In a recent post, I told a very personal story about my one painful experience with polyamory and how I mistook “love bombing” for actual love in a narcissistic abuse situation. After writing it over the holiday weekend and reading it to my co-teacher in our Memoir...
Some of what I thought I witnessed and experienced during ten years of researching my book Sacred Medicine was so out there, “woo,” and mysterious- and some of the healers I worked with turned out to be so corrupt- that I wound up cutting huge swaths of my original...
Since 2016, I’ve been teaching memoir writing as a therapeutic process for healing trauma and improving disease outcomes- “Memoir As Medicine,” as my first writing teacher Nancy Aronie calls it. Morning pages or extemporaneous journal writing can be therapeutic...
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series of “ruthless lessons” in understanding the playbook of how perpetrators of narcissistic abuse operate and how survivors can heal, I shared notes I’ve been taking from the podcast Navigating Narcissism with Dr. Ramini. I’ve been...
My therapist gave me “ruthless lessons” as part of my treatment, because I was so naïve, lacked street smarts, and couldn’t spot a cunning, manipulative, exploitative individual because my rose colored glasses and trauma-informed compassion gave everyone the...
Ruthless Lessons Part 1 Some of us relate to others through the eyes of young, innocent parts with a naïve, idealized, optimistic tendency to see the best in others, give them the benefit of the doubt, assume good intentions of others, and extend a great deal of...
We Can’t Protect Ourselves Without Understanding Trust Since I’m preparing curriculum for my upcoming class Becoming Unf*ckwithable, I was noodling what it actually takes to be both vulnerable and protected from those who might wish to mess with us- and any time I...
In response to a post about why we would be wise to be wary of spiritual showoffs, a reader, Matthew commented: “I've been asked recently what I do to look after my spiritual needs. My knee-jerk reaction was to flounder around and justify some of my alone time as a...