Excerpt from Stop Running From Love

"Distancing" is a big category. Distancers come in many shapes and sizes. They can be single or in long-term couple relationships, gay or straight, women or men, young or old. Here are a few brief glimpses of typical distancers:

Excerpt from My Mother, My Mirror

I recently looked at an afghan my mother helped me crochet in the later years of her life. Her hands were too arthritic to do more than a couple of model stitches at a time, but the pleasure she got out of teaching me seemed to outweigh whatever encumbrance in her joints she experienced. And I got pleasure from letting her teach me. She felt excited when I’d finished it (so did I, after ripping out a particular part one time too many) and was happy when family members could wrap themselves in it to keep warm. Though I’d chosen the afghan’s colors and design, and done most of the work, it was a cocreation in which yarn interwove as did my mother’s and my feelings.

Excerpt from My Mother, My Mirror

When I began to think about mother-daughter relationships, I recalled my seventh-grade lunch table. One of my schoolmates, June, would often say, after slowly unfolding the foil wrapped around her sandwich and peering inside with what seemed like dread, "Damn, my mother gave me shit on rye again." Each time, I would think, "How could she say that about her mother? She must not love her mother. I’d never say that about my mother."

excerpt from Facing Bipolar

You are much more than your bipolar disorder. You do not need to let it define you. You can attain success, happiness, fulfillment, and achievement in life despite having bipolar disorder. But at the same time, the bipolar experience is one that often sits at your core—in your brain, in your emotions, and consequently very much in your sense of who you are. It’s not in an elbow or a foot. Generally speaking, the experience of the disorder feels more like "being," as opposed to "having," yet you will hear people in normal conversation speak of both being bipolar and of having bipolar disorder.

excerpt from The Bipolar Workbook for Teens

A chronic condition like bipolar disorder can be so overwhelming that it seems like it defines who you are. But you are not bipolar disorder, and bipolar disorder isn't you! You're a lot more than just someone with bipolar disorder.

by guest blogger Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, author of The Bipolar Workbook for Teens

I recently read an article about a study that compared high school and college students from 1938 to those in 2007, and concluded that mental health problems such as depression and anxiety are much more of a problem for modern-day students than they were in the past. It does seem that mental illness is affecting more and more people at a younger age – or perhaps we’re just more aware of these kinds of problems now. Regardless, there are things we can do to prepare kids better for the pressures they’ll be facing in life.

Excerpt from

At this time in your life you are most likely going through the challenging process of figuring out your identity or who you are while trying to be the person your friends and family want you to be. This is likely to cause you additional stress. The more you learn about who you truly are, who you want to be, and what is most important to you, the better equipped you will be to cope with stress that comes from trying to meet others’ expectations of you.

excerpt from The Whole-Body Workbook for Cancer

Some of the best advice I can give anyone is to look for your "blind spots." Even if you're an avid diet and natural-food enthusiast, you may carry around a lot of judgment and attitude, and be unwilling to look at your emotional life.

Excerpt from Yoga for Anxiety

Anxiety causes a shrinking in consciousness and a reduction in your sense of self. Growing in consciousness expands your sense of self; as you learn more about yourself, you discover that there’s much more to you than you ever dreamed possible.

Excerpt from Transformative Yoga

My journey toward the healing effects of yoga began in 1993. At the time, I was seeking relief from emotional stress on both a conscious and an unconscious level. During my first year at college, I was a mess inside. I desperately lacked inner peace, although this wasn’t outwardly apparent.

My parents had recently gone bankrupt, so I was exhausted from working three jobs between high school and college to pay my tuition, and I continued to work part-time while in college. The daily grind was unfulfilling, to say the least. Meanwhile, my twin sister, Alanis Morissette, exploded onto the music scene with her groundbreaking album Jagged Little Pill, which went on to become the highest-selling debut album of all time. With her rapidly mounting success, I felt more emotionally and spiritually lost than ever before and longed to find my own identity and path in life.

I was studying to become an environmental lawyer, a vocation I had an interest in, but one that didn’t fully satisfy me. Deep down, I knew academic study wasn’t going to fulfill my quest for inner peace and happiness. Most of the books I was required to read focused on theory. I needed truth—an unwavering, blatant truth with no smoke and mirrors. In the end, I decided not to complete a degree in environmental law. Ironically, though, the time I spent at college led me in a different and unexpected direction: toward a new sense of spirituality.