Pause: Take a Moment to Take Care of You

By Sarah Hamelin, LICSW

There is no excuse for being unhappy. Happiness is free and this is a guide to find you again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483571836

Book preview

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Chapter 1

My journey

Go now

Don’t look back, we've drawn the line

Move on

It’s no good to go back in time

Jefferson Starship, Sara

This book really begins with a personal journey. If it were not for my own journey, I would not have been inspired to write this book. I call it a journey because I believe that journeys are things that never come to an end. Just because I am able to give good advice does not mean I always listen to my own advice, and it also does not mean that I have it all figured out. It is all a process. I hope to empower my readers to make changes in their own lives, but truthfully, most of us are at a stage where we are just thinking about the changes we need to make and have not yet taken action.

Looking back on my life, I feel like I have always had pretty good self-esteem. If people were bullying me, I never really let it bother me. I cannot say I knew who I was as a person or that I was comfortable with who I was, but I always seemed to know who I was not. I am a little bit of a control freak (some may say I am a total control freak), so I never got involved in the party scene. I was never a drinker and did not do drugs—I never even experimented with them. Those kinds of things had absolutely no appeal to me, and the more people pressured me, the less I was interested. To this day, I hate being pushed to do things.

I have always been relatively independent: not only do I do things on my own, but I also think a little bit differently than others do. I feel things a little bit stronger emotionally, as well. I did not realize just how different my thinking was until a few years ago. I have never felt comfortable doing things the way they are supposed to be. It is hard to explain this. I know that I am an outside-the-box thinker—I love this about myself, and it has been hugely beneficial to my career as a clinician. I think a part of the reason I am able to think outside the box is that I truly understand people, behaviors, and emotions and how they all interact. These are things I have understood for a long time—probably before I learned them in school or on the job.

I am also a very emotional person. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties, I had very little control of my emotions. I did not understand them. For example, I would get upset about something and cry for what felt like forever, or I would say things that some might call weird in an attempt to express myself. My family members generally do not express emotions very well or very strongly, so I always felt different from them. In college, I began to feel a little bit depressed, partially because I could not get ahold of these intense emotions; I felt them but could not control