People have told me their secrets all my life. Most of the time, I don’t even have to ask any questions. Or maybe just one question.
“How are you really?”
People just tell me stuff. Deep personal stuff and day-to-day life stuff.
It comes as naturally as breathing.
It may be a deep-felt empathy. An immediate connection? Possibly other people see a kindred spirit in me and feel safe. I have certainly faced my own pain and challenges in life and have mostly overcome them through hard work, asking for help, and a dogged tenaciousness.
It started before I was born. After a stressed pregnancy, my mother delivered me at 31 weeks. That was 50 years ago. The doctor on duty told my mother I would be born dead. Many babies didn’t make it. I was lucky and came out fighting. And I have been rooting for the underdog ever since.
When my marriage broke up, I became the go to divorce expert in my community. My marriage may have been tumultuous at the end, but our divorce was as amiable as one can be. Soon after that I started to coach people and wrote a book of poetry to track the progress of my journey. More recently, I created a DIY program to help people get through their own divorces.
At the end of 2017, I received a note from an old boyfriend. I was 23 when we met. These days, I have a son that age. This man and I had been together on and off for a few years way back in the 80’s and I realized even then that although I was good for him, he wasn’t good for me.
Here is an excerpt from that note:
“I want you to know what a positive impact you had on my life — It was your influence that made me follow up on Law School and I have been an attorney now almost 30 years.
So thank you for that. You seem very grounded in your writings and happier than the average person. I hope that’s true — it’s been at least 25 years since we spoke– it means a lot to me to be able to draw the strands of my life together. Our relationship was a big part of helping me find my path — not only professionally, but in all my relationships since we knew each other too.”
Thanks to Facebook and teaching at a college, I have gotten quite a few of these notes over the years. It’s nice to know you have had a positive impact on people’s lives. And after my own divorce, I started quite by accident helping other people through their own separations and divorces.
But now I feel that it’s time to branch out.
Many times in my life, I haven’t know what I wanted to do but knew exactly what others needed. Maybe I have a heightened sense of empathy. Or being able to see the whole picture when someone else can’t?
Fortunately for me, we as a species are great storytellers. It’s how we make sense of the world. Maybe the people responsible for writing the Bibles knew this. Novelists and actors know this. Like feelings, our stories need to be told. And these stories need to be told often enough to take the sting out of them and for us to move on as people.
When we hold onto our stories and secret them away, they eat away at us, whittling us down bit by bit until that one story too horrible to tell stops our whole life. Keeping these personal tragedies close to us – making them sacred – keeps us stuck. They leave many of us emotionally immobile and unable to heal.
I knew I was onto something when my own counselor asked my advice about her personal situation. I couldn’t believe it. I was paying this Medical Doctor huge sums of money to help me with my own PTSD after a benign tumor was removed from the lining of my brain, and she’s asking about what to do with her newly retired husband.
Seriously?
But of course, I offered what I thought was sound advice.
When I was in college I was a peer counselor. In graduate school, I was the person my classmates turned to when they were having a difficult time in their lives.
When my children were small, other mothers would call me before they would reach out to their own family doctors.
And since my own divorce, I have been coaching and counseling people through the rough times and move on.
When my kids were younger, their friends were in and out of our house all the time. They would often ask me for advice about getting along with their parents or sometimes about their new relationships. My favorite refrain at that time was “at your age, it shouldn’t be so hard”. It has been many years and these young adults still thank me for helping them grow up.
For the last five years, I have been teaching at a local college. My favorite comments from former students are “you taught us so much more than English.”
So now I do this for a living.
And here is what one of my clients said about me recently:
“A year ago, I connected with this wonderful life coach and counselor Tamara Mendelson, and I wanted to share the love. If you are looking for any kind of mental health support and life stuff, I warmly recommend reaching out to her. She’s wise, kind, and not a pretentious psychologist – comes from a place of experience, care and strength.”
Coaching with Tamara Mendelson
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