Table of contents

20 Most Recent Post Titles with Excerpts

A bare list of links to the last 20 blog posts with linked titles, author and date, a short excerpt, and a continue-reading link.

Do You Have a Healthy Sense of Self?

By Antoinetta Vogels | May 2, 2016

Hooray! We now have a Facebook Page in Dutch! It took a while but here it is for the Dutchies among us. Make sure you are the one to give it its first like! This is a good reason to explain once and for all what a Healthy Sense of Self actually is. Here we go!…

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Say “yes” to your temper and a Healthy Sense of Self

By Deborah Drake | May 2, 2016

Editor’s Note: There are many ways to describe a healthy Sense of Self and how it might self-express. HySoS strives to get more people thinking about the question: Do they live life with a Healthy Sense of Self. Barb Abelhauser who writes a daily blog “The View from a Drawbridge” offers an interesting twist on…

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Restoring a Sense of Self You’ll Feel the Heat!

By Deborah Drake | April 26, 2016

Last week April 19 2016 was a record breaking day of heat. The first of two in a row. Seattle (where I reside) is known for rain, not heat! Morning news reported that the day as one of the hottest day on record since 1956. “What a metaphor for doing self-development work,” I thought. Imagine…

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Dear Parents, do you help your child shape their self-story?

By Deborah Drake | April 15, 2016

Most parents intuitively know that children need to feel good about themselves to be happy and to progress in life – the same applies to adults – but practically speaking, how does this work? What do we need to be doing or saying to our children to ensure that they grow up to be happy…

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A View from A Drawbridge’s: Body Signals

By Deborah Drake | April 12, 2016

Editor’s Note: For more than a year now I have been following the daily postings of a Seattle Bridgetender whose blog The View From a Drawbridge  makes me ponder both sacred and mundane insights before starting my day. A bridgetender has a lot of time on their hands to consider the past, the present, and…

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Does human happiness depend on filtering out the negative things in life?

By Deborah Drake | April 7, 2016

“You drop a glass while making breakfast. You get stuck in traffic on your way to work. Your boss yells at you for being late. Congratulations! You’re having a bad morning. It happens to everyone, at one time or another. But how we react to the bad things in life reveals a lot about our…

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Understanding your female ancestors to support your Sense of Self

By Healthy Sense of Self | March 20, 2016

Editor’s Note: If you are a parent or thinking one day you might be one, do you ever consciously consider the legacy you bring to raising children? Do you even know the stories of the women and men in your lineage? March 8, 2016 was International Woman’s Day and Laura Vogels posted this piece on…

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Molly Ringwald: Living life by her own design and wise beyond her years.

By Deborah Drake | February 19, 2016

“We all know someone who’s been in therapy for years, who is tuned into their every slightest motivation, impulse, and emotion, and yet who at the same time remains painfully oblivious (or uninterested in) how other people are feeling. Raising a child who is emotionally aware, yet not destined to become an egotist, takes finesse,…

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Why thinking you’re ugly is bad for you

By Leighah Beadle-Darcy | February 4, 2016

Why is “who I am” so often based on “how I look”? The media is flooded with messages of what constitutes ideal beauty. We just have to turn on the television, open a fashion or beauty magazine, log into Facebook, and we see multiple images of women and men who are supposed to represent some…

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Motivation and outcome: The nature of your motivation is the key to success.

By Antoinetta Vogels | February 1, 2016

The nature of your motivation is the key to success. If you want to make sure you reach the goal you have in mind you have to know what that goal actually is. We often start something with a certain idea in mind but we never ask ourselves how that idea came to be and…

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How clean is your slate?

By Healthy Sense of Self | January 27, 2016

I’m old (relatively speaking) and in the course of my life I have made more New Year resolutions than I care to remember. Most of them lost me by, oh let’s be optimistic, end of Jan. Why is that? Every New Year I really thought I had chosen my quests well, that I had set…

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Harbingers of health in the new year.

By Deborah Drake | January 7, 2016

The new year may be still very new, and I am ready for Spring already. I search for the first flowers that break through the hard cold ground of winter each time I take a walk. Symbolically, crocuses and snow bells are harbingers of seasonal renewal for me. I remember fondly when I was young,…

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New Year’s Eve: Looking back and ahead

By Antoinetta Vogels | December 28, 2015

The year is almost done; you clean your desk and prepare for the last holiday of the calendar year. Sometime during that last week there is always that moment of reflection, of what was and how it could be; the mistakes you don’t want to make in the coming year, the bad habits you want…

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Anxiety and the holidays: 13 ways to cope.

By Deborah Drake | December 17, 2015

Dear Author of this blog post: Thank you for a thoughtful, well-paced, and compassionate post: Lots of insights. Lots of wisdom. I appreciate your discernment too. “Remember that part of their personality is the anxiety. Remember that part of them, the compilation of life experiences that they are made of, is the anxiety. It can…

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Healthy Sense of Self and Motivation

By Antoinetta Vogels | December 13, 2015

In light of the recent attacks in Paris, France (November 13th) and San Bernardino, California (December 2nd) Healthy Sense of Self jumped on the bandwagon for a “hand over your weapons and contribute in that way to world peace” – policy. As a result of the blog that appeared on Saturday, November 14th 2015, I…

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The right to bear arms…

By Antoinetta Vogels | December 5, 2015

America! Give us, well-intentioned citizens, finally a few good reasons why it is so necessary to possess arms. After all, we don’t live in the cowboy era any longer and shooting Indians (with permission) has long been banished. What reasons can possibly justify the disastrous consequences of a situation in which the wrong people are…

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Thought of the Day: How people react to being called beautiful

By Healthy Sense of Self | December 3, 2015

How might you react to being called beautiful? How might our lives be different if we learned from the time we were small to see and sense ourselves as beautiful and worthy from the beginning? Our parents, teachers, and mentors all in cahoots to assure that we developed a Healthy Sense of Self. Capable of…

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Thought of the Day: Parents as first teachers

By Deborah Drake | December 2, 2015

Our parents are our first teachers whether they do so actively or passively. Depending on their emotional intelligence and motivations for becoming a parent, we may not naturally develop a sense of our self, or embrace the idea that it is our birthright to live a life as we choose.

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Your life is not supposed to be a performance.

By Antoinetta Vogels | November 18, 2015

It was a good performance – but did you truly LIVE? Theater is fantastic but remember, it has its place. Your life is not supposed to be a performance, but it may have become just that anyway. We all have certain notions of ourselves, about all the things we feel we never became really good…

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Healthy Sense of Self reacts to the Paris Massacre of November 13, 2015

By Healthy Sense of Self | November 14, 2015

The similarity between fighting another nation, religion, or group and becoming your true self –a reaction to the many terrorist attacks in Paris, Friday November 13th, 2015 People are like a country: they have their own territory. And, just like there are people who think they have the right to take possession of a country…

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