Personal Growth, for me and you
Emphasis on the personal today…
Sigmund Freud taught that therapists shouldn’t talk about themselves at all with their patients. The technical term for this is “abstinence”, and while abstinence-only sex education didn’t keep me from impregnating my fiancee at 19, I don’t think this form of clinical abstinence is very helpful, either. Some of the most helpful moments of human connection with my patients have been when I shared something about myself. Similarly, I’m here to share some of my current journey with you, in the hopes that you can take something useful from it!
If you’ve been following me on Medium for a bit, you might remember that in March 2024, I quit social media, feeling a desperate need to replace virtual pseudo-connections with the real thing. I didn’t write about it much (other than this post about my first visit to a Buddhist sanctuary), but I also committed to meditating every single day. And I did! For a 76 day streak! But then I missed ONE day of meditation.
As you can see from my meditation log above, once that streak was broken, my time plummeted, and I averaged less than half the time in the subsequent month or so. (I started using the Insight timer app to log my meditation time in March. Before that, I had used the 10 Percent happier app, which is fantastic, but I prefer unguided meditation most of the time these…
