I love one-on-one Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work. I am forever indebted to my IFS therapist Nancy Morgan and to IFS founder Dick Schwartz, who I’ve been blessed to do some one-on-one work with from time to time. I highly recommend seeing an IFS therapist...
Pop psychology uses a lot of lingo to describe various imbalances in relationship: Overfunctioning/ Underfunctioning Narcissist/ Codependent Neurotypical/ Neurodivergent (ADHD, autism, etc) Caregiver/ Disabled care receiver Falsely empowered/ Disempowered One up/...
We had an agreement, my partner and I. I would sacrifice spending Thanksgiving with my family to be with him and our friends in Boston. In exchange, he would spend Christmas in California with my family. That Thanksgiving in 2023 was our first holiday together,...
There’s a moment in every healing journey when we meet the parts of ourselves that are armored up so tight, we can hardly breathe. Therapy is hard enough when we’re focusing on all the ways we’ve been victimized by the people who have hurt us. But it’ll knock the...
Ten years ago, when I first read Internal Family Systems, (IFS) founder Dick Schwartz’s book You Are The One You’ve Been Waiting For, it was a game changer for me. The premise of the book, which is about applying the principles of the IFS model to intimate...
Like many women, especially those of us who grew up in a religious home, I was indoctrinated at an early age to be a pleasing, compliant good girl who suppressed anger and practiced “unconditional love.” This meant I was supposed to have compassion for the people...
When it comes to healing, justice is big. Many trauma survivors struggle because their childhoods were so unjust, and then because history repeats itself, this often sets them up for relationships and jobs where the injustices play out again. And then there are the...
As I explained in my blog about IFS-informed Dating and Dating The Day Democracy Died, I learned a ton about myself and my own parts by going on about thirty first dates before I wound up with my current partner Jeffrey Rediger, who I met at a trauma conference we...