Self Development

Why Do We Underestimate Our Effect on Others?

New research shows that small acts of kindness have a much bigger impact than we think. It won’t sound like a big revelation when I tell you that kindness plays an enormous role in a person’s well-being. It can lead to changes like higher self-esteem and lower blood pressure. Kind people tend to be healthier… Read more »

Read More

Are You Able to Hold Hope In Life?

“People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you make them feel.” – Maya Angelou Finding hope, let alone holding hope as a thread through life these days, can seem like a tough task for so many. Trauma survivors often struggle to find or hold hope in… Read more »

Read More

3 Easy Things to Try to Immediately Improve Your Mood

There are a million things that can cause our mood to rise and fall throughout any given day. Whether or not we show it, and no matter how hard we work to keep calm and carry on, our emotional responses can run widely outside of our control. It’s an unavoidable and entirely human thing to… Read more »

Read More

What to Do When You Feel Paralyzed by the News

Nowadays, waking up to the news can feel like being submerged into a cloud of dust. Suddenly, the air around us feels murky, unsafe, suffocating, and hard to navigate. With each headline comes another puff of sour confusion, a steady sidewind of despair, or a giant gust of overpowering anxiety. And while the headlines themselves… Read more »

Read More

Three Questions That Could Change Your Relationship With Food

When my niece was a teenager, she asked a group of her friends to guess the number of calories in a serving of corn nuts she was eating. Because none of them had ever eaten corn nuts before, she posed the question as more of a random game of trivia than out of any concern… Read more »

Read More

3 Things to Do the Minute You’re Overwhelmed With Anger

Anger is an important, often misunderstood emotion. I recently wrote about why we could all learn to be more accepting and curious about our anger rather than judging or suppressing it. Burying our anger can bend us out of shape and lead us to suffer both mentally and physically. On the other hand, lashing out… Read more »

Read More

6 Tips For Dealing With Your Anger

Anger is a natural and inevitable human emotion. Yet, many people have a complicated relationship with it. They may struggle with any stage of processing, coping with, or expressing their anger. As a result, they develop conflicted feelings and unhealthy patterns around this heated emotion. Because anger often gets confused with aggression, people tend to… Read more »

Read More

Freeing Yourself From Childhood Trauma

Most of us have experienced some form of trauma in our development. We may have endured what mental health professionals refer to as a “big T Trauma” like abuse, serious loss, or a life-threatening experience, or we may have examples of “little t trauma” from events that weren’t life-threatening but caused emotional distress and altered… Read more »

Read More

Challenging the Fantasy Bond

In this blog, I am excited to share the introduction and conclusion from my new book, Challenging the Fantasy Bond.  I hope you find it interesting and enjoy reading it. The Fantasy Bond The early version of my theoretical approach set forth in The Fantasy Bond was primarily intended for psychologists, psychiatrists and others in… Read more »

Read More

“Name It to Tame It” – The Deep Emotions Underlying Your Triggers

What triggers you and why? We all have those moments when all of a sudden one statement directed toward us sends us into an emotional tailspin. It may be a single word our partner uses to describe us that makes our blood boil. It may be an offhand, teasing remark from a friend that ignites… Read more »

Read More