https://www.psychologytoday.com/profile/1065303

Lyna Tévenaz Jones, 8156 Highland Drive, Sandy, UT (2026)

04/30/2026

"These roles result in powerless responsibility rather than social power.
Adolescent women especially are at risk for believing cultural stereotypes about female beauty as power.
As psychotherapists, we must increasingly become aware of the actual social meanings associated with the power of female appearance and whether or how they bring real satisfaction."
— Polly Young-Eisendrath & Florence Wiedermann, Female Authority: Empowering Women Through Psychotherapy.

What is the organic source of one's power and vitality, when unwrapped from external diktats that flood our minds? Even though women have greater power to choose how to direct their lives, physical appearance is perhaps more tokenized than ever, still the principal token of societal acceptance and a source of monetization on social media.
How do we unpeel the layers of conditioning around female physical appearance while still preserving the soul-rooted importance of beauty and its unique expression?

04/22/2026

Social media has partly amplified, displaced, and exploited the earlier, developmental need for idealisation.
When you see a “perfect” woman, mother, or professional, your mind temporarily leans on her.
Of course we know that the perfect facade portrayed online is oftentimes an illusion.
And her calm, her beauty, her organization, her success, her perfect self-regulation, her perfect life…gives you a brief sense that an ideal is possible and this is what it looks like. In turn, part of you may feel a bit more stable and confident just seeing this.
So the relief is real.
But it doesn’t last because that person isn’t actually in a relationship with you so your psyche cannot internalize those attributes.
You can’t truly take in what she has—you can only look at it.
And so, after a while, the feeling often shifts from inspiration to comparison because the lack of relationship does not allow you to integrate and absorb what you're drawn to.
It stays on the surface.

Disclaimer. For educational purposes only—not therapy. Content is general and may not apply to your situation. Trust your judgment. Not intended for abuse, active addiction, or certain mental health conditions.

04/20/2026

Breaking the continuity of transgenerational trauma, dysfunctional patterns, or even a chronic habit that no longer fits you often brings about difficulties on its own.
It is often wrapped in loneliness and being misunderstood.
Therapy and inner work often create a distance between you and your loved ones that is rarely discussed. How do you navigate relationships when you are no longer willing to ignore toxic patterns?
Others may remain in the same operating system, while you no longer share the same worldviews.
The internal tension engendered by our own work of consciousness can also be painful, as some of our relationships were established around old versions of self and those unconscious contracts. For the bond itself was often established *before* this work began.
It rested upon certain unspoken assumptions: remaining silent in certain situations, playing specific roles, and tolerating particular dynamics.
When YOU change, you step outside of that unconscious contract.
Consequently, several things may emerge for you.
This brings a sense of solitude and the frustration of finally seeing mechanisms that were once invisible. Perhaps the next stage is resisting the impulse to change the other person and instead adjusting your own internal stance. This requires accepting that some people will never meet you on certain levels—a genuine loss.
It may look like accepting that certain people will remain unable to meet you on certain levels. Letting go of the need to be understood in those specific areas (and this is a genuine loss). Lerning to remain connected without betraying yourself.

Relational maturity means learning to stay connected without betraying yourself, yet without demanding from others what they cannot give. It is the practice of seeing clearly without becoming morally superior, and remaining open without reverting to naivety or excusing their behaviors because you know better so you should be more *compassionate*.

04/13/2026

I'm thrilled to present to the San Antonio Society for Psychoanalytic Studies this Friday, 4/17, on the following topic:

The Mother Wound: A Jungian and Psychoanalytic Approach to De- Idealization and Internal Maternal Repair.

Healing the mother wound means reclaiming and releasing the archetypal Great Mother in our inner world and in our bodies.

The healing often involves shifting the "ideal" from the personal mother (who is human and limited) to the archetypal Great Mother.
The resentment one may rightly feel when the personal mother did not provide enough is often the gap between who she is and who we needed our mama to be, the ultimate, perfect, and only carrier of the Great Mother archetype.
And until we separate our personal Mother from the vast, timeless, and cosmic archetype that is the Great Mother, we remain enchained to a ghost, the ghost of the personal Mother, who she should and could have been.
To achieve psychic sovereignty, one has to face a great disillusionment - aka the painful realization that the "Perfect Mother" you have been waiting for - the one who will finally "see" you or give you the closure you need - does not exist and never did. But the archetype was and is real.

That's when we relinquish the demand for the human mother to perform as a goddess - an impossible task we are bound to fail and bound to be failed by.
The deepest healing work of the Mother Wound is a developmental arc, much deeper than reframes and cognitive gymnastics.
During my presentation, I will explore the arc of transforming the Mother Wound structurally.

- Differentiate clinically between the personal mother, the maternal selfobject, and the maternal archetype. Participants will learn to understand how the unresolved idealization of the personal mother contributes to the persistence of the mother wound.
- Identify the psychic stages involved in healing the mother wound, including de-idealization, withdrawal of archaic projection, and mature mourning, from both a Jungian and Self Psychology perspective.

The presentation will be online.
Message me privately if you are interested in joining the live lecture.

04/12/2026

At one point on the journey of inner work, there is a point of no return where one is no longer interested in doing the heavy lifting for fragile egos in dating.

For a long time, the reflex when faced with a potential partner in distress - even if that distress expressed itself through blame or insecurity - may have been to seek to impress, to soothe their insecurity, or to take the blame for something we said that landed in the epicenter of their untended wounding.

We functioned as a shock absorber for the other’s self-esteem fractures.
We justified ourselves, triple-explained our intentions, and tried to "keep the peace" to maintain a connection because we feared we might not meet someone like them again.
Then one day, the veil disappears.
Gone with the wind.
We see others' fragile ego looking for a crutch, a reassuring mirror, or a target for their blame.
And we leave the role of "ego-soother" on the curb.
We hold compassion for them AND we don't take on the responsibility to chronically fix their wounded self.
We are done doing the emotional work to protect a wounded self-esteem that refuses to take responsibility for its own healing.
Being a babysitter of insecurities simply no longer interests us.
We see the work the other hasn't even started and we begin to see the narcissistic wound waiting to be filled by anyone.

Suddenly, the realization is crystal clear: carrying the emotional burden of an adult who refuses to carry themselves is no longer an option. It is no longer appealing—it is repelling.
To stop comforting suffering egos gives us the space to reclaim our energy and place it where it is honored. By refusing to satisfy this expectation, we are not just setting a boundary; we are affirming that our psychic space is no longer a service zone.

We leave the other to face their own emptiness - not out of cruelty, but out of respect for our own internal economy, for the hard work one has put into psychological healing, awareness, releasing, therapy.
We know they can and we know we no longer can.

04/10/2026

The Tragedy of Living A Misaligned Life.

Many women are forced into a dominant orientation by insufficient mothering, by unconscious patriarchal demands of their early environment.
A naturally Medial woman, one who is porous and intuitive, may have had to build a rigid Amazonian armor simply to survive a chaotic household or a competitive school system.
For years, she performs competence and independence, but because it is an adaptation rather than an inherent structure, it never provides her with congruence with herself.
She feels like a stranger to herself because her psychic energy is being funneled into a defensive mask, leaving her true orientation to starve in the shadow.
Perhaps the most common displacement occured when the culture demanded that all women inhabit the Mother orientation as their primary home.

04/09/2026

Perhaps if connection depends on your exhaustion, it isn't actually a connection; it's a service.

04/08/2026

The forgotten psychology that explains why love, validation, and belonging aren't just nice to have - they're psychological survival.
There's a branch of psychology that explains why you feel empty when you're not acknowledged, why criticism hits so deep, why losing someone's admiration can feel like falling apart.

It's called Self Psychology.

You work hard but feel empty when no one notices your hard work. You need someone to really get you to feel okay. One critical comment can ruin your whole day.

There is nothing wrong you - your self needs are unmet. Nuance.

In the 1970s, a psychoanalyst named Heinz Kohut proposed something radical:
The self doesn't form in isolation. It grows or breaks through how others respond to us.
It was a complete rethinking of human psychology and a stable self is grown.

Kohut identified 3 needs every human self requires to feel whole:

1. Mirroring — to be seen and matter
2. Idealization — to look up to someone and feel safe
3. Twinship — to feel someone is like me

When these needs are met in childhood, we develop a stable, resilient self. When they aren't... we adapt.

The beauty of Kohut’s work is how it validates that fundamental human ache to be seen and understood. It moves away from pathologizing our needs and instead recognizes them as essential psychological oxygen.

04/07/2026

Perfection is a psychological dead end.
It curtails psychological growth.

If every need is met perfectly and instantly, the psyche has no reason to grow.

04/06/2026

The Relationship as a Regulator: When You Become Someone Else’s Psychic Skin

As I've analyzed my own family system and have been exposed to others in my clinical practice, I've come to learn a crucial difference around adaptation to emotions:
Internal regulation vs. unconsciously using another to regulate intolerable emotions.

Many have been in a relationship that feels intense, deep, and vital, yet they feel utterly drained after interactions.
That often reveals a difference in mode of regulation.
They have inadvertently become an "external regulator" for a partner or family member who cannot hold themselves.

At the core of a healthy psyche is the capacity for internal containment.

This is the ability to sit with an unpleasant emotions - frustration, disappointment, or anxiety - and process it within the self.
We "think" through our feelings, feel them, and contain them rather than simply reacting to them.
However, in many family systems, this internal capacity was never developed. Instead, regulation is chronically externalized.
When a difficult emotion hits, it isn't contained; it is ejected outwards.

Because the individual cannot regulate from within, they must find an external object/substace/individual to do the labor for them.

The relationship then becomes a place for discharge, you become the regulator.

This displacement may takes several forms:
The frantic discharge: Intense, circular conversations or "venting" that feels less like sharing and more like dumping.
The scapegoat: Projecting internal shame or inadequacy onto a partner so they are forced to carry the weight of it.
The rash decision: Acting out: quitting a job, ending a friendship, or reaching for a substance to forcibly quiet the internal storm.

In these dynamics, the bond becomes a tool for stabilization. You aren't being seen as a person; you are being utilized as a peripheral nervous system for them.
Stepping back involves returning to the other person what belongs to them: their own anxiety, their own frustration, and their own responsibility for regulation.

03/30/2026

Today, I want to share a reflection that frequently arises in my practice: that invisible burden of the need to never disappoint.

A woman who has never been allowed to disappoint is a woman who has never been allowed to truly exist from her own center.
The fear of disappointing doesn't just protect us; it enchains us.
It is a cord that strangles our freedom.

For many, forbidding themselves from letting others down feels more comfortable and familiar to sacrifice one's needs, wants, than to risk disappointing someone.
Self-sacrifice is perceived (unconsciously) as a lesser cost than the risk of breaking the bond. In their internal economy, "Me" is negotiable, but "The Other" is not.

Sacrifice becomes the currency with which they preserve emotional security. They tell themselves: "If I disappear, if I have no needs, if I never disappoint, then I am indispensable and therefore, I will not be abandoned."

Many women act as if they owe the world an infinite debt. Perhaps, the inner work involves asking: "Who signed this contract? And how long do you intend to keep paying?"

I feel it is also important to demystify disappointment: someone else's disappointment is an emotion that belongs to that person. It's not a diagnosis of their worth.
How do we grow tolerance for necessary disappointment?
Well we don't start with a revolution but with micro-moments of noticing the internal fear, allowing oneself micro-disappointments that have no vital importance. It means accepting being, for a moment, the "villain" or the "disappointment" in someone else’s script, to take up the seat of your own center.
It is a muscle that tires quickly at first, but eventually, it grows to carry your entire weight, and you become able to differentiate what you are truly responsible for (your inner world) and what others are responsible to process for themselves.

03/23/2026

The fall of a projection isn’t just a painful loss.
It’s the moment you realize how much you were relying on them to hold something for you.

Our culture talks about “red flags,” “toxic people,” and “moving on.” While those are important to discern, it rarely speaks about what happens inside the psyche when a projection collapses.

We need an understanding of both internal amd external aspects.
More often than not, the painful aftermath of a projection that collapses is not only disappointment in the other: it is the collapse of a psychic structure and purpose.

When a projection shatters:
- the idealized image disappears
- the invested psychic energy no longer has an object to land
- the part of oneself that had been projected onto the other person suddenly returns

And because projections organize around archaic needs, namely to to be seen, chosen, understood, their collapse reactivates something older within you.

That is why the pain often feels disproportionate to the actual circumstance.
The collapse of a projection is not just emotional pain.

It is structural shock for the inner world: what you thought was “out there” now returns to you - all at once - and now you have to find ways to carry and embody that quality that you cherished in the other.

At times, it can feel crushing because you’re not only losing the person, but you’re losing the way your psyche was being held together through them.

We see the painful shattering of projections within the bonds of romantic partnerships, spiritual pedestaling, authority figures, people we consider to be more knowledgeable.
The projection falls and it may cause a major reorganization of your inner self.

The fall of the projection is not just a loss; it is also the return of something that now asks to be carried by you, that you already have inside yourself. And perhas a direct path onto another chapter of your Individuation.

Lyna Tévenaz Jones

04/30/2026

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