Control and Trust in Parenting
Parenting is the only job I know of where doing it well means becoming less necessary every year. Every other role rewards indispensability. This one requires you to deliberately engineer…
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Teaching Your Nervous System That It’s Safe to Let Go
You cannot talk a nervous system into safety. I wish somebody had told me that earlier in my career. I spent a while handing people very good information and watching…
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Learning to Sit With Discomfort
Almost everything we’ve talked about in this series is an escape hatch. Checking gets you out of not knowing. Managing gets you out of watching somebody struggle. Perfecting gets you…
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Small Acts of Letting Go That Build Trust
Nobody lets go of everything in one afternoon. That’s the mistake I watch people make after a good sermon or a hard conversation. They decide to surrender it all, they…
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Releasing the Fantasy That Control Keeps You Safe
I drove past a field once that had a gate in it. Chained, padlocked, hinges good. And no fence. Not on either side. Just a locked gate standing in the…
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Letting Go of the Need for Certainty
We had a storm come through here a while back. When I was younger, I checked the radar eleven times in about two hours. The storm did what the storm…
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What You Can Control (And What You Can’t)
There’s a version of this list on every therapy office wall in America. I have mixed feelings about it, because the tidy version leaves out everything that makes it hard….
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Why Letting Go Feels Unsafe
People describe this to me in almost physical terms. I asked a woman once what would happen if she stopped checking her husband’s location, and she put her hand flat…
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The Cost of Trying to Control Everything
Nobody ever hands you an invoice for this. That’s the trouble with it. If somebody walked up and said the price of keeping this grip is your sleep . In…
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When Control Starts Running Your Life
There’s a line somewhere, and almost nobody notices crossing it. On one side, you’re using control. You make lists, you plan ahead, you’re the one who remembers the field trip…
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Control Is Often a Trauma Response
Nobody grows up wanting to be the person who reorganizes the dishwasher after somebody else loads it. We use words like controlling and micromanaging and type A. Those words all…
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Learning to Be Okay With Not Knowing What’s Next
Your brain would rather have a terrible answer than no answer. That’s not a flaw in you personally, that’s standard equipment. An open question sits in your system as an…
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When You Stop Forcing Growth
Personal growth has been turned into a productivity category, and I think it’s doing real harm. Look at how we talk. Working on yourself. Doing the work. Healing journey with…
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God Does Not Rush the Seasons
Drive the Western Kentucky Parkway in the middle of September and look at the hills. Some trees are still fully green. Some are at peak, the kind of orange that…
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The Season That Teaches Us to Trust the Process
Trust the process. I’ve heard that sentence used to dismiss more real pain than almost any other four words in my line of work, and I’ve also watched it be…
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The Fear That Comes With Release
There’s a thing that happens in therapy that used to catch me off guard when I was new. Somebody comes in month after month, working hard, doing the reading, sitting…
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Fall Reminds Us That Change Can Be Beautiful
Here is a piece of grade school science that changed how I see the fall coming. Leaves do not turn colors. Not really. The yellows and the oranges were in…
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When the World Slows Down, So Can You
Here is a contradiction nobody names out loud, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. The natural world spends September downshifting. Days shorten, sap withdraws, animals slow down…
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How Trauma Survivors Can Strengthen Their Minds and Build Lasting Resilience
This is a guest post from a contributing writer. The words and views here are the author’s own. I read every guest submission before it runs. However, publishing is not…
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Flight Mode: When You Can’t Slow Down
She showed me her calendar like it was evidence, and honestly, it was. Three months, not one white square. Work, church committee, kids’ ball, the extra project she volunteered for,…