When You Love Someone Who Never Feels Good Enough: Understanding the Lasting Effects of Chronic Parental Criticism, Part 2
Loving an emotionally healthy partner Here is Part 1 of this series. If the adult child finds an emotionally healthy partner, they might feel uncomfortable because this person can challenge everything they learned about love. For the adult child, love was historically...
The Child Who Could Never Do Enough: Understanding the Lasting Effects of Chronic Parental Criticism, Part 1
The invisible wound When people think about childhood trauma, they might imagine bruises from physical abuse, scars on skin that remain red and thick, stories of children left alone to fend for themselves without food or comfort, or various forms of sexual assault....
The paradoxes of flourishing
I once dated a man with borderline personality disorder. At one point, he told me that it broke his heart to see what I was not, what I hadn’t become, how small my life was, how I had squandered my brains and looks. This unsolicited mourning of a fantastical me (a...
The Part of Healing We Don’t Talk About Enough
There’s a moment many people on a healing path quietly come to – often after years of trying, pushing, and doing all the “right” things. It’s the moment they realize:“I thought I had moved on…so why does my body still feel this way?”Why does anxiety still show...