Blog

Clients sometimes tell me they don’t want to make someone feel bad. You can’t. Or that somebody made them feel bad. Nope. People’s feelings belong to them and they can feel whatever they choose - and so can you. In fact, you do, but too often by default you accept the hurt, and dwell and dive into those ruminating thoughts without realizing it. Facing how your own perceptions and understandings and meanings of events hurt you is the first step to setting a boundary that says ‘No thank you, I don’t want that feeling.’

The bottom line is as Ghandi said “Nobody can hurt me without my permission” so make sure you are giving that permission to people who you can trust and believe in, people who deserve it. We give our hearts away so very easily to people who feel entitled to it, but we don’t have to. Just as you learned to give your heart away, you can learn how to take it back. That is what counseling is all about.

The first step is reframing the hurtful things you see, and hear, and experience into things with as little or as much impact on you as you choose.