We all have a relationship with something that’s helping us to feel a certain way, full and in control, empowered and attached. But we’ve been given so many different curricula around what we’re supposed to look and feel like, we’re using behaviors like food...

When someone seeks treatment for addiction, the truth is that we’re not actually treating the addiction; we’re treating the brain’s associations with the behavior that feels addictive. We’re delinking the positive feelings someone has with things like alcohol, compulsive...

The holiday season can be incredibly stressful and triggering for many reasons, from trying to defy our natural inclination to hibernate in the winter, to how our brains link to challenging events from all the holidays that came before.

But you don’t have to dread the holidays or...

The true definition (and outcomes) of depression goes far beyond what we typically think of: someone pulling away from loved ones, extreme sadness, maybe even feeling suicidal.

But the truth is that depression is often a symptom of trauma, and can manifest in individuals in so many...

Thanks to Gabor Maté, we know that trauma isn’t just something that happens; it’s something that happens inside of you. So when something happens to us (or doesn’t happen, like in an omission of care) and we feel anxiety, that anxiety is a result of trauma.

...

Parenting is a challenge for everyone, no matter what someone’s Instagram feed claims. And if we’re looking outside the “traditional” definition of trauma, every parent has experienced trauma at some point.

So many parents want to raise their children in a...

EMDR works. It’s well-known that it works for those who want to heal trauma, but you don’t have to be a trauma survivor to benefit from EMDR. In fact, I believe that it works for nearly every human on the planet.

This week, I’m starting a new series that I think will...

EMDR is a fantastic brain-based modality for trauma therapy, but there are so many other uses that we don’t talk about enough because of the focus on trauma. What gets lost the most is that EMDR supports anyone who wants to rewrite the curriculum they learned as a result of...

Identifying and pulling on positive resources is essential to processing trauma, but it’s also something you can do when you want to change your mindset around specific feelings and events. Even better, it’s something you can do on your own with a little bit of work and reflection.

...

Doing mindset work isn’t always the answer. We’re inundated with messages from coaches and therapists on Instagram telling us that if we just worked on our mindset, we could get past so many of our limiting beliefs and roadblocks.

And while maybe mindset works for some, for...

Most of us know how to behave appropriately in society, which is helpful in navigating the world. We follow the laws of our community, pay our bills, wait in the grocery lines, treat animals with kindness, etc. But sometimes, society (or our culture) teaches us a set of rules that...

Too often I hear therapists share that a client “isn’t doing the work.” They’re not progressing or working through their trauma because in session they talk about what’s going on in their life today, rather than talking about what happened in the past.

I...