…On-Demand Webinars In this Webinar: This online workshop with Dr. Lisa Firestone will provide tools to help people heal insecure attachment, resolve trauma, integrate their… Learn More 1. Create a Coherent Narrative Attachment research tells us that to break free of a cycle of strained attachments, we must make sense of and feel the full pain of our past. As Dr. Daniel Siegel explained in his book Mindsight, “The best predictor of a child’s se…
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…I finished revising and updating The Fantasy Bond with my husband, Robert Firestone. While working on this book, now called Challenging the Fantasy Bond, I became aware of what a delicate balance it is to keep a relationship real. In a romantic relationship, people have a tendency to either move toward idealizing their partner or going in the other direction and being overly critical of them. These reactions result from the unconscious belief tha…
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…ay misperceive our partner as needy, demanding, or controlling, and have a fear about being consumed or overtaken by emotional closeness in a relationship. If we had an anxious attachment pattern as a child, we are likely to have a preoccupied attachment pattern as an adult. We will then be more inclined to feel clingy, insecure, possessive, or fearful of rejection. In both cases, we struggle with differentiation and linkage. A dismissively attach…
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…vailable and restrictions alter, many of us are experiencing a new kind of fear and uncertainty about what our lives may look like or how we might “go back” to some form of normal. Many of us are having to make decisions about going back to work, sending our kids to school, deciding what we’re comfortable doing and who we’re comfortable seeing. Even as we may feel hopeful or uplifted about the possibility of getting to a better place, we may conti…
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How your negative self-image puts you at odds with your lover. When we first fall in love, we have a positive response to feeling understood and valued by someone who matters to us. But eventually we can find ourselves faced with two opposing views of who we are: the familiar, albeit negative, view of ourselves that we have maintained most of our lives, and our loved one’s new positive, objective view of us. On an unconscious level, we are torn b…
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When the topic of infidelity spills into our daily dose of media, we may say we saw it coming, or we may react with shock. Either way, we don’t exactly look away. Without even meaning to, we learn details, names, sources and suspicions. Most of us would admit that there is little point in speculating about the ins and outs, agreements and lies, secrets and circumstances of a stranger’s affair, but our fascination with the indiscretions of others…
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…esses? The therapy relationship should and could provide the sustenance to feed the underlying hunger in a way that is realistic and fantastical at the same time. In my work, I tend to offer “food” less in the form of words and advice, but rather, I provide “food” in terms of time. The therapy hour, hence therapy relationship, gives each person the time to talk, to be heard, to be understood, to be challenged, to be questioned and to be related wi…
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…feelings, and desires. A narcissistic parent tends to focus on or almost “feed” on their child’s accomplishments. They often do this, because something is lacking within them. They may try to use their child to fill an emptiness they feel within themselves. Parents with full lives, in which they have many interests, close relationships, and passions, often offer more to their children than those who give up everything to be with their kids. Thoug…
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…the night for her bottle, while neither her mother nor her father woke to feed her. Night after night, hungry and alone, she would wait, but no one came. Finally, one morning when her mother brought her bottle, the child took the bottle and, even though she was starving, she refused it and threw it on the floor. She recalls that something shut down in her, and she never wanted food from her mother again. As she grew up, her relationship with food…
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…ng away the ‘fix’ for the larger problem (the bad emotional feelings) they fear more than the dangers of addiction. Often the people in the best position to turn this around are caring parents or loved ones. In one study, nearly two-thirds of families taking CRAFT classes saw a resistant to help a family member become willing to get help — three times the rate seen with other frameworks for families dealing with addiction. Your ability to help is…
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