How the Enneagram Adds Dimensions to the Genogram (ft. the Bridgertons)

Your Family Tree Tapestry has Texture

Have you’ve ever looked at your family members and thought,

“How the hell are we even related?!”

If so, you’re not alone, and there’s a whole picture that show us how the pieces fit together.

Introducing the Genogram.

A genogram is like your family tree’s emotionally intelligent cousin that give us a whole lot more information than just the names of each member.

It gives us the structure, the who’s-who, the space between individuals, and the major plot points of our family stories across generations.

Here’s an example from the show FRIENDS, centered around Ross Geller (read the blog):

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At a glance, you can literally see generational patterns, roles, expectations, ripple effects of traumas, and emotional legacies.

The genogram also maps out not just people, but also patterns — conflict, closeness, trauma, cutoffs, alliances, enmeshments, and triangulations — the nature of the relationship between members of the family.

Because we’re also seeing the bird’s eye view at a glance, LACK of information is also information — for example, if there’s a ton about your mom’s side about the family but nothing about your dad’s side, this is not nothing.

Why the lack of details? Is it emotional cutoff or estrangement? Is it that your dad doesn’t have a connection with his family or that you don’t have a relationship with him?

What’s NOT present is just as informational as what is.

The Genogram reveals a ton already. But when you also throw in the Enneagram?

That’s when things get real juicy. It’s switching from black-and-white to full color, or from outline sketch to textured tapestry — so many more dimensions are evident at a glance, just by adding a few more letters.

Birth order and gender (a la genogram) matter, but they don’t guarantee certain experiences.

Each person’s own personality (a la Enneagram) play a HUGE role in how each actually interpret and react to various experiences.

This is especially evident for identical twins. (Think of Phoebe & Ursula from FRIENDS: everything is the same except for personality — and see how drastically contrasted their relationship patterns & life trajectories are!)

Personality is in the Enneagram’s wheelhouse, zhuzhing up the genogram without taking up much space on the page.

(Here are blogs about the 9 Enneagram types, 3 instincts, & 27 subtypes.)

Enter the Bridgertons: Family Roles, Public Reputations, & Internalized Responsibilities

In this blog, we’re diving into how the Enneagram reveals the emotional fabric of family dynamics — and what better example than the drama-laden, emotionally dynamic world of the Bridgertons, where we meet the picture-perfect family of 8 children, 1 widowed mama, 1 GINORMOUS estate, and WAY more expectations than anyone knows what to do with.

SPOILER ALERT: This blog covers content up to the beginning of Season 3 in the Netflix adaptation. You have been warned!

We’ll be zooming in on three characters in particular,

• Daphne (Enneagram 2, SX/SO)

• Anthony (Enneagram 1, SX/SO)

• Violet (Enneagram 2, SO/SX)

…exploring how each of them:

• Engage life in alignment with their Enneagram type

• Occupy specific roles in the family (context matters!!)

• Could benefit from some serious therapy to heal their relationships, especially with themselves.

Here’s the the Bridgerton Family Tree:

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In the eyes of the Ton, the Bridgertons are a loving family that screams unity, perfection, & class.

But behind the scenes?

Anxiety. Pressure. Comparison. Loneliness. Burnout. Grief. Resentment.

…and roles so entrenched that they’re practically titles in and of themselves:

• The Matriarch/Puppet Master (Violet)

• The Third Parent (Anthony)

• The Failure-to-Launch Backup (Benedict)

• The Carefree Kid (Colin)

• The Golden Child (Daphne)

• The Rebel/Black Sheep (Eloise)

• The Recluse (Francesca)

• The Twins/Babies (Gregory & Hyacinth)

Here’s what the Bridgerton’s genogram looks like, and how much more info it has than their family tree, especially in the space between members:

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No One’s Patterns Exist in a Vacuum

…but within a very specific social context. These roles (influenced by birth order, personality, gender roles/expectations, medical needs, trauma, etc.) reinforce each other — namely, they come as a set, fulfilling very specific emotional roles for the collective/family.

Hence, anytime there’s an addition or removal of one member (e.g., through birth, death, marriage, moves, or physical/mental health issues), the equilibrium is shaken up so that the roles may be redistributed according to who’s left. (If the Peacemaker in the family marries off and moves away, who’s going to fill that gap next?)

Each Bridgerton already had a personality leaning for certain family roles, but these roles became deeply established & entrenched especially after one major traumatic family event: the sudden death of Edmund Bridgerton, beloved husband, father, and 8th Viscount.

The Original Crisis that Solidified Family Roles

An idyllic father-son bonding time ended in a very traumatic, tragic, and disorienting shakeup for the whole family for years to come.

Watch the moment that knocked down the first domino:

Everyone in the Bridgerton family felt the gaping hole Edmund left behind.

But the tragic event’s impact is most evident in three key members who form the major family triangle:

• Daphne (Enneagram 2, SX/SO)

• Anthony (Enneagram 1, SX/SO)

• Violet (Enneagram 2, SO/SX)

Here’s the simplified genogram that reveals this triangle (green):

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Let’s set the scene & characters, shall we?

Daphne vs. Anthony:
Same Stimulus, Different Response

Birth order & gender experiences matter, but Enneagram personality (which we’re born with) matters even more in influencing how each interprets & responds to the same event.

Even if Anthony had been the second or third child, he would have still somehow become a pillar in the family because of his Enneagram type.

The direction a domino is set (NATURE) influences which way it’ll fall upon impact (NURTURE): same objective event, different subjective reactions.

Let’s first zoom in on the eldest daugther & son to see how this plays out, starting with Daphne (bc let’s be forreal — Daphne is likely to reach out to therapy long before Anthony does).

The Flawless Golden Child: Daphne
(Enneagram 2, Sexual/Social)

Poised, pretty, & practically perfect. “The Diamond of the Season” whom everyone sets as the golden standard — especially the next-in-line daughter Eloise, who considers herself a disappointment in Daphne’s shadow.

But unlike with Eloise (what we see is what we get), there’s much more happening behind the scenes with Daphne.

Behind Daphne’s halo? We find a spicy, masterful relationship engineer who skillfully shapeshifts into becoming the ultimate object of desire & envy (different spices to make herself appealing to different palates).

All Enneagram 2s (the Befriender) focus so much of their attention towards others (and away from their own inner world), intuitively sensing what makes people tick or turned on & deftly molding their relationships to their liking.

Compared to many other Enneagram types, Type Twos tend to be more romantic and idealistic, in pursuit of a love match (much like the one that Daphne’s parents enjoyed) as if that’s the #1 most important thing in life.

More specifically, Daphne is an Enneagram 2 SX/SO, meaning she has:

• a dominant Sexual (SX) instinct

• a secondary Social (SO) instinct

• a repressed Self-Preservation (SP) instinct

(Here’s more about the Enneagram instincts & subtypes.)

Here’s how this subtype shows up, compared to her mother Violet (also Enneagram 2, but different instinct sequence. More on Violet later!).

Dominant Sexual (SX) Instinct

As is the case for all Twos, Daphne's core need is to be loved, chosen, and indispensable. With her strong Sexual (SX) instinct in first place, her focus hones in on one meaningful, intimate, INTENSE connection (Hello, Simon!).

2 SXs are known to be the Queen (vs. 2 SO — the Empress, 2 SP — the Princess) who use their physical beauty, body language, and emotional dynamism to find and attract (*cough — seduce) their partner of choice.

Here’s an example of Daphne utilizing her wiles and to get the freakin’ Prince to KNEEL (Also to passive aggressively get back at Simon):

Among all the Bridgerton children, Anthony & Daphne share a particularly close bond, partly because of their positions as the Eldest son & daughter, but also because they both have a dominant Sexual instinct, which is focused on intense, 1:1 attachment with special individuals — partners, best friends, parents, kids, etc. (The SX isn’t always about sex. “Special” is the key word.)

A & D just GET each other, no words necessary. This is also why both of them form 2 corners of the triangle, their mother Violet being the third.

(Triangles (or triangulation) are the go-to relationship dynamic for those who have a loud SX instinct. More to come on this later.)

Second Social (SO) Instinct

In addition to being very vivacious & energetically dynamic, Daphne’s Social instinct prompts her to uphold a specific image, not just in the eyes of that one special person, but also in the collective: the Diamond of the Season for the Ton and the Perfect Daughter/Golden Child for her family.

Similar to the eldest son Anthony (Enneagram 1 SX/SO), Daphne is very aware of her position in the family as the eldest daughter and crown jewel of the Bridgerton household, seeking a suitable marriage match in order to:

• Alleviate the pressure on her dear brother Anthony’s shoulders

• Please her Mama

• Set a good example for her younger siblings

• Secure her family’s position in society

(Ultimately, the winning factor for her marriage is the SX value of love & romance, not particularly the SO value of duty & responsibility — that Simon is a Duke is a happy bonus, but not really the point.)

Like her mother Violet (2 SO/SX), Daphne is also a master image manager and relationship architect (i.e., meddling), but the latter isn’t as prevalent and extensive as it is for her Social-dominant mother.

Repressed Self-Preservation (SP) Instinct

Unlike Edwina Sharma (Enneagram 2 SP/SX), who takes on a very cutesy, childlike posture and is overly generous with flattery (Princess vs. Queen), Daphne is more spicy and ready to bite back at those (special) individuals who look down on her or consider her fragile (i.e., Anthony & Simon).

Her fiery Type 2 Pride + the lack of Self-Preservation guardrails leads Daphne to even LITERALLY jump into a duel (yes, with guns!!) meant to preserve her honor (because dumbass Anthony & Simon thinks she’s a helpless damsel in distress and that they’re each the valiant hero 🙄🤬).

Enneagram 2 Identity Crisis: Who Am I Now?

At the end of Season 1, Daphne becomes the family’s “success story,” the one who captures the Queen & the Ton’s attention, gets married first (to a freakin’ DUKE!), makes her Mama proud, and follows the rules…(mostly).

Even though she successfully snagged herself a titled husband by marrying Simon (4 SX/SP) in a very dramatic & emotionally turbulent way (typical for Enneagram 2 & 4 relationships), in Season 2, Daphne is confronted with a brand new problem never faced before:

• Now that she accomplished her family role, who is she now?

• Who is she when she’s no longer needed or in the spotlight in society?

• Now that she “won/conquered” Simon already and he’s focused on his business, who is she in his eyes?

Daphne built her whole identity around being desired. Wanted. Cherished. All for the sake of attaining love.

Turns out, being a wife or mother or a shiny success story doesn’t actually guarantee the feeling of love or intimacy. Though she always had this hole inside her, it’s more obvious now that she’s accomplished her Enneagram type-informed life mission.

After getting married & having a child (the first grandchild), Daphne switched gears away from the SX/1:1 focus and towards the SO/collective focus by trying to make herself indispensable in OTHER people’s lives.

Following in her mother 2 SO/SX Violet’s footsteps, Daphne injected herself into her dear brother Anthony’s love life, vetting Edwina for him (even though he never asked either of them for help) and trying to get him to pay attention to his REPRESSED AF feelings for Kate.

Mission accomplished? Yes. Anthony also gets hitched to the love of his life, making his Mama & sister’s hearts purr with delight.

…But NOW WHAT? What happens with Daphne now that Anthony too is wed? What’s her place now? Just go down the list of all the siblings that she’s not that close with? Or go back home and lean into motherhood, pining for Simon to return home from his business ventures?

Who is Daphne REALLY? *Cue existential identity struggle.

At the end of this blog, we’ll go into what Daphne might reach out to a therapist for. (Click here if you wanna fast forward to that section.)

But enough about the eldest daughter. Now’s time to zoom in on Anthony, the oldest son, the next Viscount, and the head of the Bridgerton household.

The Self-Abandoning Parentified Child: Anthony
(Enneagram 1, Sexual/Social)

When Edmund died, his mother completely collapsed under her grief, inadvertently dumping the entire weight of the whole household onto Anthony’s shoulders.

In the span of minutes, Anthony's status changed into the roles of:

• The 9th Viscount

• The head of the household

• Emotional Orphan

• Doubly Parentified Child

(How many 18-year-olds know how to handle taxes, let alone an entire estate, or lead an entire family?)

In Enneagram 1 fashion, Anthony didn’t even push back against this mantle but completely assumed responsibility on behalf of the whole family, obsessing about doing things “properly” while emotionally white-knuckling his way through his own grief and trauma.

His inner dialogue went probably like this:

Who has time for feelings? It doesn’t matter what I want. I have shit to take care of…especially because everyone else is a mess and/or completely unreliable.

(Do you hear the resentment?)

Dutiful, self-denying, workaholic, rigid, grumpy as hell…and terrified of messing it all up.

It wasn’t just because Anthony is the oldest son that he became the pillar of the family — even if he were second or third in the birth order, he would have likely ended up taking on WAY more responsibility than his share, because that’s built into the Enneagram 1 personality makeup: doing the rightful, responsible thing.

Had he been a firstborn son of another type (like Enneagram 4 or 7 — types that tend to avoid responsibility), the entire Bridgerton story would have turned out VERY differently.

(Think of eldest Featherington Prudence, whose father also suddenly died and whose family was in a more financially precarious situation, but her inclination was to do the LEAST amount of work possible and had zero problem letting other people take responsibility. She’s obviously not Type 1.)

Dominant Sexual (SX) Instinct

Like Daphne, Anthony has a dominant instinct that makes him very intense, passionate, and impulsive especially in one-on-one dynamics. This is most obvious in his relationship with mother Violet, favorite sister Daphne, and his (begrudgingly admitted) love interest Kate (Enneagram 8 SO/SX).

Unlike for Type 2s (whose type & SX instinct are in alignment), Type 1 goes the OPPOSITE direction as the SX instinct, making 1 SX into a countertype: the Type One that looks the least like Type Ones, compared to 1 SP & 1 SO.

More so than typical Type 1s, Anthony can exhibit 7ish and 4ish tendencies more readily, for better (his feelings are less repressed) and worse (his impulsive reactive tendencies spill over more).

Anthony is still (mostly) rigidly in control, but his passion and fire erupts more readily — what he thinks is to his detriment, but ultimately might be for his highest and best interest. (Thank goodness he married Kate!)

On the shadow side, the Improver energy of Type 1 gets directed OUTWARDS towards other people more than on himself, leading him to put pressure on others and and also more hypocritical than 1 SP & 1 SO would. (Daphne totally calls him out on this after she catches him & Kate in their almost-kiss.)

Secondary Social (SO) Instinct

Built into both Type One and the Social instinct are the central themes of roles, responsibilities, position, status, and influence.

Whereas Anthony’s dominant SX instinct dampens some One-ness, his secondary SO instinct reinforces it. As such, Anthony had a fairly easy time occupying the responsibility vacuum left behind by both of his parents upon his father’s death.

Social-dominant Ones are the “cool”, level-headed Ones who also become the Perfect Role Model for others to follow suit (think Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter), so Anthony tries hard to be the good older brother, the Viscount, and the head of the household, out of a fear of tarnishing the Bridgerton name and disappointing his late father.

But (as was Daphne’s case) the SX instinct still wins out over the SO instinct in his whirlwind of a love/hate romance with spinster Kate, overriding his duty-based intentions to marry her sister Edwina (the second Diamond of the Season).

Repressed Self-Preservation (SP) Instinct

Anthony’s fiery dominant SX instincts also occasionally hijack his Type One intentions because his guardrail, practical Self-Pres instinct is nowhere to be seen: his illicit hot/cold affair with Siena, being late to Daphne’s debuting first ball of the season (way to go, big brother!), and the reckless duel with Simon (that led to her sister literally getting caught in the middle).

Even though Type Ones are known for the Ready-Aim-Fire stance, Anthony occasionally accidentally FIRES first, and cleans up later. Hence, even though he’s very much a Type 1, his chaotic tendencies of swinging between extremes makes him seem very Enneagram Four-ish. (Great for TV drama!)

Enneagram 1 Emotional & Relationship Crisis:
When is it time for MY Wants & Needs?

Anthony’s resistance to admitting (let alone attending to) his wants & needs leads to him overinvolve himself in his others’ affairs — especially the firstborn daughter Daphne but also the second-in-line Benedict, regularly reminding them of their duties to support the family and set a good example for the younger siblings — while also getting resentful.

This also leads Anthony to clash with his 2 SO/SX mother Violet (who shares the same goal of marrying off the children, but for wildly different reasons — less duty, more romance — and different approaches — a more behind-the-scenes orchestration & emotional nurturing than criticism & orders).

Even though Violet finally reassumed her role in the family as Matriarch and in society as Dowager Viscountess, her emotional collapse & absence left indelible marks on the children, especially her firstborn.

Resentment simmers beneath Anthony’s stern, responsible front, especially towards his mother who both emotionally abandoned & saddled him with the dual parental role — not only is he the Big Brother & “Father”, but he’s also very “maternal” & emotionally involved.

Cold & distant is not a term to describe how Anthony shows up for ALL of his siblings, even the youngest brother Gregory despite the 16-year-age gap.

Watch Anthony’s warmth & tenderness for Gregory (in contrast to Gregory’s relationship with Violet throughout the Seasons — overlooked unless scolded for his playful pranks):

Anthony steps in, because Violet stepped back. (Another triangle!!)

This emotional backdrop of taking care of others’ at the expense of his own is what Kate Sharma steps into.

As a fellow oldest sibling + orphan + family pillar, she is the first/only person who deeply GETS him.

Part of the reason why Anthony’s passions stir out of control when she enters the scene is because her some of her Enneagram 8 SO/SX patterns of wildly defying social roles & expectations, not playing by the rules, defining her own path, and having her own one-up power stance to see him eye-to-eye (as EQUALS) shakes him out of his default overresponsible, Martyr + Savior + Protector stance. (That he doesn’t know what to do with her is good for him, even though he (love) hates it.)

For the first time in his life, someone really SEES Anthony’s grief & pain behind his strong, judgy exterior (think his panic attack triggered by Kate’s bee sting).

Anthony’s frozen trauma begin thawing, creating a messy slurry of feelings that he doesn’t know what the fuck to do with.

That he finally relents to love in marrying Kate isn’t the end of his redemption story. His healing journey continues long after they’re married and have their child.

There are a ton of things that might bring Anthony into therapy — keep reading! (Click here if you wanna jump to that section.)

Enough about the main characters of Seasons 1 & 2 (Whew!).

Now let’s focus on the third leg of the family triangle — Mama Bridgerton.

The Master Relationship Engineer: Violet
(Enneagram 2, Social/Sexual)

Even though Violet is not a main character (yet 🤞 — let’s hope she gets her own spinoff story!), she plays a MAJOR role behind-the-scenes.

Without a focus on her, we can’t fully understand Anthony or Daphne, as she is the one who singlehandedly reinforces both her eldest son & daughters’ Enneagram patterns.

Violet's grief after Edmund's death wasn’t just about loss — it was about an entire identity collapse. Her role as a wife vanished overnight.

After the initial grief shutdown (relationship losses for Enneagram 2s cut differently), she doubled down and threw herself entirely into her children’s lives, especially matchmaking. Why?

Because Social 2s derive worth from being indispensable to a group — in this case, her family and society at large. This is a much louder theme than for Daphne (2 SX/SO), who directs more energy towards 1:1 relationships.

Violet is warm and loving, but she also often blurs boundaries by injecting herself into her kids’ personal lives to feel connected with them (but then feeling hurt, bewildered, or at a loss when they push back — What to do with Eloise or Francesca?).

Her love seems generous (it’s clear she does care for her children), but it’s also a form of control and an expression of her own ego workings — about her centrality in the lives of those she loves.

Sometimes her well-meaning efforts to help leads her to inadvertently overriding her children’s experiences — most evident in the frustrations that Anthony, Daphne, Eloise, and Francesca feel & express to her.

Violet can’t fix her own grief, so she micromanages her children’s lives by engineering relationship opportunities behind the scenes with her partner-in-crime Lady Danbury (Enneagram 8 SO/SP), while still nudging them to seek romantic love above all else. (Mixed messages, much?)

Her overcompensating overinvolvement in her children’s lives puts her in a subtle power struggle with Anthony (vying for the head of household role), dragging the eldest daughter Daphne in as the battlefield and prize.

This puts all three members into a triangle deadlock in Season 1 — Daphne is triangulated into Anthony & Violet’s relationship with each other.

(In Season 2, Anthony becomes the target of Violet & Daphne’s attention, because Daphne simultaneously fulfilled her role in Violet’s eyes and initiated her own identity crisis by getting married.)

The Bridgerton Family Triangle:
Anthony, Daphne, & Violet

Here’s what the relationship between the three looks like in genogram form (the green triangle):

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Triangulation is a unhealthy but very common relationship dynamic when Party A & Party B don’t deal with each other directly and instead loop/drag in a third Party C to be the peacemaker, distraction, and/or prize. Party C serves as the pressure valve build up by A & B.

Usually the triangulated party ends up feeling controlled, burned out, and frustrated (because they’re objectified by the other two). Daphne eventually snapped back at both her mother & brother for meddling in her romantic life, feeling seen for just what she does, not for who she is/what she wants.

Had Edmund still been alive, he would likely have been the third Party between Anthony & Violet (purple triangle), since the relationship between the latter two even before his death was nowhere near as close/solid as each of their relationships with Edmund.

Triangles don’t form only from trauma or conflict — sometimes it’s just relative. The triangulated party is usually the path of least resistance.

If there were conflict between Anthony & Violet, they might have each attempted to get Edmund involved by lamenting to him rather than directly to the other party. If Edmund was emotionally mature, he would extricate himself from the triangle (detriangulate himself) and encourage them to hash things out with each other directly. But I guess we will never know…

Triangulation is a favorite dynamic especially for Enneagram 2s, but also for the Sexual instinct, as it’s the main instinct of rivalry and competition for a common prize (*cough prey).

Of these three characters’ Enneagram type & instinct setup, we have 2 Twos and 3 loud SX instincts:

• Anthony — Type 1 SX/SO

• Daphne — Type 2 SX/SO

• Violet — Type 2 SO/SX

After Daphne gets married to Simon (Enneagram 4SX/SP — that’s a whole ‘nother story of relationship drama…Double SX-dominant types + Type 2/4 combo!) at the end of Season 1, Anthony becomes the new focal point of attention in Season 2. The triangle continues, now with Daphne being the meddling one in Anthony’s love affairs.

When Anthony too finds his love match and he goes off on his honeymoon (taking off his head-of-household + parental + Viscount + older brother hats), this triangle loses steam.

Anthony’s attention is (entirely) elsewhere towards a new party D (Kate) and he (finally) gives himself permission to focus on fulfilling his own wants & needs.

Without this triangle to consume her time & energy, what is Violet Bridgerton to do next? Eloise hasn’t shown the faintest interest in finding a love match…so it must be Benedict (who’s very slippery) or Colin (who seems so confident that he might not need help?)…right?

With Anthony on his honeymoon & Daphne off to her duchy with her husband and child, Violet needs a third corner of the triangle so that she doesn’t have to think about herself & her own needs (*cue Enneagram 2 nausea 🤢).

Fortunately (?), her trusty bestie Lady Danbury (Enneagram 8 SO/SP) also has all the time in the world with no drama to keep herself entertained and no new chess pieces to maneuver.

And so another triangle is formed in Season 3…with Francesca (Enneagram 5 SX/SP), the latest Diamond of the Season….and Violet’s latest project.

The Enneagram: The Cage That Used to Protect Us that Now Keep Us Stuck

At its core, the Enneagram points to nine different themes that serve as speed-dial reactions to life’s challenges.

Each type’s patterns are coping strategies & defense mechanisms that USED to be helpful when we were actually vulnerable and without many resources and opportunities.

But as we grow up & gain more abilities, our autopilot patterns don’t always upgrade accordingly, especially when there’s trauma.

We don’t realize that we’re STUCK in one of nine patterns until our handy go-to tools just don’t work anymore, but actually start CREATING problems.

How Enneagram Patterns USED to Help

With our beloved Bridgerton trio, this is how their Enneagram types & subtypes used to help them feel secure in the wake of Edmund’s death:

• Anthony (Enneagram 1 SX/SO) — Being right, strong, competent, responsible, and in self-control gave him a sense of purpose & orientation in the midst of crisis & chaos from loss. Directing that Improver energy outwards (SX/SO) “protected” him from directing it towards himself (SP), because he might have completely shut down & collapsed alongside his unraveling mother when his family really did need someone to take charge.

• Daphne (Enneagram 2 SX/SO) — Being attractive, beautiful, pleasing, and magnetic gave her a toolbox of soft power, molding her image (and therefore her relationships) so that she can simultaneously fulfill her duty as the eldest daughter, take care of her mother & siblings, and also enjoy a romantic & emotionally fulfilling relationship like her parents did — all to avoid ever feeling unloved or alone.

• Violet (Enneagram 2 SO/SX) — Being emotionally attuned and able to discern & navigate behind-the-scenes social dynamics gave her ways of engineering/fostering relationships so that she’ll always have a place in their lives and have something to fill her broken widow heart. As an only child who yearned for connections while growing up with an emotionally cold & critical mother (Lady Ledger), Violet always dreamed having a large & actively interconnected family, with herself at the center.

How Enneagram Patterns now lead to Hurt

Unfortunately, these very entrenched patterns are the very things that prevent us from getting our true needs met.

• Anthony — Having sworn off his own wants & needs, he became more bitter, resentful, and rigid in controlling others. His inability to relax made him more judgmental of others, creating further chasms in his relationships and actually sabotaging his ability to provide for & protec the family. Because he was so (overly) responsible, his next siblings in line Benedict & Colin were able to spread their wings freely to pursue their interests without worry. They got a chance to indulge in their own desires freely, leaving Anthony feeling further alone and trapped the eldest son role & head of household responsibilities.

• Daphne — Once she accomplished her mission of getting married, Daphne lost her spotlight society as well as her identity as the Golden Child. Having also “locked” Simon into marriage, there wasn’t someone whose attention to attract anymore, meaning her soft power toolbox was becoming less and less relevant each day. Her attempt to make herself indispensable again by involving herself in Anthony’s love drama and creating a new triangle with her husband & child only bought her so much time until she was back to her identity crisis of “Who am I?”.

• Violet — Though she still has a number of children to marry off to buy herself time from also dealing with the Type 2 identity crisis, Violet was deeply shaken up to lose the Viscountess title to Anthony’s wife Kate. What happens now? Where do I even physically live? Will I still be invited to society’s balls without a title or any more children to marry off? What will I do with myself when my children no longer need me?

The Next Generation: Tectonic Shifts in Roles & Relationships

With new marriages (& new babies!), the family equilibrium has been completely shaken up — the Bridgerton family will never be the same again, and it’s time for role reconstruction.

The original triangle between Daphne, Anthony, & Violet has dissolved, and it’s TBD as to how these roles will shift or be redistributed within the now three nuclear families:

• The Bridgertons: Anthony, Kate, baby

• The Bridgertons: Violet, Benedict, Colin, … , Hyacinth

• The Bassetts: Daphne, Simon, Augie

The genograms for Before (Season 1 & 2) & After (start of Season 3):

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Before (Seasons 1 & 2): A triangle between Anthony, Violet, & Daphne, with Daphne as the main focus of Season 1 and Anthony the target of Season 2. The other children are more in the backdrop.

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After (start of Season 3): Anthony & Daphne on the periphery, Francesca the main focus of Violet & Lady Danbury’s attention. Violet has generally been more focused on her daughters and less involved in the lives of her other sons — Benedict & Colin. The youngest — Gregory & Hyacinth — are also rarely the focus of her attention.

As Anthony & Daphne fade more into the background of the extended Bridgerton family as they direct their attention & energy towards their new nuclear family with their partner & child, forming new triangles.

Here are Anthony & Daphne’s genograms with their partners & child:

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Start of Season 2: Daphne (Enneagram 2 SX/SO) with Simon (4 SX/SP) who has a turbulent triangle in his own family of origin (red) with his cruel father and Lady Danbury — who steps in as his godmother after his mother dies in childbirth).

As is common for double SX-dominant couples and also Enneagram 2 & 4 combos, Daphne’s relationship with Simon is very emotionally intense and wild. Since Simon also has some childhood attachment trauma and previously vowed to never have children, it’s TBD how his relationship with his own child August (and by extension his connection with Daphne both as a partner & coparent) will be.

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Start of Season 3: Anthony (Enneagram 1 SX/SO) & Kate (8 SO/SX) have a very vibrant, thriving relationship that’s based on several factors: both have common experiences being the responsible, firstborn pillar of the family, have very strong one-up personalities (good equal power dynamic), and similar instinct stacking (both SP-repressed).

Anthony has a lot of complex trauma wounds to heal, but his relationship with Kate and their soon-to-be born child might be very healing as he learns to rest, play, and rely on others again.

Btw, not all triangles are bad — usually new parents naturally form one with their firstborn or only child. The issue isn’t that there’s a triangle, but that sometimes there’s a rigidity & lack of flexibility when new members enter the scene or when two parties insist on not working out their issues directly and overrely on the third party as a go-between.

With Anthony & Daphne (the two corners of the original triangle) fade away, Violet forms a new triangle (pink) with Lady Danbury, both double-teaming on matchmaking for Francesca.

(Try as she might, Violet has been unsuccessful in locking down Eloise as her new project.)

WOOHOO, Congrats!! You finally made it to the final stretch:

 

Time to Heal, Adjust, & Grow:
The Bridgertons in Therapy

Let’s pretend for a second that the Bridgertons lived in present day, and that they were self-aware enough to realize that they got some deep inner work to do.

Here are the kinds of things each of them might reach out to a therapist for:

Daphne (Enneagram 2 SX/SO)

Relationship Crisis:

• Loneliness, difficulty with solitude: Why does Simon work so much? Does he love me?

• Push-pull & hot/cold dynamic: Why won’t he just tell me how he feels?? He keeps avoiding me…Does he love me?

• Overinvolvement in others’ lives, managing others’ relationships: Why isn’t he involved more in Augie’s life? Doesn’t he love Augie?

• Resentment about tasks: Why isn’t he helping more with Augie?

• Relationship Anxiety: Will my family love me even when I’m not the Diamond?

• Resentment about connection: Why do I have to always be the one visiting them??

• Emotional dependence: Why am I so needy? Why can’t I just be okay being by myself?

Identity Crisis:

• Who am I if I’m not the Golden Child or in the spotlight?

• Who am I outside of my relationships?

• I should be happy now that I have the relationships I want. Why do I keep feeling this way?

Anthony (Enneagram 1 Sx/SO)

Emotional Crisis:

• Panic attacks, especially around bees

• Dissociation — being checked out

• Workaholic tendencies: working more than resting/playing, feeling guilty for not being productive

• Irritability, annoyance, impatience, resentment

• Moodiness, especially around the anniversary of Father’s death

Relationship Crisis:

• Unfamiliarity with new power dynamic of being with an equal (Kate): She’s very self-sufficient and capable…I’m not sure how I’m supposed to interact with her or make decisions together…

• Counterdependency: Difficulty letting other people care for him eceiving care

• Codependency: Taking care of others’ needs that they can/should take care of themselves

• Learning that control ≠ love, vulnerability ≠ weak

• Repairing his relationship with his mother

• Being equals with his siblings, who don’t need him the same way

Violet (Enneagram 2 SO/SX)

Emotional Crisis

• The house feels so empty…Will my children visit me?

• Grief: I miss Edmund…

• Loneliness: I miss having a partner. Who will love me for me?

Relationship Crisis:

• Where do I belong in society now that I’m no longer Viscountess? Will I be forgotten?

• Power dynamic shift: How do I handle my daughter-in-law being the decision maker in the house?

• Relationship shift: How do I interact with my all-grown children now? I don’t know what to talk about rather than their kids or relationships…What’s okay and not okay for me to do?

• Desire: What do I do with my blooming garden?

• Boundaries: Why don’t my children want my advice on how to be a parent? Why can’t I see my grandchildren more?

Identity/Existential Crisis:

• Impending Empty Nest Syndrome:

  • Who am I now that everyone else doesn’t need me and is living their own lives?

  • What do I do with all this time?

• Second Act:

  • What will the rest of my life look like?

  • Who do I want to be?

  • Who do I want to be with?

Seeing the Bigger Family Picture in 4D — Past, Present, & Future

Here’s the recap on what we explored in this blog:

• Genograms show us the structure of the family: the WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, and HOW.

  • Significant events — traumas, immigration, addictions, etc.

  • Family roles & dynamics — triangulations, boundary issues, emotional cutoffs, etc.

  • Generational patterns — titles, socioeconomic/class issues, gender roles & expectations, etc.

  • The genogram is a cross section of the family at a specific point in time, and will change as time passes with births, deaths, marriages, estrangements, etc.

• The Enneagram shows us the texture of the family fabric: the WHY each person does what they do.

  • Central themes or values — intimacy, identity, responsibility, freedom, harmony, etc.

  • Defense mechanisms, go-to reactionary patterns that used to help but lead to self-sabotage later

  • Difficulty with certain roles & responsibilities, individuation or setting boundaries, etc.

  • Stuck points & areas of healing/growth

You’ll get a ton of mileage from using a genogram to better understand how each person in your family has come to be where y’all are today (past ‘til present).

Add to the mix the Enneagram, and you get an insiders’ look into powerful yet invisible forces within each person (that drive us to do all kinds of crazy things) so that you can:

• Deepen your understanding & empathy for yourself & others

• Map out your next growth steps so you can break generational curses and create new generational blessings

None of us live in a vacuum. Part of the reason why it’s sometimes so hard to change is because our relationship context remains the same.

You gotta change individual issues individually, and systemic issues systemically.

The genogram shows you the systemic context. The Enneagram shows you your specific individual work.

Start Mapping Your Outer & Inner Worlds

Your patterns didn’t start with you — and they don’t have to end with you either. Learn more about your social context (genogram) and/or your inner motivational engine (Enneagram)!

Genogram

Enneagram

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© Copyright 2023 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

How Brainspotting can Strengthen Your Relationships

Healing Unresolved Emotions can Improve Relationships

Human connections are the heart of our lives — offering some of our greatest insights, intimacy, growth, and joy.

But they can also be sources of our deepest pain, confusion, and conflict, especially when past wounds, unresolved emotions, or trauma subtly leak out out from our subterranean subconscious parts, warping the way we interpret new situations and respond to our loved ones.

Especially for people who feel deeply — Empaths, Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs), and those with strong emotional intuitions like Enneagram Twos and Enneagram Fours — these relationship dynamics can be even more intense and all-consuming.

Fortunately, our amazing bodies come with inherent ways of healing itself. One such approach that has actually been created as a therapy approach is called Brainspotting, a trauma therapy approach that emerged from EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing).

Read more about what Brainspotting is or how Brainspotting works, so we can get to the juicy stuff about relationships here!

When Past Relationship Trauma Wounds Spill Over into the Present

Most people who reach out to me for therapy do so less to work on past traumas (especially from childhood), but because a CURRENT relationship is in crisis:

• They can’t shake off the feeling that their current partner is cheating on them like their exes did, even though the partner has been nothing but present, truthful, and supportive.

• They have intense reactions when their 2-year-old throws food onto the floor, and they’re so so frustrated but also don’t want to blow up on their kid for doing what 2-year-olds do

• They feel constantly overlooked at work, but also don’t have the confidence to actually speak up for themselves for fear of criticism or judgment

• They have a hard time opening up to others because they’re waiting for the shoe to drop and be abandoned by others or assume that every gift comes with strings attached

The likelihood that these reactions are based on old relationships and experiences are very very VERY high.

The pickle is when people KNOW they have old trauma to work with because they read all the books and even did therapy before, but they still have no idea how to actually move on or deal with their feelings (like Whack-a-Mole).

Even if you intellectually "know" something isn’t a threat anymore, your nervous system may still react as if it is.

This leads to emotional triggers in relationships. A partner’s raised voice, a delayed text, or a perceived rejection might set off old buried memories or emotions you’re not consciously aware of.

You may lash out, shut down, over-apologize, or spiral into anxiety — not because of what’s happening in the present moment, but because of the ghosts of unprocessed past experiences that are still reverberating in your nervous system.

Namely, your body brain can’t tell the difference between the past and present.

Brainspotting Heals Old Wounds and Clears Outdated Messages about Life & Love

For better or for worse, when intense feelings “leak out” (i.e., we get triggered), we have a window of opportunity to excavate those deeply buried memories (think of the colored core memory orbs in the movie Inside Out) that we don’t have conscious awareness of.

Brainspotting Therapy helps access and clear out those echoes by giving the brain space to process what it couldn’t before. It bypasses the analytical, thinking brain (top-brain) and goes straight to the root — the mammal/emotional mid-brain and lizard/reflexive root brain.

Brainspotting helps us locate those buried orbs, release the emotional charge, reconfigure those memories, and reorganize where those newly processed memories are stored.

By the end of the movie Inside Out, those intense, simplistic single-colored orbs (preprocessed memories) become more nuanced and complex multi-colored orbs (processed, integrated memories) that are much more useful in helping us navigate new experiences with greater wisdom and emotional balance.

It’s hard to describe Brainspotting because it can be such a body-based, nonverbal, primal experience, but here’s a blog that explains how Brainspotting actually works.

…or sometimes it’s easier to just try it for yourself. Actually, if you’re an Enneagram 4 or Highly Sensitive Person, you might already accidentally be doing Brainspotting yourself out of just sheer intuition.

How Brainspotting Helps Relationships

So how does healing old painful experiences actually translate into better, healthier, deeper relationships?

1. Healing Attachment Wounds

Most relationship struggles are rooted in early attachment patterns. If your caregivers were inconsistent, emotionally unavailable, overly controlling, or unpredictable, you may develop anxious, avoidant, or disorganized attachment styles.

These styles often play out in adult relationships—creating cycles of clinginess, withdrawal, fear of abandonment, difficulty with trust, or a strong need to "fix" others.

The Enneagram — a personality framework that I also specialize in — speaks to 9 different ways of seeing and responding to life experiences, including how we relate to other people. The Enneagram speaks to WHY we do what we do — our core needs, fears, and interpretations of life.

Think of the Enneagram revealing those painful muscle knots that put your whole body out of alignment and created other issues, and Brainspotting being the deep tissue massage to “work out” those knots so that you can gain full access to your whole body again.

Brainspotting does this “massage” by:

• Uncovering and processing childhood attachment wounds from our deeper brains

• Recalibrating our nervous systems to feel safe and steady again

• Reorienting our views on life and relationships

• Helping us bring our healing wins into daily experiences, so that you can actually access the hard won peace and courage

When you resolve your old ghosts of past wounds, you’re able to be present, see life, yourself, and others clearly for what they are, and to respond accordingly with all of your internal resources and strengths.

Instead of being bogged down by familiar fears, you’d have more clarity and boldness to fully show up in all areas of your life, including your relationships with loved ones!

2. Reducing Emotional Reactivity

Whether you like it or not, relationships are emotional mirrors. We’re constantly being triggered by others, often in ways that seem disproportionate.

• A simple disagreement can feel like a betrayal.

• A missed call can ignite panic or shame.

These reactions are signals that unprocessed emotions are driving the bus and that we need to resolve them sooner than later, lest they make hard things WORSE or even create MORE problems.

Because Brainspotting allows deep emotional processing without needing to "talk it all out", it helps:

• Reduce intensity and frequency of emotional triggers

• Soften trauma responses like fight, flight, freeze, or fawn

• Increase emotional regulation and self-awareness

(Actually, did you know that you can do Brainspotting without ever saying a single word? The therapist doesn’t even need to know what exactly you’re processing, so it’s great for those mortifying memories that you feel deep shame around!)

What would happen if you were to buy yourself even 1-2 more seconds to slow your reactive roll? It might not seem like much, but even those few seconds might be the guardrails preventing you from sending that vitriolic email to your partner or boss.

What would it be like for you to feel like you’re in SELF-CONTROL, not OTHERS-CONTROLLED or OTHERS-CONTROLLING? How would your life be different if you led with calm wisdom, not chaotic panic?

3. Clearing OUTDATED, Unconscious Beliefs About Love, Worth, & Belonging

A lot of people I work with carry deep-seated beliefs like:

• "I’m TOO MUCH."

• "I’ll be abandoned if I express what I need."

• "Love has to be EARNED."

• "Conflict means rejection."

These beliefs aren’t just mental — they actually live in the body in the form of emotional reactivity. Brainspotting brings these belief/feeling capsules up to the surface so we can dispel their power.

Doing this creates an opportunity for you to bring in more realistic and healthier beliefs, such as:

• "I can be fully myself and still be loved."

• "My needs matter, independently of whether others can meet them."

• "I don’t have to fix others to be worthy."

These internal shifts radically change how you can show up in your relationships. Even switching from an extremist, all-or-nothing perspective to a more nuanced one can do WONDERS in helping you navigate through different situations in your personal and professional relationships.

4. Improving Communication and Intimacy

When you're not overwhelmed by unresolved emotion or unconscious fear, you're more able to:

• Speak your truth without wilting in shame or aggressively blaming

• Hear others without getting defensive or flooded

• Be vulnerable without shutting down

• Set boundaries without guilt (this is a tough one, but you can do it!)

Not only does Brainspotting help you resolve painful experiences, but it can also help you access positive internal resources like peace, courage, and wisdom.

Because of this, Brainspotting strengthens your internal capacity to stay present and steady during difficult conversations or emotional moments, which expands your horizons as to what’s possible in your relationships: deeper intimacy, clarity, and mutual understanding — all without sacrificing yourself.

5. Reconnecting With Your Authentic Self

At its core, Brainspotting (and the Enneagram) isn’t just about healing trauma; it’s about coming home to yourself — your TRUE self.

When you clear out all the mental cobwebs and emotional clutter, you're able to reconnect with your inherent compassion, creativity, and wisdom.

This authentic self is the foundation of all healthy relationships, because you can’t have a relationship between two fragmented people.

Relationship math isn’t 1/4 + 3/4 = 1, but 1 + 1 = 1.

A WHOLE self with another WHOLE self creates a WHOLE relationship.

When both parties are free to be yourselves without the need to perform, people-please, or self-abandon, you can create vibrant, sustainable relationships that are resilient and immune to things like burnout or resentment.

In this way, Brainspotting supports not just relationship repair — but relationship revitalization. You’re no longer relating from old patterns, but from a place of wholeness, with endless possibilities of fulfilling experiences that help both of you feel seen, known, and loved — FULLY.

Why Brainspotting Works So Well for Highly Sensitive People, Empaths, and Enneagram 2s & 4s.

For sensitive folks, traditional talk therapy can sometimes feel overwhelming, too surface-level, or too embarrassing (“Ahhhh — I don’t want someone else to see me like this!! What will the therapist think of me?”).

Another trap is that sometimes sensitive people mistake introspection with processing or resolution. You may understand your patterns intellectually but still feel stuck emotionally. Just because you have a LOT of feelings doesn’t mean you’re actually processing them!

Brainspotting honors your depth, while also making room for your WHOLE brain — thinking, feeling, and being. It doesn’t ask you to explain or rationalize your pain. Instead, it invites you to feel whatever comes up, notice it in your body, and release it in a safe, contained way.

It meets you where you live—in the emotional, sensory, intuitive spaces of the body and soul. So many of my clients who also have a very rich imaginary or spiritual inner world can easily weave them into their Brainspotting session!

There’s no one right way of doing Brainspotting, so the pressure’s off — give yourself permission to do feelings the way that works best for you & your sensitivity without getting lost in the depths! As the person sitting in the boat, the Brainspotting therapist can help pull you out when it’s time.

How to Start Brainspotting

If you're curious about trying Brainspotting to improve your relationships, here’s how to begin:

• Find a Brainspotting practitioner in your state: Look for someone with training in trauma-informed care and relationship dynamics. If you’re in California, here are some fabulous Brainspotting therapists!

• Clarify your intention: You don’t need to have it all figured out — just bring a specific emotional issue or pattern you’d like to work on. (If even that’s unclear, you can even say something like, “I don’t know why, but I just feel…’OFF’. Like there’s a fog around my head.” You’ll be surprised what Brainspotting can work with!

• Stay open: Let your body lead. You may cry, yawn, feel sensations, or just be still. All responses are valid, and none of it needs to make sense (remember, we’re not using the analytical top-brain, but the dream-like emotional and lizard brains!).

• Practice integration: After sessions, give yourself time to rest, reflect, and journal if needed. The work continues unfolding even after you leave the session, so if you have some more involved dreams afterwards, no problem — let your body continue to metabolize.

Brainspotting to Repair Your Relationship with Yourself First, then with Others

At its core, Brainspotting helps you heal the parts of yourself that were hurt in relationship and went into hiding (in Internal Family Systems, we call these the “Exiles”)— so you can thrive in connection with others.

By accessing the body’s wisdom, clearing out emotional blocks, and soothing your nervous system, Brainspotting helps you become more present, resilient, and open-hearted. You don’t have to stay stuck in old patterns or reactive cycles. Healing is totally possible.

That scary moment or relationship doesn’t have to hold you back anymore — instead, you can use your hard earned wisdom as a way to create the kind of relationship that has enough room for you and your needs, too.

With that healing comes a powerful ripple effect: deeper intimacy, healthier boundaries, more honest communication—and a profound return to love, both for yourself and for others.

Ready to Help Your Heart Heal?

---

What are your Enneagram type's emotional habits?

Grab this free guide that shows you how to grow beyond the patterns that keep you stuck!

Don't know your Enneagram type?

Find yours here!

What are your emotional habits?

Get the Emo Habits Guide!

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Check your inbox for your free gift guide,

"The Emotional Habits of Enneagram Types"!!

---

© Copyright 2023 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

How to Use Your Triggers for Growth

Change of Perspective

If you're someone who gets frustrated because you feel like you're getting tripped up by the same things over and over again, here's a quick tip for you. 

All of us have triggers, we all have pain points to heal from. That is not an issue. Our triggers are our body's way of signaling that there's an important thing that we need to heal from or important needs that are not yet getting met.

It's really important to pay attention to our triggers instead of taking our triggers as signals that there's something wrong with us. You're already in a lot of pain, you're already in a lot of stress. Don’t add to it!

One way of grounding is by switching from an ALL or NOTHING perspective to a GRADIENT perspective.

Instead of thinking of WHETHER you get triggered (“Yes, I got triggered”, “No, I didn't get triggered”) consider it as HOW you get triggered.

If you think about the how you get a lot more QUALITATIVE data so that, even when things are imperfect (or even when you still have things to heal from), that's a non-issue. You might still actually have made a lot of progress and a lot of movement that keeps you motivated to keep doing the work. 

One way you can consider the HOW or the qualitative data is by observing how your triggers might show up across four different dimensions:

1. Frequency

2. Intensity

3. Duration

4. Direction

Frequency

On a scale of 1 (every once in a while) to 10 (every day), how often did you get triggered around a specific issue?

Before, you might have gotten triggered almost every day on feeling rejected that you were constantly in a state of agitation.

Nowadays, you might still get triggered from time to time, but maybe it's once a week or anytime you interact with a particular unsafe person (sometimes a family member).

Then you can actually give yourself credit that, on the whole, you’re able to retain your balance or take good care of yourself.

It's just that every once in a while (maybe specific times of the year or when interacting with that asshole), you might have to take better care of yourself to be proactive in keeping your balance.

Intensity

On a scale of 1 (barely feel it) to 10 (I can’t take it anymore!), how painful does this trigger feel?

You might have the frequency stay exactly the same (i.e., every day) but maybe the sting decreases over time. Maybe it used to feel at an 8 (I’m so aggravated!), but nowadays it’s a 5 (it bothers me, but I can focus on other things).

You still have to deal with a situation or you still have to deal with how you're feeling, but because it's not as intense, you're able to maintain your footing a lot better.

Or you've learned some tips around how to buffer, take care of yourself, maybe create boundaries, have hard conversations, etc. so that things don't escalate to that same degree.

Duration

On a scale of 1 (5 minutes) to 10 (several weeks), how long does your trigger state last?

Often these dimensions do interact with each other where the more you get triggered (or more intensely you get triggered), the more likely you're going to be staying in a triggered state.

The longer we stay in a triggered state, the more likely it will make reactive decisions — for example, emotional eating, overworking, under working, drinking a lot, Netflix binging — all those things where you might stay in that stressed state so your pain becomes more prolonged. 

Over time as you do your personal work in therapy or in other kinds of inner work experiences, you might find that you don't stay in that state as long.

You found other helpful ways for you to regain your balance once you lose your footing (like going for a run or talking to a friend). Then the duration itself might also change over time. 

Measure your trigger along these three dimensions once a quarter on a gradient 10-point scale instead of a YES or NO metric.

These numbers aren't quite linear. Think of a Richter scale for earthquakes: each number you bump down makes it 10 times easier for you to take good care of yourself or to maintain your balance. 

Direction

When you get triggered, do you tend to direct it to the relevant party or misdirect it elsewhere?

Often our triggers prompt us to express our pain or emotions onto unsuspecting passersby; they were just at the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Let's say someone who gets chewed up by their boss at work. They get frustrated but they don't actually bring it up to their boss. Instead, they come home and kick the dog. The dog had nothing to do with it.

Or maybe they take out their (legit) frustration on their uninvolved partner who's trying to load the dishwasher.

When there’s misdirection of pain, hard things get harder. What starts as an issue between you and your boss becomes you + boss + dog + partner.

What happens when you get triggered? Where do you direct that pain or what do you do with it?

Some people might direct towards other people. Others might direct it towards work, exercise, an activity, a substance, etc.

The more we misdirect our pain, the further we get away from healing our pain and getting our needs met.

When that happens, we CREATE stress.

The more quickly we're able to direct that towards an appropriate source, the more readily we can address the core issue.

Appropriate direction might look like processing the topic in therapy, journaling, bringing up the hurt with the involved party (IF they’re not abusive; if they are, best to process in therapy), addressing the problem directly (calling the credit card company to contest the charge).

When we address the initial issue directly, the other three dimensions (frequency, intensity, and duration) will be lowered as well.

Check in With Yourself

Again the issue isn't WHETHER we get triggered. We WILL get triggered. Getting triggered is not an issue, per se — our body is trying to tell us that we have important things to attend to.

The issue is more HOW we get triggered, along the four dimensions: frequency, intensity, duration, and direction.

Check in with yourself regarding how things have been this past year. On the last page of a journal, write down your answers to the four dimensions across four quarters.

(1) FREQUENCY

On a scale of 1 (every once in a while) to 10 (every day), how often did you get triggered around a specific issue?

(2) INTENSITY

On a scale of 1 (barely feel it) to 10 (I can’t take it anymore!), how painful does this trigger feel?

(3) DURATION

On a scale of 1 (5 minutes) to 10 (several weeks), how long does your trigger state last?

(4) DIRECTION

When you get triggered, do you tend to direct it (O) to the relevant party or misdirect it elsewhere (X)?

If the results changed over time, write down what positive events, negative events, or other factors that resulted in those outcomes so you have more nuanced info.

Examples:

• Positive factors: tax issue resolved, left toxic work, started walking

• Negative factors: a breakup, diabetes diagnosis

• Other notes: Year 2 for business

Reflection Questions

• If this were to be projected onto the next year ahead for the next several quarters, what do you think might happen?

• As each of these metrics go down, what have you noticed? 

• How much better can you breathe? 

• How much more relaxed are you?

• How have your weeks looked like? 

• What is one concrete thing you can do differently this week to help bump down your numbers?

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© Copyright 2022 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

How to Set Boundaries over the Holidays

"I KNOW I need to set boundaries, but I CAN'T."

This is what I hear often when I'm working with people who learned how to people please, placate, and repress their own feelings/needs to survive their significant relationships. All of these are examples of "FAWN" responses (in addition to FIGHT, FLIGHT, and FREEZE) to (even anticipated) scary or risky situations.

Why the resistance to setting boundaries? Here are some reasons:

• I don't know how.

• I feel guilty/bad. (BTW - "bad" is not a feeling, but you get the idea)

• I don't want to because it's too scary.

• I don't want to because I don't think I'm worth it.

• I don't want to make them mad.

The majority of the people I work with have some strained relationship with family members. Unlike friends, whom you can choose or leave at will, family is what you're born into without any say.

As the holiday season rolls around (and also around family holidays like Mother's Day or Father's Day), old wounds are poked, stirring up feelings of anxiety, guilt, overwhelm, shame, irritation, resentment, etc.

Even relatively healthy relationships with family might stir up stress as people navigate spoken or unspoken expectations, travel plans, financial strain, and limited time.

Questions to prepare for the holidays

If you're feeling DREAD around seeing some people over the holidays, consider up front:

How can you keep from overextending yourself?

What are your realistic limits in terms of mental, emotional, physical, or financial energy? How can you build more down time into your schedule?

During the harder times of the year, plan to do 70% of what you usually do so that you have a greater buffer. Operating at the full 100% makes it so that any extra pain starts depleting the resources you need to just get by a “normal” week.

When things are harder, make it EASIER on yourself. DO NOT TRY TO TOUGH IT OUT - YOU’VE ALREADY DEALT WITH PLENTY OF SHIT.

Who are some people who drain energy?

What's the maximum amount of time you can hang around someone without becoming reactive?

PRO TIP: Schedule 1-2 hours with that person and schedule something ELSE at the end of that time period.

Give the person a head's up that you have something afterwards ("I have other things I gotta do while I'm here" or "I have other people I need to also meet up with"), and when time's up, say "I gotta go!"

How can YOU initiate an activity?

You might have some people you’re not super excited to see but feel like you HAVE to (like a nagging relative who keeps saying, “Why don’t we ever see you?”).

They keep reaching out to you, and you feel like you have to either maneuver your way out of that invite (and feel guilty) or endure that experience (and feel trapped, anxious, and ashamed).

PRO TIP: Sometimes, if YOU initiate an activity you feel better or safer about (bowling, watching a sports game, or shopping), then THEY would be in a position to say yes or no. If they say yes, it’s at least on YOUR terms and timeline. If no, oh well! At least you tried.

Who are people you need to steer clear of completely?

Or hang out only in public spaces? Or only when other people are around?

Don’t force yourself to hang out with them. You don’t owe anyone your time, energy, or sanity.

Let them throw a tantrum or get upset. You’re not the asshole for not making their drama your drama.

Who keeps asking inappropriate or uncomfortable questions?

Some people are freakin nosy, digging for deets about whether/who you're dating, whether/when you'll have kids, how much money you're making, etc.

PRO TIP: Pick some neutral/shallow topics you can purposefully redirect the conversation to. Not everyone deserves to have access to you. YOU get to choose - not letting others into your life does NOT make you a bad person.

Who are some safe people who can care for you?

Who can you ask keep you company during those scarier situations?

Who can help you decompress afterwards?

Here’s a blog that describes who’s a safe vs. unsafe person.

PRO TIP: Ask one of them ahead of time to call you with some urgent matter partway through if you need an out of an unpleasant meetup.

If you’re feeling guilty

Obviously, some of these things I'm encouraging you isn’t 100% ethical. Save your ethics and morality for situations where you actually have SAFETY and FREEDOM - not when you're pressured, bullied, or guilt-tripped.

When you're dealing with unhealthy, manipulative people, you do NOT need to expose yourself to being exploited or hurt again. YOU ARE NOT A BAD PERSON FOR KEEPING YOURSELF SAFE.

If you’re playing a game where the other parties keep cheating or changing the rules, there’s no fair play. No need to follow the rules; you may stop playing the game altogether.

To butcher a Henry Cloud quote: If you set boundaries and the other person gets mad, it's NOT a sign that you're doing something WRONG. In fact, it's CONFIRMATION that boundaries were necessary in the first place, because this person has been benefitting at your expense this whole time. 

MAD: The Emotion of Boundaries

ANGER is a good self-protecting and self-honoring emotion right about now. Not all anger is bad, and not all love is good. The healthy versions of both create relationships where there's enough room for BOTH parties, not just one at the other's expense.

If you're wanting to know more about the HOW-TOs of boundary setting and assertiveness, check out the following:

• A blog I wrote about Radical Candor (from Kim Scott's book).

• An interview I had about toxic relationships

• A blog about assertiveness

• A blog about resentment

• A blog about safe people (from Henry Cloud and John Townsend's book)

• These Instagram posts about anger (bio page > “MAD” highlights)

I’m really rooting for you. Hang in there.

After this season is over, I encourage you to use the non-holiday months next year to build towards a year-end time that suits and honors you. Perhaps it might be time for you to find yourself a therapist.

---

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© Copyright 2022 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Counterdependence: Why It's Hard to Ask for Help (and How to Heal)

Sooooo…I hit a deer. Actually, the deer hit me when he and his buddies just ran out from the trees onto the single lane I was driving. 

(I’m fine, the deer’s fine, but my bumper is not.) 

I put it in the shop to learn that, no, it’s not a single day job, and I gotta either be carless or take a rental.

Do I pay for a rental to just to commute to work, do I share my partner’s car, or do I ask for rides?  

Here’s the (main) problem - I HATE asking for help.

…and so do a lot of the people I work with. 

The reasons are plentiful:

• “I don’t want to burden anyone.”

• “I don’t want to rely on anyone.”

• “I want to do it all.”

• “I don’t need anybody.”

• “I don’t deserve it.”

• “I haven’t done anything to earn it.”

• “What are they going to ask me in return?“

• “I don’t know what I need.”

Obsessed with DIY

I live in a country that values independence to the point of even having a holiday for it. Rugged individualism, bootstrapping mentality, and strength without vulnerability are the treasured values here in the United States, and especially in the Silicon Valley.

Those who can’t do things for themselves are seen as weak, lesser, and immature. It’s as if it’s a crime to even have needs, let alone share them with others.

This is NOT being independent, but really counterdependent - being averse to needing anyone else. 

Independence and dependence are neutral; they are neither inherently good or bad, but both are essential aspects of being human. There are some things we ought to do for ourselves, some things we ought to do for each other, and some things where it doesn’t really matter who does it, as long as it’s done.

(BTW, when someone overly does something for another that the latter ought to do for themselves, that’s codependent.) 

Every human being is worthy of living in a smooth rhythm between dependence and independence. No one is better or worse than another. We are all equally capable of doing things for ourselves and others, and we are all worthy of being carried by others. 

We all need and deserve to be interdependent.

How do I know whether I’m counterdependent?

Here are some questions to consider:

• When was the last time you had someone else help you? (Was that deliberate or begrudgingly?)

• Did that happen because you asked for it? (Did you have any other options otherwise?)

• Would you have wanted to do it yourself? Why? 

• Do you have strong emotions (like guilt, anxiety, shame, or frustration) when someone else helps you? Do you feel lesser of a person or lesser than them? (What’s that about?)

• Are your relationships balanced or lopsided? How often do you feel resentment towards others, or feel anxious on their behalf?

• When you’re not managing or planning things, how tense do you get? How difficult is it for you to be present or enjoy things when someone else is in charge?

If you feel stressed even at the IDEA of relying on someone else, chances are you have a counterdependent stance.

Double-standards?

Who do you judge more harshly: yourself or others? Do you use the same or different standards? If not, why?

Judging others is already considered a no-no, but judging ourselves is sometimes considered a sign of maturity. Ironically, treating ourselves worse than we do others is also a manifestation of pride. 

If I have higher standards on myself (as if I ought to be stronger, less weak, less “needy”), then I live as if I am/should be superhuman (only to judge myself as a subhuman when I can’t follow through). 

(Read more about pride and shame.)

Any way we treat ourselves as NON-EQUAL with others leads to comparison, judgment, pride, and shame - all of these feed into reactivity, stress, and internal/external turmoil. 

Equanimity (“equal” + “mind”/“life”), or having evenness of emotions or mental balance, is what we’re going for. The way to do that is to live in equality with others - no one is greater, no one is lesser.

How do I move towards interdependence?

Acknowledge the ways you REFUSE to be on an equal level with others. 

If you put yourself in one-down positions (making yourself more helpless/vulnerable than others), step up. If you put yourself in one-up positions (making yourself better/stronger than others) step down. 

If you resonate with being counterdependent (allergic to being helped), practice asking for (and really taking in) help.

Give room to the emotions that bubble up - don’t shove them back inside. Let them come, and move your body to release the energy out. (Better out than in!)

Learn new muscle memory as a fellow human being who is also worthy and who also has legitimate needs.

Those who’ve learned to be counterdependent grew up too quickly being a “grownup” for the majority of your life, skipping ever really being a kid.

If you find this to be super challenging, no judgment! There’s a good reason why your body is used to this. (This might be a great time to explore this in therapy and/or learn about your Enneagram type!)

Practice being innocent, tender, playful, and joyful like a child, despite the internal judgments of you being “selfish” or “childish” (chances are, you absorbed BS messages that belong to other people and aren’t yours to carry). 

Practice being light, easy, and carefree. Allow yourself to be emotionally, physically, practically, and/or financially “carried” by those around you who (more often than you think) are wanting to care for you well. 

(BTW - if you don’t explicitly tell others what you need, you’re leaving it up to THEM to fill in the blanks according to what makes the most sense to them. Most likely, they’ll be wrong, but that’s not particularly their fault. Don’t set them up to read your mind, because you’re setting up a LOSE-LOSE situation.)

Connect with your humanity and your equality with others. Live a life where YOU MATTER, TOO.

How can you ask for help this week?

(I asked for the two weeks my car was in the shop, and my relationships are the richer for it.)

---

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© Copyright 2022 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

3 Lessons Plants Taught Me

I speak as if I’m a natural green thumb. I’m not. I’m genuinely surprised that my plants are still alive. I believe they lived this long DESPITE me, not BECAUSE of me. 

At first, I got plants for my office as a way of bringing in more greenery into my space. (As a Highly Sensitive Person, I am easily impacted by my physical environment.) 

Never did I imagine that tending to plants would a fantastic way of taming my autopilot tendencies to:

• Be perfectionistic

• Be anxious about what’s not going well or might go wrong

• Overwork

• Have difficulty sitting still

• Live disconnected from the present

• Seek intensity and novelty

Here are three things plants taught me about how to do my life differently. 

Imperfect, but nonetheless worthy

No two plants are the same. No two leaves are the same. More often than not, you see asymmetry and imperfections of color, size, and shape. 

Go outside and look at the trees, bushes, and flowers - if you’re looking for it, you will find blemishes, broken branches, and ways it could be “better”. 

…So what? Plants are still beautiful and valuable as they are, and rarely do we think about how they’re so even though they’re imperfect. 

You probably didn’t even notice those plants’ disfigurations all that much until you were prompted to look for them. You go about your day having enjoyed them, as if it’s not a problem, because it really isn’t. 

Why do we place so much emphasis on ourselves and others as if perfection is what makes us worthy and acceptable?

See yourself as a plant. It is what it is, and it’s already beautiful. 

Here’s a mantra for you:

I am how I am, and I am already good.

Are your needs met?

I get the main point of the idiom, “Bloom where you’re planted.” You’re to take advantage of the opportunities that your present circumstances provide and learn to be grateful.

That’s definitely an important skill to have in life, but as with all adages, there are limitations. 

If you have an autopilot that makes things seem worse than they actually are, and if being critical and unhappy is your baseline, do practice blooming where you’re planted. 

But useful also is the skill of attuning to yourself and knowing what works best for YOU. What works for one plant doesn’t work for another unless they have similar needs. 

Some plants need direct lighting; others would shrivel if they’re in the same conditions. Some plants need frequent watering; others are susceptible to growing root rot (RIP my olive tree). 

We are all individual and unique. Sure, we have some universal needs like food and sleep we share in common, but even in those things we have differences is how much or in what way. 

Know your own distinct needs and take steps to meet them, rather than judging yourself for not “growing” or “performing” in the way someone else is. Both of you are neither inherently better or worse; y’all are who you are, you’re both worthy, and each of you have specific needs to flourish well. 

Know thyself. Know thy needs.

Do an audit of what are your specific needs in these arenas:

• Physical

• Emotional

• Relational

• Environmental

• Intellectual

• Professional

• Spiritual

• Financial

What steps will you take this week to get these needs met?

Blame the bug, not the plant

Sometimes a plant languishes or is stunted in its growth because of pests that extract its valuable nutrients. When that happens, we are ready to see the pest (not the plant) as a problem, remove the parasites, and give the plant some good TLC so it can recover.

The same ought to be done about ourselves in some of our relationships, because there ARE people in our lives who operate like parasites. 

In my therapy practice, I often work with people who are in one-sided relationships with parents, partners, friends, or coworkers who seek a “host” to exploit, meeting their own needs at the expense of my clients’. We explore the topics of emotional abuse, manipulation, power dynamics, resentment, dependency, and codependency. 

Sometimes this exploitation is deliberate - the “parasite” consciously takes advantage of the other person or is vindictive, cruel, or petty with utter disregard for the recipients’ wellbeing. As Henry Cloud describes in his book, “Necessary Endings,” these are the “Evil Persons” who we must limit their access to us ASAP.

Then there are those who are accidentally exploitative as a byproduct of some other pattern. For example, when a person doesn’t take responsibility for meeting their own needs or see themselves as helpless, they create a power vacuum for someone else to step in for them. 

(Imagine the kind of relationship between one housemate who doesn’t clean up after themselves and another who just can’t stand the mess. Or the imbalanced relationship between someone who cries at the thought of figuring out the internet and a family member whose heart string is pulled and calls the internet company for them.) 

Are you a “host”?

The party who steps in often has a soft spot for others who are struggling, even if the pain is of their own making. Those who have a higher likelihood of being a “host” include:

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• Those who are conscientious, responsible, empathic types

• Empaths, Highly Sensitive Persons

• Enneagram 1s, 2s, 4s, 9s, and some other subtypes (all for different reasons)

• Oldest siblings (especially women)

• Children of immigrants

• Those who are in caregiving roles or professions (teachers, therapists, nurses, etc.)

Those who live as if they’re hosts often:

• Have a hard time knowing what they want and need (and ignore them)

• Find it difficult to say “no”

• Is scared of conflict or asking for help

• Overly focus on what other people are needing

• Feel guilty about taking care of themselves

Eventually, because the “hosts” have their own valid yet unmet needs, usually these imbalanced relationships leave them feeling fatigued, depleted, and resentful. 

(In this case, resentment is very GOOD, as it signals the need for boundaries, reciprocity, and care.)

We ought not to judge the depleted host for being tired, but rather remove the exploitative agents. If you’re having a difficult time flourishing where you are, consider whether it might be because someone else is sapping your energy, time, resources, and money. 

Remove the parasites ASAP (don’t let them grow), clear your environment of toxicity, and nourish yourself with what you specifically need. 

(BTW - just to be clear, this is NOT about judging others for being LESS THAN, but rather holding them accountable for their own needs and actions. You providing them nourishment that they need to give to themselves is NOT helping them, but is ENABLING them in being dependent upon hosts. Win-lose relationships are LOSE-LOSE.)  

I highly recommend you grab a copy of Henry Cloud’s book, Necessary Endings, so you know how to tend to yourself well by pruning away things that sap your strength and eliminating harmful influences. 

How will you set boundaries with others this week? 

---

What are your Enneagram type's emotional habits?

Grab this free guide that shows you how to grow beyond the patterns that keep you stuck!

Don't know your Enneagram type?

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What are your emotional habits?

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"The Emotional Habits of Enneagram Types"!!

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© Copyright 2022 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Concentric Circles of Connection

Shifting Relationships

Every time we go through any major life event (positive or negative), it's good to check in with the nature of our current connections.

Such shifting points include:

• Getting a new job

• Starting or ending a relationship

• Upgrading to the “next level” of relationships

• Moving to another city, state, country

• The pandemic

• Losing (or gaining) a job

Sometimes we find out through life experience that our connections maybe aren't as sustainable as we might think of them to be. With some people, we may not actually be as close to as we would like.

Instead of constantly putting yourself out there and then feeling disappointed, or hurt, or realizing that your relationships are super imbalanced, it's good to do a check-in every now and then.

Ask yourself, "Is my connection with someone able to sustain the level of intimacy as I would like?"

The Concentric Circles of Connection

There are many different kinds of friendships. It's not a matter of “Yes, I have friends” or “No, I don’t have friends,” but “What kind of friends do I have?”

Imagine that there are several levels or tiers of friendships.

(The number of levels may change over time, but here’s one way of distinguishing them.)

View fullsize

• +: Positive experiences

• —: Negative experiences

Tier 1: BFFs (+++———)

At the innermost circle are those who are our Ride-or-Die people. These are the people who know ourselves the best, those with whom we can share our deepest darkest secrets with and they will show up.

The relationship is consistent day after day. They're going to be there for you, no matter what. They’ve explicitly made that commitment clear.

You've cultivated a lot of connection and trust and rapport, and they're also able to sustain the difficult emotions. So, it doesn't mean that you have an equal amount of positive and negative interactions with each other, but this is the depth of experiences that you share with them.

When the best and worst things happen, these are the people you call first.

Tier 2: Close Friends (++——)

These folks have demonstrated that they're trustworthy. They share in your personal hardships and also celebrate your wins. You can have great dinners and heart-to-heart talks.

You're still close to them and deeply enjoy their company, but they're not the first people you would call if something happens. (You’ll eventually catch them up when you do meet.)

Tier 3: Fun Friends (++—)

These are people with whom you have mutual interests and have fun. You might like going to concerts, play board games, or do wine tastings, but when something hard goes on in your life, they're nowhere to be found.

That doesn't mean that they're necessarily a bad friend, but they're just not in your inner circles. That’s okay.

It's important when we come across these kinds of connections that we release them from any expectations for us to rely on them, so that THEY don't feel trapped about what we're going through, and WE don't rely on people who are not readily available for us.

But we can still have a good time! Relationships don’t have to be all-or-nothing, eggs-in-one-basket, intensity-or-bust (Take heed, Enneagram Fours! Not all experiences we have in life are super serious and it's good to learn how to lighten up and to enjoy things.).

It’s good to have a wide range of relationships, even ones where surface-level convos are the norm and where activities serve as the core.

Tier 4: Neighbors (+—)

These people can be co-workers or literal neighbors—people you see pretty often. You know each other's names, how many kids or pets y’all have, generally what might be going on in each others’ lives, but you're not necessarily going to call them up to hang out all the time.

You might share, "Someone hit my car bumper last night, and I'm kind of feeling frustrated," or "Yeah, like my kid is about to do a major performance and super excited about it."

Sometimes, to avoid repercussions in your daily life, you may opt NOT to share things.

You might connect every once in a while, but mostly you see each other in passing, say hello, be polite, be gentle. Other than that, they're not necessarily involved in your lives.

Tier 5: Acquaintances (~)

These are people who are neutral and you don’t share much with at all, good or bad. You know of each other, from a distance. If you don’t hit it off, oh well. It’s not (necessarily) a problem.

Tier 6: Blacklisters (——)

These are people who have demonstrated over and over again that they are NOT trustworthy, and they hurt more than help. They often take way too taking up way too much space in the relationship. It’s all about them, and there’s little room for your own feelings or your experiences.

When you try to speak up for what you need, you get shot down or you get dismissed, minimized, gaslit, etc. As these people are toxic, it's generally good to have strong walls up and give them minimal information.

Sometimes these people are those who used to be your closest friends, and sometimes they're family members. It's really really hard and painful in those situations, but the cost for not putting up those boundaries is that you get more and more diminished.

Emotions like resentment, guilt, shame, anxiety are all evidence that someone who belongs in the outer tiers are too close to you. Sometimes they barge in, sometimes you give them an inch and they take a mile.

They may still be valuable as human beings, so they deserve a base level of human dignity (don't be mean to them), but don't give out your personal information (including what’s going on in your life) because they might use it against you.

These are people you interact with where afterwards you feel bad about yourself or your life. THESE ARE NOT YOUR PEOPLE; GTFO.

Is everyone in their rightful tiers?

To maintain health and longevity, do an audit of your current relationships. List 10 people you often see these days, and indicate what your general interaction is like with + and —.

• Tier 1 (BFFs): +++——— (can handle both strong positive and strong negative experiences):

• Tier 2 (Close Friends): ++—— (similar as BFF, but not first pick)

• Tier 3 (Fun Friends): ++— (mostly pleasant, but not as deep)

• Tier 4 (Neighbors): +— (neutral, frequent but surface level)

• Tier 5 (Acquaintances): ~ (neutral, little sharing)

• Tier 6 (Blacklist): ——— (consistently negative)

Plot these individuals onto the Concentric Circles chart (download here). What do you notice?

Some questions to think of:

1. Are there people who have more access to you than they deserve?
   If you keep experiencing more pain than good with someone (and they refuse to change), it might be time for you to bump them into outer tiers.
   This does not make them lesser of a person, but just relocates them to where the relationship can actually handle the level of intimacy. When people stay closer than they’re supposed to, that increases the risk that the relationship will implode or explode, resulting in that person being sent to the Blacklist.
   Find the right amount of intimacy that is sustainable.

2. Are there some people who have demonstrated trustworthiness that you can give more access to?
   Sometimes, those you never expected to be close to may become some of your closest people. Be open to trying out new levels of intimacy until you hit a limit - that might be the new equilibrium point for the next season of your life.

Changing Needs, Shifting Tiers

You may find that there are some people who kind of move back and forth between different tiers—that's totally okay!

Be open to having relationships of varying mobility. Remember, it’s not all-or-nothing.

As we change and grow in life, our needs and wants change. We need to shift our connections to match the new level of personal growth.

---

What are your Enneagram type's emotional habits?

Grab this free guide that shows you how to grow beyond the patterns that keep you stuck!

Don't know your Enneagram type?

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What are your emotional habits?

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"The Emotional Habits of Enneagram Types"!!

---

© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

Therapy with Ibi - Anxiety, Insomnia, Relationships

Introducing…Ibinye Osibodu-Onyali, LMFT

Joanne: This week we have a special guest who is sharing about her practice today. Let’s just jump right in. Can you share about yourself, the things you love, what you focus on, a bit about your journey.

Ibinye: My name’s Ibinye. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist for women and couples in California. I like to focus on anxiety and insomnia. I also focus a lot on people who were raised in toxic environments—teaching them how to break those generational cycles, speak up for themselves, be assertive, and just live a life out of the box. I also help couples move their relationship from boring and feeling like roommates to actually feeling passionate and feel like lovers again.

Who Is Therapy For?

Joanne: During this pandemic period with things kind of rolling back, in your work with people, has there been one question that you’ve been getting asked often with that?

Ibinye: Yes, two questions actually.

1. “Can Black women go to therapy?” They usually whisper when they ask. “I’m Black, can I go to therapy? Is that a thing?” Yes! That’s a thing!

2. “Is it okay for Christian to go to therapy?” People want to make sure. And I’m like, “Yes! I’m a Christian! That’s fine. Yes, you can see me; you can talk to me.” There’s nothing unbiblical about therapy.

Joanne: A lot of hush hush. What do you sense that’s about?

Ibinye: It’s about the shame, the rules, the legalities, and the upbringing that says:

• Keep all your business within the church.

• Keep all your business within the home.

• Don’t tell anyone your problems.

With the faith-based shame, it’s this idea that if you have any struggles, if you’re anxious, if you’re depressed, if you’re crying, then you’re not reading your Bible, or you don’t have the holy spirit within you, or you’re clearly not going to church enough. Something’s wrong with you. There’s a lot of shame that I see.

How Therapy Works through Shame

Joanne: The message that something’s wrong with you, you need to be better, all the variations of that. And within your work of the people who reach out to you, how do you help them get unstuck from that? It’s great that they’ve already got unstuck enough to reach out, but how do support them?

With the Christians—for those that want Biblical-based counseling—we go into scripture. My favorite person that we talk about is David. He seems sad a LOT. He was struggling a lot, there was a lot going on with him, his life isn’t perfect, yet we read that he was anointed by God. Then they’re like, “wait a minute, that’s true.” Then it’s okay to seek out help.

For intergenerational stuff, I ask them some questions about their relationships and families. Things like:

• Let’s look at your grandma’s relationship with grandpa, or grandma’s relationship with mom.

• How has that worked out for them?

• How has that worked out for you?

• What you’ve been doing for the past 50 years, 40 years, 30 years, does it feel like it works well for you?

A lot of times they’ll respond with, “No—even though that’s the way I was raised and I’m just trying to walk the line, it doesn’t really work well for me.” I say, “Well, would you be open to trying something that possibly could work for you.” And they’re like, “Yeah, as long as you don’t tell my mom!” Legally, I can’t tell your mom anything anyway, so you get to do whatever you get to do. As they get to start trying new things, they find they start feeling a lot lighter and a lot happier. The anxiety isn’t feeling so heavy anymore and their families get used to their new behavior like, “Okay, I guess this is how she is now.”

Joanne: I kind of imagine that with a lot of these entrenched patterns or ways of experiencing and responding to life, it would be great if families responded well with, “Oh this is how it’s going to be going forward,” but I imagine there are some people who don’t have that experience. For those folks whose families or communities are not as supportive, what would you say to them?

Ibinye: We talk about the depth of tradition and how difficult it is to break from tradition. Everyone is just trying to play this role, whether it’s a church role, cultural role, racial role, whatever that is. I talk to them about finding support from like-minded people. I think that’s so important because sometimes your family or your church or religious body is not your support system. Sometimes they are the ones who are doing harm to you. Sometimes they’re the ones that trigger a lot of the difficult emotions you are going through. I empathize with them and help them understand that those are very common patterns, unfortunately. But outside of that, I ask questions to get them thinking about new connections:

• Who are the people who are adding people to your life?

• Who are the people who are filling your cup?

• Who is helping you feel great?

Those are the people to run to. I don’t say cut off your family or stop going to church, but how about building new relationships? Once they start to experience what those positive relationships look like, it really helps in the healing process. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to end with a bow wrapped on top of it. There’s still a lot of grief work left to be done. But they realize the pain of staying in that tradition is sometimes much greater than the joy of finding this new life and finding your voice and new ways of being, and just being yourself.

What Are Toxic Relationships?

Joanne: In a lot of moments, there are some terms that people have a certain understanding of, and I think toxic relationships are one of those words. They have some idea in their mind of what it looks like, but it might be more much multifaceted and varied. Same with anger—that it’s not just always the rage-y explosive types. There are so many other ways anger can show up. So how would you define and describe toxic relationships? What does it tend to look like in the people you work with?

Ibinye: Toxic relationships FEEL DAMAGING. They are relationships that feel uncomfortable and they often feel like they’re being done maliciously. Very often when clients come to see me, I ask about family relationships, like “how is your relationship with family members?” They say “Fine, everything’s fine.” And then after a while, they describe toxic relationships they’re in without realizing it. Things like:

• Every time I leave this person’s presence, I feel exhausted.

• I can’t wear that to this person’s house because she’s going to make a bad comment.

• I have to change who I am.

• I have to be extra quiet when I’m in the presence of this person or else she’s going to say something negative.

Decorative. A child has duct tape over their mouth.

It’s almost like feeling like you cannot be authentic, you can’t be you in the presence of someone, feeling drained after you leave that person. That’s how people typically experience toxic relationships, and sometimes it’s not even overt. Sometimes people aren’t actually saying direct things or throwing direct jabs. It might be a look, a glance, a whisper, or a passive-aggressive comment that they make constantly. You feel like you’re drowning when you’re around them, and nobody around you can see that. Or sometimes it feels like you’re drowning and they’re the ones who pushed you to the deep end and they’re standing there with their arms crossed like, “Oh well, let’s see if she can get herself out of this.”

Joanne: Are there instances where someone’s in toxic relationships and they don’t know?

Ibinye: All the time. We think that you cannot love someone who feels toxic to you. Sometimes it’s the very people that we love. It could be spouses, best friends, family members, people in your religious organizations, coworkers, bosses you respect—anyone around us can exhibit toxic behavior. So I often say, go by that feeling that you get:

• You can’t hold your head up high.

• You feel exhausted when you’re around them.

• You feel like you have to put up a show or put up an act when you have to be with that person.

If that’s what you feel when you’re around a person, then something’s off about that behavior. But I always say don’t tell people that they’re toxic. Like, don’t walk up to your mom and say, “Dear mom, you’re toxic.” It’s not going to go well.

Joanne: One of the things I’m hearing is one sign that of whether you’re in a toxic relationship is how you feel while anticipating meeting with a person or how you feel during and afterward. Are there people who feel numb?

Ibinye: Absolutely. Some people feel nothing when they’re with toxic people. Other times you find that there’s lots of jealousy and competition in toxic relationships. So there sometimes will not be this spirit of cooperation that we all want to be able to have, that support around us. In toxic relationships, it’s almost like somebody has to be in charge. There’s a dynamic of power and control sometimes where somebody always has to get the last word in; it’s difficult to agree to disagree.

Sometimes there’s this back and forth of:

• “You’re wrong and I’m right.”

• “But are you open to—?”

• “No, I’m not open.”

Or there’s the thing with tradition:

• “This is how it’s always been.”

• “But that’s hurting me.”

It’s shutting down those feelings saying they aren’t real. “It’s not my fault you’re sad. You’re sad because something’s clearly wrong with you and you’re too sensitive. If you learn to stop being sensitive, you won’t be sad when I make these aggressive comments to you.”

Joanne: I’m hearing that one sign that someone might be toxic is that they’re so rigid and one-sided, not open to hearing the other person’s experiences, let alone validating them, controlling, telling the other person what to do, the other person doesn’t have a say, their feelings don’t matter, their emotions don’t matter, etc. What does someone do when they find out that they’ve been doing those things?

Ibinye: Sometimes that’s how we’re raised and that’s what we see around us, so that’s just what we do. It’s not easy because if you’re used to that dynamic of being cutthroat and cutting people down—all of those difficult behaviors—then I say, “Okay, take a moment to pause and think how would you feel if that were done to you.”

The interesting thing is even when you exhibit toxic behaviors, you don’t enjoy it when the behavior is done back to you. You don’t feel warm and fuzzy when someone has that aggressive interaction with you. Even though that’s all you know, it doesn’t feel great on the inside. So take a moment and pause. I ask, “How would you feel if someone did that to you?” And they’ll say, “I’d be upset and I’d attack them back.” Okay, if that behavior triggers that big emotion back in you, then maybe let’s think of another way to talk about this.

We do a lot of practice in assertive communication as opposed to aggressive communication. We also talk about making amends because it’s very important. Not necessarily in the AA way, but it’s okay to take responsibility for your behavior. It’s okay to go back and apologize and say, “I noticed that I’ve been damaging to you, toxic to you, hurtful to you. I noticed that you’ve felt uncomfortable in my presence and I’m sorry.” We also talk about “I” statements. Not “because you’re so sensitive, that’s why I was so damaging to you.” No, we can’t do that. How to really talk and communicate with people and to attune with other people’s emotions we learn how to do some of those things.

Joanne: So some signs of someone who is not toxic and who is safe and quality are those who are able to consider another person’s experiences, their own impact on the other person, being able to articulate their own experiences (those “I statements”), and—I think this is a pretty significant one—taking responsibility for your own stuff. The world would be so different if more of us knew how to do that.

Ibinye: Absolutely. You don’t have to be perfect. So, safe does not equal perfect. Nobody is perfect. We make mistakes and mistakes are quite okay. I find when people are raised in toxic environments, it goes hand-in-hand with perfectionism because if you’re anything short of perfect, you will be attacked or shunned or something will happen to you that won’t feel good. So there’s this idea of “I need to be perfect because I don’t want anyone to say anything negative about me, I don’t want to be the butt of anyone’s jokes, I don’t want anyone to look down on me.” It’s about learning that imperfections are just a part of the human experience. Some things you do great, some things you don’t do great, and that’s okay.

Joanne: So perfectionism can be a way that a person is trying to take care of themselves, but it usually doesn’t lead to that outcome.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia

Joanne: You and I could talk about toxic relationships all day because that’s my jam too. Relationships, emotions, all that. But I noticed you focus on other areas as well, like insomnia and supporting couples in their relationships. Could you share a bit more about each of those?

Ibinye: With insomnia, I do cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for it. The idea behind it is, the way you think about sleep can greatly affect your sleep. The people who struggle with sleep have a lot of anxiety behind their sleep, and all day long, they think, “I wonder if I’m going to sleep” or it’s negative, “I know I’m not going to sleep tonight.” Sometimes they walk into their room, see the bed, and think, “I’m going to be tired tomorrow.” Already thinking future-focus negative thoughts about sleep, which stirs up anxiety and most of us cannot sleep when our bodies are under that kind of sleep. Or you’re laying in bed and willing yourself to sleep. “I’m closing my eyes really tight and I will force my body to shut down.” These unconscious thoughts and behaviors unbeknownst to us are increasing insomnia. With CBT insomnia, I teach clients how to create a great sleep environment, how to change behaviors so they can support sleep, and how to work on those unconscious, automatic thoughts, so we can start to think positive, sleep-promoting thoughts.

Joanne: I should’ve done this Live with you a couple of days ago because I could’ve prevented this last night! Trying harder to sleep makes it worse! I know that you have a useful resource you’ve put together, can you talk about that?

Ibinye: I have a free download and it’s just five myths that are keeping you awake and how you can finally sleep. 5 myths most people with insomnia believe are the golden truths about sleep—those are typically keeping us awake, and then I answer, “let’s debunk this myth” and here’s how you can finally sleep.

Couples Therapy: How to Love and How to Communicate

Joanne: And what’s been fun about working with couples?

Ibinye: I enjoy working with couples because when they come to me, they are like, “we are not communicating, we are arguing all the time, but we want this to work.” Or sometimes one person is like, “I don’t know, I’m on the fence” and one person is like “I really want this to work.” It’s really about teaching them how to respect one another, how to find friendship again, and how to communicate. That is key. How to communicate, how to respect one another, how to see your partner, and how to love your partner how your partner wants to be loved, not the way you think they need to be loved. I think a lot of couples get into trouble with that one.

Joanne: What is an exercise you might do with a couple that comes in having trouble loving the other person well?

Ibinye: I always point to the 5 love languages. They take the quiz on the 5 love languages together so that they can understand what each love language is, and then in session, we talk about the results of the quiz and each partner will explain examples of things that fill their cup. Some questions I ask them are:

• What are some things that your partner does that you truly enjoy? (We always try to play to each person’s strengths and things that ARE working. It’s not about, “You don’t know your partner and you’ve dropped the ball.”

• What are some things that your partner is already doing that really excited you and make you feel seen? (Then we talk about how the partner can do more of that.)

• What are some other things your partner can do?

• Then I go to the other partner and ask, “So, now that you’re hearing their perspective, what are two things things that you think you can do that can make your partner happy and loved?” And then that’s their homework.

Couples are typically busy and cannot find time, so I encourage them to prioritize “couples time” by pulling up their phones and putting it in their calendar. We also set rules together, but I don’t set the rules for them. They set the rules for themselves. Some of those rules might look like:

• No phones

• No social media

• You have to sit with me

• You have to hold my hand

Once everyone is in agreement, I teach them how to speak up for themselves, how to communicate, and then it’s always about validation. We talk about how to validate each other even when they don’t agree with each other. I also normalize that disagreements are going to happen. Because you are a couple doesn’t mean you have to be one mind and love all the same things. But everything doesn’t have to be an argument. If one person loves red, one person loves blue, “It’s fine. Okay, I can see how you love red; I happen to love blue.” It’s fine and doesn’t have to be an argument.

The Five Love Languages

Joanne: Can you go over the five love languages?

Ibinye: Love languages aren’t just for people who are coupled up. They are for kids, for coworkers, friends, loved ones. All humans have love languages, which is just the way they like to be loved.

• Quality time. It’s basically spending time with your partner but in a way where your partner is attuned with you. People who’s love language is quality time, they like people to spend time with them where you’re actually looking at them, you’re chatting with them, listening to them, and that’s how they also love other people.

• Acts of service. “You made my bed for me, you brought my meal to for me, you fixed my bike for me.” Doing things for the other person. They don’t have to be huge tasks, just simple things like “I loaded the dishwasher today.” perfect!

• Touch. That would be people who are huggers, people who love to kiss, hold hands, and things that just feel physically. You can tell kids whose love language is physical touch—they’re the ones who’ll come and give you a hug. Some people when they talk touch your arm lightly or tap you—that’s physical touch.

• Gifts. When we think of gifts typically, when I have a couple do the quiz and one of them gets gifts, the other partner is “Oh my gosh, this is about to get expensive.” no! It doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t even have to be something you buy. Just the thought behind it that knowing your loved one has spent time crafting or getting something for you. It can even be mixing them a drink and giving it to them.

• Word of affirmation. People who want to hear that you love them wanna hear that they’re doing a great job, that you’re proud of them. So, your words are affirming them, loving them, validating their emotions.

Typically I find that couples have different love languages. One could have acts of service and one could have quality time. That’s why it feels like “I don’t feel loved” or “you don’t love me, you don’t appreciate me.” Typically, we love people and show our love in our own love language, so once we learn how to speak our partner’s love language, then they feel like they’re seen and loved.

Joanne: So it’s a way of turning into a person for how they actually are, not how we think they are or how we think they should be. It leads to an acknowledgment and accepting the other person.

Therapy and Therapist Misconceptions

Joanne: So when it comes to the process of therapy, what are some of the myths or misconceptions about therapy that you’ve heard?

Ibinye: I’ve heard a LOT.

• Therapy is judgmental.

• Your therapist will tell you what to do.

• Your therapist will shame you and judge you.

• Therapy is exactly like talking to a friend, so what’s the point? They aren’t going to teach you anything.

• If you go to a therapist, then they’ll put you on medication, and then you’ll be on medication for the rest of your life.

• Therapists just want to stick you to a very strict diagnosis.

I think sometimes how TV portrays therapists, people are surprised that I laugh a lot or they didn’t expect me to be this nice. I’ve heard people be worried that I will tell everyone their business and put it on social media. No! There’s confidentiality'; I don’t do that.

Joanne: So what would you say therapy is?

Ibinye: Therapy is a process of getting you to where you want to be. The reason I’m keeping it so vague is because we don’t tell you where you need to be. The way I work is; I ask what you would like your life to look like in 6 months or a year, they tell me, and we work towards that. We start by exploring different aspects of their lives:

• What would you want your social relationships to look like?

• What would you like to feel when you wake up in the morning?

• We talk about career. What do you feel is standing in your way?

It’s a process of really getting to know yourself. A process of getting to heal difficult emotions that keep us stuck or afraid or stagnant. Learning how to create relationships with yourself and with those around you so we can learn how to thrive. I know it’s sort of nebulous how I’m describing it, but that’s the best description I can come up with.

Joanne: There’s such diversity in individuals anyway. Everyone’s goals and desires are different and there’s no need to pigeonhole people into one way of growing or healing. For example, one person’s work could be how to do anger less or how to have better ways of doing anger, but for another person, it might be how to practice anger more. Either one could be really healing for a particular person and their relationships. What other resources do you have available apart from?

Ibinye: Currently, I am enrolling for the women of color online support group. It started because when the pandemic hit, I kept hearing from women of color say, “I just feel alone. I feel like there’s so much going on and I have no one to talk to.” But they weren’t just talking about seeing a therapist, they were talking about a community of women who knew what they were going through. So, it’s a place where they don’t have to be so perfect and don’t have to be the caretaker all the time.

You get to sit, connect with other women of color who understand some of the struggles you are going through, get to support you through it. We tackle different topics; we talk about race and racism and how to maneuver that. Of course, we aren’t going to solve racism in 8 weeks, but we talk about how to maneuver that so it doesn’t feel like something that’s strangling you all the time. We talk about ways to take care of yourself. What can self-care look like? How to build self-care, self-confidence, and how to ask for help because most of the majority of the women that I talk to do not ask for help ever. It’s an 8-week group, we meet once a week for 8 weeks and you just leave feeling like some of the burdens have been taken off your shoulders. That’s why it’s called Lay Down Your Burdens.

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© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

 

 

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Moving on from Toxic Relationships

Here’s a video about moving on from toxic relationships. Melissa Moore from the podcast “Faith Hope Love with Melissa Moore” invited me to talk about dealing with trauma. Scroll down for a transcript. Follow Faith Hope Love on Youtube.

What is a Toxic Relationship?

I’ll start from what a healthy relationship is and then work backward. If we think about ourselves as images of God, everyone is SO DIFFERENT even though we’re all uniquely created. We’re given reflections of different aspects of God. Some of us reflect back His passion, some of us reflect back His holiness. With each of our differences, it’s not necessarily meant to be opposed to each other. It doesn’t have to be an either/or arrangement. IT CAN BE BOTH. So we think about healthy relationships through that vantage point. These connections are one where there’s ENOUGH ROOM in the connection for each person to be themselves. Have their own needs, own values, own opinions, and still be powerful sons and daughters in the Kingdom.

If there isn’t enough room in those connections for each person, this is how we go down the toxic relationship route. There are two different options (although we tend to see one as an example of toxic relationships more than the other):

1. APATHETIC Relationships

2. ENMESHED Relationships

Apathetic Relationships

When there isn’t enough room in our connections for both people to be fully themselves, then sometimes there’s enough “room” in the relationship by both parties going off and doing their own thing. In a marriage, for example, that might be a couple living under the same roof as if they’re roommates, but they don’t spend a lot of time together.

This could also be with other kinds of connections, like family members where there’s barely any interaction throughout the year until the holidays roll around. And when the holidays roll around, it’s super awkward. So that is an example of a relationship where there isn’t enough room for them to coexist at the same time. Because there’s not a lot of interaction, there isn’t really a knowing of each other or revealing of oneself.

That type of relationship is what I call an “apathetic relationship.” There’s a huge wall between the two people and both parties are going off in opposite directions. The main message is, “I am me; you are you. There’s no we.” That is an example of a toxic relationship, but it doesn’t usually get labeled as one because it isn’t usually labeled as a relationship. But when there are situations where the connection is forced, for example, with family, that’s how it shows up.

Enmeshed Relationship

The second example of a toxic relationship is what often gets called an “enmeshed relationship.” Sometimes, though, that word enmeshed gets used to describe different relationships that are more culturally informed and more collectivistic. In certain parts of the world, there’s more of an emphasis on society as a whole or the collective. Through our Americanized/Westernized individualistic lens, that gets labeled as being bad. It’s not bad. I want to make that distinction between enmeshed and collectivistic.

What I mean by the “enmeshed dynamic” is when two people are in close quarters and there isn’t enough space between. There’s not enough space for each of them to be. Think of two circles where one is kind of swallowing the smaller one. A lot of ANXIETY, GUILT, SHAME, ANGER, FRUSTRATION—that’s the emotional evidence that there’s way too much fusing of the two people and there’s a lot of reactivity. Each person is not allowed to have their own opinions, but they’re kind of eyeing at the other person to see what they’re going to do.

Often when people think of toxic relationships, they think of this latter group of enmeshed relationships where there’s a lot of controlling, yelling, screaming, throwing objects. Yet, even within that enmeshed dynamic are things like guilt-tripping or not allowing the other person to have time with their own friends, etc.

So, this is a spectrum; there’s not categorical difference. It’s just that more often than not in a “toxic” couple, it’s likely that one person is leaning more towards enmeshed and one leans more toward apathetic. So in other words, we call this the PURSUERS and WITHDRAWERS. This is a common couple that shows up in couples’ therapy where one person is like, “we need to spend all of our time together,” and the other person is like, “we don’t need to spend all of our time together.” Usually, they come in a set.

Everyone Has Their Own Individual Needs

I work with a lot of healers, and there’s a reason for that. It’s because how they serve others often is a reflection of them trying to do their own trauma work. They just do it accidentally. Because of their own families of origin or childhoods, they haven’t been given a lot of experience of having their needs recognized as valid and being given space and permission to cultivate their individuality.

These individuals find their worth and value being very much connected with how they connect with other people. So, BURNOUT, RESENTMENT, feeling GUILTY about doing self-care—those are the common reasons why people reach out to me. It’s not because they want to be a better healer per se, but it’s because they’ve done that too much to the point of depleting themselves. However, they still have needs, and that might be a rude awakening for them. So, in their work with me, we unpack like, “okay there are some relationship dynamics that have been celebrated in your family of origin or maybe all of society, and that’s not sustainable.”

So how do we go from whatever your relationship dynamic is (enmeshed or apathetic) where there isn’t enough space for both of you, to shifting towards and creating a different kind of relationship where there is space for both of you to fully exist in your individuality. Neither party is inherently good or bad, but when there is empathy or connection, it’s a true connection. It’s not a result of someone having to sacrifice themselves for the other party’s needs.

Using Outside Information to Understand the Self

The healers who reach out to me tend to be depleted because they’re doing two people’s work instead of just their own and having their partner or family member or friend do their own respective work. That part is super hard because their bodies have been trained to OVERLY take on responsibility. That’s a conversation in of itself, but it is a way for the person to feel in control in some sense, but they accidentally end up stealing the other person’s opportunity to do their own work and grow.

We tend to connect with other people in the way that we're used to in life, so it’s really hard to change ourselves and our ways when we’re using ourselves as a reference guide. It’s not going to work because the reason why we got to where we are now is because we got here by consulting ourselves.

Often, anything that involves a person learning or gaining information from the outside—books, podcasts, seminars, therapy, other relationships, etc.—are all fantastic ways by which we get to learn about ourselves.

To give you an example, I am a first-born, second-generation Korean American, meaning my family moved to the States from Korea, and I thought for the longest time that it was totally normal for dads to live part-time in the States and part-time in Korea. In Korea, there’s a word for this, it’s called “albatross dad.” A lot of it happens to be when the father is like a traveling professor or based on work. I thought that was super normal until I was in college, Thanksgiving was about to come around, and my friends were telling me what they were going to do with their family. It was the weirdest thing hearing them say they’re going to hang out with their dad. I was like, “how does that make any sense.”

Sometimes we learn more about ourselves when interacting with other people or gaining information from the outside.

Resources to Help You Move on from Toxic Relationships

There are some books/resources I recommended. The two favorite ones are called Safe People written by Henry Cloud and John Townsend (the same people who wrote the book on boundaries) and Radical Candor written by someone who worked on a lot of companies in Silicon Valley.

Radical Candor is when a person is able to have HIGH REGARD for BOTH themselves and others at the same time. And when one is missing, you get one of the other three arrangements. Those three arrangements are:

• Obnoxious aggression—when there’s only room for one’s own needs and not for others.

• Insincere manipulation—when a person is neither particularly caring about themselves or the other person.

• Ruinous empathy—where there’s a high regard for other people, but very low regard (fi at all) for themselves. This group is mainly the people I work with.

All three of those don’t fall in the radical candor category. Part of the work that they do in therapy is to learn how to balance out how to regard for themselves just as much as they do for other people. Often the fear is “if I take care of myself, I’m taking away from other people. No, you’re taking care of yourself JUST AS MUCH AS you do for other people.

There’s some retraining from messages they’ve picked up growing up or from their own churches or society at large. A lot of women and minorities fall into that category. It is an example of empathy is not always a good thing in the same way that hope is not always a good thing. There are healthy ways of doing it; there’s an unhealthy way of doing it. In the same way, there are definitely unhealthy ways of doing guilt and anger (which is how most people know them), but there are instances where anger and guilt are absolutely necessary.

Rounding out the full spectrum of emotions, considering oneself as just as important as the other person, it’s not EITHER/OR, it’s BOTH/AND—Safe People and Radical Candor are my go-to resources for that.

Process of Cultivating Healthier Relationships

Transitioning from toxic relationships to cultivating healthier ways of maintaining connections is a very gradual process. If people could simply choose healthy relationships, they would’ve done it already. It’s a very gradual process because our own bodies resist sudden changes. It’s the reason why dieting programs don’t work.

It’s an equilibrium point where healthy people are not drawn to unhealthy people and unhealthy people aren’t drawn to healthy people for very different reasons. Healthy people aren’t drawn to unhealthy people because it’s too chaotic; unhealthy people aren’t drawn to healthy people because it’s too boring. People have a very visceral reaction internally, where sometimes—even for people who lean more towards unhealthy even though they’re wanting to grow—their bodies RESIST something that would be more lifegiving because the nervous system has been so trained to object that upfront as a way of preventing an even deeper, scarier, pain.

I work with a lot of ruinous empathy, a lot of healers, a lot of compassionate responsible types. A lot of people have opportunities to choose a healthy relationship where the other person really cares about them, but they turn that down because it’s scarier for them to be an actual healthy relationship because what happens if it falls apart? That means it confirms that “nobody is going to love me.” That happens on a very subconscious level; it’s not something people deliberate, but that’s the degree to which there’s such deep physiological wiring within the brain.

In the last episode, we talked about how the brain isn’t just one brain, the thinking part, but it’s also the emotional and reflexive part, all these parts are interconnected, so you can’t just pick and choose what to focus on. Some people will have very visceral reactions where they push away good things. This probably shows up in the way people do their own faith relationships with God. God is trying to give them all these good experiences, but the person is like “no, I’m unworthy” and reject it upfront. So you can take the relationship with God as a significant attachment relationship, so the stuff I’m talking about applies there too. It’s fascinating especially with Christian circles how much that ruinous empathy piece kicks in. It’s not healthy y’all. There is something that’s far, far, greater and deeper, but we’ve assumed that that is what is healthy.

Toxic Relationships in the Bible

I think there are many more examples of toxic relationships in the Bible than there are healthy ones. I do want to quickly touch on the fact that toxicity doesn’t mean the same thing as abuse. There is a kind of toxicity in relationships, and it’s called neglect. Oftentimes abuse and neglect get lumped together in one, but they are very different. Abuse is the PRESENCE of a BAD thing; neglect is the ABSENCE of a GOOD thing. We must consider both of those things at the same time.

Let’s consider the first book of the Bible, Genesis. I think the bulk of that book is about Joseph. We cover several generations of his family—Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Joseph at the end. I think that’s one of the clearest examples of there being so much drama between family members. There’s lying, cheating, favoritism, exclusions, rivalry, competition, all kinds of stuff. That happened because each generation didn’t do their personal work.

Now, these are the fathers of the faith, Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, people will speak very highly of them, but actually, the chapters that describe what happened in the subsequent generations is because the previous generations didn’t do their work. There are patterns in these dynamics, like lying, cheating, etc. So when it comes to Joseph, I think his experience shows why it’s so important for people to do their own personal work and what happens afterward.

We see Joseph after he has been sold by his brothers and spent all this time completely cut off from his family. His parents thought he was dead, but in seeing and reconnecting with his brothers as the second in command in all of Egypt, I think if I was in his position, I would’ve made some very different decisions with all that power. There could’ve been moments of retaliating and punishing, and I wouldn’t blame him. But there is one particular section where it talks about how he sent his brothers out, and he just cried. I would say he probably wasn’t crying solely because he was sad, crying isn’t just about sadness, he was probably full of rage, full of hurt, feeling hopeless and powerless, and he wrestled with God when he was thrown into the hole in the ground and into the prison, he had a really rough life. In each of those moments, he struggled with God like, “how do I make sense of this awful thing that happened” that he had no control over and nothing to do with. The worst thing he did was maybe brag to his brothers that he had a cool coat. There’s nothing that he’d experienced that was warranted from what he did when he was a child.

By the time we get to the end of Genesis and before we read about his sons going forward, there’s that scene that’s so moving about how he was so struggling internally while he was trying to do the right thing. If I were to choose any Bible story to highlight why therapy is so important, it would be that. It’s saying that you have a responsibility to shift how things go going forward. It is not your fault that you experienced all this stuff, but you technically have power and influence in what happens going forward, so will you take that shot or not? That’s the big question a lot of people are presented with, especially for parents.

Tools for Understanding Your Relationship History

A big part of helping people through toxic relationships is helping them understand their relationship history. Most people will be able to recall certain events that have happened in their life, but they will probably consider those events in isolation and unrelated. There are a few exercises I do for this. One is the Top 10 list. They write down their top 10 best memories and top 10 worst memories. They put it all on a single sheet of paper, and after they’re all done, they zoom out and see if there are any patterns between those different events. Because sometimes, when we’re stuck in our ways, it’s hard to tell how those things influence us.

They put those things on a Life Timeline, positive memories above, negative memories below. It gives them a bird’s-eye-view. It helps people draw connections that were always there but just didn’t show up in the same way as they do in these exercises.

Similarly, there is another exercise called the genogram, which is a fancy family tree. Instead of writing down names, there’s information regarding different individual traits—each member of the household, parents’ generation and grandparents’ generation, any big events that any of the family members went through, things like immigration, wartime experiences, traumas of actual events or growing up in a very harsh neighborhood, etc. All those things get added onto this diagram that reveals also the relationship dynamics between individuals. It’s a very visual image.

I have one for Ross Geller to see how there are so many things that are going on between different members that are not always visible. It’s not always a physically explicit event, but when grandpa shows up, everyone turns their heads elsewhere. Those things, when we see it in visual form, it’s like, “okay now I can take my genogram and next time I see my family for Thanksgiving it’s like, oh yeah, there’s a lot of stuff happening that never occurred to me because this is the air that I breathed growing up.”

These are the exercises are super helpful so instead of me telling people what to do differently, unless they know how they’ve been up to this point, it’s really hard to change what you don’t know. The other two resources, the Safe People and Radical Candor books are other frameworks for people to locate themselves and know what to do going forward.

In the last post, I talked about the Enneagram, which people may have mixed feelings about, but it’s one of the ways by which I’ve supported people connected with their core needs, fears, experiences, it’s also what happens in our physical bodies on a nervous system level.

I have videos about relationships and I have a blog page filled with posts about relationships. So, if you’ve connected with some of the things in this discussion today, check out those resources.

---

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JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

Moving on from Trauma

Here’s a video about moving on from trauma. Melissa Moore invited me to talk about dealing with trauma on the podcast, Faith Hope Love in the Momentum Series. Scroll down for a transcript. And follow Faith Hope Love on Youtube.

Defining “Trauma”

My definition of “trauma” is broader than how it’s formally utilized in the mental health spaces, and part of that is because a lot of the people I work with haven’t necessarily experienced what people consider to be “big traumas” like car accidents or parents divorcing. Since many of these individuals are internally oriented, a lot of them are Highly Sensitive People, etc.

I define “trauma” more openly, so it’s not just the big “T” “Trauma” like those really big, observable events on the outside, but also it could be a LONG, EXTENDED PERIOD OF IRRITATION OR AGITATION. So for example, someone grows up in a home where nobody really acknowledges emotions, or where there’s a lot of criticism. If a person has grown up living and breathing that as the norm, they just assume that that is the normal experience. It’s not until they interact with someone who’s grown up in an entirely different environment where they’re like, “Oh, wait.” Then they look back on their own experiences and redefine or redescribe what they’ve been through.

If I have a formalized definition of trauma that I use with my own clients, I would say that it’s any experience— either OBJECTIVE (being on the outside or observable from the outside) or SUBJECTIVE (meaning felt on the inside) that stirs up HEIGHTENED, intense feelings of feeling OUT OF CONTROL, TRAPPED, OR ASHAMED.

Different Reactions, Same Event

This definition I use is not according to the bible for therapists, the DSM, so it’s not a mental health diagnosis definition, but the reason I expanded the definition is because two people can go through the same event and have very different takeaways. For example, two people can be in the same car when there’s a car accident, and one person will have a really hard time and that’s going to mark how they move forward for the rest of their lives where they feel really guilty or really afraid, whereas the other person in the car is like, “Oh, I’m so thankful I’m still alive!”

That’s one example. Another is, let’s say for a non-intense event, someone who is called out in the middle of a classroom by their teacher in fifth grade and asked to answer a question on the board. Some kids will be like, “Alright, I’ll rise to the challenge and show off what I can do!” Whereas another kid is going to go bright red, fumble over their words and shut down, and that is what might be driving a lot of the things they do as an adult—working really hard so they are never caught in that position again.

I hope that my definition makes it so that a lot people can consider their own experiences and be like, “Oh, yeah that was a hard experience for me, maybe I do need some more support for that, I’m not the only one.”

Symptoms of Trauma

In terms of trauma symptoms, I can use what the DSM uses as indicators. The four main indicators are:

1. Re-experiencing

2. Avoidance

3. Negative cognitions and feelings

4. Heightened reactivity

Re-experiencing

With re-experiencing, a person in the present is going through a brand new situation with new people, new details, etc., but the situation reminds them or reminds their body of this scary thing that happened in the past. So, this can come in the form of intrusive thoughts, memories, sometimes people may re-experience similar situations in their dreams when they’re sleeping, or they’re in the middle of their workday, and they have a very sudden shift in their thoughts and emotions.

Avoidance

Because it’s so uncomfortable to feel those feelings, people try really hard to avoid anything that remotely reminds them or their body of that situation. So for example, a person experiences a really harsh breakup, and they try really hard to never even drive down the street that they drove down with their previous partner. They are spending a lot of energy and effort trying to not engage with that scary experience or anything that reminds them of it.

Negative Cognitions and Feelings

Understandably, if a person spends a lot of their energy trying to avoid these difficult experiences (even perceived ones), then it’s going to shape how they feel about themselves, how they feel about others, the world, etc. Things like “I’m always going to be in these kinds of relationships,” or “I just can’t trust other people because other people are untrustworthy,” or “the state of the world is not great and it’s always going to be this gloom and doom out there.” Most people who’ve had at least one big trauma or multiple small traumas can live in a way where their perception is colored by their experiences, not reflective of what’s actually happening in front of them.

Heightened Reactivity

With heightened reactivity, the person is generally very irritable, they can be jumpy at different sounds, their moods can change very rapidly. On a nervous system level, their bodies are in this heightened sense of something is going to happen and they have to be extra cautious, which is exhausting to live like that. Even when things are actually okay on the outside, when a person’s body is always tense, even small things may be enough to tip the scale.

Finding Relief for Trauma

It’s helpful for people to know that their well-intended efforts to avoid negative feelings or experiences usually backfire. It’s like trying to stick a beachball underwater. The further down the ball gets stuffed down, the more pressure buildup there is. Eventually, you lose control of it, and it will just pop back up, make a huge splash, everything gets wet and messy.

So, with trauma’s heightened sense of feeling out of control, trapped, or ashamed, our bodies are designed to heal themselves, and triggers are actually attempts for the body to try to heal itself. It’s just that the way by which it’s trying to do so doesn’t always happen at the most convenient moments or in the most helpful ways.

Let’s say a person gets triggered by a word that a friend says. The friend didn’t do anything to cause the pain, but the body is like, “Uh, oh, we’re going to that place again.” When the person gets triggered, if we label that as a bad thing, then yeah, the person should avoid the situation at all costs, but if we re-interpret that as the body’s attempt to try to heal, we get the memo, take it and say, “okay, something inside of me is trying to get my attention. I need to attend to this as soon as possible. It might not be while I’m in the middle of a conversation with my friend or doing work, but I still need to give space to this. Otherwise, it’s going to be that beach ball underwater.”

So part of the way to help oneself heal from trauma is to give more space to the uncomfortable experience, not less. It’s kind of like being on a roller coaster. It’s really intense, there are lots of loops and lots of dizziness, and it seems like it’s going to last a long time, but really it’s two minutes long. The issue is that when people’s bodies get triggered, it’s like being a roller coaster, but the roller coaster gets stuck at the top of the ride. It doesn’t actually make it through to the other side. Because that experience is so intense, people try to get really hard to get off the rollercoaster in the middle of the ride, and it’s just not going to go down well.

Things like brainspotting as a type of therapy is one way for people to get to the other side of resolving the difficult intensity of experience, but there could be many other ways of doing so as well, like performance arts, bodywork like yoga, any kind of journaling exercise where the person is giving intentional space to it. It’s important to manage how much intensity they’re giving to it at a given time, but it’s still important to give more space to it than less. It’s a little bit counterintuitive than what people may expect.

Re-Training our Bodies

The thing is that with trauma, the worst thing has already happened. It’s in the past, it’s one and done. Now, if a person is still in a triggering or traumatic situation, yeah, get out of it as soon as possible. But for most people who’ve had trauma, the trauma is a past event. The worst part has already happened; it’s just that the triggers that our bodies engage in say, “we’re not sure whether that bad thing has actually come to an end.” And so, what’s more likely is that what’s happening right now, the current relationship you’re in, the current work relationship you’ve gotten yourself into, is more likely to be technically better than what’s happened back then, but your body just doesn’t know how to tell the difference.

It’s really hard to make sound decisions when we’re in a lot of confusion. Connecting with a therapist is one way we can have other frames of reference to retrain our bodies to know that what’s happening in front of us should be considered a brand new event, not as an exact replica of what’s happened back then.

I work with a lot of people who are in romantic relationships and their partner has a way about them that ignores emotions. Yeah, the partner has to do their own work for sure. But the way the body interprets what’s happening is as if it’s the same as when they’re getting criticized growing up. Back then, when they were really vulnerable, they really didn’t have any way of soothing themselves. And that’s hard to expect the partner to be able to do the heavy lifting on behalf of those old relationships and previous people.

Body, Mind, and Emotions in Scripture

There’s such intricacy in how our bodies are meant to work together. It’s not just about thinking soundly, addressing emotions, or doing the right thing, all of these are very much interconnected. That’s even reflected in several parts of scripture.

One of my favorite parts is in Romans 12. People have memorized parts 1 and 2. First, it says something like, “Therefore, brothers in view of God’s mercy, offer your bodies as holy sacrifices.” And then verse 2 is like, “make sure to renew your minds so that you don’t align with the way the world operates.” The first 2 verses are talking about the body and the mind, and the emotions kind of come in at the end in verses 5 and 6. But even then, it’d be doing a great disservice to us, and in a way, a dishonor to God, to consider that only one part of us is important by ignoring the rest.

So it’s kind of like splitting hair sometimes to think about our thoughts, our emotions, and our body experiences as being distinct. They definitely have different roles, but there’s so much interconnection and so much order to them that I think it does highlight the majestic work that God does. It’s not just about memorizing and reciting the proper verses. It’s not about giving full control and full reigns to our emotions, but that we’re supposed to heal in a very intricate way.

An example of that is Jesus with the Bleeding Woman. There’s a lot of layers of healing in that one particular experience. Jesus could’ve just fixed the physical ailment of it; she probably would’ve been happy with that portion of healing. But there’s this whole interaction with making sure she hangs out a little bit longer in a huge crowd of people—that’s healing for the soul portion.

She has been pushed to the side on the outskirts of society and is now given center stage for everyone to see that she is a beloved daughter. That is retraining the mind on how she sees herself and retraining everyone else’s mind on how they should consider her. It’s also a very heightened, emotional, intense experience.

One of the things I mentioned as a marker for when an event is traumatic is heightened, emotional, intense experiences of feeling ashamed. Well, Jesus put this woman front and center saying, you are beloved, you are worthy. It’s not because your bleeding problem has been resolved, but it’s because she is who she is. If you read through parts of the Bible through that lens that our thoughts, emotions, bodies are CONNECTED, then you won’t just see physical feelings for people. When Jesus interacts with different people, you’ll see that there are so many other aspects of pain that Jesus also healed.

Healing Inside and Outside

God wants our healing more than we want our own healing. It’s not just like, God changing our citizenship status to being citizens of heaven. That’s easy. But it’s us about catching up with what our status really means. Not just technically having access to His kingdom and some perks that go with it, but really being inhabitant.

I think the language around adoption is another example of that. I’ve heard a story of adoptees who technically became sons and daughters of a family. But it took a long time before they were able to live knowing that they’re sons and daughters. It’s an entirely different experience altogether. I don’t think it’s just about having a technical change in one’s status or getting enough trauma therapy that you no longer have a mental health diagnosis of PTSD. There are so many needs that are really important beyond just symptom management. God really wants people to receive His powerful healing from the inside out in all areas of our lives.

Healing with the Enneagram and Brainspotting

One of my favorite techniques is the enneagram. As I mentioned earlier, two people can go through the same event and have very different takeaways because their personalities are very different. They’re focusing on different themes, different needs, different fears. So unless we attune to each person for who they actually are, it’s going to be hard for them to find the deep healing that they need.

They both have anxiety, but for different reasons. One person is because they’re comparing themselves to an unbelievably high standard and they will never find themselves able to hit the mark, whereas another has anxiety because they’re super self-conscious of how other people see them. Unless we really know what is going on internally with a person’s personality—which is the way that the person has coped through life—it’s going to take a while. Otherwise, it’s kind of like throwing a bunch of things at them and hoping something sticks.

The metaphor that I use with the enneagram is that you go to the massage therapist and they ask a bunch of questions like, “what would you like attention around today? Are there any areas you want to avoid? Let’s look for some knots that are built into your body and let’s massage them now so you can full access to your whole body all over.” Otherwise, those knots are just pulling away at different areas for extended periods of time.

Brainspotting, which is a form of trauma therapy, is the actual massaging out those knots. It’s a type of trauma therapy that our bodies naturally know how to do. Imagine having a hard experience, and then you go to sleep, and then in the deep, dreaming process, your brain is coming up with all kinds of weird details and scenarios that don’t really make sense, but then that’s kind of how your body metabolizes and works through a lot of those difficult emotions and situations. Brainspotting is when a person does that while they’re awake in therapy.

Instead of falling into the deep end, the therapist is able to pull them out of the deep water when the session is about to end because time’s run out or when things get really intense. So, those are the main two resources that I use when supporting people with different kinds of traumas—brainspotting and the enneagram. A lot of the work that I do is around relationships and difficult emotions. I also do a lot of teaching too about what each emotion means about the person needs. They aren’t as chaotic and random as people think they are. There is a logic to it; it' just doesn’t follow the same rules as intellectual logic.

Borrowing Hope on the Road to Healing

As I mentioned earlier, the worst part has already happened, so even when we experience reminders of that, they are short. They can be overcome, but a lot of it involves courage and encouragement. We were never meant to heal from our experiences alone. So, really connecting with a lot of safe people where you can take off all your masks, and you can show up as yourself, and you know you’re not going to be judged. It’s a really important, essential factor that people need to do the healing work.

Aside from a therapist, friends, or sometimes a family member, our partners might be a huge agent of healing for us. It’s definitely is possible to work through these super scary experiences, and it’s so worth doing the work, and until then, it might be hard to imagine it. So until that time, your safe people—including your therapist or pastor or whoever—you may borrow the hope they have on your behalf. It’s okay if you feel scared or unsure.

---

What are your Enneagram type's emotional habits?

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What are your emotional habits?

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"The Emotional Habits of Enneagram Types"!!

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© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Therapist in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

Nervous System Health: Stuck On & Stuck Off

Not 1 but 3 Brains

This might be new information, but we don’t have ONE brain, we actually have THREE BRAINS.

1. We have the thinking, executive brain that plans things makes executive decisions and implements them, and can think in the past or far ahead.

2. We have our feeling and emotional brain, which is very relational. It tunes into other people’s facial expresses and cues and responds accordingly. It’s also the part that holds our emotions and big events in our lives, both harsh and great.

3. Finally, we have the bottom part of the brain that’s reflexive, called “lizard brain” that regulates all regulated aspects of our being—the things we have no control over, like pupil dilation, heart rate, blood flow, etc.

Give all the things going on in the world, the country, in our local areas, within our relationships, I wouldn’t be surprised if our bodies are being bombarded with all kinds of stress that it doesn’t know how to decompress from. Our habits of thinking, feeling, and doing are on hyperdrive as our bodies are trying to cope and survive.

Healthy Nervous System

Smooth Flow

Credit: Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, Dan Siegel

This is a visual of what happens within our nervous systems. We have what’s called a “Sympathetic Nervous System” (SNS) at the peak, which is the activity and energizing focus dedicated part of our nervous systems where we are alert in the day, we’re trying to get things done, and we’re active. We’re increasing in activity and arousal (stress).

Then we have another part of our nervous system called the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS), which is when our bodies are the opposite—more relaxed, grounded, slow, and deliberate. Imagine having a big Thanksgiving meal and feeling super groggy afterward because you’re in a food coma. That’s the parasympathetic kicking in.

Throughout a normal day, our nervous systems are supposed to be in this particular window (normal range) where there’s a smooth and easy flow between the Sympathetic Nervous System as we wake up in the morning, stay alert in the day, and then after 1 or 2 o’clock hits and you feel the crash coming where you need an extra cup of coffee. Then another burst of energy that slowly tapers off as we finish the work day, to return home, veg for a bit, then do something stimulating (watching TV, hanging out with friends) until it’s time to hit the sack.

On > Off > On > Off - a rhythm that repeats throughout the day in a smooth curve. That’s what’s supposed to help us stay present and connected, not in our reactive autopilots.

(Our Enneagram types reveal what our reactive patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing are.)

View fullsize

Credit: Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, Dan Siegel

Nervous System Overload

Spikes between “Stuck On” and “Stuck Off”

We’re generally supposed to stay in the normal range. However, when we experience a very harsh situation, either a single, acute event or a chronic series of lower-grade events, it overloads our nervous system and we don’t know how to decompress or heal from that. That’s when we jump into the Un-Discharged Traumatic Stress System.

We can compare the sympathetic to parasympathetic flow of the normal range to how the event (or series of events) overload the system. There’s TOO MUCH STRESS going on and it’s not discharged, which means it’s stuck in our bodies and doesn’t know where to go.

View fullsize

Credit: Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, Dan Siegel

Some of us may switch into what’s called “STUCK ON” where our nervous systems are on hyperdrive. The sympathetic nervous system—which is the alert and activity part—kicks in really hard, where the person is spinning in anxiety, they’re trying to be really active and get onto tasks. These tend to be the folks who push themselves really hard, have a hard time settling, spin into being hypervigilant, are very irritable, have digestive issues, etc.

Then there are some of us who go down into the “STUCK OFF” position in our nervous system. The systems shut down. People get really slow and sluggish, they have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning, they have a hard time focusing because it requires so much energy which they don’t feel like they have, there’s very low activity in the body, low blood pressure, etc.

Some of us might go to the “stuck on” where we go into hyperdrive too long, sometimes people stay in “stuck off” position too long where it’s hard to get ourselves to do anything, whereas some people oscillate between “stuck on” and “stuck off” while completely skipping over the normal range window.

Stuck ON/OFF and Reactive Autopilot

When our bodies are so overloaded, we can’t help but kick into our reactive modes. Our bodies are trying to cope, trying to survive, trying to get by, and early on in life, those habits were super useful. But when we’re adults, those patterns don’t work in the ways that they were intended anymore. Sometimes they generate problems, like being hyperfocused and hyperalert has been useful for some time, but sometimes a person might be really irritable in that place and then they get into a fight with their partner, and now there’s yet another thing they have to deal with. When you are within the normal range, you should recognize a sense of choices and options rather than default reactions.

View fullsize

Credit: Peter Levine, Pat Ogden, Dan Siegel

The goal is to find ways to come back within the normal range. When someone is “stuck on,” the goal is to try to find ways to down-regulate. If you have a hard time relaxing, it’s about finding ways to simplify things, do things deliberately more slowly, find ways to switch breathing zones (deep, belly breathing instead of the top chest, rapid breathing).

Find out ways you can take care of yourself, especially through this very stressful time with the pandemic. Not only are we experiencing very acute stressors that are very intense and out of nowhere, but we are also experiencing low-grade chronic, drawn-out stressors as well.

If you find yourself resonating with these experiences, you’re NOT ALONE and you’re NOT BROKEN. There’s nothing wrong with you, but it does mean that you’re HUMAN and your limits are actually good. It’s telling you now’s the time to limit all that you’re carrying and focus back on YOURSELF. To help you focus on the self and discover strategies to return to the normal range, check out my blogging series on self-care.

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© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Connecting with Safe People

Prefer listening over reading? Watch my Instagram Live on Safe People!

What are Healthy Relationships?

Everyone has general traits of autopilot reactive patterns that they exhibit consistently over time, much like the traits you’ve identified in yourself using the Life Timeline in a past blog post.

Oftentimes, these traits can indicate whether a person is generally safe or unsafe. Unfortunately, not everyone is good to stay connected with for extended periods of time. It’s important for us to understand who we are making relationships with as we consider our own health and well-being.

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Healthy relationships involve there being enough space for BOTH parties to be themselves. Each person is unique and worthy; therefore, each person gets to have their own values, likes/dislikes, opinions, power, responsibility, and decisions.

It’s totally possible for two parties to DIFFER and have that NOT mean that the relationship is falling apart. DIFFERENCE ≠ DISCONNECTION. Unhealthy relationships say that there’s only space for ONE of you, not both. When that’s the case, each of you HAVE to be the same OR ELSE…

Instead, DIFFERENCE = DEEPER CONNECTION, because y’all are loving each other for who each of you actually are, rather than seeing the other as an extension of oneself.

The goal is to cultivate relationships where BOTH people matter, NOT just one OR the other. You matter JUST AS MUCH AS the other person, and vice versa.

What would it be like to have relationships like THAT?

Who are Safe People?

In their book, Safe People, Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend help identify the general traits of people and categorizes those behaviors as “safe” or “unsafe.”

Here is a chart from their book:

View fullsize

The left column lists traits of an “unsafe person,” such as “defensive,” while the right column identifies “safe person” traits, like “open to feedback.” Each row corresponds with one another across columns, reflecting opposite traits.

Using the Safe People Chart

Read each row and consider these questions:

• What stands out the most?

• What emotional reactions do you have?

• Do some of these dynamics sound familiar? (e.g., do you found yourself surrounded by gossipers who are unsympathetic to others’ pain?)

• What kinds of bodily reactions occur around “unsafe” dynamics? (e.g., does your heart race? Do you fidget in these situations? This is your body trying to tell you something—listen to it!)

• Do any of these traits remind you of someone you know?

  • While thinking of someone as you go down the chart, check off traits that apply to them. Does the needle lean more towards a safe or unsafe person?

Using the Safe People Chart for Yourself

NOTE: The purpose of the Safe People Chart is NOT to judge someone, but rather to gauge who you may need to have more boundaries with or space from until they have done the work to become safer.

NO ONE on this planet is 100% safe or unsafe, you included. We all exist on the spectrum between those two extremes.

Also, NO ONE is 100% fixed on one side or the other, you included. Just as important it is for you to identify who in your life is generally safe(r) or less safe, it would be essential for you to grow in becoming a safer person for others.

When you scan the Safe Person Chart again with yourself in mind, what are some of your patterns that land in the “unsafe” column? Check them off with a marker. These are your growth areas.

In this way, the chart serves as a roadmap to finding areas where you can focus your self-development to become a safe person for others to connect with.

Looking for Patterns in Connections

Using the Safe People Chart can help audit your significant relationships (past, present, and future).

• What would you like to be different going forward in who you connect with?

• What are some signs in the other person to be on the lookout for?

• How would you yourself like to grow?

Recalibrating Your “Safe Meter”

Many of us have been trained to mistrust our emotions and body reactions to others’ unsafe traits. This is partially why you’d find patterns of unsafe traits in your relationships: since your body has become so accustomed to it, it has developed a blind spot to them.

Sometimes seeing on a chart can help us understand and validate the uncomfortable reactions we have when we connect with unsafe people.

For example, when your heart starts racing and you feel uncomfortable in a circle of gossipers, your body is trying to tell you something. It’s likely that the gossipers eliciting such a reaction point toward “unsafe” on the chart.

Rather than downplaying your reactions, upon seeing some traits appear on the unsafe list, you can recalibrate your “safe meter” to better catch certain signs going forward. Doing so will help you:

• Find and connect with safe people who ALSO care for you and

• Protect yourself when interacting with unsafe people.

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The BIG Feelings First Aid Kit

Do your Feelings TAKE OVER, ruining important moments or derailing your goals?

Grab this free guide that helps you handle feelings like a pro when they show up at the "wrong place" or "wrong time"!

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© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne: “I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

Life Timeline: A Bird's-Eye View of Your Life

Emotions Running into the Present

In my last blog post, Top 10 List: Using Memories to Change Your Life, we discussed how to identify common emotional themes in a Top 10 Memory List. This list will be helpful for the Life Timeline activity. 

Like the Top 10 List, the Life Timeline will help us discover common themes among our strongest emotional memories, but in a visual form.

Refer to your own Top 10 List, like the example below for this activity.

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How to Create a Life Timeline

Draw a horizontal line on paper and plot years on this line in increments of 2 to 5 years. This is the base of your Life Timeline.  

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Using your Top 10 Best Memory List, plot the positive memories (green) ABOVE the timeline.

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From Top 10 Worst Memories List, plot the negative memories (orange) BELOW your timeline.

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Then, plot the neutral life events (blue) in the middle, such as moving, the birth of a family member, or beginning college.

Evaluating the Life Timeline

As with your Top 10 Memory List, identify common themes that cut through various memories with a bird’s-eye view.

• What themes stand out to you? (e.g., “When problems arise, I feel I have no one to turn to.”)

• Did some of your best and worst memories take place around any neutral life events?

• Did some of your best and worst memories happen during specific periods of your life? (e.g., during childhood or college.)

• What underlying emotions or reactions emerge from these memories?

  • Which periods were generally positive? Which were generally difficult?

• Do you notice any familiar patterns? (e.g., loneliness, work-related stress, etc.)

• Are any people in your life connected to these patterns?

Now that you’ve considered the themes and patterns of your Life Timeline, color code the periods of your life that have a generally positive or negative emotional undercurrent. Which two or three emotions would you use to describe these periods?

View fullsize

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Untying the Emotional Knots

The Life Timeline allows us to visualize some of our most pivotal memories by stretching them over our lives, connecting them to ages and other life events. This visual, bird’s-eye view helps us reconnect seemingly isolated memories into the emotional undercurrent of our lives. As we become more aware of how emotions tie into our memories, we can better anticipate our emotional responses to new events as they arise.

What you feel indicates what you need in order to untie these difficult emotional knots. Identifying these rigid patterns is the first step to clarifying your needs, which makes it easier to get them met. Refer to your discoveries today and allow them to guide you into creating a better future. Now that you’ve defined some of your needs, impactful moments, and emotional undercurrents, we can determine how these build into your behaviors, and how the behaviors of yourself and others in your life can be safe or unsafe. The “Safe People” blog will help gauge your connections and provide a foundation for healthy relationships.

How does your family of origin experiences & patterns shape how you live & love today?

Wanna map out your relationship dynamics as influenced by your family of origin? Check out this blog about genograms, the family tree’s fancy cousin that has so much more info than just who’s who!

---

The BIG Feelings First Aid Kit

Messy feelings spilling out at the WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE, WRONG WAY?

Grab this free PDF guide that shows you how to handle feelings like a pro so that you can keep moving forward in life!

I want my First Aid Kit!

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Thank you!

Check your inbox for your copy of The BIG Feeler First Aid Kit!

---

© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

Top 10 List: Using Memories to Change Your Life

The Past is Still Alive

Key moments and memories from years (even decades ago) can still influence our emotions, relationships, and self-esteem today. Memories build into the fabric of our lives, and while we likely interpret memories as “good” or “bad,” we are not always able to identify the themes behind those memories and discover which events could be causing trauma, anxiety, or other difficult emotions. This is where a Top 10 List comes in.

What is a Top 10 List?

The purpose of the Top 10 List is to view these memories as part of a whole rather than random, isolated moments in our lives. Odds are that many of your best memories and worst memories have similar underlying currents that still affect your emotions and relationships in present day. Once you’ve written out what may seem like independent, unrelated events on a single sheet of paper, you may be able to better see the common threads that are still being woven today, whether you like it or not.

For this activity, divide a lined piece of paper into two columns. On the left side, list your Top 10 Best Memories; on the right side, list your Top 10 Worst Memories. Jot just a line or two—enough for you to understand what the memory is—and list the age that this memory occurred. No need to write an essay about each memory - we only need a Table of Contents for your life to use as a reference guide.

Look at the example chart below to help jumpstart your own Top 10 lists. These memories might be about connection, breakups, leisure, achievements, loss, disappointments, etc. Give yourself enough time to explore your positive and negative emotions. You can jot these memories in a notebook or use the downloadable PDF chart.

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How to Evaluate Your Memories

After making your list, see if you can identify some common themes among them.

• What themes stand out? (e.g., “Even if I mess up, someone always has my back.”)

• What seems to matter the most to you? (e.g., success, relationships, money, self-reliance)

• Are there common emotions associated with these memories?

  • What are the positive emotions (e.g., pride, belonging, connection)?

  • What are the negative emotions (e.g., failure, shame, guilt)?

• What pained you the most?

• What did you need that you didn’t get? (e.g., comfort, rest, friendship)

• What are some familiar patterns you’ve found yourself in? (e.g., friendship fallouts, loneliness, thwarted projects)

Now, think about how these emotions and themes carry into the present. Do these themes trigger you emotionally? For example, if many of your worst memories tie in with you failing, it wouldn’t be surprising that the fear of disappointing others still has a strong presence in your life today in your professional life, personal relationships, etc.

The Future is Not Yet Set: What Now?

The Top 10 List gives you a bird's eye view of your life so that, informed by your life narrative, you can intentionally weave the future in alignment with your wants and needs.

• Now that you know what you know about yourself, what would you like to do differently going forward? Keep the same?

• What are some stubborn patterns in your life that seem to repeat against your will? What do you need to do to get unstuck?

The first step at working through these knots is identifying the common threads as revealed by your emotions since what you FEEL reveals what you NEED. Then, you can take this to the next level and visualize these feelings and needs in the Life Timeline.

As you move forward this month, notice which emotions are stirred up, because the present is simultaneously the past in the making and a chance to design the future.

---

The BIG Feelings First Aid Kit

Messy feelings spilling out at the WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE, WRONG WAY?

Grab this free PDF guide that shows you how to handle feelings like a pro so that you can keep moving forward in life!

I want my First Aid Kit!

Loading...

Thank you!

Check your inbox for your copy of The BIG Feeler First Aid Kit!

---

© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne: “I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

How Does Brainspotting Work?

In my other post, I described what Brainspotting (BSP) is: a way to jumpstart our bodies’ natural ability to process experiences and heal.

That all sounds good, but how exactly does it work?

Where You Look Affects How You Feel

Have you ever noticed where your eyes go when you’re thinking about something painful? Joyful? Sad?

Try thinking of a recent event that was somewhat upsetting (don’t think of the biggest painful event - pick something smaller for the purpose of this exercise).

• What thoughts come up?

• What emotion do you feel right now?

• Where do you feel that emotion in your body?

• Where are you looking?

• What happens when you look to the left? Middle? Right? Up? Down? Does the body/emotional experience become heightened? Dampened? Move/change?

For me, when I’m reflecting on a past event that’s tinged with sadness, my eyes tend to look to my bottom left. When I’m excited or angry and ready to engage something head on, I tend to look to the dead-center. When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I tend to stare off into the distance to my top left.

What is a Brainspot?

Brainspots are the eye positions that give you more direct access to the emotions/body sensations (for better or for worse). Everyone has Brainspots for different emotional states (and corresponding thoughts/beliefs) or for various processing experiences. Our Brainspots aren’t particularly fixed - I can feel sadness when I’m looking elsewhere, too, but it’s just that I tend to more immediately connect to that emotional state when I’m looking in that direction.

When processing through a particular event (e.g., the death of my pet), my Brainspot can change locations depending on what specifically I am sorting through in that particular moment (i.e., I should have spent more time with her, I miss her, what would things be like now? She’s not in pain anymore, so she’s okay now).

Once I find a Brainspot and allow myself to just notice whatever thoughts, emotions, body sensations to come and go, eventually the emotional charge will dissipate because I will have fully processed it. (Mind you, I am better practiced in Brainspotting, so you might not be able to easily do this by yourself.)

Whatever might have been initially upsetting would shift into something more soothing/grounding. Instead of being knocked off balance from having been triggered, I would be able to be more calm and ready to engage whatever is ACTUALLY happening in front of me, not what I THINK or FEEL is happening.

Intentionally noticing where our eyes go when we’re reflecting on something (vs. accidentally finding ourselves doing so) and dedicating focused attention on it until we fully process that experience is what Brainspotting Therapy is about.

Can’t I Just Do Brainspotting By Myself?

It’s entirely possible for us to do Brainspotting on our own. This is called Self-Brainspotting (duh).

Gazespotting (the thousand-mile stare) is one example of Self-Brainspotting, though a lot of people might find themselves accidentally doing it and getting caught in the emotional whirlpool that amplifies their reactions.

For more mild discomforting experiences (feeling jittery about your upcoming interview), experimenting with the steps listed above, then finding an eye position that you can “massage out” the “emotional knot” with might be enough for you to move forward.

However, there is a risk to this: Once you open that barrel, you might find that there’s more stuff tangled up with it that you might not be able to handle by yourself. Once the barrel’s opened, you might not be able to close it easily until everything in there is cleared out.

If you sense that this might be the case for you, it would be best for you to connect with a Brainspotting-trained therapist who can help you process the heavy-duty stuff and can also train you how to safely do it on your own (when appropriate).

Why Brainspotting Therapy?

Imagine that processing significant experiences is like deep water diving. The further down the diver swims (into their nonconscious/subcortical brain), the darker the water gets and the harder it becomes to tell which side is up. When people get triggered, they feel disoriented because the past messily spills into the present.

Deep diving is still necessary to dig through the shipwreck remains (process painful experiences) and excavate lost treasure (gain fresh perspectives and healing), but in order for the diver to go deeper more effectively (and make it back unscathed), they need another person to be sitting in the boat on the surface who’s trained to reliably pull the diver out when it’s time or when things get risky. That person is the Brainspotting therapist.

Sometimes, the sheer knowledge that there’s someone sitting on the boat watching out for their wellbeing may infuse the diver with greater peace and courage to dive even more deeply than they would doing it alone.

What Does Brainspotting Therapy Involve?

In a typical talk therapy session, the client usually shares about whatever they’re experiencing, with the therapist asking questions, supporting them in enhancing self-insight, reframing perspectives, or teaching new skills. However, the benefits of talk therapy can be limited if the client gets so emotionally triggered outside of session that they forget whatever they learned in session.

Brainspotting Therapy involves the therapist intentionally giving space for the client to process out emotional reactions as they come up in session, instead of just talking about them.

For example, if the client is feeling a knot in their stomach at the thought of giving a presentation, the Brainspotting therapist asks them to notice what thoughts, emotions, and body sensations they’re feeling now, then prompts them to find a specific Brainspot/eye position where the client feels it all more directly.

Once the Brainspot is found, the client directs their full attention on whatever is happening inside of them, while the therapist directs their full attention on the client from the outside. The Brainspotting process continues until the client has fully processed the issue or until session time comes to an end.

Since Brainspotting is a subcortical, deep-brained rapid processing method, the client may feel emotionally exhausted afterwards (think of each Brainspotting experience as equivalent to 10+ talk therapy sessions!). The client’s body will also likely be continuing processing for whatever else is left. In the following session, the therapist checks in on what emotional residues seem to remain with the topic, and continue Brainspotting as needed or desired.

What comes next?

Stop getting caught in the emotional whirlpool!

If you’ve tried and felt frustrated with regular talk therapy, or if you’re finding yourself getting triggered often, Brainspotting Therapy might be right for you.

If you’re in California, let’s see if you and I might be a good fit!

If you’re still unsure about Brainspotting therapy and want to try a DIY version, here’s a post about gazespotting.

---

The BIG Feelings First Aid Kit

Messy feelings spilling out at the WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE, WRONG WAY?

Grab this free PDF guide that shows you how to handle feelings like a pro so that you can keep moving forward in life!

I want my First Aid Kit!

Loading...

Thank you!

Check your inbox for your copy of The BIG Feeler First Aid Kit!

---

© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

Joanne B. Kim, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

---

What is Brainspotting?

Thousand-Mile Stare

You may have seen people stare off blankly into space, deeply reflecting on something or being emotionally detached from what’s happening around them. They're not really looking AT anything, in particular but just off into the distance in that general direction. Their eyes are directed outward, but their focus is directed inward. That may be an example of Brainspotting (specifically called gazespotting), which is a way by which the body is attempting to process through a memory with the emotions and thoughts related to it.

When we see others doing this, we often wonder, "Are they okay?" and shake them out of it. Sometimes, we might be hurt or offended and say, "Are you listening to me?" because it seems like they're not (to be fair, they probably aren't, so it's okay for you to feel hurt). In shaking the person back to reality, they might be able to "come back" to the present to engage whatever is in front of them (i.e., continue the conversation, work, drive).

However, THAT they're spacing out isn't bad per se. THAT they're often in a daze or daydreaming might indicate that their body is needing an intentional regular space to sort through their internal experiences. The issue is they might:

• Do it at the wrong time or at the wrong place (e.g., in the middle of work)

• Accidentally further upset themselves and make reactive decisions that make matters worse (e.g., they get triggered at work, ruminate on it throughout the day, become more upset, then come home and kick the dog).

Their bodies are TRYING to take care of themselves but are unsuccessful at it. During these times, they probably need someone else who’s steady and grounded to serve as an anchor as they're doing a deep dive into their unconscious. They need someone who's trained to be attuned to them, not interfere with their processing, and pull them back to the surface when it's time.

For these individuals, Brainspotting therapy would be a great resource for them.

What is Brainspotting?

Brainspotting (BSP) is a brain-based processing method that taps into the body’s natural ability to heal itself from overwhelming or stressful experiences that often generate symptoms like anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, and overreactivity. It does so by finding the specific eye positions that directly connect to where unprocessed stress is stored in the brain so that the body can “detox”.

Brainspotting directly accesses our “lower brain” where emotionally charged experiences are stored, far out of reach of the thinking “higher brain.” By doing so, we can process them more deeply and rapidly than we might with traditional talk therapy or with reading books, listening to podcasts, and learning useful skills.

Our bodies pick up stimuli (body sensations, emotions, information, etc.) throughout the day that is supposed to get processed often when we’re in deep sleep (REM cycle) but also when we’re in a reflective, meditative trance-like state (intentionally thinking about something and feeling the emotions that come with it).

However, when we experience something that’s too new, too scary, or too overwhelming, that overloads our bodies’ natural ability to process and heal. These stimuli can get “stuck” in our bodies in splintered form, waiting until the conditions are right in the future for us to deliberately process them. Unfortunately, most people aren’t practiced in going back to process old things, so these old things just sit there, pile up, and fester until something new happens that dumps all that old, past unprocessed stuff into the present and makes things messier. This is what being triggered means.

Think of it as what happens when we have leftovers: because we can’t finish the meal in one sitting, we save it for later. A lot of times, many of us forget that we have leftovers to finish, and we find out only when we open the fridge to see that there’s no more room or when things start to smell.

Brainspotting jumpstarts the body’s natural processing mechanism to sort out the old stuff into different piles:

• What to keep (long-term memory)

• What to process (emotions associated with past events that need to be experienced/expressed)

• What to throw away (old perspectives, irrelevant details)

Afterwards, the “fridge” gets cleared out so that there’s more room to take in new things. When the old stuff is fully processed, the person won’t be triggered as often or intensely, thereby becoming able to be fully present to engage whatever’s in front of them, respond accordingly, and perhaps even to enjoy the moment.

How Do I Sign Up?

If you find yourself often:

• getting stuck on a whirlpool of thoughts, emotions, and memories

• lashing out at others and having to apologize later

• staring off into space or daydreaming, when you really need to pay attention

• having trouble focusing or remembering things

• procrastinating and beating yourself up for it

• easily getting knocked off emotional balance

• feeling like anxiety, depression, hypervigilance, or overreaction is a daily reality

…then Brainspotting Therapy might be a good fit for you.

If you’re in California, let’s work together!

Learn how Brainspotting works in a related post!

If you want to try a DIY version, here’s a post about gazespotting.

---

The BIG Feelings First Aid Kit

Messy feelings spilling out at the WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE, WRONG WAY?

Grab this free PDF guide that shows you how to handle feelings like a pro so that you can keep moving forward in life!

I want my First Aid Kit!

Loading...

Thank you!

Check your inbox for your copy of The BIG Feeler First Aid Kit!

---

© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

Joanne B. Kim, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and a Certified Brainspotting Practitioner in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

How to Make a Genogram - ft. Ross Geller (FRIENDS)

Want to make your own genogram?
Get the Canva or Google Slides template here!

View fullsize

To use these graphics for presentations or personal use or to create your own genogram, purchase the graphics & Canva/Google Slides template above.

Here’s another blog about how to integrate the Enneagram into your genogram & unpack family dynamics— featuring the Bridgertons!

Missing Parts of Your Family Tapestry

Despite the value of individualism that Western societies so pride themselves in, no one was born in a vacuum. If someone has anxiety and depression, society often sees them to be an individual issue that therefore needs an individual solution (such as medications or “Just get over it’s”). A genogram can help make sense of all that.

Chances are that what the person is dealing with is ALSO a systemic issue. The person’s significant relationships and the environment they grew up in (family, neighborhood, culture, religion, etc.) have likely majorly influenced how the person experiences, understands, and expresses anxiety and depression and how others have responded to the individual.

A person who grew up as a latchkey, only child whose parents were rarely home because of work, addictions, or any other situation might not have had the emotional attunement and coaching needed to understand their own feelings and know what to do with them. Having been so accustomed to being alone, they might have their survival mode set to “Numb”, which may have significant implications in future relationships and mental, emotional, and physical health.

This is NOT to say that our childhood experiences absolutely determine who we become when we grow up. Nevertheless, to consider one’s own experiences apart from significant environmental factors would be like trying to complete a puzzle with less than half the pieces. You ain’t gonna get that far.

So Why the Genogram?

A genogram is an important tool for self-awareness, personal development, and relationship development. It can reveal how a person’s experiences today make sense in the larger context of their family-of-origin and past experiences.

A genogram is the Family Tree 3.0: not only does it reveal who’s who in the family, but it also is rich in information about:

• major events
  (e.g., war, immigration, 9/11) that may have left a deep impact on the individuals and/or the family,

• cultural factors
  race experiences, immigration, religion, sexism, homophobia

• mental health issues
  (e.g., anxiety, bipolar disorder)

• medical conditions
  (e.g., diabetes, cancer)

• traumas
  (e.g., sexual abuse, sudden deaths, miscarriage)

• addictions
  (e.g., alcohol, work, pornography, substance, sex, ministry, shopping)

• relationship dynamics:
  closeness, distance, conflict, enmeshment, cut-off,

• the role played in the family
  (e.g., the Hero, the Victim, the Clown, the Lost Child)

*Scroll down for instructions on how to make a genogram.

Genogram Example:
Ross Geller from Friends

View fullsize

To use these graphics for presentations or personal use or to create your own genogram, purchase the graphics & Canva/Google Slides template below.

Ross, age 36, is a man who is the older brother of Monica who is two years junior. The brunt of negative attention from his mother Judy (who herself had been criticized by her own mother) fell on his sister, who learned to (overly) exert control on all areas of her own life: her eating, her work, her environment, and her relationships.

Due to the very obvious favoritism Ross received from both of his parents, his relationship with Monica has been fraught with competition all throughout childhood and even somewhat in present day. Favored as the Golden Child all his life, Ross could do no wrong in his parents’ (and his own) eyes.

A lifetime’s worth of practice of being the center of attention and the Smart Alec/Know-it-All set Ross up for several rude awakenings as is revealed in his marital history. Four years into being married, his first wife Carol (the mother of his son, Ben) came out as lesbian and ended the marriage to pursue a relationship with Susan. Though his relationship with Carol is harmonious enough today as they’re coparenting their son, this was definitely not a part of Ross’ plan for his life.

Neither were his next two divorces. As a part of his decade-long, hot-and-cold relationship with his high school crush and current (and third) wife Rachel, Ross’ marriage with Emily was DOA when he blurted out Rachel’s name instead of Emily’s at the altar.

What ensued was a string of failed dating relationships and a drunk Vegas marriage with Rachel that resulted in his third (and hopefully final) divorce when the exasperated judge denied an annulment. With this, Ross the Golden Child became “The Three Divorces Guy.” Though he and Rachel remarried after they had their daughter Emma, this is still a sore spot topic for him.

Today, Ross is trying to learn how to navigate his experience with shame and to build healthier relationship dynamics.

How to Make Your Genogram

Preview:

1. Draw the Family Tree - draw out all the members in your family for 3-4 generations.

2. Name the Players - add any relevant info about family members (age, role, marital status, personality, trauma).

3. Determine the Relationship - add info about significant relationship dynamics between family members.

4. Update as Needed - periodically check for shuffled family roles or shifted relationship dynamics.

Step 1: Draw the Family Tree

Draw a sketch of all the members of your family for 3-4 generations:

Generation 1: Your Grandparents

Generation 2: Your Parents and Their Siblings

Generation 3: Yourself, Your Siblings, Important Cousins (optional: Your Spouse)

Generation 4 (optional): Your Children and Important Nieces/Nephews Genograms can utilize various symbols and colors to depict useful information.

Here are the basic symbols indicating different individuals for two generations (parent and child):

View fullsize

Children are placed beneath their parents, with a line stemming from the parents' family line. Children should be listed from left to right, oldest to youngest.

Step 2: Name the players

List the names of the significant family members. Write down or use the key symbols below to indicate any important information about each of person:

• Age

• Marital status

• Living/deceased:
  If deceased, put an “X” over the person’s symbol. Indicate reason if not from old age (e.g., cancer, car accident, suicide, overdose)

• Profession

• Personality:
  2-3 word descriptions, Enneagram type, strengths, etc.

• Cultural details:
  Ethnicity, religion, etc.

• Trauma or other major events

• Mental/emotional illnesses

• Medical conditions

• Addictions
  Substance, work, sex, etc.

View fullsize

Step 3: Determine the Relationship

Using the symbols above, illustrate the quality of relationships between key family members.

Feel free to make your own symbols as needed to add any information that may be relevant.

Here is a summary template of what a generic genogram may look like:

View fullsize

Step 4: Update Genogram as Needed

As time goes on, the relationship or life statuses will undergo changes.

• You may learn more about yourself and your family through having conversations with family members or looking at old photos.

• With fresh(er) eyes, you may see the relationship dynamics between members that was likely there for a long time but was invisible to you until now.

• When a major family event happens (e.g., the aunt who was the pillar of your mom’s family passes away), you may notice that there is a shuffle of family roles and a shifting of relationship dynamics.

Update your genogram from time to time. If you are in or are thinking about getting some individual, couples, or family therapy for yourself, feel free to share this with your therapist.

Reflection Questions:

When you’re done updating your genogram, see your family from a bird’s eye view and consider these questions:

• What stands out to you?
  Notice what you notice. There’s probably a good reason why this is catching your attention now!

• What emotions are you feeling right now?
  What reactions are you having? (It’s OKAY for you to feel whatever you’re feeling. Your body is trying to digest this new information.)

• How has your family dealt with emotions or pain? (overdid it, underdid it, was comfortable with it.)

• How do you deal with your/others’ emotions or pain?

• How is your past showing up in your present?
  Are there any familiar patterns that resemble what you grew up with?

• What are some generational blessings & burdens that have been passed down?
  What burdens would you like to end with your generation? (CHANGE)
  What blessings would you like to pass on to your children? (CONTINUE)

• What feels important for you to focus on for the next half year?
  (e.g., exploring an unfamiliar part of your family, processing hurts from family, repairing strained relationships)

Next Steps

If you’re finding that you’re experiencing a surge of intense emotions (anxiety, guilt, shame, depression, anger), that’s totally normal. It’s OKAY for you to feel your feelings and also not know what you’re supposed to do next. This is all a part of your process of reconnecting with yourself, knowing who and how you are, healing old wounds, and growing into the person you want to become.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and would like support with this, you might benefit from individual therapy, where you can sort through all the thoughts, memories, emotions, and experiences that are spilling out.

(Couples and family therapy are legit options, too, but the tricky thing is that the other parties also need to have buy-in for the process to be beneficial.)

Here’s another blog about how to integrate the Enneagram into your genogram & unpack family roles — featuring the Bridgertons!

Need help creating your genogram?

If you’re needing help creating a genogram, schedule here for a one-off genogram coaching session.

(NOTE: this is NOT therapy - we won’t be doing any emotional or trauma processing).

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© Copyright 2021 Joanne B. Kim. All rights reserved.

JOANNE B. KIM, LMFT

Joanne is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and Certified Brainspotting Therapist in San Jose, CA, who loves helping people create emotionally thriving relationships. She helps people EXHAUSTED by anxiety, shame, and an allergic reaction to anger create VIBRANT relationships where they matter, too.

Many of her clients are:
(1) the highly responsible, conscientious, and empathic types
(2) Enneagram Type Ones, Twos, Fours, or Nines
(3) Highly Sensitive Persons (HSPs)
(4) adult survivors of emotional abuse and neglect

The most common words spoken by those who’ve sat with Joanne:

“I thought it was just me. I’m NOT crazy!”

“I can finally figure out what to do with all these feelings!”

Does this resonate?

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