Let's chat Animö with Carö

Have you been the target of distasteful comments and offensive jokes from people comparing your face to a pizza for instance ? Are you waging a war against pimples, pustules, cysts, black dots on your face, neck, and even back ? Do you let a verdict from your reflection on the mirror dictate your worth or even your dating potential ?  This predicament has been my reality most of my adolescence and all through my mid-twenties, I'm afraid. If this is also your struggle, do not despair. I got sick of people telling me it was because of my diet (eating chocolate DOES NOT cause acne). I have been through the trial of antibiotics to no avail, and the next recommended step was the dreaded medication that is in fact vitamin A in toxic doses, which I ended up refusing, too scared of the side effects, and despite being deeply afraid that my face would be scarred for life if this skin problem kept worsening. But eventually, after several years of dreading school pictures or other events where...

  ''Oh no. Not again. My chin is starting to tremble... my vocal chords want to betray me, and I feel the one-way faucet of my eyes being turned on...'' Have you ever experienced this automatic response called tears at the most inopportune moment ? By the time I was a teenager, it had happened countless times. I seemed to cry for no reason. But it is because I was crying for every reason: sadness, of course, but also anger (for having bottled up frustration against situations, people, and especially myself for not have asserted boundaries), panic, overwhelm, and yes, joy and elation. I would cry upon hearing that someone I didn't even know had died, or during commercials, or while watching the Olympics, or at weddings, or if I had a disappointing grade, or if I felt left out. It didn't matter, it seemed like the energy of the people around, their own emotional intensity, expressed or not, was sufficient for me to feel it and embody it. To say it differently, af...

As a young kid, I really loved a Japanese series called Candy. It was a kind of Animé (although we didn't really call this Animé in the 70s) and the main character was an orphan girl who became fond of a boy, the ''Prince'', and who once told her, as she was crying (because she was going through some hardship and injustices, as many orphans do), that she was more beautiful when she laughed. This line stayed with me my whole life after that.  Due to the tension between the need to emancipate and to stay close to family, discomfort towards puberty, peer pressure, embarrassment towards our parents, or heartbreak after a first love, adolescence is not particularly a time when we feel like in a smiling mode in a consistent way. At least it was not my case. Even though I am a generally joyful and positive person (who sure has her moments of grumpiness too !), in my teenage years, when around certain people, I didn't feel like faking a smile. So it was particularly ann...

Dear son, A chapter of your life is quietly closing. You are officially turning the page on adolescence. I have this urge to give you a dense package stuffed with all the wisdom and advice a mother can think of... I know it is futile, because learning doesn't happen through the reception of words and concepts but through experience. But maybe my words will serve as a validation tool one day, if you are ever confronted with the challenges and dilemmas that led to those words I am about to utter for your benefit... Leaving the nest, even if you come back on the weekends, is a huge milestone. Even though I know you are very capable and self-sufficient (you have always been eager to assist from a young age), having to do laundry, get groceries, cook, pay bills, problem-solve often all at once can be a little bit of a shock. College or university means bigger school, more people, more competition. You might struggle to keep your excellent grades (I certainly did, when I went from commun...

Dear son, Halfway through the puberty, this can be a pivotal stage. It has been for me. I was in the middle of high school. My academic future became more precise. I attended a talk given by a missionary physician and I thought it was my calling. My interest in closeness with boys became distracting but I continued to prioritize school work. I started becoming more fashion-conscious. I tended to copy my friend who got nice clothes, she must have found this a bit annoying but never mentioned it. I had no sense of style yet so I was exploring by relying on what I perceived as her good taste. We were really good friends, she lived on my street and we walked to the bus stop together. Her parents took me and my friend, an only child, to Wildwood, New Jersey, on a road trip that summer. I realize now I didn't have a passport, it was not required, I guess they used another ID, I cannot remember. Times have changed.  I remember vividly going to New York on the way there and we visited a ta...

  ''Adolescence is characterized by a form of inertia, which is necessary to prepare the person for the major transformations that are about to occur''. I don't recall the exact words Dr Daniel Bordeleau used (plus, the message was in French), but I vividly remember the impact they had on my awareness. When I was in my mid to late twenties, Dr Bordeleau, also a Jungian psychoanalyst (or a counselor who had training in depth psychology which is a discipline looking at various aspects of the unconscious, like dream symbolism, synchronicities, or archetypes like the shadow figure) was a popular mentor who was teaching us during my residency program in psychiatry. When he made that statement, it forever reframed an aspect of my self-concept I had struggled with since my adolescence. I was often feeling like I was not doing as much as I should in life. In the most painful shame-inducing situations, I even thought (or was prone to perceive that others thought) I was simpl...