Dating Advice Blog
Confidently Authentic was started by Krystal Mazzola Wood, LMFT to provide a mentally healthy dating advice blog. The articles on this dating advice blog range from guides to make dating easier and stop wasting your precious time to those that may not seem like they’re about dating at first.
Other articles on this blog focus on mental health and therapy skills on topics such as overcoming perfectionism, developing a self-care practice, and healing from trauma. Initially, these types of articles may seem strange on a dating advice blog yet after years of clinical practice (and personal trial and error), Krystal realized that your mental wellbeing is the foundation for all your other relationships. In other words, the more balanced and self-loving you feel, the healthier the types of relationships you can attract – and maintain.
Finally, there are articles on this blog which focus on maintaining healthy relationships – or overcoming toxic or difficult traits in relationships. These articles include “How to Fix Relationship Problems: 4 Important Tips from a Couples Therapist” and “Good Communication in a Relationship: A Couples Therapist Explains.”
This blog was designed to help you each step of the way in your dating process from finding the right person for you to maintaining a healthy relationship.
Krystal is passionate about supporting you and welcomes any questions you may have. You may reach out to her on Instagram or send her an email at krystal@confidentlyauthentic.com. Your information will always be kept private while Krystal may answer your questions in a general advice article.
Relationship therapist & author
Krystal Mazzola Wood is a licensed marriage and family therapist. For over a decade, she has helped clients heal their relationships with others and themselves. She currently sees clients at her private practice, The Healthy Relationship Foundation. Her clinical experience and expertise led her to write her two best-selling books, The Codependency Recovery Plan: A 5 Step Guide to Understand, Accept and Break Free from the Codependent Cycle and The Codependency Workbook: Simple Practices for Developing and Maintaining Your Independence. Her third book, Therapy Within Reach: Setting Boundaries, will be released September 2023. Krystal lives in Phoenix, AZ with her husband and their two rescue pets, a cat and dog. When she’s not writing or seeing clients, Krystal is spending time with her family, reading and participating in her book club, doing yoga, going to cycle, or just relaxing in the Arizona sunshine.
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Books for improved relationships
My Personal Dating Journey
I struggled for almost two decades in my dating life. I don’t want you to struggle as much or as long as I did which is why I started this blog. This is truly the dating advice blog I wish was available when I had been dating!
I was the queen of the situationship as well as on-again, off-again relationships. Dating was incredibly hard for me because I didn’t know what I wanted. Instead, I sought validation from emotionally unavailable men to “prove my worth.”
Yet, I really wanted to find “my person” to experience the life-long adventure of intimacy. I knew something had to change and that meant my relationship with myself. I needed to find my worth from within and know that even if a romantic partnership was never mine my life still mattered!
This self-worth guided me to date in a completely new way – one rooted in self-worth and self-protection. I focused on what I really wanted – not what was “cool” and set boundaries. I started to listen to and trust myself. No longer was I ignoring red flags or self-sabotaging. I stopped choosing to experience hurt just to have a good “story.” I stopped feeling “guilty” and obligated to spend my time with someone and started setting genuine boundaries.
Dating in this self-loving way did ultimately guide me to my husband who is the partner I always dreamt of. But this only happened because I healed my relationship with myself first.