Episodes

  • The Inner Child That Still Controls Your Relationships

    The Inner Child That Still Controls Your Relationships
    Oct 18 2026
    Check out my new Substack psychodynamic observations

    Why do seemingly minor disagreements sometimes trigger emotional reactions that feel completely disproportionate to the situation? Psychodynamic theory suggests that unresolved childhood experiences may continue influencing how we interpret rejection, criticism, and intimacy in adulthood. Drawing on object relations theory, attachment, and the concept of the inner child, this episode explores how early emotional experiences become internalized relationship patterns. We examine why adults sometimes respond to present relationships through the emotional expectations of their younger selves and how psychotherapy can help change those patterns.
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    4 mins
  • When Criticism Feels Like Abandonment

    When Criticism Feels Like Abandonment
    Oct 15 2026
    Why can a seemingly insignificant criticism provoke overwhelming shame, anger, or an intense fear of abandonment? From a psychodynamic perspective, reactions to perceived rejection may reflect narcissistic vulnerability, fragile self-esteem, and internalized relational experiences that give present-day disappointments a deeper emotional meaning. Drawing on object relations theory and self psychology, this episode explores how earlier experiences of criticism, emotional inconsistency, or conditional acceptance may shape the way individuals interpret rejection in adulthood. Rather than simply labeling these reactions as Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, we examine the unconscious conflicts, defensive processes, and attachment patterns that may help explain why being disappointed by another person can sometimes feel like being emotionally abandoned.
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    4 mins
  • Are You Parenting Your Child or the Child You Once Were?

    Are You Parenting Your Child or the Child You Once Were?
    Oct 11 2026
    Sometimes our strongest reactions to our children have surprisingly little to do with what they are actually experiencing. As children grow, their struggles can awaken old insecurities, disappointments, and expectations in their parents. This episode explores how recognizing those emotional patterns can create healthier relationships and allow children to develop identities separate from their parents' histories.
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    4 mins
  • Attachment Theory in the Therapy Room: What Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant Attachment Actually Look Like

    Attachment Theory in the Therapy Room: What Secure, Anxious, and Avoidant Attachment Actually Look Like
    Oct 6 2026
    Attachment theory tends to get flattened into dating-app shorthand, but its clinical roots run much deeper than that — secure, anxious, and avoidant patterns describe fundamentally different ways people organize themselves around closeness, separation, dependency, and the threat of rejection. This episode looks at how those patterns don't just surface in a patient's stories about relationships, but live inside the relationship with the therapist itself. An unanswered question, a silence, a vacation, or even the ending of a session can carry wildly different meanings depending on what a patient has come to expect from others. Understanding attachment gives clinicians a working framework for what actually happens between two people once one begins to matter to the other.
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    4 mins
  • Why Some People Constantly Need Validation

    Why Some People Constantly Need Validation
    Oct 4 2026
    Why can a compliment make someone feel wonderful for an hour, only for the insecurity to return almost immediately? The constant search for reassurance may look like vanity or attention-seeking, but self psychology suggests something deeper may be happening. Heinz Kohut’s work helps explain how validation from others can sometimes become psychological scaffolding for a fragile sense of self.
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    3 mins
  • Why We Become Our Parents Without Realizing It

    Why We Become Our Parents Without Realizing It
    Sep 29 2026
    You promised yourself you would never sound like your mother or father—until one day their words came out of your mouth. Psychology suggests that our earliest relationships create internal templates that can quietly influence how we love, argue, parent, and respond to rejection decades later. This episode explores how object relations, identification, and repetition can turn childhood experiences into adult patterns—and why recognizing them can give us more choice.
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    3 mins
  • The Mirror We Never Outgrow: Kohut's Theory of the Self

    The Mirror We Never Outgrow: Kohut's Theory of the Self
    Sep 23 2026
    Heinz Kohut broke from classical psychoanalysis to argue that the self isn't shaped by drives and conflict alone, but by whether early relationships mirror, idealize, and validate who we are. This episode unpacks Kohut's self psychology — mirroring, idealizing, and twinship needs — and how empathic failures in those early bonds can leave the self fragile or defensively grandiose later in life. We trace how this framework reshaped clinical thinking on narcissism, moving it from a fixed diagnosis toward a developmental injury that can be understood and worked with in treatment. It's a concise but substantive primer on one of psychodynamic theory's most influential departures from Freud.
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    3 mins
  • The Omega-3 Autism Claim: Small Effects, Large Headlines, and the Persistent Gap Between Data and Desire

    The Omega-3 Autism Claim: Small Effects, Large Headlines, and the Persistent Gap Between Data and Desire
    Sep 21 2026
    This review looks at a recent summary of about a dozen clinical trials that claimed omega-3 supplements improve irritability and communication in autistic individuals.
    It compares the actual findings which showed small, often statistically meaningless results based on subjective questionnaires rather than real-world changes with the much bolder headlines seen by the public. While the idea makes sense in theory, the underlying studies suffer from small sample sizes, loose research methods, and a tendency for benefits to fade under closer scrutiny. Ultimately, the evidence isn't strong enough to call omega-3 supplements a dependable treatment.
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    4 mins