Heal Your Codependency with Marshall Burtcher

#Reinforcement Episodes: The Two Commitments You Must Make With Yourself COMMITMENT ONE: Honesty with yourself and safe others.  This involves being willing to acknowledge what you feel, what you are experiencing, and what is actually happening. This involves the end of fantasy making and toxic hope. This means acknowledging the pain you're feeling, their abusive and neglectful behavior, and...

How To Empathize Without Violating Your Well-being Many of us struggle with a sense of conflict between caring for ourselves and caring for the other person.  This is especially pronounced when the other person is also the person who harmed us.  One's trauma bond with a harmful person along with one's natural care and empathy can create a divide within the codependent that is trying to n...

Is Being "Too Much" A Real Thing? Have you been told you're "too much" by someone? Have you questioned your own level of needs, desires, and wants due to that? Have you felt shame, confusion, doubt, or guilt for what you want or need, and how much of it you want or need? This is a very, very common impact we feel from others.  It can be especially painful if we're rep...

Consequences are key to learning, to growing, and to maturing.  When we interfere with a consequence someone chose through their behaviors, we are interfering with their ability to grow and mature. Learn more about how consequences are actually love in action. *** Seeking help in healing codependency? Join The Heal Your Codependency Community and get access to weekly experiments, practices, and su...

Are You Being Selfish?  Or Is Your Self-Interest Being Weaponized? "You're selfish" or "Stop being so selfish" or "You have to share!"  These are phrases I heard a lot in response to me saying no, to having a boundary, or wanting to keep something of mine, mine.  I was also raised to believe that sharing was the ideal and that having boundaries or saying no meant...

The One Question That Reveals Compatibility Fast "How would you define compatibility in relationships? What could I look for to determine if he is compatible with me?" This question comes to me a lot, especially in Focus 6 of the Codependency Healing System where I teach students the fundamentals of healthy relating. Much of what is taught about compatibility centers around mutual values...

Self-doubt caused by gaslighting, lying, and betrayal leaves us highly vulnerable to harm and leads us to question if we know what is real and what is not real.   We are left to struggle to understand what is happening and what "right" choices to make.  We turn outward towards others to define reality, and often towards those that are gaslighting and harming us, as we want to feel safe w...

Stacey and Marshall discuss the origins of codependency, how needs are factored in, and how to actually heal and be free of your codependency. You can follow Stacey Steinmiller here:  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCCy1EfJy-VR8XI9yEO6gaw *** Seeking help in healing codependency? Join The Heal Your Codependency Community and get access to weekly experiments, practices, and support in your healin...

Dating Again?  Boring Is The Green Flag You're Looking For Healing your codependency means you're evolving your nervous system's attunement to choose something different. Put another way, as you heal, you will become more attracted to what your brain may call "boring" because it lacks intensity, threat, and unrealibility.   Learn why boring is the green flag you are lookin...

Do you avoid positive outcomes because of pain? This is really, really, really, normal. Healing your codependency involves learning how to receive joy again, especially in things that you really want and carry a lot of loss trauma in them, like relationships and love. Learn how this was formed and how to navigate receiving what you've lost in the past and adapting to having it in your daily l...

The Essentials: Restoring Sanity Is Fantasy Sabotaging Your Relationships And Your Life? In codependency, fantasy is a core element of how we cope with relationship systems that are not changing, yet we feel deeply dependent on for our sense of well-being, safety, connection, and worth. The brain creates fantasy as a way of giving us direction and something to hope for, especially when we do not h...

Do you feel like there are "people" in your head that tell you what you should be doing, must be doing, or else? Do you feel like others are watching or scrutinizing you? When you go to make a decision or do a thing, do you find yourself evaluating if it is the "right" thing to do or find yourself fixated on what others may think or feel about it? Do you feel like you don'...

The Essentials - Sanity: Do You Struggle To Believe Yourself? In abusive, harmful systems, we are taught to doubt ourselves and question our feelings, senses, and lived experiences.  This is gaslighting in action.  To heal our codependency, we must restore sanity back to our daily life. What is sanity? Sanity is the act of being consciously in contact with the facts in reality and operating from o...

Get More Loving Relationships & Friendships With This Shift The shift is simple: My responsibility is to love and care for myself and choose connections with people who show they love and care for me. I am not responsible for getting people to love me, choose me, respect me, or value me.   Learn how to start implementing this in today's episode! Caring for yourself:   - Emotional warmth,...

What To Do When You Have Big Resistance To Your Pain Resistance to pain is often vilified. It is seen as a block, a problem, a thing to solve.  It becomes the problem, the hindrance that is preventing your healing and success! What if resistance was a teacher?  What if it was a protector?  What if it was a signal for the need for more safety? Discover how resistance is an ally in your healing and...

End The Judgment Trap: "I love you anyway" Practice We fix, pursue, chase and try to create healing.  We are stuck in transactional relationships with our healing, ourselves, and others.  Often in an effort to have worth and feel lovable.   This is the trap of transactional love. Let's start breaking of this with the approach of loving ourselves anyway.  Learn how in today's ep...

Real Healing vs Transactional Healing *** Bluntcake Episode *** Watch after checking with your capacity and availability for hearing information that can be confronting. *** Often, we get into the healing work in order to try to fix, prevent, or cause something else to happen.  This fast becomes a trap, as we start expecting specific results from our efforts.  When those do not materialize, we get...

The Essentials: Warmly Welcome Emotions Today we will practice welcoming emotions warmly and what to watch out for. *** Seeking help in healing codependency? Join The Heal Your Codependency Community and get access to weekly experiments, practices, and support in your healing journey: https://community.freetheself.com *** Connect with me on social media and via email, and learn more about how I he...

The Rush To Forgive is A Rush To Fix The rush to forgive is a rush to fix. This is the fawn impulse driving us to regulate our distress and discomfort with their feelings, as well as try to prevent more harm happening by rescinding the accountability the other person inherited with their behaviors.    Learn how I address this and help nurture more safety and personal allyship to my emotions and ex...

Are You Ultra-Independent? Do you say, "I don't need anyone!" You are in a trap.  The trap called "counter-dependence". Counter-dependence develops as a reaction to the enmeshment experience of codependency.  For many, enmeshment and connection are confused with each other.  The deep sense of being highly close or engulfed by another feels intense.  It is often draining, o...

Does Approval Equal Permission For You? Codependency has our authority and personal power attached to other people's perspectives, feelings, and ultimately their approval and rejection responses. This is why we often fixate on and try to control someone's approval of us.  We believe it grants us permission for certain things. This permission can pertain to one's worth (I'm wort...

Do You Feel Lost Without A Relationship?  Here's Why and What To Do About It Codependency has us orienting ourselves around other people, places, and things as a means to creating safety, connection, and a sense of worth.  It does this as it is a reaction to chronic unsafe relationships. If this starts in childhood, we never really learn how to orient to ourselves and become self-directed.  I...

Bluntcake: People-pleasing sabotages connection and belonging Note: Bluntcake episodes are more direct and firm information that can be confronting, especially when looking at one's own behaviors. Please check in with your capacity before listening or watching. Doing so helps you make an informed choice about listening to information that may bring some activation to your body.  This allows y...

Capacity is the most often overlooked, underdiscussed element of safety in healing work.  It is mentioned, but its role is not emphasized or prioritized. What is capacity?  It is the amount of something a person can receive or contribute. Codependency creates a habit of exceeding one's capacity by ignoring it entirely due to how capacity is treated by entitled persons. It is often vilified as...

Doubt That Your Feelings Matter Or Are Valid? Here's What To Do The Essentials: How To Feel Emotionally Safe Again - The Necessity Of Believing Your Emotions Are Valid And Real Gaslighting and abuse cause us to doubt ourselves in core areas of our reality:  our lived experience, our senses, our memory recall, our perception, and the validity of our emotions. When we do not believe that our fe...