Last Thursday, I had a difficult conversation with a family member that left me feeling sad, disappointed, and exhausted. After processing the experience with safe people in my support system, something was missing. It wasn't until I realized that a much younger version of me needed some healing attention that things started to feel like they were coming around to a resolution. The Inner Child is not a "sweet idea." It's not an imaginary playmate. And it's not psychobabble. The child we once were still resides inside each one of us, often in the form of our deepest needs. This week, we dive into inner child work as a healthy response to triggers. If we're going to learn how to love ourselves in a healthy way, we need to learn how to love who we were at every stage, not just who we are now.

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In the wake of the Nashville school shooting, we are understandably brought once again to the seemingly unanswerable question: what in the world drives people to do this? The common answer from armchair therapists everywhere is: "childhood trauma." No. That's not it. Many of us were traumatized, and we didn't become violent. So what is it? This week, we look at the real reason people turn to violence. Here's the bad news: our society is on a slow march to more and more violent crime if we don't stop this in its tracks. Here's the good news: we can stop this in its tracks. The choice is yours.

How do we really find rest? Is a good night's sleep? A massage? A quiet afternoon with a book? It's much simpler than that, but we can easily miss it. This week, we dive into the real path to finding rest and my own lessons learned in the past couple of weeks. I slipped into a pattern that needed to be stopped, and it got me thinking: do we over-complicate self-care? (We do.) Stunning in its simplicity, the best way to care for ourselves is as obvious as the breath in our bodies.

Now that life feels back to normal after the worldwide COVID pandemic, we look at where we are as a human race. Did we progress or regress over the last few years? Perhaps we can make the case for both, but in this episode I'm going to look at the pandemic that slipped under the radar and infected all of our minds: emotional reasoning. This dangerous relationship with our subjective reality - where we believe everything we feel - has eclipsed rational thought and rendered people more vulnerable to mental distress. We're seeing surges of mental illness like we never have before. This week, I tackle the complex cognitive distortion known as emotional reasoning and give the listener the tools you need to resist emotional manipulation and retain a sound mind. 

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What are you made of? What qualities and decisions got you through your hardest times? The hardship we face in our lives has the ability to refine us into gold or define us as victims. When we focus on our struggles without noticing our strengths, we're only telling ourselves half the story. This week, we tackle the qualities in our humanity that allow us to overcome. We're going to look at grit: where passion meets perseverance. And we're going to unfold and discover the well of strength we all have within us to stay with our goals, overcome any obstacle, and truly thrive.

Shame is a painfully universal experience. Every living human being battles feelings of shame, thoughts of being inadequate, not measuring up, being "bad," weak, or inherently unlovable. It grows inside us from childhood. Every shaming word, every experience of failure, every moment of abuse (if there was abuse), and comparison with others drives home the message: "You're not good enough." Sometimes it's just, "You're not good." It's like a bubble in the middle of our lives, inflating without our knowledge and growing without pause. Until we put an end to it. This week we're going to take a pin to the bubble of shame! We've got to take it on. We don't have to live like this. So many of the qualities and experiences we shame ourselves for are simply normal parts of the human experience. It's time we stop hurting ourselves inwardly for merely being human.

This week, we dive into the root causes of anxiety. So often, it's rooted in a belief that life is supposed to be pleasurable, easy, and satisfying all the time. This is a recipe for anxiety. Or we think that we're supposed to have an easy time of it, that things should generally go in our favor. This also is a recipe for anxiety. And then we feel anxious because we're anxious, and it's a miserable soup. Instead, let's take a look at the reality of how life really is, the nature of human beings, and the secret skill everyone can learn that reduces anxiety forever.

Sign up for The Toolbox Workshop here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-toolbox-workshop-tickets-516328722107