Thoughts about Resilience

Resilience isn’t just about bouncing back—it’s about creatively transforming challenges into something meaningful. True resilience requires engaging with what you have, thinking outside the box, and building something valuable from life’s setbacks. Whether in relationships, personal growth, or life transitions, resilience empowers you to move forward with intention. Discover how to cultivate resilience in a way that brings purpose and possibility to your journey.

Understanding Attachment Styles in Intimate Relationships

Dr. Christine reveals the surprising way childhood bonds shape your love life—whether secure, anxious, dismissive-avoidant, or fearful-avoidant—unpacking how these styles drive your emotions and relationships, and how you can rewrite the script for deeper, healthier connections.

Narcissistic Victim Syndrome: Recovery

In this part of our series on Narcissistic Victim Syndrome, we focus on recovery. Standard, run-of-the-mill approaches are potentially dangerous for couples stuck in power and control cycles. As coaches and counselors, we must protect the victim from further harm and work to potentially bring them to a place of collaboration. The dominating partner must become connection-oriented before collaboration can occur. Which means that couples work is not the first step.

Narcissistic Victim Syndrome: Overview

Our working definition of emotional abuse is that it is an ongoing pattern of selfish, destructive behaviors used to gain and maintain control over their spouse for one’s own benefit at the expense of their spouse. Underlying this pattern of behavior is a strong sense of entitlement to use others regardless of the cost to them. Narcissistic, emotional abuse eventually culminates in a very complicated case of un-health. The soul-crushing experience of being dismissed, unheard and unseen, belittled, and silenced culminates in becoming a dead (wo)man walking.

What is your bias?

Another nuance impacting attachment is confirmation bias. This might seem a bit random in the context of trauma, but there is a strong correlation between confirmation bias and resistance to change, thus resistance to healing. What we’ve deeply learned, both intrinsically and extrinsically, determines what we seek, expect, and perceive. When there is a gap in our understanding, we fill it in with our own narrative based upon previous learning. Most often we fill in those blanks with negativity and suspicion. Trauma teaches us what to watch for, what to expect, and how to perceive it.

Attachment has a Role

There is a curious power to attachment theory and the role it plays in complicating trauma. I believe attachment issues underlie every psychological disorder and diagnosis. In my intro above, I started to write “…the role of attachment on psychological health.” But, it goes much deeper than that. I think it has a role is every aspect of our health – biological, psychological, sociological, spiritual, and relational.