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Real Challenges

Unexpressed Emotions

Therapy comes in surprising places

Susan Brearley
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Published in
3 min readNov 11, 2024

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Innisfree Garden by the author and NightCafe

This week inside my home — inside the Airbnb I run and also live in — the energy was not as challenging as you might think.

We had guests from all around the globe. Countries represented here were from Algeria, Sierra Leone, Japan, Puerto Rico, Peru, Romania, and people from the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Louisiana.

You might think with this sort of cultural diversity and varied belief systems — nationally, religiously, racially — layered with a very intense election week, there would be much tension and many opportunities for frustration, anger, or escalating emotions.

But you would be wrong. Personally, I felt more tension out in the public spaces of America than I felt inside the safe enclave of my home.

How can it be, in spaces of high cultural diversity, there could be less tension than in a space where division is over a single topic — who should become President of a country?

This is one of life’s great ironies.

Two groups, ideologically pitted against each other over just a few important tenets of their belief systems, can find enough animosity in this disagreement to allow for the severance of the very…

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Published in Contemplate

Reflections of the Mindful — A publication designed for the writer to reflect, the reader to be inspired, the creatives to find their muses.

Susan Brearley
Susan Brearley

Written by Susan Brearley

Writing on Medium since 2016. Boost Nominator, EIC (10 publications), Entrepreneur, Coach, IMBA Community Leader, NGO Founder. https://linktr.ee/SusanBrearley

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