Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (Goop Press)

So, here’s the first tip for working on your partner’s core negative image of you: the more you refute it, the more you’ll reinforce it. But the more you admit to the kernel of truth within your partner’s exaggeration, the greater the odds that the exaggeration will relax. Try it. Don’t defend yourself—yield. Yielding can work as a core negative im

After you have a fair idea what your repeated dysfunctional stance looks like, here are three questions to ask yourself: Who did you see do this? Who did it to you? Who did you do it to and no one stopped you?

The great spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti once said that true liberation is freedom from our own automatic responses.

As a couples therapist, I have three sources of information: what the partners report about themselves and each other, how they behave in front of me, and how I feel witnessing their behavior.

Some injurious transactions are clear examples of disempowerment (You little shit!) while others are clear examples of false empowerment (You’re the only good thing in my life!). But most relational trauma empowers and disempowers at the same time.

Cognitive science teaches us that what we think of as ourselves derives not from a direct experience but from a collage of sensations and images—self-representations, pictures we have of ourselves.

In reaction mode, our Adaptive Children tend to do the opposite of what we ourselves experienced. Intrusion breeds walls. Abandonment breeds intrusion.

We will never experience collective healing until we undo the dissociation and compartmentalization that is required of us to do collective harm.

offending from the victim position. When we offend from the victim position, we feel like a victim while acting like an offender.

“Evangelicals?”