How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self

going to the gym regularly to help channel her stress

When we’re running on autopilot, a primitive, or subconscious, part of our mind drives our reactions.

that I couldn’t ignore this soul signal.

It was impossible for her to get any clarity about what she wanted because she wasn’t tapped into her intuition.

Running on autopilot is a function of our conditioning. Most of us are stuck in subconscious programming; in fact, some brain scans reveal that we operate only 5 percent of the day in a conscious state;22 the rest of the time, we are in subconscious autopilot. This means that we are making active choices during only a small sliver of our days and l

I looked around me—really looked, as if for the first time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every single one of my clients who came to me for psychological treatment also had underlying physical symptoms. Long out of school, I started to ask new questions: Why did so many of my clients suffer from digestive issues, ranging from irritable bowel

When people hear about my whole-person approach to healing, they want to dive right in and meet their inner child, start the reparenting process, do the ego work, remove the trauma. This desire for the quick fix, emblematic of the Western culture in many ways, comes from an understandable want to end the incredible discomfort of living with these w

When our needs are consistently unmet, our pain and disconnection are compounded. Self-preservation leads to self-betrayal. It’s a loop we can easily get stuck in. The cycle of unresolved trauma, repetition of maladaptive coping behaviors, and consistent denial of Self allows the pain to live on in our mind and body, where it can eventually make us

We all have an intuition, a psychological and spiritual concept that refers to an innate and unconscious wisdom. It’s the evolutionarily driven gut instinct that helped keep us alive throughout human history and still speaks to us; it’s that feeling of the hair on the back of our neck standing up when we walk down a dark alley alone, it’s the deep

When our needs are consistently unmet, our pain and disconnection are compounded. Self-preservation leads to self-betrayal. It’s a loop we can easily get stuck in. The cycle of unresolved trauma, repetition of maladaptive coping behaviors, and consistent denial of Self allows the pain to live on in our mind and body, where it can eventually make us