Wellspring Counseling, LLC

Gifted. This season is full of it: performances, sacred services, gift exchanges, food giveaways, card sharing, and donations. Each of these involve the act of giving and receiving. These are acts of catch and release,infused with the warmth of unconditional regard.
Giving and receiving can feel like complicated exchanges. It can feel perfunctory, obligatory or rote. It can feel like there are expectations packed inside the response anticipated from us. Sometimes we rally to show up for the moment, engage with the activity to meet the social demands of the encounter, while a large part of ourselves feels empty or despondent inside.
“Christmastime is here. Happiness and cheer. O that we could always have such spirit through the year.” Famous lines from the Charlie Brown soundtrack. But it highlights something very important. It isn’t always happiness and cheer that we are feeling. There is contrast. There is heartache. These are very real for many even in spite of an amplitude of “Holly and Jolly.”
Go bravely into the season with a sensitivity to your own feelings and an allowance for that to waiver and fluctuate and temper those expectations arriving this time of year with permission to feel-

The Growing Season. Def: A period of time where the conditions are favorable to support life. Here in North America, agriculture is beginning to close its growing season. The harvesters are in the fields bringing in the corn and the garden plots are struggling to bring the final tomatoes to ripening. Cooler evenings remind us that fall is on its way.
But where are you? Are you inside a growing season undefined by hours of sunlight or daytime humidity? Are you meeting a challenge with a new strategy and a new understanding of what was missing before? Are you expanding your heart? Or, if you were honest, has it felt more like a period of dormancy and winter? Has the challenge in front of you been met with a stiffening or a rigidity? Do you feel stuck?
The invitation is very real and present. Nature is on full display of what can come at the end of a growing season-

Freedom- it has become an anecdotal word in our North American culture. But it is made of bedrock. What is it after all? In psychological terms it is the ability to pivot, to choose change, to alter one’s position. It is not forged in times that are vacant of adversity or trial, rather it is proven in them. Freedom is the choice in the response. It is movement within a particularly hard process. It is the very active element inside the elasticity that we talk about in therapy. Freedom to change.
Life experiences including trauma and shame can lead to places of calcification. These are places where our responses seem frozen or fixed. Perhaps they feel inside an endless loop of disappointment, distance and retreat. Freedom comes knocking and offers a new perspective. Response to adversity can take a different shape; it can be altered, healed, reconstructed. Freedom to develop new patterns of thought and behavior. Freedom to try again. . .over and over again, like growing a new muscle.
Where are you today? Do you want to learn more about how freedom opens places in your life that have felt closed and shut down? Reach out today and begin that journey-