Flip Your Mindset

There is a saying I keep coming back to: we’re never happier than the saddest person in our home. When someone we love is struggling, we feel it in our own bodies. Their pain becomes our pain. Their chaos becomes our chaos. And without ever deciding to, we start co-regulating with them, making their challenge our challenge, because we don’t know how to separate ourselves from it. That is where thi...

Jenn Noble calls it “the relationship that broke me.” The way her ex later explained it to her, when they first started dating he poured everything into her cup. One hundred percent. She loved all of it. She just never felt it. She was very anxiously attached. He was avoidantly attached. So he poured, and she needed a little more. He poured again, and she needed a little more again. A few months i...

Have you ever stopped to think about how much time we spend trying to get rid of something we don’t like about ourselves? For me, it was anxiety. For you it might be overthinking. The need for control. The inability to relax. People pleasing, perfectionism, or the way you shut down when things get hard. Whatever it is, we usually come at it with the same question. How do I make it stop? And listen...

In his twenties, Ton Mazzone couldn’t get through a conversation without his mind going blank and his heart racing. He bought every confidence book he could find. Nothing worked. The only time he felt like himself was after a drink. So he did what so many of us do. He self-medicated, until that stopped working too. When he finally went to his doctor and asked for help, the appointment went the way...

Most people assume that once you leave an abusive relationship, the abuse is over. You got out. You did the hard thing. Now you get to start healing. But what happens when you share children with that person? What happens when you cannot go no contact? When the courts require you to keep communicating? When parenting schedules, finances and the family court system itself become a brand new avenue...

There is a particular kind of person I keep meeting. From the outside, they look like the success story. The title. The career. The composure. And underneath, there is a child who learned a long time ago that needing things was not safe. Rich Dunning is one of those people. He grew up in a Bronx basement where silence was not calm. It was survival. By the time he was eleven, he had already stopped...

If You’re the Person Everyone Leans On, This One Is for You You are the one they call at 2 a.m. The one who reads the room before anyone says a word. The one who notices what everybody needs and quietly takes care of it. You are so good at it that no one thinks to ask the obvious question: Who takes care of you? My guest this week, Dr. Adam McCormick , has spent his whole career circling that ques...

There is a sentence I have heard in my office more times than I can count. “How can I logically know that relationship was devastatingly awful, and still feel so drawn toward it?” It usually comes with a list. Why did I stay? Why did I keep hoping? Why did I defend them? Why did I go back? Why do I still miss them? Why do I still want them to call, even after everything? And underneath the list is...

You do not always know the moment a relationship starts to make you smaller. There is rarely one scene you can point to. No single blowup that explains it. Instead there is a slow narrowing. Your world gets a little quieter. Your choices get a little fewer. You start editing yourself before you speak, managing someone else’s mood, rehearsing how you will explain the most ordinary things. And if an...

What if addiction isn’t the beginning of someone’s story, but somewhere in the middle? This week I’m starting a series I’ve wanted to make for a long time, and I’m starting it with a friend. Vincent Castellanos is a Certified Trauma Recovery Coach and addiction counselor with 32 years of sobriety. Before that, he was a working Hollywood actor. You’ve seen him in Anaconda, The Crow: City of Angels,...

There is a particular kind of person I keep meeting. They have done the therapy. Not badly, and not briefly. Years of it, with someone good. They can tell you exactly what happened to them and exactly why it affected them. They have the language. They have the insight. And they are still stuck. If that is you, I want you to hear something Kelly Francini said to me this week, because it reframed th...

The Lindsay Clancy trial has raised difficult questions about mental health care, what happens when someone knows something is wrong, and what it can feel like when you keep asking for help but don’t feel heard. But this episode is not about determining Lindsay Clancy’s criminal responsibility . It’s about something bigger. After I posted a reel responding to courtroom testimony about Lindsay’s at...

Time Doesn’t Heal Trauma. Here’s What Does. | Dr. Christopher Cortman We’ve all heard the phrase: “Time heals all wounds.” But does it? In this episode of Flip Your Mindset, I sit down with Dr. Christopher Cortman, a Florida Licensed Psychologist with decades of clinical experience and more than 80,000 hours of psychotherapy, for a conversation that completely challenges the idea that we simply ne...

Before you decide this one isn’t for you, stay with me. I know what happens when people hear the word trauma. Their mind goes straight to war, sexual assault, physical abuse, a natural disaster, a horrific accident. Something catastrophic. Something with a headline attached to it. And all of those things absolutely can be traumatic. I am never going to dismiss that. But those images have also quie...

Hi friend, I want to tell you about a moment from this week’s episode that I have not stopped thinking about. My guest, Audra Phelps, had been out of the Mormon church for eight years. Eight years. She was making Thanksgiving dinner from scratch, the way a good Mormon wife does it, and she noticed she felt resentful in her own kitchen. So she did what I would want any of us to do. She got curious...

Have you ever caught yourself saying, why am I like this? Why can’t I stop overthinking. Why am I still replaying that conversation three days later. Why do I apologize when nothing is wrong. Why do I say yes when every part of me wants to say no. Or maybe you’ve never asked those questions about yourself. Maybe you’ve asked them about someone else. Why is my partner so angry. Why can’t my spouse...

“A baby doesn’t remember that? Well, their nervous system does.” That line stopped me in my tracks this week. My guest on Flip Your Mindset is Kelly Tondre, a trauma therapist, therapeutic coach, adoptive sibling, and adoptive mom of three. Kelly has lived every side of the adoption constellation. And she told me something I wish every adoptive parent heard on day one. The wound starts before word...

Pause for a second before you read on. When you hear the word boundaries , what happens in your body? Tight chest? Stomach drop? A specific person’s face? Most people think boundaries are a communication problem. Another script for the hard conversation. Another lesson in saying no. I don’t see it that way anymore. Boundaries are about trust. More specifically, boundaries are what self-trust looks...

Have you ever felt completely exhausted from trying to be the person everyone else expects you to be? Not because you are doing anything wrong, but because you carry around a lifetime of expectations, obligations, and invisible rules about who you think you are supposed to be. This week, I am joined by Pam Brown, a professional certified coach and the author of Build a Life That is Becoming Should...

For most of my life, if you’d asked me whether I had trauma, I would have said no. Without hesitation. At 30, no. At 40, no. Honestly, even at 48, probably no. What I would have told you instead is that I had anxiety. Generalized anxiety disorder, to be exact, diagnosed after my first nervous breakdown at 30. For years, that diagnosis became the lens I saw myself through. And if anxiety was the pr...

What if it’s not anxiety? After twelve weeks of back-to-back loss, I realized the tight chest, the daily tears, and the constant overwhelm I felt weren’t anxiety at all. They were something I almost never hear anyone name: a nervous system carrying more than it could hold. In this episode, I challenge the word “anxiety” and the habit we have of dumping grief, exhaustion, overwhelm, and stress into...

Welcome back to Flip Your Mindset. Have you ever asked yourself if everything you built was not really about ambition, but about survival? Today I sit down with Lena Fein to discuss exactly that. Lena is the author of “Shattering the Mirror,” a memoir about confronting a traumatic childhood. In this episode, Lena shares her story of being raised by a mother who used power and control to parent. We...

I almost didn’t write this. I debated it in the shower, while I was getting dressed, the whole morning. But there’s so much going on in my personal life right now, and I’ve always believed these real experiences can be teaching moments. So here we are. Between April 1 and May 23, life piled on and up. Not one hard thing. Not one stressful moment. Multiple emotionally significant experiences stacke...

Some conversations stay with you long after you stop recording. My conversation with Junie Moon was one of them. If you’ve ever smiled on the outside while quietly falling apart on the inside, this episode is for you. Junie spent 20 years in a marriage where she walked on eggshells, managing everyone’s moods, micromanaging every detail, making herself smaller so she wouldn’t rock the boat. From th...

For a really, really long time, I thought anxiety meant something was wrong with me. I thought I was broken, that I had generalized anxiety disorder, and that I was too sensitive, emotional, or tightly wound. But looking back now through a nervous system lens, I see something very differently. I see adaptation, overwhelm, and protective layers. To understand this, I want to share a story about a v...