Erin Nicole McGinnis, LMFT

Erin Nicole McGinnis, LMFT Led by Erin McGinnis, a licensed marriage and family therapist, our practice takes a unique approach to mental and emotional well-being.

At East West Holistic Psychotherapy, we are dedicated to providing a safe and supportive environment for individuals seeking holistic healing and personal growth. We specialize in trauma, EMDR, victims of narcissistic abuse, adult children of narcissists, trauma bonding, love addiction, women’s issues, dating, grief, spiritual psychology, stress, anxiety, depression, relationship issues, and more.

⚠️ Like a lot of people, I keep thinking about Lindsay Clancy. I think about her children. I think about her husband. Th...
08/04/2026

⚠️ Like a lot of people, I keep thinking about Lindsay Clancy. I think about her children. I think about her husband. There's obviously a lot that went wrong here, and I am not on the jury or close enough to the situation to really know all of the things that led to that horrifying night.

But as a therapist and a mom, I can say that the mental health field failed her. She told people she was not okay. She asked to be hospitalized. She checked herself into one of the top psychiatric hospitals in the country and was sent home after five days. In four months, she was prescribed 13 different medications. She did everything we tell mothers to do, and she still did not get the help she needed.

Postpartum psychosis runs in my family, so this one sits close to home. When I had my own children, I was afraid of what could happen to me, and afraid that even as a therapist, I would not be able to get real help.

If you are pregnant or postpartum and reading this, I am not trying to scare you. I am telling you the truth because you deserve better than what we are giving mothers right now. Postpartum depression and anxiety are not the same as postpartum psychosis. But depression and anxiety can get very serious in the postpartum period as well. Postpartum psychosis is treatable when it is caught early and taken seriously. If you are struggling, please find a therapist who actually understands postpartum mental health. You deserve to be believed. And if you have a history of postpartum anxiety, depression, or psychosis in your family, then try to find a therapist before you become pregnant or during pregnancy that you can trust, come up with a plan in advance of who can help you, and what everyone can do if they notice the signs of mental illness.

What does the Lindsay Clancy case bring up for you?

Sources
The Boston Globe and Biography.com, July 2026
Patient Experience Journal (SAGE), 2022
Medical Daily
Action on Postpartum Psychosis
Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health

08/03/2026

Every human being carries two fears: being engulfed and smothered, or being abandoned and left.

Healthy attachment isn't the absence of those fears. It's just having a workable strategy for staying both autonomous and connected.

But when you grow up in a dysfunctional home, asking for what you needed usually didn't work. Worse, a lot of us were punished just for asking. So what later gets labeled "anxious" or "avoidant" attachment is really just a maladaptive strategy for getting normal, healthy needs met, built by someone who learned the direct route wasn't safe.

But this can change. It's about healing the trauma underneath and slowly exercising the muscle of asking for what you need in a way that works.

The strategy was learned. Which means a new one can be, too.

Sources: Bowlby 1973; Main 1990; Mikulincer & Shaver 2016.

I cried every day in kindergarten.Not for myself. I cried because I could feel it when the child beside me didn't unders...
08/01/2026

I cried every day in kindergarten.

Not for myself. I cried because I could feel it when the child beside me didn't understand the lesson, or missed their mother, or felt left out.

Eventually, I learned to hide it. Most of us did.

We were told we were too sensitive, intense, or too much. So we learned to shrink, to read a room before walking into it, to manage how everyone else felt, and to call that being good.

Now consider what a narcissist is looking for.

You were not chosen because you were naive. You were chosen because you were perceptive, generous, and willing to absorb. There is research on this. People with predatory traits are unusually accurate at identifying who will accommodate them, sometimes from cues as small as how a person moves across a room.

Your sensitivity was never the problem. It was just the gift that got used against you.

This gift is also the way out. The attention you spent a lifetime pointing outward is the same attention that can finally turn toward you.

Nothing about you needs to be fixed. You are not broken and in need of repair. You are tender, and perceptive, and deeply human, and in need of healing.

New letter is live. Link in bio.

07/31/2026

PTSD is being chased by a tiger. CPTSD is living with one.

Every sentient being has the same sequence when the tiger appears.

First instinct is to fight or flee. If we're trapped and can't run, third instinct: fawn, befriend the tiger. And when even that fails, we freeze.

Most of the people who show up in my practice come in with CPTSD, relational or developmental trauma. And most of them have spent the majority of their lives in fawn or freeze. So much so that they've come to believe it's their personality. Or their attachment style.

It's neither. It's trauma. And trauma can be healed.

Sources: Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (1969, 1973); Levine, Waking the Tiger (1997); Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (2013).

Sara Gilson was a TikTok creator in Owasso, Oklahoma. She was 43 and had two children.In June, police told her that her ...
07/30/2026

Sara Gilson was a TikTok creator in Owasso, Oklahoma. She was 43 and had two children.

In June, police told her that her husband had been accused of molesting a 15-year-old girl on a team he coached. She filed for an emergency protective order the next day and a judge granted it. He was ordered out of the house and ordered to stay 100 yards away. On July 11 she posted publicly about the allegation. On July 23, police say he came to her home and shot her.

Leave. Get a protective order. Come forward. Those are the three things victims are told to do, and she did all three in six weeks.

Separation is the highest-risk period in a relationship built on coercive control. A protective order creates a legal consequence that only exists if a system enforces it in time. Speaking publicly is the step that most reliably escalates danger. Every instruction we hand to victims carries a risk we then ask them to absorb alone.

Coercive control is a criminal offense in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In the United States it is recognized in only a handful of states, and that number has been moving.

DomesticShelters.org publishes a state-level guide on how coercive control laws get passed, including where the law currently stands. Search "How to Pass a Coercive Control Law in Your State."

Accountability belongs to the person who chose to abuse women and children and to a legal architecture that reads a pattern of control as a series of separate incidents that each fall under the threshold.

What would have to be different for Sara Gilson to still be here?

If you are in something like this, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788.

Sources: NBC News. Evan Stark, Coercive Control. Jacquelyn Campbell, Danger Assessment.

07/29/2026

I believe everything has a trauma root.

So let's start with what trauma actually is, and what it does to your brain.

Picture a caveman who sees a tiger in the bushes. The back and middle of his brain light up on fire, and that pops the top right off his frontal lobes. For good reason. In that moment he doesn't need to think, he needs to run. Thinking would slow him down.
But as he runs, he's encoding everything. Every sound, every smell, every sight. So the next day, walking through that same jungle, when he hears a twig snap, he doesn't wait to confirm the tiger is real. He just runs. That's how a trauma trigger works. It bypasses the rational, human part of the brain entirely.
Then the frontal lobes come back online, and they do their job: they make meaning. And the story we tell right after is almost always a negative one, usually about ourselves. I can't protect myself. I should have known better.

We don't have literal tigers anymore. But we have threats to our sense of self. Because we need more than air and water to survive. We need to feel like we belong, like we matter, like we're good enough, like we have some control.

Trauma can be anything that threatens that.

If your reactions have ever felt bigger than the moment seemed to call for, this is why.
It isn't weakness. It's a brain doing exactly what it was built to do.

Sources: Arnsten 2009; LeDoux 2000; Ehlers & Clark 2000; Williams 2009.

Usually someone with CPTSD comes in with a word for it, something like sensitive or codependent or anxiously attached, a...
07/28/2026

Usually someone with CPTSD comes in with a word for it, something like sensitive or codependent or anxiously attached, and they have carried that word long enough to have built an identity around it.

The word almost nobody arrives with is trauma. Most people picture trauma as a car accident or a war or one terrible night, something with one specific memory, so complex trauma slips past the definition entirely.

Nineteen years in practice and I can tell you the exposure criterion is about the nature of the trauma, not the age at which it happened. Prolonged domestic violence, coercive control, and sustained emotional abuse in adulthood all meet it. When the person closest to you is the one you cannot predict, and leaving is constrained, the same adaptations develop.

Judith Herman described this presentation in 1992. The ICD-11 recognized it as a distinct diagnosis in 2018. It is real, it is studied, and it is treatable.

If you recognize yourself here, the two treatments I recommend most are EMDR and Internal Family Systems. EMDR targets how the memory was encoded, which is why talking about something repeatedly can leave the symptom unchanged. IFS works with the protective parts that developed in response to the original environment.

Which of these have you been calling something else?

Sources: World Health Organization, ICD-11, 6B41. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery. Pete Walker, Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Francine Shapiro, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Richard Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy.

07/27/2026

This is the beginning of a new series on trauma and CPTSD.

And I’m starting here because of a question I get some version of from nearly everyone who walks into my practice: why do I keep attracting the same person? Why do I end up in the same dynamic, with the same type, even when I know better?

There is a way to stop the pattern. I promise you that.

But the pattern starts with trauma. All of it has a trauma root, and until we understand that root, the pattern keeps running underneath us without our permission.

So in this series I’m walking through what trauma actually is, what it does to the brain, the difference between PTSD and CPTSD, and how CPTSD quietly reshapes the way you show up in relationships and the way you see other people.

That’s what makes the pattern breakable. Understanding what’s running underneath it.

You’re not broken and you’re not choosing this on purpose. You’re carrying something that makes sense once you can see it.

Follow along for the rest of the series.

You can look like you are managing everything and still be frozen inside.When we picture freeze, we picture collapse. Ca...
07/25/2026

You can look like you are managing everything and still be frozen inside.

When we picture freeze, we picture collapse. Cannot get out of bed. Blank stare. Shutdown. But there is a quieter version that keeps working, and almost no one names it. You go to work. You answer the emails. You make the dinner and remember the appointments. And inside, something is braced and still and far away.

It shows up as forgetfulness. A wired but tired feeling. Sitting in the parked car before you can make yourself go in. The five-minute task that sits undone for weeks. We call this lazy, unmotivated, checked out. And because you are still functioning, you often turn those words on yourself.

But laziness has no fear underneath it. Freeze does. What looks like not trying is very often a body that is still, quietly, braced for impact.

If you have spent this whole time believing something is wrong with you, I hope you can see it differently now. This is a normal response to painful events. There is nothing wrong with you at all for surviving.

The full letter is on Letters of Unlearning. Link in bio.

07/24/2026

Every single thing that made you a target is the same wiring that can set you free.

The empathy they exploited is real, and it is yours. Pointed back at yourself, it becomes the thing that finally lets you believe your own pain instead of explaining it away. It teaches you to be with yourself instead of by yourself.

The sensitivity, the senses you used to read everyone else, those become discernment. As you relearn to trust yourself, you get very good at knowing who is safe and who is not.

The complex trauma, when it is tended to, becomes growth that carries you further than you have ever gone.

And that open loop you cannot close? It does have an answer. The answer is within you. When you see that they were never the answer to anything, and no one outside of you ever is, you become more free than most people ever get to be.

None of this was a flaw to fix. It was a gift no one taught you how to use. You were never too much. You were never the problem.

This is the close of the neurodivergence and narcissistic ab*se series. Which trait are you ready to turn back toward yourself?

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