Lisa Olivera

Identify, understand, and reframe your life story with this essential guide for self-acceptance from Lisa Olivera, a therapist, writer, and creator of a wildly popular Instagram account. When Lisa Olivera was just a few hours old, her birth mother abandoned her behind a rock near Muir Woods in Northern California. She was found and later adopted. Growing up, Lisa knew she was adopted and later learned she was abandoned. Like with many adopted children, this led to questions. Including this big one: why did her mother leave her behind? Without answers, Lisa came up with her own: something must be wrong with her. Lisa came to believe she was not enough. This story wasn’t true, but it made sense of a confusing experience. It allowed her to move forward. It felt like the only way. Until, with the help of a therapist, Lisa began to tell herself a better story. And now, a therapist herself, she shows you how you can too. In Already Enough, Lisa gets honest about our stories and how they affect us—often more than we realize. She guides us through the brave work of reframing our stories so we can remember that we are already enough, just as we are. This book is about finally freeing ourselves from the constraints of the past by integrating all parts of who we were, who we are, and who we want to be—the messy and the beautiful—to live a more whole and more meaningful life.

Embracing Who You've Been, Who You Are, and Who You're Becoming

Already Enough

'Beautiful, meditative, touching and hopeful' Arianna HuffingtonHave you ever told yourself that you don't belong, or that you aren't worthy or enough, exactly as you are? It's time to rewrite your story.In Already Enough, therapist Lisa Olivera explores how our 'stories' affect us - the stories we tell ourselves about the person we are because of the things that have happened to us or the way people have treated us - often a lot more than we realise. Drawing on her own extraordinary experience as an adopted child, abandoned by her mother in California woods just hours after birth, she combines memoir with therapeutic exercises to help us reframe the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. For young people finding their way in life, professionals who doubt their own abilities and parents who struggle to love themselves as much as their families, Already Enough is a manual to healing and self-love. Urging us to believe that we are already enough, just as we are, this is a tender, hopeful and inspiring reminder that we are the authors of our own stories, deserving of a more nourishing life.

A Path to Self-Acceptance

Psychotherapist and author of Already Enough, Lisa Olivera blends her own personal experience of living with depression with therapeutic wisdom in a moving exploration of the emotional pain each of us lives with to offer readers guidance on holding the ache alongside the beauty. Emotional pain, of all kinds and magnitudes, is part of life. We’ll never be able to find ourselves free of it; no meditation or amount of therapy will cure us of the harder parts of being alive. The practice of turning toward the ache with care—reverence, even—might be one of the most meaningful gifts we can give ourselves. It might even save us. Lisa Olivera has confronted this reality for years as a therapist, weaving her exploration of it throughout her popular newsletter, Human Stuff. She asks questions like, how do we confront and tend to the painful parts of being human without letting that pain entirely overtake us? How do we find joy even when depression visits, even when we lose someone we love, even when the hurt of the world is ever-present? How do we cultivate aliveness in the midst? When the Ache Remains explores these questions for readers in a tender and wise exploration of how ache shapes life, how we can alchemize our pain into medicine, and how presence is accessible even in the midst of difficulty. Blending deeply personal narrative, humanistic psychology, lessons from nature, words of nourishment, and her naturally poetic undertone, Lisa invites readers on a journey alongside her as she explores the impact of depression and the process of learning to tend to it, and all of our aches, in more open, integrative, and loving ways.

Lessons on Tending to the Unfixable and Finding Beauty Anyway

When the Ache Remains

'Beautiful, meditative, touching and hopeful' Arianna Huffington Have you ever told yourself that you don't belong, or that you aren't worthy or enough, exactly as you are? It's time to rewrite your story. In Already Enough, therapist Lisa Olivera explores how our 'stories' affect us - the stories we tell ourselves about the person we are because of the things that have happened to us or the way people have treated us - often a lot more than we realise. Drawing on her own extraordinary experience as an adopted child, abandoned by her mother in California woods just hours after birth, she combines memoir with therapeutic exercises to help us reframe the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. For young people finding their way in life, professionals who doubt their own abilities and parents who struggle to love themselves as much as their families, Already Enough is a manual to healing and self-love. Urging us to believe that we are already enough, just as we are, this is a tender, hopeful and inspiring reminder that we are the authors of our own stories, deserving of a more nourishing life.

Lisa Olivera

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