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…
Healing Beyond Talk Therapy: What Silence Does That Words Cannot There is a moment I have come to recognize in therapeutic work. It does not announce itself. The person across from me has just touched something real, something that cost them something to reach, and then they go quiet. Not…
How Society Keeps People Addicted: Addiction, Disconnection, and Relational Healing Addiction is often described as a problem of substances, willpower, or brain chemistry. We are told that people become addicted because drugs are powerful, because pleasure overwhelms reason, or because certain individuals lack discipline. There is some truth in the…
There are moments in therapy when someone says something that lands with unusual force in the room. They say, “I do not know why I am always bracing.” Not anxious about one thing in particular. Not panicked in any dramatic way. Just bracing. Bracing for conflict. Bracing for disappointment. Bracing…
There are moments in history that are not “over there.” They cross borders the way weather does, and you feel them in your body before you can name them. Something tightens, something wakes up, something old and unfinished inside us stirs. Iran feels like that right now: not because the…
Mary Oliver, in her poem In Blackwater Woods, offers this fierce and tender instruction for being human: To live in this world, you must be able to love what is mortal, hold it close as if your life depends on it, and when the time comes to let it go……
Every year as the holidays get closer, a familiar theme shows up in therapy sessions: “My family is so toxic.” “I just need to survive the visit.” “Being around my relatives sends me straight back into trauma.” The language of toxic family relationships, trauma, and nervous system collapse has become…











