Critical Inner Voice

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 »

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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 »

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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 »

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Fantasy Bond 101

This month, I’ve been working on creating a whiteboard explaining the fantasy bond and I’ve come to realize that it is a complex concept to get across in only a few words and with simple drawings. A while ago, I did a whiteboard about the critical inner voice, which was also challenging to describe. What… Read more »

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Are You Sabotaging Yourself?

Many people struggle with reconciling what they think they want with what they go about getting. What I mean by that is, they don’t fully understand how and why they get in their own way when it comes to their goals. To a certain degree, many of us don’t actually want what we say we… Read more »

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How to Let People Help You

All of us have a longing to be the recipient of caring gestures and offerings that express thoughtfulness and sensitivity to what we need. However, many of us also experience a certain level of discomfort around receiving because, even as it may benefit us and be what we wish for, it also challenges us. Too… Read more »

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Why We Must Keep Nurturing Connection

If these past 18 months have forced us to evaluate anything, it’s the importance of connection. Be it through new technologies, outdoor activities, or the little pods we’ve packed into to stay safe, we’ve all had to find creative ways to make connection work in a world of social distancing. Nurturing our relationships is one… Read more »

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Nourishing Your Resilience in Hard Times

I was listening to a podcast recently where the host was talking about the state of the world as we enter a new year. At one point, he offhandedly remarked that we seem to be experiencing so many daily sources of alarm and distress that we don’t even have time to process one before we’re… Read more »

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How to Cope with Missing People

One of the hardest things about living through a pandemic is being separated from people we love and the activities we used to share. Between social distancing, travel restrictions, and in some cases the need to quarantine, we are all grappling with new levels of isolation. I’ve written a lot about coping with loneliness during… Read more »

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Dealing With Today’s Trauma

Two weeks ago, I was talking to a friend who has been depressed. Because of COVID-19 and her age, she is quarantined and has been unable to visit with many of her friends. As she described the details of her life and her loneliness, she broke down crying, “I don’t recognize my life! I don’t… Read more »

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