Perhaps 2023 is the year for breaking the bonds addiction, in its many forms, has held on your life or that of a loved one.  Michal Kocum, LPC can help you build a safe, authentic relationship where you can get to be who you truly and fully are. He works with you towards understanding, accepting and redeeming the dark and painful corners of your soul. He has experience working with adults both in high intensity treatment and long term settings. 

His areas of specialty are trauma, substance use, difficulties with mood and relational dissatisfaction and stress. He can help you in outgrowing your past, wherever it brings shame, imposter syndrome or pain and sense of meaninglessness.

He is fond of stories and metaphors that represent and bring to life the profound work of therapy. He would like to share this one with you:

The New Year tends to bring layered memories. I remember standing outside in the freezing, dark cold at 11:58 PM, right at the edge of the the tiresome old and potential new. Everyone around me was nostalgic to a point of silliness and tears, all together watching the warm, bright colors of fireworks above our heads. Each described part carries meaning, memories and feelings, which all mesh together into a pile of… complicated nostalgia. It is not a pile I enjoy, yet I do know it is important and worthy of respect. It deserves to be and I deserve to hold it.

For some of us, the New Year can bring much more complex and difficult “piles” than mine. On top of loss and love, pain and elation, some of us are contesting with the struggle of how to join in with the festivities, let alone the resolutions that we’ll all start tomorrow. One day at a time can be a very, very long time indeed. 

A lot is at stake. Your wellbeing, joy, sobriety, relationships and hopes for a new year. How do you tend to all that matters as well as all that can turn us back to the old, well known paths. Patterns, situations, feelings and resolutions that appear seemingly out of nowhere, throughly familiar and itching with discomfort. Complicated paths full of deep holes in the sidewalk, conveniently unavoidable. Holes you fell into before. And maybe it’s this year you won’t. Or you’ll know how to get out. Or find a diamond down there. Let’s look at, break down and hold the complicated nostalgia of your story together. We can learn to respect it and find dignity in pressing forward with it. Let’s see if together we can find a way around the holes in the sidewalk. Maybe we

“… walk down the same street.

There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. 

[we] walk around it.

I walk down another street.”

• Portia Nelson, There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk: The Romance of Self-Discovery”

It’s extended in a couple of point where I thought it could benefit. I’m attaching a different picture, it seems more fitting for the implied call for taking responsibility. And it adds variety to the newsletter. The text that originally went with the picture follows, in case you want to use it as with the one in the newsletter:

“Living is as hard as it is worth it. Taking a radical ownership of one’s life is freeing and difficult. Being able to know what we know, feel what we feel and do what matters to us is a crucial and life giving stance that allows us to take on the challenges of day-to-day life.”