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Nancy Colier

Must We Always Be Striving For A Better Life?

Switching from the five-year plan to the right now plan… The workshop started with a simple question: What do you want? That question was followed shortly with What is your deepest intention? And then, What do you want to create in your life? Out then came the magic markers, poster boards, glue sticks, glitter, and all sorts of other art supplies. […]

We Weren’t Always As Good As We Are Now, So What?

Why there’s no shame in crawling before we walk. There’s something profoundly disturbing going on in our culture right now. Well, truth be told, there are a multitude of profoundly disturbing things going on. But at the center of our toxic culture is a rapidly metastasizing and malignant sense of entitlement—a righteousness. And specifically, the […]

Freeing Yourself From Your Partner’s Behavior

I recently wrote an article about a client who enjoys her marriage and who also struggles with her partner’s angry outbursts. The article garnered some fierce criticism. To recap: After many years of explaining to her partner how and why his anger (and denial of that anger) was hurtful and not okay, his behavior continued, barely impacted by her […]

When Your Relationship Is Not What You Think It “Should” Be

There comes a time in every relationship when you realize that something you think you need and “should” have is not available. What you do when you discover this can determine the future of the relationship, and your contentment within it. Our partner will have limitations, just as we will. It might be something small […]

Rushing to Be Okay Before You Are Okay

From the time we’re young, we’re taught to find the silver lining in every cloud, to search for the lesson in every challenge. Adversity is our teacher, darkness brings light, difficulty is an opportunity. Yes, that’s all useful, but sometimes, we rush the positive narrative before we’ve allowed ourselves to feel the actual feelings … the hard […]

Hitting the Pandemic Wall

How to keep going when you’re depleted and there’s no finish line in sight. As a society, we are hitting the proverbial wall in this pandemic.  We’ve gone through the stage of being happy to clean out the closets, bake new goodies, catch up on every Netflix series we missed, or learn how to order a meal in a new language.  And, through the […]

Why Trying to Be Understood Is So Exhausting: Rethinking our Response to Daily Hurts.

Kim came downstairs for breakfast that morning only to find the coffeemaker full of old coffee. Yesterday’s brew sat in the pot, looking stale and dead. Her husband had always woken up earliest and was the designated coffee-maker in the family.  Kim could count the number of times she’d made coffee on one hand in the nearly two decades of breakfasts […]

Are Your Thoughts True? Do You Even Believe Them?

I was recently taking a walk with my closest friend, hand in hand, enjoying each other’s company and kidding around as we usually do. My friend, who is a bit of a loner, made a joke that he doesn’t make friends easily, to which I sweetly and playfully replied, “Well you made friends with me, a long […]

Are Healthy Relationships Possible After Growing Up in Emotional Chaos?

When we grow up in emotionally chaotic households, we face challenges in establishing healthy adult relationships. When chaos is the norm, we get accustomed to living with what feels bad and scary. We learn to silence our experience because it feels too dangerous to speak up for ourselves or call anyone out on their behavior. As children, […]

Parenting 101: Love Is In the Details

Pam was crying tears of happiness and relief, but also sadness. The man she’d been dating for six months had asked, “How do you feel about what’s happening in the news, given what happened to you in middle school?” Her boyfriend had remembered a small detail about her, something she had mentioned in the first week of their […]