We live in a world that celebrates speed. We demand faster progress, faster responses, and faster healing. Even our self-care often comes with an undertone of urgency: “fix,” “optimize,” “get back to normal.” Our bodies don't move at the pace of urgency. They move at the pace of trust.

Once you start to dialog with your parts, you might start to have some more questions. Here are some suggestions to get you through the tight spots.

If there was any single book that applied to nearly all of my clients, this would be the one.  Emotional neglect is incredibly common, super hard to see, and yet it results in complicated feelings and issues that shape personality and behaviour.  AND it’s treatable.

There’s so much to say about parts! Here’s the 3rd blog post in a series about parts work. What do we do when we can’t find our parts?

Thinking about ourselves in terms of parts can help us to actually become more connected.  It’s a very different way of seeing ourselves, so it’s just fine if it takes a while to start to notice it in yourself and if it takes even longer to make any use of it.  Humans aren’t designed to be alone.  We are designed for connection both internally and externally.  It’s okay to reach out for help with this.  We’re here to help.

You may have heard people talking about doing “parts work” or “inner child work” in therapy. Parts work is becoming more popular, and people are asking for it more often. I love talking about parts, so here’s an explanation of what that means.

Everyone deserves a life free from an eating disorder. We need to understand the science of eating disorders in order to get helpful treatment.

This is a must read for anyone who lives or works with teen girls! Lisa Damour has a delightful understanding and appreciation for teen girls and generously lets the rest of us in on all the secrets. In this book, Lisa aims to untangle the confusion of adolescent development for us and present it as seven transitions that teen girls must go through. In Untangled, Lisa aims to help parents untangle themselves from the “emotional knots we get caught in with our teenage daughters.”

When my clients say they want to control their emotions, they are usually asking me to help them turn off their emotions so that they look like the second group. The second group is often baffled that they have problems since their emotions are so under control. They often see themselves simply as unemotional people, struggle to locate their emotions, and generally have their emotions as turned off as possible. This all makes sense because our culture has long devalued and misunderstood emotions, telling us that being unemotional is the goal. However, neither of these groups is regulating their emotions.

Somehow, when people are able to see that they didn’t run their own lives into the ground on their own, something shifts. They start to believe in themselves again. They start to reject the pieces of culture that don’t bring them life. Things start to get just a tad easier. When we stop thinking that we are the problem, we gain the power to become the solution.

Anxiety is a normal, human experience that comes for a wide range of reasons. While diet is not usually the cause of anxiety, research has found that our diet can play a role in the severity of our symptoms, how we manage anxiety, and the impact of stress and anxiety on our body. There are foods and habits that are best to both include and exclude to help mitigate and manage anxiety. Below are 12 evidence based nutritional considerations when it comes to anxiety.

No one knows how hard it is to live with your chronic pain except for you. Chronic pain is a profoundly isolating experience that touches every aspect of your life. While it is sometimes associated with a specific diagnosis, most often chronic pain is unexplained which can make it hard to hope for improvement. Because of this, chronic pain can easily lead to depression and anxiety.

My best gift ever was the nurse announcing to me that since it was Christmas Day, she would let me hold my daughter for 30 minutes. It still makes me cry to think of it. Thirty minutes of peacefully holding the tiny human that should have been inside of me.

I am sitting here imagining that you definitely don’t like talking about anxiety as much as I do. If you are here reading about anxiety, it’s probably not because it’s a mere curiosity. I’m guessing that your anxiety has gotten way too big, and it’s making you miserable.

Every year at Christmas, when it comes time to decorate the tree, I get super crabby! I seem to be able to handle decorating other parts of the house, just don’t let me near the tree. Is it because I’m not a visual person? Did I suffer some ornamental trauma at age 2?