Your Pocket Therapist: Quick Hacks for Dealing with Toxic People While Empowering Yourself

By Sherrie Campbell

A pocket coach to help you heal and set necessary boundaries—from a clinical psychologist and fellow survivor of a toxic family.

Your Pocket Therapist is the powerful follow up to But It’s Your Family, providing the reader with quick hacks to deal with the toxic people in their lives, all the while empowering themselves. Each devotional within Your Pocket Therapist reads like an actual therapy session where it builds upon the strategies used to cope with toxic people. It is designed to bring the reader into a deeper and deeper understanding of the strategies being presented so they are second nature and easy to apply. Within Your Pocket Therapist, Dr. Sherrie Campbell reveals:

• Quick hacks to dealing with toxic people
• Practical empowerment strategies to deal with manipulation
• Simple mindsets that equip readers to know what to do and say in toxic relationships
• Practical steps to help readers find a way out of toxic ties
• How to utilize withdrawal and silence as superpowers when dealing with toxic people

Praise for Dr. Sherrie Campbell’s Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members

“A must-read . . . Each chapter of her book offers profound insights into the most common struggles faced by adult survivors of toxic family dynamics.” —Kim Saeed, author of How to Do No Contact Like a Boss!

“Sherrie Campbell offers a unique and true-to-life view of what it means to separate yourself from toxic family members . . . In this book, you are given full permission to feel what you were never allowed to feel or speak about.” —Jack Canfield, coauthor of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781631952135

Book preview

When in Need, Pull Me Out of Your Pocket

I am Dr. Sherrie Campbell, your pocket therapist. Today is a new beginning for you. If you’re reading this book, then you are ready for a fresh start with new information.

You’re done with people taking advantage of you.

You’ve had enough with being the good person who is consistently scapegoated as the ‘bad guy.’

We will take a look at your pain and confusion and commit to not leaving you there.

I promise you that you’re not hopeless, and I will make sure to help you see this every single day.

We will examine your pain and confusion and guide you to what you can do to get better.

You will find out what you have learned from your mistakes—the mistakes you may still continue to make. And I will counsel you on what you can do to make better decisions going forward.

We will discover where you’re stuck and who or what you may need to let go of to get to that amazing life you know deep down you are capable of living.

I will show you how to heal old hurts and help you to stop repeating emotional patterns that do not serve you.

We will discover what it is you’re looking to transform.

Bottom line: Together, we will supply what you need to change your life for the better day by day.

When you need me, I will be here. All you have to do is open this book. In it you will find my advice designed for you. It comes from nearly thirty years as a clinical psychologist and author. It is also directly inspired by my own suffering of growing up in a deeply toxic family system and my repetition of those toxic patterns into my adult life—until one day, I stopped the destructive cycle. I offer myself to you as a fellow sufferer who, like you, has suffered deeply and yet has found the way to live beyond it. We are all human here.

Know, too, that I have not and do not suffer less just because I am a psychologist. My textbooks in psychology provided great information, but they were far from the best teachers I’ve had in my life. As surprising as it may sound, my greatest teachers have been those people who have hurt and confused me the most. Without them, I would never have my depth, the grit to survive, the humility to know I need help and guidance, and the courage to thrive in spite of all of them.

Now, I own me.

And I will teach you to own you.

This daily devotional is your pocket coach for helping you to heal yourself and set the necessary boundaries around the toxic people in your life. Each day, you will learn something new about them and something empowering about you. I want each of you to have this knowledge in your pocket so in critical moments you have a quick reference to help you with toxic people.

This is free therapy every day!

Here is one of the many things that I know with certainty: If you want to feel better, you have to get better.

I will coach you, just as I do my weekly patients, to love yourself, to put yourself first, and to choose high quality thoughts, emotions, environments, friends, relationships, and careers. You will learn to choose the company of those who love you, appreciate you, and uphold you.

As you learn to choose better and use this coaching to move you in the direction of becoming the best person you can be, your life will transform. I can guarantee that as you heal, the people you attract into your life will be healthier. I guarantee that you will find the strength to release those individuals who no longer make sense for your life. When you start choosing better, you naturally start living up to new standards. If you don’t know your standards, I will teach you. These new standards will become a reflection of your own self-love and respect.

Your Pocket Therapist will enable you to feel loved and supported with great and simple advice each day. If you have never felt loved in a relational commitment, it may be because you were never first committed to yourself. I will teach you how to put yourself first without feeling guilty. It is my life’s work to help you to own and take responsibility for your happiness. I will teach you how to bring joy to the table without your having an expectation for others to serve it to you. I will introduce you to the unrealized power that lies within you.

It’s Okay Not to Be Okay, Okay?

When we’re going through tremendous change, it often feels like we’re about to breathe in our last breath. When our hearts break, it feels like our whole person breaks. I know from experience that whenever I am in a great deal of uncertainty, I suffer. My knees feel watery, and it feels terrifying to take my next step. There is no guarantee if the next step will be safe when life is uncertain. These experiences define what it means to be human and vulnerable. I always tell myself when I am in these times of life, It’s going to be okay. I also remind myself, It’s okay NOT to be okay. That may sound like a revolutionary idea, but it shouldn’t be.

Why do we feel like we have to always be okay to be lovable? Can we stop that belief right here and right now, please?

It’s far better for us all to work on being human and throw the perfection expectation out the window.

Take some time right now to look back on all the moments you have wept, failed, or felt rejected, abandoned, or beaten down. What do you see?

What I see is that you are still here! Whatever or whomever it was that hurt you, they didn’t win. Can you see that? So far, nothing or no one has ever been strong enough to take you completely down. You may have felt lost at times. You may even feel lost now. In the midst of that, though, realize that you are already ahead of those who have hurt you.

Keep this in your pocket

It’s okay to be lost and to feel lost.

Dealing with Life’s Necessary Changes

Life will change. The greatest advice I can give you is: Let it. If things are changing, they are changing so other things can find their way to better your life. I truly believe life’s intention is good for each of us, although it doesn’t always feel that way.

No matter how bad things may seem, we must never give up on love or life. There is simply too much to live for. Even if we can’t see the good right now, it is there.

Here is what I have learned: Part of living life is losing things and people we love. There is an incredible bond shared between life’s losses and its gains. On the other side of pain, we discover hope. Pain and hope are the best of friends. Pain comes when we have to let go of things or people we dearly love and want in our life (regardless if those things or people were good for us in return). Hope is that glorious light at the end of the tunnel where we hope to be loved, where we hope to be okay and feel okay, and where we hope that life will feel good again.

After traumatic relationship losses, it often feels as if we’re losing a cherished part of ourselves that we will never get back. Heartbreak can be so hard on each and every one of us. It can bring us to what seems like the end of ourselves, to wanting to give up. We should never underestimate how powerfully painful it is to lose love. This is something I know all too well.

Still, here is the good news: The losses we face force us to confront the dreams and hopes in our heart. We come to know clearly what we want when we lose something or someone we love. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), there will be times we will not be able to hold onto someone, no matter how badly we want them or how much we sacrificed for them. This can include family relationships, friendships, love relationships, or even pets. These losses leave us feeling vulnerable and sad, for we have had such a passionate investment in those hopes and dreams.

Keep this in your pocket

No matter who you are, losing anything you have invested your time, energy, effort, and heart into tends to be gut-wrenchingly painful.

None of us are above experiencing these feelings. I want you to understand that your sadness, confusion, or anger in response to a loss are the normal, healthy responses you should have. You are not crazy! You are not too sensitive! You are not losing your mind! You are, however, human. And humans suffer hurt and experience love. And love can give us the most deadly of all hurts.

Here is what you can expect. You’re going to hurt. And you’re going to hurt until you don’t. The hurt can only pass as quickly as it can. You aren’t going to want to feel this hurt. You will get mad at it, curse it, resist it, and finally have to surrender to it. When you cry, you will feel slightly better for a little while—until the next wave of despair visits again. And it will return. This is how healing and grieving work.

You will also be mad toward what is unfair. That’s okay. What happened to you probably was unfair. But you need to accept it. It, too, will pass. You will heal. Just ride the wave. In time, it will return to the calm rhythm of the ocean under a gentle breeze.

Recognizing Some People Cannot Love

There is nothing more maddening than loving people who cannot, will not, or do not love us in return.

There is nothing more frustrating than loving people we cannot change, help, or influence.

There is nothing more draining than trying to measure up to what we think people want from us and then still getting shunned.

We end up wasting so much time squandering our love, our efforts, our generosity, and our kindness to gain the approval of those who refuse to see us or validate us for who we are. This is especially painful when the ones we are caring about and for are family.

Isn’t it crazy how often it seems easier to live in a consistent pattern of manipulation, denial, and rejection than to face the reality of the toxicity of the people who raised us or of those others who treat us so poorly? Why is it easier to live in this pattern of pain and manipulation? Because it’s often easier to allow ourselves to be abused under the guise of keeping the peace than it is to face telling the truth and creating a cold war. Unfortunately, we cannot heal in this poisonous and odious dynamic because we can never get the space or support to develop our own life purpose. Our development is arrested and held captive by those who claim to love us. They beat us down—over and over again—until we have no I of our own to claim, much less to assert.

We do have a choice, however. We can free ourselves from this awful situation. How? By moving on and cutting the ties that make us prisoners. If we want to have real life, we must stop living in the manipulative dynamic that now defines our world. We must get to the point where our happiness becomes more important than keeping the lies and the false peace of the toxic family system. Healing can only come to us and our purpose can only find us when we set ourselves free.

Freedom from toxic family members can be scary. They have defined us. They have set our identity in the family system. Our sense of being worthless and unlovable has come from them. But what they claim is true about us is a lie! In reality, we have great value, and none of it is dependent on them. They have manipulated us to believe what we think and feel about ourselves. What we must understand, however, is that life cannot blossom where there is no sunlight, where there is no love, and where there is no community.

The life we want is out there. It is available to us. But to gain it, we must separate from those who are toxic to us. We can find new lovers. But we can’t find anything new until we let go of what is not working. This takes tremendous courage. The idea of severing ties to core people in our lives can make us feel like we will face a future of being alone. The doubt that creeps in is the doubt we don’t want to face, and this doubt is what fuels our fear of leaving and leads us to stay in the situation we know, no matter how bad it is for us.

Keep this in your pocket

When you leave toxic people, you must dig deep and push through the loneliness, despair, identity loss, grief, and fear that you feel.

Many people never find the courage to leave their abusive situation. And while that’s definitely not what is best for them, it’s definitely understandable. Each of us is different. Some people leave these dynamics only to feel so lost that they return to them. It took me three times to finally leave my abusive family dynamics for good. I was scared to feel family-less, especially if life was hard and I was alone and needed support. That is what made me go back. What I have learned is that my reality was that I didn’t know my new self well enough to stay gone on my first couple of tries. You may not know yourself for a little while after you leave either. That’s normal. Each time I returned to my family, the hurt I endured only became worse.

When you activate steps of liberation and get yourself away from toxic manipulation, just the act of staying away is enough to start the process of undoing the brainwashing you underwent. The more time you spend away, the more clarity you will gain. When you are no longer poisoned by another’s tainted, twisted, negative view of who you are, you begin to find your roots and sink them more deeply into new, firmer, and truly nourishing ground. Here you find what you need to stand strongly on your own.

Understanding Heartbreak

Heartbreak is one of the paths that falls deeply inside of us. Deep heartbreak makes us question life, love, God, fairness, humanity, and karma. Heartbreak makes us question the very values and beliefs we’ve built our life upon. Each day spent in despair is another day we carry the heavy load of our sadness. This sadness is what draws us to question the why’s, what’s, when’s, and how’s of the people or situations that put us in this place.

When I have been in the mires of my heartbreaks, the questions they raise have been the most crucial to my healing. Some of the answers I have found have been within me while others were not. Those within me were always the most frustrating. The reason is that we can only answer for our own behavior and decisions. I would obsess over trying to figure out those individuals who had hurt me and why they had acted the way they did. I eventually realized, however, that this was not an effective use of my time or attention. It only brought me into more despair and self-doubt. It’s too easy to focus on figuring out the people or situations that hurt us than it is to figure out how we became a person who allowed so much hurt. As long as we obsess over them, we abandon ourselves.

Keep this in your pocket

Heartbreak gives you clear vision into what is and is not working in your life when it comes to love.

A new life must begin with you and me. We must learn to focus on ourselves and to love ourselves. But what does it mean to love who we are?

Loving ourselves means being endlessly courageous and changing ourselves whenever necessary to better live our answers.

It means having a purpose.

It means getting rid of things and people that pull us away from peace and joy.

It often means enduring struggle. No one but us can get us to the answers in our lives for us. The work, dedication, choice, and effort are ours alone.

And all of this requires that we become willing to risk big change.

To love yourself is an effort-filled and oftentimes scary endeavor, for it requires you to live and thrive through times of uncertainty, heartache, and pain. But you can choose to do this from a place of defeat or a place of passion. Passion feels better than pain so become passionate about changing. It is through the challenges you face that you develop the wisdom, strength, and ability to overcome.

I encourage you to ask yourself, What is my ultimate goal? I would answer that your goal is to live a life you can love, to love other people who are capable of authentic love, and to experience what success and freedom taste like. The ultimate goal is to thrive in the joy of making your life better each day, of loving yourself and others more deeply, and learning to be passionate about who you are. Thriving means you will be optimally stressed. To be optimally stressed means you are healthfully challenged—challenged in ways that inspire you to grow, challenged by things you are most passionate about. These are the answers I would urge you to accept and dedicate yourself to.

Recognizing There Is No Need to Hate

Fact: There are people in our lives we are going to love but not like very much, if at all. This is how it has been for me with my core family members.

Undoubtedly, you will have to sever ties with people who continually hurt you, no matter how closely connected you are to them. And you will need to do this in order to save yourself.

Some people will see this as hateful. The reality is that you may need to hate certain people during phases of your healing, but this is a phase you must move through. Remaining stuck in it isn’t healthy for you. Here is the thing about hate: Hate is sometimes a more powerful energy than love. And why give anyone who doesn’t deserve any of your energy any of your hate? No amount of your hatred toward them will matter enough to them so they will make a change in themselves. You can’t hate them enough or even love them enough for that to happen.

If these people were in our lives for any significant period of time, we can choose to remember the good shared with them, especially if this pertains to severed familial relationships. However, this remembered good should not lead us to go back into those relationships. Seeing the good simply gives us a mature sense of balance as we move on. It is too easy to consider another person all bad as a way to cope with and justify our decisions when choosing to end a relationship. The easy way is hardly ever the right way.

Keep in mind that you choose to leave relationships because they are more unhealthy than healthy. You have the right to do this. It is a courageous act of self-love. You leave relationships to untether yourself from those people who are bringing you down and placing undue restrictions on your freedom and happiness. No one—and I mean absolutely no one—has the right to impinge upon your right to be the person you want and desire to be.

Keep this in your pocket

No one has the right to tell you who you are, who you should be, and that you’re not good enough.

If this is the kind of life you’re living under in any relationship, it won’t change until you choose to put yourself first. We really do teach people how to treat us. What we allow will continue—this is the law of simplicity.

Therefore, making these decisions shouldn’t require hating the person you no longer want a connection with. Choosing to leave a toxic relationship isn’t about hating those who hurt you. Instead, it should be about loving you. It involves granting yourself the freedom and responsibility it takes to be able to love someone and not like them at the same time. Think of it like this: You don’t hate them; you simply respect yourself enough to free yourself from them.

If You’re Feeling, You’re Growing

When in the midst of challenge, heartbreak, or confusion, our heart can literally feel too heavy to carry, and yet we cannot put it down and get rid of it as much as we would love to feel a sense of relief. This doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with us. We’re not losing our minds. We’re not crazy.

But we are hurting.

We hurt when we’re changing, transitioning, and growing.

Moreover, a broken heart is not a burden, even though it may feel that way. It is a sign that we need to take some thoughtful and loving time to nurture ourselves, lick our wounds, and examine where and how we allowed ourselves to get beat up. When we feel beat up, we hurt inside. And hurt, like any other emotion, is temporary. It only feels like forever when we’re in it, and those moments of being in it are excruciating. In that place it is natural to deeply doubt other people, doubt love, and question, even hate, ourselves for not being better, stronger, or wiser.

Welcome to life.

I highly suggest that you remind yourself that when you’re feeling hurt, exasperated, heartbroken, angry, resentful, confused, abandoned, betrayed, hateful, or frustrated, you are growing. These feelings are warning us that something is wrong and that we need to look at our situation and make some changes. If you’re growing, you are learning, changing, and expanding in tandem with all those painful feelings. The learning and changing you’re going through will help protect you from ever repeating the pain you’re in right now. When you’re grieving, it is normal to feel as if your heart will never feel light again, that you will never feel better and have better than what you lost. I remind my patients that when they are in the throes of their pain, they may feel hopeless, but that doesn’t mean things really are hopeless.

Keep this in your pocket

You are not hopeless, although you may feel hopeless.

Everything has a beginning. Trust that there will also be a middle and an end. Not only will your heart stop hurting, but your heart will also become stronger and more resilient.

When you’re hurting, be good to yourself. Give yourself a little credit. Growing is no joke. It takes a very strong person to look at the truth and live it out.

Understanding Potential Is a Trap

No matter how attractive a person’s potential may be, keep in mind that you will have to live with their reality. Potential is energy that doesn’t move; therefore, the potential of how great you think someone could be has nothing to do with the reality of who they really are.

It is so common to ignore our intuition, our gut feelings, when we want to love or be loved. Intuition is easy to ignore because it isn’t always clear, and our denial systems too eagerly gather any evidence we need to override intuitions we don’t want to be true. Denial helps us stay in a place of hope about who we want to share our love with, especially when deep down we know something isn’t right. I had always hoped for the unhealthy people in my life to be the vision of the person I needed and wanted them to be, even when who they really were couldn’t have been further from my vision of them.

Keep this in your pocket

You must be careful not to rationalize someone’s abusive behavior simply because you love them.

The strongest part of any person is who they are in reality. People will show us to no end who they are. Because we love them or have been raised by them, we will still deny, still hope, and still believe they can be different. What I have come to learn, however, is that no matter how much I love them, I cannot change them. No matter how strong the evidence may be that they can grow and change, I cannot open their mind to seeing what they don’t want to see. Closed minds are red flags.

Knowingly or not, people who are closed-minded are also shortsighted. Shortsightedness blocks insight and compassion. If we are loving a person who lacks empathy, whether it is a lover, a friend, or a parent, and we ignore this lack about them, we will never be treated fairly by them. Nor will they see us through eyes of genuine love. Instead, life will be about them, with them viewing us as in their life to meet their needs and desires.

No one is perfect, but red flags are labeled red for a reason. They are intuitions that urge us to stop, to carefully weigh our decisions, to even