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Resources

I’ve compiled these lists of resources (books, audio, video, etc) that I’ve found helpful and sometimes tell my clients about.

Resources for art, writing, and other creative pursuits
Resources for anxiety
Resources for nutrition and healthy eating
Resources for focus, attention, and discipline
Resources for a creating a healthy relationship to anger
Resources for skillfully working with painful emotions
Resources for starting or broadening your meditation practice
Resources for help with depression
Resources for help overcoming addiction
Resources for self-compassion, self-love, and confidence
Resources for learning about and healing from trauma
Resources for getting better sleep and alleviating insomnia
Resources for help with your romantic / intimate relationship

metaforestinsights

Therapist reflecting on peace, growth, love, purpose, and living fully.
My full long-form videos are on YouTube.
🌲❄️🗻🪿🍄☀️
metaforest.life

The one thing that matters most to me in a client

The one thing that matters most to me in a client isn't age, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or background. It's this: Are you curious about yourself? Do you reflect? Do you want to look inward more?

Early in life I realized something that has stayed with me: it's much easier to change ourselves than to change the world. The world is so much bigger than we are, and our control over it is — if you really think about it — extremely small. What I started to see was that our happiness, our whole experience of life, has less to do with how much the world caters to us and more to do with how aligned we are with it.

Some people come to therapy because their external lives are hard and they want relief. Sometimes they're hoping therapy will directly change their circumstances. Other times they assume that providing relief is simply my job. In both cases I will likely disappoint, because the only way I know how to help is by helping you change something in yourself:

Some way you've been turning away from your own emotions, subtly or not.

Some change in your behavior, your habits, the ways you relate to people.

Some shift in how you see yourself and others, in both the past and the future.

Some way of becoming more present, of saying yes to your experience more fully.

Our circumstances do matter. But the only leverage I can offer you is on the inside. And pursuing outer changes while avoiding inner change is frequently the very pattern that brings people to therapy in the first place.

When people do make inner changes, their outer circumstances usually improve — but often with a long lag time of years. Think of adjusting a sailboat's course. The sails swing all the way across, a dramatic change, and yet your position on the water has barely moved. Give that new heading time though, and the small change compounds. Eventually you could find yourself on the other side of the world.

Importantly, where the boat ends up isn't really the point. What matters is how it's sailing: trimmed, balanced, and moving cleanly through the water it's in right now.

#therapy #innerwork #selfreflection #psychotherapy #carljung #presence #selfawareness #healing

In couples work, my clients often resist showing u

In couples work, my clients often resist showing up lovingly for their partner. The logic is understandable: "Better to not give than to give and not receive."

But more self-protection changes nothing. The bond just keeps degrading. Someone always has to "go first" to interrupt the downward spiral.

Here's the more motivating reason to give freely: I call it cleaning up your side of the street.

If you're holding back, it's impossible to know how much your partner is capable of loving you, because your withholding creates theirs.

But if you give genuinely and consistently, without keeping score, eventually you get clarity.

Either your partner feels the love and responds in kind, or it becomes clear they can't meet your needs, however wonderful they are in other ways.

You might even discover the happiness you sought from receiving was found in giving. That you need less than you thought, and can tolerate more imperfection, once you become a better cleaner of your own messes.

Any of these outcomes creates movement. You're no longer stuck in agonizing stagnation. You've either restored a win-win relationship, or found the conviction to leave.

When there's a collective mess, it's hard to know how much is yours. When you thoroughly clean your part, you can finally see how much is really theirs.

#Relationships #CouplesTherapy #Healing #Love #PersonalGrowth RelationshipAdvice SelfAwareness LifePhilosophy

It’s crucial to know the difference between partne

It’s crucial to know the difference between partner incompatibility and our unhealed wounds, because it informs whether you simply need to find a more compatible partner, or need to turn your attention toward yourself for a while to address the wounds that don’t go away when a relationship ends.

Sometimes after a breakup, it's clear that no path with that person would have served you. The differences were too great. Staying would have meant betraying your essential nature, suppressing vital parts of yourself, and giving up non-negotiable dreams.

When you find this truth, you don't tend to question the choice. You feel peace and empowerment, mixed with grief. You take comfort in knowing yourself and your needs more fully.

But other relationship endings are different. You may have an intuition that you were already limiting yourself before the relationship even started. And that that suppression kept you from rising to the occasion, from being who you really are. Fear of authenticity and intimacy kept you from showing up fully. You sense that you self-sabotaged for emotional protection.

When this happens, it happens on both sides, because commitment is a joint act. You can sense when someone says "I'm in" but their heart isn't fully there. And that makes you close off too. Fear of investing is mutually reciprocal, like two ships drifting apart from one another.
~~~
Incompatibility vs unhealed wounds
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.4)
~~~
#Relationships #Breakups #SelfAwareness #Commitment #Love Healing PersonalGrowth RelationshipPatterns LifePhilosophy AttachmentTheory

Committing too fast to an incompatible or uncommit

Committing too fast to an incompatible or uncommitted partner can be an attempt to protect the wound of abandonment or neglect.
Withholding commitment too long, even from great partners, can attempt to protect the wound of engulfment or loss of autonomy.
These commitment defenses correspond to anxious and avoidant attachment styles, which are ironically often drawn toward one another, because both the ability to commit and the wisdom to be discerning can be lost parts of ourselves. Each ability is one half of the art and skill of commitment. We can be simultaneously attracted to and repelled by either of those abilities that we've disowned in order to avoid pain and heartbreak in our pasts.
~~~
Commitment Defenses
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.3)
~~~
#Love #Relationships #Dating #AttachmentTheory #Healing PersonalGrowth Commitment SelfAwareness AnxiousAttachment AvoidantAttachment RelationshipPatterns AttachmentWounds

Most people thrive with a secure attachment. When

Most people thrive with a secure attachment. When they adore and are adored. Cherish and are cherished. Ambivalence for too long prevents that security.

Choosing a restaurant meal is low stakes, so we only need 10 or 15 minutes to decide. But for choosing to commit (emotionally) to a partner, the relevant unit of time is months or years. A few weeks isn't enough to know someone well enough to let our heart fully open. But two years of significant ambivalence is probably too long. Life is too short to spend years holding back our love or being with someone who is holding back theirs.

The direction of a relationship commitment also matters. If it’s increasing at the 2 year mark that is very different than if it’s decreasing. Commitment isn’t all-or-nothing and it doesn’t happen all at once. It’s also a risk, but with greater reward when it lasts.
~~~
How Long Should Commitment Take?
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.2)
~~~
#Relationships #Commitment #SecureAttachment #Dating #Love LifePhilosophy

Every path we choose excludes all others. That's t

Every path we choose excludes all others. That's the existential given of relationship commitment.

Staying at the commitment fork in the road is also a choice. If we stay there too long, we miss the adventure of deep, nourishing intimacy.

Two people can share a lease, a last name, and even kids — and still not be fully committed to each other in their hearts.

Commitment is like ordering off a restaurant menu instead of staring at it forever and not eating.

~~~
The Ambivalence Trap
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.3.1)
~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #SelfAwareness #InnerWork #Psychotherapy #Attachment #PersonalGrowth #ExistentialTherapy

Ever notice how after a breakup, people sometimes

Ever notice how after a breakup, people sometimes pick up each other's hobbies or habits? What bothered you about your partner might have been a part of yourself you shut down long ago. The discomfort they triggered can be worth following.
~~~
When a partner lives what we forbid
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.6)
~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #SelfAwareness #InnerWork #Psychotherapy #Attachment #PersonalGrowth

Characteristics that we’re attracted to in a partn

Characteristics that we’re attracted to in a partner can sometimes be the ones we disowned from ourselves when we were growing up. They can also be the parts we most need to reclaim.
~~~
Reclaiming lost parts of ourselves
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.5)
~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #SelfAwareness #InnerWork

Intimate relationships are the ones most likely to

Intimate relationships are the ones most likely to abrade our core wounds, because it is within them that we allow ourselves to be the most vulnerable. That pain can make or break the relationship.
~~~~~
A relationship without defenses
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.4)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #Therapy

Psychological defenses from childhood are like a h

Psychological defenses from childhood are like a heavy wooden raft that we keep carrying long after the river is behind us.

Aggression, withdrawal, people-pleasing, guardedness, etc — they are the rafts that once helped us survive the river of childhood vulnerability.

But eventually they become a burden we have to learn to set down.
~~~~~
Walking with a heavy raft
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.3)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #Psychology #Therapy

Defenses block the flow of love in two ways: they

Defenses block the flow of love in two ways: they prevent us from showing up for our partner the way they need, and they prevent us from receiving the healthy ways our partner shows up for us.

Defenses exist for a reason: to protect us from the pain of old wounds so we can keep functioning and moving through life.

But every defense comes with a cost. We tend to forget about the wound beneath it and instead become skilled at maintaining the defense itself rather than healing the wound.

Just as limping protects a broken toe but limits our ability to walk freely, emotional defenses protect us from pain while limiting our capacity to love and be loved.

~~~~~
How defenses block the flow of love
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.2)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Defenses #EmotionalWounds #Psychology #Therapy

Psychological wounds can be described in many ways

Psychological wounds can be described in many ways. The simplest map is of a single “core wound”: a sense of unlovability. Another useful lens sees the two fundamental attachment injuries: abandonment and engulfment. Still other models describe core schemas (core beliefs) such as “I am unlovable”, “I am unsafe”, or “I am powerless”.

There are many classifications of emotional wounds, but they all attempt to make sense of what is underneath our protective defenses.

~~~~~
Maps of psychological injury
(Three pillars of a nourishing relationship 3.2.1)
~~~~~
#Relationships #Healing #Psychology #Therapy #Defenses #CoreWounds

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Resources that I share with clients