Tag Archives: Psychotherapy

Detour Ahead. There. And there.

Look carefully. Yep, that’s a detour sign, pointing to the right at the T-intersection. And yes, across the street is another detour sign, pointing left. There are, as it happens, only two ways to choose here – right or left. Both appear to be detours. To where? From where?

A quarter-mile away, the road crews who neglected to pack up these signs (months have passed) also left behind a Detour sign with an arrow pointed up, as in, go straight ahead. That particular sign has been moved back and forth, one day pointed north, then south, and, most recently, either whimsically or horribly, as if the detour was to crash through someone’s side fence into their backyard.

Pity the unsuspecting rideshare driver who has to figure all this out. Eventually, there will be road work in our area again and we’ll all stupidly ignore the first detour signs, because we’ve learned to regard orange signs with arrows as signifying nothing.

There you go: life with crazy detours and places where there seems to be no right answer. At least, there seems to be no easy answer. It can be hard to know if a detour indicates something to be avoided or a relic or even a ruse.

Anyone new to the neighborhood would be stymied by the mixed messages, while the people who know the origin of the dueling detours shrug and ignore them – or, in some cases, get annoyed and move signs across the street.  There’s a clue: when a detour arises, ask questions; see how other people are responding to the apparent detour, and why.  On occasion, I see, in stores, the relics of the social distancing recommendations of 2020, those half-peeled away stickers on terrazzo floors. Like the road-sign-weary denizens of my area, shoppers ignore signs that used to be treated as if they’d come down from Mount Sinai.

There are detours that make sense, like when there’s a big hole in the road. No doubt you’ve gotten your share of detour signs from life. I’ve had mine. Some have kept me from disaster, and some turned out to be less about danger and more about someone else’s fears or agendas.  I’ve heard about many – and about so many people who figured out which detours were legitimate, and which were either relics or ruses.

Wishing you good adventures, and the wisdom to know relics from ruses, as well as to never be the person who puts up fake detour signs for others.

To Ink or Not to Ink

To ink or not to ink: that is the question.

Not my question, but a lot of people debate this. Perhaps they are considering the latest news: the research showing a significant increase in the risk of blood cancers with just one tattoo. That seems worth attention.

Sometimes, people planning a tattoo want to talk about it, the image and the expected arguments from friends or family. We might discuss the option of wearing a piece of jewelry with the same design for a year straight – no exceptions – or the benefit of a trial run with temporary tattoos for a few months.  Perhaps pulling out a particularly unflattering photo, with a hairstyle and clothing you thought looked great at the time, and facing it every day for a year or so would provide a tap to the brakes. Most often in these conversations, I simply listen, ask a lot of questions, and offer my personal explanation as to “why not.” There are three significant reasons.

On my phone, I have a photo of memorial bricks that rest in Europe, with the names and deportation dates of family members who died in Auschwitz in 1944.  They would have been tattooed by the Nazis, each with a unique number, for the obsessive record-keeping for which the Third Reich was known. Out of respect to their memories, no ink.

I can’t think of any sort of decoration I wouldn’t tire of, sooner, probably, rather than later. A look at my hair and fashion choices in old photos makes that spectacularly clear. Due to the likelihood that I will someday find my décor of the day regrettable, no ink.

Finally, the two most significant factors in my life, my faith and my marriage, are too important to me for tattoos. Both deserve a deliberate, mindful choice – every day, every moment. The crucifix I wear is by choice, never mindlessly or without reverence for its meaning and the demand placed upon me, however poorly I may live out that demand. The wedding ring is deliberate, a clear statement of, I love you, I choose you, each day. Never indifferent, never nonchalant: to wear these things is a daily action verb.

Now, those reasons may make no sense to you. Maybe they seem silly or irrelevant to your situation. Perhaps they do; but perhaps they are worth a conversation with someone as you, or they, make decisions about permanent records of this particular spot in place and time.  

Social Contagion

(This post mentions eating disorders, self-harm, substance abuse and suicide. Please reach out to your local emergency services if you or someone you know is struggling with any of these!)

When I was in 9th grade, I unwillingly, and briefly, attended our parish’s very small Catholic Youth Organization meetings (CYO.  The group comprised mostly boys, all altar servers, who played ping pong and pool with our associate pastor, a well-meaning middle-aged priest from Poland. The only other girls were the type of enmeshed best friends that are normal at that stage of life. Their shared passion was Bay City Rollers. They put together, in that era of typewriters with ribbons and no internet, a monthly fan newsletter with some success.  Life would have been oh, so easy, if only I could have mustered enthusiasm for the boys from Edinburgh.  I tried. But, despite the social costs, a Dylan fan I remained.

Go ahead, laugh. But you have faced the challenge of social contagion, too. You may even now be wearing a style of clothing you don’t actually even like. It’s just what’s “in.” As a teenager, you wore the right clothes, or pined after them; you strove for the right hair style. You wore the trendy colors even if they made you look ill, and were anxious for the approval of your peers.  It’s not just kids who follow the crowd; every married person knows that when your spouse’s friend circle comprises mostly divorced people, there may well be trouble ahead.

Over the years, we’ve seen waves of societal concern about the risks of contagion. Were young people teaching each other to cut or burn themselves (1990s), how to purge or starve themselves (ongoing since at least the 90s), how to get a so-called “high” from household items? Could a teen’s suicide lead to copycat attempts?  The answer to all of these is, yes.

Children now are not gifted with preternaturally adult-style brain development. The ability to sound sophisticated by parroting what you’ve read or heard is not the same as an adult brain with a well-developed executive function – something that takes into the early to mid-20s to acquire.  Your kid is not any more resistant to peer pressures of even the subtle type than you were when you were screaming in excitement over a band because all your friends were.  As it happens, they are more vulnerable, because peer pressure can surround them wherever their cell phone works. Odds are, you were free – as soon as you were off the school bus, there was some space for other influences to counterbalance the noise of adolescents striving to show their individuality by being as much like their desired group as possible.

Notice the vagaries of the teenage years: they move from music star to music star, aesthetic nomads in lockstep. No one wears jeans; then they all wear jeans. The games, the accessories, even the car you drive falls under the anxious eye of a child who wants to fit in.  It’s important for all of us to be attuned to the various social pressures to conform, because we want our young people to survive, and thrive, throughout these very turbulent times.

What’s in your backpack?

I was speaking with someone reluctant to make any sort of commitment to a small change in the routine. Things were not going well for my friend, and the future seemed murky. With no clear picture of “where the journey is heading,” taking any first step seemed imprudent, my partner in conversation asserted; it would be better to wait until the “where” is sorted out in life before making a concerted effort in any direction.

One reasonable response to that is, there is no “standing still” in life: attempting to stand still just means things around you will change while you pretend you can hold your position.  See how that works for you standing in the ocean. Maybe that seems trite; the whole “you never step into the same river twice” trope that is, as it happens, absolutely true.

Another way of looking at my friend’s dilemma is this: no matter where my journey is going, some items always go in the backpack. I may not always need the water purification straws, or the sleeping bag rated for freezing weather, but I always need underwear and socks. I always need a spare pair of contact lenses and sunscreen. I always need a small Bible. I always need chocolate and my thyroid medicine. Even without knowing where, or when, I’m going, some things can go into the backpack.

No matter where your life journey is taking you, wouldn’t it be helpful to have a better quality of sleep? More physical energy?  A firmer sense of what your values are, and why, and what the implications are for daily life? A little less messiness in the closet or refrigerator or your car? Less weird clutter and mysterious crumpled papers in that one drawer? Some better thinking habits, whether it’s taking on a phobia or developing your capacity for focused attention?

Even if you’re feeling really stuck – a lot of pressures, an unhappy job situation, the first year or so into significant grief – perhaps there is one small thing you can do first– something you can “put into the backpack” – without a clear picture of where you hope to be heading. And, as you’re putting those essentials into your pack, perhaps the mystery of the next few steps on the journey will begin to come into focus.

Happy trails –

Cutting off Mom and Dad, Part 3



…and now we come to the final installment (so far) in my
wonderings about this strange phenomenon of parent rejection by adult children.
So far, I have tried to spread the responsibility around: the infantilization
of young adults by many institutions, the culture at large, and parents.  Now it is the young people’s turn.


It is my observation (granted, limited to some review of the
literature, professional trainings and clinical experience – over a quarter
century) that it is not usually the abused children who grow up and cut off
their parents. This seems odd, doesn’t it? If a child who was tortured decided
to cut off contact, we could understand, even support the healthy distancing.



It is much more typical for the young person who simply does
not want to be bothered to cut off the parent or parents. Quite often it seems
to be one parent; a widowed mother, typically, which makes me suspicious that
the possibility of some sort of responsibility drives the distancing.  I am sorry to be that cynical, but so it
sometimes seems.  Other themes seem to be
that the parent doesn’t just pat the child on the head for every decision, or
the parent has different political opinions, or religious beliefs.



If you are an adult, then surely you have developed the
capacity to tolerate the presence of people different than you; it appears to
be a matter of pride to young adults, especially, to be open-minded about
people’s differences, to refuse to allow even stunningly foundational
differences in values to be barriers to mutual respect. If that is the case, if
you think of yourself as tolerant, then surely you can tolerate the fact that
your parents, or grandparents, or aunts or uncles or other relatives, no doubt
have different ideas than you (and from one another). It may come as a surprise
to you that your parents, whom you may see as some monolith of monotony,
actually disagree with one another. A lot. The research indicates married
couples disagree on about two thirds of the stuff of life, or more; they just
have figured out, I hope, how to live and let live on these disagreements and
how to work with the few that are pretty significant areas. 



Are you afraid? Afraid that you cannot properly defend your
own positions, operationalizing your terms and pointing to data, rather than
feelings, and that interacting with your parent(s) will be an exercise in
losing an argument and feeling like a fool? 



Are you afraid to simply listen to try to understand more of
their opinion, meaning the information and experiences that support that
stance?



Are you afraid that staying close to aging parents will mean
being stuck with them, having to take care of them, when you are carefully
curating your life to minimize responsibility?



Are you afraid you will die of boredom if you have to listen
one more time to their ramblings about the events of their lives, which may
actually not be any more ennui-producing than your own (have you wasted a chunk
of your life bingeing a fictional series lately or playing video games?).



Are you afraid that they will keep trying to get you to
change and you are tired of explaining to them that your
job/partner/reproduction plans are not up for discussion?



Are you afraid to set boundaries, including the boundaries
of discretion? Surely you do not talk about everything with every friend; in
the same way, it can be very wise to discern what topics to discuss with whom.
If your definition of family means “people who have to accept and agree with
everything about me,” then even something as simple as dietary differences (the
omnivore and vegan siblings, for example) will necessitate cutting off a family
member when all you had to do was not rave on and on about the great steak you
grilled last weekend or stop talking about murder when you are sharing a meal.



Cutting off family without very strong grounds to do so is a
red flag. If your friends have done so, consider their reasons; if this is how
they treat the people who sacrificed for them in ways they may not yet
understand, exactly how solid is the rock you stand on with these friends? Can
you really count on them to be there, helping to clean up after you have
vomited, for the zillionth time, during chemo? To show up for you when there is
a death, or a birth, and in the long months of change and bewilderment
afterwards? To take a day off and drive you to and from having your wisdom
teeth out, or a colonoscopy, or whatever else has to happen – and the medical
office will not release you to a ride share service?



The family cut-off is a tragedy, under the best and most
reasonable of circumstances. The dangerous parents might need to be cut off,
for the sake of their children and grandchildren. It is heartbreaking that life
had to come to this, but it may be necessary. That is not something to be done
lightly, indifferently, or without serious reflection of how this decision will
play out in the decades to come.



Thanks for reading –



For Those Mourning a suicide

If you have lost someone to suicide, my sincere condolences:  peace be upon you in these incredibly difficult times.

I have been involved in grief counseling for a long time. I began volunteering as a grief support group facilitator about 20 years ago. Grief is always painful – the Irish language word clumsily translated into English as “Troubles” actually means tearing apart.  Losing someone to suicide is definitely a tearing apart, and one that carries particular burdens.

  • They are even more likely than other mourners to look backwards and try to reinterpret events to make sense of what happened. We humans like for things to “make sense,” even things that can’t be understood. Looking back can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering – self-blame, recrimination, guilt.  Our culture pretends we can control just about everything, but we cannot. Through the lens of grief looking backwards, even a passing sad day years before can seem like a sign that was “missed,” and the perfectly normal little disagreement turns into the possible cause. Every memory is scoured for warning signs. The lists of warning sides of suicidality are helpful, but not all people have them. In reality, about 70% of suicides are impulsive acts – there are no real warning signs or markers, beyond the events of life that many people experience without becoming suicidal:  relationship struggles, financial struggles, legal struggles, job loss.  Some people will show some of the warning signs but are not be suicidal at all, such as someone who is enthusiastically minimizing their possessions in order to downsize. Please try to refocus on something else, even a small physical task, when you find yourself looking back to try to see what you “should have” seen: you are at risk of burdening yourself with unnecessary guilt.
  • Those whose loved one committed suicide are likely to hear even more of the hurtful things people can say to those grieving. Granted, most people’s hurtful remarks to mourners are well-intentioned, and yet incredibly unhelpful, such as the dreadful, “You’re still young…you’ll have other children,” or, “You should be glad they’re not suffering any longer.”  There are some people, though, who say truly, intentionally horrible things about those who commit or attempt suicide, and this leads mourners to lie about the cause of death and/or isolate from others.  Avoid these people; seek the company of those who are compassionate.
  • Those who have lost someone to suicide are especially likely to avoid going to grief support groups, or will only go to those about suicide.  I encourage going to a general grief support group, too; it can be a place to learn a lot of skills and strategies that are helpful to all mourners, and can be that first, safe place to talk about what really happened and get support as you manage the tangle of terrible emotions. You will find strategies and support for how to take one step at a time into a world that seems to no longer make sense. Please do not isolate out of pain, unnecessary shame or unnecessary guilt.
  • See your primary care doctor, avoid any mind-altering substances, and try your best to follow medical guidance – even though you will often not feel like eating right or exercising.
  • Seek individual or family counseling to help with the grief process as needed.

And, of course, as this is not psychological guidance or advice – just information and encouragement – reach out for help if you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or fear for someone else. Besides your health care provider, the local emergency room, or 911, you might call the National Suicide Hotline at 988 or the 1-800-273-TALK (8255) National Mental Health Hotline.

If you are reading this and thinking of someone you know who has lost someone to suicide, please reach out with compassion. Be present; keep reaching out. Invite for simple things; offer specific help (with chores, for companionship, to go with them to a grief support group because going is, at first, absolutely terrifying). Please do not ask a lot of questions about the death; if the person is open, instead ask about the person: the happy memories of the past. Ask if you can help and don’t be surprised if you hear, “I’m fine,” or, “You can’t bring them back,” or, “I don’t need anything.”  In that case, come back another time with specific offers (“Can I come by sometime and help with the lawn?” “Are you up for a cup of coffee at the park?” etc.).  Be gentle with people who have been torn apart.

Thanks for reading.

Cutting off Mom and Dad, Part 2

As previously explored, the culture undermines parent-child relationships. One way is the manipulation of expectations of normalcy. Young adults are frequently told to believe that anything less than absolute, craven praise and approval, of anything, is some sort of miserable toxicity and not to be borne. The relationship must be severed, even with parents.

On the flip side, many parents feel that their position as parent gives them license to offer criticism, advice, and endless commentary on their adult child’s habits, clothes, parenting, etc.  If you are financing an adult child, then I would suggest you tell your child what you will do – not what the adult child will do. You can’t make them do anything, but you can control yourself.  A self-sufficient adult who lives on their own, paying their own way, and raising a healthy, well-adjusted child does not need unsolicited advice or undermining, either.

If you’re thinking, reading this, that you jolly well can make them do something – well, actually, no, not without force.  We parents specialize in saying things that can’t be enforced, silly things like yelling at a toddler, “You’re going to get in there and go to sleep right now!” The average three-year-old has figured out you can’t make her go to sleep; and if you do anything that forces sleep, and I find out, I will report you to Child Protective Services. A three-year-old is portable:  you can pick them up and transport them to their bed, over and over, but the command to sleep is just a waste of syllables.

Sometimes, fellow parents, you may be grieving. You had your child, and you had dreams. You imagined a long future, that child’s adulthood, and the ideal fantasy of whatever your engagement with that child’s future life would be.  I was hoping for a shared private practice (we had discussed this, to be fair!) and lots of hands-on times with grandchildren and spent a couple of decades amassing cookie cutters and art supplies that seldom needed, and given away with much grief, grief not for the things but for the unfulfilled dreams. Instead, I have an adult child of whom I am immensely proud who lives many hours away, and that means her husband and their lovely child are far away, too.  I don’t get to impose my dream, or a guilt trip about my unfulfilled dream, on them. Doing so would be foolish and unfair, and reduce the likelihood I can enjoy what I have, which is far more than many people have, and a situation that those who are involuntarily childless would envy.

So…this set of posts on family cut-offs doesn’t solve anything. I don’t have any big, smart solutions or a therapy intervention that will take away the pain of alienation from the very people for whom you would willingly die. Perhaps it can open up some ideas for reflection, or conversation. If you are an adult who has cut off a parent, please reconsider, seriously and prayerfully, on whether their behavior warrants that wall of silence. If you are a parent, wondering what you have done, perhaps there is room to change the ways in which you try to influence or even make demands on someone who does not belong to you.  Perhaps there is nothing to be done except wait and pray, which comprise tremendous power in the long run.  What to pray? I do not know. I can tell you how I pray, across all relationships: family, friends, clients, students, our leaders, our enemies…that both the other party, and I, be open to becoming who God wants us to be. Amen.

Cutting off Mom and Dad, Part 1

We were talking about families, generally, over breakfast.

“I don’t know why family therapy isn’t held in greater esteem,” my husband commented. “Look at what things are like for families…people are really struggling.”

I agreed with the struggling. And, yes, it would be nice if family therapy were more respected. It is rich with the integration of lifespan development, evolutionary psychology, personality, temperament, and culture. Family psychology and family therapy seem to be the neglected child in the world of mental health. Yet every theory of development, and most personality theories, see the family and early life experiences as foundational to the development of the adult person.  How we attach to others, the ease of trust, our expectations of the world, are all rooted in life experiences, particularly those early life experiences most often lived in the context of family.

Well, of course, if we emphasize family then we are saying family is important, pivotal, vital. And that, it seems, flies in the face of much of the mainline culture.

I will take one small slice for now: the bizarre movement to cut off parents who were not, and are not, abusive, neglectful, cruel, or so otherwise dysfunctional that remaining in active relationship with them would be endangering to one’s safety and/or sanity. There seems to have been, over the past few years, a growing movement in this regard. I have spoken with people, and read books by professionals, on both sides of these issues: the grieving parent and the disgruntled adult child; the professionals who attempt to help parents bridge the gap or, if that is impossible, to heal from the grief, and the therapists whose main lens is the toxic relationship that will only hurt you until you extricate yourself.

Are there cruel, abusive and destructively manipulative parents? Yup. And, likewise, selfish, cold and manipulative adult children, too.  And my somewhat limited professional experience (I’ve been in this field about 30 years) is that sometimes children who cut off parents did not have abusive, cruel parents. Sometimes, people cut off parents who did not do what the child wished, did not read their minds, did not feel obliged to agree and praise everything their child did.

And here we come to a piece of the culture guaranteed to undermine the family: the demand that people validate and accept whatever one thinks, feels, and does as indisputably “okay” because it is how we “feel,” etc. Well, now we have a problem that any family therapist could easily explain.

Mommies, generally, give children the majority of early care.  They provide unconditional love and approval because, as Dr. Jordan Peterson often points out, infants are “always right.” If the baby is crying, the baby is right: something needs attention, swiftly, lovingly and gently! That loving care must come even if baby is colicky, pukey, poopy, or otherwise quite disagreeable.  The baby is, after all, always right. However, this stage of life passes, and then Daddy’s influence increases: Daddies specialize in unconditional love with conditional approval. “I love you, and the room is a mess. Get going on it, kid. Here, I’ll give you a hand.”

This coordinated approach works great: it prepares children for the real world, where people have expectations and you can’t just do “whatever” and then complain it’s how you feel, and have everyone act shame-faced, shrug and say, Oh, OK. If that’s how you feel. Whatever.  Children benefit from the solid backing of both parents’ love, and the experience that disapproval of how I behave does not mean I am not loved. It means my behavior probably needs improvement.

The world, or the part of it to which children and young adults are often exposed, plays another tune. The modern message is that the relentlessly approving gaze of a nursing mother ought to be the perspective of parents forever, across all circumstances. That is a set-up to disrupt and undermine the family.

And it appears to be working terrifically.

A child goes off to college and is enlightened about…it matters not.  Politics, nutrition, whatever. They realize their parents are abject idiots. Worse, their parents may be bad and ill-intentioned because, look! A younger sibling is being raised in a religious/liberal/conservative/omnivore/vegetarian/whatever home. Big sibling becomes disrespectful towards the parents, dismissive, and undercuts them in an attempt to rescue little sibling from the fate of growing up in the same family.

Or, a young adult who is apparently sliding along, perhaps in perpetual adolescence, shifting from goal to goal, engaged with street pharmacology or alcohol, resents the parent who dares express concern and perhaps even the intent to turn off the money tap. Anger, resentment, and accusations flare; the young person demands parental fealty, blames the parents, and the parents, afraid of losing the relationship, are tempted to cave and pretend that a ten-year cycle of major changes in undergraduate school is just okay. It wouldn’t be okay even if the young person was the one financing it with their series of so-not-serious jobs; it would still be a waste of talent and youth.

In short, the mainstream culture offers the illusion that new-mommy bottomless approval is what is normal for adults. Do parents contribute to the problem of parent/child alienation? Absolutely; and that will be a story for another day.

The Problem of Re-Emerging Shame

Perhaps you have had this experience, too.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, some stupid, thoughtless, awkward, or embarrassing thing you said or did, years or even decades ago, pops up and invades your brain like lyrics from a an old song you didn’t particularly like, only instead of a pesky earworm you are troubled by the bubbling up of shame.

There are a lot of ways to look at this, and I would like to offer one that, perhaps, you haven’t tried. With the earworm, we try singing it out loud, singing something else out loud, and complaining.  With the shameful episode, consider this.

The episode has come to mind for some reason. What could it be?  The accusing spirit (the word is Satan) would have you believe that you are the sum of this event, you are always “like this,” and encourage the shame. Shame frequently leads to angry behavior, withdrawing from the good, even giving up.  It’s a great trick to encourage bad choices.

But the accusing spirit is not the only spirit. It is not the most powerful Spirit; the most powerful Spirit in on your side, working in mysterious and subtle ways. Perhaps the purpose of this re-emerging memory is not to humiliate you but to help you. If that sounds perplexing, stay with me.

If you believe that you have grown at least a little since that time, been forgiven by God, if not by yourself, then the thought has some purpose besides seeking forgiveness. I wonder if it emerges to remind you that, perhaps, you need to remember to forgive yourself, grow, and be grateful for forgiveness.  Further, this notion that you have grown, changed, realized how wrong or silly or selfish you were, may have direct utility because, no doubt, there is someone who needs that generosity of spirit from you at this very moment.

I suspect you can easily come up with a list of people who have stymied or offended you recently with their version of your suddenly recollected episode. Perhaps it is a family member who was having a bad day. Maybe it is the coworker whose discomfort with death led to awkward and profoundly unhelpful remarks after you lost a loved one. It may be a friend. Whoever it is, maybe the thing to do is recall the forgiveness you’ve received and allow that to temper your response.  Your words could be gentle when you offer correction, quiet and calm when you express disappointment within affection. Perhaps, on reflection, you decide it isn’t even worth bringing up – just an off remark on a tough day. Then dismiss the temptation to wallow in your shame and give thanks to have grown some, at least, since those days.

Try taking those seemingly random eruptions from memory and turning them into grace and gratitude, and see what happens. Odds are, it will definitely be better and healthier than shame.

It looks good from the school bus window

In 1976, I was in 8th grade. 

It was the year the entire country had bicentennial fever.

It was the year the assistant principal’s son, usually diffident and polite, in my grade, slugged my friend “Tara,” who had spent the first half of the school year exploiting female privilege by kicking him and whacking him with a large hairbrush on a several-times daily basis. He said the suspension was worth it.

It was also the year that the Tara’s younger brother, “Tommy,” announced that he wanted to grow up to be a…cow.

Not a cowboy.  Not a farmer. A cow.  Tommy was abundantly clear, and he was impervious to reason, science or bribery with a combination of ice cream and more typical ideas about things he could be when he grew up, as any five-year-old would be.  The ice cream bribe having failed, the family shrugged and figured he would outgrow it. They didn’t play along; they kept calling him Tommy and sending him away from the dinner table if he pretended his salad was cud. Eventually, of course, Tommy moved on to the next thing, probably driving race cars like Speed Racer – something plausible enough to make his mother pine for the sweet, innocent cow days.

I’m sure that for Tommy, choosing the life of a cow made perfect sense.  Imagine how it looks from the window of a school bus, especially for a small boy.  The heavy humidity of a New Jersey summer has passed. It’s finally perfect weather to play outside all day. Nature’s colors are sharp and bright, the air is clean and crisp, and the cows are out there reveling in it, with the bunnies, turtles, birds and white-tailed deer.  Then winter comes – the dour, endlessly gray winters of the Raritan River valley, and after shivering in soggy boots at the bus stop, and climbing slippery steps into the bus, the cows can be glimpsed, in their shelter, occasionally outside into the snow, but ambling back into the warmth at their pleasure.  Yes, to a five-year-old trapped on the cold, rattly school bus, whose eyes are barely window-high, the life of a cow probably looked pretty sweet.  Perhaps if they’d lived along the water, Tommy would have aspired to be a fisherman, a pirate or a dolphin, but we were in landlocked rural New Jersey. He wanted the life of a cow.

Tommy has been a reminder for me to always explore the vision people have of what life when they reach a goal.  For example, if a young person announces they want to get a degree in (whatever), I think it’s important to explore the pieces of the dream around that. What do they see life being like with that degree? What do they imagine will be better for them?  What will they have to give up to reach that goal? What will they have to surrender for that career, realizing that every door opened means many others will close? What texture of life goes with that career, and will that work for them?  What about that career appeals to them? How will they handle the particular negative aspects of that goal?  What draws them to that work? How many people who do that work have they met? In what ways do they see themselves as similar to those people?

Similarly, if someone wants to make any major life change (say, moving from their parents’ home in coastal Florida to live off the land in Alaska), it makes sense to ask questions that make the expectations, underlying assumptions, and perhaps misperceptions, clear. It’s not that I want to be a fun killer; I am obligated to accompany clients on an exploration of their suppositions, knowledge base, and emotional reasoning.  If the Alaska-dreaming young person has innocent delusions about being free, about being “my own boss” in the wilderness, well…actually, Mother Nature will be your boss, and she is far harsher than the weary assistant manager where you bus tables and more relentlessly demanding than your high school physics teacher. The adult’s job is asking questions to elicit thought and inspire more research. An idea may feel “fun” but the reality may not be so jolly.

People may disclose all sorts of ideas and aspirations, wishes and whims. Ask questions about the expectations, beliefs, assumptions, sacrifices. Be curious, be compassionate, but be realistic. Be honest, because ultimately honesty is kind. Iceberg lettuce salads and fish sticks are not cud; major life choices should not be made on a whim, or when under the influence of mind-altering substances, or when distraught.

Because Tommy was never going to grow up to be a cow. But I hope that, whatever he grew up to become, he has plenty of time to enjoy nature on those clear, beautiful days.

**Tara and Tommy are not their real names.