I love words. I love reading them, I love writing them. So when SB-CAMFT President Kathleen Barry invited me to be the Santa Barbara Therapy News editor, it did not take me long to give her a resounding YES! It was not a hard decision – before becoming a psychotherapist, I spent six years as a freelance writer and editor. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to combine my passion for words with my interest in psyche.

Each month in this column I will present a different word for you to get to know and contemplate. It may not be a new word to you, but I hope to bring new meaning and depth to common words. In honor of the New Year and my choice to become the newsletter editor, the word for this month is decide. We face many choice points each day, some more significant than others, but we rarely think about what it really means to decide.

The prefix de of the word decide means "off," and cide comes from the Latin c_dere, which means "to cut" or "to kill" (as in suicide, homicide, pesticide, etc.) Each decision we make is a choice to cut off or kill off other possibilities. Such a powerful word! No wonder so many people have a hard time making decisions. Who wants to be a killer?

The meaning of the word decide became painfully clear to me through a dream I had several years ago. I was single at the time, at home by myself on a Saturday night. I felt both lonely and ashamed at having to spend yet another Saturday night at home alone. In a flash, I made an important decision. I realized that my loneliness was a genuine feeling that I could accept and host. My shame was another story – it was the result of harsh self-judgment and strong ideas about how my life should be. I decided in that moment to relinquish my shame. It was not serving me.

That night I had a dream that I will never forget. In the dream, I saw two women sitting next to each other, one brunette, one blond (perhaps representing loneliness and shame, respectively). I heard a loud explosion and saw that the blond woman had been killed with a gun shot to the head. I awoke with a start, my heart racing and my anxiety piqued.

I believe that my dream was about my decision to be done with, or kill off, shame (at least in that instance). It was a decision that I think was in my own best interest, but its impact was still quite powerful – it felt like killing off part of myself. As Irvin Yalom (1980, p. 318) says, "For every yes there must be a no. To decide one thing always means to relinquish something else. As one therapist commented to an indecisive patient, 'Decisions are very expensive, they cost you everything else.'"

In every decision we make, we both kill off and bring to life possibilities. Who knew that life and death were intertwined in every decision we make? What decisions will you maker 2009?

Reference: Yalom, I. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. Basic Books.

Jennifer Wohl is an MFT in Santa Barbara. She has a private practice and works part time as bereavement counselor at Hospice of Santa Barbara. She can be reached at jenwohl@cox.net.