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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.…
regret is self abandonment

Regret is Self-Abandonment

Regret is to feel sorry, disappointed, distressed or remorseful about the past. To remember with a feeling of loss or sorrow. To mourn. Well jeez, that’s dire. Regret is some heavy business. When we are living in regret, we are abandoning ourselves.  We are abandoning and exiling the version of us that made those decisions.…
emotionally immature parents

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…
being the cake

Being 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.…
healing the self-abandonment cycle

Healing 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…
self-abandonment cycle

The 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…

Clean 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…
conflict doesnt have to be the worst

Conflict 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…