You have been trained into believing that anything that goes wrong in your abusive relationship is solely your fault. And you have been trained out of feeling joy.It is terribly hard to let go of something in which you have invested so much for so long. Because you think that your investment and you...

Abused women try desperately, excessively, hard to be lovable. We will let down boundaries, tolerate bad behaviours, ignore the writing on the wall, silence our intuition… You name it, we have all done it. And it doesn’t work. It may be less trouble in the short run, but it definitely compounds ...

“Why Men Love Bitches� This week I’ve been reading Sherry Argov’s ground-breaking book “Why Men Love Bitches�. Briefly, Argov divides women up into two categories: the nice girls and the bitches. The nice girls are the ones who fall over themselves to make a man happy. The bitches focus ...

It’s that time of year again, the time of year when, so the hype goes, everything in your life should be rosy. If your life is not rosy, it can be especially hard to have to admit the failure of a relationship in which you invested so much....

As the great house move draws ever closer, allegedly, I am constantly reminded of all the ways in which dogs are superior to their humans.  Does Sharon obsess about sorting out the mail and the telephones? I don’t think so. Does Sharon care about which furniture stays and which furn...

It's rare that the Dowager Duchess lets Life-Made-Simple write a post, without adding her own unique contribution - or, more correctly, taking over.  But today I got lucky on two counts: Sharon didn't get to see the film.  Unlike Venice, people are so sniffy about allowing dogs in public p...

Sharon Shih Tsu, she of the petite retrousse black nose and huge brown eyes is becoming increasingly Zen.  Just a few brief years ago she would take matters into her own velvet paw and show her humans how things should be done.  These days she trusts, rightly, that in times of trouble or c...

This morning the postman rang our doorbell with patent enthusiasm.  Why?  Because of a small, brown, hand addressed Jiffy bag from www.couturepaws.co.uk.  Even Sharon bestirred herself willingly from her bed.  The  fabled pink feather boa trimmed jumper had arrived.  We...

Life has not been easy chez Kaszina over the past couple of days. Sharon, usually the most even-tempered of canine gurus, has been on her high horse – so to speak.  Why? Unkind media coverage of course. Even a Shih Tsu Dowager Duchess has her Achilles paw and the photo that acc...