Emancipate Your Mind

As we’ve talked about healthy attachments, two words kept cropping up in conversations: Trauma Bonding. Many people used these words to describe the almost instant friendship between two people who have experienced the same trauma and can validate one another’s experience. However, this is known as “bonding over trauma”. (We’ll talk more about this next… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 111: What Is Trauma Bonding?

Developing healthy interdependence with our partners, family, and friends is healthy and normal. Relationships where we feel free to both give and receive support and love can help us feel more emotionally stable and studies are showing that it can even help us live longer. But in our Western culture where independence is prized almost… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 110: Codependency or Co-regulation? How to Tell the Difference

Developing a safe, intimate connection with others can feel scary for those who are trying to reclaim a sense of personal identity after religious trauma or interpersonal codependency. In this episode, we discuss what healthy emotional co-regulation looks like and how we can set the stage for this powerful experience in our most important relationships.… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 109: Learning to Co-regulate Your Nervous System

If you’ve been in a relationship with insecure attachment patterns, how do you begin practicing secure attachment? Licensed Professional Counselor and my husband, Kevin Hales, discusses the first three steps he shares with couples in his therapy room as well as practical examples of conflict resolution from our own marriage. ________________________________________________________ RESOURCES: Fredrickson, Ronald. “Living… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 108: Practicing Secure Attachments in Adult Relationships

In today’s episode, we explore the last of the 4 attachment styles and how high demand religion may have influenced our primary caregivers or us as children and how we relate with others. Disorganized Attachment Style, otherwise known as Fearful-Avoidant Attachment Style, is a unique combination of both Anxious and Avoidant behaviors. Today we talk… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 107: Disorganized Attachment Style and High Demand Religion

If you have an avoidant attachment style, you may feel highly uncomfortable getting emotionally vulnerable with other people, which makes it difficult to create the deep connections you both crave and fear. On the one hand, you would love to feel the joy of connection with another special human but on the other hand, because… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 106: Avoidant Attachment and High-Demand Christianity

If you have an anxious attachment style, you likely spend your time trying to people please, take care of the people around you, and in general try to win the love and connection you so desperately crave. But, you may worry that those you love don’t care about you as much as you care about… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 105: Anxious Attachment and High-Demand Religious Parenting

Do you crave close relationships with others but find it hard to connect on a deep level? Do you often feel lonely or misunderstood? Do you worry deeply that those you love will abandon you? You are likely struggling with an insecure attachment style. For the next few episodes, we’re going to talk about what… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 104: What Is Healthy Attachment and Why Does It Matter?

Have you ever thought about how high demand religion taught you to relate to and attach with God? Have you considered how your learned attachment style with the God you were taught to worship might have informed your childhood relationships and may still inform your relationships today? In this episode, Self-Trust Coach and Licensed Mental… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 103: Exploring and Healing Attachment Wounds with God with Catherine Quiring

Often, some of the most difficult conflicts of values we’ll face is with the people we love the most. Many of us were taught through codependent patterns and practices that love means always agreeing with one another on the things that matter most. This kind of thinking is reinforced through scripture that tells us that… Read More »Emancipate Your Mind: 102: Resolving Values Conflicts with Others