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Do you have an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style? If you do, how does your attachment style make you feel?

(If you’re not sure what kind of attachment style you have, you can learn more about the 4 main attachment styles right here.)

Your attachment style influences how you approach and navigate relationships, especially in terms of emotional bonding, intimacy, and conflict.

This means that it can shape the type of romantic partner, family member, friend, and parent you are to those you love.

So if you know that you have an insecure attachment style, you might think that you’re doomed to have unhealthy relationships and continuously struggle to feel safe, satisfied, and happy in them.

But do you know what, my dear?

Just because you developed an anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment style as a kid doesn’t mean that you have to have this attachment style forever.

Because there are steps that you can take to develop a more secure attachment...

How much do you think that your early relationship with your primary caregiver (e.g., your mom, dad, grandparent, or foster or adoptive parent) matters today?

If you’re like many people, you might think, “not much” or even “not at all,” especially if this person isn’t a regular part of your life right now.

But if you read my last post on attachment and attachment styles, you discovered that the way that we approach and navigate relationships in our life, even as adults, is heavily shaped by the early relationship that we had with our primary caregiver.

Specifically, if we developed what’s called a secure attachment to our caregiver, then we may trust others easier, form healthy relationships readily, and be resilient in the face of relationship conflict.

However, if we instead developed an insecure attachment to our caregiver, we may be anxious and clingy with our partners, shy away from close relationships, or both crave and intensely fear...

Have you noticed that you tend to do the same thing over and over again in different relationships?

For example, maybe you get jealous easily in relationships.

Perhaps you cling to partners and loved ones almost to the point of driving them away.

Or maybe no matter how awesome someone seems, you never want to get close to them.

In my last post on inner child work and relationships, I talked about the benefits of identifying patterns in your relationships and how they may be linked to your childhood.

One specific link that’s especially helpful to explore is the one between your current relationship habits and patterns and the first relationship you were ever part of: the one you had with your primary caregiver.

Why is this first relationship so important—even if you don’t have any contact with this person now?

Because according to psychological theory, the first relationship that we form with our primary caregiver influences the relationships that we form later on...

Whether we’re experiencing some challenges in our relationships or generally feel fulfilled in them, most of us would love to enjoy them even more.

After all, if you find that most conversations with your mom end with you feeling frustrated or upset, you’d probably love for this to change.

And even if things are generally going well with your romantic partner, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind enjoying a bit more intimacy and connection in the relationship.

As I’ve mentioned recently, one of the key benefits of doing inner child work and healing your inner child is that it can help you build stronger, healthier, and more fulfilling relationships.

But in thinking about whether inner child work is truly worth your time (which I know you can’t afford to waste), you might be wondering how exactly inner child work can benefit your relationship.

That’s why in this blog post, I’m going to pull back the curtain on 3 key ways that healing your inner...

Loving someone who won’t change can be incredibly tough. On the one hand, you really care about them and want to keep them in your life. But on the other hand, the relationship often leaves you feeling drained, resentful, disappointed, sad, and maybe even angry.

In recent weeks, I’ve shared how you can navigate a relationship like this in a healthy way. And I’ve chatted about ways to maintain your relationship with your loved one while nixing or at least reducing the stress that it may be creating for you.

But what if the relationship is really taking its toll on you?

What if you don’t really look forward to spending time with your loved one?

What if you just can’t look past the things they do that really bother you or that you don’t agree with?

Or what if having them in your life is starting to eat away at your mental health or affect other areas of your life?

Are these just a “normal” part of having a challenging relationship with...

No matter how much you want to, you can’t change someone you love.

You’ve seen me talk about this on my blog. And you’ve probably heard it from someone else in your life too.

But you might still think, “My situation is different. Because I just KNOW that if I try hard enough or stick with it long enough, I can get my loved one to change. And then everything will be better.”

My dear, if that thought has run through your mind even while reading my post about why you can’t change other people, I don’t blame you.

Because I know from my own experience that our desire to change someone we love can be so, so strong.

In fact, it can be so strong that even when we’re told that we can’t change our loved one, we might still believe that we’re the exception or that our relationship is the exception. We might think that even if other people usually can’t change their loved one, we can. (And if we believe in it so much, surely we...

Being in a relationship with someone who won’t change isn’t easy.

If you’ve ever experienced it, you know that it can be exhausting, frustrating, and painful. It can also make you feel sad—for what your loved one used to be like or could be like, for the lost potential of your relationship, and for what you’re not getting from them.

But do you know what makes it even harder?

Feeling stuck and confused about how to navigate the relationship.

My ex-husband had a drug addiction, and we ended up falling into a codependent relationship as a result.

This would have been a challenging situation under the best of circumstances. But it was even harder for me because there were some things that I didn’t know at the time about how to navigate challenging relationships in a healthy way.

For example, I didn’t know that when I was around my ex, I was better off focusing on what I COULD control than on what I couldn’t. (Read my previous post to learn...

Have you ever had someone in your life who you desperately wanted to change? Or have you ever been in a relationship where you’d often say to yourself, “If I just wait a little bit longer, encourage them more, or try harder, they will finally change and everything will be better”?

My dear, having a relationship like this in your life is exhausting, and I get it.

And I can tell you that your experience definitely isn’t unique because I’ve been there myself.

In fact, many of us have someone in our life who does something that bothers us on an ongoing basis—whether it’s someone who chronically violates boundaries, is emotionally closed off or unavailable, has a quick temper, or engages in self-destructive behaviors.

In my case, this person was a romantic partner. But it can be anyone we love and care about, such as a parent, sibling, child, extended relative, or friend.

When we have someone like this in our life, it can be really tricky....

Did you catch what I shared in my previous blog post—the one about how to set healthy boundaries with your parents?

In that post, I shared that for a long time, I didn’t know that my relationship with my parents lacked healthy boundaries. And I didn’t understand that the relationship and my own well-being were suffering as a result.

I’ve also shared with you before that it’s important to know the signs that your relationship with your parents lacks healthy boundaries. Because it’s only once you realize that these boundaries are missing that you can work toward putting them in place and enjoying a healthier and less stressful relationship.

But here’s what some of you might be thinking:

My parents do give me unsolicited advice or call me out of the blue all the time. Up until this point, though, I haven’t really set any boundaries with them about it because it seemed easier to just put up with it. But now I have a romantic partner. He...

I have a confession to make: I really enjoy talking to you about setting healthy boundaries with parents.

Why?

Because it’s a topic that’s near and dear to my heart.

If you’ve read my blog posts before, you might know that I used to lack healthy boundaries in my relationship with my parents.

You see, when I was growing up, I was taught to place the needs of the people around me, especially my family, above my own. So I pretty much always said “yes” to my parents, did what they wanted me to do, and let them call the shots.

And for a long time, I didn’t even realize that our relationship had this dynamic because it lacked healthy boundaries. (If you’re wondering whether YOUR relationship with your parents needs better boundaries, check for these 7 signs.)

However, even once I knew that I needed to put better boundaries in place with my parents, I had a hard time setting them.

One of the reasons why I struggled was because I thought that by...