Midnight Sun Counseling

04/01/2026

08/05/2025

It’s easy to walk away from someone and say “I’m done.”

But maybe that’s not automatically the best path…

A more nuanced investigation might be:

-To understand why they trigger you
-To try to calmly communicate what’s up for you, and what might be better
-To give them a chance to respond thoughtfully

If it blows up or if they refuse to engage respectfully, read the room. Understand that you can’t control their reactions.

Also honor your own needs (for respect, for kindness, for love - it’s not too much to ask), and to protect your peace.

06/06/2025

Beautiful message about what it means to work together. Diversity is a strength.

In this video, I react to the powerful and emotional Harvard graduation speech by Yurong "Luanna" Jiang, the first Chinese woman to deliver a commencement ad...

10/17/2024

One of the defining features of traumatic events is the loss of choice over what happened to you. They can leave you feeling trapped, helpless, or powerless.

When we do not feel as though we have choices, we can begin to feel trapped, our nervous system perceives a threat.

Therefore, recovery from trauma involves realizing that you do have choices available to you now. (And hopefully that is true).

Take some time to reflect on the small choices available to you today that make a positive difference in how you feel. Choices to engage or disengage from the news or choices to rest and/or move your body, choices about how your feed yourself, choices about how you talk to yourself with self-compassion, choices about how you treat others with kindness, choices to pause rather than react with anger…these decisions add up and help you come out of survival and to feel more empowered so that you can be the creator of your life…one choice at a time.

10/17/2024

Sometimes I like to remind myself that the experiences and feelings I'm trying to resolve or heal don't make me an outsider. They don't make me wrong or broken. And they don't necessarily need to be fixed, rather, tended to.

These pieces of us that we carry shame around, that we try to hide, that we want to fix are the very byproduct of a human experience.

Your pain, your desire, you fear, your anger, your grief, your effort, your attachment, your triggers, your exhaustion makes you a human being.

Human is messy. Human is disorganized. Human is fragile and strong and resilient and needy. Human is brilliant and beautiful and intelligent at that. Human is intentional, human is hardwired (for things like connection!). Human is a complexity of nuanced experiences that arise as a result of living in the organism we inhabit. It's not something we can fix or change or "heal" all the time.

This doesn't mean we have to just let all our wounds and triggers and behaviors just "be", but it also doesn't mean we need to hyper focus on fixing and changing everything.

Rather, what might it be like if we met ourselves in it more often?
Instead of " I need to feel X instead of Y" What if we offered "I feel X and I'm going to hold the piece of me that feels this way"

Perhaps the practice isn't "healing" it by changing it. Perhaps it's through meeting it that it naturally heals. – Lexy Florentina

10/17/2024

Developing discernment is part of healing trauma and stepping into our full sovereignty as adult women.

Discernment is an expression of healthy self-respect and maturity.

It raises the standard for who and what we allow into our lives, based upon self-attunement to our own truth, needs and limits.

But displaying discernment can feel fraught with cognitive dissonance, in moments, if we were raised in a dysfunctional family that coded discernment as being inherently mean, ungrateful, arrogant or being snobbish.

Discernment gets closely associated with shame. And shame makes us easier to exploit and easier to enforce compliance.

As a subset of patriarchal culture, dysfunctional families unconsciously attempt to "break" a child's healthy No and sense of individual will, likely because this was done to the parents as well.

Discernment includes things like:

🔥Saying no to things that don't feel safe or comfortable.

🔥Taking time to decide if you want to do something. Not rushing or pushing into a choice.

🔥Observing and assessing the degree of engagement that feels comfortable based upon data from the environment and how well it aligns with your own sense of truth or comfort.

🔥Feeling free to change your mind or shift your choices based on new information.

🔥Trusting yourself more than others.

Healthy families will encourage a child's growing development of discernment even if the child's limits or boundaries do NOT happen to align with the parents' needs or wants.

The healthier the family, the more flexibility and spaciousness it has in accepting and welcoming a child's individuality.

The less healthy the family, the more rigid and inflexible it will be towards a child's developing sense of self.

If it feels like you are confronting the Terror Barrier when you want to say NO, speak your truth or honor your limits, take heart.

Inner Mothering is the practice in which we can become the loving mother we always needed and help the inner child see that *discernment is NOT incompatible with being a loving person.*

Check out my new blog series here: https://www.bethanywebster.com/blog/crossing-the-terror-barrier-of-the-mother-wound-from-subservience-to-sovereignty-part-2-of-2/

In the article, I share 7 ways you can support yourself in crossing the Terror Barrier!

10/08/2024

ℹ️🌿 AM I EMOTIONALLY UNAVAILABLE? |

Emotional availability is what helps us connect, empathize, and be present with others - in a way that builds intimacy. Emotional intimacy is what we all need in relationships, to feel nourished, and fulfilled. When we are in relationships that lack emotional intimacy, we feel achey, empty and sad.

If you’ve been in relationships that lack emotional intimacy or if you’ve been with someone who is emotionally unavailable [or are drawn to that kind of person], it may be helpful to look at your part in the dynamic, first.

We often attract what is most similar to us, or familiar to us. The good news is that when we notice ways we may be avoiding intimacy, we can start doing the work to make a shift- and then bring more depth into our relationships. And/or attract others who have more capacity to develop richer relationships.

Read the Full Article: https://integrativepsych.co/new-blog/am-i-emotionally-unavailable



📷: unknown, quote: Dr. Alexandra Solomon

10/08/2024

I've never been a fan of the "let" in "don't 'let' them bully you." We don't really "let" bullies & abusers do what they do. What may seem like
"letting" them do it is often us stuck in a freeze, fawn, or other trauma response.
Not "letting" them do it isn't quite that simple.

Trauma responses aren't choices. We don't sit down & calmly decide between fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop.
When we're triggered, our nervous system makes that decision for us.

Maybe you don't suck at setting boundaries.
Maybe it's unreasonable to expect your boundary setting to be perfect when the "fawn" trauma response is lighting up your nervous system like a forest fire.
Trauma responses aren't "choices." Maybe you can extend yourself some grace. — Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle