There seems to be a throwback in zeitgeist to an earlier time where character trumped importance in all things. For the past decade, the rise in radical identity politics has taken its toll. It began as a call to revolute against the norm or mainstream and challenged all things traditional. Of course, the roots to this call for social change was fueled by years of neglect on issues fermented in what had traditionally been viewed as marginal spaces in society. It seemed that there was a flip in focus that geared governmental policy to address protecting individuals and groups who identified in ways that vulnerablizied them. This shift in focus seemed to cause societies at large to cast its collective view on attributes related to the who one is rather than on the what one does or has achieved. In my view, this shift was mobilized by social media and did impact everyone on a global scale.

In recent times schooling, hiring and even dating practices shifted as well. How an individual identified became more important in candidate searches than anything else. You are likely familiar with the check-box system currently used when applying for school, job, or a date. There is a list of questions that work to categorize candidates based on identifiers such as race, ethnicity, gender, previous relationships, preferences, languages spoken and more. Some platforms seek questions about income levels, and the number of members in a household as well. There are many types of programs that currently seek ways to “identify” your demographic data. Some questions on survey-type platforms such as your age, marital status, or religious affiliation are no longer legal in most professional hiring or student application interviews.

Nonetheless, more and more platforms have been created to weed out individual identifiers that are not preferred in a particular context by systems designed to filter data. Some dating applications allow users to create limited filter settings, which activate remaining potential matches that programs determine are best for you. Many of you have certainly had experiences whereby identifier-matching services got it completely wrong, overlooking individuals who are truly a better fit for you. Job hiring apps and platforms are similar, also offering user-directed filters to target particular candidates for jobs. Hearing mostly about the lived-experiences of dating-app users, it seems that this data-driven process is imperfect.

An idealistic perspective of human character would be difficult to identify on platforms for hire or dating. Most hiring screening programs rely on information such as years of experience, languages spoken, the number of degrees earned and more. An imaginary online recruitment checklist for character might include some evidentiary support of:

• Respecting people’s time
• Listening with care to what people have to say & contribute
• Understanding that people have bad days
• Honouring one’s personal limitations and boundaries
• Affirming unique contributions by offering verbal praise, rewards, & bonuses
• Doing what they say they would do
• Trusting people to help
• Celebrating personal and social successes with authenticity
• Engaging fairly in tasks designed for groups
• Being honest about setbacks and failures
• Completing assigned tasks
• Speaking up when someone is being mis-treated
• Helping those expressing a need for support

Character is typically assessed once you have made it through the online screening process, and you are meeting with people in a formal interview, or on a date. Many single people posting on dating apps express how “exhausting” this process has become for them. They have accepted however, that in order to really meet anyone in today’s society, you must have a dating profile on at least one reputable dating app. There are obvious dating app preferences and after a short while on them, people quickly discern whether this is the site where they might meet like-minded individuals or not. Some people use dating apps for sex and hook-ups, but most adults are actually interested in finding a more serious life-partner and soul-mate.

It might be a worthwhile exercise to reflect on the concept of “character” and what it means to you at home, in the workplace, and at play. Do you feel that your character is as important to your sense of self as your physical attributes? Do you think that the people closest to you stay close to you based on those all too familiar identifiers used to screen your suitability for school, job, or a date? Or, do you believe that perhaps people choose to be close to you because you are trustworthy, kind, helpful, loyal, honest, fun-loving, and compassionate?

The ways that people identify and speak about the self is of utmost importance. Your “I” is unique and as such open to terms that best identify your sense of self. An authentic sense of self is definitely greater than the sum of it’s individual parts or identifiers. In this sense, you likely feel that there is more to you than the terms used to identify your cultural, physical, religious, or ethic affiliations and gender. Character transcends your identity and is best understood as a qualifier rather than an identifier. Being with that individual impacted me positively because of the genuine care and concern spent trying to understand what I had in mind. Qualifiers might help guide you in your quest for candidates to date or to employ. This is especially true when you begin to describe your experience with the candidate using “I'” statements such as, “I found this person’s honesty really uplifting during our chat today”.

“The purpose revolution: How leaders create engagement and competitive advantage in an age of social good” is an excellent read for those of you in business. It provides several examples where leaders unpack what customers are really seeking, how brand loyalty develops, and why and how people decide to invest in you and your company. Much of what is written in this book speaks to human character, and the need for people to feel as though they are seen and respected during capitalistic exchanges. The traditional term might be “customer service”. When I call a number or ask a question in-person, will someone take the time to listen and assess what I need, and then help me or not? The Best Buy Blue Shirt strategy is one such example shared in the book where customer service is based on authenticity and care.

It seems that first world countries continue to progress and enjoy the liberties associated with greater wealth. As the gap between the rich and poor widens globally, governments aiming to protect the “social good” need to be more vigilant than ever before about listening to voices rising from marginal spaces. Perhaps, identity-informed character will help to lead the way.

The Purpose Revolution: How Leaders Create Engagement and Competitive Advantage in an Age of Social Good by John B. Izzo | Goodreads

Enjoy your day,

Lisa Romano-Dwyer BSc, MSW, PhD, RSW

Your personal sense of justice is typically experienced as a “feeling” that something is just not right. You probably find yourself ruminating about all the different ways that you did not deserve to be treated in one way or another. There are likely several times in your life where you may experience niggling sensations that situations or people are taking you for granted or mis-treating you. These are the times that you must listen to what you are feeling and to unpack your did I deserve that impulse more deeply.

Whenever you are stopped in your tracks at home, community, or in the workplace by experiences that make you wonder if you deserved that, your internal justice-compass has been activated or triggered. It is important to trust what you are feeling, even where you may or may not be mis-interpreting or mis-perceiving events. Your feelings will help you to further understand what about certain situations are rubbing you the wrong way.

Sometimes, these initial feelings are activated by core wounds that every person has deeply embedded in the unconscious mind. Core wounds are best understood as early childhood relational trauma inadvertently caused by parenting or child-minding practices that fail to meet the child’s emotional needs. In horrible cases, some early childhood trauma results from abusive parents or other adult caregivers who hurt children. But in most cases, core wounds are caused by normative parenting that is experienced by a child’s unmet emotional need as relational trauma – why aren’t you making me feel better?

It is only when you are solidly adulting that you begin to ask how do I make myself feel better in this situation. Where parents accept that they can only try to get reading their child’s emotional needs right, the better off everyone will be. Preverbal children communicate emotional and physical pain in the same way, and it is one of the most stressful experiences in life to settle an unhappy infant or preverbal child. There are many things that happen over the course of the day that trigger your inner child. So, accept that your sad and unhappy wounded inner child will be activated while adulting.

It is generally expected that adults can talk their way through problems. We ought to expect less from children according to their ages and ability to communicate effectively. Most children grow more sophisticated in problem solving skills as their language abilities develop. Some adults never truly harness this ability to solve problems verbally. You probably have memories of people at work or in your community who tantrum in response to problems instead of engaging in conversation about ways to move forward together. It is reasonable to view these reactions as childish and immature especially in professional workplace environments. As you learn to exercise your choices in life, your capacity to nurture and address your own inner child becomes easier. In fact, an excellent measure of maturity is this ability to meet your own emotional needs and to regulate your feelings independent of external factors that trigger childhood emotional injury.

Some of you are also wondering if the did I deserve that impulse signifies whether you are acting childish, sucky, or entitled in response to a problem situation at home or work. This is a good question to ask yourself and to explore honestly from your “all grown-up” adult standpoint. You may find that in fact your standards about how people behave are set too high. It is possible that the now did I deserve that signifies a faulty self-concept of being special or more deserving than others. This idea is also worth exploring further as you may struggle with accepting the inherent worth of all persons equally. Where you hold the view that you are more important or special than those in your workplace, you run the risk of internalizing decisions that ought not be taken personally.

On the other hand, an honest exploration of the did I deserve that impulse may reveal more troubling aspects about your relationships with people in your life. You might identify that certain people in your life dismiss humiliate or offend you on a regular basis. You might identify that some of the people in your world express a particularly triggering discourse that challenges your choice to work with them. There may be times where values in a work context simply no longer align with your personal points of view. Where this mis-alignment between shared values occurs in the workplace, the risk for workplace trauma increases. A risk of relationship trauma also increases in romantic relationships when you discover that your partner or spouse knowingly behaves in ways that trigger core emotional wounds related to lying and dishonesty, or abandonment and rejection. Discovering repetitive patterns of emotional abuse after honestly asking for a change in behaviour is toxic and often the main reason couples cannot repair problems.

The now, did I deserve that impulse becomes most powerful when it helps to discern if your workplace or romantic relationships are indeed healthy for you. It may take some time with a professional counsellor or psychotherapist for you to unpack what is really going on for you, and whether your feelings are related to historic pain or current problems. In my professional experience, everyday problems trigger old wounds that beckon for healing. Either way, your impulse to question the impact of people’s words, behaviours, and decisions on how you feel is deeply significant and as such, worthy of your attention.

Enjoy the journey of self-discovery and all that it has to offer!

Happy Easter

by Lisa Romano-Dwyer PhD, RSW

It seems fairly reasonable to me that following days of celebrating with family and friends over the holidays, most people think about changes to food and exercise when considering their New Year’s Resolutions. Truly, I am no different. My own relationship with food has been a complex one. As I have written in one of my earlier blog posts, I was a fat child. I am okay with using the derogatory term to describe my childhood body type as opposed to terms like mesomorphic, big-boned, heavy, or chubby. Reclaiming the use of the term fat for me helps to further understand the persistent inner-child perspectives about food, femininity, pleasure, and body size. For me, like many other women, there is an emotional entanglement between my female gender and food, especially in light of being regarded generally as a fat girl in my early childhood. It is true that I have always loved food. My Italian mother was a great cook and dinners were a sacred event in our family. Similar to other newcomer families in the sixties and seventies, we all had to gather each evening to eat dinner together – and we did.

My mother always served our dad’s meal first, and then each of her six children in birth order. As the youngest of six children, I was always served last. Of course, my mom’s serving practice had deep and lasting impacts on me and my relationship with food and eating. As a child, I learned that food, especially delicious wholesome food was worth waiting for! I would eat it wholeheartedly and with gusto and sadly, I would often over-eat indulging in second helpings. It was a wonderfully pleasurable experience for me. I loved food and never learned to feel ashamed about my food choices. All food was delicious and nothing was really forbidden in our home. In fact, my mom would give each of us a bedtime snack-pack full of chips, chocolates, and sweets depending on our preferences. Again, in her view, as long as you had eaten a healthy meal, it was okay to indulge in the not-so-healthy stuff. Other than spoiled or rotten food, nothing was off-limits.

As a young child, I was not attuned to the subtle sensation of feeling full, and so I only stopped eating when I was quite full. I ate hurriedly and ravenously, as though the next meal was never a guarantee. In truth, I would stuff myself with the delicious food at home, and my mom always seemed happy to have a daughter with such a healthy appetite. At that time, fat babies were viewed as healthy babies and baby-fat was something that people eventually outgrew. Any shame I learned about over-eating unfolded as a fat girl with five older normatively-sized siblings, and with friends, mostly thinner than me at school and in my community. It really did seem at the time that I was physically larger than most of my female friends. By ten years old, I weighed 140 pounds. Seven years post-menopausal, my weight continues to hover around the same.

At home, I was fortunate to learn that food rewards were not associated with merit. My mom did not change how she served food based on how we behaved. She also never withheld food as punishment. This may have been influenced by her cultural heritage or her own hunger-trauma experiences during the war. My mom simply stuck with her hierarchical practice of serving food based on age. Many cultures practice this way, where no one at the table begins to eat until the eldest is served and begins to eat first. She was also very particular about extending food and hospitality to our neighbours. We had the best birthday parties and holiday celebrations. She was intuitively inclusive and we often had neighbours and friends over to share in good food and company. So, I learned early that food is always to be shared. It was a very hard lesson for me to learn that some children at school were “not allowed” to share their food with their friends. Sharing food with others was joyful and celebratory. Even at this later stage in my life, I find it difficult to eat or drink anything in front of someone else without offering some of it to them. Not surprisingly, I have cultivated friendships with other women who are equally hospitable and celebratory with food opening their homes to host dinner parties or pot-lucks.

As a young child, it did not really matter that my siblings and school mates bullied me for being fat, because all of the wonderful tastes of food outweighed (no pun intended) any harm caused by hurtful and mean words. Again, I am now more aware of the impact of this meanspirited bullying on my sense of self today, but in those early years, I ate unreservedly. As I grew into my own womanhood, my relationship with food evolved. I continued to perceive myself as larger (and I was) than most of my peers until puberty, when my feminine attributes became more obvious somewhat bypassing an adolescent stage. Where many of my female friends were still girlish before the age of twenty, I had long felt physically like a grown woman. Many of my friends of European and Mediterranean descent experienced the same. My eating habits during my adolescence and young adulthood were more scientifically informed. I ate for health and did begin to restrict some of the less healthy foods and to move more. Of course, I continued to eat for pleasure as well. I had already established a real enjoyment of eating, and so I did enjoy eating from the Canadian Food Guide as well.

As a psychotherapist, I prefer to frame a woman’s relationship with food developmentally and longitudinally. Neuropsychiatrist, Louann Brizendine describes the female hormonal trajectory in her book, The Upgrade as occurring in three main phases over the course of a lifetime. She provides the scientific support to show the connection between female hormones and health. Brizendine argues that a woman’s transformation of sex hormones occurs over several years and impacts all areas of the body and mind. In the first phase during Adolescence, the hormonal storming brings about so many changes that help to understand emotional and behavioural changes described in Mary Pipher’s important 1994 publication, Reviving Ophelia, which chronicles the increased pressures on adolescent females to restrict themselves in all areas of life. In Pipher’s view, this restriction too often leads to a girl’s total loss of voice, character, and vitality seen in her earlier years. Author, Sarah Ockwell-Smith recreates space for girls to be compliant, helpful, gentle, and loving. She has created a series of gentle parenting resources based on sound attachment-based theories that debunk otherwise pathologized views of the good girl syndrome beginning in early childhood. In her view, behavioural compliance results from attachment-parenting where household routines are predictable, structured, safe, nurturing, loving, and clear.

The argument that a good girl or perfect girl syndrome is created in response to social pressures is a real one for many women. Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 publication, The Second Sex introduced the idea that female-disadvantage was for the most part caused by biological differences, especially as they related to females being smaller and physically weaker than males. In her simple yet original version of feminism, de Beauvoir explained that a woman’s power in her time emerged from the possibility of saying “no” to the advancements of males who could overpower women with ease. This notion of the good or perfect girl always-already agreeable and yes-oriented characterized as vulnerable to men may in fact have its origins in the earliest forms of feminism. A good and perfect girl would not have the power to say “no”, and as such, it is important that she be parented to resist and defy. As times have changed and men have grown increasingly educated, sensitive, dignified, and sensible to the rights of women, this characterization of vulnerable good or perfect girls feels outdated to me. In the face of choice today, does a good or perfect girl have the power to say yes or no as she sees fit, and will her decision be respected by the men in her life?

Although the embodiment of the perfect female is traditionally thin in North America, most women report feeling at their best when they carry around less body fat. When my youngest son was six years old, I decided that the extra forty-five pounds that I had been carrying around was no longer related to my pregnancy with him. It was easy to deceive myself in believing that I weighed 165 pounds, when in fact I was closer to 190 pounds. At this point, I was in my late thirties, and looking back, I felt physically very strong and needed to be as a working-mom. Yet, my inner fat girl did not appreciate the reality of being close to 70 pounds over the then standard weight for women my own age.

So, I decided to follow in my good mother’s footsteps, and I joined Weight Watchers. Unlike my mom however, I decided that my weight loss program would be an opportunity to learn more about myself and my emotions. I made the conscious decision to be gentle with myself and to learn more about my relationship with food. I focused on when I eat, how I eat, what I eat, with whom I eat, and how I feel during and after I eat. I learned to discern feelings that had nothing to do with my meal or the food I was eating, but that had been connected to my experience of eating. I learned to enjoy food without over-indulgement or restriction. As I released my emotional baggage with food, my tormented relationship with it also ended. It took me close to a year to slowly lose fifty pounds. My inner fat child is content with my new normal. I no longer feel any guilt or shame with food. I eat everything and no longer feel the need to stuff myself. I can recognize even the subtlest full feeling.

My post-menopausal body does seem to react, sometimes painfully when I eat something that disagrees with me. There are several new sensitivities to foods that I did not experience as a younger woman. Many of my female clients in their forties and fifties also report changes in their ability to digest food with ease. It seems that more and more women experience extreme bloating and pain as the first and second phases of hormonal changes happen to the aging female body. Brizendine argues that the gradual loss of estrogen and progesterone impacts all bodily systems in females until it finally stabilizes, which she argues is the third and final stage of menopause in later life.

So, my New Year’s resolutions in 2025 are much like my previous ones. I will purchase my first ever TO-All Access Pass that will allow me to participate in drop-in fitness classes with friends or on my own that suit me best. I will keep my LA Fitness membership as they offer court play. I hope to learn Tai Chi and to brush up on my long neglected guitar. I will continue to explore food reactions on my body and do my best to choose foods that make me feel healthy and well. I will support the people in my life who are ill and whose bodies are fighting for survival. I will continue to practice gratitude for all the goodness living in such a privileged city and country yields. Finally, I will continue to provide my best clinical-self to my amazing high achieving clients from various professional fields whose commitment to self-care and mental wellness in the workplace incentivizes me to continue as well.

Best wishes for a Happy & Healthy New Year in 2025 as you continue to realize your dreams.

Lisa Romano-Dwyer MSW, PhD, RSW