Author: Iveta Upeniece
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How Toxic Relationships Invade Your Mind: The Grasshopper Metaphor
Some time ago, I saw a video where a parasite affected a grasshopper’s perception to such an extent that the grasshopper jumped into water, where its body was abandoned by a worm. Really scary, isn’t it? But my first association was with specific clients or people I had met in my life. Because this scary…
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Why They Won’t Let You Go: Understanding Manipulation in Toxic Relationships
Both in groups of people who have separated and in therapy sessions, I have observed a pattern that repeats itself regularly, so it is worth talking about. There are some people who use other people to satisfy their own needs. I won’t focus on the classification here, but in therapy, the question “Why won’t he…
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Why do soulmates become enemies?
It seems like fate — two people meet and feel like they’ve known each other their whole lives. They understand each other without saying a word. They laugh at each other’s jokes like old friends. They finish each other’s sentences and feel a sense of kinship or “soulmate” with each other. And if I’ve ever…
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Day 5 after separation, or the moment when the psychological anaesthesia wears off
During the separation period, love, anger, pain, resentment, and indifference can fluctuate in an incomprehensible sequence, and sometimes these emotions and feelings can overwhelm a person all at once. In the first days after a painful breakup or divorce, people may experience a strange numbness — a strange, almost surreal calm that masks the intensity…
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Trauma Isn’t the End — It’s the Beginning of the Return
For many years, I believed that what happened to me in childhood defined me. That the silence, the responsibility, the fear I carried were proof of something broken inside me. But slowly, through deep work, I came to understand something else: Trauma isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of the return. As…
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Death by a thousand paper cuts
An article about emotional abuse with insights into the consequences of psycho-emotional trauma, awareness, and healing. Unlike physical or sexual violence and the acute psycho-emotional trauma that follows, emotional abuse is not immediately noticeable, whereas physical violence is. Emotional abuse is also the most difficult to identify in therapy, as it can be completely hidden…
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Why do we crave sweets when we are stressed?
When we feel stressed, many of us crave something sweet. This is a biological response to situations where we feel threatened, either physically or emotionally. When we feel threatened, the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis is activated, causing the release of cortisol (the main stress hormone) and adrenaline and noradrenaline (fight-or-flight hormones). These hormones mobilize energy, raise blood…
Psychotherapy 