Reclaiming Confidence and Self-Trust
The Cost of Outsourcing Your Authority
In our desire to make the "right" choice or avoid failure, it's common to seek external validation or guidance for our decisions, thoughts, and emotions. While advice and insight from others can be valuable, co...
When Dissociation is Mistaken for Insight
Recognizing Emotional Disconnects
In therapy, the line between genuine insight and emotional dissociation can sometimes blur. Insight involves authentic emotional engagement, self-awareness, and understanding, enabling true personal growth and me...
Therapists as Observers: When Emotional Disembodiment Flattens Human Depth
Therapists hold a unique and delicate role as observers of human behavior, emotion, and cognition.
Ideally, this role enables them to witness deeply personal experiences with compassion, clarity, and profound insight. However, when therapists become...
The Unconscious Limits of Advice and Thinking
People Understand at Their Own Level
We’ve all been there—receiving advice that seems completely irrelevant or simplistic to our circumstances, or giving advice that falls flat despite our best intentions. The reason for this disconnect lies in a...
Integration and Wholeness: Making Space for All of Who We Are
Why Wholeness Matters
Most people don’t need more goals. They need more coherence.
They know how to perform. They know how to over-function, overthink, or over-deliver. What they struggle with is bringing all parts of themselves into alignment so t...
Are Other People Struggling Too? Why We Want to Know We’re Not Alone
We Want to Know We’re Not Alone
Sometimes we don’t need advice. We don’t need a reframe. We just want to know: Is anyone else carrying this kind of weight, too?
Not because we want to compare pain—but because we want to stop feeling like our strugg...
When What You Want Isn’t What You Choose
Understanding Core Needs and Core Commitments
You say you want freedom. Or love. Or peace. But your choices tell a different story.
You keep overcommitting. You push love away. You chase goals that don’t really matter to you. You stay in dynamics t...
The Work of Integrating Anxiety
Not all anxiety needs to be “resolved.”
In many cases, anxiety is an intelligent strategy—one that once kept you functional, vigilant, productive, safe. But over time, it may begin to lose utility because your system has grown strong enough to tole...
When Anxiety Is the Messenger and When It’s the Mask
Not all anxiety is a problem to solve.
Sometimes it’s a signal. Other times, it’s a smokescreen.
The challenge is knowing when anxiety is pointing to something real—and when it’s blocking something deeper.
Anxiety can be a truth-teller or a ...
Why We Can’t Think Our Way Out of Anxiety
Anxiety is often misunderstood as a thinking problem:
Racing thoughts, irrational beliefs, catastrophic predictions. So we try to fix it with insight, convincing ourselves the worry is unfounded, reframing our thoughts, applying logic.
But anx...