Shame is often transmitted through family lines. Parents use shame-based parenting, the children grow up with shame and use shame-based parenting, and the pattern is repeated. Shame is something that comes up in therapy regularly. One of the most powerful …
What To Say If You Made A Mistake Or Regret How You Behaved.
We all mess up from time to time. Remember, it is not the conflict that defines a relationship. The magic is in the repair. How well do you repair? When we have made a mistake, we have usually done something …
5 Proven BENEFITS of Crying
For all the times you have cried and shamed yourself! Here is some permission. Crying is a natural response to many situations. It relieves stress, it effectively self-soothes and brings the parasympathetic nervous system online. It releases oxytocin and endorphins, …
To My Daughter
If children are first conceived in the mind of a parent, then I dreamed you into being at around 5 years old. Holding my toy doll with knitted purple clothing and pretending to feed it a bottle. I felt you …
Complex Trauma and Dysregulation
When you have been raised by parents whose nervous systems are activated and in fight or flight all of the time, you will not have learned co-regulation. Co-regulation happens when one nervous system calms another nervous system down. This would …
The Separation of the Body and the Mind
BOOM! And herein lies a fundamental problem. Enter Descartes in the 17th Century and the idea of the mind and the body being separate, providing the foundation for the biomedical model for the next three centuries. I feel we are …
The Power of the Parent-Child Connection
As a parent, there are two ways to view this: With hopelessness. With the thought that you have already made too many mistakes. With hope. With the belief that the changes I make today CAN make a difference. Some questions …
PTSD and Dysregulation
If you have been following me for a while, then you know I talk about this a LOT. Gone are the days when we can think it’s okay for children to be raised in homes where there is violence, abuse, …
Connection
How do you let your children know you love them? I ask! I ask if they feel loved. I say, “if you were to feel a little bit more loved by me today, what would happen, or what would I …
The Faint Response
Faint is the action of last resort. It is the result of total shut down and para-sympathetic activation. If this is a response you have that seems to come about at random times, you might think about when you first …