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.

When I look back at young me, teenage me, 20 something me, I can’t help thinking, ‘man that little girl didn’t have a clue what she was doing.’ I was a bit of a paradox, because I had an innately, happy disposition, but I was always negative, always critical, never satisfied and always focused on what I didn’t have.

I was lucky enough to have my life completely torn apart by my Narcissist, and yes, I did say lucky. I was lucky, because I had been given a wake-up call. Rather than live out the rest of my days unhappy and slowly dying inside, the universe saw to it, that I take a look at my life and all of the poor choices I was making. I get a lot of emails expressing the deep, emotional pain people

The best blogs I have written have been ones where I’ve written straight from the heart. What I mean by that, are articles that have been a true reflection of my experiences and lessons that I have learned. To me, the only way that you can really write about something and have it be truly authentic, is to have lived it.

I get a lot of emails from people, who have been reading about codependency, and they are freaking out, because they see themselves and their behavior in the descriptions. They ask me what do I do? How do I fix this? I have, in bits and snippets, written about battling codependency, but I’ve never compiled a comprehensive list all in one place. Due to it’s length, I was going to do it in two separate blogs, but I thought it important to keep it all together.

What I have compiled below are the steps that I have taken to beat codependency. It’s important to understand that this healing is a journey and a process – with many, many twists and turns along the way. Some parts are difficult, some are easy and some flow right into the other. Without further ado, here are the steps of my journey:

Awareness: The first step is recognizing that you have been the victim of emotional abuse in childhood. Last week I wrote about the effects of emotional child abuse in adults. This isn’t about being beaten, or locked in closets. This is about growing up in an unhealthy, shame based environment, with an emotional manipulator, where there was little c

When I was 14 years old I met my first love. He was 18 and he was big, strong, smart and beautiful. When I turned 15 he asked me to be his girlfriend. I was smitten and for a couple of months it was pure bliss. Within that year, he slept with my best friend, my cousin, and many others. I stuck around for months, hoping he’d come back and he would throw me a few crumbs from time to time and then off he’d go again. I gave him my heart and my innocence and in return he gave me heartache and sorrow. My very first relationship left me feeling broken, unwanted, unlovable, flawed and not good enough. It was a feeling I was very used to, a feeling that I had carried around with me my whole life.

Looking at my life backwards, it makes perfect sense that my first relationship was really a reproduction of the dysfunctional dynamic that had developed between my mother and I. All of the pain and hurt was a manifestation of what I had been taught, as a child, to feel about myself.

When I was studying Psychology we read and watched many experiments with monkeys. In some experiments these poor little monkeys were taken from birth and kept all alone with no contact with other animals or people for 6 months. The experiment placed the isolated monkey