Peace and Perspective Counseling, LLC

06/11/2026

Few are able to plan for what the end of a career brings.

06/06/2026

She was seven years old the first time she picked up a guitar.
Not in a music school. Not with a teacher. On a street corner in San Antonio, Texas, with a crowd of strangers tossing pennies at her feet while her family played beside her. That was Lydia Mendoza's classroom. That was her stage.
Her family had crossed the US-Mexico border carrying almost nothing — forced to migrate, forced to adapt, forced to perform just to pay rent. Her mother taught her to read at home because there was no school that would take them in consistently. The railroad moved them. The seasons moved them. Survival moved them.
But music? Music stayed.
By the time Lydia was 19, she walked into a recording session for Bluebird Records in 1934 with a song whose words she had memorized from a chewing gum wrapper she had found as a child. That song was Mal Hombre — "Bad Man" — a raw, unflinching account of betrayal told entirely from a woman's point of view.
It was unlike anything on the radio.
Women were not supposed to sing like that. Not in that era. Not in that industry. Spanish-language artists were underpaid and underestimated. Female performers were treated as novelties — celebrated briefly, then forgotten. Lydia was expected to follow that same path.
She did not.
Mal Hombre spread without a marketing campaign, without a label pushing it, without industry machinery behind it. It spread because women heard themselves in it. They heard their dignity. Their pain. Their refusal to be silent. The song traveled from kitchen to kitchen, from labor camp to labor camp, carried by the very people the music industry had decided did not matter.
For decades, Lydia followed her audience wherever they gathered — migrant camps, small town theaters, venues where segregation still drew lines between people. She traveled without guarantees, without security, often without comfort. Fame brought her responsibility, not luxury.
She kept singing anyway.
She called herself "La Cancionera de Los Pobres" — The Singer of The Poor — and she meant it. Every song she performed was a document. Every concert was an act of preservation. She carried the interior lives of women who had never been written about, recorded, or celebrated — and she made sure their stories survived. Tejano Nation
Her performance career became one of the longest in American music history, spanning from the 1920s to the 1980s, when a stroke finally ended her time on stage. Only then did the formal honors arrive — National Heritage Fellow, Tejano Music Hall of Fame, recognition from the Smithsonian. LOC
By then, her voice was already living in every artist who came after her.
She did not sing to be remembered.
She sang so that women like her — poor, displaced, overlooked — would never be forgotten.
And because she refused silence, an entire culture survived with its voice still intact.

05/18/2026

If this cartoon is relatable, then the way you learned to set boundaries was likely responsive and adaptive.

That means the ways you had to get your needs met MADE SENSE inside of the environment you found yourself in.

As in, it’s not your fault. It’s important not to blame ourselves for the ways in which survival happened.

And yet…

The way you had to adapt to survive … probably isn’t helping you now. ❤️‍🩹

We need to be able to set healthy boundaries in our adult lives.

But most compassionate people struggle with boundaries because we still have old survival strategies (like keeping-the-people-pleased) running the show.

It’s time to change that.

And you can.

❤️
Molly
Therapist-turned-boundaries-guide

Practical help now:
Https://boundaried.com/101

04/26/2026

Healing is realizing that each new day is a step forward toward recovery. And even when we falter and we fall, as long as we don’t stop, we’re making progress on this journey.

04/26/2026

04/07/2026

Psychological health has giant impacts on physical health, but sometimes we’re not making the connection between what we’re being “taught” about aesthetics daily and how it contradicts true health and wellness.

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/hourglass-syndrome-why-you-should-stop-sucking-in-your-stomach?fbclid=IwRlRTSARCNu1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEe3w5OBxv38ln-6mLPFs9KUef7nQq33zQHCACDvfXtTTjW6m-H8J5EnTkGaJc_aem_gC_UEV22e1qFt16IwOTMjQ

Have you ever felt a little bit self-conscious about your stomach and tried to “suck it in” to appear thinner? But “stomach gripping,” as it’s called, can lead to health concerns.

04/05/2026

Do you feel a longing to be known that is not being met? If so, you are not alone, Arthur Brooks wrote in 2024: More than half of U.S. adults said in a 2018 poll that they always or sometimes felt that “no one knows them well.” But this longing to be known, Brooks says, often stems from the inattention we pay to those around us. https://theatln.tc/mQM6aLjP

The asymmetry between wanting to know others and being known by them is also known as “Poe syndrome,” a name attributed to the poet Edgar Allan Poe, who frequently wrote about his loneliness—yet, some evidence suggests, lacked interest in others. “Relationships require reciprocity,” Brooks explains. “If I don’t do the work to know you deeply, a relationship doesn’t form in which you will know me.” And Poe syndrome can be a vicious cycle: It gets worse when people are lonely to begin with.

Feeling isolated and lonely can make people more self-focused and less interested in others. But research suggests that a combination of active listening and mindfulness is central to improving the quality of relationships. To do so, there’s a simple solution: Proactively get to know people. “This trait does not come naturally to many of us,” Brooks writes, but one place to start is to be “persistently curious about others, ask questions, and listen to the answers.”

“I ask people a lot of questions about their life and their happiness. Invariably, what they tell me only brings up more things I want answers to,” Brooks continues. “By showing genuine curiosity about a person in this way, you might get a second date, repair a frayed marriage, or start a good friendship. You will also be on your way to being truly known yourself.”

Read more tips on how to foster meaningful conversations: https://theatln.tc/mQM6aLjP

03/28/2026

Telling a trauma survivor who has been functionally on their own since they were a kid that they "have" to "reach out"' for "relational healing" disrespects & misunderstands their wound.

The only "have to" in trauma recovery is, we have to find a recovery path that works for us.

02/25/2026

We witness and hold so much grief ♥️💔

02/07/2026

Someone’s past history is not yours to be available for when it costs you peace.

Your time is valuable so to discount it will teach others that your time is accessible.

Stop making excuses for people who won’t leave victim mentality.