How One Thought Can Shift Your Entire Day
It’s 6:40 in the morning and there is no coke in the house because somebody (I’m not naming names) didn’t pick it up the night before from the Walmart. You…
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Your Thoughts Are Powerful, but Not Always True
Some thoughts show up wearing a suit and tie. They sound official. Most of them come in with a clipboard and a confident voice. The thoughts tell you things like…
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What Changes When You Finally Let Go
This month, I have been telling you what to put down. This one is the report on what’s over there. I want to give you the honest version, including the…
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Choosing Presence Over Perfection
A perfectionist is never in the room. She’s four hours ahead of it, running the check. Is this going to turn out? I have to make sure everyone is happy….
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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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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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You Can Control Your Response, Not the Trigger
Let’s start with what’s not negotiable, because most advice in this area skips it and loses people immediately. You don’t get to choose your triggers. A certain tone of voice,…
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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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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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The Beauty of Becoming Less Busy, Less Loud, Less Burdened
In July you can’t see thirty feet into those woods behind my place. By the first week of November you can see all the way to the fence line, and…
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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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Learning to Feel Safe in Your Body Again
Every so often a client shows up ready to charge straight at the worst memory on the first visit. They come at it with machete out and a “let’s go”….
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Freeze Mode: When Your Body Shuts Down
Remember the man from earlier in this series, the one who goes completely blank when his wife raises her voice? We owe him a whole post, because freeze is the…
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Why Trauma Lives in the Body, Not Just the Mind
You are driving along fine until you pass a certain exit, and your chest tightens before you even register where you are. Or a stranger in the grocery store wears…
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Learning to Speak Kindly to Yourself Again
Try something for me. For one day, just listen to how you talk to yourself. Write down the actual sentences. “Stupid.” “You always do this.” “No wonder.” Then look at…
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Letting Yourself Feel Without Being Consumed
“If I start crying, I’ll never stop.” I’ve heard that sentence in my office more times than I can count, and I understand why it feels true. The grief behind…
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The Difference Between Facts and Stories We Tell Ourselves
Here’s a fact: he didn’t come home until 2 a.m. and wouldn’t say where he’d been. Here’s a story: he’s probably been doing this for years and everyone probably knew…
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Boundaries With Your Phone
Sometimes the boundary you need is not with a person. It’s with your phone. The constant buzzing, the unread messages piling up, the pressure to answer fast, the feeling that…
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Still Blooming
Resilience, hope, and becoming There is often a desire to end a healing season with clarity. To name what has changed and to define what comes next. Real growth rarely…