Health - Mental

To begin to get free of the self-critical voice, ask yourself if it is helping or hindering you in building the kind of life that you want for yourself. Is it helping you realize your dreams? Does its input give you strength to persevere? Does it give you productive new ideas that really make things better?

Today I will let myself be playful without worrying about whether it fits my image as a responsible adult. As a child in my addicted family, I was forced to hurry and grow up. I took on adult responsibilities, such as substitute spouse and/or substitute parent. As a result, I developed a serious approach to life at the expense of my sense of

Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we “feel like ourselves.” However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently.

As you can see, working with early attachment issues is very delicate business, and clearly not every therapist or form of therapy is suited to it.

Keeping the exiles locked up, however, stamps out not only memories and emotions but also the parts that hold them—the parts that were hurt the most by the trauma. In Schwartz’s words: “Usually those are your most sensitive, creative, intimacy-loving, lively, playful and innocent parts. By exiling them when they get hurt, they suffer a double