I was in conversation with a dear friend recently about something I was struggling with, and at some point she became worried that she wasn't being helpful. She was angry about something someone had done to me. I wasn't particularly angry. And she was worried that because she was having an anger response, she wasn't mirroring or validating me accurately enough. Maybe she was putting something onto my experience that wasn't there. Maybe she wasn't validating where I actually w

Vulnerability is a big word in the healing world. And yet we—even the most emotionally intelligent of us, even the therapy community—often unintentionally champion a definition and experience of vulnerability that is…well, the opposite of vulnerable. I saw it again the other day, in a comment that had nearly a thousand likes on a therapy page on social media. He said that the men he knew don’t struggle to open up, but rather they struggle to trust the share won’t be used agai

I saw a very popular article recently about all the ways we self-abandon in relationships. Where did you ignore your gut feelings? Or Ignore the red flags? Where did you tolerate disrespect? Where did you coach them instead of setting a boundary? Where are they not doing their work? Where did you accept less than you deserve? The problem is, however, that this is still self-abandonment, just now with greater psychological precision and vocabulary. …notice where the center of