Even the most well-behaved children tend to lie. Sometimes the lies are about things that don’t really matter, but it can be frustrating when your child continues to lie in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. As a child, how many times were you told that you wouldn’t get into “as much” trouble […]
Because Dr. Glasser taught that focusing on the past is futile, some people might think that discussing trauma as a Choice Theory practitioner is discouraged. I disagree. When we experience a traumatic event, our sympathetic nervous system is activated. This releases our stress hormones—cortisol and adrenaline—during the fight or flight response. Typically, our first response […]
National Be Someone Day is designed to remind adults to be someone special in the life of a child. As a counselor, I am constantly reminded of the fact that almost everyone on the planet is recovering from or currently enduring some sort of trauma, a lot of that trauma inflicted or experienced as a […]
In honor of National Foster Care Month, I wanted to write an article about the truth of foster care: There is a beautiful side of foster care and there is a diabolical side. I will write about both, as well as my opinion of what a great foster parent looks like and what foster children […]
I have been studying Choice Theory for more than 30 years, and there has always been the concept that people are doing their best in any given situation with the information available to them. I ascribed to that statement for much of those 30 years. We had a colleague, Diane Gossen, who spoke of people […]
Another designation for the month of August asks us, “What Will Be Your Legacy?” I attribute the natural desire to leave a legacy to the basic human need for Significance. Everyone wants to have an impact, to make a difference and to leave something of themselves behind to be remembered by. Leaving a legacy will […]
You know the clichés about children being the future; they will be running the world one day. The children of today will be making decisions for us that will affect us in our retirement. They will be deciding if we should go to war, how taxes should be spent, what the country’s priorities will be. […]
In honor of yesterday’s Global Forgiveness Day, I wanted to write about the importance of forgiveness. One of the components of Mental Freedom® is the concept of Unconditional Trust. If you know about this concept, you know I started it as the Unconditional Trust Challenge. The idea is to start trusting everyone to do one […]
May is Foster Care Awareness Month. Foster care is a strong interest and personal cause of mine. I spent 17 years working with a specialized foster care agency in Pennsylvania. I loved the work and the kids I met during my tenure, even though there were some practices that created more harm than good. It […]
The month of April is both the month for sexual assault and child abuse awareness—two serious societal problems that span across many cultures. In 1987, I began working with children in specialized foster care. At that time, not enough was known about child abuse, especially sexual abuse. There was a misunderstanding around cause and effect: […]
