Heal Your Codependency with Marshall Burtcher

Your Pain Tells The Story of Your Lived Reality Most of my life, emotional pain meant I was either sinning, in error, or expressing some kind of flaw in my nature. I learned to see my pain this way through the reactions I received from my parents and culture.   They routinely responded to my pain with: - dismissal - claims that boys don't cry - shaming of the emotion (why do you feel that way...

What Is Freeze And How Do I Work With It? The freeze response involves a state of physiological and psychological immobilization, where the person may feel unable to move, speak, or take action. This response is often considered a form of dissociation, where the individual disconnects from their immediate surroundings or emotions as a way of coping with overwhelming stress or danger. In codependen...

Anatomy of Codependency Series: Fawning - How To Start Healing It Fawning happens because your body does not feel safe enough to advocate for itself.  This points us to what is required for your freedom and healing: increasing your sense of safety.  This happens through focusing on three specific areas:  safety emotionally, reliable connection, and real self-worth. Learn how this works in today&ap...

Therapists and self-help will often tell you that codependency is the problem and is what requires healing, but here's why that is wrong:  Codependency is actually a result of a deep biological threat response in the body called "the Fawn Response".  This response is triggered by chornically unsafe, unstable relationships that a person cannot separate themselves from without fearing...

How To Empathize and Keep Your Boundaries In Three Steps Empathy in codependency often causes a person to violate their own boundaries or allow unhealthy behavior to continue with an individual. Boundaries often feel harsh and conflicting while also empathizing with the pain that a person may be expressing in an ineffective way. Use these three steps to empathize with a person while keeping your b...

What If Triggers Are An Ally, Not An Enemy? Triggers speak for the trapped parts of ourselves that are reliving a terror in the past.  They give us moments to lean in, acknowledge, and legitimize our past lived reality.  They invite us to add sanity to our reality through our listening and validation of what is there.  And as we love and care for them through warmth, curiosity, and inquiry, their...

Blunt Cake: Are You Trying To Heal By Getting Rid Of Your Emotions? I touch on this topic frequently, as it is that important to healing and well-being. Often we're taught that we have to purge, get rid of, or fix our emotions.  We're taught to see our emotions as a problem, the enemy, or something to fix. This leads us to reject our emotions, fight them, deny them, and attempt to make t...

To Stop Pleasing & Appeasing Others, Focus On These 3 Things Wonder why you automatically people-please, rush to fix things when there's a problem, panic at the idea of someone being upset with you, or feel an internal pressure to avoid disappointing others? This is the fawn response in action, and it is happening because your body is perceiving a threat or anticipating a threat. The body...

Achieving Success In Your Healing: Are You Stuck In The "Start-Stop" Loop of Healing? Does this sound familiar? - You buy a course, feel a burst of relief, and never open the course again? - You get a big aha from something you've read, heard, or watched.  It feels like something changed, yet the same behaviors and results show up again? - You try really, really hard to get engaged...

It's been called "idealizing others" or "putting them on a pedastal". This is where a person perceives another to be much better than they are, including being perfect, being "the one", or having some kind of special meaning.  These are positive illusions This habit comes from the young parts of ourselves that idealized parents, peers, and authorities.  This happ...

 These two commitments assist you in staying free of codependency impulses and help you orient back to your well-being.  ***  Workshop link: https://workshop.freetheself.com  Codependency Healing System: https://chs.freetheself.com

How I Nurture Emotional Safety And You Can, Too Emotional safety is an essential factor in creating and sustaining your ability to heal and thrive in your daily life - especially beyond codependency. What is emotional safety?  It is knowing that your emotions are safe to acknowledge, feel, and care for AND they'll be cared for and supported by those around you, too.  it is a you-and-others ex...

Not Sure What To Do? Use These 4 Questions To Get Direction. Four questions for codependents to ask themselves when encountering situations in their lives: 1) What am I aware of in my body and senses? 2) Who do I want to be in this situation? 3) What principles do I want to prioritize in this situation? 4) What outcome am I willing to live with? These help you interrupt the codependent impulses to...

Do You See Yourself As A Real Person?  Essentials: Taking Back Your Personhood Abuse and neglect rob us of being a person - a being that is recognized as having inherent worth, limits, boundaries, desires, dislikes, needs, and perspectives. We are often conditioned to see ourselves (and others to some degree) as objects that perform a function and a benefit. This kind of conditioning is especially...

Loving yourself is difficult because you've been trained to believe love is transactional, earned, and conditional. In my work, real worth and love of self doesn't have conditions. These are unconditional and independent of all rules or justifications. It is a radical concept to consider.   And it is one that each person must discover for themselves.   Learn the question I give each of m...

Today a student had a question about healing in today's Homework Hours (a live call I offer my students in the Heal Your Codependency Membership). It inspired this dialog about the "layers of the onion" metaphor often used in healing work.  What are these layers actually? I've found they tend to be three things: 1) The coping mechanisms that we've used to tolerate and live...

Why Can't I Just Accept Myself? Have you struggled to "just accept yourself?" Do you feel a resistance, a judgment, or sense of "but I'm not acceptable!"? This is common for people who have suffered through frequent criticism, critiquing of themselves, and rejection from family, peers, or community. These patterns of rejection taught that person see themselves as unac...

This One Practice Unlocks Your Actual Healing Often we respond to our pain with judgment, with force, with denial. In fixing, we take on the pain as a thing to correct, alter, eliminate, or change. Warmth, curiosity, and care are the ways pain is received in my work. What does warmth mean? It means the person with the pain turns towards the pain concern and care (much like a parent does towards a...

Why Mindset Is Not Healing Your Pain From 2003 through 2009 I was a mindset junkie. I was constantly working on changing how I thought, how I perceived things, and how I interpreted the experiences I had. I found this to be partially helpful, as it helped me learn how to nurture curiosity and begin to disconnect from reacting to all my thoughts as though they're real. But what didn't cha...

Are You Emotionally Auditing Yourself? Are you trying to choose the "right" emotional response to what you're experiencing? When you experience something upsetting, activating, pleasurable, or emotional, do you find yourself wondering what the "right" emotion is and what you "should be feeling?" This comes from attempting to find the emotional response that will...

How Do I Know I Am Actually Healing? Real healing has signals and milestones.  These show up through the changes the mind and body have towards past, present, and future experiences.   In the Actually Heal Trainings, we focus on four specific signals of real healing: 1) The gap between where you were and where you are 2) The reduction of pain, reactivity, or intensity a person notices after comple...

Are You Doing The Spaghetti Approach To Healing? I call it: the spaghetti-healing approach This is where you try out a series of random tools in hopes something sticks (or works).   I did this for nearly 8 years of my healing journey, causing myself deep pain, anguish, fear, and frustration.   I often wondered if something was wrong with me because these tools weren't doing anything for the p...

#bluntcake  This is one that took me a good while to embrace.  Go gently. You are not entitled to anyone's acceptance.  And you are not entitled to people's lack of disappointment with you. Accepting this was very difficult.  It brought up a lot of anger, hurt, and fear. "But then what happens to me? I'll be alone!" This statement from within myself speaks to the trauma of...

Isn't it healthy to have certain expectations? In healing your codependency, your understanding of what expectations really are and how we use them to foster well-being and happiness must shift. For most, expectations seem like a logical, normal, healthy factor in relationships.  In my work, expectations are the center of a lot of conflict, misunderstanding, and unnecessary pain.   This stops...

"How Do You Manage Escapism, Marshall?" Firstly, what is escapism? It is the tendency to seek distraction and releif from painful realities.   In codependency, escapism shows up as: 1) Being hyperfocused on the realities of others, their feelings, and their lives (so you can escape your own emptiness, loneliness, or pain) 2) Medicating emotional pain through food, sex, needlessness, work...