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...
Ruthless Lessons Part 1 Some of us relate to others through the eyes of young, innocent parts with a naïve, idealized, optimistic tendency to see the best in others, give them the benefit of the doubt, assume good intentions of others, and extend a great deal of...
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...
Like many women- and like many children of both genders who grew up in religious upbringings- I was raised to be a good, nice, accommodating, compliant, sweet girl who was pleasing to authority figures and didn’t cause any trouble for teachers, pastors, or my...
Right now, I’m sitting on the South Aegean Sea in Kos, Greece, where I was invited to help a group of German doctors renew their Hippocratic Oaths at the Asklepieion temple where Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, started a famous healing temple and his...