Picture your emotions as this dog: a mangy mutt you have no interest in adoptime but who has somehow set p residence in your life. You have tried everything to get rid of this pesky best. Why wouldn't you? There he is, day after day, under your desk at work, pulling at your pant lef, jumping on you in the grocery store, distracting you while you try to drive. He doesn't smell great, either. You ask a coworker to take him off your hands. She politely says no, that she already has a few dogs of...

Trauma has a way of putting in buffers to prevent stumbling across the things that brought you pain in the past. We try SO HARD to circumvent activating our old wounds. We operate in a protective way that helps us regulate our exposure to intense feelings, because we are shaped by the experiences thay have harmed us. Imagine every person has different elements of their personalities, or parts of themselves, that are created from the traumatic exposures we have had to endure. Each "part" has...

We have many negative thinking patterns we may not even register. They aren't ours, but we have adopted them as our own. We may have learned from family, friends, or experiential knowledge by people watching. I don't care how you got it, we all have them. Let's figure out which you have and how to alter the mentality so we don't have to carry other people's bad thinking patterns forever. Cognitive distortions are central to emotional dysregulation. You may notice that there are certain things...