C’est Moi:

Lisa Timberlake LCSW
Jun 8
3 min read

The Mistflower Method

I have imposter syndrome at times, I think most of us do, but I’m tired of letting it author my life. When I author my own life things change, and the Mistflower Method is the change I can offer right here right now, intros time where offering kindness is bravery and anything less feels antithetical to my values.

Digital watercolor of a stem of blue mistflowers

So Who The Hell am I?

(and why am I the right person to talk about this now?)

This is something I grew up watching at my mothers side. She was a lawyer for the impoverished elderly members of the community I grew up in, and all of my life she helped people facing guardianships. My childhood was filled with senior centers and nursing homes.

The consistent was my mother and her fight for compassionate care for those she represented. When my life path took me to social work it made sense that I began with a guardianship agency. I saw first hand the ways dementia can ravage a family, causing mistrust, paranoia, fear, and hostility; and that’s just in the elder!

Digital watercolor of a monarch butterfly

The pain, sadness, and grief that their families feel is heart breaking. In several cases as a guardian, I couldn’t reverse the changes dementia made, but I could help my clients and their families reforge trust and love for each other.

My next position was at an Adult Day Center. This time my clients were often young adults, and their families present and caring were their parents, and in some cases siblings, who love their families members deeply. They found ways to get supports from the system, and I helped them navigate, sometimes offering emotional support that their lives weren’t quite going the way they had anticipated.

During that period a dear friend experienced a tragedy. Her ex-husband had a TBI, and they shared children. We navigated that together, and I witnessed the hardships, and gave space to process.

When I left that role, I became a hospice social worker. The job was different but the love was still there, still present, and still seeing day to day changes as health declines, advancing dementia and physical limitations changed the way love was felt and delivered.

Where I grew up, food was love. When someone stopped eating, for a variety of reasons, the families worried that the patient wouldn’t know they were loved. Stomach cancer doesn’t care that soup is love, stomach cancer took that place, dementia took the part of the brain that remembers to be hungry, chronic pain has taken hunger, or Parkinson's took the muscle control to eat. The actions of day to day love changed, but the years spent together, the joys and hardships shared, they didn’t go away.

It was my role to help my patients and their families still connect, and change how that loved showed.

Now I’m a therapist. My population has changed, but partners, parents and children still affect people and I see how loving someone deeply and intensely can be difficult. Especially when there is a diagnosis riding shotgun with your love.

So the core question remains.

How do I love my person, how do I stay soft and vulnerable?

when they change,

when they forget,

when it hurts and I feel so alone?

What to do when you want to stay?

This is not for an abusive relationship. So, I do screen heavily for it. I cannot use these tools to excuse an abusive situation. While I can’t force someone to leave an abusive relationship I recommend speaking with a therapist if you feel you are in an abusive relationship.

So after more than a decade of watching love change, and the world forcing everyone to toughen up, it’s time to broaden my scope a bit more, adapt again, and move into coaching those who want to stay.

It’s going to feel different for every one of you reading this, and it should, it’s your love story. I’m here to make space, help you give a name to it, and share the things I’ve learned as I’ve watched others love and loved myself.