The Mary Clegg Clinic

09/07/2025

Totally relate to this 💔

19/05/2025

17/05/2025

If a man didn’t see his mother receiving much affection or emotional interest from his father, he will often grow up emotionally disconnected. Not because he chooses to be, but because he never learned how to love with emotional presence. He never saw what it looks like when a woman is held not just physically, but emotionally.

And that's one of the reasons why so many women today are suffering in relationships. They live with men who are physically present but emotionally absent—men who may provide, protect, or even stay loyal, but don’t know how to be tender, curious, or emotionally available.

Dear man, this is not to blame you. This is to bring awareness to the roots. If you grew up watching your mother carry the emotional weight alone, then maybe no one ever showed you how to carry that for your own woman. Maybe you were told to be strong, but never taught that strength also means being soft when your partner needs you.

It's time to change that. It’s time to re-learn intimacy—not the kind that only touches the body, but the kind that touches the soul. Your woman doesn’t just want your presence in the room, she wants to feel your presence in her heart.

Heal yourself so that the women in your life don’t have to carry your wounds. Break the cycle. Be the man who learns to love with his whole heart. Not just through words, but through presence, patience, and deep emotional responsibility. Your healing is not just for you—it’s a gift you give to your partner, your children, and generations to come.

04/05/2025

The loneliness of the long distance widow. I am about that time when it appears that no one thinks about your loss. It sometimes comes down to who really cares? Do you project the face of fine hoping no one will see you silently weeping begind your door. Am I alone or lonely fine line. If you think that no one cares then it is lonely. However you can be caught in between the two.
I can honestly say I feel lonely not because I am alone but I havnt got a check in to see if I am ok. Not aiming this at daughters x

04/04/2025

“It’s funny, grief, isn’t it? How you die with them. Whoever you were before has gone. Your ghost walks the earth. You look the same, sound the same, but are not the same. You don’t breathe oxygen the way you did before. You negotiate life under an ocean. Drowning as you do your shopping, drowning as you ride the bus, drowning as you go to work. You can’t live with this, you think. No one could live with this. It’s unliveable. Then there are moments when your head rises above the water. You find something funny, laugh. A glimpse of your previous self. Until you are submerged once again.”
― Charlotte Levin

14/01/2025

Shout for a colleague and friend. Also an exceptional therapist!

03/05/2024

Yes grief is a lonely place. We are “stifled” in a western society how do we form a tribe, seek sanctuary find solace?

"A magnificent killer whale named Tahlequah
gave birth and caught the world’s attention.
Her calf died only thirty minutes after being born, each of those blessed minutes a sacrament to the progeny of love.
But the real reason journalists and photographers and millions of viewers followed this mother’s story, was her willingness to grieve unbidden, to become a thing utterly governed by kinship.
After a year and a half of growing this enormous life inside of her belly, and the immense feat of labor, and a half an hour of looking into one another’s eyes, Tahlequah proceeded to carry her dead baby on the tip of her nose for seventeen days, traveling more than a thousand miles all throughout the Salish Sea.
And some people think that grief is not
inexplicably beautiful. But perhaps it’s because those people (who are us people) no longer see grieving enacted publicly as a plea for sanity, as a way of feeding that which grants us life.
There was no real grieving at my mother’s funeral––
sniffling and shoving tears back up into our eyes, yes, but no keening. No collapsing into the bottomless cavern of one another’s trembling arms, no crying out into the insufferable heat of that late-summer day, and certainly no carrying my mom’s dead body as a holy procession all throughout the places she ever knew and loved.
So I continued to carry her mostly on my own.
I wailed in the privacy of my own home long after the funeral was over, with only the hurting eyes of my husband to behold me––a kind of holding that was never meant to be done alone.
I imagine that if killer whales were not endangered, Tahlequah would have swam those seventeen days with a grand procession of many other glistening, black and white giants all across the ocean.
Or perhaps she swam for one thousand miles
to personify the loneliness of her grief in a world spiraling toward oblivion.
And our savagery for not swimming alongside her; for taking pictures, for watching her exquisite ceremony on our little screens as if it were pure entertainment, as if that couldn’t be any one of us, carrying our dead children out into the dark and emptied streets."
From ‘The Progeny of Love' by April Tierney, Artwork by Lori Christopher 🐋
Story & Image: David Attenborough Fans.

23/04/2024

Forgiveness is one of the really difficult things in life. The logic of receiving hurt seems to run in the direction of never forgetting either the hurt or the hurter. When you forgive, some deeper, divine generosity takes over. When you can forgive, then you are free. When you cannot forgive, you are a prisoner of the hurt done to you. If you are really disappointed in someone and you become embittered, you become incarcerated inside that feeling. Only the grace of forgiveness can break the straight logic of hurt and embitterment. It gives you a way out, because it places the conflict on a completely different level. In a strange way, it keeps the whole conflict human. You begin to see and understand the conditions, circumstances, or weakness that made the other person act as they did.

JOHN O'DONOHUE

Excerpt from his book, Eternal Echoes
Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

County Kerry, Ireland
Photo: © Ann Cahill

27/03/2024

Sometimes you have to learn to find joy in the story you are actually living.

Incredibly wise advice from Finding Joy.

09/03/2024

❤️❤️
(Pinterest)