Parents and Self-Care

When Resilience Requires Slack

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The traditional approach to understanding complex systems has been reductionist, breaking them into smaller, simpler components. While effective for understanding mechanical systems like clocks, where each cog serves a clear purpose in isolation, this method falls short when applied to dynamic, interconnected systems like living organisms, ecosystems, weather patterns, or even social structures such as economies, organizations, institutions, supply chains, or families. To look at systems like these and only see parts is to miss the force that ties them together. […] You don’t …

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Tending the Garden of Our Soul

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Frog was in his garden. Toad came walking by.  “What a very fine garden  you have, Frog,” he said.  “Yes”, said Frog. “It is very nice, but it was hard work.”  “I wish I had a garden,” said Toad.  “Here are some flower seeds. Plant them in the ground”, said Frog, “and soon you too will have a garden”.  “How soon?” asked Toad.  “Quite soon,” said Frog.  Toad ran home. He planted the flower seeds.  “Now seeds,” said Toad, “start growing.”  Toad walked up and down a few times. The seeds did not …

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Interoception, the Sense that Builds the Mind

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Our five senses are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. Proprioception is frequently called “the sixth sense”, which helps us with body position, movement and action. This sense allows for walking in the darkness without losing balance. The finger nose proprioception test is a bedside test to check if a patient can touch their nose with the finger while the eyes are closed. Patients with proprioceptive impairment will miss the tip of the nose.   The vestibular system is a sensory system occasionally called “the seventh sense”. This system …

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Emotional Escapism: How Watching TV Shows Help Us Cope with Life’s Stressors

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I simply couldn’t finish a new tv series for the last two years, as I was more drawn to my comfort shows, Monk, Brooklyn 99, Derry Girls, or Avatar: The Last Airbender. There is something oddly comforting in rewatching favourite tv shows when confronting pandemics, lockdowns, social injustice, or war. Comfort watching, instead of binge watching, is that gentle feeling that everything feels ok with the world. There is no twist, dialogue, or scene that could surprise me when I rewatch these shows, giving me a reassuring impression …

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What I Wish I Knew Before Having My Child

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While creating the outline for an article about preventing parenting burnout, I kept thinking about what I wanted to know before I had a child. So, I asked my husband and some of my friends what they wish they knew before their first newborn. In random order, and under the guise of anonymity, here are some ideas:  Breastfeeding  One of the biggest myths about breastfeeding is that it is easy, billions of mothers have done it before us, and it only takes a bit of …

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Cognitive Reappraisal or How to Cope with Unpleasant Feelings through Reframing

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In psychologist Guy Winch’s book The Squeaky Wheel: Complaining the Right Way to Get Results, Improve Your Relationships, and Enhance Self-Esteem, I came across one of the most descriptive explanations of how to handle the emotional load of uncomfortable situations.  What we call feelings are complex experiences composed of several elements. Anger, frustration, sadness, rage, exasperation, etc., are our subjective experiences (“feelings”) of particular events in our life. First, these emotional experiences are always accompanied by physiological reactions: potential elevated heart rate and blood pressure, stress hormones …

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Metaphorical Thinking – The Guest Metaphor

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Metaphorical Thinking – Introduction Metaphorical Thinking – the Cloud Metaphors Metaphorical Thinking – the Guest Metaphor Metaphorical Thinking – the Web Metaphors There are two instances that the metaphor of guest can explain or enhance: treat our children as guests in our life, and how our body is a guesthouse for our emotions. The first meaning is an idea coined by Haim Ginott, a mentor to John Gottman (Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child), Adele Faber (How to Talk so Kids will Listen…) or Laura …

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Crafting Intuition, from Chaos Theory to Motherhood

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At the end of one of his lectures, Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky recommended Chaos: Making a new science, a book by James Gleick. While reading it, the following quote struck me: When I came into this game, there was a total absence of intuition. One had to create intuition from scratch. Intuition as it was trained by the usual tools – the hand, the pencil, and the ruler – found these shapes [fractals] quite monstrous and pathological. The old intuition was misleading. The first …

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