Available now on Amazon!!!

Jailbreak: The Making and Breaking of Our Invisible Prisons,

An IFS Informed Escape

What if… I could show you a way to reconnect with the whole of who you are, in service to your highest purpose as you know it? What if I could help you break out of the invisible prison in which you have been living--the one that keeps you small and scared? I have been in the field of mental health for 30 years--as a professor, a researcher and a clinician. I hold a Ph.D. in human development and am a licensed marriage and family therapist. What I have noticed in my work is that at the very core of most mental health issues is a deep longing for connection. We want to be seen and understood. We need to feel valued. All the “symptoms” that bring people to my office are really just adaptive strategies, protectors of our hearts, designed to help us get connection or to numb us from the pain of not having it. These maladies happen when we think we are in it alone. They are a side effect of disconnection. Indeed, study after study confirms that loneliness, another word for disconnected, is correlated with heart disease, high blood pressure, sleep disorders, substance use, depression, anxiety and a host of other mental health problems (Hawkley & Caciopopo, 2010). Symptoms aren’t the enemy—they are the markers of disconnection.

I wrote this book to share a glimpse of what I have learned on this journey to freedom and to invite you to come out of the darkness of the internal prison in which you may be caught. It describes the process I have learned and refined over the years in my practice as a psychotherapist, university professor, and full time spiritual seeker. It’s what I have found in my personal work and what I do with my clients and in my workshops. It’s my profession and my passion. The tools are an amalgamation of what I have been drawn to over the past three decades. This includes an understanding of our neurobiology (our “hardwiring” for connection), developmental psychology (how we “learn” to connect), and psychotherapy (tools for helping us reconnect).  The ideas presented here are anchored in stories of my own incarceration and escape as well as composite case studies of my clients (identifying information has been changed to protect confidentiality).