Part 3 of 5: Overcoming Unrealistic Expectations

Part 2 of 5: Overcoming Unrealistic Expectations

The reason I’m doing this five-part series is that having unrealistic expectations has been the story of my life. Letting go of those expectations has been an enormous part of my recovery and something I continue to deal with. I almost wrote “struggle” with, but it’s not…

Part 1 of 5: Overcoming Unrealistic Expectations

Photo Credit: ph-m-chung

One of the most disruptive patterns I discovered in early recovery was that I had…

Photo Credit: Dayne Topkin

When I first heard the saying, “It's none of your business what other people think of you”, I had no idea what that meant. I seriously couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Every time I thought about that saying, it…

Photo Credit: Tim Mossholder

I believe I’ve always pretty much liked myself. But I realized in recovery that I didn’t really love myself, and I didn’t feel worthy. When I inventoried my life, I could see, “Those were not the behaviors of a woman who feels worthy and loves herself.” Learning to love myself has been one of the…

Photo Credit: Fellipe Ditadi

Learning to love yourself is one of the most incredible gifts you can give yourself. In essence, treat yourself as if you are beloved, and you will be.

This is the second of my three-part series on how to love yourself. In case you missed the first one, here’s what the first five…

Photo Credit: Fellipe Ditadi

On a recent call with a private client, she said, “I am falling in love with myself!”

I cannot tell you how unbelievably awesome that makes me feel! My heart is swollen with pride and love that I get to shepherd her on her journey to self-love. Mind you, that was only after four weeks of working…

Photo Credit: Ozkan Guner

The concept of willingness is something we talk about frequently in recovery. We say if you’re willing, you can make it through just about anything.” But just because you’re willing to do something doesn’t mean you want to do that thing.

I am willing to have the…

Photo Credit: Vanessa Kintaudi

Photo Credit: Adi Goldstein

If you’re the kind of person who is always looking for someone to blame, welcome to the club! That was me. But I didn’t even realize that was what I was doing until I got into recovery. I’ve come to realize that I have an…

Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “Feelings aren't facts.” Though this is true, they’re still real, and they matter. The point behind this saying is that feelings don’t need to rule your life. Take your feelings into account, but don’t necessarily use them as the only guide to your actions.

I used to let my feelings rule my…

photo credit: Kyle Nieber

One afternoon at the beach nearby, I happened to sit next to a couple of women who were just bitching up a storm. Before recovery, I would have stayed there and been pissed off that these assholes were sitting next to…

Part 5 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

The mentality I’m speaking of is referred to as victim mentality. There are a lot of misconceptions about what this is, which means so many people don’t even realize they have it.

Just because…

Part 4 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

The Drama Triangle is sometimes also referred to as the Victim Triangle. It’s a model of dysfunctional interaction first delineated by Stephen Karpman in 1968. It includes the roles of Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer.

When I first learned of it, it explained so much of the dynamics of my life – within all of my relationships. If you’ve had dysfunctional relationships at any point, it…

Part 3 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

1. Realize you have victim mentality

This mentality can be super hard to see because it's deeply entrenched. Having this mentality  doesn't mean you're bad or weak. You've internalized a mode of thinking that was useful to you at one time, likely because you were victimized somehow.

If you continually think, “If __ would…

Part 2 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

If you have the mentality of victimhood, you likely got it from being victimized in some way. For me, it was from growing up with the dysfunction of my childhood. It wasn’t something egregious like being kidnapped; it was the continual drip-drip-drip of emotional invalidation and abandonment I experienced. When you internalize victim mentality, it permeates every area of your life and just…

Part 1 of 5: What Victim Mentality Is and How to Overcome It

This is part 1 of a 5 part series on what victim mentality is and how to get out of it. In this essay, I’ll share how understanding “your part in things” (as we say in 12-step recovery) brings you out of victim mentality.



If you’re not familiar with victim mentality, it’s a way of thinking that’s so deeply internalized that we don’t realize we have it. You might call it a…

If you’re constantly pissed off at things like the barista getting your coffee order wrong or that there’s traffic on the highway, you might need to learn acceptance.

That was my problem for most of my life. Once I started to understand that lack of acceptance was my problem, things began to change. I came to understand that it wasn’t the coffee order or the traffic – it was my thinking was the source of all my problems.

It became clear that my…