Connection Codes

For the first time ever, the whole Connection Codes team is on the podcast together. Dr Glenn, Phyllis, Elijah, Laurel, Montse, and Jonathan look back on the 2026 Connection Codes Cruise: the rough start, the late-night emotion charades, the couples who worked through misses in front of the group, and the friendships that formed in a single week. It's a picture of what community can look like...

We're starting something new: Connected Parenting on our podcast, a monthly conversation on how to practice Connection Codes in parenting. Dr Glenn and Phyllis are joined by The Connection Codes COO Elijah Runyan, a dad of four (almost all teenagers!), to talk about what changed when he and his wife Christina chose connection over compliance. They get honest about the reflexive "no,"...

Most of us think clutter is a stuff problem. Organizing coach Tracy Hoth has spent 18 years learning it's usually something else: a skill we were never taught, a belief we picked up as kids, or an emotion we'd rather not feel. In this conversation, Tracy, Dr Glenn, and Phyllis Hill talk about why hired organizers rarely make a lasting difference, why clutter tolerance causes so much confli...

We say it all the time: "You need to process that." But what does that actually mean? John Kilmer is back with Glenn and Phyllis to answer the question so many people are quietly asking, and the answer is simpler and more physical than you might think. Through Phyllis's childhood memory of being told she couldn't make a sound, her mother's pattern of getting sick after hard n...

Elijah woke up one morning with a familiar weight on his chest. It was the start of the kind of heaviness that had cost him two to three weeks with his people, over and over, for years. This time he caught it. He named what was happening, and then he made the harder choice: he answered his wife Christina's call and let her in. Dr Glenn and Phyllis Hill unpack why isolation can feel safer than...

Dr Glenn and Phyllis Hill are recording from a new house, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, and the conversation turns to something some of us haven't fully unpacked either: grief. Phyllis opens up about the thirteen years since her mom died and the fact that she doesn't remember crying, or anyone asking her what was happening for her. Dr Glenn names the thing most of us do instead: spiri...

Two weeks before we hit record, Andrew came home white-faced and said, "Are you sitting down?" He'd been let go with no warning, and because their family's entire life in the U.S. is tied to that one job, this wasn't a setback; it was a sinkhole. In this episode, our dear friends and certified Connection Codes coaches Andrew and Lara Pilcher let us in on the rawest two weeks...

Your nervous system is running the show — and most of us never learned how it works. This week, psychologist Dr. Margaret Nagib joins Dr. Glenn and Phyllis Hill to unpack why the body sounds the alarm, why "sucking it up" actually works (and what it quietly costs you), and why the same protective wiring that shuts you down is also waiting, patiently, to bring you back online. From the smoke alarm...

We've all watched a kid "check out" and assumed they weren't trying — or weren't smart enough. This week, Teresa and Mark Lubovich blow that up. They run a learning center built on one radical tagline: connection before content. Their students don't get better at math because they get smarter; they get better because they finally feel safe enough to think. Glenn connects...

John Kilmer is back 💥 and this one we couldn't stop. Picking up where the last conversation ran out of time, Glenn and Phyllis sit down with John to talk about what it actually means to live in your body instead of in your head. Somewhere in the middle, something unplanned happens: John invites Dr Glenn and Phyllis Hill to do the Core Emotion Wheel not with words, but with sounds — a sigh for...

Two years after his first visit, Justin Jones-Fosu is back, and this time he's rewritten a story we all thought we knew. His new fable, Stop Chasing, Start Creating, reimagines the Tortoise and the Hare and asks a question most of us never stop to consider: what if the tortoise was never slow, just wise, strategic, and intentional? In a conversation that moves from absent fathers to morning ro...

We're taught to rush past grief. To fix it, explain it, or hurry someone back to "it is well with my soul." Pastor and author Vadim Yurchenko learned the hard way that healing runs the other direction. After losing his newborn daughter, Hope, at just 56 days old, Vadim discovered that before you can say it is well, you have to be honest enough to say it is not well. In this deeply mo...

Connection Codes coach Laurel Simpson returns to talk with Phyllis about chronic pain, not as a purely physical problem, but as something tangled up with fear. After a severe 2023 injury left her in constant pain, Laurel noticed her flare-ups spiked every single time she was under emotional stress. This is a tender, honest conversation about the pain-fear loop, the quicksand of unprocessed emotion...

Phyllis sits down with two friends in very different time zones — Laurel Simpson in Canada and holistic pain coach Esther Mooney in Australia — for a conversation about something most of us carry quietly: pain that doesn't have a clear cause. Esther spent over two decades chasing answers for pain that moved from her knees to her ankles to her pelvis to her neck, until she learned that the brai...

John Kilmer is back — and this time, Glenn and Phyllis wanted to go all the way in on somatic work and embodiment. What starts as a simple breathing exercise turns into a full tour of the body: where joy lives, where shame hides, why so many of us have been trained since childhood to ignore what our bodies are telling us. This episode builds directly on their first conversation with John, going ev...

Bridgett Blood is back — a year older, a year braver, and now specializing in the work underneath the work. She's traded a leap-of-faith move to Nashville for certifications in story work, narrative-focused trauma therapy, and Christian sexual health, all aimed at singles, daters, and engaged couples. This episode isn't really dating advice. It's about the thing beneath every relations...

In April, Laurel Simpson's husband was rushed to the hospital — and for ten days she didn't know if he would live. In this tender, remarkable conversation, Laurel walks Glenn and Phyllis through what it actually looks like to process Fear in real time when it won't stop coming. Not the tidy version where you feel it once and it passes — the version where Fear arrives wave after wave af...

Greg and Missy didn't come to Connection Codes as experts — they came as a couple who almost didn't make it. Thirty years married, with a near-divorce and a two-year separation somewhere in the middle, they found the Core Emotion Wheel during the slow work of rebuilding. In this episode, Phyllis sits down with these longtime listeners (who emailed in after we invited friends onto the show)...

What if your body has been keeping a record your mind never agreed to? In this episode, Glenn and Phyllis sit down with John Kilmer — occupational therapist, life coach, and newly certified Connection Coder — for a conversation about how emotion lives in the body long after the moment has passed. John shares what it was like to grow up between countries, why a hospital stay at 18 months still shap...

A trigger isn't an overreaction — it's stored pain asking to come out. From a rainforest compound in Costa Rica (howler monkeys included), Glenn and Phyllis unpack what's really happening when someone gets "triggered," why the brain can't tell the difference between a stubbed toe and an old wound, and why our instinct to calm people down is doing the opposite of helping....

Glenn and Phyllis at the mic. They open with a goodbye on a train platform in Switzerland — and the tears Phyllis chose not to swallow — then go straight into what crying actually does inside your body, and what it quietly costs you when you don't. Glenn unpacks the science (your tears are carrying stress chemistry out of you, and blocking them keeps it in), and Phyllis shares the grief that w...

After four years, hundreds of episodes, and countless wheels, Tera Wages is stepping down from her role as host of the Connection Codes podcast. In this special two-part episode, Dr. Glenn and Phyllis open with a heartfelt tribute from Costa Rica, and then Tera takes the mic solo from Spain — where she's hiking the Camino de Santiago for her 40th birthday — to share what the Connection Codes h...

Michelle and Kurt have been married since 1999 — and they're the first to tell you that "together a long time" isn't the same as "doing well." In this conversation, they share the moment Connection Codes stopped being a book on their shelf and started reorganizing their marriage. Michelle, a relationship coach herself, names something most of us have felt but never said...

Susan and Sean McGinnis drove two hours to a live Connection Codes event in Austin knowing almost nothing about the framework — just desperate to save a 30-year marriage that kept circling the same argument, every three or four months, for three decades. In this episode, they walk Glenn and Phyllis through what they now call "the 30-year fight": a cycle of hurt, still face, shutdown, and...

Bob and Jen Bevan are a married couple from Cleveland, Tennessee — 29 years in, two kids, three grandchildren, and owners of Witt's Frozen Custard. What they didn't expect was that the path to real connection would run straight through the Core Emotion Wheel. In this episode, Bob and Jen share what it was like to enter Connection Codes from very different starting points — Jen as a certifi...