May 2025 

What the Hell Did I Actually Learn? Month 

Healing from Narcissistic Relationships

Month Description:

A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

- Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges (thank you Emily for submitting this quote!)

Month Overview: 

I have some very simple goals as I approach this month in the program, and the most primary goal is that I do not Brightside any of us.  We learned stuff in these relationships, we learn on bad days, we learn on good days, we even learn from trauma and loss.  Narcissistic relationships are like brutal teachers that rap us on the knuckles with rulers and humiliate and shame us.  They block us from learning other things about ourselves (which is yet one more thing we learn).  Some of what we will talk about this month will harken back to meaning and purpose month. But this is a little different – we learned stuff – and it can feel uncomfortable to reflect on these relationships as a place we learned, but sometimes extracting the lessons can help us set ourselves free from the rumination.  These are not lessons we wanted; they are lessons we got.  And this is a month of learning from each other -and a very natural jumping off point from last month – I have no doubt that Vision Board month opened you up to some of this, now let’s put it into action.