What hypnosis reveals about where healing actually lives In January 2024, a team at Stanford published something in Nature Mental Health that should have been bigger news than it was. They recruited eighty people living with fibromyalgia, screened them for hypnotic ability, and deliberately excluded the naturally gifted, keeping only…
The Distance We Mistake for Healing Let me concede the ground where the critique is right, because everything after it depends on that concession. There are relationships a person should leave. Where there is violence, ongoing abuse, addiction that pulls everyone near it under, manipulation that rewrites your sense of…
Triggers for Parents of Estranged Adult Children: Why the Hour After Matters Most A woman I have worked with for some time told me about an ordinary Tuesday in a grocery store. She was standing in the produce section, and a few feet away was a mother about her age…
Abuse by a Family Member: Why We Tolerate It, and How We Stop I’ve spent a lot of time listening to people describe being hurt by the people they’re supposed to be safest with. A mother whose adult son speaks to her with open contempt. A woman in her fifties…
The Phrase That Keeps You Stuck I was sitting with a woman recently who had just come through the collapse of a business partnership. She had been overridden, dismissed, and eventually pushed out of something she helped build. She told me the whole story with remarkable clarity — the early…
The Permission to Want: Why You Hide What You Really Desire Preparing a client for a retreat last spring, I sat across from a woman who had spent twenty years on her path. Meditation every morning. Years of training in energy work. A depth of presence you could feel through…
The Open Heart in a World That Ends There is a particular stillness a person arrives with when they have decided, somewhere they cannot quite name, that the safest way through their life is to want less of it. They rarely say this out loud. It shows up instead as…
The Quiet Cost of Being Loved Conditionally A few years ago I had a client tell me, mid-session, that she didn’t think she’d ever actually wanted the career she’d built. She said it the way people say things they’ve never said out loud before, carefully, like she was checking it…
The Parent You’re Angry At Is Not the Problem There is a pattern I encounter often enough in the therapy room that I have come to expect it. Someone comes in carrying years of dense, complicated frustration toward one of their parents. They can describe it in precise detail: the…
The Kindness We Mistake for Virtue: Niceness, Boundaries, and Honest Care There is a particular kind of exhaustion I have come to recognize across years of sitting with people in therapy. It does not come from overwork, though people often arrive believing that is what it is. It comes from…











