Fixer: Someone who engages in relationships with dysfunctional partners, with an uncontrollable need to help, give, rescue, and recreate that person into the image that they desire.

If you see yourself in the above definition, raise your hand if you have ever tried to fix someone and it actually worked? I’m not talking about two relatively healthy people, who make each other better. I’m talking about two unhealthy, broken people, with one giving and one taking, one responsible for everything and one responsible for nothing, and with one trying to change the other into something they are not.

I get a lot of emails from people that are suffering. They are going through so much emotional anguish and they don’t know what to do. Sometimes they’re fine, but they’ll get a text message from their ex-Narcissist and it will send them into an emotional spiral. They need a healthy solution to alleviate the pain they’re experiencing and they need it now. I came across something a couple of years ago and was reminded of it this week, as I came across some writing by Gabrielle Bernstein. 

The new year brings with it new challenges, new chapters and new beginnings. But before we look ahead I think it’s important to look back, to make sure that we’ve taken care of all of our childhood baggage.  This is important, because if you refuse to do this work, these unresolved issues will continue to manifest in your life, and you will have a never ending battle, trying to manage symptoms, rather than eliminating the problem at its source.

Many people eat, drink, or do drugs to counteract the painful feelings from childhood neglect, or abuse, these are clearly inappropriate coping mechanisms – bandages, that only mask the problem. When you’ve been brought up to feel not good enough, you really do feel a void. You feel incomplete and you believe that if you could only figure

Most of us want to have the ‘typical’ family holiday. We want the tree, the presents, a delicious Christmas dinner and to be happy and surrounded by loved ones. We want the occasion to look like it does in the commercials and movies on TV, but quite often it doesn’t.

For many of us, the holidays mean being around people that we don’t necessarily like, or those who make us feel uncomfortable. That could include – your overbearing Narcissistic father, your hyper critical mother, your spiteful, passive-aggressive sister, or that Narcissist you thought you had gotten rid of ages ago.

Many of us have been on the road to healing for some time now, healing from childhood traumas and from our adult relationships. Most of us have gone no contact with our last abusive partner and we’ve distanced ourselves from the toxic people in our lives. Everything is going great, but along comes the holidays and this is when we are at our most vulnerable and when our resolve is severely tested.

There are a lot of misconceptions about hypnosis. Many people believe that they are supposed to be completely unconscious and have no memory of what’s going on and if they don’t get there, it’s not working and they come to the conclusion that they can’t be hypnotized. The truth is that hypnosis is really the place between awake and asleep. It’s a trance like state where individuals are highly suggestable and highly relaxed. If you’ve ever been driving your car and you are just hyper focused on the road and nothing else and it seems as though your conscious mind has shut down and your subconscious mind is steering the wheel and you don’t remember just how you got to your destination, then you’ve experienced a trance like state.

Many people fear that a hypnotist will make you do foolish things. I’ve been asked on many occasions, “You aren’t going to make me cluck like a chicken are you?” I always say, ‘You aren’t going to do anything you don’t want to do, or wouldn’t normally do.’ You never hear a legal defense for murder as, not criminally responsible, because the defendant was under hypnosis. If you wouldn’t kill someone when you’re awake, you won’t do it under hypnosis.

Several weeks ago a picture of a Muslim woman, wearing a niqab, was floating around social media with the caption, ‘How does this make you feel?’ More recently, Kim Kardashian’s nude photo shoot with Paper Magazine has been making the rounds and the comments about each were two sides of the same coin.

While the objectification of women is nothing new, Kardashian is setting a dangerous new standard, not just for women, but for media. Ironically, Paper Magazine is an arts publication. It’s a magazine about and for artists, musicians, poets and the nightlife. It’s not a nudy mag, like Playboy or Penthouse, which have age requirements and are relegated to the back of the rack. It’s a mainstream magazine, which has set a precedent for other mainstream magazines to follow suit, or be left behind.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a prude. I think nudity can be art. I believe the photographer Jean-Paul Goude wanted to create an artful piece of work, but the subject – a seemingly, self-centered, arrogant, talentless, constantly-in-your-face-for nothing, spotlight seeking, self-important, starlet, evokes a lot of negative criticism and this latest work, is seen as nothing more than a feeble attemp

When your eyes first open in the morning, it’s usually because your alarm clock is making that awful aaaaaa-aaaaa-aaaaa noise. At that moment, you have to decide – do I get up, or do I hit the snooze button?  Have you ever wished that life gave us the same kind of signal – some sign that would alert us that we were off course and that we needed to wake up?

The good news is, that life does provide us with a wakeup call, except the alarm isn’t a sound, it’s a feeling. It’s our emotions.  When we waltz through life continuing to play out the same dysfunctional scripts from our childhood and we keep making poor choice after poor choice –  then we are going to, at some point, find ourselves in the grips of emotional turmoil.

Many people go through life continuing to ignore the obvious signs that something is seriously wrong. Whether you’re going to get up and do something about it, or continue to snooze is entirely within your control.