I was lucky to grow up with a nervous system that likes close, bonded, intimate relationships. Getting close to people isn’t hard for me. I have a low tolerance for relationships that lack the capacity for intimacy and am absolutely awful at small talk. If I’m forced to attend a…

Nobody could easily see how badly the little boy in the middle pew in the fundamentalist Christian church had been beaten because his father always made sure it was the boy’s hind-quarters that bore the bruises, cuts, and oozing welts, safely hidden beneath overalls. The fact that he squirmed on…

I was raised to be a good little Christian girl. Independent thinking or rebellion of any kind were suppressed from as early on as I could remember. The rules were clear, and disobedience was punishable not only by a lifetime of blistered flesh in the torture of eternal hellfire (an…

I used to have a very grandiose, inflating, “othering” idea of what a “spiritual” person was or wasn’t. Having already rejected the fundamentalist Christianity of my mother’s persuasion, I considered “spiritual” people “better than” religious people, who I judged as racist, homophobic, patriarchal, and oppressive. I’m embarrassed to admit that…

Spiritual bypassing, a phrase coined by John Welwood and defined as a kind of spiritualized conflict avoidance that demonizes certain natural emotions like anger and can cause us to bypass our need for healing trauma, our activism, and our pain, runs rampant in spiritual and religious circles. …

While finishing my latest book and preparing to teach an online class Spiritual Bypassing Recovery 2.0 as part of releasing that content, I’ve been pondering how spiritual teachings so frequently demonize anger and make us anger-phobic, when anger is the emotion we need most in order to protect our boundaries…

Since the Trump era, there’s been a nationwide renaissance in public discourse about malignant narcissism, and many of us have taken off our spiritual bypassing, rose-colored glasses to spot the dangers of trying to relate with people who are very blended with narcissist parts. We’ve learned to get savvy about…

Since the chaos of 2020, I have been writing a book I have not yet published, reckoning with the distortions, disinformation, delusional thinking, and downright demonizing of all things scientific, rational, or fact and reality-based from New Agers I had previously respected. I spent the first year of writing unpacking…

People with relational trauma often have trust issues, and they can be a beast to deal with if you’re someone new in their life. People with a heavy trauma burden often have upside down compasses when it comes to knowing who to trust. …