Carol Freund

About Carol Freund

You tell yourself that you ought to be happy. You have so much going for you. So many people have it so much worse. Other people think you’re doing well.

You argue with yourself, criticize yourself, tell yourself to be grateful  and you are but..... The but is like a song you hear in the middle of the night, a beautiful song -- you get out of bed and go to the window to get closer to the music and you can’t hear it anymore. You tell yourself you were dreaming but it’s a dream that you want to be real. It’s music that you want to hear, and be able to reproduce and play at will.

Simply put, there is so much more in you than you are living. You’ve always dreamed of loving and being loved more. You like your work but there, too, there is something missing. If you’re a parent, you’re always unsure that you are making the right decisions. As a couple you function pretty well together but the magic is gone. 

Having listened to and worked with a lot of people, I can tell you that what you want deep down is real, and is worth working toward.

Maybe you’re bothered by what you feel. You’re not patient enough. You get too angry. Or too anxious. You don’t make the right choices.
Is the problem that you haven’t grown up and become realistic enough?
Are you too absorbed with yourself and your own needs?
Is what you want unreal?
I don’t think so.

Maybe you are something like Ada, a brilliant student who became a surgeon but wanted to be an artist. She was respected and successful in her profession. And no one questioned her work’s value.

But an artist! How could she know she’d be good enough? And what was the worth of any art she could do compared to surgery? Ada wasn’t self absorbed or childish. She was connected to her own deepest self. She remembered being a child and getting her deepest pleasure from being alone and looking at things. But no one else around her thought that was of value, and Ada didn’t give in to what she felt until she was in her fifties. Once she forced herself to allow time to paint, her whole life changed. She didn’t stop being a doctor. She said she became more certain of the value of individual human life.

Or maybe you’re like Charles: good looking, smart, relatively successful, married with two young children, a man who loves his family and wants to be faithful and more successful but struggles with romantic and sexual feelings that sometimes arise in  outside friendships, and struggles with not being sure he makes money and success important enough. He compares himself unfavorably to other men who he sees as more dedicated.

Is he just too immature, as he sometimes charges? Or is he one of those unusual strongly feeling people who tries to be honest and in touch with what goes on inside of him?

In case you haven’t guessed, I would say the later of those two choices is the truth.

In fact, I think many of us make ourselves less than we are. What we call mental health, and maybe even what we call success, is largely a matter of adjustment.

Most of the clients I’ve worked with over the years, men and women, children and adults have been struggling with the difference between who they really are and who they’ve been told they’re supposed to be. The strongly emotional child who was told she wasn’t supposed to be angry instead of being valued for her strong emotions and taught how to handle them, her anger included.

Most people can’t be taught how to tolerate the feelings inside of them, and how to use the creative power of that energy because most adults raising children were never taught that. But people can learn to listen to what’s inside of them, and can develop into their best selves. Ironically, by doing that they can also be more giving to others. Helping people become more authentic and create the lives they want is work that I love.  Please feel free to call me at (908) 806.2040 or e mail me at carol@carolfreund.com to chat about whether I could help you create a life more deeply authentic.