relationships
Sara Stanizai
Are Family Roles for Life?

By Sara Stanizai.

In my previous post, we explored how childhood dynamics shape our adult relationships, identifying common roles such as the Hero Child, Scapegoat Child, and Lost Child. Understanding these roles is the first step toward healing our relationships, but the real work lies in transforming these ingrained patterns into healthier relational dynamics.

Maybe you resonated with one or more of these roles. But now what?

What do you do when you feel stuck in these relationship patterns from your family?

According to Relational Life Therapy, understanding and using the basic concepts of the Adaptive Child, Wounded Child, and Wise Adult can help guide your journey toward healthier relationships.

Are Family Roles for Life?
relationships
Sara Stanizai
Heroes, Scapegoats, and Lost Ones: How ...

By Sara Stanizai

It might be a therapy cliche, but our family roles profoundly shape who we become as adults.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this (and sharing with my clients) especially recently. I’m making my way through a certification and training with my therapy hero, Terry Real, an LCSW and the founder of Relational Life Therapy (RLT).

In our trainings, he sheds light on the specific roles children often adopt within their families of origin. These roles—such as the Hero Child, the Scapegoat Child, and the Lost version of each of these—can have lasting effects on our behaviors and relationships as we navigate adulthood.

This especially resonates as I run the Eldest Daughters group and do more research on the impact of birth order on our mental health. It’s never as cut and dry as eldest/middle/youngest/only.

Understanding these roles can help us identify patterns in our romantic relationships, friendships, and professional lives, providing a pathway to healing and personal growth that we may not find in traditional therapies.

Which one are you?

Heroes, Scapegoats, and Lost Ones: How Childhood Dynamics Shape Adult Relationships
relationships
Sara Stanizai
No Contact: Navigating the Decision to Cut Ties

Like many pop psychology terms, people really throw around the idea of “going no contact.” It can be tempting to cutting ties with someone in your most heated moment — and it’s true, it can ultimately be beneficial to move on with your life.

But if you value community care, and wanting to do right by the people in your life, it can be confusing to figure out when and if it’s the right decision, and how to ethically do it.

What does going no contact actually mean and how can it help or harm you? How do you know if it’s the right decision for you? Have you truly done all you can - and should you?

No Contact: Navigating the Decision to Cut Ties
Sara Stanizai
What is Trauma-Informed Therapy?

The phrase “trauma-informed” is being thrown around all over the internet, but what does it actually mean?

Being trauma-informed goes beyond simply acknowledging the existence of trauma and its effects on mental health. Trauma-informed therapy is an actual approach to care that revolves around specific core principles. What a skilled therapist does with those principles, and how they implement them in the therapy room, will vary.

How we generate trust, safety, choice, collaboration and empowerment for our clients depends on what you have experienced in the past and what you might need now. (It’s those. Those are the principles.) This involves a deliberate and thoughtful approach to therapy that influences every choice we make as a therapist, both in session and when setting up our practice.

If you’re seeking therapy or if you’re a therapist yourself, it’s crucial to understand this concept so that you know how therapy works — and if it’s working for you.

What is Trauma-Informed Therapy?
Nik Stancil
"Therapy never worked for me": CBT isn't enough ...

Most of my clients have been to therapy before. Many have tried therapy several times over their life, but they never felt it was that helpful or they found it difficult to find a therapist who was a good fit. There are plenty of reasons why this might be the case, and this post aims to explore one of the main offenders: a very common type of therapy practiced is CBT, and using CBT alone may not be a great choice for neurodivergent brains. 

"Therapy never worked for me": CBT isn't enough for neurodivergent clients seeking long-term healing

perfectionism

Perfectionism is Not Polite

Perfectionism is Not Polite

It’s natural and a sign of high self esteem to want to improve yourself. The main difference between wanting to do better and wanting to do the BEST is how you view mistakes, shortcomings, or flaws. The person striving for improvement sees their mistakes as a natural part of the process, not as a sign of failure. The perfectionist sees their flaws as cancelling out any good they have done.

The pandemic has burdened a lot of our social circles from seeing each other as often as we did in the past.

This may not be the popular opinion, but a lot of us are fine with that. For many people, less emphasis on socializing has been a relief.

Introverts, people with social anxiety, busy parents, people paying down credit card debt. A bunch of us were glad to not have to look for parking every weekend.

However, you may have been feeling lonely and isolated this whole time. And it may not be just because of the pandemic. Perhaps something deeper is at play?

If you spend so long coming up with the right thing to say that you delay interacting with anyone, your problem could actually be perfectionism. This, in fact, is great news!

While we can’t control the ebbs and flows of the world outside, we can always control how we choose to face it. Let’s talk about why overcoming your perfectionism could be the key to several ongoing problems in your life.

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You Might Be a Perfectionist

,
You Might Be a Perfectionist

It’s natural to want to succeed at the things you do. But when does striving for achievement become perfectionism?

Perfectionist tendencies are the combination of wanting to do our best, while simultaneously feeling like we never actually do.

Having high standards and wanting to pursue excellence can be helpful qualities. Without them, one could argue, everyone and everything would stay mediocre.

But this is different from perfectionism, which is less about an excellent result, and more hyperfocused on not making any mistakes or having flaws.

When perfectionists make mistakes, they feel like a complete failure, fixate on the negative, and have anxiety or depression over their perceived flaws.

When people with high standards make mistakes, they forgive themselves, see it as “part of the process,” learn from it, and are not deterred from their pursuit.

How can you tell which one you are?

Convenient to Long Beach and Seal Beach at:

4510 E Pacific Coast Hwy, #540, Long Beach, CA 90804

contact@prospecttherapy.com | (562) 704-4736