KC Life Counseling

11/13/2025

11/13/2025

11/12/2025

You've already proven how powerful your mind is - now use it to picture things going right. ✨

11/12/2025

When life is overwhelming, you can choose these things. ⤵️ 🧡

Mindful of Dreams

11/12/2025

We carry more than we realize. It’s not just our parents’ eyes or the curve of a smile that shows up in the mirror. It’s the weight of their unspoken stories, the emotions they never had the language or safety to name. Sometimes it’s in the way we tense when someone raises their voice, or how we chase approval without knowing why. These things live quietly in us, shaping how we love, how we fear, how we move through the world.

The psychoanalyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes that what is wounded in one generation often seeks expression in the next. It is as if the soul of a family keeps trying to finish a story that was cut short. That thought used to scare me, this idea that we might be carrying the echoes of other people’s pain. But the more I sit with it, the more I see it as an invitation. We are not doomed to repeat what came before; we are invited to bring it into the light. Awareness itself is a kind of healing.

Virginia Woolf once said that each of us must face the fact of our inheritance, not to be bound by it, but to understand it. She was speaking about women and creativity, but her words reach further. Facing what we have inherited, emotionally and psychologically, means looking with compassion at the people who raised us, and at the younger versions of ourselves who learned from them. It means asking what love was supposed to look like in our family, what silence was protecting, what was never finished.

When we begin to ask those questions, something shifts. The patterns that once felt inevitable start to loosen. We realize that what we have been carrying is not all ours to keep. Some of it belongs to the generations before us, and some of it we can finally lay down.

That is the quiet work of becoming whole, not rejecting where we come from, but transforming it. We take the unfinished stories, the griefs, the hopes, and we give them a new ending. Not perfect, not final, but honest. And in doing so, we offer the next generation something lighter to inherit, a story that has been seen, felt, and finally tended to.

11/12/2025

There’s a quote that says something like, “You can’t be universally liked and authentic at the same time.” That’s true, but it’s also incomplete. You’ll never be universally liked, full stop. No matter how kind, careful, or agreeable you are, someone will still misunderstand you or dislike you for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Even the most polished performance won’t guarantee applause. So if there’s no promise of being well received, you might as well not be well received for being real.

We’re relational beings. We need one another to grow, learn, and love. But connection isn’t the same as contortion. The moment you start making other people’s comfort your compass, you lose your own sense of direction. You begin to shape yourself around their preferences instead of your principles and path. What starts as empathy and fair compromise slowly turns into self-betrayal.

The real art is balance. Bringing honesty into the world with compassion, loving deeply without losing yourself, and caring without carrying what isn’t yours.

However, living this way takes courage, because it often unsettles those who depend on your compliance. Some people prefer the version of you that makes them comfortable, like being the agreeable one, the one who doesn’t say no, and the one who smooths over tension instead of facing it. When you start choosing yourself, they might pull away, get defensive, or label you as difficult. But that’s a reflection of their attachment to who you used to be for them.

The best way to live isn’t by chasing approval, but by resting in awareness. There’s a quiet centre within you that doesn’t move or change, no matter who praises or rejects you. It’s the space behind your thoughts, the presence that watches it all unfold. When you take a moment to ground yourself there, the highest wisdom naturally rises up to meet you, gently guiding you along the way. Live from there. That’s your truth; your home. It won’t always please others, but it will bring you peace of mind and set you free.

11/12/2025

— boundaries and growth. 🍃

11/12/2025

Trust the path—you were chosen for it. 🌟

11/12/2025

When we widen the lens on our behavioral patterns, we will always find that they are not unique to this moment in time. Humans are nothing if not creatures of habit.

And when we widen the lens even further, we will see that many of our most frustrating behaviors are old responses to some earlier environmental or relational pattern, and that that behavior served us in some way.

We yell because we learned that you needed to yell to be heard.
We stay quiet because using our voice elicited disdain or disconnection from caregivers.

Whatever the behavior is, I can assure you, when you zoom out the lens, it makes sense.

It makes sense that you have big feelings when people don’t listen to you.
It makes sense that you want to run away when people try to get close.
It makes sense that you self-soothe with food, screen time, or alcohol if you didn’t learn other ways of navigating emotional distress.

It makes sense.
And when we can approach ourselves with compassion instead of shame, we can bring ourselves into the present moment and increase our curiosity around the underlying need.

And when we lessen the shame, we can begin to try to find new ways of navigating our world so that we can better meet these needs in ways that feel more in alignment with our values.

In case you missed it, The EQ School can send daily texts to your phone — which is great if you’re trying to spend less time on social media but still want reminders that help you check in with yourself, and to remind you of why you’re doing this life changing work.
https://hdly.me/theeqschool

11/12/2025

It is so easy to feel like you're falling behind. I get caught in that comparison trap all the time. This is your reminder (and mine too) that it's okay to go at your own pace.

11/12/2025

Letting go can be one of the hardest things to do. Whether it’s a job, a belief, or a relationship - walking away often brings guilt even when we're honoring our own wants and needs. But what if we reframed it? What if letting go isn’t about losing something, but about making space for something new (and so much better) to find you?