Lately, I’ve heard a lot of relatively privileged people expressing distress about the way diverse groups of people behave together since the world fundamentally changed in 2020. Yes, it’s harder and there’s more pressure to be “PC,” which is challenging, because...
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...
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...
When I left the church at 18, and then again when I began pulling back from New Age spirituality once I learned about spiritual bypassing and its antidote, Internal Family Systems (IFS), I struggled with what I believed in. Did I believe there was a...