If you’re anything like me, you may have been burned far too many times because you trusted people who were untrustworthy and felt blindsided when you realized your discernment failed to pick up on the red flags. In my internal family system, those parts in me are...
I’m reading a great book about boundaries, Anne Katherine’s Where To Draw The Line, with my partner Jeff. The whole book is great, but I just wanted to share with you all some of the Cliff Notes of what I really appreciated, which is a check list of helpful “Do’s”...
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...
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...
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...