Leslie's BlogTED Talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html I was sent this wonderful TED Talk video where shame researcher, Dr. Brene Brown, discusses the impact shame has on our lives. I found it to be thought provoking.
Thank You Card Aversion
Our Christmas holidays have ignited these past years into bonfires of activities. The running of the gauntlet features tree-buying, tree-decorating, tree-needle picking-up, holiday card sending and receiving, baking, shopping, gift hinting and gift puzzling out what the picker members of the family want, wrapping said gifts, coordinating relatives’ visits and a general implosion of life [...]
Christmas Spirit Around the Corner
The Christmas spirit came to me one year in the guise of a street fight. I was in Chicago shopping and touring the city, and since it was my first visit, I spent the evening craning and turning in order to take in the Art Deco downtown with its sweeping canyons of elegant buildings. My [...]
Is Wife Alcoholic?
November 27, 2010 Dear Leslie, My wife drinks every night, stays in her room all the time, and won’t engage with us as a family. She works a full-time job and doesn’t miss work. Is she an alcoholic, and if so, what should I do? Signed, Lonely in the Next Room Dear Lonely, That must [...]
Dear Leslie Advice Column
November, 21 2010 Dear Leslie, I found another woman’s phone number in my husband’s pocket. What should I do?” Signed Fuming after the Searching Dear F&S, Your e-mail reminds me of me a story my grandfather told about a woman who was married to the meanest guy in their 1920’s west Texas county. Now he [...]
Thankful Hearts Discover Blessings
Thankful Hearts Discover Blessings The jack-o-lanterns have long since disappeared from the front stoops of homes and Christmas decorations are still fairly contained to only the larger department stores. It must be that magical, middle holiday called Thanksgiving. For over three hundred years Americans have been gathering around tables filled with foods and encircled by [...]
Explaining Evil to a Brownie troop
Author’s note: This is a column in progress; below are the introductory paragraphs. How do you explain the evil side of human nature to ten little Brownies who are touring Austin for an outing badge? That was one of the questions facing the two troop leaders and myself recently when we took a gaggle of [...]
Passing the Flame
Author’s Note: I have been granted the generous permission to publish this story by my former client’s husband. All names have been changed to protect identities. L.T. Flipping through client files my hands cross over the stiff manila folders, touching names printed in the corner. Unbidden, each person come across in flashes as bright as [...]
The Clinic
Paul said I needed to work with a seasoned therapist, so he assigned me to shadow a social worker named Eleanor who had been at the clinic for over ten years. She was a middle-aged woman with a sweet face and graying hair parted primly down the middle with razor-edged exactness. She had a penchant [...]
C is The Clinic
I sat in the parking lot, looking at my new job’s office. Before becoming a county mental health clinic, it had obviously once been something retail because the front had two display windows on either side of the glass front door, now covered with matching bland curtains hanging limply in the bright summer’s morning glare. [...]