[PREVIEW] When It Feels Real But Isn’t Safe: Understanding Pathological Love, Cluster B Traits, and Repeated Harm

[PREVIEW] The Angry Daughter in Love

In this episode, I return to the angry daughter — but this time, I look at what happens when she tries to love someone. The survival skills that kept her intact in her family of origin are the same ones that quietly work against her in relationships. She over-functions. She holds everything together. She mistakes someone's performed pain for depth, and she chases validation in ways she can't always see while it's happening. This episode is personal, and I'm not writing from some resolved place on the other side. I'm writing from inside it — still learning that I'm allowed to want things, still figuring out what it looks like to stop disappearing so love can fit.

[PREVIEW] The Angry Daughter

In this episode, I reflect on what it actually means to be the angry daughter — the scapegoat, the truth-teller, the one who names what others refuse to see. Drawing from my own childhood and my experience as a mother, I trace the way systems assign their tension to one person, teach her not to trust herself, and then use her exhaustion against her. This episode is for anyone who has ever been told that their reaction was the problem, that their clarity was the threat, or that their limits were a character flaw. You are not the problem. You are the person who finally stopped pretending otherwise.

[PREVIEW] Q&A: Trauma Bonds, Leaving, and Rebuilding Self-Esteem

This month's Q&A episode covers three listener questions that get to the heart of what recovery actually requires. First, I explore whether trauma bonds in adult relationships are rooted in our earliest relational wounds with parents. The connection is real, but it is not the whole story, and understanding what your nervous system learned to call love can be enormously clarifying. Second, I answer one of the most common questions I receive: how do I leave? I walk through what to prepare quietly, what to say, what to avoid, and why one more honest conversation will never produce the outcome you are hoping for. Finally, I talk about rebuilding self-esteem after years of being diminished. You are not starting from zero. You are starting from a deficit that was manufactured, and that distinction changes how the work of restoration unfolds. Please ask questions for the next episode here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeMInxIFVH04aCaxJiNsA58os45FHcxWtBBa-SFYlwaHBq4Yg/viewform?usp=header [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeMInxIFVH04aCaxJiNsA58os45FHcxWtBBa-SFYlwaHBq4Yg/viewform?usp=header]

[PREVIEW] When Love Feels Like a Hostage Situation: BPD in Romantic Relationships

This episode is dropping here first before it goes out to the general feed. If you have been around for a while, you may remember the original BPD episode — it is one of the most listened-to things I have ever put out, and I have wanted to come back to it for a long time. Two more years of client work, my own processing, and graduate coursework later, I felt like the conversation deserved more depth and more honesty than I gave it the first time around. I go into the idealization cycle, splitting, emotional dysregulation, what leaving actually looks like, and a piece that I do not hear talked about directly enough — what to do when someone threatens self-harm to keep you from going. I also share some of my own experience more openly than I have before.

[PREVIEW] What the DSM Gets Wrong About Survivors

You’ve probably heard of the DSM—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It’s often treated like the authority on what’s “wrong” with people. It’s where diagnoses like anxiety, depression, PTSD, ADHD, and personality disorders are defined and categorized. In this episode, I’m breaking down what the DSM actually is—and what it isn’t. These diagnoses are not based on clear biological evidence. There are no blood tests, no brain scans, no definitive markers. They are based on patterns, observations and agreements among clinicians. With the development of the next version (DSM-6), there’s a push to move even further toward a biological model of mental health—despite the fact that those biological markers still don’t exist. That matters for survivors. If you’ve ever been in a therapist’s office and felt like your reactions to abuse were being labeled as symptoms instead of understood as survival… this conversation is for you. We talk about: * Why trauma responses are often pathologized * How diagnoses like BPD are disproportionately applied to survivors * The risk of shifting away from context and toward unproven biology * The history of psychiatric models getting it wrong (like the chemical imbalance theory) * And why your pain makes sense in the context of what you’ve been through