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Articles by Sheryl Paul

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189 articles by Sheryl Paul · showing 50

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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

This is a Powerful Predictor of Your Well-Being

We all have inside of us a well of Self. This is a fluid well that is continuously being drained and refilled by how we spend our time, depleted and nourished by how we move through our inner and outer worlds. When the well is full, we are resourced and regulated, which means we’re more adept at handling life’s stressors, including the inevitable anxiety that frequently traipses through the door of the highly sensitives.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
1,332 views
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Loss of Light

Light fading, time passing, big boy is ten, baby isn’t a baby and the time for having babies is over. The pregnant woman in the check-out line and it’s eleven years ago, pregnant with my own belly of hope and love, on the threshold of everything new and exciting. There was pain then, too, but it’s the joy and anticipation that come flying from past to present now, another layer of recognition that a stage of life is over. Oh, this life. Oh, the highly sensitive soul with the acute awareness of the passage of time and how it just keeps on marching on.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
1,575 views
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Intrusive Thought: “I Have to be Single In Order to Heal”

It’s a thought that arises frequently for those struggling with relationship anxiety: “I have to be single in order to heal.” Offshoots and extrapolations of this thought sound like: • “I have to backpack by myself across Europe.” • “I have to live in a loft in New York.” • “I haven’t dated enough.” • “I have to leave my partner in order to find myself.”

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
1,099 views
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Falling in Love with Other People

Let’s blow the cover off of another taboo topic in our culture, one that causes my clients to barely be able to whisper their experience loud enough to share it with me: “falling in love” with people other than your partner, including bosses, celebrities, religious figures, and even your therapist.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
743 views
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Ways to Challenge Fear

Living with kids close to nature and on a creek, I find that my fear-mind has many opportunities to reveal itself. In spring, when the creek swells to river stature and rushes in white-lipped rapids, I worry that one of my kids will somehow escape through the gate and… In summer, as we gleefully splash in its pools and rock-hop to the other side, I worry about one of them slipping on an algae-covered boulder and… And now, in winter, as my older son courageously and curiously wants to explore the multi-faceted and miraculous displays of ice, my worry-mind sees the ice cracking, breaking, and…r

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

A 24-Hour Challenge

In 2008, shortly after we moved from Los Angeles to Denver with our two-year old son, I adopted a weekly ritual in honor of the Jewish sabbath: to shut down my computer for twenty-four hours. This was before the era of smartphones and before I was pouring my energy into my online business daily, but even back then it was a weekly challenge to rip myself from the seductive distraction of the computer and literally shut it down.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Career Anxiety And How To Trust Your Path

I receive a lot of questions from course members and clients on the topic of career anxiety: “How do I know if I’m at the right job? How do I know if it’s time to change paths? Have I missed my calling?” (If you’re struggling the myth of a calling, please read this post.) These questions predicate on one of ego’s most compelling beliefs, which is that there’s one “right” path and that if you find it you’ll feel fulfilled and alive. It’s similar to the belief that if you find the “right” partner you’ll be lifted above the messy pain of life and be transported into a land of ete al bliss.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Loneliness and Love

There’s a fundamental loneliness that is part of the fabric of being human. It arrives in the corners of night, when shadows form from curtain folds and the backs of chairs. It seeps in just before twilight, when afte oon exhales its last breath and evening hasn’t yet inhaled. It lives on the edges of exaltation, in the space between the golden hour when the gods breathe their jeweled breath over meadows and in the splintered crack just before night’s multi-colored ink begins to sink into dreams.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

A Remedy When You Don’t Know Who You Are

Our culture entrains us not to know who we are. From the time we’re born and continuing into our early years, we’re conditioned to exte alize our sense of self through being told when and how to eat, sleep, play, socialize, learn. Although this may be changing, the dominant child-raising culture teaches parents and educators literally to train babies and children to eat and sleep on a schedule.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Something is Wrong

Fear-mind has a special genius for trying to prove that it’s right. It’s like we all have this aspect of our personality – some call it ego, other call it lower self – that has secretly attended law school and graduated at the top of its class. This character, terrified of change, will gather such convincing evidence to support its case that it would win in any court of law, or at the very least in the court of law that takes place inside your mind.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

What If I'm REALLY Not Attracted to my Partner?

The following question is one I often receive from my clients who are struggling with the specific spoke of relationship anxiety that contains the longing to feel more love, connection, and attraction for their partner (and let’s remember that I use attraction or lack of attraction in the broadest sense of the word to talk about all of the ways in which you believe your partner is “not enough” that then cause you to retract, judge and withdraw. This “lack of attraction” can focus on any perceived lack: physical, intellectual, humor, social, or simply “we’re not connected enough.”).

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

This is Why You Struggle with Relationship Anxiety

“Probably the next important evolution of Western humankind is to find a proper container for religious life so that we do not unrealistically expect another mortal human being to carry this high value. In short: don’t ask a human to be God for you.” * Robert Johnson, Balancing Heaven and Earth “Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.” * Robert Johnson, We: The Psychology for Romantic Love

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Leaf in the Wind Syndrome

“I’m always comparing my relationship to other people’s relationships. Why does everyone else look like they’re so in love?” “I have such a hard time making decisions. Sometimes I can’t even decide what to order at a restaurant!” “I worry about whether or not my family likes my partner. I always care so much about what they think.” “I believe every anxious thought that enters my brain. It’s exhausting.” “What if I’m gay? What if I’m a pedophile? What if I have a terminal illness?”

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

The Rapture of Love

We long for rapture. We long to be transported to an otherworldly place where the problems that weigh heavily into our souls and the pain that pierces our hearts lift away, if only for a moment. We long to feel profoundly alive and deeply fulfilled. We long for ecstasy.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Love is Stronger tha Fear

My son is still struggling with his nighttime fears. He’s been engaged in this battle for a year and a half and, while he’s no longer in a state of terror, the fear creeps up steadily enough to prevent him from falling asleep easily. We’ve introduced him to every technique and tool we can think of to manage the fear, from talking about it to guided imagination work where I’ve led him to his “special place” and taught him to invite magical friends to advise him on the fear.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
1,787 views3.7/5 (3)
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Does Relationship Anxiety Ever End

Among the many questions that dart through the mind plagued by relationship anxiety, the one that can cause either hope or despair is, “Will this anxiety ever end? The short answer is yes: the acute anxiety that you’re experiencing – the one that wakes you in the night and causes you to lose your appetite, will end when you receive accurate information and can douse the flames of “What’s wrong with me?” with a good splash of truth-water.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

How Engagement Counseling Can Affair-Proof Your Marriage

My clients call me with a variety of anxiety-based questions (many of which I’ve discussed in previous articles): Does my anxiety mean that I don’t love my fiancé enough? How do I know that I’m making the right decision? Is there someone out there who’s better for me? Does the fact that I’m not excited about planning my wedding mean that I’m making a mistake? Embedded in all of these questions is another question, the one that they’re trying to articulate and hoping I’ll be able to answer: Will my marriage last?

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
2,832 views5/5 (1)
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Feelings Are Messy

As humans in an uncertain world, we seek certainty in a variety of ways. We ask questions that are fundamentally unanswerable. We ruminate and obsess on a single thought (otherwise known as intrusive thoughts). We Google and text and seek reassurance in a variety of increasingly technologically oriented ways. When I see someone falling into these common mental habits, the first questio I encourage them to ask themselves is, “What are these thoughts/actions protecting me from feeling?”

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

“The Wisdom of Anxiety” is Coming Down the Birth Canal

In April 2015, I had a dream while on vacation in Los Angeles: Robert Johnson, the Jungian analyst who has informed so much of my work, came to me and said, “It’s time to write another book and it’s mostly written.” I woke up, faithfully wrote it down as I do with most of my dreams, then filed it away in some far-back recess of my mind.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

The Fear of Aging

During my search for new recipes for my little vegetarian son (who declared he was a vegetarian about nine months ago; you can read about it on my blog), I stumbled upon a beautiful and inspiring book called, Healthy at 100, by John Robbins (author of Diet for a New America). As my current life affords scant time for the luxury of reading, the book sat around the house in a variety of locations for a couple of weeks. But a few days ago something urged me toward the book, and even though work and kids called as always, I picked it up and started to read.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

If I'm Calm Now Is It Still Relationship Anxiety?

There is often a predictable arc to relationship anxiety that includes three stages.* The first stage is characterized by typical symptoms of anxiety and panic: Can’t sleepr Can’t eatr Tearful Depressedr Bolting awake in the middle of the nightr Difficulty functioning at workr Fluttering stomachr Racing heartr

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Grieving as Letting Go

At the heart of transitioning consciously is the willingness to grieve. Sometimes grief arises unbidden as a pang of emptiness; sometimes it wells up in a bubble of memory about a former house; sometimes it appears as a longing for a past experience or stage of life; sometimes it comes barreling into the psyche on tidal wave of sorrow for a deceased relative or an estranged friendship. It can be attached to a memory or it can appear “out of the blue” without a specific content or story riding in its waters.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

When Love Makes You Flinch

One of the common fear-lines that arises when the ego is trying to deconstruct the idea of relationship anxiety and convince you that your truth is that you’re just with the wrong person is: “If what Sheryl says is true, why don’t more people talk about it?”

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

The Scariest Thing We Do

Every day that I work with clients struggling with relationship anxiety I find myself saying some version of, “Of course you’re scared. Loving is the scariest thing we do.” As I’ve written about several times on this blog, fear doesn’t always present as fear but instead shows up as irritation, annoyance, numbness, ambivalence, lack of attraction, and doubt. It’s a convoluted defense mechanism, the ego’s attempt to circumvent being left or rejected by convincing you that you don’t love or even like your partner anyway, but in the end these are all manifestations of fear.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Shrink Fear Grow Love

When the fear-fog clears, when the projection that has kept him separate from you and sealed a barnacle over your heart finally shatters, you see your partner as if for the first time. Not only do you see her clearly, in all of her sweet and simple splendor, but the delusions of separateness fall away, and you can see how under the hooks of hair or teeth or height or education or ambition or boredom or do we have enough to talk about or he’s wrong for me or she’s not attractive enough or I’m always irritated or mannerisms or humor or social fluidity orr

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Transitions: The Art of Letting Go

Transitions provide continual opportunities to practice the art of the letting go. At each new threshold, the task is to let go of the old lifestyle, identity, and belief systems that are no longer serving us so that we can gracefully move into the new stage. The adolescent lets go of childhood. The high school graduate lets go of living at home (and the parents enter the transition of empty nest as their final child departs and so lets go of their primary identity being parent).

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

This is What Actually Goes on Behind Closed Doors

One of the most common questions I’m asked is, “How come other people don’t suffer in this way?” It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about relationship anxiety, friendship anxiety, social anxiety, or any other hook that anxiety hangs its hat on, when you’re the one suffering it feels like you’re the only one suffering. As I recently shared on Instagram, one of the reasons why we struggle with so much shame around anxiety is that we’re disconnected from the real fabric of humanity, the village where friends meet at the well or in the field and talk about their places of struggle.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

What You Choose Determines What Comes Next

Transitions, as breaking and renewal points, offer choice-points that determine how we unfold into the next stage of our lives. Many people find me during their wedding transition when when they’re broken open not only by relationship anxiety but also by the earthquake of feelings that erupt because of the transition itself. The same is true for the transition into parenthood, career changes, moves, and deaths.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

At the Heart of Anxiety

“The final stage of healing is using what happens to you to help other people. That is healing in itself.” – Gloria Steinem “Why me?” people often ask when they’re dragged into the underworld of anxiety in any form. “Why do they have it so easy? Why does it look like everyone else glides through life when I struggle?”

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

This is What is Embedded Inside Fear and Regret

This is a story about what happens when we forget to make room for grief around transitions. It’s a story that illuminates the heart of a highly sensitive person, and how easy it is to overlook and minimize the tende ess of our hearts. It’s a story of remembering my own medicine, and how easy it is to forget.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

I Hid in the Bookstore to Learn About Sex

In response to an email called “Emerging Womanhood” from my Sacred Sexuality course, a member shared the following on the forum. What touches me so deeply about her response is not only the exquisite vulnerability with which she tells her stories of becoming a young woman, but also the ways in which responds to her young self with tremendous compassion. She models two of the essential components to embracing our bodies: excavating the shame stories and learning to respond to our hurt and lonely places from a place of acceptance.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

The New Pledge of the Highly Sensitive is Life-Changing

A theme has been constellating lately in my professional and personal worlds, and when I see a theme I’m compelled to write about it here as it’s my indicator that we’re tapping down into the realm of the collective unconscious: the invisible realm where we’re all connected, all struggling with different variations of the same hooks, all holding hands beneath the surface as we glide along our stories aboard spaceship Earth.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

When Will I Feel Better?

When you’re neck-deep and soul-soaked in anxiety, when you’re having trouble eating, sleeping, and basically functioning, when the love you formally felt for your partner has been eclipsed by indifference, doubt, or numbness, when intrusive thoughts invade your brain day and night, you will inevitably ask, “When will I feel better?” This question hits at the onset of anxiety when the symptoms are full-tilt misery, it hits when the excruciating first set of symptoms starts to abate, and it hits when people find my work and sign up for my courses.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

One Moment At A Time

One of the slogans in the 12-step programs is One Day At A Time. In the life of someone enduring a transition - whether in the midst of a break up, becoming a mother, trying to conceive, or retiring - a more appropriate and helpful phrase is One Moment At A Time.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Caring What Other People Think

How would your life be different if you didn’t care what other people thought? How might your relationship, your job, and your day-to-day functioning be different if you weren’t weighed down by others’ opinions? How might you peel and crack out of the shells of your insecurity and arrive more closely at the essence of who you are if you weren’t worried about others’ judgement? What would happen if you made decisions based on the inviolable knowledge of your intrinsic worthiness instead of based on the constantly moving target of exte al approval?

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

When It's Time To Say Enough

For those of you who are struggling with relationship anxiety, you probably saw the title of this post and wondered if I was going to talk about when to leave a relationship, and perhaps felt nervous that it was going to spike you.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Take Back Your Gold

Last Monday, after a typical Colorado October snowstorm, my sons and I drove into town to serve dinner to the homeless. Consistent with this time of year, the snow started to melt just hours after it fell, and what was left was a stunning display of beauty where the golds and reds of autumn kissed the snow-covered foothills in the foreground with the pure white Rocky Mountains jutting up above it all. The juxtaposition of colors took my breath away and shook off the last shroud of the gray morning that had settled into my soul.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Who Sits at the Head of Your Table?

In last week’s post, I wrote about the essential task of attending to our four realms of Self in order to find wellness and equanimity, and that in order to do this we need to have a loving, competent and clear inner parent at the helm of psyche. Just as kids feel safe when there’s an attuned parent sitting at the head of the metaphoric dinner table, so our inner characters – our Anxiety, Judgement, Fear, Jealousy, Critic, Taskmaster, Good Girl/Boy – feel safe when there’s a loving, clear, attuned parent at the head of the table of psyche.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

To Be Human

To be human is to know that we are imperfect and whole: we will hurt and be hurt; we will feel disappointed and will disappoint; we will stumble and fall and get back up again. To be human is to remember that this being human is an experiment without a goal or destination but with a plan that includes learning about love at its center.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

Where Anxiety Hangs Its Hat

Anxiety can hang its hat on almost any hook. It can focus on relationships, fertility, parenting, health, the world, money, career, death. Within each of these topics, there are endless sub-topics that lure anxiety into its lair. If we’re talking about relationship anxiety, for example, the hook can be: lack of physical attraction, lack of sexual attraction, focusing in any area of perceived lack (education, intelligence, social fluency, humor, wit, height, ambition), religious differences, we never had an infatuation stage, or just a pervasive sense that the relationship is “wrong”.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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By Sheryl PaulRecently published1 topic

How Marie Kondo can Help You Fall in Love With Your Partner

Anxious people aren’t typically the most easy-going people on the planet. Because our high sensitivity wires us for hypervigilance, which then causes us to scan the horizon for danger, we’re physiologically primed to have a more tightly-wound nervous system. Unless you received guidance as a child for how to work with this propensity to worry, all of those worry-strands continued to coalesce and gather strength in your body and psyche over the years, forming a tightly wound ball of twine until it reached a breaking point.

Primary topic: Life Transitions
Life Transitions
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