Heal Your Codependency with Marshall Burtcher

De-centering others and centering yourself in your life is *necessary*, not selfish. It is about understanding what matters personally to you while setting aside other people's opinions and perspectives of what you should be centering in your life. They are not the authority, and they do not live with the outcome like you do. You are the authority.  You inherent the outcome and consequence of...

Knowledge overwhelm is a primary factor in experiencing freeze, procrastination, and loops of stagnation when you're trying to heal from trauma and instability. The mind's ravenous appetite for knowledge is driven by a fantasy that "if I'd only known better, I could have done better".  There's a deep assumption that we're lacking something specific and when we fi...

Going Slow - It Is A Must To heal, we must sloooooow down. To know ourselves, we must sloooooow down. To find direction in our lives, we must slooooooow down. Codependency, trauma, and the culture of "productivity" demands you speed up. You get it done now. Faster! Faster! FASTER!  Healing, thriving, having a sense of self, liking yourself, loving yourself, loving others, feeling satisfa...

Being neglected, being abused, being shoved into the world without guidance, care, shelter, or protection wired our attachment systems to be on high alert and braced for danger. Depending on what feels safest, your attachment system may try to control external things, resulting in anxious attachment. Or it may choose to avoid the threat all together and be needless and "independent", cre...

Emotional Perfectionism, Part One:  Making sure you feel the "right" things, not the real things I define emotional perfectionism as the rigid habit of feeling what one "should feel" in order to satisfy the real or perceived expectations of others. It is a sub-type of General Perfectionism, where behaviors and expressions are tailored to meet external expectations. This is a co...

Creation Phase is where you arrive with the ability to determine what kind of experiences you want to have, and then using your personal power, intuition, and skills, go out and receive those experiences. This all depends on knowing what you *actually* want, not what you think you want (which is often a product of trauma controling things rather than a genuine alignment within ourselves). This pha...

The Healing Phase is the deep work of unbecoming your codependency and discovering who you are beyond your pain, trauma, and survival self.  This is where we develop the necessary skills, experience and expertise we didn't get growing up, along with amplifying our safety, our belonging, and deeply embodying our self-worth. Learn how I work with this phase and how you can start to in your life...

Survival is the phase we all start in.  It is the phase where we realize our codependency and begin the big work of healing that codependency and become who we actually are. This phase is noted by the presents of: - Anxiety - Shame - Freeze and fawn impulses in the body - Feeling depressed, collapsed, powerless  - People-pleasing, perfectionism, avoiding conflict to keep the peace, and more Learn...

Quitting - It is necessary in the healing journey. Quitting relationships. Quitting fixing. Quitting chasing fantasy outcomes. Quitting. It makes space for new, healthy outcomes to come into your life. It makes it possible for you to face the pain that needs the loving care of your attention and loving care of community so it can heal. Quitting. That is what we explore in this week's episode....

Episode: Why you only love yourself when things are going well When we live from a love equation that says "I'm only lovable when...", we are being controlled and manipulated.  This leads us to invest precious time, energy, and attention on satisfying these conditions and then *maintaining* them. No wonder we burn out! Learn what do about this in today's episode: *** START YOUR...

Two Hidden Factors That Short Circuit Your Self-Love Really, actually loving yourself is a profound challenge when we come from codependency and love-is-earned relationship and family systems. We are striving to earn the love, earn the permission, become worthy, and demostrate that we deserve it. To break out of this prison, you need to understand the two hidden factors that keep you chasing love....

Episode:  The ONE thing that absolutely prevents you from loving yourself Transaction, earned love teaches us that we must - MUST - seek, chase, and perform for love. This means we have to be "just right" in the eyes of the other or we won't get love. This means that when there are challenges, problems, hiccups, mistakes, love is in jeopardy. This means we start LIVING like we'...

Why You Struggle To Really, Actually Love Yourself When you're rewarded with praise, attention, or affection for doing something, your body will see performance and love as the same thing. When you're presence is met with warmth, praise, attention, or affection on a consistent basis, your body will see your existence and love as the same thing.  You deserve to know the second form of lov...

Codependency And Shame - What's Really Happening You cannot become free of your codependency until you break free of what I call "Your Root Identity". Codependency depends on a root identity. What is a root identity?  It is an identity that you FEEL and experience as utterly true about yourself. You filter the world through this identity and it controls how you live your life. Learn...

3 Priorities For Satisfaction If You're Codependent Do you often feel:  - Empty, frustrated, or used?  - Wonder why your life is not fulfilling or satisfied?  - Feel lost as to what you want, value, or even need in your life? Codependency has us prioritizing others emotionally, physically, mentally, and even financially or intimately.   This happens through acts of people-pleasing, perfection...

You're Not Emotionally Blocked - You're In Need Of Love The term and concept called "blocks" is prevalent in the self-help and healing world.  It is something that sabotaged my healing, satisfaction, and personal alignment with my purposes and joy, as I was drawn to try to fix, eliminate, and overcome these "blocks". This wasted over a decade of energy, time, and mone...

3 Things You Must Unblend From Others If You're To Thrive Codependency has us blending ourselves with others. What is blending? It is confusing one's self with another's reality.  An example: You know their feelings and mistake their feelings for your feelings. This is a common form of being enmeshed with another. In today's episode, I show you three critical things to unblend...

3 Things You Must Trust In Yourself If You're To Heal And Thrive Abuse and neglect conditioned you to naturally distrust yourself.  You learned to discount the legitimacy of your lived experiences, the importance and value of your emotions, to seek your worth through pleasing others and being "good", and so much more. To heal, your distrust must be healed into trust. I share the 3 e...

Navigating New or Foreign Experiences That Come From Your Growth And Healing Adapting to new results because you're choosing different people who behave differently is challenging.  It is also one of the more risky parts of our journey, as we may turn to old behaviors to generate a sense of safety or comfort because it is familiar.   I share the gentle approach I teach my students that helps...

What secrets does your emptiness hold? Emptiness is often something we fear and can be really intense to confront if we're not sure why we're turning towards our emptiness. But what if emptiness wasn't something wrong?  What if it could add deeply to your healing? What if your emptiness holds the key to more fulfillment and connection? Learn how to work with your emptiness and disco...

What does it mean to fulfill or nurture a need? Needs are somatic - meaning they are experienced in the body, and their fulfillment is found in the body. This makes our needs interdependent experiences - both with you to yourself, you to others, and others to you. A need being fulfilled or nurtured means your body is having experiences that fulfill the desire that need has. Example: I want warm af...

The 3 Sides Of Fulfilling Connection Feeling connection and a sense of belonging invovles the interaction of three distinct "movements" we each do towards each other and ourselves. When we understand these movements and deliberately involve them in our relating, we experience more fulfilling connections.   What are these 3 movements? - How you relate to yourself (You-to-Yourself) - How y...

Do You Have Internalized Loneliness? First of all, what is "Internalized Loneliness?" It is an enduring, profound sense of being emotionally isolated from others and from yourself. I visualized it as my being in a transparent glass box where I could see others, hear them, and they could see and hear me, but we could never touch emotionally. This box also existed within my internal experi...

3 Tips That Take The Sting And Shame Out Of Disappointing Others Disappointing others is a terrifying thing when we've been rejected, discarded, and harmed by it in the past.  Yet, to thrive and enjoy our lives, we must be willing to navigate this, so how do we do that? Today I give you three tips that take the sting, shame, and intensity out of disappointing others. - Tip one:  acknowledge t...

A crucial and often not taught or discussed aspect of healing and growth is valuing, praising, and appreciating our efforts REGARDLESS of the outcome. Growing up, my worth and my confidence were deeply tethered to outcomes.  If the outcome was the "right one", I was worthy, safe, loveable, and could trust myself.  If the outcome was the "wrong one", shame, self-distrust, and re...