Light and Shadow: the podcast

Throughout the healing journey, we will all face discouragement. We may feel like we're fighting a war on all fronts and not see the way out. We may think that everything we try still ultimately leads to failure, leaving us feeling powerless over changing our lives. What we don't realize is that healing stands on multiple moving parts. A house isn't built on one stick, or branch - it&#...

While interrupting the cycle teaches specific skillsets at the nervous system, thought, feeling, body sensation, urge/impulse, and behavioral levels, renewing and rebuilding is all about making those skills become an integral part of your daily routine to not just choose healed responses, but to live a completely healed life. In this episode, I talk about how interjecting these practices work to r...

This is the rehab episode! Therapy and treatment centers are not always accessible to the general public - especially those who truly need the help, so I've decided to bring rehab to you. In this episode, I've compiled everything I've learned from psychological facilities, therapists, self-help books, counselors, and my own life experiences over the past 12 years to tell you what really works when...

In a society that runs from emotions, you might find it surprising that building healthy self-confidence grows from an almost entirely emotional base. In this episode, I go through what confidence truly is, where it comes from, and how to grow it in your own life. I talk about how far-reaching the effects of confidence really are, not just in your life, but the lives of almost everyone you encount...

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate." - Jung In order to master your mind, you've got to read the manual on how it works. In this episode, I synthesize everything I've learned about neuroscience as it pertains to mental health. I explore the dopamine cycle and how it relates to mental health struggles and addiction, as we...

I never thought I'd see the day that I'd be happy for getting ghosted, but here we are. It's almost like the only way to truly get over your fear of rejection and abandonment is to get repeatedly rejected and abandoned. In other words, the only way out is through, and this is me finally getting to the other side of my breakup. The deep pain it caused pushed me to learn more about attachment styles...

In the beginning of me learning emotional regulation, I didn’t really know how to “feel my feelings” - like what did that even mean or look like? I put together this short little audio guide to give you a real time example of how I emotionally regulated today - putting blueprint for the anxiously attached overview into a real life practicum. When we get more into interrupting the cycle, I’ll have...

For some, breakups are just, "he's not for me, I'm over it." They mean it and they move on. For me, it's, "why did this happen? What did I do? How are they seeing me? Why won't they come back?" And then I go and do a doctorate analysis on the "why." I find it extremely hard to let go even when the person has proven to not be a good fit for me. Now inst...

Dealing with emotionally immature parents and partners can feel like you're fighting for your life. You desire close and meaningful connection, but it feels like it's just a matter of time where the other shoe is going drop and you'll be the one blamed. It can feel like you're constantly in fight-or-flight mode and don't know how to break through the walls of constant emotional explosion or emotio...

Following my breakup, I really wanted to make sure I was learning all the lessons I needed to learn to not only pick a better partner in the future but also be a better partner in the future. I started to realize that the majority of my part in our issues were around communication and understanding where I faltered not just in what I said, but the larger picture of my attachment wounds being activ...

I've always struggling with this horrible, aching sense of emptiness. The only way I can really describe it is a black abyss that comes over me and fills me with a sense of dread. I know I've gone through how to feel all different feelings, but this emptiness was one I could never really feel the "cure" for. I found it purposeless and strange and no one else seemed to understand the feeling I was...

Breakups are hard. There's no way around that. You think this person is a dream and you're finally closer to finding your person only to find it crumbling beneath your feet. When there's no real closure, the person chooses to ghost and quickly replace you with someone you wonder if any of it was ever real. You feel shaken with distrust for yourself, all your trust issues resurface, and...

We all know that our thoughts drive our emotions and behavior, but what's even more critical to understand is distinguishing the validity and truth or falsehood of our thoughts and beliefs. I've found that the majority of arguments we have with other people isn't necessarily a difference in values, but a difference in perspective and how each other is viewing a situation. Often our tho...

Dissolution of relationships in any form can be so difficult, leaving you feeling angry and confused. This is exactly how I felt following coming back to a situationship after a year only to be rejected and discarded once again. I felt I had done nothing but try to understand and be there for him when all he ever did was use me. I recently went to the gym where he’d told everyone that he “hit” tha...

I really wanted to make shorter episodes for you guys, but this episode really needed the length to explain each issue of fear, trauma, addiction, attachment, toxic relationships, and familiar family dynamics, while also bridging the gap between them to illustrate how they are each so intimately connected. Often times, we see we have issues, but don't see how they are often the same issues jus...

Ever date someone you didn’t really think you’d like and then all of a sudden you find yourself pining after them like, “why they don’t like me anymore? Why does no one ever care about me?” Have you ever really asked yourself - before the attachment - happened if you ever even wanted them? Maybe, but your craving for that love and validation that seems to be lost is so deep that you can’t see the...

I know I promised a "little learnings" on ego-defensive behavior, but life took some unexpected turns. In this episode, I talk about the strange turn of events over the past 3 months that diverted my attention from examining other people's behaviors to taking a deeper look at myself. I discuss how my previous dark intermissions episode really highlighted a narrative about my inner world that neede...

I'm back! I know it's been 3 months since I've published my last episode and while I wanted to jump straight back into the little learnings for "uncovering the truth," I wanted to share some things I'm struggling with in my own life. The reason I include some of these episodes with more practical educational videos and to show how I personally work through my own difficul...

This episode is our longest yet, but jam packed with vital information all about the role of emotions and how actively feeling them will change your entire life. It is the part 2 continuation of emotions part 1, and finalizes the “little learnings” for the emotion/body sensation phase needed to “interrupt the cycle” is step three of the healing process. I begin the episode with a short recap of pa...

We are back with another “little learnings” episode, now covering the emotional piece. I know this is a long episode, but it’s probably my most important episode to date - and the most researched! I’ve working on this episode for 5 months, trying to flesh out all the details and nuances of emotion to help change your narrative and understanding of emotions as a whole. This episode starts off by de...

The perfect bridge between the past three dark intermission episodes and talking about emotions in the next episode coming, episode 14 really gets into the uncomfortable feeling that abandonment brings. Sometimes we fear being left so intensely that it effectively dictates the way we live our entire lives. In this episode, I discuss how childhood experiences shape our brain, nervous system, core b...

After some life changes, we’re back with another dark intermission episode (in the same thread as episodes 8 & 12) examining what to do when someone’s effort toward your relationship suddenly starts to decrease. While I begin by focusing on unhealthy relationships that serves as a continuum of episode 12, I also shed light that some effort levels drop simply because that person is no longer in ali...

This episode is in the same “dark intermission” thread as “the case for not choosing the guy (or girl) that makes the huge effort.” In this episode, I examine the questions a lot of us have following the ending of a toxic relationship - particularly the one where we did go for the guy who made the huge effort, only to be dumped just as quickly as they came into our lives. We can’t help but think,...

After going through the “little learnings” of logical fallacies and cognitive distortions, we finish off this cognitive restructuring segment with thought reappraisals. Thought reappraisals begin with identifying distortions that other people have told us or ones that we’ve told ourselves. By first recognizing that we’ve fallen into thinking traps can we start to find our way back to truth. By fin...

This is the second of the “little learnings” we’ll be using for interrupting the cycle at the thought level. While logical fallacies talk about argument and evaluation in terms of interpersonal debate, cognitive distortions really speak to our mind’s misinterpretation of events, information, situations, or people being presented to us. Even more often, cognitive distortions can affect the way we s...