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

trauma

Harnessing the Power of the Vagus Nerve: 7 Effective Ways to Support Your Mental Health

Harnessing the Power of the Vagus Nerve: 7 Effective Ways to Support Your Mental Health

In my quest to manage my mental health after an extremely stressful few years (who’s with me?) I’ve noticed everyone keeps talking about the vagus nerve. As the longest cranial nerve in the body, it forms a vital connection between the brain and various organs, including the heart, lungs, and digestive system.

It’s one of those things I learned about in grad school, as well as at several therapist trainings over the years. But like most things, I didn’t start paying close attention until it affected me. Here’s what I’ve learned, I hope it helps you too.

REST AND DIGEST: The Opposite of Fight or Flight

By stimulating the vagus nerve, we can enhance our vagal tone, which is crucial for supporting our mental health.

Increasing your vagal tone activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and having higher vagal tone means that your body can relax faster after stress.

If you think of stress management in terms of cultivating the opposite of fight or flight, you’ll understand why things that promote our body to rest and digest will help you not only reduce stress, but bounce back from stressful situations more easily.

How Does the Vagus Nerve Help Anxiety?

I’m glad you asked! Here are seven ways to improve your mental health by activating your vagus nerve.

What is the Difference Between PTSD and C-PTSD?

What is the Difference Between PTSD and C-PTSD?

Imagine: You’re moving through your workday, like usual, handling the day’s joys and stresses like the boss you are. When, all of a sudden, it feels like the world around you has changed. For the worse.

Your heart drops into your stomach, your body feels vulnerable and exposed, and then you begin to feel confused about where you are or what you were doing.

Mentally, emotionally, and perhaps even physically, you feel like you were just dropped back into the worst day of your life. You’re immobilized. Bracing. Waiting for it to happen all over again.

That is what a flashback feels like, for people experiencing PTSD. But what does a flashback feel like for individuals experiencing C-PTSD?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can set in after experiencing a single, horrific event. Think of things that happen in a flash, like being in a car accident, grieving the death of a loved one, or experiencing assault.

Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) can set in after experiencing repeated trauma. Instead of going through a key event once, it’s caused by living through a lengthy and highly stressful period of time. This includes chronic or repeated experiences.

Unlike those diagnosed with PTSD, who experienced a single, existentially-threatening event, those diagnosed with C-PTSD may have experienced an entire childhood of abuse, ongoing domestic abuse with a partner, being a prisoner of war, or experiencing abuse or harassment in a long-term workplace. This complex stress can arise from a series of major events or from prolonged micro-aggressions. We all know that trauma isn’t defined by the scale of the event, but rather by the person’s ability to cope with the event(s). This means that a lifetime of experiencing micro-abuses, neglect, aggression, etc., can produce the unique web of hypervigilant pain and wounding that we clinically refer to as C-PTSD.

Trauma Bonding: How to Recognize the Cycle and Break Free

Trauma Bonding: How to Recognize the Cycle and Break Free

Some of the hardest challenges we face in life can connect us deeply to others.

Winning a championship with your recreational softball team, getting to the end of a show week, or making it through that last deadline with your coworkers. Moments like these can create lasting relationships with the people who stayed, even when we were down in the dirt.

But what happens if the person you went through hell with caused the hell? More than that—what if you like them being around but feel conflicted about the levels of stress and toxicity they bring you?

That’s called a trauma bond. Feeling emotionally connected to the perpetrator of your prolonged abuse. Sometimes it can be tricky. You may feel like you have to take the bad with the good. And generally that’s true. But if the “good” parts only come at the price of negative experiences, and you feel obligated to tolerate or look past things that don’t sit right with you, there’s a good chance you are involved in a trauma bond.

(Contrary to popular belief, trauma bonding is not bonding with someone over each of your own past traumatic incidents.)

Trauma bonding is characterized by what feels like “hot and cold” manipulation, so that you emotionally and physiologically, feel bonded to whatever (or whomever) provides the first semblance of safety.

This is not only the case in abusive family or romantic relationships, but often strong group dynamics that require intense physical and psychological devotion, such as military training, spiritual cults — even some workplaces TBH.

Let’s talk about recognizing the cycle of trauma bonding and how you can eventually break free of it.

Aggression Toward Women Doesn't Discriminate

Aggression Toward Women Doesn't Discriminate

When it comes to aggression against women, there are no qualifiers that determine who is going to experience it. Harm takes on the full spectrum, from famous women in powerful positions to the most disenfranchised, including trans women of color.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a U.S. Democratic Representative of New York and youngest woman to ever serve in Congress, was simply walking up the steps of the Capitol to cast a vote when she was accosted, bullied, and verbally attacked by Congressman Yoho, who didn’t agree with her political views. AOC had to defend herself multiple times in front of Congress after Yoho denied the charges, despite reporters overhearing Yoho say aggressive slurs about her.

Megan Thee Stallion is a rapper and songwriter whose latest smash hit, WAP, broke music records by debuting as No. 1 on both the streaming and digital sale charts, with over 93 million U.S. streams and 125,000 downloads in the first week of its release. But current headlines are focused on questioning the legitimacy of her recounting being shot in the foot by rapper Tory Lanez. Despite video footage of the incident and her various messages on social media discussing how she was coping with the trauma, Megan Thee Stallion resorted to sharing graphic photos of her foot post-surgery after followers said they didn’t believe her.

Eden the Doll, Jaslene White Rose, and Joslyn Flawless were recently robbed, attacked, and physically assaulted in Hollywood by Carlton Callaway, Davion Williams, and Willie Walker while Steven Hurtado recorded evidence to ridicule later, all as onlookers pointed, laughed, and encouraged further violence. Two arrests have since been made. The footage itself, however, reflects the sentiment that violence against women is not only allowed, but celebrated. Anyone who has been made complicit in their own violation instantly recognized the insidious terrorism of a perpetrator holding someone’s hand while forcing her to find her friends to be further victimized.

These stories are only the tip of the iceberg. Millions of people endure this violence and aggression from men and carry their own unsung stories. From the #metoo movement to the sickening number of un-publicized deaths of trans women, aggression toward women is not a small issue. But it’s the small things that make it an ongoing issue.

Three Ways You Might be Minimizing Your Trauma

Three Ways You Might be Minimizing Your Trauma

Trauma is any experience that overwhelms our ability to cope with it.

In other words, the deciding factor of whether an experience is traumatic or not, is whether it overwhelms your ability to cope with it.

The tricky part is that frequently, one way that we try to cope with traumatic events is to minimize them. That’s our brain trying not to be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the stress. This goes for events that overwhelm us physically, emotionally, or both.

Here are three signs that you might be minimizing your trauma, and thereby actually prolonging or intensifying its effects.

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