MC Somatics: Rebuilding The Self

What happens when you stop trying to fix every uncomfortable feeling, and every unanswered question in your life? This week, I follow a resurgence of compulsive urges beneath the behavior itself and into something much deeper: emotional loneliness and the lifelong need to feel known. I talk about the ways we try to fill that space, with food, achievement, relationships, over-functioning, or consta...

I went to Europe expecting mountains, adventure, and probably a few travel disasters. I didn’t expect to find an old relationship blueprint waiting for me there. In this week’s episode, I unpack what seven days across Europe unexpectedly showed me about attraction, attachment, and the emotionally unavailable men who have felt familiar to me for most of my life. For the first time, I watched the pa...

What if the internal battle we call relationship OCD sometimes has another layer underneath it? In this week’s episode, I take last week’s conversation about incongruence even deeper—into attachment, moral injury, emotional labor, and the conflict that happens when one part of us desperately wants connection while our adult self is saying,  this doesn’t feel right anymore. I explore what happens w...

What happens when what someone tells you doesn’t match what their patterns are showing you? In this week’s episode, I explore the incongruence gap, and why, for me, that gap can become a powerful trigger for OCD, rumination, and what I call the  mental courtroom : the endless internal litigation between what I’m being told and what I actually see, feel, and experience. I talk about hypervigilance,...

In this week’s episode, I talk about the point where isolation stopped feeling like freedom and started becoming isolation. What began as space to heal eventually became a place where loneliness, avoidance, and OCD could quietly take over. I explore how the same fears can show up whether we’re single or partnered; they simply wear different clothes. I also talk about the deeper attachment wound un...

In this week’s episode, I explore what happens when we stop trying to replace our losses and finally allow ourselves to grieve them. Over the last four years, I’ve lost relationships, places, dreams, stability, and my beloved dog. Like so many of us, I’ve found myself wanting to fill the empty spaces—to get another dog, start dating, or chase the next chapter. But what if those impulses aren’t wha...

Sometimes we learn the lesson, and then we have to live through the burn. In this episode, I unpack the aftermath of betrayal, broken trust, toxic group dynamics, and having my intuition confirmed in ways I wish it hadn’t been. I also connect with the part of me that desperately wanted to be heard, believed, and validated, and what changed when I realized she no longer needs anyone else to take he...

In this week’s episode, I explore what it means to enter a stealth season a time when healing is no longer something we perform, explain, or seek validation for, but something we quietly protect. I talk about the power of withdrawing our energy from people, places, and dynamics that keep us tethered to old versions of ourselves. Instead of defending our choices or trying to be understood, we begin...

In this week’s episode, I talk about a boundary that has become non-negotiable for me: I no longer stay in relationship with people who continue to enable, excuse, or maintain close relationships with those who have caused significant harm. This isn’t about punishment or asking people to choose sides. It’s about recognizing that the company we keep reflects the values we are willing to stand besid...

In this week’s episode, I talk about what healthy relating looks like when chaos is still part of your relationship blueprint. I share a recent experience where I could see the old patterns happening in real time, the attraction to chaos, the familiar pull toward what I already knew, and how, this time, I chose differently. But what surprised me most was the grief that came afterward. I realized I...

In this bonus episode, I talk about connecting with the part of myself that had become exhausted from tolerating things just to stay in connection. The part that had spent years adapting, accommodating, overlooking, and enduring because losing connection once felt harder than losing pieces of myself. Through a recent chaotic experience, I finally saw her clearly, and instead of asking her to toler...

In this week’s episode, I open up about my experience with Relationship OCD (ROCD), the intrusive thoughts, relentless doubt, shame, and guilt that can make relationships feel overwhelming. I share what it has looked like in my own life and the exhausting mental loops that can leave you questioning your thoughts, your feelings, and yourself. This is a deeply personal conversation about the invisib...

In this week’s episode, I explore the version of ourselves that gets trapped in time, the self that learned to survive, fawn, appease, and abandon its own truth just to keep relationships intact. I share how some of my biggest decisions, including buying a bed and even a house, were driven not by what I wanted, but by an attempt to quiet someone else’s needs and keep the peace. Looking back, they...

In this week’s episode, I talk about the three pillars of capacity: financial, physical, and emotional. I explore how wanting something is not always the same as having the capacity for it, and why so much wisdom lives in being honest about what season we are actually in. I use the example of wanting a poodle—because my dream capacity says yes, but recognizing that my current capacity needs a couc...

In this week’s episode, I talk about what comes up when we actually sit with ourselves. The recurring themes. The thoughts we keep circling. The feelings waiting underneath the noise. And the honest question of whether we are truly making time for ourselves at all. I explore what self-connection can reveal when we slow down enough to listen, and I share a simple exercise of writing first thing in...

In this week’s episode, I talk about the bare minimum and how healing changes our ability to see it, and how what once felt normal can start to reveal itself as emotional manipulation, low effort, or a profound lack of emotional availability. I share examples from my own life and how, as I healed, certain friendships began to fall away because people could no longer meet me emotionally. What I onc...

In this episode, I talk about the remnants of narcissistic abuse—the ways it can linger long after the relationship or dynamic has ended. I explore what gets left behind: self-doubt, hypervigilance, confusion, internalized blame, difficulty trusting ourselves, and the exhausting habit of overexplaining, appeasing, or questioning what we know. I talk about how this kind of abuse does not just wound...

In this episode, I talk about the years I spent trying to convince myself that if I just healed enough, certain things would stop bothering me. I explore how that mindset became its own form of self-gaslighting, how it created internal conflict, disconnected me from what I was actually feeling, and turned healing into a maladaptive coping mechanism. Instead of listening to my reactions, I kept ass...

In this episode, I explore the symbolism of what we drive and how our choices often reveal more than we realize. The cars we choose can reflect what we value, such as safety, status, freedom, comfort, reliability, adventure, or image, and those same values often show up in our relationships. I talk about how our preferences are rarely random, and how what carries us through the world can mirror wh...

In this episode, I explore communication as a high art form, something far deeper than simply saying words. I talk about how we come to connection from very different places: sometimes from defensiveness, and sometimes from a real desire to understand. That difference shapes everything. It shows up in our tone, our timing, our ability to listen, and whether our words create clarity or distance. Th...

In this episode, I talk about moving out of the cycle of constantly fixing ourselves. I explore what happens when we stop treating ourselves like a project and start building a life that actually supports us. I talk about reducing the pressure to improve, perform, and constantly work on ourselves, and how choosing what feels more peaceful, honest, and regulating can change our relationship with an...

In this episode, I talk about the immense grief of living without repair. I explore what it has meant to have a father who never really repaired with me, who made the pain about himself, and how that absence shaped what I came to expect from other people. I talk about the “look on the bright side” kind of bypassing that skips over what is real, and the deeper wound of having your hurt minimized in...

In this week’s podcast, I talk about authenticity as the cost of admission to your life. As the old self dissolves, there are patterns, relationships, and parts of an old life we can no longer participate in. Not because we are better than before, but because something in us has become too honest to keep abandoning itself. This episode is about identity, change, and what happens when authenticity...

In this episode, I talk about what happens when we already know the answer, but do not trust ourselves enough to act on it. So instead, we go to committee. I explore the ways we outsource our knowing by polling other people, gathering more opinions, asking the same question in different rooms, and hoping someone else will give us permission to do what we already know is true. I also talk about wha...

In this episode, I talk about how resentment is often not randon, it is a signal. More often than not, resentment builds when we have missed a boundary that was necessary, ignored what we needed, or kept saying yes when something in us was already asking for a no. I explore how resentment can point us back to ourselves, showing us where we have overextended, self-abandoned, or tolerated too much f...