Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it - it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy... When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.

It's a practice for me every day, sometimes every hour of every day. It is an absolute practice. When I went into the research, I really thought that there are authentic people and inauthentic people, period. What I found is, there people who practice authenticity and people who don't. The people who practice authenticity work their ass off at it.

Perfectionism is a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, it's the thing that's really preventing us from taking flight.

Then I tell my own story. The two things that people really need to transform is language to understand their experience and to know they're not alone. It's the combination of the researcher-storyteller part.

We're a nation of exhausted and over-stressed adults raising over-scheduled children.

Social media has given us this idea that we should all have a posse of friends when in reality, if we have one or two really good friends, we are lucky.

Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.