"Complex PTSD" has traveled a long way in a short time. A few years ago it was a term most people only heard in a therapist's office. Now it shows up in captions, comment sections, and self-descriptions — often as shorthand for "I had a rough childhood and I'm still feeling it." That shift has done real good. A lot of people finally have words for something they've carried for years. But when a clinical term gets stretched to cover everything, it stops being able to describe

Sometimes the body is telling the same story the nervous system has been telling for years — just in a different language. I sit with a lot of clients who arrive with two separate files. One holds the medical history: the autoimmune workup, the migraines, the gut issues no one can quite explain, the fatigue that never lifts. The other holds the relational history: the childhood that required constant vigilance, the relationships that feel unsafe even when they're good, the in

The toddler who melts down because you cut his sandwich the "wrong way" and the 45-year-old who cannot tolerate their partner having a bad day without making it about them are doing the same thing, developmentally speaking. One of them is right on schedule. The other one got stuck. That's not a moral failing. It's a clue. Egocentrism Is Supposed to Happen Piaget gave us the term, but every parent has lived it: young children genuinely cannot yet hold someone else's internal e

Nobody puts this in wedding vows. No one stands at the altar and says, "I promise to communicate with you about who is picking up the kids on Thursday, to tell you when I have a work event that runs late, to actually look at the shared calendar, and to see your time as mattering as much as my own." But maybe they should. Because in twenty years of clinical work, some of the most profound disconnection I've witnessed in couples and marriages hasn't come from a lack of love, it

By now you've probably seen it everywhere: Netflix's new true crime documentary Maternal Instinct premiered on June 12 and quickly became one of the most talked-about releases of the summer. The film follows the real case of Taylor Parker, a Texas woman who maintained a faked pregnancy for months and ultimately killed a pregnant woman, Reagan Simmons Hancock, in order to take her unborn baby. It's the kind of story that's almost impossible to look away from. It's also, for a

Talking about Pride with children is part of raising kind humans.

Summer is such an important time for kids to recharge and relax after working so hard during the school year! Kids do best when they have...