If you have reached this website seeking my professional services, please know that I am no longer in practice. I hope whomever suggested my services can provide someone helpful who has more availability.
If, for some other reason, you need to reach me, please know that I have relocated to Portland, OR, and can be reached through the information on my Contact page.
"That was fast. I mean, Life" Ron Padget
“We have only ourselves, and one another. That may not be much, but that’s all there is. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it." - Sheldon Kopp
What I Believe
In the context of listening to the stories of people’s lives, certain beliefs and understandings begin (eventually!) to stand out. What follows is the core of what I understand:
Human beings are relational: we are born in relationship; sustained in relationship through childhood; create new families and die in relationship. It is the dominant context for living – universally. Even for those who choose isolation or cannot create relationships, the context is still defining.
Telling the truth – as a value for living – determines the nature of and the outcome of a person’s relational experience. It creates the bond of trust in which both intimacy and shared vulnerability can exist.
There are gender related emotions – vulnerability/shame in men and voice/fear in women that function as both constraints and regulators for the expression of functional intimacy in a couple. The higher the level of expressed vulnerability in men and expressed voice in women, the more functional the relationship. The higher the level of shame (or anticipated shame) in men or the levels of fear in women, the more dysfunctional the relationship.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. As we develop over a life span, we create stories or beliefs that regulate and expand or contract our experience of living. We choose to live within the framework of our stories and those choices determine much of our lived life. The capacity to know and respect our stories, as well the capacity to change our story, determines the extent to which a person lives – or does not live – a life of consciousness and awareness.
Mindset matters. Even in the face of difficult and numbing conditions, the ability to hold a position of functional (as opposed to naïve) optimism or hope is core to a well-lived life. Cynicism and pessimism are a defense and a dysfunctional form of self-protection that distances the individual from himself and from others. The antidote to is a mindset rooted in engagement, authenticity, and gratitude.