Project I Am

How your healing becomes someone else's hope.

We've spent years talking about self-awareness.

But what actually happens when two nervous systems meet?

In Part Two of The Well, Dr. David Schlosz explores the invisible space between people, the place where healing relationships are formed.

Why do some people make us feel instantly safe?

Why do we sometimes carry emotions that don't belong to us?

How can we remain deeply compassionate without losing ourselves?

Drawing from counseling, attachment, interpersonal neurobiology, and years of clinical experience, David unpacks the profound difference between rescuing and accompanying, empathy and emotional fusion, and reacting versus remaining present.

In this episode, you'll discover:

• Why your body is always listening
• The hidden wisdom of countertransference
• How to ask, "Whose feeling is this?"
• Why differentiation is essential for healthy relationships
• The difference between helping someone and carrying them

Most importantly, you'll discover that people rarely heal because someone says the perfect thing.

They heal because they discover someone who isn't afraid to stay.

Whether you're a therapist, a student, a caregiver, or someone who simply wants to love the people in your life more deeply, this conversation will change the way you understand connection and yourself.

Because when you've spent years digging your own well...

you finally have water to offer.

Why your healing begins with you.

Before we can become a safe place for someone else, we have to learn how to become a safe place for ourselves.

In Part One of this three-part series, Dr. David Schlosz explores one of the most important and often overlooked truths of healing: the work we avoid in ourselves inevitably shapes the way we show up in our relationships.

Using the metaphor of a well, David reflects on why personal growth isn't separate from helping others, it is the foundation of it. Whether you're a counselor, parent, teacher, leader, or simply someone longing for deeper relationships, this episode is an invitation to stop performing, stop abandoning yourself, and begin the courageous work of digging beneath the surface.

Together, we'll explore:

• Why healing is expansion, not erasure
• How childhood adaptations become adult patterns
• The difference between surviving and truly living
• Why your greatest gift to others is your willingness to keep doing your own work

Because every difficult conversation... Every honest therapy session... Every boundary... Every tear... Every moment you choose yourself instead of abandoning yourself...

You're digging the well.

And one day, someone else's hope may come from the depth you've been willing to create.

"Every place you've learned to stay with yourself becomes another place you can stay with someone else."

There is a particular kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being alone. You can be loved, married, surrounded, texted-back-within-the-hour, and still feel that no one in the room is meeting the real you. Just the version you sent ahead. The easy one. The capable one. The one who's fine.

For a lot of us, that gap wasn't an accident. We built it. Because somewhere along the way, being seen stopped feeling safe.

In this episode, Dr. David Schlosz explores the need to be seen: why it's biology rather than neediness, why we run from it even as we ache for it, and what happens in the body when someone finally stays long enough to witness us and doesn't look away. As he says, "We were made for the dance."

Three lenses: your inner life, the therapy room, and the one who does the seeing.

The episode ends with a short guided practice. You are not broken. You were adapting. Come as you are.

What determines whether pain breaks us or transforms us? In this episode, David explores one of the most neglected concepts in psychological healing: capacity, the room we have for our own difficult emotions, and for each other's.

Through three lenses, our own inner life, the therapy room, and the heart of the helper, this episode weaves together the window of tolerance, research on emotional suppression and experiential avoidance, the neuroscience distinguishing empathy from compassion, and stories of people learning that the feelings they feared would drown them were actually survivable.

Whether you're a clinician, a leader, a parent, or simply someone carrying something heavy, this episode offers both a framework and a practice: capacity is not a trait you're born with. It is a room you build, one ninety-second stay at a time.

We often imagine healing as a journey toward peace, freedom, and deeper connection. But what happens when your growth starts changing the relationships around you?

In this episode of Project I AM, Dr. David Schlosz explores one of the most difficult and rarely discussed realities of healing: not everyone benefits from your becoming healthier.

As you learn to set boundaries, listen to your body, speak your truth, and stop abandoning yourself to keep the peace, relationships inevitably shift. Conversations change. Roles dissolve. Old patterns are challenged. And sometimes the people who seemed most comfortable with you are actually most comfortable with the version of you that ignored your own needs.

If you've ever felt guilty for growing, lonely for changing, or confused by how others respond to your healing journey, this conversation is for you.

Because sometimes healing isn't about learning how to keep everyone else comfortable.

Sometimes it's about learning how to remain loving without disappearing.

"You do not need to become less compassionate to become whole. You simply need to include yourself in the circle of compassion."

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Anger is one of the most misunderstood emotions we experience. Many of us were taught to fear it, suppress it, spiritualize it away, or turn it inward against ourselves. But what if anger is not the enemy? What if healthy anger is actually a form of protest, agency, dignity, and self-protection?

In this episode of Project I Am, Dr. David Schlosz explores the difference between destructive rage and healthy, integrated anger. Drawing from trauma psychology, somatic work, relational healing, and personal reflection, David discusses how suppressed anger often becomes shame, depression, self-abandonment, perfectionism, and self-criticism.

Sometimes anger is not evidence that something is wrong with you. Sometimes it is evidence that something inside you still knows you deserve dignity.

If you’ve ever struggled with self-blame, resentment, people pleasing, emotional suppression, or feeling disconnected from your own needs, this episode is for you.

There are moments in life when we abandon ourselves in order to protect ourselves. We stay silent instead of speaking honestly. We disconnect from our feelings to avoid conflict, rejection, shame, or discomfort. And afterward, something painful lingers: the feeling that we betrayed ourselves.

In this episode of Project I AM, Dr. David J. Schlosz explores the hidden cost of self-abandonment and why so many of us learned to disconnect from ourselves in order to survive. Drawing from relational therapy, trauma work, somatic psychology, and personal experience, David unpacks how self-protection can quietly become self-betrayal and why choosing ourselves in healthy, grounded ways is one of the most courageous acts we can make.

If you’ve ever felt exhausted from performing, people-pleasing, caretaking, or disappearing inside relationships, this conversation is for you.

You do not have to disappear to be loved.

In one of the most personal and vulnerable episodes of Project I AM to date, Dr. David Schlosz explores the painful intersection of shame, trauma, grief, and healing. Drawing from his recent experiences in an intensive training, David reflects on a profound realization that moved from intellectual understanding into something much deeper.

This episode explores how children internalize blame in order to survive unsafe environments, how shame becomes embedded in identity, and how survival strategies formed in trauma can later affect relationships, emotional regulation, and self-worth. David discusses the difference between cognitively knowing something and emotionally believing it, the role of the nervous system in trauma, and why anger often protects deeper grief.

Blending personal storytelling, somatic awareness, relational healing, and reflections from thinkers like Gabor Maté and Carl Rogers, this episode offers a deeply human reminder that survival was never your identity, it was an adaptation. And beneath the adaptations, there is still a self worthy of love, grief, compassion, and belonging.

This episode contains discussions of childhood trauma, sexual abuse, conversion therapy, shame, and grief. Listener discretion and self-care are encouraged.

In this follow-up episode, David moves beyond labels and into honest self-reflection with a powerful conversation titled “Confessions of a Covert Narcissist.”

This episode is not about diagnosing others. It is about recognizing the subtle ways fear, shame, insecurity, and emotional self-protection can shape all of our behaviors.

Why do we become defensive when receiving feedback? Why do we sometimes over-give and quietly keep score? Why does being misunderstood feel so painful? Why do we perform instead of authentically connect?

Blending psychology, nervous system insight, personal anecdotes, therapeutic wisdom, and compassionate reflection, David explores how covert narcissistic tendencies often emerge not from arrogance… but from unhealed shame and the desperate need to protect ourselves from emotional pain.

This episode offers a compassionate reminder:

Having protective patterns does not make you broken. It makes you human.

The work is becoming aware enough to choose connection over protection.

Because awareness is not condemnation. Awareness is the beginning of freedom.

What if narcissism isn’t always loud?

In this compassionate episode of Project I Am, David explores the hidden world of covert narcissism: the quiet, vulnerable, and often misunderstood ways people protect themselves from shame, rejection, and emotional pain.

Rather than reducing people to labels or internet buzzwords, this episode looks beneath the behavior to the deeper wounds that often fuel defensiveness, validation-seeking, self-absorption, withdrawal, perfectionism, martyrdom, and emotional fragility.

This conversation is not about blame. It is about awareness.

Blending psychology, personal insight, therapeutic wisdom, quotes, and heartfelt reflection, this episode invites listeners to move away from judgment and toward compassionate self-awareness.

Because sometimes the behaviors that hurt others most are rooted in the deepest fear of not being enough.

This episode is for anyone who has:

• struggled with criticism or defensiveness
• felt unseen or emotionally fragile
• experienced confusing relational dynamics
• over-given while secretly longing for validation
• wondered whether healing is possible for deeply ingrained patterns

Healing begins when we stop protecting the image… and start telling the truth.