What kind of relationships do you want?
Life coaching with Claudia Tranca, PhD
“He gave man speech, and speech created thought, Which is the measure of the universe.” P. B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound I’ll never forget the day when I, a 26-year-old woman with wavy hair flowing past my mid-back, sat on the lady barber’s chair and asked her to shave off my hair, à la Kojak (to …
“How we feel about our kids isn’t as important as how they experience those feelings and how they regard the way we treat them.” Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting “I don’t have any regrets.” Some people make this remark, more often than not with an air of absolute certainty and self-sufficiency as if they belonged to …
Continue reading "Controlling Parents – Reclaiming Unconditional Love"
“If your kids are unable to see you as worthy of love, acceptance, and forgiveness, then you have to find redemption in that small crack in the continuum of catastrophe, as Walter Benjamin put it.” James Coleman, Rules of Engagement “So, how’s your daughter doing?” I asked my new acquaintance behind the wheel of her …
Continue reading "Adult Child Estrangement: Living With the Pain"
“I've got a magic charmThat I keep up my sleeve,I can walk the ocean floorAnd never have to breathe,” “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me” by Maya Angelou “Should I do this or not?” Tell me you didn’t ask yourself this question when it came to buying a house, having a child, getting married or divorced, accepting …
Francis and Margot Macomber seem to be a happy couple: young, good-looking, famous, rich, envied and admired. Except they’re not. Their marriage is riddled with crises (he drinks, she has affairs), yet they remain stuck with each other for 11 years as they have “a sound basis of union. Margot was too beautiful for Macomber …
Would you be willing to eat a worm? Would you be willing to get electric shocks? As bizarre as these questions may be, they were part of an experiment whose findings were revealed (among others) by the psychologists Ronald Comer and James D. Laird in a 1975 article. The experiment went like this: the subjects …
Late in the evening, a woman sits at a table in an empty restaurant, staring into her cup of coffee. Behind her is a window as large as a wall through which one sees nothing of the city’s life. This black rectangle intensely reflects two rows of ceiling lamps. Edward Hopper’s painting “Automat” (1927) conveys …
What kind of relationships do you want? 