It’s not your fault if nobody ever taught you how to be in a healthy relationship. If you grew up in a house with at least one selfabsorbed narcissistic parent who didn’t model a healthy, balanced relationship for you. Or even worse, if one of your caregivers was a...
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...
When I embarked upon my online dating experiment in January 2021 and went on about thirty first dates, I took advantage of the opportunity to write about all my dates and notice which parts of me showed up on each date. I thought I had a pretty stable sense of self...
Before the pandemic, I’d been intentionally single because I was in a phase of trauma healing recovery that needed me to focus on my own needs and healing. My inclination towards codependent love addiction and making someone else’s needs matter more than my own was...
Kids can grow up with developmental wounds that put them on one end of the unhealthy entitlement spectrum or the other. On one end, kids grow up too entitled. They feel entitled to things they’re not actually entitled to, and this can put them at risk of...
As my partner Jeff Rediger and I just finished writing about in our book Relationsick, compassion might not seem like a health issue, but it’s intimately tied to the health of the body. It turns out that when our bodies act up, the body is a trailhead we are...
If you’re like most people I know, you either fantasize about being rescued- or you identify with being the rescuer. If you look at the history of movies, in traditional heteronormative gender dynamics, the rescuer is the heroic man, rescuing the...
I was recently listening to one of my favorite podcasts, couples therapist Esther Perel’s Where Shall We Begin. In this episode, the woman who is co-parenting with a man is complaining because she feels like she’s carrying far more than her fair share of the...