For 15 years, I was focused on resolving my "mental blocks". This idea that something in me was blocking my abundance, my relationships, my love, my healing, was scary yet very tantilizing. It gave me a thing to blame, a thing to target, and a thing to fix. And yet, to this day, I have never resolved one single mental block. Why? Because mental blocks are not real. What, Marshall? WHAT? Yep. Learn what is really going on in today's episode! *** Enroll in the January 2024 Foundation Trainings her...
Dec 14, 2023•9 min
Ever feel confused, flustered, and then suddenly anxious after someone is nice, kind or caring towards you? Do you feel the tension of negative anticipation building, like waiting for the "other shoe to drop"? This reaction tells the story of how unreliable and unstable kindness has been for you in the past. It boldly shares the experience of kindness being followed up with some kind of cost or harm. You see, your body is picking up on familiar signals that existed prior to a threatening or pani...
Dec 08, 2023•11 min
Codependency causes us to seek love, belonging, value, and safety outside ourselves. This happens because we've experienced profound rejections of ourselves that caused us to distrust and fear ourselves. This resulted in a low availability for ourselves and maxxed out availability for others. This leads us into deep states of feeling unlovable, drained, isolated, and burned out. Learn what to do when you find yourself facing the struggle of low availability for who you are and what you need in t...
Nov 30, 2023•12 min
Let's talk about trust in the work of healing from rejection trauma and codependency, specifically trusting yourself. What does it mean to trust yourself? In my work, trusting yourself means you regard your interpretations, senses, choices, and actions to be the best-at-that-moment options. This means that mistakes or errors are also trusted because they reveal more clarity and help you refine your accuracy and effectiveness. When I trust myself at this level, all my past choices that I would do...
Nov 22, 2023•13 min
Fear drives much of our behaviors, keeps us stuck in loops of trying to escape it, and tends to cause us to believe that most of life is scary. This is understandable, considering you've lived through very scary events and patterns. Learn today what fear is trying to do for you and how to soothe it and use it to your well-being. *** The 2024 Freedom After Codependency Promotion Is Happening. Save money and time on your healing, peace, and freedom. Check it out here: https://2024.freetheself.com ...
Nov 16, 2023•10 min
5 Things I Do When Things Get Discouraging Discouragement is a real, valid part of the work of healing and growing towards things we value. It happens often when when outcomes aren't happening as we're hoping and working for. It happens when our resources start to run low and we're dealing with big uncertainties. It happens when we've been doing big, hard work and not seeing the benefits yet. This shows up in healing work as: - The same intense feelings showing up again and again - Efforts to ma...
Nov 01, 2023•13 min
Ask Marshall: How Do I Trust Myself and Believe Myself More? Belief and trust in ourselves was our first natural state. We were born naturally trusting our own senses, impulses, and experiences. Self-doubt was introduced into our thinking through the reactions of others - namely shaming, questioning, criticizing behaviors, or being dismissed or ignored in what we were sharing. When others did not trust our experience and senses, we learned not to trust them, too. This distrust within ourselves c...
Oct 25, 2023•13 min
*** Tired of being stuck, lost, and hopeless in your efforts to actually heal and experience real peace, freedom, and progress in your life? Join my on-demand workshop, The 3 Secrets To Healing Codependency Permanently and discover how to unlock your natural ability to heal your codependency and thrive in confidence, peace, and freedom. Click here: https://3sworkshop.freetheself.com Join my email community to get access to more episodes, tools, my writings, and more here: https://connect.freethe...
Oct 18, 2023•14 min
Essentials: Are You Blended Or Solid In Your Sense of Self? The fawn response focuses our mind and awareness outside ourselves. In my work, I call this the External Orientation. This means we're interpreting our reality through the lens of other people, places, or things. We are not associated with ourselves and not processing reality through our own perception and lived experience. This orientation can lead us to feel diffuse, fluid, or blended with others - especially their feelings, their opi...
Oct 13, 2023•11 min
Essentials: Reclaim Yourself From Enmeshment Through Connecting To Your Innate Sovereignty Codependency externalizes our sense of authority, personhood, worth, and experience. It outsources these factors to people we feel connected to and dependent on for our sense of being real, being worthy, being lovable, and being "allowed". In other words, the fawn response that drives codependent behaviors has us believing that others have an inherent authority to define our worth, who we are, and what we'...
Oct 11, 2023•13 min
Why Do I Push People Away? This is a potent question, and has many possible answers. It is one I explore myself. "Why do I push away people that like me? That love me?" Or "Why do I push away success? Praise? Recognition?" This is a nearly universal reaction for people who've been neglected, been harmed, or abused. Sometimes we think it is about love, or about worthiness, or about vulnerability. And, often those are part of the reason we push others away. But they aren't the deep cause. Learn wh...
Sep 29, 2023•11 min
Do I Matter? How To Cultivate A Sense Of Mattering Having a sense of mattering to others and to yourself is crucial for well-being and belonging. It is one of our core needs. In this episode, learn what really needs to matter first in the case of healing codependency and how to start fostering that with yourself. *** Join my email community to get access to more episodes, tools, my writings, and more here: https://connect.freetheself.com Join my Facebook community for more guidance, tools, and m...
Sep 27, 2023•12 min
Are You Knowing Your Pain, Or Ignoring Your Pain? Pain is the most neglected, denied, and avoided aspect of our lived experience. It is also the gateway into actually feeling known, loved, seen, and valued - by ourselves and by others. Today, I speak on this, its vital importance to our freedom from codependency, and how to begin nurturing care and knowing of your pain. *** Join my email community to get access to more episodes, tools, my writings, and more here: https://connect.freetheself.com ...
Sep 22, 2023•11 min
What Replaces Codependency As You Heal? Codependency is a strategy the body creates in order to preserve a sense of safety, connection, and self-worth within a chaotic, unsafe, unreliable relationship. The sense of danger the relationship creates for the individual activates the body's natural fawning response (aka the please-and-appease response), prompting the person to do things that make themselves more appealing to the threat - all in hopes of reducing the risk of harm, abandonment, or repl...
Sep 20, 2023•8 min
Your Pain Tells The Story of Your Lived Reality Most of my life, emotional pain meant I was either sinning, in error, or expressing some kind of flaw in my nature. I learned to see my pain this way through the reactions I received from my parents and culture. They routinely responded to my pain with: - dismissal - claims that boys don't cry - shaming of the emotion (why do you feel that way???) - annoyance at the pain - sometimes outright rage - accusation that I feel this way due to some kind o...
Sep 15, 2023•17 min
What Is Freeze And How Do I Work With It? The freeze response involves a state of physiological and psychological immobilization, where the person may feel unable to move, speak, or take action. This response is often considered a form of dissociation, where the individual disconnects from their immediate surroundings or emotions as a way of coping with overwhelming stress or danger. In codependency, the Freeze response can promote the use of codependent habits like conflict avoidance, people-pl...
Sep 13, 2023•14 min
Anatomy of Codependency Series: Fawning - How To Start Healing It Fawning happens because your body does not feel safe enough to advocate for itself. This points us to what is required for your freedom and healing: increasing your sense of safety. This happens through focusing on three specific areas: safety emotionally, reliable connection, and real self-worth. Learn how this works in today's episode! *** Join my email community to get access to more episodes, tools, my writings, and more here:...
Sep 08, 2023•13 min
Therapists and self-help will often tell you that codependency is the problem and is what requires healing, but here's why that is wrong: Codependency is actually a result of a deep biological threat response in the body called "the Fawn Response". This response is triggered by chornically unsafe, unstable relationships that a person cannot separate themselves from without fearing for their survival in some way. Specifically, their body feels their sense of safety, connection, or worth is at ris...
Sep 06, 2023•14 min
How To Empathize and Keep Your Boundaries In Three Steps Empathy in codependency often causes a person to violate their own boundaries or allow unhealthy behavior to continue with an individual. Boundaries often feel harsh and conflicting while also empathizing with the pain that a person may be expressing in an ineffective way. Use these three steps to empathize with a person while keeping your boundaries: 1) Recognize and name the pain you see they're expressing 2) Express care and understandi...
Sep 01, 2023•11 min
What If Triggers Are An Ally, Not An Enemy? Triggers speak for the trapped parts of ourselves that are reliving a terror in the past. They give us moments to lean in, acknowledge, and legitimize our past lived reality. They invite us to add sanity to our reality through our listening and validation of what is there. And as we love and care for them through warmth, curiosity, and inquiry, their trapped energy begins to cycle into completion bit by bit. They're not signals something is wrong with ...
Aug 25, 2023•15 min
Blunt Cake: Are You Trying To Heal By Getting Rid Of Your Emotions? I touch on this topic frequently, as it is that important to healing and well-being. Often we're taught that we have to purge, get rid of, or fix our emotions. We're taught to see our emotions as a problem, the enemy, or something to fix. This leads us to reject our emotions, fight them, deny them, and attempt to make them behave a certain way. We end up feeling stuck, deeper in pain, and lost as to how to find peace. Real heali...
Aug 16, 2023•9 min
To Stop Pleasing & Appeasing Others, Focus On These 3 Things Wonder why you automatically people-please, rush to fix things when there's a problem, panic at the idea of someone being upset with you, or feel an internal pressure to avoid disappointing others? This is the fawn response in action, and it is happening because your body is perceiving a threat or anticipating a threat. The body will react to the present based on your past, re-living that past experience through the feelings, sensa...
Aug 09, 2023•15 min
Achieving Success In Your Healing: Are You Stuck In The "Start-Stop" Loop of Healing? Does this sound familiar? - You buy a course, feel a burst of relief, and never open the course again? - You get a big aha from something you've read, heard, or watched. It feels like something changed, yet the same behaviors and results show up again? - You try really, really hard to get engaged in your healing work, and you find yourself distracted by other things? - You feel pressure to "do it right" and whe...
Jul 31, 2023•17 min
It's been called "idealizing others" or "putting them on a pedastal". This is where a person perceives another to be much better than they are, including being perfect, being "the one", or having some kind of special meaning. These are positive illusions This habit comes from the young parts of ourselves that idealized parents, peers, and authorities. This happens as a way to try to create safety and comfort anxiety, as well as eliminate doubt or uncertainty the child doesn't know how to navigat...
Jul 28, 2023•16 min
These two commitments assist you in staying free of codependency impulses and help you orient back to your well-being. *** Workshop link: https://workshop.freetheself.com Codependency Healing System: https://chs.freetheself.com
Jul 26, 2023•4 min
How I Nurture Emotional Safety And You Can, Too Emotional safety is an essential factor in creating and sustaining your ability to heal and thrive in your daily life - especially beyond codependency. What is emotional safety? It is knowing that your emotions are safe to acknowledge, feel, and care for AND they'll be cared for and supported by those around you, too. it is a you-and-others experience (also known as interdependent experience). Emotional safety is the first core focus I teach in the...
Jul 25, 2023•10 min
Not Sure What To Do? Use These 4 Questions To Get Direction. Four questions for codependents to ask themselves when encountering situations in their lives: 1) What am I aware of in my body and senses? 2) Who do I want to be in this situation? 3) What principles do I want to prioritize in this situation? 4) What outcome am I willing to live with? These help you interrupt the codependent impulses to please, fix, absorb, or perform. This interruption creates space to orient to yourself and inquire ...
Jul 21, 2023•12 min
Do You See Yourself As A Real Person? Essentials: Taking Back Your Personhood Abuse and neglect rob us of being a person - a being that is recognized as having inherent worth, limits, boundaries, desires, dislikes, needs, and perspectives. We are often conditioned to see ourselves (and others to some degree) as objects that perform a function and a benefit. This kind of conditioning is especially pronounced in narcissistic family systems and cultural systems. The impact is that we are unable or ...
Jul 19, 2023•13 min
Loving yourself is difficult because you've been trained to believe love is transactional, earned, and conditional. In my work, real worth and love of self doesn't have conditions. These are unconditional and independent of all rules or justifications. It is a radical concept to consider. And it is one that each person must discover for themselves. Learn the question I give each of my students that starts this discovery off in their personal life in today's 3-minute Insight. Join the workshop me...
Jul 17, 2023•3 min
Today a student had a question about healing in today's Homework Hours (a live call I offer my students in the Heal Your Codependency Membership). It inspired this dialog about the "layers of the onion" metaphor often used in healing work. What are these layers actually? I've found they tend to be three things: 1) The coping mechanisms that we've used to tolerate and live with the pain and meaning we carry 2) The meaning we've created about why something has happened and what it may mean about o...
Jul 13, 2023•3 min
