#meaning-making

#meaning-making

This week, as both Mercury and Jupiter begin their retrograde cycle, we are reminded that even as time moves forward, it asks us to look backward. Retrogrades bring a necessary review before there can be integration, realignment, and wisdom. They're a time of inward reflection and personal truth. Your weekly horoscope for November 9-15, 2025, helps you understand where to look for your insights.

Synchronicities can be dismissed as quirky experiences, an anecdote to trot out at a dinner party, but they can also be profoundly transformative and healing. It's for this reason that synchronicity-informed psychotherapy informs my clinical practice. As a refresher, synchronicities are events in the external world that coincide in a meaningful way with the internal world of thoughts, feelings, images, sensations, memories, and dreams, but not due to causal reasons.

Indeed, getting to forgiveness is perhaps the most difficult and challenging thing that we can do to go beyond ourselves when we are so fixated on our problems, our needs, our expectations, and our demands. Let's face it: When things are spinning out of control-and especially out of our control-it is at least comforting and cathartic, even if it doesn't really resolve anything, to be able to point the blame on others for the situation at hand.

In our current clinical landscape, "trauma" has become a ubiquitous term-both in the scientific literature and in popular discourse. The word is invoked in diagnostic manuals, self-help books, and even casual conversation. The dominant narrative around trauma today often privileges a view of trauma as a "thing"-a technical problem with distinct behavioral, neurobiological, or cognitive symptoms that exists apart from the lived experience of the person.

Meaning-making often leads individuals to negative interpretations of their experiences, especially in the context of sexual desire discrepancies, creating unnecessary suffering and confusion.