This morning the boys and I cleaned the dining room windows. While they were working on school, I spent time cleaning up the kitchen and wiping down the counters and cabinets. It’s a satisfying chore that I try to do weekly. Earlier this year we went to Target so I could resupply the house with cleaning supplies. For years I have used essential oils mixed with water and spray bottles. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the scents are still better than any store-bought cleaning products. But I wanted something that was ready-made to make the cleaning supplies more available for kids to use.

So I use my sprays on the counters and the floors. For a short while the house looks as though part of it was cleaned. I didn’t clean the floors this morning and it was good I didn’t. With the boys and I coming in and out the back door, in and out of the kitchen to refill the buckets with clean water, there was quite the trail of dirt and mud. While we were outside I had them rake and dig out leaves from the side of our fence. They wiped down and sprayed off the screens while I wiped down the window sills and the siding that surrounds the windows. They definitely look cleaner and better than they did, but since the windows are older, the glass parts still have a fogged up shine.

It felt good to work. I didn’t get any kind of outside spring cleaning done last year. The potato gardens we planted the year before grew completely back over with grass. Each year I look out at my back yard area and think about how much potential this space has if only I knew what it is I’m supposed to do with it. In addition to having new windows, with new siding if I was really dreaming, the outside landscaping seems like something it would be nice to pay somebody to think up and do. This is one of those things about living in a house we don’t own, but is owned by a not for profit ministry. Money is something you don’t spent loosely, so you can’t get too ambitious about making any kind of major or solely aesthetically based changes to the house that you’re living in.

I finished my paper over the weekend. I ended up having to take my computer up to my mom and dad’s over the weekend. It was my grandma’s 90th birthday, so we had a party for her, which was a wonderful time. All I had left was to write a conclusion and then finish proofreading, and that took me three hours. I don’t know if that’s normal or if somehow writing papers will get faster with practice. Anyhow, the paper got done. I turned it in on Saturday night.

I’ve had some deeper thoughts about life that I haven’t been able to sit down and write about. I come to these places sometimes where I start to wonder what the point of everything is. Like, if I were to die tomorrow, is this what I want to be doing with my life? I have lived a lot of my life this way, basing my choices on who and what is most important in life in light of dying tomorrow. On the other hand, I’ve also recently thought, “Let’s say I’m still alive in 20, 30, or 40 years. What do I want to have done or be doing with my life?”

There’s this saying out there in inspirational Instagram land that says something like, “If God puts a dream in your heart, it’s because he’s going to bring it to fruition.” Well, that’s not exactly true I’m realizing. Not that I haven’t realized this before. But every so often things happen that bring that reality back into the forefront. There are plenty of people who had dreams that did not come true. Let’s take Jane Marczewski, the singer who became famous last summer after her memorable appearance on America’s Got Talent. Well, her story was supposed to go like this: Jane wins the Golden Buzzer on America’s Got Talent. She gets to compete with the rest of the amazing singers and wins. Throughout this time she continues to get stronger and beats the cancer odds.

That’s not how things went. She won the Golden Buzzer, and then had to drop out of the competition because her health was declining. She continued to get weaker and weaker for months, until she died. It didn’t matter what her dreams were. It didn’t matter how strongly she believed or how rebellious her hope was or how hard she fought to live for her dreams. I know death for the Christian is not the worst thing, and from what her family says, Jane died with the hope of knowing Christ as her deliverer. This doesn’t stop me from wondering why God heals sometimes but then doesn’t heal always.

The friend I mentioned several posts ago is doing better as of late. She’s started doing high dose Vitamin C IV’s. Her family also arranged for friends and relatives to be able to call or facetime on a regular basis because she is so uplifted by fellowship. I have different thoughts about health these days. While there are a lot of things we can do to promote health and well-being, there really is only so much we can do. I used to want to believe that every situation, problem, and perplexing question is figure-out-able. I want to believe the answer is in the tree sap, a juice fast, or in some kind of life hack that can be figured out by human beings, and yet, I can’t think of anything farther from the truth than this. God is the keeper of all of our days. Ultimately our lives are in his hands.

We didn’t end up with the 8-10 inches of snow for today that was first predicted. This morning the boys and I walked down to the beach to check out the lake. It had melted enough and gotten cold enough again over the past several days to be covered in flurries and a thinner layer of ice. The boys were light enough to be able to walk and slide on it and not break the ice. The difference in weight between me and the boys was just enough so that any ice I tried to walk on cracked or broke through.

I’m taking a break from working on my paper. I had to stop this afternoon to read the biblical book of Esther for a discussion assignment due by midnight. Our assignment was to share our favorite or least favorite theme or event from the book and why. I took the more negative route and shared how almost immediately I felt anger toward King Ahasuerus for making such a rash judgement call following Queen Vashti’s dismissal of his request. Not only does his personal request seem selfish, but when the queen does not do what he wants, she is swiftly removed as queen. One of the king’s advisors, Memucan, imagines and fears an extreme scenario where word will get out about the way Queen Vashti refused the king, which he says will then lead to women throughout the kingdom holding their husbands in contempt. Instead of any self-reflection of his own behavior and motives, or working things out between him and the queen (probably a naïve proposal for those times, I admit), the king clamps down on his own power and strengthens the kingdom-wide grip of men as rulers over their wives. 

“Not only against the king has Queen Vashti done wrong, but also against all the officials and all the peoples who are in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus”, Memucan says in the presence of the king and his officials. In the king’s humiliation, a woman is blamed. I’m not saying Queen Vashti wasn’t somehow in the wrong. Whatever her reasons were for refusing his request, she likely could have done so in a less humiliating way for her husband. But it is the king, in this story, who is sinning left and right.

In a lot of the Christian resources I have read over the years about the relationships between men and women, I have typically seen it described how one of women’s chief sins and desires is to rebel against male authority. This isn’t just in books I’ve read. At a pastor’s wives conference last fall I listened to a deaconess speak about how women have trouble accepting that they are not in charge. We all have an inner feminist inside of us who wants to rebel against the divine order and grasp at male authority.

It came up in Bible class a few weeks ago when the pastor was talking about laws being passed for sex education in the public schools. He said we can’t just speak out about what is wrong. We also need a picture of what is right. He then went on to describe God’s design for marriage and the way God created men and women, as well as the ways that sin has distorted it, including a woman wanting her husband’s position. I sat through a pastor’s conference just a few years ago where a loved and respected seminary professor taught a room full of pastors and a few present women that Genesis 3:16, which says, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”, means that women will desire to control their husbands. I learned quietly and remained silent, without so much as even raising my hand to ask any questions (For the pastor’s conference. This past recent time in Bible class I said something). I used to hope my husband and the other pastors would notice how feminine and godly I was, as that is what I thought the good men cared about and praised. I was afraid of what men might think of me or my husband if I raised my hand to speak. I didn’t want to humiliate my husband in front of these peers of religious men for having an unsubmissive wife.

I used to believe this about myself, that I wanted to rule my husband and that in turn I needed to submit to his authority, which I didn’t think would be too hard since the desire to usurp his authority wasn’t something I felt. I believed that any dissent or disagreement rising up in me was simply my Genesis 3 tendencies coming out to rear their ugly heads. I interpreted my actions and desires by filtering my life through the lens of this long for me intriguing verse. The solution was to deny my thoughts, my feelings, my own rebellious personhood and unsubmissive voice. All of this I put on myself. This belief was a double-edged sword that resulted in more and more self-denial and a stunting of my growth toward relational health and wholeness. In books, and blogs, when it would talk about a women desiring to rule over her husband, I wondered if maybe I just had it easy and didn’t feel this desire to usurp and rule like other women. I was proud I wasn’t rebellious like apparently the rest of the women of the earth were. To control and rule over my husband was not my desire at all. I wanted him to love me and I wanted his heart like I had it once before.

I have issues with the complementarian interpretation of Genesis 3:16. One, I don’t like it because it makes women look bad. Two, I don’t like it because I’m 95-97% certain it’s not true. Kevin DeYoung, pastor and writer, and one of the main supporters of complementarianism in online circles, wrote an article back in 2013 responding to women who at the time were respectfully challenging some of the popular complementarian teachings and beliefs. Their Genesis 3:16 interpretation was one of the main issues of these women’s contention. In his article New Wave Complementarianism: A Question and a Concern, Kevin writes:

(In order for the next quote to make sense it’s important to know that Susan Foh is the woman who wrote the article What is the Woman’s Desire that states that a woman will desire to dominate her husband, and that the husband, in turn, must rule his wife. The first time I read it I had an extremely strong urge to stand up and scream, “LIAR!”. Links/parenthesis below are all contained in the original article. I added the bold).

“Susan Foh – Her argument that the “desire” in Genesis 3:16 is the women’s desire to domineer over her husband makes sense to me from the parallel passage in Genesis 4:7 (cf. Claire Smith’s excellent post defending this view). Alsup believes this is an entirely new interpretation that was never before heard of until Susan Foh argued for it in 1975. Even if this were the case—and my quick perusal of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture shows that Johannes Brenz (1499-1570) wrote about “when women aspire to dominate their husbands in running the household” in his commentary on Genesis 3:16—it doesn’t do much to alter the central point; namely, that the blessing of the male-female relationship has been twisted into a burden by sin. Husbands, who can be tyrannical, need to love their wives; and wives, who can chafe at submission, need to respect their husbands (Eph. 5:33). This basic point is hardly dependent on Foh or her almost 40 year old article, which no one but a handful of scholars has heard of or references. “

The point I’m trying to make is that the way people teach and interpret the Bible matters. If Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood had said, “You know, this is a difficult passage to translate, so we can’t say for sure what exactly it means, but the general idea is that the blessing of the male-female relationship has been twisted into a burden by sin”, that would be one thing. If Johannes Brenz or Martin Luther or John Calvin or Kevin DeYoung or any of these men with more authority had said, “I wonder what the women would say, it might be worth at least asking them…”, then we gladly would’ve had a deep and loving conversation. But the way it stands now, there is a very specific belief being taught to women and about them. If I am wrong and this view of women taught from the Bible is correct, then I trust the Lord will work in my life and show me I’m wrong. If it is the actual interpretation and teaching that is wrong, then I would argue that this greatly matters. It means that pastors, teachers, and men and women in the church have been bearing false witness against women for years.

The kids had another day off school. This morning we walked down to main camp. Dad had left us buckets in the dining hall for collecting the tree sap. For the past three years, my brother has come down to tap maple trees. The first time we did this was in March 2020, right before the shutdowns. He has a friend who is skilled in identifying the state-wide trees. He knows them simply by looking at the bark, which is a useful skill to have in a season when trees have shed their leaves. The first year, we caught the tail end of the tapping season. We yielded just enough sap to make a half cup of syrup.

Last year he came with more friends, wives and children included, to make a weekend out of it. I wasn’t healthy enough to do anything except stare at my brother while he stood in the garage vigorously explaining the collection process he’d set up. Josh and the kids did the collecting during the following days and weeks. I’d drink the pure, unprocessed sap, hoping it to be a kind of magical mineral elixir to heal and cure me. It’s like drinking crystal clear water with a noticeable but light refreshing sweetness to it.

We picked up the buckets then drove down to the bottom of the hill where the kids and I collected the sap from the ten tapped trees. So far we’ve stuck to the trees on the edge of the woods, simply because they’re most accessible. The yields have never been extravagant. If we were hoping to store quarts and quarts of homemade syrup to last us year round, we might by this point be looking deeper into the words for different trees. What we do get is enough to know the lavish experience of gladness in February.

I didn’t go to class tonight. Josh is gone for most of the week in North Carolina. Once a year they have this February week-long gathering for camp people. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving the kids alone for that long. Since we’re allowed to miss two classes in an 8-week period, I figured this would be my time to miss. We walked down to the lake this evening and amazingly the lake still had ice to walk on. The snow we received in the recent snowfall has nearly melted in the past few days of fifty degree weather.

We had a wonderful day, but I wasn’t productive at all in terms of any kind of school work. I have a paper due this weekend which I have yet to start on as far as actually typing out words. I’m hoping tomorrow brings more focus and productivity. This one is on Feminist Therapy applied to the case of Stan. Stan is the fictional character in our theories textbook. Every chapter has two or three pages of the chapter’s theory being applied with Stan, based on his biography. Stan has a fear of women that he is hoping to address (among other things). I’m planning to look over a few pages again after getting the kids tucked in and settled, hoping the time I have is more than enough.

The big kids had another snow day today. They called off school last night following inclement weather forecasts. This morning when we woke up there was nothing on the ground or falling from the sky. The freezing rain scheduled to begin shortly after sunrise did not appear until the early mid-morning. Since then the snow has fallen swiftly without mercy.

This neuroscience thing is still in my head, but not as much. I decided not to take the class. I still have to tell the teacher, but at least my mind is made up and can thus return to a state of peace. From the very hour the thought first entered my mind several weeks ago, I didn’t know whether or not the presentation to add more classes to my schedule was a temptation to resist or an opportunity to embrace. There’s another one I could take on Tuesdays.

The thing is, I like my schedule now. I like being able to focus without rushing. I like being able to absorb more of the material. I like that I still have time to read other things of interest. Going back to the reality therapy, I ask the question, “What do you want?” The answer is easy: I want to take the class. But even if I could end up managing the paper, I don’t want this class enough to believe it’s realistically beneficial or wise to think I can get through all those quizzes before class starts in two and half weeks, which the teacher has been encouraging students get started on since fall semester. I opened my student portal to take a look at them. They’re not the kind of answers you can know without studying.

When it comes down to it, there are other things in life that I want far more. I recently finished a book called The Sexually Healthy Man by licensed counselor Andrew Bauman (weird jump, I know, but I’ll try to connect this.) One of the things he talks about is facing the arousal that comes from encountering beauty. In his chapter Face to Face With a Dying God, he tells the story of a time he was participating in a group training session. The attendees were asked to pair up with a partner for an exercise to quickly bring them into their shadow. This exercise required the partners to hold uninterrupted eye contact, with their faces approximately 12-inches apart. After holding eye-contact for several minutes, he says they were asked to complete the following sentences “without thinking, from our gut”.

I love and I have never loved

“I see in your eyes…”

the one I cannot ever love

I feel shame when I…”

remember the ways I didn’t love you

“My fear is that you will see in me…”

that I wasn’t as good as you thought I was

to fall in love with you
was to fall in love with me
a grace that I might see
again
for if you could love me
so could I
old love so true
we never die
quiet
hell
Love breaks the spell
all falsehood slain
the Lamb will reign
my sun, my star
falls down before him

Andrew writes about being paired with a woman who he also found to be incredibly attractive. His heart started to pound as he looked into her eyes. Shame overwhelmed him as he remembered his past years of objectifying and devouring beauty rather than honoring it. Thoughts and fantasies bombarded his mind to be pushed away as soon as they entered. In the past he’d have used her to seek pleasure for himself and numb unhealed wounds. The dying god was an illusion that women were the answer to his life’s deepest pains, that a beautiful woman could save him from his heartache and traumas. Andrew writes, “I no longer wanted to engage with her in a degrading way, but I also didn’t want to ignore what was going on inside me. In my experience, the more I try to push uncomfortable emotions away without properly acknowledging them, the more power they have to control me.”

Several paragraphs later, he continues on, “When facing my deepest shame and terror, I had to answer my deepest question and greatest fear: Am I a good man, despite the evils I have perpetrated? These complex questions are typically the ones we most want to escape, but what if we decide to no longer judge them? What if we pay attention to these uncomfortable emotions and arousals? What if we could practice being with them, instead of attempting to annihilate them? What if we could stop naming them “good” or “bad”, and simply see them as an opportunity? What if we were curious about their unexpected arrival? Is it possible that they are here to help cleanse us, teach us, and foster redemption and wholeness? What if we could bless, rather than curse, these emotions? Within this posture, no matter what comes up in us, we can give ourselves permission to work with, instead of against, our pain, moving through it and into healing. Nothing is so vile that Love cannot redeem it.”

Somehow by reading his story, I was healed by it. Not completely, not everywhere, but somewhere in the fabric of a quiet heart, a part was mended. I cried when it happened, but I didn’t cry too much. The pain was different, less severe than before. I wouldn’t even say I completely related to what Andrew said, but in other ways his words were like the ray to shine a light. The sexual side of my humanity would not have been the first thing I could’ve told you was broken, not that you can so neatly divide the human being up into sides.

Which is why this still somehow is all connected to the class. The vice of the enneagram 7 is gluttony, which means the corresponding virtue of mine is sobriety. They say happiness isn’t everything, and I get what they’re saying. I can even accept it without the urge to fight back. Two days ago I knew and believed that I wanted this class to be more fully happy, which is the same thing I wanted for the stranded man on the moon. Today it’s beautiful to see the earth is turning again.

I added another class this semester. I’ve been going along fine, thinking the course work and work load hasn’t really been too bad. Multiple times I’ve thought I could do more. But I ended up registering today for the Neuroscience intensive that’s being held over Spring Break. We’re required to take two electives, offered on a 3-year rotation during break times. Neuroscience is a class I would really want to take, and since it only comes around once every three years, this semester is more or less the one time I could take it. Last night in class I overheard classmates talking about how they have required readings and 29 quizzes that need to be completed before class even starts. I contacted the teacher this morning, trying to get a better idea to see if this was something I could realistically do.

She sent the syllabus and I instantly thought, “Nope.” Over 1,000 pages of reading for the quizzes, plus a case analysis due at the end of the elective week, a lab report from a sheep brain dissection, plus a 15-page research paper with at least 10 scholarly sources in APA format. The class is held during the day for a week, and then you have to turn in your paper two weeks after that, so by March 25th. It’s not even the daunting prospect of trying to cram in, take, and pass that many quizzes, or writing that long of a paper that bothered me most. It was the realization that taking this class is highly likely to diminish any chance I might’ve had of meeting my goal of graduating summa cum laude.

I was explaining this at my counselor appointment this afternoon. Not being that far out from completing the program herself, I was interested in her input. She said this particular professor was tough, which I’d gathered. The rest of the electives aren’t that different, with most of them requiring prep work similar to what she was asking. I’d missed a meeting earlier in the semester where I probably could’ve learned some of this information sooner. All this to say is that I am trying to be mindful not to overdo it or pile on too many new things at once. I want to get done with school faster if I can, but I also don’t want to be overly absent from my family or set myself back with unnecessary stress.

I’m positive that at some point I’m going to end up regretting this. Nothing is set in stone so I can always drop it if I need to. The problem is I’m fairly interested in neuroscience and really want to take the class. I ran past my husband the idea of auditing it. Because this professor requires any auditing students to still complete the required reading ahead of time (speed-reading would surely have to count in this case), and since I’d still be gone for that week during the weekdays attending the class (8AM-12 or 8AM-4), he didn’t think it made much sense to not go ahead and get the credit for it. “That means you’d pretty much just be doing it for fun,” he said. “Yeah, basically”, I said, unashamed and perfectly sure of my thoughts and beliefs.

It’s been a busier past couple of days. Nothing out of the ordinary, just enough extra outings and commitments to keep me from the normal space and time to settle down. I called off school today to give the boys time to sleep in and rest. A few kids have had low-grade fevers here and there. Four of the kids and three of the cats have colds.

But also, the off day was for me to catch up. If the weekends are fuller and the weekly reset doesn’t happen in terms of clean-up and down time, then Mondays become the catch up day. That’s what it was today at least. My sleep hasn’t been the greatest this past week or two. Anymore it doesn’t take long for lack of sleep to catch up with me.

The big sigh of relief I was waiting for after finishing last week’s presentation came this afternoon when I realized all I have to do for tonight’s class is show up. Three more weeks of classes and this first 8-week session is over. The major thing I have left to do is write a ten page paper due on the 26th. We’re supposed to pick one of the textbook’s theories and write a paper on it. It can’t be the same one we presented on.

I’ve been thinking about over-explaining, which is supposedly some kind of adaptive response connected to times in your life of not feeling heard. I feel like God is bringing peace to this long-held inner needing to be heard and understood. I’m hoping that as these inner parts of me continue to heal, God can take the over-explaining, opening space for time and words where I am also able to explain other things.

I’ve been following the health journey of a pastor’s wife friend from our former circuit. There were several us pastor families who dispersed from the area around the same time. Their family moved the farthest, all the way to other side of the world. They were missionaries in South Korea before needing to come back to the states for treatment.

Please pray for Gretchen. She has tumors in her brain that keep coming back. We keep praying for healing and for these tumors to shrink and go away. The doctors say they’re coming from somewhere else in her body, but they haven’t been able to find a source. As of tonight, she’s no longer wanting any more standard Western medical intervention.

Her family sent out a request tonight asking for prayers. If anyone can offer a prayer for them it would mean a lot to her family as they decide where to go from here.

Last night in class my presentation went fine. I had to stop in the middle of my slides. The sweating, rapid heartbeat, and increased noticeable body odor was something I needed to halt before it became a choking stutter. I stepped away from the podium to catch my breath. I told the class I did not have a phobia of talking in front of people (our teacher had told an earlier story about phobias), but if there was a rung or two beneath the phobia level, that’d be me. The strange thing was, I hadn’t even been nervous.

“You’re doing great”, they started to say, though I heard it like a muffled rain. I probably should’ve looked around, but instead I kept my eyes on the neon screen right in front of me. I finished the slides then moved on to the demonstration. My client (the teacher who was playing herself) was a 60-something year old woman who was currently having trouble getting student papers graded. She was supposed to have them back by the end of last week, but was finding every excuse in the book to avoid grading. I clumsily tried to apply my WDEP reality therapy questions: 1) What do you want? 2) What are you doing? 3) Is what you are doing working? (evaluation) 4) What is your plan?

I was expecting to feel a huge sigh of relief when it was over. That didn’t happen. I actually felt worse. After I’d gotten my questions out, the whole thing, at least for me, slowly unraveled. By the time our demonstration was over, I’d completely fallen out of character, a third or more of the class was laughing, and somebody had tossed a piece of chocolate at the teacher to motivate her. I stood up from my chair and felt void. I had no idea what to think or why I didn’t feel relieved. The sweat from my legs had left a mark on my chair that would slowly have to evaporate underneath the white fluorescent lights. I thought of the man I had just met that evening, wondering if he’d seen my sweat and thought less of me. It doesn’t matter. This is what I’ve noticed about going to school this time. People are nicer and you’re not as afraid of them.

If you’re so smart, so strong
and I’m weak
Then why is it me
who has carried your sins?

Carry your own
except, wait
That’s God’s job

Could it be that I’m projecting
my own fear, my own anger
Fear that you will never change
Anger that you haven’t yet

We’ve changed enough for me
to love you, but not enough
for me to trust us.

I don’t want to be the one
to admit my faults either
But at least I know them
inside and out

We can know each other’s bodies
and be equally pleased
But does my mind, do my cries
have nothing to teach you?

Will I always need to bite my tongue?
the exchange
for a pain far less
than a ravaged heart

Does something in me
stir up something in you?
That makes you want
to turn away

Hahahahahahaha, we’ll see
Afraid is the last thing you’d be
with me

They warned me not to make you
God, said you couldn’t be God
I didn’t listen

Because I knew that you were better
than gods and kings
somewhere, somehow
Your humanity was mine

I rearranged my calendar to make it not so overwhelming looking. The thing I didn’t like was seeing how full the boxes looked. Last summer we attended a $3,500 marriage intensive weekend that was covered for us financially by a couple we’ve known since the days we both worked here. A special scholarship for pastors covered $3,000, and the couple who helped us covered the rest.

One of the action steps we were given was to be intentional about combining our lives on paper, that is, on our calendars. They wrote all of this down on a wall-sized sticky note. They divided the paper into two columns. Having a marriage is like owning a business in some ways. In both cases organization, communication, and planning are important to keep things running and functioning well.

Instead of writing in a size that filled the entire calendar box space, I erased what I’d originally penciled in and shrank the handwriting down so that the event/chapel visit/meeting fit into the bottom fourth of the date box. That one small change significantly opened my calendar back up. Now I could see my things and also see his things. I could see I wasn’t losing my present time with the boys.

When the mornings are open, I can then start to fill in those spaces with a general idea of when to work on what assignments. I felt much better about this major class project coming up on Monday when I saw I had several open mornings and afternoons to work on it. Today I spent a good portion of the daytime reading about and taking notes on Choice Theory/Reality Therapy, which is the theory I chose to present on.

One of the purposes of our theories class, in addition to learning the different theories, is to start to get an idea of who we are as a therapist (not sure I like that word). While there will be mixing and matching of theory application depending on the situation and person you are working with, our instructor says there will typically be at least one or two we find ourselves especially drawn to.

I’ve liked a lot of them. Over the past five weeks, there’ve been a few times when I’ve read again about the tested and familiar attachment theory, or we’ve talked about the three components of person-centered therapy, or someone gives their presentation on Gestalt therapy which is interested in knowing the happenings of the whole person. I read today and again was drawn to something about this one.

Rather than spending considerable amounts of time on the past, reality therapy focuses on the present. It assumes five encoded needs shared by all human beings. The needs are 1) Survival/self-preservation, 2) Love and belonging, 3) Power/inner control and feeling in control of one’s life, 4) Freedom/independence, and 5) Fun/enjoyment. The strength/presence of each need will vary with each person.

Reality therapy is based on the belief that insight alone is not enough to make a change. For example, the couple who worked with us at the marriage intensive helped to take our past and make a plan. They gave us the visual to bring home and keep as a reminder and reference. They helped us identify the areas where we could start to be intentional about becoming and choosing again our present life.