Family secrets don’t just hide the truth, they divide families, freeze emotional development, and corrode trust for generations. Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, walk through four ways secrets damage families and offer practical guidance on breaking destructive triangles, with callers sharing their own experiences.
Protecting others often masks an inability to protect ourselves. Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, unpack the Enneagram’s three instinctual drives (self-preservation, social, and sexual) as frameworks for understanding why we over-give, and callers share vivid stories of caretaking that costs them.
What is the real opposite of dependency? Armand DiMele argues it is autonomy, not independence, then unpacks the dependent personality with Linda Vanella, LCSW-R. The episode covers how dependency forms, how it fuels serial relationships and narcissistic dynamics, and why genuine autonomy must be a conscious choice rather than a reaction to fear.
What does it mean to steal from your employer when the workplace has already stolen your sense of self? Armand DiMele traces how cubicles, microchips, and smartphones eroded worker identity, then opens the question of workplace theft, personal ethics, and what it costs to live with or without integrity.
What if people don’t fall in love with who you really are, but with the polished self you perform? Armand DiMele argues that revealing your true self often drives partners away, and that therapy’s push for authenticity can backfire. A caller’s story of kibbutz bullying, suicide, and bulimia recovery gives the theory raw, unexpected weight.
Submission is not always weakness. Armand DiMele and Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, map the difference between servers and peacemakers, trace learned helplessness from childhood abuse to elderly isolation, and examine how dominance hierarchies shape everything from family dynamics to corporate mergers and sexual behavior.
What does it feel like when your mind detaches from your body and never reconnects? Jeffrey Abugel, who lived with depersonalization disorder for decades and wrote about it, joins Armand DiMele alongside Linda Vanella, LCSW-R, to explore DPD’s causes, its links to panic and drug triggers, and its surprising overlap with spiritual concepts of ego dissolution.
We are never just one person. Armand DiMele argues that the selves we show at work, in love, or in fear are not masks hiding the real you but genuine alternate personalities, shaped by survival. The episode examines perfectionism, passive aggression, romantic longing, and SSRI-induced personality shifts through this lens.
Most people with dyslexia, ADD, and related phobias feel stupid despite high intelligence. Dr. Harold Levinson argues the root cause is inner ear dysfunction, not brain damage, and that treating the cerebellum can lift reading difficulties, phobias, and chronic disorganization at once.
What if every addiction or compulsion is run by a hidden alter self, not the person you know yourself to be? Armand DiMele draws on his decades treating dissociative identity disorder to argue that alter personalities, from the false front to the persecutor, operate in all of us, driving behaviors our primary self disowns.
