As a girl some of my favorite memories were going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house every Sunday to play Hide & Go Seek Base with my cousins.

My grandparents had a huge backyard with a ton of really great hiding places.

On my grandparents back porch, they had a bench which was a backseat taken from an old vehicle.

That bench was HOME BASE.

It meant safety.

In our Hide & Go Seek Base, we would use the back porch bench as the place the seeker or sometimes multiple seekers had to wait and count to allow everyone else to run and hide.

The seekers were “it.”

The only way to become “it” is to get tagged before you reached the safety of home base.

If you reached home base you were secure.

You were safe.

When it was my turn to hide, I would strategize to find the best place and time to make a run for the safety of home base as quickly as possible.

That was a game, but in my real life, I didn’t have a strategy on how to anchor myself to the safety and security I...

Last week my clients and I talked a lot about why my clients were experiencing being on an emotional rollercoaster.

I helped them see that this rollercoaster of emotions is tied to the manuals they have for their relationships and the people in them.

We have these unwritten rules that we’ve decided on in our minds of how the people in our lives should behave for us to feel better and be happy. 

We give the behavior of others so much leverage over our emotions.

It’s like handing them over the remote control of our emotional experience. 

And in so many cases we hand it over to those we’d least like to have that power over us.

Here’s the thing though. 

We can’t really hand over a remote control.

We are the only ones that can engineer our emotions.

We just blame it on others because of our operating manual of rules we expect others to follow.

We believe these things are just common sense and that everyone truly knows how to be a good mom,...