Thanks for Sharing

We usually talk about trust issues as if the answer is to trust more. But trust isn’t something you have more or less of. It’s a judgment about a specific person, in a specific area of life, made over time. The tricky part about trust is learning to tell who you can trust and who you cannot. In this episode I talk about: Why trust isn’t either/or: it’s situational and graded (and why I trust our m...

Has your partner’s bad mood ever become your problem? In Part 2 of our boundaries series, we look at emotional fusion: what happens when one person’s feelings and another’s get so tangled that neither of you can tell whose are whose. We walk through a kitchen conversation many couples know, the four boundaries at work in every heated moment, and the difference between clarifying and invalidating....

Why does saying no feel so hard, even when your body already knows the answer? In this episode of Thanks for Sharing, therapist Jackie Pack explains what boundaries really are, drawing on Pia Mellody's model: not walls, not ultimatums, but the place where you end and another person begins. Through stories from her own family and marriage, Jackie shows what it takes to feel a boundary, speak it, an...

What if some of the things you do to feel safe are actually keeping you from the connection you want? Avoiding difficult conversations. Staying in control. Not asking for help. Keeping people at a distance. These behaviors can feel completely reasonable when they're built on beliefs you've carried for years. But what if those beliefs were formed at a time when you had fewer choices, less experienc...

The Questions Underneath Our Relationships: Someone can tell you they love you, and you can still wonder whether you matter to them. Underneath many of our reactions in relationships are questions we may never say out loud: Are you there for me? Can I reach you? Will you respond when I need you? Do I matter to you? We begin learning the answers in childhood. But those questions keep getting answer...

For this episode, Rachel and I tried something different. We borrowed the format—and the questions—from NPR's Wild Card with Rachel Martin: choose a card without knowing the question, answer it, and see where the conversation goes. Full credit to Rachel Martin and the NPR team for creating a format I love. And it took us places neither of us would have planned. We talked about the first time Rache...

A client said that to me a few weeks ago — she was leaving a job she had chosen to leave, and she couldn't stop rehearsing every grievance, every frustration, every way the place had failed her. She wasn't actually angry. She was trying to make the grief feel like certainty, because certainty is more comfortable than grief. This episode is about what happens in transitions — even the ones we chose...

A Conversation With Rupture Ever After:  here are things we can understand for years before they actually change us. We can know where a pattern came from. We can explain our childhood. We can recognize our attachment strategies. We can even know that something that happened to us wasn’t our fault. And still respond as though the old story is true. One of the things I love about therapy is watchin...

How well can we really know ourselves if we’re only willing to rely on our own perspective? We all have blind spots—not because we lack self-awareness, but because there are things we simply can’t see from where we’re standing. And sometimes the people who know us well can see patterns we’ve normalized, adapted to, or never recognized in ourselves. In this episode of Thanks for Sharing, I revisit...

Some losses don’t come with a funeral. Sometimes we’re grieving what didn’t happen—the nurturing we didn’t receive, the childhood there wasn’t room to have, or the adults who couldn’t be adults. We can build something different now. But healing doesn’t erase the impact of the wound, and making meaning from suffering doesn’t mean the suffering was necessary. Sometimes grief says, That mattered. And...

In this episode, we explore three relational skills that often get confused: Validation says, “If I am you—with your history, family of origin, and the meaning this held for you—I understand how you got there.” Agreement says, “I reached essentially the same conclusion.” Accepting influence says, “Because you matter to me, what you shared is allowed to affect my understanding or what I do next.” W...

For a lot of people, those are surprisingly difficult questions to answer. Sometimes we genuinely don't know. Sometimes we know, but we've learned to keep parts of ourselves private. Sometimes we've gotten very good at figuring out what's practical, reasonable, available, or best for everyone else before we consider what we actually want. And sometimes "be grateful" quietly became "don't want more...

There's a moment almost everyone knows: someone says something, and before you've even processed it, you're already deciding not to react. You smile. You let it go. And somewhere in that quiet moment, you might be abandoning yourself. In this episode, I talk about the difference between self-abandonment (the pattern) and self-betrayal (the moment-by-moment choice that builds it) — and why understa...

Your "difficult" child might just be determined. Your "too much" might just be someone who hasn't finished growing into her enthusiasm yet. In this episode, I talk about the difference between adaptation and development,  why the traits that got labeled as problems in childhood (stubborn, dramatic, bossy, shy) were often never the problem at all. They just hadn't matured yet. We go deep: reparenti...

The deepest injury of narcissistic neglect isn't what happened to you. It's what never consistently happened for you. Nobody wondering what you were thinking. Nobody asking what you felt. Nobody staying curious about who you were becoming. And when those thousands of small moments are largely absent, something else develops in their place. Not a self. An adaptation. An identity organized around ke...

In this episode, Rachel joins Jackie as they dive into the intricacies of early recovery in therapy. In this episode, they discuss the foundational stages of addiction recovery, focusing on the challenges faced by individuals new to therapy.  From addressing justification and rationalization to the role of accountability, Jackie and Rachel offer insights into the vital components that set the stag...

That question has been on my mind after two clients asked me to record this episode. For some of us, touch meant comfort and safety. For others, it meant obligation, manipulation, or even fear. Some of us grew up in families that hugged all the time. Others rarely experienced physical affection. And sometimes, it wasn't the presence or absence of touch that mattered most—it was what that touch cam...

Changing your patterns doesn't just change you. It changes the relationships around you.   One of the biggest surprises in healing is that being healthier doesn't always feel better, at least not at first. The people around you have learned the old dance just as much as you have. So when you stop over-explaining, caretaking, shutting down, or apologizing for everything, the relationship often wobb...

You can understand your pattern completely. You can know exactly where it came from, what it's protecting you from, why it shows up the way it does. And still, in the moment, you do the thing anyway. That's because understanding a pattern and interrupting it are two different skills. And interrupting it and actually replacing it — building something to put in its place — that's a third skill entir...

Understanding your patterns is one thing. Interrupting them in real time is something else entirely. In this episode, we talk about the tiny space between the trigger and the reaction — and how to find it, use it, and slowly make it bigger.    Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode? You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love heari...

Why can you understand your behaviors and still repeat them: You can explain exactly why you do it. And then you do it again.   That's not a character flaw. It's the difference between insight and integration, and they are not the same thing. In this episode, I'm talking about why understanding your patterns doesn't automatically change them, what's actually happening in your nervous system when i...

I said that in a men's group a few years ago — and the room went silent. Everyone immediately understood what it meant to organize your life around being needed. What surprised me was what came next: when I introduced the idea of being chosen — freely, without obligation — some of the men weren't just skeptical. They weren't sure relationships like that actually existed. They had seen duty. Obliga...

"All behavior makes sense. And if it doesn't make sense yet — we keep asking questions until it does." This is one of the phrases I say most in my work, and in this episode I'm unpacking where it actually came from. Not grad school. Life. I'm sharing two stories that changed how I see people — one from a cassette tape in my car, and one from a borrowed office and a father who asked me point-blank...

In this episode, we explore the difference between values and beliefs — and why that distinction matters so deeply in healing, recovery, relationships, and identity. We talk about: • Survival beliefs formed in childhood • The gap between who you want to be and what feels possible • Compliance-based identities • Emotional reality being deprioritized in families and systems • Why coping patterns oft...

In this episode, we explore the quiet loneliness of being surrounded by people who don't really know you, the fear underneath the masks we wear, and what it ttakes to build the kind of friendship that survives time, change, and all the complicated business of being human. Plus: the girls' weekend nobody talks honestly about, a friendship that didn't just fade but detonated, and a personal reckonin...