the-other-side-of-wellness

Why Do I Defend Someone Who Hurts Me? Understanding Trauma Bonds

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:46:35 GMT

I was reflecting on the relationship I have with my older sister. Well, we don’t have much of a relationship today. Growing up, she was my very first trauma bond. Verbally, she expressed so much love and care, and at the same time, I experienced so much hate at her hands. I loved her. I was loyal to her. I was confused.

That’s essentially at the core of a trauma bond. Confusion. And if the trauma bond itself isn’t confusing enough, they can be found everywhere: in churches, families, and especially in love, making them so difficult to detect.

When you’ve grown up in a family where you were trauma bonded, then possibly a church or another institution where trauma bonding runs rampant, the dynamic becomes commonplace. In fact, it feels like home, a smelly one. One where visitors detect it, but the people who live there are oblivious. Just like someone who’s invited you into an offensive home, the realization that you’ve been trauma bonding can produce shame. In both situations it’s easy to overlook. Many people do. There’s nothing to do about the past, and taking responsibility for the future is key. But first, the issue at hand.

At worst, a smelly home is offensive. But trauma bonds? They hurt. And that pain can go unnoticed for a while. Often, the pain of a trauma bond is first perceived by recognizing its impact on another. In churches, it looks like a pastor or authority figure hurting others while the congregation defends them. Eventually, the protection emboldens more abuse, and the hurt spreads. Some walk away, others continue to endure it because they hold onto the good and reject the bad even though it hurts. That’s the bond at work. In a family, a child defends the parent who hurts the other parent. They don’t understand the dynamic because the abusive parent is kind to them. Eventually as they grow, they are directly targeted and abused. In spite of the pain they feel, they hold on, because it “isn’t that bad”. The child knows two people, one who’s kind, and one who’s abusive. They want to believe the former is the “real them”, while they work to appease the latter, and it grows more intense.

Early experiences like these create the mindset that causes you to hope for the best while experiencing the worst instead of walking away. It’s the setup for leaning into love that hurts, until it hurts so much that you eventually have no choice but to walk away. It’s a part of the relational blueprint you developed early that dictates love is supposed to hurt, at least a little; and when you tolerate a little hurt, you will tolerate a lot of it.

When the warning signs of a trauma bond are visible to others, the people closest to you can see it; even those who can’t see it in their own relationships. They may not know what it’s called, but they can detect its impact, either now or in the future. If they intervene (and it’s best that they do), their expressions of concern can land as a threat to one of our most basic needs, love. It can also reinforce shame due to the exposure of the truth that you’ve been explaining away or hiding from yourself to make love work. Ultimately, it can lead to isolation and even more pain.

For many people, instead of taking the intervention into consideration, they reject it, and often reject the people who love them most. The presence of pain, now or in the future, isn’t a big enough threat because it aligns with what you’ve come to believe love is. So, of course you’ll chase the trauma bond, because this is what “love” has always looked like. Love, or the potential for love, can be blinding to the reality of pain, especially if you’re starting with an unhealthy blueprint. The key is to take an honest look at the blueprint to determine how you got here, and to re-work it so it leads you to real love, not love as you’ve known it, but the love you desperately desire.

I know that part of you may be pushing back, because you’ve already tried doing things differently, and it didn’t work. Journaling, listening to podcasts, and even taking the steps to fix your approach or your appearance. None of these are wrong; they are incomplete. You can’t attract something new from an old mindset. What you haven’t yet tried is doing the actual work of healing: exploring the dynamics that led you here, embracing thoughts of new possibilities, and becoming the person who no longer tolerates unhealthy dynamics so she has room for healthy ones. That’s the work.

If you’re ready to do the work, The Restoration Group is where it happens. You learn the signs of abuse, and more importantly you’ll learn to detect it, to feel it in your body, to trust yourself. You’ll explore the difficulties of your attachment style and relationship dynamics and rework them to healthier ways of relating. The most important work we do is restoring the relationship with yourself, because if you don’t love you, you’ll reject anyone who does. Join this powerful group of women as they become the women they never imagined they could be.

The next cohort begins this Thursday, August 13 ^th . After that, there’s only one more opportunity to do this work for the rest of the year. Register now.

Why You Stopped Trusting Yourself in a Toxic Relationship (And How to Get It Back)

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 23:55:22 GMT

You’ve ended another toxic relationship. Looking back, you realize there were red flags that you saw and ignored. Now you’re wondering, “Why don’t I trust myself?” You’ve tried to figure out where you’ve gone wrong, and you’ve come to find that you’re successful in many areas of your life, except in love. As a result, you believe that self-trust lives on a spectrum, and that in some domains of your life you trust yourself wholeheartedly, while you struggle in others. But what if you actually don’t trust yourself at all? What if your trust has been placed outside of yourself all along? Let me explain.

We live in a society that rewards conformity over difference, and for many of us our households followed suit. When we came into the world, we had to place our trust with others. We trusted our parents and caretakers to do right by us: to feed, clothe, and emotionally nurture us. When we were cute, cuddly, and without speech, they did all three instinctively without thought. The moment our differences began to emerge, it presented a challenge: to continue to nurture or to impose conformity. Instinctively, they chose the latter. For example, when a small child utters the words ‘no’ the typical caretaker views this as defiance that must be disciplined away instead of individuality that must be nurtured. One builds self-trust, the other strips it away. You, like many others, probably grew up in an environment that stripped it away.

You colored. It needed to be in the lines. You chose mismatched clothes. You had to change. You might have even had objections to certain foods, but you had to eat everything on your plate. Experiences like these were foundational to you not being able to trust yourself. They taught you your thoughts, expression, and choices could not be your own. Naturally, you learned to ignore yourself while looking to those you relied on most for approval; not superficial approval, but you saw this as a means of survival, and it’s been that way ever since.

With your inner world shaped around them, instead of being formed around that little one who naturally embodied the spirit of ‘no’, you leaned into behaviors that were guided by your need for approval. You likely performed well in school, sports, or some other talent. You learned to place value in the areas where you were celebrated. You prioritized the thoughts and opinions of others over your own. In many ways, this brought success. You did well, and it’s the reason for your achievements today. Where it fell short is that it never handed you the opportunity to think, feel, and behave independently, even when others didn’t agree. Ultimately, you learned to only trust yourself when it met the approval of others versus being able to trust yourself in spite of others. A strategy that worked beautifully back then, but has left you with holes that you can’t seem to fill today.

You work hard, and maybe even enjoy the finer things in life, but ultimately, you’re unfulfilled. At work, your value is acknowledged, but not compensated. With family, you feel loved and accepted, but not authentic. And in love, you give all you’ve got, and find yourself circling back to pain. All of these dynamics are frustrating at best, but in love, it’s intolerable. Work provides. Family is intact. But love, it’s nowhere to be found. Let’s get into the why.

At work, conformity is rewarded with a paycheck that also reinforces constraints that you can feel, but tolerate. With family, you know exactly which role you need to occupy to receive whatever benefit you can get. You may not like it, but it’s the way it’s always been. In love, you give, you perform, and you come up short every time. There’s the temporary comfort of a relationship, but ultimately the cycle repeats itself. You show up for love; they do you wrong. You’ve tried to address it by giving more, meeting demands, and changing yourself as you have in the other areas of your life. Here, however, the strategy doesn’t work, and this is why. True love is never rewarded by performance; it’s rewarded by authenticity.

Love cannot exist without authenticity. Loving another requires that you be honest with yourself while determining if the person you’re considering is someone you can truly love. Being loved also requires you to be honest with yourself to show up as the real you and not the version that you believe others want. This level of honesty requires you to let go of control. Until now you’ve played it small and leaned into performance in an effort to control outcomes. You wanted them to love you. It hasn’t worked. You didn’t take a beat to consider if they were even worthy of loving you, nor do you know the person you’re presenting to be loved. When you release the outcome and trust that what’s for you will come to you, you’ve created the foundation from which to build self-trust.

Letting go of outcomes is essentially letting go of others; and when you do, you free yourself to grab ahold of the person who matters most, you. You reclaim the responsibility to nurture the little person who once said ‘no’. She wasn’t wrong. She was raw, she felt things, and she wanted to be heard. The same is true for you today. You feel things, you’ve wanted to say things, but you’ve ignored them and pushed them away, for fear that you wouldn’t be accepted. You’ve even felt things about people. You gave them a chance anyway only to find that you were right about them all along. You’ve ignored your boundaries and said ‘yes’ when you meant ‘no’ because performance is all you’ve known. Here’s the truth: you might not be accepted everywhere (and that’s okay because everywhere isn’t acceptable for you), but you will be accepted somewhere. When you embrace this, the real work begins.

The real work is reconnecting with everything that went dark as you were conformed instead of nurtured. Feeling your emotions instead of managing them. Trusting your gut instead of silencing it. Honoring your ‘no’ even when saying it threatens the outcome. This is the work of getting to the other side, and it’s the work we walk through together inside The Restoration Group.

You don't have to know how yet. You just have to be willing to look. If you're ready to see where you stand today, that's where we start:

Take the Diagnostic →

Investing in Relationships

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 21:07:57 GMT

If you’ve watched Shark Tank you’ve seen how inventors and business owners appeal to the panel of investors for money in exchange for ownership in their business. Some appeals are successful because the presenter has the magic sauce composed of an effective product, supportive financial data, a reasonable assessment of value, and an entrepreneur with attractive business qualities. Others fall flat because they’re missing one or more of these factors. The objective of the show is clear, and so are the requirements to walk away with a deal, yet many people walk away with no deal in hand because investing is serious business, and not everyone is a fit to enter into a business relationship with.

The truth is, not everyone is a fit to enter into any relationship with, and similar to the Shark Tank panel, when it comes to matters of the heart, not everyone is worthy of your investment. Anything that you pour into with the expectation of receiving something in return is an investment. Relationships are an investment. Healthy relationships require you to pour time, attention, affection, and commitment into another person, and before doing so, it’s important to assess whether or not you can expect to receive a return.

Unfortunately, for many, the assessment process never happens. Instead of approaching matters of the heart from the perspective of an investor, they approach them as a gambler; high on the waves of emotion, heavily entertained, yet seeking a profitable return. A return which almost never comes.

Gambling is emotional, and like many people in pursuit of love, the desired outcome doesn’t align with the process. In both cases the parties in pursuit walk away disappointed at best and severely set back at worst. This happens because they fail to soberly assess whether or not there’s proof, not promise or potential, that the choice in front of them is capable of producing their desired outcome. In your case, the desired outcome is love contained within a healthy committed relationship.

Similar to what I’ve witnessed during the Shark Tank assessment process, vetting someone for a healthy relationship strikes a delicate balance between the practical and personal. In the case of Shark Tank, the practical is the data, the numbers that provide factual information about the performance of the business. If there’s no proof of performance, investing becomes a gamble. After the numbers review the panel shifts their focus to the person to determine if they can work with them to take what they’ve built and multiply it. In this case, the numbers don’t matter if it doesn’t feel like a fit, and that ‘feel’ comes largely from the gut.

In love, the practical data is the factual information that you acquire through conversation and observation that informs you about who this person is. Some practical information includes facts about work and self-sufficiency, temperament, ethics and integrity, and values. This information tells you whether or not this person is suited to be in partnership with you. Will they contribute equitably to the household? Will they provide suitable care for you? Will they be consistent and committed when life gets difficult? The practical data is key to a healthy relationship and needs to be the box that is checked first in your assessment process.

The personal assessment becomes equally important only after you’ve determined that the core person, independent of what you can do for or with them, is good enough to be in a relationship with you. And yes, they must be good enough to be in a relationship with you. For some the idea of someone else being good enough stings, because it touches that part of you that’s always believed there was something about you that wasn’t good enough. I submit to you that you’re worthy of love. You deserve someone who is good enough to give it and receive it from you. Deep down you know that, and you’ve wanted to protect your investment, you just haven’t known how. When you assess someone on the personal level you become the protection that you never knew you could be.

The personal assessment involves chemistry and a determination of whether or not you like this person, but more than that, the personal vetting process requires you to be clear about how you feel. Feelings in this case aren’t as much about feeling good, as they are about feeling right. This is where your gut comes into play, because what you’ve been told, and even what you’ve observed on the surface may not align with the truth. This is where you go from trusting them to trusting you. There is truth in your feelings that you must learn to trust. Are there any internal warning signs? Are you able to be calm and settled in their presence? What do you notice about you when you’re with them? These are the feelings that matter because anyone can make you feel good, but not everyone will feel right.

After reading this you might notice there’s a distance between knowing how to assess someone and actually being able to do it, between knowing your worth and believing it. There’s a chasm between knowing you have a gut and how to trust it.

That distance is where the work begins. It's closing the gap between understanding the investor mindset and becoming the woman who lives it: the one who can no longer be talked out of what she knows, who protects her investment without apology, who finally believes she's worth protecting.

You may have finished this and felt that gap open a little wider: you understand the assessment, but you're not sure you could actually run it. You know, in theory, that your gut has been talking. You're just not sure you'd trust it if it did.

That's not a flaw in you. It's what happens when the pattern you grew up inside taught you the warning signs were normal, that feeling small was love, that being talked out of what you knew was just being reasonable. You can't trust a gut you were trained to override.

So don't start with him. Start with the pattern.

The Relationship Pattern Diagnostic is a few honest questions that reflect back the thing you've felt but haven't been able to name. It won't tell you what to do. It'll show you what you keep doing, which is the first thing that has to become visible before any of this becomes possible.

 [TAKE THE DIAGNOSTIC →]

Why Do I Lose Myself in Relationships

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 20:57:12 GMT

The question, “Why do I keep losing myself in relationships?” is one that’s common for both men and women who routinely shrink themselves and give space to everyone else in an effort to make themselves more lovable. These are the anxious overgivers who mistakenly believe they need only a little from others to be happy in relationships; yet when their experience is actually understood, they are the silent sufferers who sit in the quiet resentment of giving and giving only to find that when they need to receive, there’s no one around. These are the strong, responsible, and high-achieving folks who are always ready to give…in fact they volunteer, yet rarely, if ever, lean on others for help. These people don’t passively lose themselves, they actively, yet not intentionally, give themselves away, time and time again.

They do this because of a deeply held belief that their worthiness in love is based on what can be given, instead of who they are. This belief lies beneath the surface of every relationship they engage in, and regardless of how unfulfilling the outcome, the cycle repeats itself. At work, they are the high achievers who sometimes receive a “thank you” or pat on the back for going above and beyond, but may rarely receive the compensation that matches their effort. In their personal life, they show up consistently for others, and on the rare occasion they ask for help, they are met with excuses that leave them right where they began, sitting alone with it.

With all that they put into relationships, there is no expectation of being met at the level of their giving. So, out of the gate, the relationship, any relationship, begins from a place of imbalance, where they are assigned the role of the giver, and the other, the taker. Giving becomes instinctual and reflexive; it often feels like who they are at their core. But in nearly every relationship, they eventually find themselves sitting in the bitterness and resentment of constantly showing up for people who rarely if ever show up for them. Essentially, they carry the belief that they must give in order to be in meaningful relationships, and they choose people who reinforce that belief.

If you’re recognizing these patterns in yourself, you know just how painful it is to find yourself in this cycle that reduces you down to only what you can give; and when you’re in spaces where your only contribution is giving instead of being, you lose yourself every time. Most count it a badge of honor to be a giver. The truth is, being a giver is only a gift when it’s rooted in strength. It looks like joyful giving that doesn’t come from obligation, personal need, or lack.

When you give because you really want to, because you can, and because it is truly your pleasure, it enhances your own happiness and adds no burden. You’re in control, and not subject to the control or manipulation of others. On the other hand, if you find yourself giving because you can’t say ‘no’, it’s not a gift at all, it’s a curse. It’s shaped by the blueprint you carry that says, “I must give in relationships”. Not because you want to, but simply because this is the way it’s always been. But what would happen if you stopped giving? What’s at stake? And what would your relationships look like if you could actually receive? In fact, would you have any relationships if you decided to lay down your role as the giver? These reflections are significant because it doesn’t have to be the way it’s always been, and no one is going to change that but you.

Takers take. They don’t pause long enough to consider the impact of their taking, but you do. You feel the loss each and every time. But somehow you continue to believe that by giving you’ll actually receive something, and that just isn’t the case. The ray of hope often comes on the rare occasion that a taker gives, and it’s important to note just how rare it is. Typically, it’s also unfulfilling because you can feel the begrudging nature of their giving. You feel it because takers only give enough to keep taking, not because they actually want to give. They live to receive, and as long as you keep on giving, they’ll continue to take and you’ll continue to lose.

When it comes down to it, you’ve lost yourself, because you’re a giver who fails to keep you at the center of your giving. You’ve prioritized others to the degree that you need them to give back to you to be fulfilled, because after all of your giving to others, there’s nothing left for you. What you’re essentially doing is working to make others happy while ignoring yourself. ‘No’ doesn’t exist in your vocabulary, because you’ve been conditioned to believe it can’t. If you say no, they’ll leave, they’ll be sad, they won’t want to be in relationship with you, and if that’s true, you’re not in a real relationship at all, you’re in a transaction. You give. They take. You lose. You haven’t yet realized that when you prioritize you, you actually win. Sure, you’ll lose them. And when you see losing them as a win it becomes a no-brainer.

Giving is not a requirement; it’s a blessing. And so is receiving. You need to be able to draw from where you pour, that’s a relationship. That level of reciprocity is necessary for partnership, and it only comes when you see yourself as the central priority in your life, and everyone else as valuable additions.

Losing yourself isn't an accident, it's a pattern. And patterns change when you can clearly see them. The Relationship Pattern Diagnostic shows you yours. Take the diagnostic.

Why Do I Ignore Red Flags?

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 19:18:53 GMT

You're not missing the signs. You've been taught to override them.

The question of ignoring red flags assumes something significant: that you saw them, and chose to ignore them anyway; and more often than not, that’s exactly what happened. When working with my clients they’ll say something like, ‘how could I miss it’, and when we dig a little deeper, we find that they didn’t miss ‘it’ at all; they saw it, felt it, and talked themselves out of it.

Why does this happen? The answer is both simple and complex: hope. But not the aspirational hope, the kind that’s grounded in evidence or a sincere promise, it’s the hope driven by anxiety. This hope is rooted in fantasy.

Fantasizing is the habit of imagining the best possible outcome. It is similar to catastrophizing, where one escapes to immerse themselves in the worst possible outcome. Both are functions of anxiety, and both ignore the reality right in front of you. This is why red flags are so easily ignored.

For many, catastrophe is the more recognizable symptom of anxiety, but the truth is both sit on opposite ends of the same spectrum. Fantasy is often overlooked as a function of anxiety, and is usually associated with something more positive, like having a vivid imagination. In reality, as an adult, fantasy can lead you into danger if you’re not mindful. It usually develops in childhood as an escape from an unpleasant reality, and over time, evolves into a habit where you ignore what’s in front of you to imagine something much more pleasant than the truth. This is how you can find yourself in an abusive relationship.

What often triggers the fantasy in relationships is the conflict between what you see and experience with the other person, and what you want. You see the red flags, and you want to make it work with this person, so you fantasize to make them better than they are. This is where the trap is built.

On the outside, their behavior is toxic, or at least less than ideal. On the inside, you’re envisioning a future in a house with a white picket fence and babies running around; and this vision, you’ll fight to protect regardless of what’s in front of you. This is why when your friends and loved ones question the relationship or reflect what they’re seeing it feels like an intrusion. It’s not just a threat to the relationship, it feels much more personal. It’s a threat to your fantasy and the future you hope to exist in.

The question is, how likely is it that what you’ve imagined can exist with who they actually are? This is where it’s necessary to wake up. Not to a reality that says you can’t have the love you long for, but to the reality that you can’t get love from someone who isn’t loving, no matter how hard you work to manifest your fantasy.

This tendency isn’t new, as I mentioned, it was developed in childhood. It’s the sign that the love and attention you needed as a child and the love you received were not in alignment. You couldn’t force the love you needed, so you adapted. You held onto what you were given while fantasizing about something much better, like being showered with gifts, receiving praise, or possibly even having a friend. Over time, this became a pattern. You added what was missing, eased your pain, and made it all make sense even when it didn’t. These tools helped you to survive childhood with your mental health relatively intact, and today they challenge it.

What worked then keeps you stuck now. You had one childhood and one set of caregivers to survive, and you did that. Today, you have options, but you keep choosing people who also will not meet your needs, and possibly even hurt you, while escaping instead of choosing to walk away. It’s time to set aside the fantasy and start responding to what’s actually in front of you. As Maya Angelou said, “when people show you who they are, believe them”.

This is where the work begins. The truth is you are deserving of love, the kind that doesn’t require you to escape to envision it, but the kind you can experience in real life. The challenge is believing that you can have it, and that you’re worthy of the type of person who can provide it. This is where many people get stuck, believing they can have something that they’ve never consistently experienced: love without anxiety. Until you do, you won’t just ignore red flags, you’ll continue to justify them.

If you’re recognizing yourself in this, it’s likely not just this relationship—it’s a pattern.

And patterns don’t change just because you understand them… they change when you can clearly see them.

If you’re ready for that kind of clarity, take the Relationship Pattern Diagnostic .

Why Leaving a Toxic Relationship Feels Like Withdrawals

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 17:45:44 GMT

Understanding the Addictive Pull of Artificial Love

It’s confusing to leave a relationship for all the right reasons, only to experience the pain of withdrawal.

The truth is, we don’t become addicted to healthy things. You may crave a salad, feel the absence of the workout you skipped, or feel called to reengage in a spiritual practice, but you’re not addicted to them.

Why Healthy Love Isn’t Addictive

Similarly, walking away from a healthy relationship may leave the imprint of loss or heartbreak, but one thing is certain, no one goes through withdrawals from peace, consistency, or respect. Why? Because although we receive the reward of dopamine from healthy encounters, there’s only enough to make us feel good, not addicted.

The Addictive Pull of Artificial Love

Artificial love is a powerful drug, but not for everyone.

Its chaotic and unpredictable nature can ignite the chase in anyone who has been conditioned to equate love and passion with self-abandonment. It’s familiar, instinctive, and addictive. This is the cycle that many of the women I work with eventually break out of, yet if left unchecked, this is the pattern that continues. Not for lack of trying, many people stuck in these patterns are desperate for change, but they don’t know where to begin. They hate the chaos, yet lack the insight to identify the source of the problem. And that problem lies deep beneath the surface. It cannot be addressed by shallow superficial shifts. It requires deep reflective work to produce the necessary mindset shift to choose healthy love.

Before this shift occurs, healthy love is repulsive and toxic love is alluring and attractive. Without thinking, you can easily choose the most toxic person in the room while ignoring the calm and respectful pursuer. It’s not the case that you just so happen to keep choosing the wrong people, your nervous system is subconsciously choosing what’s familiar. Think about it, you want something better than you’ve gotten, yet you continue to choose the same person in a different body. In fact, your choices become more intense, more toxic, and often more dangerous. This pattern and cycle is so cemented that you begin to believe that this is your fate or destiny, so you settle even though you desperately want more. And when something healthier does appear, it’s perceived as boring, mundane, or not good enough.

This is because you can’t choose healthily from an unhealthy mindset. Until the underlying pattern is addressed, you’ll continue to be drawn toward what hurts you. You’ve got to break the addiction, and all of the beliefs attached to it to break free.

You’re attracted to the possibility or promise of love that actually exists outside of reach. That’s artificial love. The more it pulls away, the more it draws you in. It’s like watching the coyote chase the roadrunner, or Sylvester the cat chasing Tweety, they’re drawn to the chase that repeatedly hurts them, and you’re drawn to watching it, even though you know how it ends.

This dynamic is attractive because it’s familiar. It’s all you’ve ever known. And until you become familiar with a new dynamic, you’ll continue to repeat the pattern of attraction, chase, failure, and withdrawal over and over again.

This is the work I help women do: identifying the pattern beneath the attraction so they can finally choose something different.

Why Leaving Can Feel Like Withdrawal

The difference between artificial love and love is significant. Love is being seen, heard, understood, and accepted as you are. It comes with consistency, contentment, and peace. Artificial love is being picked up and dropped, praised and then criticized, attended to then ignored. It’s unpredictable. Chaotic. It’s toxic. And it sets your dopamine receptors on fire. You know it’s bad for you, and you want to just walk away, but you cannot resist. When you finally walk away for good, it’s only because the evidence against the relationship becomes insurmountable, you have to leave, and even though you know better, any hint of them triggers the addiction drawing you back in with conscious belief that “maybe this time things will be different”, while subconsciously you’re chasing the high or chaos and unpredictability. You don’t want it, but you depend on it.

If you’ve ever wondered why love feels like withdrawal, this is why.

For years you’ve called it love, when really, you’ve been stuck in the cycle of intermittent reward or reinforcement followed by emotional deprivation. After being deprived you desperately long for connection, affection, or approval, even if it lacks depth, compassion, or care.

The withdrawal comes when the reward doesn’t follow. There’s not just heartbreak, there’s pattern disruption. In some cases, there may not be heartbreak at all, because your heart was never really in it, you just felt the absence of their presence, and that alone produced the withdrawal.

The good news is you don’t have to stay stuck in this cycle. The women I work with often come in believing they are doomed to repeat this pattern over and over again, but when they realize it isn’t destiny, it’s conditioning, they begin the work to break free. Why? Because conditioning can be changed.

Real love doesn’t require you to jump through hoops, to bend until you break, or to give until you’re depleted. It’s steady. It’s considerate. It’s consistent.

And once you’ve broken your addiction to artificial love, you’ll never mistake chaos for love again.

If this resonated with you, you’ll want to be part of Next Chapter , where I go deeper into the patterns behind love, healing, and becoming the woman who can no longer be pulled into cycles like this.

Join Next Chapter

Protecting My Peace

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:09:14 GMT

There’s a lot of talk about protecting one’s peace these days, but what does that even mean? And how do you protect your peace? Let’s dig in.

Peace is an emotion. In psychology there are five basic emotions that are widely accepted: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and happiness. Unfortunately, of the five only one would be considered a positive emotion, though I believe all are positive in that they provide you with information. But I digress. Happiness, the more positive of the five is the one emotion you likely welcome with open arms, and when it comes, you want it to stay. You protect it.

Peace lives on the spectrum of happiness, and like all other emotions, it is literally a feeling in the body. It feels like serenity; there’s stillness and a calm that comes over you. I’ve had folks identify peace in their bodies as the absence of the feelings they’re accustomed to: tightness in their chest, sweaty palms, stomach discomfort, etc. For many, peace is rarely felt, so when they feel it, or any other emotion for that matter, they fail to recognize the environment that nurtured it; and if you’re going to protect your peace, you’ve got to notice when you feel it and what contributed to it.

Understanding peace as an emotion is necessary because the role of your emotions is to provide you with information about your environment. At times, emotions can be so intense and distressing that the focus shifts from the environment that ignited them, to suppressing or extinguishing them. But emotions aren’t the problem, the environment is. Every emotion is important, even those that you’ve identified as negative. They tell you that something in your circumstances or environment needs your attention, and when you ignore your emotions, you ignore the task at hand.

Peace is a gift, and not everybody or every environment offers it. When you notice peace in your body, you also need to notice what nurtured it. Are there people who bring peace? Are there places where you feel more at ease? Identifying these sources gives you what you need to take care of yourself by accessing more of it. On the other hand, where do you experience the opposite of peace? Where, and with whom do you find chaos and confusion? If you’re going to protect your peace, these are environments and people who you need to limit contact with.

If you’re going to protect your peace, you’ve gotta increase your self-connection by noticing your emotions, and allowing them to tell you what you need to increase your overall well-being. When you fight your emotions, you fight yourself and your best interests. Extended periods of suppressing emotions can lead to depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions because two things are working against you: you are becoming more disconnected from yourself while existing in environment that don’t serve you. There’s no magic pill that creates more peace and happiness, it’s the consistent work of nurturing self-connection and meeting your needs, because you are the most important person in your world. May you grow exponentially in peace!

If this resonated with you, you’re not alone. These are the conversations we continue inside Next Chapter: Notes from The Other Side, my monthly newsletter where I share insights, reflections, and guidance for women breaking toxic patterns and learning how to love themselves differently.

Join Next Chapter here

The One Thing Standing Between You & Success

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 16:21:22 GMT

The new year typically comes with a desire to be successful in an area where winning has been challenging. As such, we spend time thinking about what we want for the year ahead and commit to doing things that will help us achieve our goals. The challenge many of us run into is that we quit on our goals before we can clear the first few months of the year; so, while January is still with us, I want to share with you some information about what I believe to be the number killer of success, anxiety, and how to overcome it so you can have a greater chance at winning this year.

Regardless of your goals, anxiety has a way of stepping in and stealing your motivation before you can gain much momentum. It’s the quiet voice lurking in the background telling you that you can’t have what you really want because it’s too hard, or you’re not good enough, or if you do attain it, something terrible will come along and take it away. Essentially, anxiety is at the heart of why you settle; you’ve listened to that little fearful voice that’s informed only by your limited experience and/or imagination, and convinced yourself you can’t have the thing you deeply desire; so your only option is to go without the tightened body, or the love you deserve, or the business that would positively impact the lives of others, which ultimately leaves you dissatisfied and even regretful. You’ve given up on your goals and dreams because of something that might happen, but probably won’t.

If you’re going to disrupt this cycle the key is to challenge your ego. Many people believe the issue with the ego is cockiness and arrogance that leads one to see themselves as above others, and while that’s true, what most people fail to understand is the arrogance in perceiving fear as fact versus seeing it as just one of many possibilities. When you see your fears as fact you treat them as certainty and you make decisions that align with them, ultimately shortchanging yourself of the life you deserve.

In reality, the ego can work for or against you, and combined with anxiety, an unhealthy ego will kill your ability to enjoy your life and achieve your goals. So, if you you’re going to succeed in anything and have a good time doing it, you must check your ego and anxiety so they don’t keep you in a constant state of settling in fear. If left unchecked, the ego will convince you not to invest too much or not to try too hard because “this probably won’t even work”, or “nothing good ever happens for me”. It will see losses as catastrophic events and overinflate the importance of a few outside opinions. Its goal is to keep you safe, when in reality, the things that pose a threat to you are likely not threatening at all.

The key is balancing the ego by removing certainty from your beliefs, because anything that hasn’t yet happened isn’t certain, it’s a possibility. When you begin to see your fears as possibilities you can move from a place of guardedness to a place of curiosity; this helps you to open yourself to more possibilities than the one rooted in your fears, and when you see more possibilities, you can free yourself to take risks (which is necessary to succeed).

With this shift, you can begin to see losses as lessons so you can use your setbacks as a setup to do better, to refine your approach, to put the proper supports in place; and as your gain more experience, you’ll begin to see realistic likelihoods of what can happen over possibilities and certainties, reducing the size of your fears. You begin to think “if I take these steps, it is possible that I won’t achieve my goal, but it is likely that I’ll be closer to it than if I settle here”, and when you take on this perspective beautiful things happen.

What's The Deal With Boundaries

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 16:29:29 GMT

Most of us are trying to improve our lives, and as such, we can cling to ideas and concepts that we believe will help us to get there. A lot of times these ideas and concepts lose their true meaning and become a crutch that we lean on to resist change, instead of a skill we develop to become a better us. Boundaries is one of those concepts that’s often used, rarely understood, and often weaponized in ways that keeps us stuck in the same old patterns; that changes for you today.

Simply put, boundaries are our deeply held, internal ‘no’, and when our boundaries have been violated, you feel it. Think about the feeling you get in your body when you’ve waited for a parking space, and someone steals it, or when you’ve loaned someone money that they fail to repay; these are boundary violations.

Boundaries are the line we’re not willing to cross in our interactions with others, and that line is your responsibility to maintain. For example, you may have a boundary that dictates you don’t loan money; but, if someone asks you to borrow money and you give them the loan, you have violated your own boundary, and that feeling is far worse than violations from the outside.

When you don’t know and/or do not articulate your boundaries you are hurting yourself, and that type of behavior sets you on a course for a world of pain. When you fail to take responsibility for your boundaries it becomes difficult to trust and depend on yourself; and if you can’t trust and depend on you, who can you really trust?

Bottom line, boundaries are ingrained into the fabric of our person, they don’t go away; and boundary-setting and protection are necessary skills to develop in order to become a confident and self-assured human who is fulfilled in life.

If you struggle with identifying and honoring your boundaries, Becoming Her Again is the gamechanger you need to step into the woman who no longer shrinks or settles for less than she deserves. The course is coming soon, join the waitlist to be the first to access this powerful resource.

(P.S., it comes with 2 bonuses: The Boundary Starter Pack & Scripts for Difficult Conversations)

Why Heal?

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:19:32 GMT

Why Heal?

Healing has become a buzzword in the company of words like self-care, peace, and mental health. They’re certainly a bit overused, but are nonetheless vital components of the life we all want to live.

So, what is healing? Healing is wholeness. What makes us “unwhole”? Trauma. Many of us don’t believe that we’ve experienced trauma, and that’s understandable because this type of trauma is so common it doesn’t seem very traumatic. But here we’re talking about what we call “little t” trauma. Some examples are the separation or divorce of parents, emotional neglect (no one to talk to/childhood loneliness), or a parent suffering with mental health challenges (anxiety and depression are most common). When children have experiences like these, they often have parents or caregivers who are unavailable or incapable of providing for their needs, and instead of the parent taking responsibility, the kid blames themselves – that’s the trauma. When you are at fault of anything, you naturally correct or fix yourself; so, when you blame yourself for something you weren’t responsible for you overcorrect and rid yourself of attributes and qualities you actually need.

There’s no way of knowing this process is taking place in childhood, the damage is done. The good news, however, is it’s reversible, and reversing the damage is called healing. There’s also no way to instinctively know what we need to heal until we begin living; life tells us where we need to heal. The easiest way to identify areas where healing is needed is when we want something, especially basic life necessities like love, and we can’t seem to achieve it, we do the same thing we did as kids, we fix ourselves. And when the fixing doesn’t work, we either settle, or we give up. We settle, because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have this than nothing, or we quit because we believe the lie that this is the best we can get, and we’d rather have nothing.

There is some truth to the idea it doesn’t get better. The truth is, this is the best you can get if you don’t change, and change comes with healing. This is why you may feel stuck in certain areas of your life. You’ve fixed everything you believe needs fixing, but you haven’t healed.

We can see this very thing play out currently with Cardi B who within the past year has separated from her husband Offset, had a baby, met a new man Stefon, and is currently pregnant again. In her new album she reflects on the events of the past year, and likely before. She’s gotten a new man, new clothes, and upgraded her body, but she hasn’t described any updates on her heart. Same Cardi, different man, same problems; and the same is true for us all. When we invest heavily in the superficial things that we believe will get us what we want (and we will undoubtedly start with the superficial things) yet we fail to do the real heart work, we’re deceiving ourselves.

Why heal? Because it’s necessary to achieve our goals so we can live the life we truly want to live.

Leaning Into Self-Love

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 18:16:48 GMT

You’re pretty amazing! Yes! You.

In spite of everything you’ve been through, you’re still killing it in life; and the one thing that’s stopping you from accessing your fullest potential is you.

You’ve mastered achievement, and if we’re being honest, you’ve limited yourself there as well, but where you can’t seem to win is in love. The reason is simple, you’ve never learned to love yourself. You learned instead, that the failure of the people who were entrusted with the responsibility of loving you was a reflection of you, and that couldn’t be further from the truth.

All this time you’ve believed that there was something inherently unlovable about you. What you never understood, because no one ever told you, is their behavior was never a reflection of you, it was a reflection of them. They didn’t love you because they didn’t know how, and now it’s on you to break the cycle of lovelessness for you and the generations that follow you.

This is your time; your time to experience love because that’s the one thing we’re all longing for. It’s the purpose of families, friendships, and romance; and you’ll never truly experience it until you learn to love yourself.

I know what you’re thinking, “I already love myself”, and to some degree you do, but not for the reasons you’re giving yourself credit for. You’re thinking about all the achievements and the ways in which you take care of yourself, and quite frankly, those are all performative or surface-level at best. Meanwhile, at your core, you are lonely and deprived of real heartfelt love, even in a crowd; and that’s not love.

The easiest way to detect your love for yourself is in how you show up for yourself with others. People pleasing, a lack of boundaries, an inability to say “no”, and giving without reciprocity are all symptoms of a person who lacks self-love. These behaviors indicate you are forsaking yourself while looking for someone else to love you, and they never will. The truth is you can’t tolerate real love from others and you’re stuck in a cycle of inviting people in who reflect the lovelessness of those who reared you. That sword cuts both ways, and it’s time to put it down.

You want love, and it’s time for you to realize that it must come from you. The most important step in loving yourself is choosing to love yourself. No one explicitly told you that you were unlovable, you simply surmised it from their actions. (And let’s be clear, you’ve always been smart – brilliant even. Wise? That’s a newer skill that comes with setting aside a childish mindset.) As a child, you couldn’t properly understand the actions of those around you without intervention, and you’ve been carrying around false beliefs about yourself your entire life. The assumption that you’re unlovable has led you to years and years of pain. All of your choices have stemmed from this belief.

By shifting your mindset to self-love, a mindset that recognizes your worth, you are unlocking the joy and fulfillment you always knew was possible, but thought only existed in the arms of another. When you stop relying on others to love you and you begin to love yourself, you guarantee yourself love, and all of your choices will align. Your love for yourself will attract love, just as your lovelessness has piled on pain.

Spinning the Block

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:56:03 GMT

After ending a relationship with a narcissist, one of two things will happen. They’ll immediately spin the block with the hope of reconciling, or you’ll instantly become their number one enemy and there’s nothing they won’t do to destroy you. Neither of these options are personal to you, both are the result of their incredibly fragile ego that won’t allow them to “lose”.

The narcissist is extremely sensitive to the thoughts and opinions of others. This is why they put on such a show with others, and will act a complete fool when they’re alone with you; on top of that, they’ve insisted that you keep what happens between the two of you private. (Side note: anyone who requires secrecy about your relationship will, or already has begun abusing you.) So, when you leave, even if it’s after they break up with you, they believe they’ve been placed in the spotlight, and narcissists hate truth-bearing light. They’ll never admit it, however, they know deep down that they’ve mistreated you, and for whatever reason, they’re terrified for others to know. The path of least resistance, in this case, is to get you back. This way they can ensure you’ll keep their little secret.

They will beg, plead, and apologize to get you back; and if you’re paying attention, you’ll see that none of these efforts are sincere. They have trouble articulating what they’ve actually done wrong, and when they do, they’re blaming you for it. This is an indication that though there’s the promise of change, the intention to change is nonexistent. If you go back, it’ll be better for a little while, then boom, you’re right back to the old patterns.

If you’ve found yourself in the pattern of leaving and returning, I get it. There are so many beliefs to contend with: “will I find someone else to love me?”, “I love them”, “there’s no one else for me”, “I want to keep my family together”. In addition to that, there’s all of the things they tell you will happen if you leave them, including threats of self-harm and self-sabotaging behaviors that pull at your heart strings. This is why on average women return to abusive relationships 5-7 times before leaving for good. The truth is, these women eventually find out what women who leave once already know, the narcissist is never going to change. You’ve learned to love them more than you love yourself, which is like pouring into a black hole, because they can’t return the love and care you’ve given to them; they’ll never know how.

When you do leave, prepare yourself to meet the real person you’ve lived with, slept beside, and created children with. They couldn’t contain you in a relationship, now, they’ll do what they can to destroy you. The goal here is to shift that spotlight that’s been placed on them to you, and to make you look like the problem. This is why they’ll instantly find another woman (see someone will be with me, not you) and they’ll tell that woman all of the horrible things you’ve done to them. They’ll contact any of your family and friends they believe they can manipulate with tales of your issues. Before a court, they will tell the most vicious lies under oath to take away everything you have, even the kids whom they have no intention of caring for. Until you’re in the situation, you won’t be able to imagine how far they’ll go to paint you as the evil villain; and even when you’re in the situation, you may struggle with what you’re hearing about yourself. I’ve heard painful stories, from many women about the ways in which the narcissist ravaged their lives and the lives of their children all because of their ego.

So, what do you do? In a nutshell, you do the very best you can do to take care of yourself. That task is a tall order because if you’ve spent significant time in a relationship with a narcissist, you don’t know what it means to take care of yourself. Self-care is a skill, that once developed will provide you with the love you didn’t know you could give to yourself. What you need right now is love. Yes, love from others can go a long way, but until you’ve learned to love yourself there’s only so much real love you can tolerate from others.

You thought love was jealousy, attention, and control; these don’t come close to embodying love. Love is being seen, heard, understood, and accepted for who you are. Love is free and fun and peaceful at its core. Love let’s you be you, unapologetically. You deserve to be loved, and it begins with you.

If you want support in getting back to love, it would be my pleasure to join you on your journey. Visit theothersidetherapy.com or email me at info@theothersidetherapy.com

In the meantime, begin taking good care of yourself!

Are You Projecting?

Mon, 26 May 2025 16:51:53 GMT

I’ve heard it said, “you don’t see people as they are, you see people as you are”, and there’s so much truth to that. If you’ve ever had someone accuse you of something, seemingly out of the blue, with no knowledge of where the accusation came from, you know the impact of not being seen as you are. You hadn’t even considered doing what they said you’ve done, and yet it doesn’t seem to matter. They’ve determined you’re guilty simply because they said so. This is a classic example of projection, and most of us do it. Projection is the imposition of one’s own perspective – thoughts, feelings, & behaviors – onto others, and it’s most easily identified when the perspective tows the line of the unacceptable, like tendencies toward cheating, stealing, etc.

Projection, however, can be equally as damaging, possibly even more damaging, when we, without evidence, assume others share our positive perspectives. Many people everyday find themselves in abusive or dangerous situations with others because they assume that others are inherently good, simply because they themselves endeavor to be good to others. Women overlook bad behavior in men, parents excuse a lack of discipline in their children, and strangers let down their guard, all because of a commitment to seeing the best in people.

The reality is, people lie, cheat, steal, and kill every day, and though it is my hope that none of those circumstances happen to you, it is your responsibility to protect yourself. In fact, I was recently touched by the story of Lyntell Washington, a pregnant Baton Rouge woman who was murdered in front of her 3-year-old daughter by her then boyfriend. She believed he was better than all the men she dated before him, and she was mistaken, he was much worse. She confronted him about lying, and threatened to disclose their affair to his wife, and he killed her. If that weren’t bad enough, he attempted to use another girlfriend to get away with it. I imagine Lyntell had questions prior to discovering his lies, and I imagine she used projection to excuse those questions so she would not be seen as difficult or combative, and because she likely believed the best, in the face of the worst, she lost her life. Questions are protection; and in order to ask effective questions, you must maintain an awareness of the truth. Ducks quack, liars lie, and thieves steal; and when you excuse and overlook that behavior, you set yourself up to be harmed. Often it seems easier to just trust people, to not maintain boundaries, or to be nice; the truth is the people who approach interpersonal interactions this way are more likely to be harmed. Most people will not be like Lyntell Washington; however, the damage of emotional abuse alone can take years to recover from. Please understand, you can’t afford to see the best in people, you must see the truth, even when the truth makes absolutely no sense to you; and at times, it won’t.

I regularly listen to women share stories of the harm being done to them by men they once loved, and it pains me because I know that at some point, they projected positive thoughts and feelings onto these men to settle for less than they ever deserved. It pains me much more to hear about the harm being done by their family and friends, during the aftermath of the breakup, who can’t understand how low these men will go to destroy their former mates, and that there are systems that support them.

The truth is, it is useful for children in challenging environments to escape reality in this way, it is harmful when we continue to do it into adulthood, to ourselves and potentially to others. It's time to call a spade a spade. We uphold problematic systems, positions, and relationships when we fail to simply accept the truth that the humanity can be anything from graceful and kind to devious and diabolical, even when the person before us once played the role of graceful and kind. There’s nothing more that’s required from us but that we simply pay attention and open ourselves to the facts of what people do, and ultimately who they are, and the only thing required to do so is time.

Open Your Eyes

Mon, 19 May 2025 16:45:47 GMT

Trauma creates negative cycles, and those cycles result in negative consequences, that then lead to negative feelings like sadness, despair, and frustration. When you get there it’s difficult to see anything positive about yourself or your life. You can’t seem to get it together, and you begin to speak in absolutes like, “I can never do anything right”, “I’ll never find someone to love me”, etc. A shallow hole grows deep and your find yourself stuck. The same perspective, however, is not typically true when you look at others – you only see sunshine and rainbows over their lives while your life is covered by dark clouds and rain.

The truth is we all experience sunshine and rain, and when we choose to only focus on one of these experiences, we can find ourselves in a state of overwhelm. If we choose to only focus on the good times, we are overtaken and distraught when not so good times present themselves. When we only focus on the bad times, we can exacerbate and even attract more negativity as our energy is consumed by the negative. Most times, there is both positive and negative happening in our lives at the same time, though we can’t always see it. Both are the fruit of our thoughts, words, and actions. When you sew an apple seed and you reap and apple trees with apples you’ve done exactly what you intended to do. When you sew oranges and you end up with avocados, and you hate avocados, you’ve done something wrong and it’s easy to get caught up focusing on the avocados instead of going back to the seed.

If you’re not getting what you want out of life, open your eyes to the lesson. Often, the lesson isn’t apparent, otherwise, we wouldn’t find ourselves repeating negative cycles. When we can’t break out of patterns it’s a sign there’s something we can’t see. In this case, we need to seek out the help of others – a trusted and wise family or friend is capable of bringing your attention to what you cannot see on your own. A good therapist will also be able to shed light on the dark or hidden spots in your life. In my experience, when you’re seeking, you’ll find it; and when you know better, you will most likely do better.

Also, in the midst of your difficulty, it is helpful to notice what’s not so difficult; to see the areas in life in which you’re winning. You’re not a total loser, no one is; in fact, you’re not a loser at all, like the rest of us, you’re subject to lessons. No one’s life is overall easier than yours. Everyone has had to face lessons and overcome obstacles. When you believe you’ve missed a handout you subscribe to the idea that you must be rescued, and the truth is, there’s no one to rescue any of us. We were all born with the drive and will to take care of ourselves, and we all have had to face impediments to doing so. Somewhere along the way the shortcomings of those who were supposed to provide you with temporary care led you to believe there was something inherently wrong with you and that you need a lifelong caretaker. This is a lie. You were born with everything you need, maybe you buried or pushed some of it away because you thought it wasn’t useful for others, but those parts of you are more useful to you now than ever before. Lean into your uniqueness. Embrace your gifts. Acknowledge your flaws. All of it is a part of you, and all of it will carry you to the next level.

Nothing in life exists without positive and negative, all matter exists because of both. When you realize and accept that both exist in your life, you may discover a greater appreciation for the life you live; and that the fruit you get to enjoy is a result of the intentional seeds you’ve planted…open your eyes.

What is Trauma?

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 22:54:04 GMT

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a therapist and my proximity to mental health, but there seems to be more discussions about trauma these days, and I’d like to set the record straight. Well, as straight as possible, because when it comes to people, there are no absolutes; so I guess instead of straightening the record, I’d like to help you gain a bit of clarity about trauma because what we believe to be true greatly impacts our approach to life, and how you approach your life affects the outcomes of your life.

Trauma is not the terrible experiences you’ve had; it is the outcome of having had terrible experiences. Specifically, your trauma is the ways in which you disconnect from yourself as a result of having endured something terrible. So, you can experience something traumatic (or terrible) and it may or may not result in trauma (a separation from yourself); the outcome depends largely on one factor wisdom.

Childhood is when most trauma occurs, and most children unknowingly rely on adults for wisdom. So, when children endure traumatic experiences alone and they don’t have someone wise to process those experiences with they typically blame and turn on themselves, resulting in trauma. For example, a child who is touched sexually without the intervention of wisdom with feel shame and blame themselves for the actions of an inappropriate adult. A child whose parents are going through divorce, without wisdom may believe they are the reason for their parent’s split. These feelings and subsequent beliefs cause the child to distance the parts of themselves they believe to be responsible for their own distress, and they will take steps to attempt to fix or resolve the issue with those who are truly responsible, which is impossible, but the child will continue to try.

With time, these feelings and beliefs manifest in all sorts of problematic behaviors – people pleasing, perfectionism, overthinking, overexplaining, self-abandonment, etc. – that point back to the powerless little boy or girl who began the process of disconnecting from themselves. That’s trauma; the adaptation of a child who was never really the problem, but thought they were, so they continue into adulthood trying to push away who they really are because of beliefs that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Trauma is about beliefs. Healing trauma requires a healing of beliefs, and a welcoming in and embrace of the true self. What do you believe about yourself? What might you need to heal?

3 Telltale Signs of an Abuser

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 18:11:43 GMT

Often many of us want to see the good in people, which is a setup for our own disappointment, resentment, or heartbreak. When we focus primarily on seeing the good in people it creates a gap that prevents us from seeing the real in people; and when we can’t see the real we are left vulnerable and defenseless to the abuses of others. Vulnerability and defenselessness are comforting and healthy in the presence of safety, but what do we do when others are unsafe? Simply put, we pay attention so we can navigate our way to safety.

Unsafe people are abusive; and abusive people want power and control. If you’re going to get to the place where you can never be abused again, you’ll need to hold onto your power and secure your sense of safety. To do this it’s necessary to see people for who they are, even when they are well-intended, because well-intended people can be unsafe as well. I know how difficult it can be to call a spade a spade, especially when you haven’t trusted your intuition on this level before it the past. So, I want to give you three ways to know when you are at risk of being abused.

Secrets

In most cases, abusers don’t want others to know about their abuse. They take the time to select the right target to help ensure their tactics get them what they want without being discovered by others, so they go to great lengths to establish rules of secrecy in the relationship. For children, the rules of secrecy can start off as a game that’s generalized to everything that occurs in the relationship. Among adults, the rule can be established many ways; it can be framed as a mandate from the outset where there is a threat of loss because they tout themselves as being “a private person” who doesn’t want others in their business, or they mine you for something embarrassing so they can use it as a threat to expose you if you were to tell others. Another way secrecy is established between adults is through the appeal of elitism; you’re apart of something special that others cannot know about because they are not special enough or are incapable of understanding. This approach often evolves to become more threatening if secrecy is not maintained.

The problem with secrecy is that in the beginning the secrets are innocent and maybe even fun, with time, however, you, the secret-holder become more of a target for abuse and the intensity of the secrets makes them more difficult to maintain. Next, you may run into the issue of sunken cost where the commitment to the secret becomes greater than the commitment to personal well-being. So much has happened that it can seem like there’s no point in telling others, so the cycle continues, and it becomes a breeding ground for shame. Disclosing abusive secrets is the key to unlocking your freedom, and avoiding secrets altogether is the key to maintaining your power.

Urgency/Rushing

While we don’t have all the time in the world, taking our time before making decisions, especially important decisions is vital. Often when we rush into decision-making we can run into regret. When others impose a sense of urgency upon us it’s often because there’s something they don’t want us to consider. The pressure of time disrupts calm, and when we are deprived of calm it inhibits our ability to develop sound and clear thoughts; and without active awareness we can only really process what’s in front of us at the time, including what we hear from the person in our ear rushing us to decide. Generally, people who create this type of condition stand to gain more from your immediate decision than a well-thought out one. This is a power play, and it’s abusive.

Pressure/Ultimatums

There’s a significant difference between asking someone to make a decision and asking for a decision with an imposed threat. In the absence of threat or pressure the true self emerges and the heart decides; threats muddy the waters. It’s hard to know what someone might naturally do when pressure is involved and when someone introduces threat, they generally want to control the outcome. Because of this, people who impose pressure upon others are abusive. The goal is to get what they want, not to discover what you want; this positions you to choose between them and you, and when you succumb to pressure, you’re choosing them.

In healthy relationships there is a respect for autonomy; each participant is free to think, speak and act according to their own will. Naturally, we only have control over ourselves, and with that control, we have the ability to walk away from people who are incompatible with us. One way to assess for compatibility is to pay attention to our comfortability in relation to others. Are you comfortable with keeping secrets or with being rushed? If not, someone who requires this of you is not compatible with you. If you’re indifferent, it’s possible that you have an extensive history of abuse that is familiar which leads you to settle for behavior you aren’t really comfortable with. In that case, you need to heal so you can learn the signals your body gives you to indicate deep discomfort. Ultimately, there’s no need to try to make something fit with someone who doesn’t fit you, and the only way to know if there’s a fit is to pay attention.

If you’re having challenges in your relationships and you need support, please reach out.

The Trouble with Anxious Attachment

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 19:21:56 GMT

It’s difficult to indulge in any form of media without stumbling upon an article or video that exposes a psychological challenge and provides some solution to the problem. Pop psychology is on the rise due to an increase in suffering, we the “experts” are trying to do all we can to help as many people as we can, and one of the greatest causes of suffering is relationship abuse.

In my practice I specialize in recovery from narcissistic abuse and I’ve come to understand that people, largely women, who have suffered abuse aren’t victims, they’ve chosen their abuser(s), and ultimately their abuse. I know, you may be asking the question, ‘why would someone choose abuse?’, and my answer to that is they’re not making a conscious and active choice, but rather one from the subconscious.

Ages ago, people who studied the mind discovered the power of the unconscious has to take control of our lives, and in the last century, a psychologist, Carl Jung said, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”. What this means for you is you are likely being controlled by unconscious drivers that have highjacked the brain and lead you to do things you don’t truly want to do. It’s evident when you look at your life and you find yourself stuck in patterns and cycles that are taking you away from where you want to be.

In the case of relationship abuse, many women are stuck in cycles of abuse and they don’t know how to get out. They keep choosing the same man with a different name over and over again. This isn’t destiny, or the way it’s supposed to be, it’s a matter of sleepwalking, and when one awakes and becomes conscious of their unconscious motivations and choices, they become equipped to make satisfying choices and to ultimately win in life. This is the power of my work as a therapist, I help people to discover themselves and to win.

Attachment style is one of those unconscious motivations. From childhood, we were all placed into one of four attachment styles that are categorized as either secure or insecure. The insecure attachment styles are anxious, avoidant, or disorganized. Most of us in the insecure category fall into either anxious or avoidant. If you’ve done the work of discovering your attachment style, and you’ve determined you’re an anxious type, studies have shown you are more likely to enter into and remain in abusive relationships than any other attachment style.

The main characteristics of anxious attachment are preoccupation with romantic relationships, a deep belief of not being good enough for healthy love, and fear of abandonment. Typically, this looks like rushing into relationships and spending an excessive amount of time in the company of the other person or thinking about them, fantasizing about a future with this person without any evidence they can fulfill the fantasy, and engaging in performative behavior like cooking, cleaning, or buying things to prove worth. The anxiously attached is so focused on being chosen, they are unaware of their capacity to choose; being chosen is the goal, by whatever means necessary. This is what makes the anxiously attached so susceptible to abuse of all forms.

Attachment style is not a death sentence, the good news is, we can do the work to change it. It does require work, which is no walk in the park. With healthy introspection and a significant amount of trial and error, you can move from being insecurely attached, to securely attached. The purpose of secure attachment from childhood isn’t to find a secure mate, but to lead to an adulthood with security in yourself. As a child, you saw yourself as a reflection of your interactions with others. Now that you’re all grow up, you can learn to see yourself through a different lens that requires more of your own input and judgement. When you believe you’re good enough, worthy enough, and capable enough for anything, you won’t settle for anything less and you’ll naturally become more securely attached to yourself and to others.

Becoming Discipline

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 16:56:31 GMT

We all have had the experience of wanting to achieve something that we couldn’t quite attain. In fact, many of us are likely pursuing something at this very moment that seems to constantly elude us, and for some of us we don’t understand why we can’t get there. There are a number of possibilities to address the “why?”, however the most obvious answer is, we lack discipline. What’s even more frustrating is when our challenges with discipline are confined to only a few areas in our lives. For example, you may wonder, “how is it that I’m able to do well with achieving my career goals, but I struggle with saving?”. When these questions arise, most of us can easily identify a lack of discipline as the issue; but what exactly is discipline, and how do we get more of it?

Discipline is widely understood to be the quality of maintaining control to achieve a desired outcome, which is at times is easier said than done for most all of us. What’s little understood about discipline is the role of emotions, and the importance of being intimately acquainted with them to get what we really want out of life. Today, most people know very little about emotions; in fact, many of us run from them or dismiss them as something that’s only for women. The truth is that we’re all emotional, and if we fail to understand that, we’re limiting the degree to which we can live fulfilling and enjoyable lives.

We all experience emotions. We get sad, mad, happy, excited, and afraid, even if we don’t express ourselves outwardly. When we fail to recognize our emotions and the behaviors that typically accompany them, we can be driven in all sorts of directions without any regard for wisdom or logic. For example, when someone is happy, they can spend money buying drinks for everyone without having the means to do so, and when they return to their logical state, they may experience regret because they just spent their rent. It’s interesting how within one body two opposing intentions can exist, and one will always win. This is the power of our emotions, and left unattended or ignored, they can destroy everything that we work hard for.

So, what can you do? Know your emotions, attend to your emotions, wait out your emotions, and use emotions to inform wise decisions. The word emotion is synonymous with ‘feeling’. This is because we literally feel our emotions in our body. Often, we talk about “feeling” things, and most of the time we’re talking about beliefs that we think, not what we feel. Some of our feelings are unique, but by and large we feel similarly. For example, when we’re afraid, most of us feel our heart pounding or our stomach dropping, or both. When we’re sad, we feel the tears welling up for a cry. These are feelings. Many of us have developed a habit of suppressing our feelings, thereby suppressing our emotions, and when we do this, both grow to become uncontrollable and our actions follow suit. Suppressed emotions stay in the body and typically result in emotional and physical distress that results in mental health issues and medical disease. When we allow ourselves to feel, it relieves the pressure and makes room for the next emotional experience.

When we attend to emotions, we give attention to ourselves; it can look like showing curiosity about the source of the emotion; so in fear, we may ask ourselves, “what am I actually afraid of?”. This line of inquiry can often resolve the emotion if we come to realize we have nothing to fear. On the other hand, it can provide us with information about the environment around us, and when we take the next step of waiting out our emotions, we can then make wise decisions without regret. Feelings pass. When we give space to our emotions they may wash over us like a wave, and then they’re gone. There are times when we may need to act while in our emotions, like when there’s eminent danger, and in these cases, managing our emotions can be the difference between a stampede that hurts people or moving quickly and orderly, keeping everyone as safe as possible. The key to waiting out emotions is not to speak or act while the emotional experience is present. This keeps us from engaging in behaviors like impulse buying, going off on others, or even excessive drinking, smoking, or drug use. Once the emotion has passed and we return to logic we can use emotions to make informed decisions in the moment for our future.

In essence, discipline is about bridging the gap between logic and emotion. Without emotion, we are likely to make decisions that seem good for us, but possibly bring no enjoyment. In the heat of emotion, decisions only feel good, and usually only in the moment the emotion is present. Wisdom can be found in our emotions, we were given them for a reason, use yours for your benefit.

Who Are You?

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 23:11:53 GMT

When faced with the question of “Who are you?”, many people really don’t know the answer. It’s a sad reality that we know so little about the person whom we walk around with all day every day, yet if I were to ask you about the other people in your world, you’d be able to answer the question with great accuracy.

I know, you probably don’t think you fall into this category because as you’ve begun thinking about who you are, you’ve come up with quite a few adjectives to describe yourself. I’d like to challenge you, however, to remove all descriptors that associate you with someone else, like mother, sister, friend, and even giver. The question is more about who you are at your core, independent of others. If there was no one else around, who would you be? What would exist in your world? What would motivate you? What would please you?

Many of us are so “other” focused that we haven’t taken the time to get to know ourselves, the most important person in our world; and if we don’t know ourselves, what exactly are we doing with the brief life we’re given? How can we be confident that we’re making the most of everyday? We can’t.

If you’re struggling to describe yourself, you don’t truly know yourself; and if you don’t know yourself, you can’t live for yourself. If this is you, I invite you to turn off autopilot and to take the time survey your life with clear focus of yourself in it, so you can live! You may be wondering how to do that, and there are many ways to go about it; I’ll give you a few to get you going.

1. Notice yourself. Take time every day, if possible, during your optimal time of day (i.e., mornings for a morning person) to simply breathe deeply and notice your breath. If you’ve never done this, it can bring up emotions for you. If you can tolerate it, allow the emotions to come as you continue to notice your breath. If this is unbearable, be compassionate with yourself and don’t push. Grab a drink of water and bring your attention to the space outside of yourself to get back to safety.

2. Journal. Journaling is a great way to discover your thoughts and feelings. Again, your optimal time of day is the best time to journal, and you can journal about anything. The best way to approach journaling is to write like no one else will read it. After finishing, read back what you’ve written. If necessary, destroy and discard your journal entries to protect your heart from others.

3. Discover your core values. Core values are deeply connected to our beliefs, and when we operate from them our actions are more intentional and aligned with who we are or who we want to be. We all have core values, even if we don’t recognize it. When we acknowledge our core values, we use them as our guiding light as we move through the world. When we fail to act with our core values in mind, often we experience shame, regret, and resentment. If you need help with discovering your core values, simply search “core values” on the internet and you’ll find sites that provide lists of examples. Once you discover your core values, I invite you to analyze them to determine if they truly resonate with you, or if they’re what you “should” choose based on your environment or upbringing. If it’s the latter, scrap them and try again.

4. Look in the mirror. Spend time looking at yourself in the mirror. What do you see? What do you like? Why? What don’t you like? Why? What would it be like to accept and embrace it all without attempting to change it? (Side note: these are great prompts for journaling.) When looking in the mirror, it’s important to note that what we see on ourselves is often reflective of what we see in ourselves. Many people want to change the outside, when really, it’s the inside we want to change. We all have the power to change, and acceptance is the first step. Remember, nothing in this world exists without positives and negatives, not even atoms. Our negative attributes provide balance; sometimes accepting them is all that’s needed.

5. Therapy. Therapy is a great place to learn about yourself; after all, it is all about you. In therapy you talk quite a bit, and then listen with the goal of gaining more insight into the way you exist in the world. Without help, many of us will sleepwalk through life and face many regrets. We are thinking, speaking, and behaving, and we don’t always know the why that’s at the root of it all. It is not a place to be told what to do, but rather to learn who you are so you can achieve your goals. Keep in mind, not all therapists are created equal. One attribute of a great therapist is their ability to take your words and to use them as a mirror for you to see your emotional and psychological self more clearly. If you find a therapist who can do this, you’re likely on your way to better knowing yourself. If you believe you can’t afford therapy, many states have agencies that offer low-cost options. In California, there’s Southern California Counseling Center, they offer low-cost therapy with pre-licensed counselors.

Rethinking Self-Care

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 21:01:22 GMT

From the moment we exited the womb, we were only concerned about one thing, ourselves. Driven and motivated to meet the need to be fed and held, we cried in our helplessness to have our caretaker(s) come to our rescue. As we developed, our needs evolved and expanded to the need for connection and learning from those around us, and at the same time we began relying on ourselves to hold our own heads, our bottle, and eventually to crawl, walk, and eat independently. Over time, we took responsibility for many of the things our parents or caregivers did for us, and for some of us, adamantly so, as we refused hand-holding and spoon-feeding. We followed the example of our caretakers and we grew into adults who would eventually do for themselves, much of what was done for us over the course of our development.

When done well enough, caretaking is a beautiful process that spans helplessness, observation, trial, error, proficiency, and mastery in every area of our lives. Those areas include meeting our physical, spiritual, and emotional needs. Unfortunately, for many of us, in the context of emotional caretaking, the process wasn’t so beautiful; and though we may say we didn’t have it so bad, when we look at the fruit of our lives, we might surmise that it wasn’t all that great; some important things were missed. Let’s be clear, most parents did the very best they could with what they had, to give us the care that we needed; and though this is true, it also still wasn’t enough. The result, adults who may have mastery of how to physically care for themselves, yet lack the ability to fully care for themselves which leaves us with a self-care dilemma.

I conceptualize self-care as all of the things we do to meet our own needs. The challenge to self-care is that many of us are not attuned to our needs because we’ve suppressed them and put them away as a result of them not being met by our caretakers during our very formative years; but we weren’t able to put them away completely. Those needs still linger around waiting to be met, and they often surface when we find ourselves in relationships with others. Many times, we don’t know the need exists, and if we do, we struggle to articulate it, because we were never given the opportunity to do so as we developed. This can result in misdirected blame and upset with others who aren’t aware of our needs, nor how to meet them. What’s more is that many of the needs we place with others to fulfill aren’t for them to meet, we’ve simply had no one to show us how to meet the need for ourselves (like we did with eating and bathing), so we rely on others to do so, crippling us and the relationship in the process.

Self-care most commonly looks like spa days, going to the hair salon, and vacationing; and because of this, self-care doesn’t seem attainable for most people. In reality, self-care on a more basic level includes activities like going to the bathroom, eating, and bathing, which are triggered by an urge within us like a full bladder, hunger, or routine and discomfort with uncleanliness. To engage in self-care, we need to be connected to ourselves to assess what we need and then take steps to care for it; this requires self-care before the self-care. Many of us weren’t attended to as children; we weren’t seen, heard, or understood. The result is that we’ve grown into adults who don’t see, hear, or understand ourselves. We simply don’t know what we need, and when permitted, we chase what seems to fill needs, or at least what feels good, but often leaves us feeling empty when it’s all said and done. This can result in addictions, including drugs/alcohol, sex, porn, food, shopping, etc.; all of which presents momentary highs with long-term distress.

True self-care addresses the needs at our core. Most of the time, we’re not in need of a spa day or vacation, we just really want it. The needs that might exist at our core are de-stress, asking for help, or advocating for ourselves with a boss. The way to know what we need is to do the self-care before the self-care; to take time with ourselves to find out what our challenges are, what’s missing from our lives, and how we’re really feeling. This work can be challenging, or at the very least distasteful in the beginning for those of us who weren’t attended to during our childhood, who experienced neglect, were dismissed, and who’s feeling weren’t validated. The unconscious thought is, “if my parents didn’t attend to me why should I?”. The answer is, because this is the way it’s supposed to be. You have needs, and you’re the one designed to meet them, even if those needs are ultimately designed to be met by others. You don’t feel hungry and wait for someone to change your diaper, nor would you have someone bathe you, you can do it best yourself. Likewise, you are best suited to love yourself, advocate for yourself, and to seek out and cultivate relationships with others who are suitable to care for you. It’s a simple concept, and not very easily applied, be patient and compassionate with yourself.

If you need support on your journey of self-care, seek out the support of a trust friend or family member, or even a therapist. If you can’t afford therapy, there are low-cost options available in your state. In California, I highly recommend Southern California Counseling Center (https://sccc-la.org/).

Take good care of yourself!

Emotions Are Information

Tue, 17 Sep 2024 18:13:24 GMT

Emotions are information. Sometimes the information is relevant to today, and sometimes the information is old but somehow still directing our lives; either way, the more connected we are to our emotions, the more information we have about ourselves, and the greater control we have over our decision making. Fear, for example, is a really strong emotion. It has the capacity to stop us in our tracks, propel us into defense of ourselves, or to simply get us to run away. All of us are afraid of one thing or another, and if we don’t confront our fear, not by fighting it, but becoming intimately relational with it, the fear will always exist and possibly even grow; and whatever it is we are afraid of will continue to elude or control us.

Becoming relational with your emotions is as simple as sitting with them. I say simple, not easy, because it’s simple to understand, but not always so easy to do. Sitting with our emotions looks like sitting with the feeling that comes with the emotion. In the example of fear, you may feel a drop in the pit of your stomach. Sitting with the fear is sitting with the sensation in your stomach. The next step is then inquiring within yourself about the fear. Some questions you could ask yourself are, what am I really afraid of? What’s the worst thing that could happen? These two questions alone could reveal to you that you’re dealing with fear that’s rooted in your past, and no longer relevant to who you are, or the circumstances you’re in today. On the other hand, you may discover that what you’re afraid of is smaller in magnitude than the thing you actually want. Either way, it’s difficult to know what’s happening in you when you run away from the fear you’re feeling.

Typically, when we feel unwanted emotions (i.e., heart racing, tightness in chest, etc.) what we want more than anything is to make the feeling go away. The most logical way to do this is to give into the cries of the emotion, and in the case of fear it would be to fight the thing, run from it, or stop in our tracks. For many of us, the desire to push away our emotions is compounded by messages we’ve received from others to not feel whatever it is we’ve felt, if it wasn’t happiness. What many of us haven’t learned is that in the absence of a life-threatening situation, if we sit with the emotion and attend to ourselves in it, the feeling will pass and we have the benefit of the information we’ve gained that we would have otherwise not known about ourselves, enabling us to overcome fear or work through our emotions.

As I mentioned, this work isn’t easy. For some, sitting with emotions and feeling bodily sensations can be traumatizing; so please exercise caution and be compassionate with yourself if you find this to be difficult, or even impossible to do. For the rest of you, it will likely take some time to build your tolerance of your emotional experience and your focus to attend to yourself; patience and persistence is key. Awareness of your emotional experience is key to really knowing yourself.

Becoming Un-Desperate for Love

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 21:44:28 GMT

Many of us are desperate for love and don’t recognize it. One telltale sign is when you find yourself stuck in the same relationship cycles and patterns that don’t serve you. These cycles leave you feeling hurt, confused, lonely, and sometimes ashamed because you’ve given so much and failed yet again. In your mind, ‘this time will be different’, yet somehow, you’re here again, and again, and again. Be encouraged! There is a way out.

Desperation is driven by unmet needs that no matter how hard we try we can never satisfy. We can’t satisfy them because they aren’t actual needs, they’re needs we’ve convinced ourselves we have, born out of painful childhood experiences; let’s call them phantom needs. Left unchecked, phantom needs lead to a lot of pain as we chase after the unattainable. The truth is we all have the need to be loved, first by our parents/caregivers, then by ourselves; and if we weren’t loved properly as children this need quickly becomes desperation if we don’t happen to stumble upon someone who’s willing love us properly. The challenge many of us face is while some of us may gravitate to the person who shows up willing to love us as we need, many of us will reject that person and gravitate toward the people who love us in similar ways to the people who failed to love us properly as children. This is the cycle, overlooking healthy love for toxic love that feels familiar, out of a need to resolve our childhood dilemma.

Childhood is the space we are given to learn everything we need to take care of ourselves for the remainder of our lives, including how to love and be loved. If you were loved properly as a child, you then love yourself properly and have a generally healthy approach to loving others. If not, the opposite is true. Children learn by example, our initial lesson is to receive love, and as we learn, our priority shifts to loving ourselves. If you were not loved properly as a child, you will miss the cue to begin loving yourself as you have not been given the tools to do so. Instead, you will move into adulthood continuing to seek after the love you missed in childhood from romantic partners instead of recognizing your responsibility to give it to yourself first. Somewhere in our adolescent years (I imagine) is when the shift takes place and the cycle is put in motion, hence the boy crazy/girl crazy teen.

It's also important to note that our perception of love is informed by our childhood experiences. Because we are born with the automatic expectation to receive love, we understand love to be whatever it is we received or witnessed. Thus, no matter what we experienced, we interpret the treatment we received from our caregivers as loving, even if it was completely devoid of love. Generally speaking, if we were neglected as children, we will tolerate and accept neglect in our adult relationships and see it as ‘the way we love each other’. This is how toxic love is born.

Healing this type of trauma isn’t a linear process, meaning, there’s no true first, second, and third step to take. There are, however, steps you can take, in whichever order feels right for you, toward healing so that you no longer chase after love outside of yourself. The goal is for you to rely first on self-love and then look to others for love, as God intended. I’m going to provide you with a numbered process, but again, this isn’t linear; you’ll circle back and skip around according to your own needs. I will say, this process is best undertaken with the help of a trained mental health professional or a trusted friend or family member, so they can reflect what they see to help you make more informed decisions. If you have neither, there are things you can do right now in your own company with as little as a journal and a pen to begin moving the needle in the direction of healthy love; the key is to be honest and reflective with yourself about what you think and feel.

Become clear about what happened to you. Who hurt you? When? How? What hurt the most about it? What message(s) did that hurt send to you about yourself? How did this hurt change you? Where possible, address your concerns with the people who failed you.
Learn yourself. We are full of strengths and great characteristics, as well as flaws. Who are you? What do you enjoy? What are your strengths? What are your flaws? What are your values? It’s difficult to love what you don’t know.
Know your worth. When we are improperly loved in childhood it can cause us to believe that we are not worthy of proper love because something is wrong with us. The truth is there is nothing intrinsically wrong with you, you are lovable just because you are.
Learn to love yourself. Love is accepting someone exactly as they are, with all of their flaws and being willing to stick it out for life. The easiest way to learn to do this for yourself in adulthood is to surround yourself with people who show you this type of love; people who are willing to hold up the mirror to show you how great you are and how flawed you are, and are willing to love you anyway.
Embrace aloneness. If you can tolerate, and even appreciate spending time alone, it’ll become difficult to settle for time with just anyone. Quality time will need to be quality.
Become clear about what you want out of a relationship. Do you want to be needed or wanted in relationships? As healthy bonding occurs, the need for one another will increase as you grow to depend on one another; however, at the outset of a relationship being needed can create a dependency that can foster resentment down the line
Address the symptoms of the trauma. One of the most common symptoms of childhood relational trauma is fantasizing. Many of us meet someone, and within weeks, or even days the fantasies begin. You begin to envision a future with this person without the evidence that they are a suitable mate. To address this, bring yourself back to the present, what behaviors do they display? What do these behaviors say about who they are? Don’t assume anything is true about them; if you don’t know, ask. Be clear and honest with yourself about the red flags that are present? If you’re making excuses for them, your fantasies have become stronger than your reality.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it’s a good start. The goal here is to work through, process, or even resolve your childhood trauma around improper love so you can clear out the clutter and become more intentional about the love you give yourself and the love you expect to receive from others. By doing this, you become more capable of showing up for yourself and others from a place of worthiness and confidence, rather than from desperation. The truth is, from the moment of your conception you were lovable and worthy of being loved properly. You have the power to shift your mindset so you can achieve the loving relationships you were born to have.

If you’re in need of support, I invite you to join the waitlist for a community I’m developing to support singles in their quest for healthy love. Visit https://theothersidetherapy.com/news and enter your email address to join the waitlist under the paragraph entitled ‘Hey’. Additionally, if you’re interested in therapy, I have a few slots available for individuals and couples. Visit the website and book a free 15-minute consultation to determine if we’re a good fit for therapy.

Kerrie Jones,

Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (#143151)

Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (#15245)

Supervised by Dr. Glenna Anderson, LCSW (272046)