The Toxicity Survival Guide

Blackburn suggests you need good mental health in order to do philosophy. I say he's got it all wrong. In this episode, I share how philosophy can directly improve your mental health and some of the best ways to accomplish that!

Some topics demand nuance and not everyone is going to have the capcity to hold onto that nuance. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't express what needs to be said. I explore the value of expressing nuance in light of the Israel-Hamas war and as someone who regularly speaks about child abuse.

I explore the wisdom existential philosopher and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl has to offer in these turbulent times. I share how his wisdom is helping me navigate the current increase of antisemitism and how it can help everyone working hard to break cycles.

This habit of labeling sometimes totally normal parts of the human experience as "ill" or "sick" or "broken" has become popular thanks to the busted Healthcare system in the United States. And while it is good and appropriate to call out illness when it is genuinely present, we've all probably gone a bit too far with it. I break down exactly what is up with this tendency to pathologize and why I think we need to let it go.

Want to avoid spiraling into a deep pit of emotions everytime you start to think critically? In this episode I share how pairing Radical Permission with your critical thinking time can help you focus your energy on the important decision making work you've got to do on your cycle breaking journey!

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After recapping my father's passing, I explore how my life has changed one year later. Toward the end I share one of the most surprising outcomes of these past 12 months.

Inspired by the introduction to Skye Cleary's How To Be Authentic, I explore the tension self-help has with core features of our identity as cycle breakers, and some of the reasons philosophy might be a better choice for us.

When you grow up in chaos, you often crave chaos later in life. In this episode, I talk about how to manage that craving for familiarity without engaging in the more self-destructive side of this tendency.

I have been struggling to articulate exactly why philosophy is so freaking powerful to folks who are going against the status quo. On the heels of running the world's first ever Practical Philosophy course, I finally figured it out. In this episode I break it all down.

I am spilling the tea on my colleagues! In this episode I explain why you tend to see a lot more psychology in cycle breaker spaces than you see philosophy, and what I am doing about the situation. 

After some hard thinking about what the real secret sauce is to philosophy, some changes are coming to Empowerment Through Thought. Inspired by the struggles with flying monkeys, I'll continue to serve my fellow survivors and call in all those seeking to go against the norms. 

There is trend in the healing space to reject psychology's talk therapy and embrace that healing must come at the level of the subconscious. In this episode, I explore how we can acknowledge the limitations of psychology's talk therapy without necessarily moving to the much more vulnerable space of the subconscious. I share how philosophy can is another way to engage in conscious dialogue that can produce extensive healing. And I share why I think philosophy has some intense benefits over psychology's approach to talk therapy. 

Suffering follows us wherever we are on the survivor journey. We might as well learn how to live well within its presence. In this episode, I share some of Marcus Auerilius' thoughts on how to deal with inevitable suffering. 

You may have heard of grey rock, but I bet you haven't heard of Stoic Philosophy or Marcus Auerilius. In this episode, I explain why understanding the philosophic foundation of this popular technique for navigating toxic people can help you immensely. I share how it helped me on my journey and why it can help  you deal with both guilt and anger. 

Started playing with my current angst in the form of a fiction piece and I have discovered that it is wildly difficult to live in the peace that so many of us strive for on the journey. 

We often strive to be the version of ourselves that are no longer burdened by the challenges of long-term abuse, but this idealization of our fully healed selves may be causing more harm than good. I explain why I think that there is no such thing as being fully healed and what survivors can focus on instead. 

Have you ever thought about how much power the algorithm has when it comes to your healing work? The more we rely on social media to help us on our healing journey, the more susceptible we are to the preferences of this robot. 

In this episode I explore the potential shortcomings of social media as a tool for healing from abuse and what you can do about it. 

Learning to allow emotions that once brought us a lot of heartache back into our lives in the wake of healing from toxic people can be a CHALLENGE. In this episode I reflect on my own recent experience crying in a public space and what us survivors can do who want to learn to heal our relationship to these formerly dangerous feelings. 

This episode is all about the identity crisis that comes up for us survivors of narcissistic abuse. Often we cling to old parts of ourselves since that served us well in navigating abusive environments, but as we make progress on the healing journey, we can struggle to make sense of these older parts of ourselves and the new folks that we are becoming. 

In this episode, I talk about the final communication my toxic father ever sent me. I discuss a particular "witnessing" technique that I have been using to help ease the absolute horror and dismay his final cruel words have created in me. 

I do not share any direct quotes from the letter, but I do discuss death and many of the harsh realities sacrifices we make to toxic parents. 

Email me: dr.louise@empowermentthroughthought.com

Ready for some fun healing! In this episode, I invite you to consider the stuff that toxic people forbid you from doing. I also share how this has been quite liberating on my own journey, including some spicy talk on the paranormal. 

When you are ready for some one-on-one support, reach out 

Email: dr.louise@empowermentthroughthought.com

In this very raw episode, I share with you my recent experience of losing a friendship and how this too is part of the healing journey as survivors of narcissistic abuse. 

Email: Dr.louise@empowermentthroughthought.com 

Sometimes feeling ok isn't enough. At some point on your healing journey, you are likely to want to actually feel GOOD. But how the heck do we accomplish that after navigating so much darkness? I share my recently developed ideas on how exactly to do that. 

Much to my surprise, the memorial service of my toxic father was overall a good experience. In this episode I recap how the event went and unpack some of the reasons I think it was an overall good experience. 

Loneliness and isolation is one of the hardest things to deal with on our survivor journey. The bigger our boundaries get the more distant we can feel from the folks around us. In this episode, I talk about how I am working to ensure that us survivors never have to feel lonely again!

Toxic people taught us directly that we are not worthy of goodness and beauty in our lives. Unfortunately, survivors have likely interanlized these messages and are likely to have self-worth issues popping up in unexpected places. Listen to this episode to hear what I'm talking about and what you can do about it!

Hot of the heels of shutting down this house, I am bringing you a recap and the biggest lessons I learned along the way. If you have worried about what it will be like shutting down the house of a toxic person, this episode is for you. 

This episode original published in September 2021 covers such an important topic that I really wanted to bring it back to y'all. It is was a very difficult episode for me to originally come up with, and it hits on topics that are so so important in the abuse recovery journey. Hope you enjoy!

In this episode I share a piece I wrote on explaining what exactly philosophical counseling is. I explore how it differs from mental health services and how it compares to life-coaching. 

After a recent explosion on Instagram, it was clearly time to do a deep dive on the controversial topic of forgiveness. Many folks in the survivor community seem to think that you must forgive toxic people in order to heal. In this episode, I bring in the work of Aristotle, Kant, Hume, and a contemporary philosopher named John Kekes to show why forgiveness really is optional. 

While the standard advice for dealing with toxic people is to go no-contact, what enables a person to be able to do that often depends on a bunch of things that are outside their control. In this episode I explore how privilege plays into the decision to go no-contact, and why those folks who are not able to do so can still make a lot of progress on their journey. 

If you are ready for some support navigating toxic people in your life, reach out to me

Email: dr.louise@empowermentthroughthought.com