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/...
Everyone deserves to be loved, especially the people who didn’t get love growing up. We all deserve companionship, affection, attention, appreciation, nurturing care, safe touch, comfort, and someone to have fun with. All human beings deserve to feel special,...
For many of us on a healing journey or a spiritual path, the pursuit of peace, love, and transcendence has been both a refuge and a compass. Practices like meditation, prayer, yoga, reading spiritual books, going to spiritual retreats, or chanting mantras or...
Like almost everyone else I know, I loved Liz Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. I read it right after I blew up my own life by quitting my stable job as a doctor to pursue an unknown life of God knows what, and I wanted to be Liz Gilbert. I hadn’t published any books of...
In 2019 at the IFS conference in Denver where I taught a workshop with Dick Schwartz about using IFS for treatment of medical conditions, I saw a keynote presentation by Hailan Guo, MD, PhD, who was described to me as “The Oprah of China.” She’s a medical doctor...
In Part 1 of this series, we explored how, to use IFS language, our “parts” can trick us into thinking we’re being guided by intuition or spirit, when really, our parts have an agenda they’re trying to disguise. I promised to offer some guidance on discerning the...
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...