Unprocessed

You've heard me say that feeling goes against doing. When I feel grief, I want to do more. I want to tend to others grief instead of sit in my own. This week, following the death of relative, I noticed this pattern and did something different: this is called opposite action. I explore why it's so hard to say "can you help me?" and how being a "helper," hides the part of...

We feel frustration when we are stuck, but in this episode, I share about my stuckness in a big life decision and what I learned about how to move through stuckness without force. It starts with getting to know the two opposing energies: stalling and forward moving, and then looking at the bigger fear under the fear you think you have about change. 

This episode is about loneliness and how those of us who give connection to others, can find ourselves in moments when we feel disconnected from ourselves. I share about how I sometimes hide my greatest wounds under my strengths and instead in this episode reveal the part of the wound I am ready to share, so I can reconnect to it.

We are learning from data that men, at large, are struggling in the US--feeling more isolated, removed, depressed and disconnected. In this episode, I unpack some of the reasons why, and how women sometimes weaponize their hurt around male unavailability by talking about men as if they are useless--the trope of the buffoon husband who can't make his way around the home. Instead, I revisit the pled...

In this week's episode, I share about a recent interaction with someone I love where I felt angry and had a split second to decide what I wanted to do with that anger. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy offers three intentions for communication: objective effectiveness (getting your need met, so you have to appeal to the other person), relationship effectiveness (maintaining the connection), and s...

This week I talk about how no high is for free, but why so many of us are willing to pay the price of something that harms us with something that takes the edge off for us. James Baldwin said that many of us want to be "relieved of an affliction" but we don't want to give up a crutch. Tune in to learn about how choosing control prevents us from wielding our true power, and what we ha...

I share about a time when anxiety was actually distracting from my grief. Therapist Sheryl Paul taught me "the noise in our brain distracts from the pain in our hearts." While anxiety is a very sentient experience, it actually works to conceal the bigger, juicier, often heavier emotions underneath. In this episode I share my perspective on developing long-term, unrushed, relationships wi...

There I said it. I own that I expect presence in my relationships and this is a tall order in 2025--with so much distraction and things to pay attention to. Listen in to hear about the difference between healthy expectations and ones that weigh a relationship down, why we gossip and how it fills a gap when presence is too hard, and why I believe we need to demand presence from the people in our li...

In this episode, I share about a time when I lost my sense of wonder. Overly responsible children tend to become overly responsible adults, and these adults have a hard time being comfortable with the fluidity and chaos that comes with wonder. Listen in to hear how getting lost, giving up attachment to reassurance, learning what's really underneath striving, and more helped me find my way back...

Do visionaries have any fun? I notice those of us that curate amazing experiences for others, sometimes have the LEAST fun. We give away the thing we need and we are afraid to own we expect something in return. In this episode I share about my struggle not with saying the hard things, but letting people into HOW I feel while I say the hard thing. Why don't we want people to hear the cracks in...

In this episode I share about an interaction I had with a friend, when I started to question if I did something wrong because of a shift in her affect that I observed at dinner. I unpack this interaction by describing why we are hypervigilant to others and reference Meg Josephson's, LCSW, new best-selling book "Are You Mad at Me?" to help us understand where this question comes from....

This week I share about my desire to teach someone a lesson when I felt wrong. I unpack why we go into teacher mode when we are hurt or disrespected, and how this actually harms connection rather than fosters it. As humans, we often try to use our heads to solve problems of the heart, and then we wonder why our kids/friends/partners don't hear us--we are speaking with cognition, when others ar...

In this episode, I share about a time someone walked away from me because they didn’t want to see me, and I pursued this person, even with their back turned to me. I unpack what was happening for me, and explore the reasons why we knock on closed doors even when they continue not to open for us.

This week I explore the times I've said "I can make this work," as a way to avoid the inner knowing that something isn't working, that I don't like what I am doing, or who I am spending time with. I dig into the psychological reasons why women try to make it work and my process of digging into what's underneath it with definiteness and discernment.

It's a topic that we don't want to talk about, but sometimes our needs for our friends, our longings and our fears that get kicked up in friendship, reveal unmet needs we have for our mother. In this episode I unpack how the mother wound might show up in women's friendships (unrealistic expectations, unclear needs, advice giving, feelings of abandonment, etc) and how totally ok this is. I also sha...

This week, I invite my 7 year old daughter on the podcast to talk about our relationship with mistakes. She shares about how she disliked her mistakes and what she did to shift that. I share about how I learned to hide my mistakes to secure belonging (an important fear-driven behavior that perfectionists take, as well as people who have marginalized identities), and how this podcast has helped me...

In this episode I trace the path of the needless person in relationships--she comes across as if she's down with anything, gets angry along the way, and then buries her needs through partner critique, and creates the scenario of her biggest fear realized: she will be a burden. In reality, it's not her needs that are a burden to the other, it's that they are a burden to herself. Listen...

I don't want to record a podcast this week and it got me thinking about what do we do when we are not in the mood? Why do we really procrastinate (hint: we don't procrastinate tasks, we procrastinate feelings that those texts bring up). In this week's podcast, I talk about sharing one true thing and getting to know the variations in my "I don't want tos." I don't want to talk about this, but I wil...

I wandered through a farmers market and started to question if I should live a life like this. In this episode, I talk about how many of us tell ourselves what we want is the thing (the body, the house, the relationship, the job title), but what we really want is the wanting itself: to feel connected to the sense of possibility that the wanting provides. Listen in to hear about how I've shifte...

What happens when we hold a mirror up to one another and don't like the reflection? My husband and I get into how we've learned to express shame and anger in a way that fosters connection instead of ruptures it. We learned that perfectionism is just trying to prevent us from feeling shame, but what do we do when shame and anger are present and hot, prompting us to lash out, shut down, or r...

In this episode, my husband joins me to discuss how we fought in the past and how we fight differently now. This is one of the best episodes yet--I use my lens as a couples therapist to get real about how we remain disconnected, when we really want to be close, and what I had to do to get the intimacy that I so craved. Hint: It had a lot to do with how I was showing up, even though I wanted to bla...

Esther Perel says in every relationship, there's someone who is more afraid of losing themselves and someone who is more afraid of losing the relationship. In this episode, I share about how I went from being the person afraid of being alone to the person who is more afraid of not being myself. I explore the fear of being alone and why we busy ourselves to avoid it, along with how we sneakily...

There I said it, Sometimes choosing health is the boring thing to do. My biggest fear was settling and not living the biggest juiciest life. And yet, what if our biggest fear is what we need? Listen in as I talk about data on choice, why we shouldn’t strive to not be triggered, and differentiate between complacency and contentment.

Many times we tell ourselves we are "torn," to avoid having to sit with the fear of making the decision we know we need to make. I share about a difficult choice point in my life, how I went toward my fear, and explore we want to know WHY before we take the leap. I also share a song that helped me lean into the sorrow, without the why, and share some of that sorrow with all of you.  Disc...

We choose what's familiar, not what is best for us. We enact dynamics that remind us of childhood and the emotions that we felt the most, not the ones we want to feel. Listen is as I talk about my compulsivity toward drama and high intensity experiences and what data is saying about the relationship between the increase in anxiety and the decrease in the willingness to fuck up.