Vulnerability is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful human experiences.
Research tells us that we judge people in areas where we're vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we're doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in...
Build a culture of trust.
We are worthy of love and belonging now. Right this minute. As is.
There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.
Fear of the Dark I’ve always been prone to worry and anxiety, but after I became a mother, negotiating joy, gratitude, and scarcity felt like a full-time job. For years, my fear of something terrible...
Live-tweeting your bikini wax is not vulnerability. Nor is posting a blow-by-blow of your divorce . That's an attempt to hot-wire connection. But you can't cheat real connection. It's built up slowly....
'Crazy-busy' is a great armor, it's a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we're feeling and what we really need c...
A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are n...
We cannot grow when we are in shame, and we can't use shame to change ourselves or others.
Serpentining means trying to control a situation, backing out of it, pretending it's not happening, or maybe even pretending that you don't care. We use it to dodge conflict, discomfort, possible conf...
Never underestimate the power of being seen
Dr. Kristin Neff is a researcher and professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She runs the Self-Compassion Research Lab, where she studies how we develop and practice self-compassion. According...
Don’t squander joy.
Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected. Connecting the dots of our lives, especially the ones we’d rather erase or skip over, requires equal parts self-love and curiosity: How do...
Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame's is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.
Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.
Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it—it can’t survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. The most dangerous thing to do after a shaming experien...
I can encourage my daughter to love her body, but what really matters are the observations she makes about my relationship with my own body.