Today is my birthday and I started my day in a reflective mood.

I was thinking about the past year and examining where I have grown, the things I have learnt, and the places where I still need to do some work.

For a moment, I was tempted to reach for my notebook and start writing down my goals, plans and expectations for the year ahead. That is usually where my mind goes, thinking about what is next and what I need to do.

Then, in a moment of clarity, I reminded myself to be present.

Today is not the day to figure everything out.

Today is a day to enjoy.

So instead, I wrote a letter to myself.

Dear Shaunty,

You are a year older, and this is a great moment.

You have had your mountaintop experiences and your valley experiences over the past year. Some moments brought so much joy, while others stretched you in ways you did not expect.

Through all of it, you are still here.

Still doing your best. Still showing up. Still figuring things out as you go and there is so much to be grateful for.

Your family, friends, the people who love you and have been there for you through the different seasons of your life.

And right now, there is peace.

There is joy.

There is something about the peace you are feeling in this moment that feels quite liberating. Maybe because you are learning that you don’t always have to be looking ahead. Sometimes you can just stop and appreciate where you are.

So today, just enjoy the moment.

Laugh more. Do more of the things that make you smile. Enjoy the people around you. Enjoy being celebrated. Enjoy the little things.

You have spent so much of this past year holding other people up. You have been there for people through their own mountains and valleys, making space for what they needed.

Today, the focus is on you.

There will be time for the goals and the plans. There will be time to think about what you want from the next year and where you want to go from here.

You don’t have to do that today.

Today, just be present.

Take it all in.

Enjoy your birthday.

And be grateful that you get to see another year.

Happy birthday, Shaunty.

With love,
Me

“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry for.”

Ask almost anyone who grew up in the Caribbean, and they will know the line without needing it explained. Some of us heard it once. Some heard it often enough that we can still hear the voice that said it.

It usually was not said in cruelty. At least, I do not think it was. It was said in the same practical, matter-of-fact way you might warn a child away from a hot stove. I do not think most of the adults who said it were trying to teach us that feelings were bad. They were passing down what they knew. They were raising children in circumstances that often demanded strength, responsibility and resilience. Many of them had their own emotions they had learnt to put aside long before we came along.

So, they taught us to keep going too. We learnt to respect our elders, work hard and be grateful. We also learnt that life was not always fair and that sometimes you simply had to make the best of what you had. Those were good lessons, and I still believe they are, but somewhere alongside them, many of us also learnt something about emotions. Some feelings were easier to accept than others. Some were tolerated for a little while, while others were shut down almost immediately.

I have been thinking about that a lot lately, particularly because of what I see in my work. What did we actually learn about emotions growing up Caribbean?

We learnt that sadness should have a time limit.

Crying was often something to stop rather than something to understand.

“Stop crying.”

“Go and wash your face.”

“There’s nothing to cry about.”

“Big boys don’t cry.”

“After all I’ve done for you, this is what you’re crying about?”

The message was not necessarily that you were not allowed to be sad. It was more subtle than that. It was that you should not stay there. Pull yourself together, wipe your face and get on with it. There is something valuable in learning that we can survive difficult feelings. Life does require resilience, and there are moments when you really do have to wipe your face and keep moving. The question is what happens when that becomes the only thing we know how to do.

Some of us became very good at getting on with it. We learnt how to cry privately and how to compose ourselves before anyone noticed. We also learnt that being able to carry on was evidence that we were strong. Perhaps that is one reason some adults can talk about everything that has happened to them and still struggle to say, “That hurt me.”

We learnt that fear was something to overcome.

“Don’t be scared.”

“Nothing is wrong.”

“Be brave.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Again, I understand the intention because most adults want children to feel safe. They want to reassure them, and they want to teach them courage, but I wonder sometimes if we confused reassurance with emotional understanding. A child who is afraid does not always need to be convinced that there is nothing to fear. Sometimes they need someone to sit beside them and say, “I know you’re scared. Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

There is a difference between teaching a child to be brave and teaching them that being afraid is something they should not talk about. We may have learnt the first part without always learning the second.

We learnt that anger was complicated.

In some Caribbean homes, children were expected to manage their anger while adults were given considerably more room to express theirs. A child raising their voice could be disrespectful. A child questioning an adult could be considered rude. A child saying, “I’m angry with you,” might quickly hear, “Who are you talking to?”

We learnt there were rules about who was allowed to have certain emotions. For some boys, though, the rules looked different. Anger could be one of the few emotions they were permitted to express openly. Sadness could be weakness. Fear could be weakness. Vulnerability could be weakness. Anger, however, could look like strength.

Many young men may have grown into adulthood with a limited emotional vocabulary, where anger became the easiest emotion to recognise because it was the one they had been allowed to practise. This does not mean they were incapable of feeling sadness or fear. They simply may never have learnt what those feelings looked like or how to express them.

We learnt to MINIMIZE disappointment.

“Life is hard.”

“You can’t always get what you want.”

“Other people have it worse.”

“Be grateful for what you have.”

There is truth in all of those statements. They can teach perspective, gratitude and an understanding that disappointment is part of life. I would not want to take those lessons away, but there is a difference between teaching a child that they will survive disappointment and teaching them that they should not feel disappointed. You can be grateful and disappointed. You can know that someone else has it worse and still acknowledge that something hurts. You can understand that life is hard and still grieve what you hoped would happen. Both things can be true, and perhaps emotional maturity is learning to make room for both.

We also learnt to pray through our emotions.

This one deserves some tenderness because faith is deeply woven into Caribbean life.

“Take it to God.”

“Pray about it.”

“God will work it out.”

For many of us, those words were comforting, and they still are. Faith gave us somewhere to place our fears, our disappointments and the things we could not control. There is something powerful about believing that you do not have to carry everything alone. So, I do not think prayer is the problem. The question is what happens when prayer becomes the only language we have for emotional pain.

You can pray and still need to talk. You can have faith and still struggle. You can believe God will help you and still need a therapist to help you understand what is happening inside you. Those things do not have to compete.

Perhaps that is one of the conversations we need to have more openly in Caribbean communities. Seeking therapy does not mean we have stopped praying. Sometimes it simply means we are giving ourselves permission to talk about what we have been carrying.

We learnt that vulnerability was risky.

Maybe this was underneath many of the other lessons. “Don’t let people see you struggling.” “Don’t tell everybody your business.” “Keep family matters within the family.” “Don’t make yourself look weak.” “Don’t let people know your problems.”

There were good reasons for some of these lessons. Privacy and boundaries mattered, and everyone did not need to have access to our lives. Somewhere along the way though, privacy can become isolation, discretion can become secrecy, and strength can become never allowing anyone to help carry what has become too heavy.

I hear the echoes of these lessons in my practice. A man who describes himself as “not really an emotional person” and means it as a compliment. A mother who can talk for twenty minutes about her children’s feelings and becomes quiet the moment I ask about her own. Someone who says, “I don’t know what I’m feeling.” Someone else who says, “I just know I’m tired.” Another person who believes they are simply “stressed,” even though their body has been carrying anxiety for months.

They are not necessarily avoiding the question. Sometimes they genuinely do not know how to answer it. They do not have a shelf where the answer can sit because no one ever taught them how to build one.

That process can take time, and many of us have to learn that irritation can sometimes be covering hurt, that anger can be carrying fear, or that constant busyness might be keeping sadness at a safe distance. We may also have to recognise that exhaustion is not always about needing more sleep. Sometimes the body knows something the mind has not found words for yet.

That is part of what therapy can offer. It can become a place where you begin to understand yourself, and I think this is one of the reasons therapy can feel so uncomfortable for some of us.

Therapy asks us to slow down and pay attention to what is happening inside us. It asks us to name things we may have spent years pushing aside. It asks us to talk about parts of ourselves we may have been taught to keep private and to allow someone else to see us when we are not okay.

For someone who grew up learning to wipe their face and keep moving, that can feel incredibly vulnerable. This may be one reason some people resist therapy in our culture. It is not necessarily because they do not want help. They may simply not know what to do with a space where they are being asked to feel rather than function.

So where does that leave us?

I do not think the answer is to reject the way we were raised. I do not want to look back at our childhoods and decide that everything our parents taught us was wrong. It was not.

Our parents taught us resilience. They taught us responsibility and how to survive difficult circumstances. They taught us to keep going when giving up was not an option, and those lessons matter.

Maybe the work now is not to throw those lessons away, but to add to them. We can teach children resilience without teaching them to suppress sadness. We can teach boys that strength and vulnerability can exist in the same person. We can teach girls that being emotional does not make them irrational. We can teach children to respect adults while still giving them permission to say, “That hurt my feelings.”

We can teach them that fear does not make them weak, that anger can be understood without being acted out, that disappointment does not have to be minimised and that asking for help is not failure.

Most importantly, we can teach them that having an emotion and acting on an emotion are two different things. You are allowed to be angry, but you still have to learn what to do with your anger. You are allowed to be afraid, and you can still learn how to move through fear. You are allowed to be sad, and you do not have to apologise for your tears.

Maybe that is the emotional education many of us are still giving ourselves. Sometimes we reach adulthood and realise that the tools that helped us survive one season are not necessarily the only tools we need for the next one. We can keep the strength. We can keep the resilience. We can keep the faith, and we can learn how to talk about what is happening inside us.

When I think about that child being told, “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry for,” I don’t hear a child being taught that their feelings were bad. I hear a child being given the tools the adults around them knew how to give.

As adults, we can choose to add to those tools. We can learn to name what we feel instead of simply saying we are “fine.” We can learn that sadness does not have to be hidden, that anger does not have to be acted out, that fear can be spoken about and that asking for help is not failure.

This is why I believe the conversation about therapy in the Caribbean has to include the way we were taught to understand emotions in the first place. It is difficult to embrace a space that asks us to talk about feelings when we were never given much practice doing so. Therapy does not ask us to abandon our resilience, our strength or our faith. It asks us to make room for ourselves alongside them.

We were taught to survive. Now we can learn to understand ourselves while we do it.

I have always believed that I am a forgiving person. I do not hold grudges. Once I have decided something is not worth carrying anymore, I usually let it go. I do not spend a lot of time keeping track of what people have done to me or revisiting old hurts. At least, that is what I have always believed.

Lately, I have been thinking about what actually happens after I have been hurt because I have noticed something about myself that I do not think I paid much attention to before.

I walk away.

I remember being in university and having someone I considered a close friend say unkind things about me to someone else. I was hurt because I felt betrayed by someone I valued and felt safe enough to share my private thoughts and feelings with. Knowing that they had spoken about me in that way left a painful sting.

I honestly do not remember whether I ever addressed it with them. What I do remember is creating distance. There was no big confrontation. I just withdrew. I spent less time around them and became less available. At the time, it felt like what I needed to do to protect myself.

Looking back, I realize this was not the only time I have responded this way. As I have gotten older, I have noticed that I can forgive someone and still significantly reduce their access to me. That realization made me question myself.

Have I really forgiven them?

Or is my distance evidence that I am still holding on to what happened?

For a long time, I had a very particular idea of what forgiveness was supposed to look like. If I had forgiven someone, shouldn’t I be able to go back to the way things were? Shouldn’t I trust them again? Shouldn’t I be comfortable giving them the same access to me?

I had somehow connected forgiveness with restoration but forgiveness and trust are different things. I can forgive someone without trusting them the way I did before. I can interact with someone without thinking about what they did every time I see them. I can genuinely wish them well. I can have no desire to hurt them back but something about the relationship often changes when trust is not present.

Trust is affected by what we experience. When someone shows us a part of themselves, we did not expect to see, we cannot simply unlearn what we now know. We may choose to forgive them, but that does not mean we have to ignore what the experience taught us.

As a psychologist, I know our relationships are shaped by patterns. We pay attention to what people say, but we also pay attention to what they consistently do. We learn who we can be vulnerable with, who we can rely on, and where we need to be more careful.

I think sometimes we put too much pressure on ourselves to prove that we have forgiven someone. We think forgiveness means giving them the same access they had before they hurt us. We think keeping our distance means we are bitter. Some also believe that a boundary means they have not healed.

 Forgiveness Does Not Mean Forgetting What Was Learnt.

Healing does not require me to forget. I can remember what happened without being consumed by it. I can remember that someone hurt me without being angry with them. I can acknowledge that a relationship changed because of something that happened without spending the rest of my life trying to make sense of it.

There are people in my life who have hurt me whom I can now interact with without any anger. I do not think about what happened most days. I do not want anything bad to happen to them, and I do not feel the need to make them pay for what they did. I have forgiven them. I just do not give them the same access to me anymore. For me, that distinction has become important.

When Does Distance Become a Boundary?

I have also had to be honest with myself about why I withdraw. There is a difference between creating distance because I am protecting myself and creating distance because I want someone to feel my absence. Those two things can look exactly the same from the outside.

If I am hoping someone notices that I am no longer available, or waiting for them to realize what they lost, there is probably still something I need to work through. I am still emotionally tied to the outcome. If I have reached a place where I can say, this relationship no longer feels good or safe for me, and I do not want to continue it in the same way, that is different.

That is a boundary.

One of the things I have come to appreciate in my work is that boundaries do not always mean completely cutting people off. Sometimes a boundary simply changes the level of access someone has to you.

Not everyone needs to be in the inner circle. Not everyone needs to know everything about you. Not everyone gets to have the same level of closeness. That does not have to be punishment. Sometimes it is simply a recognition that relationships change.

What Forgiveness Does Not Require

Forgiveness does not require a relationship to return to what it was. We can forgive people and still choose not to be close to them. We can wish someone well while recognizing that the relationship has changed. We can interact with someone without resentment while knowing that the level of trust and access we once gave them is no longer there.

There is a difference between holding on to hurt and remembering what happened. There is also a difference between punishing someone and protecting yourself. The more useful questions are not simply about whether we have forgiven someone. They are questions about what forgiveness means to us and what happens in our relationships after we have been hurt.

Do we create distance because we have made peace with what happened, or because we are still trying to protect ourselves from feeling that hurt again?

Are we holding a grudge, or have we simply changed the boundaries of the relationship?

Do we believe forgiveness requires us to restore the same level of trust and access we once gave?

What do we do when someone shows us something about themselves that we did not know before?

Forgiveness can coexist with boundaries. Trust can be rebuilt, or it can change. Relationships can survive hurt and become different relationships. Some will become more distant; some may end but none of those outcomes automatically tell us whether forgiveness has taken place.

Forgiveness is personal. So are the boundaries that follow it. We do not have to give someone the same access to us simply because we have decided not to hold what they did against them.

Forgiveness can release the hurt without requiring us to reopen the door.

August has always been my favourite time of the year. It holds so many milestones for me. My daughter celebrates another birthday. My husband and I celebrate another anniversary, and I celebrate another year of life. Over the years, birthdays have become a time when I slow down and think about where I am and where I have been.

Who have I become over the past year?

What have I learnt?

What do I want this next year to look like?

Getting older does not mean that I suddenly become a different person. Still, I know that I am not the same woman who celebrated her birthday last year. This past year brought some things to the surface that I had been carrying for a while. I had to face grief that I had pushed aside while getting on with everything else. I also started looking at some of the expectations I had placed on myself and wondering whether I still wanted to live by all of them.

For the past several years, I have chosen a word to focus on for the year. One year, I chose intentional. I wanted to be more deliberate about the choices I made instead of simply doing things because they were what I had always done. I thought more about the relationships I gave my time to, the opportunities I accepted, and the things I was doing because they mattered to me.

This year, choosing a word was not as easy. I kept asking myself:

What do I need in this season of my life?

For a while, I thought it was freeing, and I think a lot of that came from rediscovering play. I do not think I stopped playing because I stopped enjoying it. I stopped because I always felt like I had something else to do.

As a therapist, wife and mother, there is always something that needs attention. There is another report, another meal, another conversation, another responsibility. Even when one thing is finished, there is usually something else waiting.

Without really noticing it, I kept putting myself further down the list. It was not that I did not want to do things for myself. I just kept thinking there would be time later. It was easy to say later because there was always a reason to wait.

Whenever I saw adults playing, laughing, dancing, or just enjoying themselves, I never assumed they had more time than I did. I usually found myself watching them and thinking about how easily they seemed to let themselves enjoy the moment.

If I am being honest, I envied that sometimes.

They did not seem as concerned about whether they looked silly or whether someone was watching. They were not trying to get it right. They were just enjoying themselves. I realised that I wanted some of that for myself.

When I started playing again, I felt lighter. I had not expected that. At first, it was not easy because I am used to holding myself together and thinking about what needs to happen next. Playing required something different from me. I had to loosen up and allow myself to be in the moment instead of thinking about what I should be doing.

The laughing was probably one of the best parts. I laugh a lot, but playing made me laugh at myself. It reminded me that I do not always have to take myself so seriously. I remember drawing and feeling self-conscious because my drawing was not perfect. I wanted it to look good. Then I had to remind myself that the drawing did not have to be perfect. I was just drawing things that made me happy, and that felt different.

Doing something without an outcome was one of the biggest things I took from the experience. I have started to notice that in my writing too. Sometimes I sit down because there is something I want to say. I do not always know where the writing will take me, and I am learning to be okay with that. I do not need every piece to have a lesson or a perfect ending. Sometimes I just want to write because I enjoy writing.

I have been thinking about how much of my life is centred around getting things done. As a therapist, there are always goals and things to work towards. As a mother, there are children who need me. As a wife, there are responsibilities at home. There is work, family, and all the little things that make up everyday life.

I do not want to stop doing those things. I just do not want them to take up all the space. I want to do more things simply because I enjoy them. That is when I realised that freeing was not the word I was looking for.

The word was permission.

I needed to give myself permission to do things that were just for me. To play. To try things without worrying about whether I would be good at them. To laugh at myself. To enjoy something without having to explain why it was worth my time.

Underneath all the roles I carry, there is still a person who likes to laugh, play, create, explore, and try new things. I had not lost those parts of myself. I had just given them less and less room.

There are so many things I tell myself I will do when I have more time. When the work is finished. When the children need me less. When everything at home is taken care of. I am beginning to realise that those conditions may never exist. There will always be something to do.

So, I want to stop waiting for everything else to be taken care of before I take care of myself. I know I will probably slip back into old habits. I know there will be days when I put myself last without even thinking about it. The difference now is that I notice it, and when I notice it, I can make a different choice.

One year, my word was intentional, and it taught me to be thoughtful about how I spent my time. This year, I am learning that being intentional can also mean choosing things simply because they bring me joy, even when they do not serve a particular purpose or lead to an outcome.

I know there will always be work to finish and responsibilities that need my attention, but I no longer want to wait until everything is done before I make room for myself. I want to do more of the things that bring me joy. Not because I have finished everything else or because I have earned it but simply because I want to.

I did not lose myself. I simply kept placing myself further down my own list. This year, I am choosing to move myself back up.

The greatest barrier to mental health care in the Caribbean is not a shortage of therapists, it is the meaning many people still attach to seeing one.

Conversations about mental health are becoming more common across the region. More people are speaking openly about anxiety, depression, grief, and trauma than they did even a decade ago. Even so, many still hesitate to make that first appointment because therapy feels like something that was never meant for them.

Across many of our islands, therapy has long been associated with being “crazy,” “mad,” unable to function, beyond help, or somehow broken. Consequently, people struggling with anxiety, grief, relationship difficulties, or simply the weight of a difficult season rarely see themselves as someone who could benefit from professional support. The thought of going to therapy seldom crosses their mind. Those who do decide to seek help often do so quietly. They tell no one, leaving their support systems, spouses, siblings, or close friends unaware that they have even started.

Despite growing awareness surrounding the benefits of mental health care, deep-rooted stigma and reluctance remain. Many of these beliefs have been passed down through generations and unlearning them will take time.

Faith, Culture, and Mental Health

Religion is woven into the fabric of Caribbean life. For many of us, faith shapes how we celebrate, how we grieve, and how we endure suffering. We grew up hearing assurances like, “Take everything to God in prayer,” “Leave it in God’s hands,” or “God won’t give you more than you can bear.”

Those words have brought comfort to countless people, but they have also shaped how we interpret emotional pain.

For many families, prayer is the first response to suffering, offering hope and strength when little else is available. However, believing that prayer must be the only answer can prevent someone from reaching for additional support.

In some Caribbean communities, mental health struggles are understood primarily as spiritual issues. Someone experiencing depression, psychosis, or severe distress may be viewed as facing a spiritual attack. As a result, families often seek guidance from a pastor, priest, or religious leader through prayer, fasting, or deliverance long before a medical professional or therapist is ever consulted.

Over the years, clients have sat across from me and admitted almost apologetically, that they only came to therapy after months of praying while remaining overwhelmed by what they were carrying. Some spoke as though needing both prayer and therapy meant their faith had failed.

I do not see it that way.

Prayer can nurture the soul while therapy helps us understand our thoughts, emotions, relationships, and coping mechanisms. One does not have to replace the other. My intention is never to criticize anyone’s faith or diminish the vital role religion plays throughout the Caribbean. Healing does not have to come from a single source: we can seek God while accepting help from qualified professionals.

“What If Someone Finds Out?”

Another barrier will sound familiar to almost any Caribbean person.

Our communities are small, and everyone seems to know, someone you know. That closeness builds a deep sense of belonging, but it can also become the exact reason someone avoids seeking help.

People worry that a therapist might know a relative, recognize a family name, attend the same church, or run into them at a local event. They fear that deeply personal details might find their way into everyday conversation. Those worries are understandable if you have never been to therapy, it is easy to imagine the worst. Most of the time, people are not afraid of therapy itself; they are afraid of who might find out.

In reality, therapists are bound by strict legal and ethical standards of confidentiality. Protecting a client’s privacy is paramount. With very few legal exceptions regarding immediate safety, what is shared in therapy stays in therapy. Because many who avoid therapy have never experienced a professional therapeutic relationship, their fears are based on assumptions rather than reality.

Suffering in Silence

Too many people choose to push through rather than reach out. They tell themselves:

 “Other people have it worse than I do.”

 “I just need to be strong.”

 “This will pass.”

 “I don’t want to burden anyone.”

These are not just passing thoughts, they are messages inherited from our families, communities, and culture. Over time, they stop sounding like temporary coping strategies and start feeling like unquestionable truths. While those mindsets may help us survive, they do not help us heal.

Ignoring anxiety does not make it disappear. Grief does not shrink because we refuse to name it. Trauma rarely resolves simply because we resolve to be stronger. Instead, unaddressed pain shows up elsewhere: in our relationships, our parenting, our work, our physical health, or in the quiet moments when everything else falls still.

One of the biggest misconceptions about therapy is that you must be falling apart to deserve it. People seek therapy before a marriage breaks down, while caring for an aging parent, after a loss, or simply to understand themselves better. Sometimes, therapy is just a dedicated space to make sense of life before our struggles become overwhelming.

Looking Ahead

The beliefs we hold about mental health were shaped by our history, our faith, and generational patterns. Changing them will take time.

Every person who steps into a therapist’s office, even quietly, helps loosen a stigma that took decades to tighten. They may believe they are only changing their own story, but every step forward makes it a little easier for someone else to ask for help.

My hope is that therapy in the Caribbean will no longer be viewed as a last resort for those who are “crazy,” but simply for what it has always been: another way of caring for our minds, our relationships, and our overall well-being.

My coworkers and I usually have random conversations on a Friday when we are all in the office together, but this week’s conversation lingered in my thoughts long after we had finished talking.

We were talking about marriage and one person shared that she was not sure she ever wanted to get married. Growing up, she had never seen what she considered a healthy relationship. Her parents’ marriage was marked by ongoing conflict, and marriage came to be something people endured rather than enjoyed. To her, it felt like a trap with no way out.

Another coworker expressed a different perspective. She felt that marriage and children offered few benefits to women and instead limited their independence. She questioned whether either was worth the sacrifices they often require.

What struck me most was that these women came from quite different backgrounds. The first had grown up in a home where relationships were painful and unpredictable. The second often spoke warmly about her childhood. She described parents who loved and respected one another, a close-knit family, and values that continue to shape her today.

Listening to them, I found myself wondering how two people with such different histories could develop such resistance to the idea of marriage and relationships.

As a therapist, I have learned that our beliefs never really formed by a single experience. They are shaped over years by what we observe, what we experience, and the meaning we make of those experiences. Our first lessons about relationships usually begin long before anyone sits us down to talk about love. They begin in the everyday moments of family life.

Children are constantly observing. They notice how their parents speak to each another, how conflict is handled, whether affection is expressed freely or withheld, whether apologies are offered, and whether home feels emotionally safe or emotionally unpredictable. These early experiences become their relationship blueprint.

 Attachment theory refers to them as internal working models, the expectations we quietly develop about ourselves, other people, and relationships. Long before children have the language to explain love, they are building beliefs about what it feels like to be loved, whether relationships are safe, and whether closeness can be trusted.

These blueprints often follow us into adulthood. Someone who grew up experiencing warmth, respect, and emotional safety may come to expect those qualities in their own relationships. Someone who grew up surrounded by unresolved conflict may learn to associate closeness with anxiety, criticism, or emotional pain.

Yet childhood is only part of the story.

This is why two people can grow up in similar homes and develop very different beliefs about relationships. It is also why people who experienced significant adversity sometimes go on to build deeply healthy marriages. We are influenced by our experiences, but we are not imprisoned by them.

As therapists, we often see that what appears to be a preference may sometimes be a protective response. A person may genuinely believe they simply do not want a committed relationship. Sometimes that is an authentic choice. At other times, it reflects a nervous system that learned early in life that intimacy comes with pain or loss. One of the goals of therapy is not to persuade someone to marry or remain single, but to help them understand where those beliefs came from and whether they still serve them today.

Of course, families are not our only teachers. Our beliefs continue to be shaped by culture, faith, friendships, social media, past relationships, and the stories our society tell us about love, independence, success, and commitment. Sometimes we inherit beliefs from our families. Other times, we absorb them from the world around us without ever realizing it.

As I reflected on those conversations with my coworkers, another question quietly surfaced.

What are my partner and I teaching our own children about relationships?

What are they learning through the ordinary moments that they witness everyday. I am quite aware that they are watching how we speak to each another. They are looking at how we behave when we have disagreement. Whether we apologize, how we resolve conflict and treat each other after. Whether kindness is still present even when life feels stressful.

I used to think the goal was to protect children from ever seeing conflict, but healthy relationships are not conflict-free. They are relationships where repair follows conflict, where respect survives disagreement, and where love is shown in the good and difficult seasons.

Our children may not remember every conversation we have about relationships, but they will remember what relationships looked like.

This is one of the greatest gifts we can give them as parents. We are not striving to be an example of a perfect marriage, but to create an environment where they can see two imperfect people treat each another with love, respect, grace, and a willingness to repair when things go wrong.

Reflection

When you think about the relationships that shaped you, which lessons are you grateful to have inherited, and which ones are you still learning to rewrite?

My childhood was filled with love and support. My parents always listened and nurtured every dream I shared. They were present, and because of them, I felt safe. Growing up in the Caribbean, I did not only have my parents, I had my village. My aunts played an integral role in raising me, they were my mothers too. When I think about my family, I think about my village. Even now, that village is still present. They continue to show up for me and for my children in ways both big and small.

In tribute to my village, I want to share their stories.

My mother is a remarkable listener and nurturer. She is the parent who quietly stays in the background, offering advice, checking in, and asking how she can help. Even as an adult, she remains a constant presence in my life. We speak every day, most days, three times a day.

She was the parent who always put her children first. As a child, I often found her overbearing and a little fussy. She is meticulous, thrives in a spotless home, and notices every detail. Those qualities irritated me growing up, but today I recognize so much of her in myself. I find it difficult to function in chaotic spaces. Before I begin my day, I need my environment to be clean and free of clutter. Like my mother, I pay attention to details, and I take the time to truly listen whenever someone needs to be heard.

Then there was my dad.

He was incredibly generous. He always found a way to help anyone who needed him. In the neighbourhood where I grew up, everyone knew him. Whenever someone had a problem they couldn’t solve, my father was often the person they called. He also believed in people’s dreams.

My cousin once told me that he was the first person who truly believed she could become an accountant, and he helped pay her tuition when she was just starting out. My dad was also a fixer. He had a way of making other people’s burdens feel lighter. I see so much of him in myself. Helping others brings me genuine joy, and perhaps he was the first person who inspired me to become a psychologist.

Then I think about my aunts.

My mother’s older sister was like a second mother to me. She was my safe place and my greatest defender. There was nothing she would not do for me. She loved me as though I was one of her children, and through her I learned what acceptance felt like. She was also my advocate. Whenever my mother hesitated to let me try something new, my aunt was often the one encouraging her to let me explore.

She introduced me to experiences deeply rooted in our culture. She taught me how to make coconut oil. I remember our many adventures picking cocoa to make chocolate balls, and the afternoons spent learning to make local sweets. Those memories still make me smile. She allowed me to simply be a child. There were no impossible expectations, just space to explore, create, and learn. I think my love of trying new things began with her.

One of my fondest memories is going to the local market together. She taught me how to choose the best fruits and vegetables, and she even gave me my first entrepreneurial experience by helping me sell rosemary plants from our garden. Looking back, those ordinary moments gave me confidence, curiosity, and balance.

Then there was my mother’s youngest sister.

She was the outgoing one, the loud one and she made life exciting. She took me to cricket matches, Carnival events, and countless sporting activities. Through her, I learnt that life was meant to be experienced. She also taught me to use my voice. She never apologized for expressing her opinions or standing up for herself. She did not make herself smaller to make other people comfortable, and I admired that strength. She is still the same today. She continues to show up for me and my family with generosity, laughter, and unwavering support.

My village is still very much a part of my life, and I feel incredibly rich because of them. They were the first people to teach me what love looked like. They gave me experiences that broadened my world, encouraged my curiosity, and reminded me that I mattered; that I belonged.

When I think about them, I cannot help but smile.

To the village that raised me, thank you.

Every lesson, every tradition, every act of kindness, and every experience has shaped the woman I have become. They have also become the benchmark for how I hope to raise my own children and some evenings, when my children are asleep and the house is finally quiet, I still find myself reaching for the phone to call my mother just to tell her about my day. I’m grateful for my village and the impact they continue to have in my life.

This week a conversation with a friend got me thinking about the reasons why we wait before acting. She wanted to book a trip but kept asking herself if it was the right time. She felt that work was too hectic and that her schedule was full. She was uncertain about whether the timing was right for her to take a much-needed break.

As she spoke, I found myself thinking about my dad. He had talked for years about the trips he wanted to take after retirement. When he had finally retired, he got ill shortly after and never got a chance to go on any of the trips he had planned.

This experience stayed with me, and it changed the way I think about waiting. Whenever we make plans, we tend to view our time as guaranteed, but in reality, none of us is aware of what will happen tomorrow or even later today.

In my work as a psychologist, I have noticed that many people do not delay because they are unsure about what to do next. Many times, they are aware of what the next steps are, but they are just not ready to take them. I have noticed the same tendency in myself, especially when I am faced with a difficult decision.

It has made me wonder whether timing is really the issue as often as we think it is. Sometimes waiting is the wisest choice but I have seen how easily “I’ll wait until things settle down” becomes another week, another month, or another year. Often, we are not waiting for better circumstances; we are waiting for discomfort to disappear.

The problem with this approach is that life does not offers us certainties and if we wait until everything feels right, we may spend more time waiting than living. Looking back at some of the major decisions that I have made, I did not feel ready before making them. I made them and then my confidence followed the decision rather than preceding it.

Something else I have noticed is how little attention is given to the cost of waiting or procrastinating. We think about spending the money on the trip, about how uncomfortable the doctor’s appointment might be or how awkward it could feel to call a friend after months of silence.

What we do not focus on is what waiting can cost us. Waiting can cost us time, it can cost us peace of mind, and it can even cost us meaningful relationships. These losses can be easy to miss but over time they can slowly happen and cost us more than waiting to feel ready ever could.

I also wonder if that’s why planning can feel so satisfying. If the trip stays on the list, it cannot disappoint us. If we have not started exercising or changing our eating habits, we do not have to deal with setbacks or days when our motivation disappears.

Planning can feel so satisfying. We get to enjoy the ideas of the possibilities without taking any risk to pursue it. Whenever I notice myself slipping back into this pattern, I remember my dad. He was not waiting because he was not ready, but he thought he had more time.

These days I have been trying to stop asking myself whether I feel ready. Instead, I have been asking myself if I am willing to take the next step. Honestly, some days the answer is yes and there are days when it is a no, but I am quite aware that life keeps moving and that I cannot stay in a period of uncertainty for too long.

When I think about my dad, I am reminded that waiting is never a neutral decision. Life does not tell us the perfect timing, but   it will ask us whether we are willing to begin anyway.

As a child, I was always encouraged to play, so when a facilitator at a recent workshop asked us to identify the negative messages we had received about play, I struggled to think of any. Play was never presented to me as a waste of time, and I was never restricted from playing. However, as I reflected, I remembered that the older I got, the focus was more on studying and less on playing. My responsibilities also increased and play slowly became something I could do after everything else was finished. Somewhere along the way, I accepted that growing up meant there were always more important things to do than playing.

Listening to the other participants, I realized many of us had similar experiences. Some were told negative things about playtime; others, like me, were encouraged to play. Still, we had all come to believe, in one way or another, that play belonged to childhood. The interesting thing was that the workshop expected us to play. We rolled play dough between our palms to create things that reminded us of happy times, drew pictures we had no intention of showing anyone and played games where nobody was really keeping score. At first, it felt a little strange, because as adults we rarely give ourselves permission to engage in scheduled playtime and I realised how unfamiliar play had become.

While my group looked over the pictures we had drawn, someone laughed, and then we all found ourselves laughing boisterously. It was the kind of laugh that was not polite or contained, the kind that left many of us with tears rolling down our faces. It caught me completely by surprise, because I had not expected this to happen at a workshop, and I realised it had been a long time since I had laughed like that.

The focus of the training was helping people find their way back to happiness after trauma and disaster, yet the lesson that stayed with me was not something written on any of the slide presented. It was that simple moment where I reconnected with the power of play. For weeks I had been feeling a sadness that seemed to exist quietly in the background of everything I did, and during that segment of playtime, the heaviness lifted. I felt lighter than I had in months. It was as if I too was returning to my own path of happiness.

This experience made me appreciate the power of play. Many times, when life gets hectic or heavy and we try to figure out how to reconnect to ourselves, we think that some major shift or decision is needed, and sometimes it is, but by simply letting go and engaging in childlike play, I released much of what had been weighing me down.

I thought about how playing draws you into the moment instead of pulling you away from it, and that may account for why so many of us struggle with uninhibited play. Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many of us stopped seeing play as something worthwhile unless it produced some measured result. Even our hobbies can start feeling like projects that should earn money or prove we are good at something.

If it has been a while since you have played, you do not have to make a big event out of it. Draw something, even if it looks terrible, or sit on the floor with your child, your niece, your nephew, or by yourself, and build something just because you can. You might feel a little silly at first, and that is okay. It is part of allowing yourself to enjoy an activity simply because it makes you happy or laugh. We never outgrow the need for play. We just need to be reminded of its power, and how playtime can be exactly what your body and soul need in that moment.

Recently, one of my coworkers asked a colleague and friend if everything was okay with me. She had noticed I had become quieter than usual and was concerned.

Life has been a little trying lately. There was a lot I was trying to make sense of, and I needed time to process before making any decisions. I became quieter because I needed to listen. I needed to understand what was happening within me before I could decide what came next.

During this season, I have found myself returning to gardening, something I genuinely enjoy and that has always helped to center and settle me. No matter how many times I do it, planting a tiny seed, watering it each day, and waiting for something to happen still fills me with a sense of wonder. Every morning before I leave for work, I check on my plants, looking a little more closely than I probably need to, hoping to discover something new.

Some seeds sprout within a day or two. Others take much longer, and those are the ones that make me wonder if I did something wrong. Did I water them enough? Did I plant them too deeply? Maybe this one just is not going to grow.

Then, just as I am about to give up on it and sow something else, I notice the tiniest bit of green pushing through the soil. It happens every single time. I am not sure why the waiting still makes me anxious, but every new sprout feels like a small miracle.

As I watched this process unfold, I realized how often I mistake stillness for inactivity. Just because I cannot see movement does not mean nothing is happening. Beneath the surface, the seed is already changing. Roots are forming. The shell is slowly breaking open. The most important part of its growth happens before anyone, including me, sees a single leaf.

If I dug up the seed after a few days just to check on its progress, I would only interrupt the very thing I was hoping for. I wonder how often I do that in my own life.

Sometimes growth looks like reading instead of talking. Praying instead of planning. Sitting with difficult questions instead of rushing toward easy answers. None of it looks impressive, but all of it is quietly changing us.

The longer I garden, the more I notice that nature is never in a hurry. Trees do not panic because they have not grown overnight. Flowers do not compare themselves to the ones blooming beside them. Seeds do not give up because they are still beneath the soil. Unlike me, nature does not become anxious because nothing has sprouted after two days. It simply continues the work it was created to do.

Perhaps we are invited to do the same, to trust the Gardener as much as we trust the seed.

So, when someone notices that I have grown quieter, I no longer feel the need to explain myself. Quietness is not always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it is a sign that something is taking root. Long before anyone sees the first green shoot, life has already begun beneath the surface.

Maybe the same is true for us.

As a mother of four, I have had days when I feel like I am doing a pretty good job. My children are kind, thoughtful, and I think, Maybe I’m actually raising people who will leave the world a little better than they found it.

Then there are the days when everyone needs something at once, my phone will not stop ringing, and I fantasize about locking myself in my room for an hour just to hear myself think.

If motherhood has taught me anything, it is that what works beautifully with one child can fall completely flat with another. The longer I have been a mother, the more I have realised that each of my children needs something different from me.

My firstborn has always been easygoing and laser focused. She knows what she wants and goes after it. She does not need much motivation, but she flourishes when she is encouraged. She is also the one who reminds me that I am capable of more. If I am giving too much of myself away, she will tell me I need better boundaries. I laugh because I often wonder who is parenting whom.

My second daughter is completely different. She is a dreamer. She believes the best about people, loves exploring new places, and has a way of making almost everyone feel welcome. She is naturally empathetic, quick to learn, and always willing to help.

Parenting her has felt fairly intuitive because so much of who she is fits naturally with the way I parent. Those first two gave me a dangerous amount of confidence.

Then came my third daughter. She is funny, outspoken, and wonderfully stubborn. She will tell me exactly what she is thinking, whether I asked or not. She is deeply affectionate, but she likes doing things on her own terms, which means we sometimes find ourselves in a battle of wills. Loving her has required me to become firmer, calmer, and more consistent than I ever imagined.

Then there is my youngest, my son. He is strong-willed too, but in a different way. He is more emotional, more adventurous, and feels everything deeply. He asks more of me: more patience, more reassurance, more presence. He is the child who stretches me most as a parent.

I do not share their personalities because they are unusual. I share them because raising them taught me something that developmental psychology later gave a name to.

One of the ideas I return to often, both as a mother and as a psychologist, is something called goodness of fit. The idea comes from developmental psychologists Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess, whose research on children’s temperament introduced this concept.

Their work showed that children come into the world with different ways of responding to it. Some adapt easily. Some are cautious. Some are highly emotional, while others are persistent from the moment they are born.

The question is not whether one temperament is better than another. It is whether the adults around that child learn to respond to the child they have instead of the child they expected.

When I first learned about goodness of fit, it gave language to something I was already living. It explained why the same parenting strategy could work beautifully with one child and completely miss the mark with another. More than that, it quieted some of the guilt.

For a long time, I thought changing my approach meant I was not being consistent enough, nowI see it differently. Adjusting to meet the needs of each child is not inconsistency; it is attunement. Treating children fairly does not always mean treating them identically.

One lesson I have had to learn is that temperament is not a behaviour problem waiting to be fixed. A stubborn child is not necessarily defiant. A highly emotional child is not weak. A quiet child is not automatically content.

These are differences in how children experience the world, not flaws in who they are. Our role is not to erase those differences. It is to help our children understand themselves and learn to use their strengths well.

Parenting is not only about understanding our children’s temperament; it is also about understanding our own. I have had moments when I was frustrated with one of my children, only to realise later that what I was reacting to was not simply their behaviour. It was the way their behaviour collided with my own personality, my expectations, my stress, or my exhaustion.

Our children have a remarkable way of exposing the parts of ourselves we would rather not look at and that can be uncomfortable. Yet if we are willing to pay attention, it may be one of parenting’s greatest gifts. While we are busy shaping them, they are quietly shaping us too.

I have also become careful not to assume that the child who requires less from me is doing better. An easygoing child may be genuinely content, but they may also be less likely to ask for what they need. The loud child usually gets our attention, but the quiet child deserves our curiosity too.

Parenting four very different personalities has stretched me in ways I never expected. One child needs encouragement. One needs freedom to explore. One needs clear boundaries. My youngest simply needs me to slow down and sit beside him a little longer. They are all asking for the same thing: to feel loved, accepted, understood, and safe. They simply do not all receive love in the same way.

Parenting is not about getting it perfect. It is about remaining willing to grow into the parent each child needs, even when that asks something new of us. Some days I will get it right, other days I will fall short.

On those days, I remind myself that tomorrow is another opportunity, not only to understand my children a little better, but to become a little wiser, a little gentler, and a little more present than I was today. Perhaps that is what parenting has been teaching me all along.

This week, thousands of children across my country received the results of the exam that would decide which secondary school they would attend. Some opened it in celebration while others experienced disappointment when they saw their results.

I met one of those children who felt disappointed. He recounted that while looking at his results, he felt like a failure because he had not been placed in the school he wanted. He felt like he was not good enough.

What struck me was not that he was disappointed. Children experience disappointment when they do not get something that matters to them. What unsettled me was how quickly he had turned a result into a conclusion about himself.

He had not really failed. He had been placed in a good school. He just had not earned the score needed for the one he hoped for, and to him, that felt like failure. He felt as if he had let down his parents, his teachers, and himself. In his mind, there was not much difference between I didn't get the result I wanted and I am not enough. Those had quietly become the same sentence.

That belief did not begin with the exam. It had probably been taking shape for years; in ordinary conversations no one remembers having. I do not think most parents set out to make achievement feel like a measure of worth. We talk about working hard because we want our children to have opportunities. We celebrate good grades because we are proud. Over time, those conversations become less about what a child did and more about who they are.

By the time that child sits the exam, it feels as though the paper is measuring far more than mathematics or reading comprehension. It feels as though it is measuring the story they have already started believing about themselves. That is part of what makes disappointment so heavy.

When children have not yet learned to separate what happened from who they are, disappointment does not sound like this did not go the way I hoped. It sounds like this proves something about me. That shift is almost invisible, but it changes everything.

As parents, most of us instinctively reach for reassurance. We tell them the result does not define them, and of course we should. We ask too much of that conversation, though. We hope one reassuring sentence can undo years of quieter messages that came before it.

It rarely works that way because children do not build their sense of worth in the conversation after the disappointment. They build it in the hundreds of conversations before it. The comfort we offer in the hard moment can only rest on what is already there.

So, what actually helps a child move through disappointment without turning it into a verdict about who they are? It starts with what we notice.

Eventually, praise can start to feel tied to performance, even when we never intended it to. A child who hears, you worked hard, you stayed with something difficult, begins to believe their value lives in something they can carry. A child who mostly hears, you're so smart or you're always the top student, can begin to believe their value lives in something fragile, something that must be maintained. One gives a child something solid to stand on while the other leaves them afraid of failing.

I also think we have become far too uncomfortable with disappointment itself. Our instinct is to fix it whenever it is experienced. We reassure; we minimise or point to the bigger picture in the hope they will feel better. More often than we would like to admit, that is about easing our discomfort rather than theirs. Children do not need us to erase the feeling. They need to discover they can survive it.

When a child says, I'm not good enough, I don't think the most important response is don't say that. I want to know where that belief came from. Most children do not suddenly believe they are not good enough. That belief builds slowly, through small experiences of not meeting expectations and in how adults respond when they think a child could have done better.

The boy I met did not need someone to tell him the result did not matter. It mattered to him, and pretending otherwise would have made him feel more alone. He needed space to be disappointed without that disappointment turning into identity.

The older I get, the less I think this is really about children.

Adults do not receive envelopes deciding our future, but we have our own versions. The promotion goes to someone else, a relationship ends, a business struggles or the year does not look anything like we expected. Most of us meet those moments with the same script we learned years ago; work harder, do better, try again. Nobody ever questions the equation underneath it: what I achieve is what I am worth.

I have found it more useful to ask a different question when disappointment arrives. What am I actually grieving? It may be the loss itself, or everything we believed that outcome would prove. Those are different griefs. One deserves to be felt while the other is a story that needs rewriting.

I also think we have become obsessed with recovering quickly. Every disappointment must become a lesson. Every setback must turn into evidence of resilience before we have even had time to feel it. Life does not always work that way. Sometimes resilience is simply staying in the story long enough to discover this was not the ending.

The language we use with ourselves matters more than we often realise. There is a world of difference between saying I failed and saying this did not go the way I hoped. One becomes an identity and the other stays as an experience.

We spend so much time protecting children from believing that a result can tell them who they are. I sometimes wonder how many of us still believe exactly that about ourselves.

Growing older brings this realization: disappointments do not stop coming, and many of us are still learning not to let them define us.

This weekend I watched my oldest daughter play a violin tribute at church. It was a slow, reflective piece, and as she played, the room grew quiet. Everyone was simply listening.

She stood there with a quiet confidence I have watched her grow into over the years. When she finished, people did not just applaud, several of them told her they wished she had played another piece because they were not ready for it to end.

I sat there thinking, That’s my little girl.

I don’t even know how to explain that feeling. I was just so incredibly proud. What stayed with me, though, was not the performance. It was what happened afterward.

On the drive home, I told her how beautifully she had played. I expected a smile, or maybe even a little relief after all the nerves that had gone into preparing.

Instead, she looked out the window and quietly said, “I was horrible. I made mistakes.” She didn’t want to watch the recording. She didn’t want to talk about it. As far as she was concerned, the mistakes had cancelled out everything else.

That was the part I couldn’t stop thinking about because I knew exactly what she was hearing. I have spent years listening to that same voice.

For a long time, every accomplishment came with a sense that it was not quite enough. I would finish something difficult, accept the congratulations, and almost immediately start thinking about what I should have done better. I got so used to picking it apart that I stopped enjoying the win.

Sitting beside my daughter, I found myself asking a question I did not really want the answer to.

Did she learn this from me?

I have never expected perfection from my children. I have never told them they had to earn my approval or be the best at everything they do.

In that moment, I started to think children learn just as much from what we live as they do from what we say. They watch how we speak about ourselves. They notice how quickly we brush off compliments. They hear us point out our own mistakes before anyone else has the chance. Little by little, they start hearing that voice in themselves.

Perfectionism is not always taught with words. Sometimes it is taught by example.

I wanted so badly for her to see what everyone else had seen. I even reached out to her violin teacher afterward because I knew my daughter would trust her perspective as much as mine. Her teacher confirmed what I already believed. She had played beautifully but the compliments could not compete with the story my daughter had already decided was true.

It made me realize how often we do this to ourselves. We spend weeks, months, sometimes years working toward something. We finally get there, and instead of celebrating, we replay the one awkward moment, the one wrong note, the one mistake that probably no one else even noticed. We reduce an entire experience to a single imperfect moment.

I did not want that to be the lesson she carried with her. So, I told her something I probably needed to hear myself.

“This wasn’t about playing every note perfectly. It was about having the courage to stand in front of people and share something beautiful. You did that. You gave people a gift, and they received it.”

I do not know if she fully believed me in that moment, but I was determined that one day she would. I hope she hears someone tell her she did beautifully and believes it before she starts looking for the flaw.

As I sat beside her in the car, I realized I was not only trying to convince my daughter that she had done well. I was also trying to convince my younger self, the one who believed nothing was ever quite enough and who thought one mistake could erase everything that went right.

I kept telling her how proud I was because I was finally saying something I wish someone had helped me believe years ago: she did not have to be perfect for the moment to matter.

Her effort was enough.

Sharing her gift was enough.

She was enough.

Maybe this is how these patterns start to change. They may change slowly because the inner critic does not suddenly disappear, and I know that because mine has not. I hope my daughter learns to recognize that voice sooner than I did. I hope she learns it does not always tell the truth.

I am reminded that the way I speak to myself matters, not just for me, but for the little ears that are always listening. If I want my daughter to believe she is enough, she needs to see me believe that about myself too.

It was her birthday. I had reached out and wished her well, but it was not the kind of celebration she wanted, and she made sure I knew it. There was a time I would have replayed the conversation, looked for what I had missed, and tried to make up for it with a call, a gift, or an apology for something I didn’t really believe I had done wrong. If someone I cared about was disappointed in me, I assumed I had caused a problem and needed to resolve it.

This time, I let her be disappointed.

It did not feel good. Every part of me wanted to reach for my phone and smooth things over, but the last couple of weeks had already taken a lot out of me, and I was emotionally exhausted.

I remember sitting there with my phone in my hand and realizing something uncomfortable: I was not actually responding to the situation in front of me. I was responding to a pattern. The pattern where someone is unhappy, and I automatically step into fixing the emotional outcome.

So, I did not move. What came up first was not clarity, it was discomfort. The kind that makes you want to reach out just to get rid of it. Underneath that was something sharper: the realization that I had been treating other people’s disappointment as something I needed to resolve in myself.

I used to think boundaries were about keeping people out. Drawing a line so you would not get hurt. In practice, it has not felt like that at all. What I experienced in that moment was simpler, noticing, in real time, where I stop and where someone else begins. What is actually mine to carry, and what I have been taking on out of habit.

Someone else’s disappointment does not automatically become my problem to solve. That has been the shift. Not so much in how I felt, but in how I responded.

I had to learn that distinction the hard way. For a long time, I was the person who made things easier. I answered quickly, checked in first, kept things moving. If there was tension, I stepped in to ease it, even when I was the one absorbing it. It made me reliable. It also made me the place where a lot of other people’s expectations quietly landed. I did not notice how heavy that was until I started pulling back.

 Being available without limits does not make us more loving. It often makes us more resentful. When we keep saying yes after we have reached our capacity, we do not become more generous, we become exhausted, and eventually we start giving from obligation instead of love.

When I began pulling back, not responding as quickly, not filling silence, not rushing to fix things, I saw something I had not noticed before. Some relationships adjusted without issue. Others did not adjust at all. They resisted it, and that revealed more than any conversation could have. What had changed was not my care. What had changed was my availability to overextend it.

It made me question what some of those relationships were actually built on. Mutual care, or my willingness to carry more emotional weight than I should have.

This is what boundaries do. They do not turn people into better or worse versions of themselves. They expose what the dynamic has been all along, without the cushion of your overfunctioning. That part is not always easy to sit with.

Boundaries don’t change people. They reveal relationships. They show you what remains once you stop over-functioning inside them.

We do not talk enough about what those costs. Boundaries shift expectations, and once expectations shift, relationships have to shift too. Some become healthier. Some become uncomfortable. A few do not survive the adjustment. This does not make anyone a villain. Most of us are just responding to patterns we learned long before we knew we had a choice. Still, it can be uncomfortable to realize that what felt like closeness was sometimes built on your willingness to carry more than your share.

I still feel guilty sometimes. I still have to resist the urge to explain myself more than the moment calls for, but I have come to understand that a boundary is not successful because everyone agrees with it. Sometimes the healthiest boundary is the one that disappoints someone else but lets you stay honest with yourself.

If you are trying to find your own line, start small. Notice what drains you and what restores you. Pay attention to the moments when you say yes and immediately feel that quiet resistance underneath; that resistance is information.

A boundary does not have to be a confrontation. Sometimes it is just deciding not to explain yourself more than necessary. Not replying the moment a message comes in. Letting someone sit with their own disappointment long enough to handle it themselves.

And when you are ready, ask yourself:

Where am I giving from obligation instead of love? Whose feelings have I been carrying that were never mine to hold? What would be available to me in time, in energy, in peace, if I stopped treating other people’s comfort as my responsibility?

The peace I felt came from realizing that her birthday was never really the issue. The issue was how quickly I used to hand over my sense of self whenever someone I loved was unhappy with me.

I am still learning to stop doing that.

That bothered me more than I expected because writing has become one of the ways I understand myself, and I have grown attached to the feeling of ending a day knowing that I moved something forward, even if only by an inch. Sitting still has never been my strength.

My first instinct was to fix it. I wondered if I should read more, exercise more, or make a schedule and force myself back into a routine. I even tried to tell myself that I would write every day whether I felt like it or not. I know how to push through because I have spent years doing exactly that. We have jobs to do, families to care for, and responsibilities that do not disappear because we are tired.

 Pushing through had always seemed to work, so I never questioned it. Still, I kept coming back to the same thought: that I do not need another strategy but simply need to pause for a while and rest.

For years, slowing down felt unnecessary to me, maybe even irresponsible. We admire people who keep producing, who stay dependable, who somehow manage to carry everything without dropping it. I admired those people too and I tried to be one of them. Eventually, I had to admit that keeping up the same pace was not helping anyone, including me.

Over the past few weeks, I have written less, said no more often, and spent time doing things that do not lead anywhere. One evening I sat through an entire episode of a show with a basket of clean clothes beside me and left them there when it ended. I went to bed earlier and ignored the small voice that kept insisting I should be accomplishing something.

 At first, I felt guilty, then I felt relieved. My desire to write had not fully returned because I am not as writing much but I am not carrying the same pressure to make every day count.

For a long time, I measured maturity by how much I could carry without complaining or asking anyone else to help. I am beginning to think that part of maturity is admitting when you have reached your limit and respecting it.

 I do not know how long this quieter season will last. I only know that I do not want to leave it having learnt nothing from it.

As I was reading the news this week, reports of two police officers dying by suicide made me stop. I did not know either man, but I kept thinking about how many professions still teach men to hold themselves together no matter what is happening underneath. What struck me even more was that these deaths occurred during Men’s Mental Health Month, a time when conversations about checking in, speaking up, and seeking help seem to be everywhere.

For years we have been telling men to talk, to reach out, and to ask for help. We have repeated that it is okay not to be okay and built campaigns around encouraging vulnerability. I do not think those messages are wrong, but I do think they are incomplete. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if telling men to speak was only ever half the work. The other half may be learning how to listen well enough that speaking feels worth the risk.

That gap matters because men remain far less likely to seek mental health treatment, even though many experience depression, anxiety, and overwhelming stress. They are also significantly more likely to die by suicide than women. Globally, more than 720,000 people die by suicide every year, and men die by suicide at roughly twice the rate of women worldwide. In some countries, including the United States, the rate is nearly four times higher among men.

I have started to wonder whether “How are you?” is one of the least useful questions we ask. It comes with an easy escape hatch. “Fine” ends the conversation, and many men have spent years mastering that response. Questions such as “What has been weighing on you lately?” or “What was the hardest part of this week?” leave less room to hide. They also require something many of us struggle with ourselves: the willingness to sit quietly and allow silence to do its work.

We also need to broaden our understanding of what distress looks like in men. Sadness is not always the emotion we see first. It may look more like irritability, working longer hours, pulling away from family, spending more time fixing things around the house, or throwing themselves into responsibilities they once carried with ease. We are often taught to look for tears when perhaps we should be paying closer attention to someone’s absence, to the parts of themselves that slowly stop showing up.

I have noticed that many men do not open up while sitting across from someone making direct eye contact. They talk while driving, walking, cooking dinner, or fixing something. There seems to be something about doing things side by side that makes honesty feel less exposed.

What happens after a man finally says, “Actually, I’m not doing well,” may be the most important part of all. Too often we rush toward solutions because suffering makes us uncomfortable. We offer advice, try to solve the problem, or reassure ourselves that things will work out. Most people do not need an immediate fix. They need someone who will remain present without changing the subject, minimizing their feelings, or becoming overwhelmed by what they hear.

Father’s Day tends to focus on appreciation. We celebrate fathers with cards, cookouts, and gifts, which are meaningful in their own way, but loving someone also means paying attention before there is a crisis. It means noticing shifts in mood and behavior and staying engaged even when someone insists they are fine.

The men in our lives have spent years learning how to carry heavy things quietly. Carrying them was never the problem. The problem is that many of us never learned how to recognize when the load becomes unbearable, and we have built very few places sturdy enough to hold it if they ever decide to put it down.

So this Father’s Day, do more than send a text or sign a card. Call your father, your brother, your husband, your son, or the friend who always seems to have everything under control. Ask him what has been hardest lately. Ask what he has been carrying by himself. If he changes the subject, come back to it another day. If he says he is fine, listen for what his routines, energy, and presence might be saying instead. The goal is not to force a confession but to make it unmistakably clear that he does not have to carry everything alone.

You may never know whether that conversation mattered in the way you hoped it would. We rarely get that kind of certainty. What we can do is keep showing up. We can make it easier for the people we love to tell the truth about how they are doing and remind them, simply by staying, that they do not have to hold everything alone.

I suspect I am not the only one who has wiped their face and walked into the next thing. We carry more than we show, most of us, and the feelings find us when they’re ready.

This morning, I sat in silence for a while and checked in with myself the way I check in with other people. I ask clients how they are doing every day. I ask my children, friends, and family, yet I do not always offer myself the same courtesy.

What I found was sadness and a quiet loneliness. When I stayed with it long enough, I knew where it was coming from. Last week marked ten years since my father died, and it was a difficult day. I missed talking to him. I caught myself wishing he had known my youngest children, the ones who arrived after he was gone, and I felt the familiar ache of realizing there are whole parts of my life he never got to see.

While I was sitting with those thoughts, my phone rang and I learned that my aunt had passed away. I wish I could say I immediately cried or felt overwhelmed, but I did not. I felt numb. Maybe there was too much happening internally already. Maybe my mind decided it could only deal with one loss at a time. Whatever the reason, I moved through the numbness, got dressed, and prepared for my day because clients were waiting and sessions do not stop because your heart is having a hard morning.

Just before my first session, I played one of my favorite songs. I was not trying to make myself cry, but the tears came anyway. They surprised me because I had not really been thinking about my father or my aunt in that moment. Then I glanced at the clock, realized it was time to log in, wiped my face, fixed my makeup, and showed up for someone else’s pain.

That is the life of a therapist sometimes.

The work did not suffer and neither did my ability to be present. The day carried on as days usually do, but hours later I found myself thinking about how easily I moved from one role to another. I have become very skilled at carrying my own feelings quietly while making room for everyone else’s. I have not decided whether that is simply part of being a therapist, part of being a mother, or something I learned long before I became either.

I suspect I am not the only one who has wiped their face and walked into the next thing. We carry more than we show, most of us, and the feelings find us when they are ready.

As an introvert, speaking up in groups was something I avoided whenever I could. In trainings, meetings, and gatherings, I often sat on answers I knew were right because the possibility of saying something awkward felt worse than staying silent. Even when I had something worthwhile to contribute, I spent so much time editing my thoughts in my head that the moment would pass before I said a word. That fear shaped more of my life than I would like to admit.

Over time, I started pushing against it. I spoke up a little more often. I shared an opinion before I had perfected it. I volunteered to present when every part of me wanted to disappear into the background. People often talk about growth as though it happens in a single transformative moment, but that has never been my experience. For me, growth has looked repetitive and unremarkable: choosing discomfort over avoidance again and again until something slowly shifts.

The nerves never completely disappeared. Even now, before a presentation, I rehearse. I still think carefully about what I want to say. The difference is that I do not let those feelings make the decision for me anymore.

Recently, I was giving a presentation when the slides refused to load. While the technician worked on the problem, I found myself standing in front of the audience with nothing to rely on except my own voice. Years ago, that situation would have felt like a nightmare. I would have been counting the seconds and wishing the floor would open up beneath me.

Instead, I just started talking.

I talked about mental health, why it matters, and the work I care deeply about. Somewhere in the middle of that conversation, I realized I was not thinking about myself at all. I was not wondering whether I sounded intelligent enough or polished enough. My attention had moved entirely to the message. That moment taught me something I had not fully understood before ;passion can outgrow fear.

People often tell us that confidence comes first and action follows. My experience has been the opposite. I did not become confident and then start doing these things. The confidence came later. You do the thing while feeling uncertain, and eventually you look back and realize uncertainty no longer has the same power over you.

I think we also give the comfort zone too much credit. We talk about it as though it is a place of rest, but for many of us it becomes a place where fear quietly makes our decisions for us. Staying silent protected me from embarrassment, but it also kept me from being known. Avoiding risks protected me from failure, but it kept me from opportunities I wanted.

What changed me were the small decisions: asking a question, sharing an idea, posting something I was not sure was good enough, and walking into rooms where I felt out of place. None of those moments felt courageous, most felt uncomfortable. Looking back, they were the moments that mattered.

These days, when I find myself hesitating, I pay attention. The things that scare me often point toward something I care about. Fear is not always a warning sign. Sometimes it is evidence that I am standing near a meaningful edge.

So here is the question I have been sitting with lately:

What is the thing you want to do but keep talking yourself out of?

What would the next step look like? Not the big leap, just the small thing you have been avoiding because it makes you uncomfortable.

What I discovered is that growth does not tell you it is happening while it’s happening. It becomes visible only when you find yourself in a moment that once would have terrified you and realize that somewhere along the way, you became capable of handling it.

I was about ten or eleven when I realized the page could hold things I could not say anywhere else.

People often talk about finding their voice, but I think I found mine by writing it down first. My spoken words always felt constrained by the room I was in, by expectations, by who I thought I needed to be. On paper, those pressures loosened their grip. The page did not ask me to be agreeable, impressive, strong, or even coherent. It simply took whatever I brought to it.

By then, the weight of expectation had already settled on my shoulders. I was supposed to excel, to set an example, to carry responsibilities that felt much larger than I was. Maybe that is why writing became so important. It gave me a place where I did not have to carry anything gracefully. I could be angry. I could be afraid. I could dream beyond the limits of what seemed possible. The page could hold all of it.

What began as a way to express myself became something much deeper. Writing helped me make sense of a world that often felt confusing and overwhelming. It became a companion during seasons when I felt isolated, misunderstood, or exhausted by the effort of holding everything together.

There were days when writing was more than comfort. It was survival. When dark thoughts crowded my mind and I struggled to see a way forward, I wrote. I filled pages with fear, grief, confusion, and questions that had no easy answers. Writing never solved everything, but it created enough space between me and the storm that I could keep going. Looking back, I do not think the pen saved me in any dramatic way. It simply gave me somewhere safe to put the things that were threatening to consume me.

For years, those words belonged only to me. I never imagined sharing them. The notebook felt like a private country, one where I could exist without explanation. Even now, sharing my writing feels strangely uncomfortable. I love being understood, yet I still hesitate before letting people see what I have written. The fear of being seen never disappears completely; it just loses some of its authority.

What surprises me is that joy keeps winning.

Every time doubt tells me to stay quiet, the joy of writing pulls me back. Every time I wonder whether my thoughts matter, writing reminds me that they do. There is something deeply reassuring about returning to a practice that has remained constant through every version of my life.

Writing has been a witness to my fears, my grief, my growth, my questions, and my hope. It has never demanded perfection. It has never required me to earn my place. It has simply waited for me to return.

That kind of faithfulness is rare.

So, when people ask what writing means to me, I do not think of it as a hobby or even a passion. I think of it as a lifelong companion. One that has helped me understand myself, survive difficult seasons, and find joy in the middle of ordinary days.

The page has never promised answers. What it offers is something I value even more: a place where I can tell the truth. And for a girl who spent years carrying things in silence, that has always been enough.

What am I doing right now, in this season of my life, to bring myself joy?

The irony was not lost on me; I had chosen the question. I had put it in the presentation, yet when it was time to answer it for myself, I hesitated.

The longer I sat with it, the more I realized I could not answer it until I figured out what I meant by joy.

We often talk about joy as though it is obvious, easy to find. As though we all know it when we see it. As though happiness, joy, contentment, fulfillment, gratitude, and peace are interchangeable words floating around in the same emotional soup.

I am not sure they are.

Then, from the next room, I heard my son laugh. It was the kind of laugh children have before they learn to monitor themselves. Loud, unfiltered, completely committed to the moment.

I smiled immediately, then I had an uncomfortable thought. When was the last time I laughed like that?

Somewhere between adulthood, responsibility, deadlines, caregiving, and the endless list of things that require attention, joy had become something I admired rather than something I regularly experienced. I wasn’t unhappy and that was what made the question so difficult.

I think many of us assume the absence of unhappiness means we are doing fine. I am no longer convinced that is true.

A few days later, an email landed in my inbox about joy and human development. Under ordinary circumstances I might have skimmed it and moved on. Instead, it felt like a continuation of a conversation I had already started having with myself.

I began paying attention.

I thought about how many people are functioning beautifully on paper while feeling strangely absent from their own lives. I thought about how easy it is to become efficient at existing. We learn how to meet obligations, solve problems, support other people, and keep moving forward. The machinery keeps running, so nobody asks whether the person operating it is actually enjoying the journey.

For a long time, I did not ask either. So, I decided to conduct a small experiment. I was not going to wait for joy to appear when life became less demanding. That day never seems to arrive. There is always another responsibility waiting politely around the corner.

Instead, I was going to pay attention to the moments when I felt most like myself and see what happened if I stopped treating those moments as optional.

Three things kept showing up. The first was the ocean.

I live in the Caribbean so beaches are so common here that they are easy to overlook. Tourists travel thousands of miles to experience what I can reach in a short drive, and somehow, I had started treating the sea as background scenery.

So, I began going. I was not exercising. I was not processing a problem. I was not turning it into a productivity tool disguised as self-care.

I simply sat there.

The waves arrived and departed without needing anything from me. The ocean had no interest in my qualifications, my deadlines, or my accomplishments. It offered the rare experience of existing in a place where nobody expected a performance. I had not realized how tired I was of performing.

The second thing was writing.

I have always written, but somewhere along the way writing became useful. It became connected to publishing, sharing, growing an audience, delivering a message, creating something worthwhile.

What I missed was the feeling of sitting with a blank page and telling the truth before deciding whether that truth was presentable. Writing returned to being a place instead of a product.

The third thing was my husband. He makes me laugh more than anyone else. Some of those laughs are sophisticated and intelligent but most are not. What matters is that around him I experience a kind of ease that becomes increasingly rare in adulthood.

I do not have to manage an impression. I do not have to be insightful. I do not have to be competent. I do not even have to be particularly interesting.

I get to be myself.

The older I get, the more convinced I am that being fully accepted is one of the most underrated sources of joy available to us. As I looked at these three things, the ocean, writing, and my husband, I noticed they had something important in common.

None of them were asking me to become a better version of myself.

The world is full of invitations to improve. Improve your body, your habits, your career, your mindset, your productivity or your morning routine.

Improvement does have its place but a person can spend so much time improving herself that she forgets she is already allowed to exist. The moments that brought me joy were not demanding growth. They were offering permission.

Permission to stop editing.

Permission to stop proving.

Permission to stop earning my place.

Maybe that is why joy had felt elusive for so long. I kept looking for it in experiences that required effort while overlooking experiences that required presence.

When I finally returned to the presentation, I looked at the question again.

What are you actively doing to bring yourself joy?

I had an answer.

The answer was not a list of hobbies or wellness practices. It was not a prescription. It was not even particularly impressive.

I was returning. Returning to the ocean that had been waiting for me all along. Returning to the page that still felt like home. Returning to the person who sees me most clearly. Returning to myself.

The question had never really been about joy.

It was about remembering who I am when nobody is asking me to perform and my son’s laugh still catches my attention every time I hear it.

For a while I thought children possessed some secret adults lose along the way. These days I think the difference is simpler than that. Children spend more time inhabiting moments. Adults spend more time managing them. His laughter reminds me of what becomes possible when there is nothing to prove and nowhere else to be.

The blueprint, if there is one, is surprisingly ordinary. Create more moments where you are free to be exactly who you are, then guard those moments fiercely.

A life can contain plenty of achievement and still feel strangely empty.

Joy enters through a different door.