Healing & Growth

Intro to State Shifting: Choosing to Be Happy Anyway
Shifting from a bad mood to a good mood is both easier and harder than it sounds.

The Moment Healing Happens In Your Mind
The moment when your brain offers you an interpretation based in trauma and you choose reality instead.

Healing Clutter: Trauma and the Tyranny of Aspirational Objects
How to withdraw your inner critic and aspirational fantasies from objects so you can let them go.

Healing Fantasies: Releasing the Longing to Be Rescued
Wherein I explain healing fantasies (aka redemption or salvation fantasies), the function they serve, my personal history with them, and what to do about them.

Self-Loathing Serves a Purpose (and How to Heal)
Why our mind inflicts pain on itself and how to make it stop.

How to Meet Your Own Emotional Needs Through Self-Validation
Giving up my healing fantasy of emotional rescue and learning to give myself the validation I always needed.

Don’t Hold Your Present Hostage To Your Past
You have no power over the past. But you do have power over your present.

How to Process Trauma By Yourself (Without Therapy)
Processing trauma isn’t nearly as complicated as it often sounds.

False Spirituality and Self-Delusion
“Meant to be” can easily become a way to disempower ourselves.

Conscious Coping – Let Yourself Have It
Guilt and self-criticism do not improve your behavior. You can love yourself, even when you’re not perfect.

When “Feel Your Feelings” Doesn’t Work
Sometimes you are just reinforcing negative beliefs.

The Hell that is Fearful-Avoidant Attachment (and How to Heal It)
Desperate to be loved, terrified to be seen.

It Doesn’t Have to Mean That You’re Broken
We end up holding ourselves hostage to the meaning we give things. Change your story, change your life.

Healing School Trauma
Preparing kids “for the real world” by traumatizing them is ridiculous.

Darkness is Merely the Absence of Light
The darkness doesn’t spawn demons. We do.

You Can’t Become a Better Person
Healing is about remembering you are already whole.

When your world falls apart, can you still love yourself?
Life, pain, God, and loving yourself and the world with such fierceness that you find the state of Grace.

Enduring Pain You Cannot Change: My Life as a Prison Wife
Wherein I get everything my heart desires and am still unhappy. But not for the reasons you’re thinking.

Facing Unavoidable Pain
We make meaning out of tragedy. But the tragedy is still tragic.

10 Levels of Wounding and How to Heal Them
Pain comes in many forms, and the key to healing is finding the right remedy for what you are experiencing. This post attempts to diagram all the kinds of psychological, emotional, and spiritual wounding I know of and the best remedies I have found for each.