Blog
Emotionally Immature Parents
Often at the core of our codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits are emotionally immature parents. Our parents are older than us, and as children, we would understandably look to them for wisdom and guidance. But parents are fallible human people like us too. They have their own baggage, trauma, issues. They have their own upbringing…
Read MoreBeing The Cake: Let Others Be the Icing
I came up with a saying some years ago around relationships. And as always, that can mean dating or partnerships, friendships, work-spouse relationship, parent-child, and that is this: I want to invite you to be the cake and to let everyone else in your life be the icing on the perfect cake that is you.…
Read MoreHealing the Self-Abandonment Cycle
The self-abandonment cycle happens when we overdo for others, we over-function, we do things people haven’t asked us to do, things people could totally do for themselves. We live their lives for us. And we do this from our codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing habits unwittingly because we learned in childhood that this is how you…
Read MoreThe Self-Abandonment Cycle
I want to talk about how our conflict aversion or subtle conflict creation habits play out in a self-abandonment cycle and impact our self-concept— the way we think about and relate to ourselves—and thus the people we love. Those of us living with codependent, perfectionist, and people-pleasing thought habits, where we define codependent thinking as…
Read MoreClean Fight Club Rules
We’ve delved into what conflict is and why it feels so enormous, how we avoid it and attempt to escape it by pushing it under the rug, pretending it’s not a thing, or how we sort of throw ourselves headlong into it or create it, often without even really realizing we’re doing that. We covered how…
Read MoreConflict Doesn’t Have to Be the Worst
We can make conflict, particularly in relationships with the people we care about in our lives, feel a little easier, a little lighter, a little safer to traverse. The dictionary definition of conflict is a serious disagreement or argument, typically a protracted one, which feels like very heavy language indeed. And I think we can…
Read MoreConflict & Codependent Thinking
Raise your paw if you’ve ever said “I hate conflict” or “I’m conflict avoidant.” I hear it all the time from my clients in Anchored. I’ve totally acted from conflict avoidance many times in my life. Let’s dive into what conflict is, what it isn’t, how our codependent, perfectionist and people-pleasing habits confuse the issue…
Read MoreWhy Friendships Matter
Friendship is an important part of our lives. Several well done studies show that having quality friendships, however you define that for you, leads to increased life satisfaction, reduced loneliness, and potentially longer life span through increased social connection! I would add to that the more loving people we have to co-regulate or stabilize and…
Read MoreWhy Privacy Matters
The difference between privacy and secrecy is that the roots of secrecy are so often shame, fear and worry about what others will think, say or do when they learn our truth. It was logical and understandable for us to decide, as children, that being secretive was safer, because it often was as children. It…
Read MoreRelationship Red Flags Are Gifts Not to be Ignored
Learning about relationship red flags is a vitally important topic for us from our codependent, perfectionist and people pleasing habits! Because we are constantly sourcing our self worth outside of ourselves. When someone wants to date us—while I’ll be framing this in dating, we can take these same lessons and apply them outside of a…
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