Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts I’ve been thinking along about what we teach, what those around us learn from us, and how the lessons we intend to teach are often not the lessons received. This week, I am at Bearskin Meadow Camp training the counseling staff, trying to prepare them to help kids and families have a meaningful experience at camp. Fundamentally, the most powerful method we have of teaching is our own...
10 days ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts I am watching Yellowstone, and there’s a scene where Kevin Costner’s character John Dutton realizes that he does not really have a relationship with his adult children. He relates to them as his employees, as tools in his empire. Realizing this, he makes an effort at dinner to talk to them differently—to try and talk to them as his children rather than as people who work for him or do...
17 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Many of us, myself included, suffer from disappointment because we hold ourselves to high standards. We expect a lot from ourselves and from our work. For many reasons, we have a hard time feeling that what we do, accomplish, or produce lives up to what we think it should be. This internal sense of what we expect is divorced from others’ expectations. Those around us– boss, colleagues,...
24 days ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts Chemical coping is another name for addiction. It describes a cycle: feel distress, take a chemical, feel better. The specific chemical might be fentanyl, alcohol, nicotine, or cocaine, but the process is the same—it’s a learned response to distress that, when repeated many times, becomes automatic. Feel distress → take a chemical → feel better. From the outside, addiction looks...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts When patients have been in recovery for a while, there often comes a moment when they want to put it all behind them. “Doc,” patients will say, “I want to get off this medication. I just want to move on with my life.” It’s an understandable desire. Addiction isn’t something most of us feel proud of, and it often comes with shame, regret, and a deep wish that it had never been part of...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts We like to believe that we choose our norms—that we live our lives based on principles, values, and reasoned decisions. While this is true to some degree, one of the most powerful forces shaping our behaviors and the structure of our society is far more mundane: repetition. Repetition is a neutral force—not good or evil. It doesn’t care what it reinforces. But what we repeat, we...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts “How did you go bankrupt?”“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” Hemingway was talking about money, but he could’ve been describing almost anything that falls apart—our health, our relationships, our sobriety, even our identity. Collapse is rarely abrupt. Usually, it's a slow unraveling we tolerate, excuse, and ignore—until we can’t. We all do this, in one form or another. We normalize...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts As we age and reflect on our younger selves, the amount we change is difficult to ignore. Think back to what you were absolutely sure of when you were 10 years old, and compare it to what you’re certain of now. Depending on your current age, we can repeat a similar exercise for different points in our lives—our 20s, 30s, 50s, or perhaps before and after kids, before and after marriage,...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Doc’s Thoughts Broaden your perspective. Live a happy, healthy, meaningful life. Subscribe to Doc's Thoughts “Stress” is one of the most frequent reasons I hear when people try to describe what ails them, and what limits taking care of ourselves. It gets in the way of exercising, interferes with sleep, turns food into a coping mechanism, makes real relaxation elusive, and leads to that extra drink (or two) in the evening. Because chronic stress affects our health, we spend a lot of time in...
2 months ago • 4 min read