Dr. Amy Van Buren

One of my favorite opening lines is from the spiritual classic, The Road Less Traveled, by M. Scott Peck. It reads, simply, “Life is difficult.” Somehow, most of us expect that it won’t be. Or that if it is, we should be able to handle it effortlessly. We criticize ourselves for feeling very human things like loneliness, confusion, anxiety, anger, boredom and depression when things don’t go the way we hoped. Unfortunately, life does not come with a user’s manual for how to work with the hard stuff.