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

I know so many of us work on self-kindness, self-compassion, self-acceptance, self-regulation, self-worth… But I don't know that I've ever been asked if I was warm with myself. Or if these things resided inside a climate of warmth. I came to find that often these qualities, that one might assume were warm, were for many…lacking in warmth. Warmth is something we know viscerally. It’s physiological. Relational. Somatic. Warmth in being held against a warm, caring body. Warmth o

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