http://www.theempoweredtherapist.com/

The Empowered Therapist, 12720 Hillcrest Road, Suite 106, Dallas, TX (2025)

12/16/2025

Your true self is waiting on you to find them, promise.

To those of you finding yourself as you heal from childhood wounds, I see you.

(IC: Those with BPD traits or CPTSD may be unlikely to know a true self because a known self wasn’t able to form when they were busy surviving)

12/12/2025

Sometimes distance is the only option. But let’s not pretend like creating distance between you and the people who are supposed to show up for you, isn’t a grief-filled decision. What people usually want when they go no or low contact, is a supportive family. They separate themselves as a protective strategy, not because they desire to punish someone or because they don’t know how to move forward. In the absence of family love and support, they will create a physical and emotional boundary in an attempt to stop the steady flow of pain and additional hurt or harm.

Sharing more validation and support for those who have had to distance themselves from people who are harmful for their mental health. I know these decisions are never easy, and I trust you to know what you need.

To those of you longing for a caregiver who isn’t there, I see you.

12/11/2025

How we experienced (or didn’t) love, affection, attunement, emotional availability, and care when we were young will have a lasting impact on our relational way of being.

We come by ourselves honestly, and y’all, as we heal, our relational way of being can change.

To those of you working through your past so you can have a more attuned present, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: If it feels like no one ever gets it right it might not be because everyone is wrong, it might be because your body is unsure what healthy co-regulation and emotional availability feels like; Slide 2: If we didn’t receive proper attunement when we were young, it’s likely we don’t know how to feel into attunement as we age; Slide 3: When emotional neglect was the norm, emotional availability can be hard to come by; Slide 4: Said with so much gentleness: If we experience emotional neglect, we are likely to experience less emotional availability ourselves; Slide 5: But hear me out, because I’m not saying you’re to blame. I’m saying: We may not know how to be emotionally available if emotional availability wasn’t modeled for you; Slide 6: As we heal, we often have to work through this dynamic. As we heal, we have to work on our own emotional availability so more of us is open to receiving from others; Slide 7: Sometimes we believe that no one exists for us, but often the reality is we don’t know how to fully exist, YET; Slide 8: When we shift, our relationships do to, and sometimes that comes in the form of new connections and emotionally available people)

12/10/2025

Relationships take work, and a concerted effort to turn towards one another, even when things are challenging. If we have lingering attachment wounds or unchecked relational patterns, we might find ourselves turning towards others too much, or we might find that we move away from others too quickly. And the best relationships exist when we can speak our truth, hear the truth of others, and feel heard and still in connection.

When more of you and more of someone else can co-exist, that’s the good stuff.

To those of you learning how to show up in your adult relationships, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: When we don’t tell someone the truth about how we’re experiencing them, we are robbing them of the opportunity to repair, and robbing ourselves of a potential corrective experience; Slide 2: And if you have told them how they have impacted you and they continue to show up in a way that’s hurtful, then take this as an invitation to reconsider this connection; Slide 3: Sometimes we don’t give people a chance, and sometimes we stay for way too long; Slide 4: Working on your relational wounds from childhood will allow you to operate from your adult self in your adult relationships; Slide 5: Wounds from the past become behaviors of the present if we don’t intentionally consider our own relational patterns)

12/09/2025

As we heal from our earliest wounds, we become more available to ourselves and healthy peer relationships. When we’re longing for more reciprocity, emotional availability, and intimacy, we can first consider the ways we are showing up relationally. Relationships are dynamic, which means that how each person shows up and contributes to the relationship, matters.

To those of you working on your relational way of being so you can find the sort of people you want to be in community with, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: We really need to spend time considering the sort of friend we are, and want to be when we find ourselves ready to critique someone else’s friendship style; Slide 2: We can sometimes get so focused on what we think the other person is doing wrong that we forget to examine our own behavior; Slide 3: The best way to find and keep solid and secure friendships is to be a good friend yourself; Slide 4: So many of us long for deeper connections with our peers, yet we often demonstrate inflexibility and rigidity in our expectations of others; Slide 5: If our relational needs were not met in childhood, we might be projecting our pain onto our friend and peer relationships in the form of harshness, criticism, inflexibility, and one-sided expectations; Slide 6: Childhood attachment wounds get loud when we yearn for closeness with our peers and then experience them as not meeting our needs or expectations; Slide 7: When it comes to friendship, we need to create connections where accountability and flexibility can both exist. Relationships with peers need to allow for each person to have needs, wants, and expectations; Slide 8: The safest peer relationships are the ones where we both tend to ourselves and the relationship we’re in; Slide 9: When we are more resourced in the present moment, we are better equipped to communicate our relational needs and also attend to the needs of others; Slide 10: Healthy friendship exists when there is reciprocity, when there is desire and attempts to repair after rupture, and when each person gets to prioritize themselves and still be invested in the connection)

12/08/2025

The end of the year/holiday season tends to highlight the feelings of loneliness we carry around with us all year. The reality is, so many of us experience emotional loneliness, even when we are in physical connection with others.

I’ll be sharing more about social and emotional loneliness throughout this month, so check back for more nuance.

To those of you learning to look for available people, as you begin to become more available yourself, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Emotional loneliness is incredibly common for complex trauma survivors as many of us didn’t get the attunement we needed when we were young, and therefore we carry the felt sense of emotional loneliness with us into adulthood.; Slide 2: The unfortunate truth here is that many of us feel this emotional loneliness even in our intimate partnerships, family relationships, and close friend groups.)

12/05/2025

Listen y’all, my fight energy will come all the way out in support of survivors. Deciding to go no contact is a painful decision, and not one people enter into lightly. There is a big difference between someone temporarily taking space or even giving someone the silent treatment, and someone who agonizes over whether or not they can mentally and emotionally handle staying in connection with their family of origin. But either way, we likely don’t need to be chalking up relational behavior where pain is involved, to a trend.

You know what people who go no contact want? LOVE. They aren’t looking for attention or to be oppositional for no reason. Rather, they are taking a stance in favor of themselves and their well-being. The distance communicates, “If you aren’t willing to care about my emotions, I will tend to them on my own.” And this is often the last course of action someone wants to take, so if they land here, please trust that it’s because their other options were either exhausted or not working.

There is nothing trendy about supporting survivors, in fact, it’s a timeless decision we should all be making.

To those of you who are taking the space you need so you can tend to your aching heart, I see you.

12/04/2025

To those of you honoring, naming, and believing yourselves and your experiences, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Emotional neglect is complex because it’s hard to clearly name and identify pain that doesn’t overtly look like trauma; Slide 2: Emotional neglect often goes unnamed until we see or feel someone show up in an attuned way; Slide 3: When trauma looks like violence, it is easier for people to understand. When trauma looks like adults needs coming over the needs of a child, people struggle to see how it’s real.; Slide 4: Trauma is truth to the nervous system, and your body knows the story; Slide 5: Honor and acknowledge your experience of emotional neglect, whether or not someone else can see it)

12/02/2025

This is why we don’t compare traumas. Emotional neglect tends to get overlooked, because to outsiders it can seem like someone has available caregivers if they are physically present. But for those who experience emotional neglect, the lack of emotional availability from their caregivers can feel devastating and have long-lasting impacts.

It’s hard to get not enough of something that seems like it could be in reach, and this is often the experience of the emotionally neglected child.

And so often, when adult children begin to feel into this dynamic for themselves and begin naming what they felt when they were younger, they are invalidated. And this invalidation is likely to feel like even more complexity and pain.

To those of you carrying wounds no one even knows about, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: The wounds created by emotional neglect are likely to follow us as we age; Slide 2: If your caregivers can’t hear you when you share about your pain now, chances are younger parts of you feel erased again, as though your childhood pain is still invisible; Slide 3: Emotional neglect can feel especially heavy because it is a complex wound; Slide 4: When we’ve not gotten the emotional attunement we’ve needed, and we’re not believed when we name this pain, we are then left carrying the initial wound and the wound of rejection and dismissal)

12/01/2025

Some of us apologize way too much (I’m looking at you, people-pleasers), and some of us need to lean into apology more.

Learning how to take accountability for our impact on others is crucially important, because owning our part helps others to feel less defensive and allows us to integrate and grow. When we can see that we’ve negatively impacted someone else, even when we didn’t mean to, and we can take ownership for our role in their pain, then we are able to appropriately be in the nuance of connection.

Messing up is part of life- this is how we grow and learn. And learning how to engage with others in a variety of ways is how we strengthen our relational bonds over time. Now hear this: All of us will have something to apologize for at some point.

One of the scariest relational things that someone can say (IMO) is, “this is just how I am, and they can like it or not” because this demonstrates zero flexibility or desire for connection. Of course we should be true to ourselves, but in a way that allows for intimacy and vulnerability. When we are so defended that we can’t soften to someone else’s experience, we are teaching that person that we aren’t really safe for them to be honest with us. We are showing them that our ego is more important than their in the moment reaction.

Relational nuance is where it’s at y’all, and learning what is yours to hold will help you lean into healthy vulnerability and authentic connection so much more.

To those of you learning when to take ownership and beginning to allow others to own their parts, I see you.

(IC: Learning when and how to apologize to someone you care about is a love language)

11/25/2025

Slide 2 really applies to any and all endings, especially when someone is needing to end a relationship to best take care of themselves.

To those of you who have needed to create distance so you could finally find peace, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Most adult children who take a step back from their caregivers don’t do so impulsively; Slide 2: Don’t forget that even the person leaving might be doing so with a broken heart)

The Empowered Therapist

12/16/2025

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