Posts Tagged ‘codependency’
Do I Stay or Do I Go in This Relationship? (Part 1)
Let’s say you come up with some challenges in your relationship, and it can be so challenging to know what to do. Do you stick it through and make it to the other side of a rough path or do you cut and run? I wish I had the answer for you, my darling kitten.…
Read MoreEmotionally 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 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 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 MoreSecrecy: How Shame and Secrets Hold You Back
And a big way our disbelief in our own worth presents itself is around the line between being a private person and being secretive person, and not knowing whether it’s okay to keep some things private, and not even realizing when we’re being secretive or lying in an attempt to people-please, protect connection or to…
Read MoreThe Emotional World of Wants and Needs
We conflate wants and needs so often and I don’t think it’s very good for our wellness, our mental health. So biologically, as human mammals, we have the need for oxygen, glucose, you know, food, calories. We need water, shelter, love, community, safety. These are the things we need to survive and thrive as humans.…
Read MoreLet Your Wants Be Your Guiding North Star
Wants are the “it would be rad to have it” things, not the things that sustain life. I want to truly deeply celebrate our wants and our needs, but first, I want to share six reasons why it matters that you, that we, from our codependent, perfectionist and people pleasing habits get in touch with…
Read MoreAll-or-Nothing Thinking, Codependency and Perfectionism
Following closely behind the season of bountiful buffering, as I’ve come to call the holidays, is New Year’s resolution time. It’s this time of magical thinking that says tomorrow, New Year’s day, I shall awaken a wildly new and different person with completely different habits that I will complete with utter perfection day after day…
Read MoreThe 5 Love Languages & Thought Work
As someone who reads, thinks and talks a lot about relationships, I think it’s high time that we talk about the 5 love languages, which is a framework for thinking about how we give and receive love popularized by Gary Chapman in his 1992 book, which has been a NYTimes bestseller for about 10,000 years…
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