yourpassions.tk

Earlier this year I published A Humble Story Lives On , a post based on the work of Amy Cohen, a distant cousin of my husband’s. Amy has been busy over the last several months lovingly publishing a posthumous memoir written by Ernest Lion, another shirt-tail relative who survived the Holocaust at Auschwitz. Amy asked for my guidance in preparing the manuscript for publication, and I became intrigued with her project as well as the story. In this post Amy explains how she came across the story and why she decided to publish it. I find it especially intriguing that a story written late in life with no known plans for publication could be found and brought to the world by a stranger. It just goes to show that you never know where your words may end up. SL: Amy, how did you discover The Fountain at the Crossroads ? AC: I was researching the family of one of my Schoenthal cousins—Rosalie Schoenthal. She was one of only two siblings of my great-grandfather who did not immigrate to the US fro...

In my previous post I touched on Expressive Writing as a way of dealing with post-election stress. I need to expand on that. Writing for stress relief takes more than one form, and spontaneous writing in real time is best known as journaling. I can attest from personal experience that journaling my heart out has been hugely helpful in coming to grips with anger, confusion, and other chaotic emotions. I highly recommend it, and if your topic is a tender one that could cause the chaos to spread of others near and dear to you happened to read it, write it into the fireplace , or the shredder, or delete the file. As great and powerful as journaling is, I’m not aware of any studies showing that it has long-term health benefits. Nor is it reliably useful for calming currently chaotic emotion. Expressive writing is especially powerful for resolving stressful memories after the fact. This research was pioneered by James Pennebaker and expanded upon in over 200 replications in situations rangi...

As much as we’d like to forget it all, it’s hard. Who can forget the finger pointing, the name calling, the conversations you tried not to have before November 8? We hoped it would end the next day, but we knew, most of us knew anyway, that it wouldn’t. Here we are now, stressed, burned out and perhaps more divided than ever. Half the country is rejoicing that they managed to Trump the so-called self-righteous, socialistic feminists represented by That Woman. “Change is finally possible,” they crow. “We can get back to true values, to democracy as it was intended to be.” And on it goes. On the flip side are those who were either Hillary’s True Believers as well as many who may not have preferred That Woman, but they claim a trained seal would be better than that devious, inexperienced, misogynistic bully. The sudden triumph of Trump seemed unimaginable and that half of the country is in deep mourning, highly traumatized. “How can they believe all that stuff?” “How can they just throw ...