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Why Insight Isn’t Enough to Stop People-Pleasing
You understand your patterns. You know you are a people-pleaser. You may even know exactly where it began. So why are you still apologizing, backing down, overexplaining, or disappearing whenever someone is upset with you? The answer is that insight isn’t enough to change a pattern rooted in unconscious beliefs and predictions about what will … Read more
The Dark Side of People-Pleasing: Rage, Shame, and the Shadow
People-pleasing looks nice from the outside. You are agreeable. Accommodating. Helpful. You anticipate what other people need. You avoid unnecessary conflict. You learn to read the room and adjust yourself accordingly. But there is a dark side of people-pleasing that we don’t talk about nearly enough. Underneath all that niceness there may be feelings that … Read more
The Christmas Story Is About You: You Were Born Legitimate
What if the Christmas story is about you? I don’t mean that you are Jesus. I mean that perhaps we have made the Christmas story too small by treating it only as the story of one miraculous incarnation two thousand years ago. What if it is also an archetypal story about incarnation itself? A human … Read more
How to Live a Life of Your Own: What Marion Milner Can Teach Us
What would it mean to live a life of your own? Not the life your parents imagined for you. Not the life your culture rewards. Not the life you constructed in order to be accepted, admired, safe or loved. Your life. It sounds obvious. Of course my life is my own. Who else could possibly … Read more
From Ego to Heart Self: How to Stop Defending and Start Listening
Most of us assume our biggest problem is that we don’t have enough confidence. But what if confidence isn’t the issue? What if the real issue is that we’re living from a part of ourselves that was never meant to lead our lives? I call this the ego—not in the sense of arrogance or narcissism, … Read more