Sean's Blog

This past weekend I went to see Three Days Grace and Three Doors Down in concert in Hinckley, MN with my Dad and two brothers.  First off, it was a fricken' amazing show!  But, a lot of stuff came up for me there that I'm trying to process now. When Three Days Grace came out the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.  The lights were all out, and a speech from the movie Charlie Chaplin's 'The Dictator'  was on in the background: We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want.  Our  knowledge  has made us  cynical . Our cleverness,  hard and unkind . We  think  too much and  feel  too little.  More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need  kindness  and gentleness.  Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine  hearts ! You are not machines! when the the speech got to t...

For most of my life I had been able to control my fear.  Then one day, seemingly out of the blue, I had my first panic attack.  For those who haven't had one, they can best be described by the phrase 'you think you are going to die'.  If it persists for long enough, you start to think death might be a preferable alternative in order to free yourself from the agony of being in a panic about it. Then there was a paradigm shift that loosened the panic attack's stronghold.  The book 'Don't Panic' (funny name, right?) called out these panic attacks for what they were -- fear of being afraid.  When you realize that the best way to deal with it is to try and let the fear be present, the panic loses a lot of its power. But why was I so afraid in the first place?  That's where counseling came in.  My counselor, Mark LaFluer, opened my eyes to a hidden world when I first came in to see him.  After hearing a brief synopsis of my story, he retorted with...