Posts by Susan Schueler
Is It Better to Hit Delete?
In my over forty years of teaching various subjects, I have learned more about human nature, including my own, than any course I have ever taken. One exchange with a student’s mother still reminds me how much can depend on the words we choose when we feel unfairly judged. Her daughter was a senior, a…
Read MoreBe Your Own Best Friend
“Be your own best friend.”Kathleen Keenan-Takagi My high school music teacher wrote those words in my yearbook because she knew something about me that I had not yet learned to recognize in myself. She knew how hard I worked, how much I expected of myself, and how quickly I could turn disappointment into evidence that…
Read MoreWhen Receiving is Really Giving
“Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self sufficiency.” Mahatma Gandhi I was what people now refer to as a “free range child,” which is a pleasant way of saying that no one had any idea where I was for large portions of the day. I was the opposite…
Read MoreI’m Not A Barbie Doll!
For much of my marriage, I occasionally suspected my husband had wanted a Barbie doll and was mildly disappointed to discover that his wife came with opinions, comfortable shoes and absolutely no interest in being dressed for someone else’s approval. He placed a great deal of emphasis on my appearance. He liked my hair a…
Read MoreHow Persephone Found Heaven in Hell
Most of us know Persephone as the young woman taken by Hades into the underworld. Once associated with innocence, flowers and spring, she became Queen of the Underworld, a woman capable of moving between darkness and light because she understood them both. Her story is often presented as one of innocence lost, yet I have…
Read MoreThe Best of Both Worlds: Finding Home in Two Places
After my niece was tragically killed in 2011, I started going home to Western New York more frequently to be with my family. It started with three weeks at a time and renting summer cottages, then evolved by 2021 into staying for several months as my mother’s dementia got worse. I became an expert at…
Read MoreWhen No Answer IS the Answer
Closure is something I hear people searching for all the time, especially when a relationship or friendship ends without the conversation they desperately wanted or the answers they believed they deserved. There is something particularly difficult about an ending that does not feel finished. For many of us, closure has come to mean receiving…
Read MoreThe People Who Remember Who We Used to Be
Yesterday I received news that a friend from back home had passed away. I immediately was transported back to a time when he came to visit and several of us went to the Santa Monica Pier. Sadly, I realized that out of the five of us that were there that day, two are now in…
Read MoreHave You Made Peace with Your Anger?
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Carl Jung Few psychologists have influenced my thinking more profoundly than Carl Jung, perhaps because he never asked us to become less human in order to become more whole. Instead, he invited us to stop running from the parts of…
Read MoreThe Stories We Mistake for Truth
I recently heard a medium on television confidently state that 80% of the population dreams in black and white. The comment immediately caught my attention, not because I considered it impossible, but because it seemed inconsistent with my own experience and with the thousands of conversations I have had over the years with clients, students,…
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