Sheryl Paul
MA
Free
Conscious Transitions Expert
Sheryl Paul Quick Facts
- Main Areas
- Life transitions
- Best Sellers
- The Conscious Bride
- Career Focus
- Counselor, Author
Sheryl Paul, M.A., has counseled thousands of people worldwide through her private practice, her bestselling books, her e-courses and her website. She has appeared several times on “The Oprah Winfrey Show”, as well as on “Good Morning America” and other top media shows and publications around the globe. To sign up for her free 78-page eBook, “Conscious Transitions: The 7 Most Common (and Traumatic) Life Changes,“ visit her website. If you’re suffering from relationship anxiety – whether single, dating, engaged, or married – sign up to take her FREE assessment on relationship anxiety. http://conscious-transitions.com
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Sheryl Paul Books
Articles by this expert
SelfGrowth articles and saved writing connected to this expert.
Article
“Attachment and Flight”
“Something valid and necessary takes flight when it senses deep attachment, and this flight also seems so deeply rooted as to be an honest expression of soul. Our ultimate goal is to find ways to embrace both attachment and resistance to attachment, and the only way to that reconciliation of opposites is to dig deeply into the nature of each. As with all matters of the soul, it is in honoring its impulses that we find our way best into it mysteries.” – Thomas Moore, Soul Mates: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationships, p. 3
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The Gift of Projection
Projection is one of the most important concepts to understand when you’re stuck in relationship anxiety or any manifestation of anxiety. It’s a psychological term that essentially means we’re stuck in a story about someone or something else with the belief that it’s true, and that if the person or thing would change we would feel better. Everyone will, at some point, find themselves stuck in a projection; it’s part of being human. Projections are a bit challenging to define and even more challenging to see when you’re in one. In Wikipedia’s words:
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This is What it Takes to Heal from Shame and Anxiety
When I was in graduate school twenty-five years ago, we learned many essential principles and tools for becoming a skilled healer in the counseling arts. We thoroughly covered various modalities, including the depth psychological perspective that informs all of my work, and spent countless hours practicing the sacred art of listening, tending, and receiving. But there is one element that was left out – or at least it wasn’t explicitly discussed as an essential ingredient for healing – and it took me years before I understood why. It’s the element of love.
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How to Break Free from the Mental Addiction of Health Anxiety
Like all forms of anxiety, health anxiety is on the rise. With information about our health more available than ever, the anxious mind that seeks control at all costs can easily latch onto health as a hotbed theme that invites this mind to shift into overdrive. You mea I can prevent catastrophic events from happening if I only take these actions? Nothing could make the ego happier than jumping onto a train with control as the conductor. But there is no true happiness that arises when ego becomes perseverated on a theme. In fact, it’s nothing short of hell.
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Birth Trauma and Anxiety
When working with anxiety and intrusive thoughts, the essential component is to resist the gravitational and habitual pull to attach onto the stories that appear like planets in our inner galaxy and assume that they’re true. The story of the day – whether it centers around your relationship, your fertility, your job, your health, or your children – occupies so much space and presents its argument with such conviction that the untrained mind will naturally attach and interpret in a lightening flash second.
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What is the Work of Breaking Free from Relationship Anxiety?
A coaching client recently said to me, “You talk a lot about doing “the work”, and I wondered for so long what “the work” was. I thought that if I understood anxiety intellectually I would feel better. And the first time I went through the course I did feel better for a while, which I know is very common for new course members. But then I felt anxious again, and I realized that I wasn’t doing the work.” “How do you understand the work now?”
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A Passionate Life
Inspired by the courageous, wise members of my July 2014 Trust Yourself program. Quotes from the forum reprinted with permission. *** My family and I were driving into town last summer when we saw a blue van pass by with the words “Mr. Pool” printed on the side. “There goes Mr. Pool,” I said, as we had just hired him to finish hooking up our pool heater. And I had this moment of appreciation for the person who started Mr. Pool.
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When Fear Meets Love
When fear pricks the heart it flies in the face of every message about love we absorb from the culture: that love should provide a safe haven against the storms of life; that love should be easy; that love and fear are mutually exclusive, and that if fear enters the picture it means something is wrong.
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Love Cannot Be Measured
Love cannot be measured. It cannot be placed in test tubes in a science laboratory or placed on the great scale of life to determine whether or not there’s enough. The anxious/sensitive mind longs for a definite answer to the questions that swirl through its brain - Do I love you enough? What is enough? Do I love you as much as you love me? - praying that a divine hand will reach down from the heavens and seal the relationship with a stamp of approval. But love is not an exam you take in school where you can receive a letter grade.
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When Anxious, Start at the Beginning
Anxiety is a messenger, a symptom, and a gift. I know that statement flies in the face of everything we learn about anxiety in a culture that is pathologically obsessed with eradicating shadow at every turn and consequently attempts to “get rid of” the symptom of anxiety as quickly and cleanly as possible, but I carry a vastly different approach. Instead of immediately medicating anxiety and its cohort of symptoms away, I seek to understand the messages encoded in its underlayers.
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Call the Witch by Its True Name
My favorite fairy tale when I was a child was Rumpelstiltskin, the story of a girl who makes a bargain with an imp-like creature in exchange for saving her life from being executed by the king. First she gives the imp a necklace, then a ring, then promises her firstbo child. But when her child arrives, she begs the imp to let her keep it. He says he will if she can guess his name.
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Fear is a Friend in Disguise
There’s a common concept in our culture – one that I’ve adopted myself at times – that fear is our enemy. When we’re caught in fear’s offspring of anxiety and panic, it certainly feels like we’re been taken into enemy territory and are being held hostage. It feels like someone wraps a gloved hand around our throat and is sitting on our chest with a fifty pound bag of bricks. Anxiety in any form around any storyline – relationships, health, impending loss/death – is an unmanageable state that feels like torture.
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Websites & resources
SelfGrowth-published websites, downloads, and contributor profile websites connected to this expert.
Website
Conscious Transitions: Lessons in Letting Go
Weekly blog posts on all aspects of managing life's transitions, from getting married and becoming a parent to moving, job loss, breaking up and retirement.
March 22, 2011
Website
Conscious Weddings
Transform your engagement anxiety and wedding stress with the pioneer of bridal counseling and the author of "The Conscious Bride" and "The Conscious Bride's Wedding Planner."
December 21, 2009
Contacting Sheryl Paul
Due to the volume of emails that Sheryl receives daily, she’s not able to offer advice via email, so please know that if you send an email asking for advice it will not be answered. However, there are hundreds of free articles on her site that offer help and guidance if you’re struggling with all forms of anxiety.
Please note: Sheryl’s counseling practice is currently full.
If you’re struggling with relationship anxiety – whether dating, engaged, married, male, female – she strongly encourages you to consider her Break Free from Relationship Anxiety eCourse. It’s the most effective action you could take and offers more support, information, and tools than she could offer in 20 counseling sessions.