reflecting on my extended family and their experience, I have found that talking about it with my mother and family, and also meeting myself and these ancestors (via meditation) with loving-kindness have been important parts towards for my own healing.

It’s really not rocket-science: Acknowledge past pains. Feel them. Be kind during this process. And then ultimately shift to the present moment and realize that those things don’t need to be carried anymore.

Yet as the saying goes, “What is simple is not necessarily easy”.

One of the challenging parts in this process, is that there can be no agenda or timeline for how fast the process goes. For Susan Cain, she was able to heal from her inter-generational trauma by going through the process above by writing her book Bitter-sweet. That took time.

North American Cultural Values

If you live in North-America, you’re also entrenched with multiple cultural values including self-sufficiency, efficiency, “effortless perfection” and a “tyranny of positivity”.

Self-sufficiency admires the person who does something all by them-self without help from others. Efficiency admires people who heal quickly and on a time-line.

Effortless Perfection is the pressure to appear like a winner without needing to try (a term coined at Duke University in 2003). We can see this demand for effortless perfection in so many places from motherhood to being a student. Susan Cain talks about the Tyranny of Positivity and how this has taught people to suppress their emotions and put on a mask of smiles at all times.

When we meet people who struggle to heal from great trauma – they can be left behind and judged for not putting in enough effort to heal. I read a thoughtful critique on Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor and psychiatrist who wrote the book “Man’s Search for Meaning”. He brought the duality of both inspiring many people to heal but also not giving room for those who couldn’t heal from their trauma. This excerpt is from an online Jewish Magazine called Tablet.

“Frankl avoided the many painful cases of Holocaust survivors who were unable to reconcile themselves to their past torment. He focused only on those who achieved an optimistic, forward-looking life, people like himself, who could be inspirational examples for the rest of humanity. But Frankl’s ‘tragic optimism,’ as he called it, turned away from the true pain of the Holocaust, which is the fact that it cannot be made into a source of moral inspiration…Such a reality can never be a source of satisfying life lessons.”

David Mikics

What would it be like to start freeing ourselves from timelines and cultural demands to “get over things”?

Freeing myself from a timeline to acknowledge, feel the impact, and heal from of the inter-generational trauma of war in my family has been tough. I generally have that nagging voice of “Damn, you’ve got a great life with so much goodness, how can you be stuck in old pain?”

Susan Cain gives a beautiful story in her book about her time in a grief group. What do we do with our own story after hearing someone’s story that seems much worse than our own? This is a dialogue between her grief group leader, Simcha, and her own internal thoughts.

“Simcha: ‘Are you thinking that ‘she had a four-tissue story and I only have a two-tissue story’?

Susan: Yes … I’m relieved to see others laughing with relief at Simcha’s question. I wish that I didn’t have to tell my story at all; it feels so thin compared to Maureen’s. But refusing to speak feels wrong, ungenerous.” Cain (p. 255-56)

Support From Others

North-American culture really values it when you can do things all by yourself. Healing Inter-generational trauma is not one of those things best done by yourself.

The process often requires some support from others – whether that be therapy, close friends or family who can be fully present with this pain, body-work, psycho-somatic release, energy work, exercise or many combinations of these things.

If you’re open to sound-healing, here’s a link for Unwinding Ancestral Tangles by Laurie Thorp, one of my former teachers at Barbara Brennan School of Healing.

Ultimately, healing requires a process of being met with softness and kindness and a holding of the duality of both the joys in one’s life and the pain too.

This Remembrance day, I hope you get to spend that moment at 11:11 to reconnect to your own family lineage connected to war. It is a beautiful way to connect to your ancestors and also acknowledge yourself.

References

Cain, S. (2022). Bitter-sweet: How sorrow and longing make us whole. Random House

Mikics, D. (2020, Sept 10). The Lie of Viktor Frankl. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/viktor-frankl

How Do Spiritual Leaders Deal With Their Anger?

October 17, 2022 by Juanita Lepage Leave a Comment

Years ago I googled, “Dalai Lama Angry”. I was in a state of honestly wondering what spiritual leaders do with their anger. I was tired of being in spiritual and psychotherapy communities that by-passed their anger. In the spiritual world I rolled my eyes every time I read some trite advice about “letting it go” or “opening your heart”. In the psychotherapy world I felt anger when models said “anger is a secondary emotion” or “you just need to shift your thoughts to change your emotion”.

Um, anger can actually be a very accurate response to a situation – anger can sometimes be incredibly healthy. Too often the anger gets the focus and not the problem underneath.

I remember feeling relief as I watched a Youtube video of the Dalai Lama lashing out towards someone. Part of me felt relieved at seeing such a strong Spiritual Leader having such a human moment.

Shifting The Stigma About Anger

I have been thrilled to see a slight opening in dialogue about anger emerge from spiritual leaders.

Here are few!

Jack Kornfield

Jack Kornfield is a leader in the Buddhist meditation world. He was interviewed by Tim Ferriss in June. Here’s a link to their conversation: How to Overcome Apathy and Find Beautiful Purpose.

Jack tells a great story about returning from a few years in retreat in a monastery and finding himself struggling with his anger as he started to be around people (right?!!). He shares that for him, he realized that he had a strong discomfort and judgment towards his own anger. He did some body-based psychotherapy to help him process his anger and learn new ways to be present with it. He doesn’t share his ongoing journey with anger, but I love that he shares that he needed something different than meditation to help him.

Tim then shares how the process of therapeutically expressing anger, generally just makes him more angry and more stuck in his anger. Jack gives him some ideas from a Buddhist approach.

Dan Harris

First of all, Dan would likely hate be called a spiritual leader. He is a news anchor who had a panic attack on live television and that was the impetus to start exploring meditation. He is wonderful for anyone who is more cynical about spirituality, and he has a great sense of humour.

Recently he gave a Ted Talk: The Benefits of Not Being a Jerk Towards Yourself. This one is short and sweet (13:39). Dan shares about his cringing hesitation to try being kinder to himself and his journey to get there. After practising meditation for years, he decided to do a 360 review (a corporate type of performance evaluation). He was noted as being arrogant, rude, and a diva. He then set out to change this and shares the multitude of things he tried and that a (spoiler alert) silent meditation retreat with a a loving-kindness approach towards himself, was a big piece in helping him shift. He realized that if he was nicer to himself, he was then able to be nicer to others. After his second 360 review, he shares his transformation.

Joe Dispenza

I’m new to the Joe Dispenza world, and his work is often interpreted as by-passing sadness, anger, grief, and the more challenging emotions. Here’s a great article he wrote trying to dispel that understanding: Emotions Are Not Your Enemy. He doesn’t share at all about his own journey with anger, but he tries to normalize the process of feeling emotions and highlights his work is often beneficial for anyone who finds that they are stuck in those emotions and past experiences. If you’re a new subscriber and missed my most recent post that includes him – here’s the link to learn more My Crush On Physics.

And More?

If you’ve seen a spiritual leader share about their own journey with anger, please share that with me, I’d love to hear more.

And if you’re curious to explore anger a little more, I seem to write at least one post a year about his topic, so here are a couple of them.

Reconciling The Death Of Queen Elizabeth With The National Day For Truth And Reconciliation

September 30, 2022 by Juanita Lepage Leave a Comment

On September 30th, Canada instituted a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. This is a day for Canadians to acknowledge the truth of residential schools and the long-term impact on Indigenous children, families, and communities.

On September 8th, Queen Elizabeth II died, and a public holiday was also given on September 19 to acknowledge her death.

So in summary, we acknowledge colonialism on one day and then 10 days later, the impact that the monarchy, the government, and White people have played in the genocide of Indigenous people in Canada’s history.

Needless to say, the timing is interesting. The timing has given space for a variety of emotions to arise. I’ve had a variety of conversations about this topic, so I thought I’d attempt to write about it.

Duality

Often in therapy, there is a goal of being able to hold space for mixed emotions. Every person will hold a variety of emotions towards their parents and how they parented them. Often times, people get stuck in believing that we can only hold positive or negative emotions towards a parent, when in reality, we’re more complex than that.

On one end of the spectrum, children of abusive parents may have mixed emotions of anger and love towards an abusive parent. Often a person will feel shame that they have any love towards that parent.

On the other end of the spectrum, children who say the phrase, “I had a great childhood”, often minimize any conflictual emotions they experience towards a parent or are completely unaware of any. They may learn to not feel any negative emotions at all or feel shame about their negative emotions.

When we don’t acknowledge or we try to push away our negative emotions, it comes out sideways in our lives with anxiety, depression, and irritability, addiction and many other ways. It also impedes our ability to truly hold space for others who are feeling these emotions too.

How This Connects To The Queen

It is important to acknowledge the feelings of love and grief that you may have about the Queen’s passing. Many people have stories of meeting her, having a connection to their heritage, or to an aspect of her personal life. If you’ve watched the Crown, you may have some empathy and awe towards her as she navigates the responsibility of being Queen at such a young age. Your feelings of love and connection are valid and deserve your attention.

You also may have feelings of apathy or anger towards the Queen and the damage the monarchy has inflicted on so many people. I’ve watched season one of The Crown and it was painful to watch how she betrayed her sister, her husband, and ultimately herself. These feelings are also valid and deserve your attention.

The addition of having to swing from two opposing holidays of grieving the Queen to acknowledging the monarchy’s impact on the Indigenous community within a short time span can be a lot to absorb.

White Privilege

If you felt a lot of love for the Queen, you may not be able to switch to reflecting about the harm the monarchy has caused in the span of 10 days. So don’t. We are not emotional light bulbs that can switch to the relevant emotion of the day.

BUT, put some time in your calendar at some point to take the time to reflect on reconciliation with Indigenous people in Canada or whichever country you live in.

If you’re a White Canadian, when it comes to supporting Indigenous communities, we often fall into the trap of looking at our leaders in government and the monarchy and say a version of, “They were such great parents! They did their best in the time they lived with what they had”.

Or we can get defensive and say, “I had no idea these things were happening, so it’s not my fault”.

As a White Canadian, I have the privilege of being apathetic towards the government and the monarchy if I’d like to because racism isn’t a daily impact on my personal life.

My invitation to my White audience, is to consider opening the door to see if you can hold space to connect to what was happening while we live(d) our protected lives. Can we acknowledge the impact of what it must’ve been like for Indigenous people to be here in Canada for the past few centuries? Can we acknowledge the impact of residential schools that were here until 1996? Can we acknowledge the ongoing racism that still occurs in our communities?

Hamilton (The City)

If you live in Ontario, we have Municipal elections happening in October. This is a great place to explore looking at leaders that embody anti-racist platforms. In my city of Hamilton we have the Hamilton Anti-Racist Resource Centre – where you can learn about ways to support our community. The school boards have also been learning and trying to implement more anti-racist policies.

Where could you put more energy into being an anti-racist in your community? You don’t have to do it all, it’s about starting to make intentional change.

In the next few months I’ll be sharing a few anti-racist books that crossed my path that you may want to explore. If you have any books or resources that you love, please share!

As always – thanks for reading and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic.