I was talking to a friend who gave me permission to share her story in my upcoming book Relationsick about how over-giving, fawning, and people pleasing to an extreme degree led to depletion, burnout, and cancer. I had shared a book with her about how to discover...
I’m new in town, so I’m trying to make new friends and I met someone today who had never heard of IFS. She was a longtime seeker with a tough past who had worked on herself for decades. She’d been in therapy here and there but she hadn’t tried any of the cutting...
You know the drill. You go to the person who hurt you. You say “When you did x, y, and z, I felt hurt, abandoned, neglected, tortured, betrayed, enraged, devastated, disappointed, misunderstood, invisible, [fill in your emotion.]” The other person either cuts you...
On Monday, August 11, we’ll be teaching our LOVE SCHOOL participants how to do peer to peer parts processing with Internal Family Systems, as a way to deepen your personal self-help practice of IFS, either on your own, with peer support, or between IFS therapy...
In Understanding Defensive Parts Through An IFS Lens, Part 1, we unpacked the various immature defenses that can get in the way of holding ourselves accountable when we’ve made a mistake or done something hurtful. These defenses are often used when trauma...
In intimate relationships, agreements are sacred. They are not just logistical understandings; they are expressions of mutual respect, shared values, and equal power. When two people come to an agreement, especially about something emotionally charged or...
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...
Let’s be honest. Trauma survivors don’t always behave well. Even if they’re trauma symptom is people-pleasing niceness, that usually rides shotgun with passive aggressive resentment and punishing behaviors that result from poor boundaries and over-giving. But...