In therapy, it’s easy to assume that the request a client makes is the place we should begin. They ask for communication tools, conflict strategies, or better ways to respond. Yet sometimes those requests point toward something much deeper.

I’ve found myself becoming increasingly curious about what happens when a client’s request isn’t actually their deepest need. What if the request itself reveals the hopelessness they’ve been carrying for far longer than the relationship in front of them?

He was working hard.

His wheels were turning visibly, tracking what was happening in the room. He was choosing his words carefully, trying to engage as a good partner in therapy is supposed to. There was real effort in it.

But his body told a different story: shoulders hunched and collapsed, face drained, and eyes discouraged, staying away from mine.

The effort and the defeat were happening simultaneously.

His wife had reacted loudly and critically to a question he’d asked their adult son—something ordinary about a car repair. As we slowed that moment down and I asked him what sense he made of her reaction, he was careful at first. Eventually, he admitted it: he found her controlling and overbearing. His response in the moment had been to shut down. To refuse to engage in what he experienced as toxicity.

I reflected the meaning he’d made. The hurt underneath it. The logic of his withdrawal.

He heard me. It bounced off.

He wasn’t interested in being understood. He wanted me to tell him what to do differently.

In EFT, we are trained to work at the level of attachment meanings and emotions. To help partners feel what is underneath the pattern. To create moments where one person risks something more vulnerable or authentic, and the other can receive it.

That map is accurate. Yet in this room, with this man, it was not enough.

Because the man asking me for a solution was not primarily a man with an attachment wound. He was a man who had stopped expecting anyone to be there for him. His request for a tool—tell me what to do differently—was not resistance to the work. It was the work, presenting itself.

A man who still believes understanding is possible doesn’t require you to skip it.

I didn’t give him what he asked for, because I couldn’t.  I didn’t ignore the request either.

I named how hard he was working. I named that he wasn’t interested in my understanding—that he saw no point in it. Then I stayed with that, wondering aloud how long it had been since there’d seemed to be any point in looking for someone to understand him. To be there for him.

I named the hopelessness I could feel in the room. The sense that she would never be able to see him and appreciate him. That something in him had already concluded this, even while another part of him kept showing up and turning his wheels.

I named the validity of wanting a solution. Of course he wanted something concrete. I wasn’t going home with them. I wasn’t the one who would have to live inside whatever didn’t change.

I didn’t offer this all at once. I stayed with each piece long enough to see whether it landed or would, too, bounce.

This is where I find myself expanding the EFT map.

This reflection builds on an earlier exploration of how healing changes when we begin making room for emotions that have long been pushed away. You may also enjoy The Distance We’ve Had to Travel to Survive.

EFT illuminates the attachment meanings that organize a couple’s cycle: I don’t matter. I’m too much. I’m alone. It teaches us to lean into the softer emotions beneath the surface, helping partners risk vulnerability in each other’s presence.

What I have come to track, before any of that, is something quieter: How close is this person to the belief that any of it is possible?

Is there enough proximity to hope—or to the grief of its absence—for the work to have anywhere to land?

When hopelessness is this complete, asking for emotion is asking someone to risk something they have already concluded is pointless. The request for a solution is not a defense against feeling. It is the feeling, organized into the only form that still makes sense.

To work with this man, I had to go to where he actually was—not to where the model suggested he should be.

This is also where the question of therapist responsibility shifts.

For a long time, my quiet pressure in rooms like this was: find the right reflection, the right question, the right way through. As though the next move might finally unlock what hadn’t shifted.

What I have come to understand is that this pressure, however well-intentioned, is part of the problem. When I am organized around producing movement, I am adding to the pressure already in the room. The room is already full of two people who have been trying to produce something for a very long time.

My role is not to move the work forward. It is to create conditions where movement becomes possible if the system is ready to organize in that direction.

That shift echoes another reflection, The Distance We’ve Had to Travel to Survive, where I explore how healing begins by appreciating the distance someone has needed in order to survive before expecting vulnerability.

That is a quieter role. In some ways, it’s a more demanding one.

It means staying present with shoulders slumped and eyes discouraged, without trying to lift them. It means naming hopelessness without rushing toward hope. It means validating the request for a solution without becoming the person who provides one.

Sometimes it means simply being someone who stays in a room where the deeper conclusion is that no one  does.

I don’t know what, if anything, shifted for him that day.

What I noticed was that toward the end of the session, his eyes came to mine briefly. I didn’t see hope, exactly, but  something less defended than what had been there before.

That was enough.

Not because it meant something had changed. But because it meant something had been seen.

Which is, I’ve come to believe, always where it begins.

Photo by Ema Ak. 

We often think healing begins by uncovering the emotions beneath anger. But over time, I’ve found myself noticing something that comes even before emotion.

Distance.

The distance someone has had to travel from themselves in order to survive.

This realization has gradually reshaped how I understand Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the nervous system, and the conditions that allow people to reconnect with themselves and with those they love.

The first thing I track in a therapy room now is not emotion.

It’s distance.

How far someone has had to travel from themselves in order to survive—and how carefully their body has learned to hold that distance.

Most clearly, the distance shows up in the eyes. Rarely are they present and near. Some focus somewhere else entirely, as if following something unfolding in another world. Others stay just away from mine. Some are open but shuttered inside, the way a house can look lit but empty. And sometimes the eyes engage—the head nods, the words respond—but the feeling inside them remains dull and distant, the emotion no longer matching the movement.

It was the first thing I tracked when she and her partner sat down across from me.

She was anxious about being there—about committing so much to saving their marriage. I appreciated the honesty of it.

As she talked about the problems in the relationship and her wife’s affair, her voice dripped with hostility.

When she spoke about her childhood, the stories sounded well-worn. The tone carried a familiar edge:

Are you going to see me as the broken one, too?

From Emotionally Focused Therapy, I learned to recognize movements like this as protests against devastating attachment messages:

I don’t matter. I’m too much.  I’m alone. I’ll be abandoned.

EFT taught me to lean toward hostility rather than pull away from it—to see anger not as pathology but as protest, and to look beneath it for the softer emotions that often bring people back into connection.

But as she spoke that day, my attention kept returning to something else.

Distance.

I could feel it in the heaviness of her body. In the flatness of her voice—and in the effort it took to push the words out.

Her eyes weren’t focused on me. They weren’t really focused anywhere. They hovered somewhere far away, as if she were standing a block or a mile from the room we were sitting in.

I let the room settle for a moment.

Then I said something that would have surprised an earlier version of me.

“I appreciate how far away you are right now.”

She blinked and looked at me, puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

“Your body is here,” I said gently. “But something in you feels like it’s standing quite a distance away from this room.”

She paused.

“Yeah,” she said quietly after a moment. “That sounds right.”

In the past, I might have seen it as my job to help her find the sadness beneath the anger, the fear beneath the hostility.

Now I do something different.
I stay curious about the distance itself.

Over time, a pattern became visible.

Before asking, What is the primary feeling here?

I sense something quieter:

How close is this person to themselves?

Sometimes a person speaks easily but feels miles from their own words.

Sometimes their body sits upright while something inside them remains withdrawn.

Sometimes they look directly at me, yet their presence never fully arrives.

When I notice that kind of distance, I don’t feel urgency.

I feel awe.

Because distance tells me something important: how long and hard they’ve had to survive without expecting anyone to meet them there.

When I tuned into how far away she was, I didn’t only see personal pain. I saw the loneliness of the world she had learned to survive in.

A world where people learn to perform competence instead of asking for care. Where politeness replaces presence. Where someone can spend years surrounded by people and still feel fundamentally unseen.

In that kind of world, distance is not failure.

It is protection.

Beneath that distance is often immobilization—dissociation, collapse, compliance, competence—the quiet adaptation of having learned to survive alone.

When anger lives that far away, asking for sadness or fear too quickly can feel like asking for vulnerability before the deeper protest has been heard—before the parts of them that had to disappear have had a chance to return.

Tears may appear.

But the deeper protest remains untouched.

So my sequencing shifted.

As Saj Razvi puts it, we cannot say yes until we can say no.

I began to prioritize anger—the anger of having had to travel so far from oneself in order to survive.

The anger of being received as a burden rather than someone worth meeting.

The anger of living inside judgments that were never ours to carry.

Not anger meant to destroy connection, but anger that makes connection possible again.

Not because anger is more important than grief or fear.

For many nervous systems, vulnerability becomes possible only after dignity has been restored.

Anger is often the fire that restores dignity—when that fire is allowed to return to the body it once had to leave.

Then the rest of the emotional world begins to reorganize naturally.

Grief surfaces without collapse.

Fear can be named without humiliation.

Longing emerges without desperation.

Seeing anger this way expands the EFT map.

EFT brilliantly illuminates how partners activate each other’s attachment wounds. But those wounds exist inside larger systems—generational conditioning, cultural expectations about strength and caretaking, and survival physiology operating in every moment—not only during conflict.

Attachment meaning and survival adaptation operate simultaneously.

So the question in the room is no longer only:

What is the primary emotion?

It is also:

How far away is it?

And what conditions would allow it to come home?

My work now is less about extracting vulnerability and more about building a hearth for anger—conditions where anger can live close enough to warm rather than destroy connection.

When fire has a hearth, it warms the room.

Without one, it burns the house down.

I’m still learning how to do this well.

I don’t know exactly what creates the conditions where fire feels safe enough to come back into the body.

I only know that having an agenda never works.

What seems to matter more is presence without pressure.

Appreciation for the distance someone has needed in order to survive.

A willingness to welcome the cold places first—collapse, numbness, shame, and mistrust.

And sometimes the anger that comes with returning.

The anger of having had to go away for so long.

The anger of not having been welcomed back sooner.

The anger that may be directed at me.

I still stand firmly on the ground EFT gave me.

But over time, my map widened.

The map widened most when I began learning how to build a hearth where anger could return to the body from the cold places it had retreated.

For many nervous systems, anger is not the opposite of connection.

It is the doorway back to dignity.

Photo by Quang Nguyen Vinh

A supervisee has been asking me a question for months.

“How has your work with primary emotions changed?”

Each time he asked, I answered partially. I spoke about cultural conditioning. About distance. About survival states.

I implied that nothing, fundamentally, had changed.

But I didn’t speak plainly. It took him getting frustrated with me to see that.

I wasn’t confused at work. I’m in the zone in the room. I have a clear vision of what’s happening and what I’m doing.

Primary emotions are important—precious to find and support.

What I didn’t fully see was that something in me was still organizing around belonging.

I was trained deeply in Emotionally Focused Therapy. I lived inside that map for years. I taught it. I trusted it.

It shaped how I saw couples, how I understood conflict, and how I listened for longing beneath protest.

It also gave me community.

When a model forms you professionally, it does more than offer technique. It offers belonging. Language. A shared way of seeing the world.

No one excommunicated me. No one pressured me to stay loyal. In fact, much of the fear was old and familiar—the same fear many of my clients carry.

If I diverge, will I still belong? If I say this differently, will I be misunderstood? If I move beyond the model, will I be seen as ungrateful?

None of this was conscious. It lived below language.

When my supervisee kept pressing, I didn’t know I was avoiding the question.

My hesitation was relational.

It has taken years to metabolize a shift that had already happened in my body. My work has changed—gradually, over time.

It unfolded as I explored other modalities—IFS, somatic work with the autonomic nervous system, psychedelic-assisted therapy—and as I went further into my own nervous system.

I wrote more about this process of integration in Better Together: Integrating EFT, IFS, and PSIP, where I reflect on how different therapeutic frameworks can deepen rather than replace one another.

It deepened through the privilege of working intensively with couples, not just in fifty-minute hours but in extended, immersive stretches where patterns and positions have nowhere to hide.

And perhaps importantly, I never formalized my teaching role within the model. Had I stepped into that position, I suspect my allegiance to the map might have tightened.

Instead, I remained in conversation with it. I could love it without being contained by it.

But loving something and evolving beyond its edges are not always easy to hold together. There is a subtle fear that evolution equals rejection.

Evolution doesn’t require rejection. It requires integration.

I’ve written elsewhere about how change often depends less on effort and more on the conditions surrounding us in Change Requires New Conditions.

Over time, I began to notice that what I track first in the room is no longer exactly what I was trained to track. My sequencing has shifted. My map has widened.

I’ve known this for a while.

What took longer was the courage to articulate it plainly. Because naming an evolution risks being misunderstood.

And for many of us—therapists included—the fear of not belonging runs deep.

It wasn’t the model I was protecting. It was my place inside it.

This month, I’m naming it.

Next month, I’ll try to describe how my map has expanded. Not in opposition to what shaped me, but in gratitude—and honesty.

Photo by Pavel Martysiuk on Unsplash

A supervisee recently asked me how my work with the View of Self and Other differs from what I learned in Emotionally Focused Therapy.

EFT is still nestled, very close to my heart. I still trust the clarity and compassion of its map. But it’s true that, in some significant ways, I’ve expanded the map.

One of these shifts is how early—and how explicitly—I widen the frame around the meanings that organize people’s pain.

One thing I’ve always loved about EFT is how quickly it gets to the heart of the matter. The meanings that drive our defensiveness are always there. They’re alive in the room from the start—sometimes obvious and loud, often subtle enough to be easy to miss.

People often name experiences like:

I’m not good enough.
I’m too much.
I don’t matter.

Alongside these are equally strong perceptions of others:

They don’t care. (Often interpreted—especially under stress—as narcissistic, emotionally unreachable, or shaped by neurodivergence.)

They’re demanding. (Often judged—especially under stress—as borderline or cruel.)

They’re selfish or unsafe. (Often judged as sociopathic or crazy.)

As we go deeper—whether through Stage II work or parts-based exploration—these meanings often sharpen.

The view of self can condense into something like: bad, unworthy, unlovable.

The view of the other into: incapable, abandoning, controlling, or dangerous.

This is familiar terrain in EFT. That part hasn’t changed.

What I do differently is how I contextualize these meanings early on.

Rather than treating them primarily as individual pathology or couple-specific distortion, I name them as adaptations to lived conditions—including gendered, relational, cultural, and systemic pressures.¹ We all have these experiences, regardless of how much or little big-T trauma we carry.

Before going further, one clarification matters: these trainings are not cleanly assigned, and they are rarely singular. Most people carry more than one, often simultaneously, and often in tension with each other.

Importantly, I’m not talking about identity here.

I’m talking about what people are trained to carry early, before identities are formed and reformed.

Some bodies are trained—explicitly or subtly—to earn belonging through usefulness, competence, or restraint.

Others are trained to absorb emotional labor, anticipate needs, or maintain relational stability. Many people are conditioned to suppress or override anger, disgust, contempt, exhaustion, numbness, and emptiness in order to stay connected or safe.

Many people—especially queer, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming folks—have lived multiple, sometimes conflicting, versions of these conditionings.

I’ve written before about how these accumulated trainings can become internal burdens in Unseen Layers of Burdens, particularly when they go unnamed for years.

When these adaptations are named as intelligent responses rather than personal failures, something shifts.

Here’s how this might sound in practice.

When I see someone working hard to make sense of the distress in their relationship—organizing, explaining, diagnosing what’s wrong and what needs to happen—I feel calm and compassionate. I hear a nervous system that learned early to manage pain by managing everything else.

I might reflect:

“I see how hard you’re working to take care of yourself and everyone around you. It’s almost like you’re alone with that job.”  

“I wonder how long you’ve had that job.”  

(Almost always, the answer is: As long as I can remember.)

At that point, most clients are willing—often relieved—to look beyond themselves and the couple, toward the generational and cultural conditions that shaped this role.² What was once framed as over-functioning or control begins to register as endurance.

When clients then touch the meaning of I’m too much, or the deeper pain of feeling monstrous in the amount of power they’ve taken on, or the grief of not mattering, these experiences feel less like personal defects.

They begin to feel more inevitable—more like natural outcomes of living in the world as it is.

The emotions become lighter to approach, easier to stay with. They are no longer proof that someone is failing—individually or relationally. They become signals of what has been asked of them for too long.

This doesn’t excuse harm.

And it doesn’t bypass responsibility.

But it does relocate responsibility—from character to conditions.

I explored this idea further in Change Requires New Conditions, Not New Effort, where I write about how transformation depends less on trying harder and more on shifting the environments that shape us.

For me, this shift hasn’t diluted EFT. It’s steadied it.

By widening the lens early—by naming the forces that shape how people learn to protect themselves—clients can go deeper with less collapse and less shame.

The map stays the same.

There is simply more room inside it.

And in that room, more people can stay.

References:

Knudson-Martin, C., & Huenergardt, D. (2023). Socio-emotional relationship therapy: Bridging emotion, power, and social context. New York, NY: Routledge.

Internal Family Systems Institute. (n.d.). Working with generational and cultural burdens

[Online training]. https://ifs-institute.com

_______________________
¹ This reframing of attachment meanings within gendered and relational power contexts is articulated in Carmen Knudson-Martin’s recent work on socio-emotional relationship therapy, which integrates attachment, power, and social context without pathologizing individuals or couples.

² This orientation is consistent with Internal Family Systems approaches that explicitly address generational and cultural burdens as organized, inherited survival strategies rather than individual pathology

For more on how therapeutic models expand to include broader relational context, read Better Together: Integrating EFT, IFS, and PSIP.

Photo by Cody King. 

As 2026 begins, one of my strongest resolutions is this:

to have—and own—more of my anger.

I’m writing this both as a therapist and as someone who learned early to move away from anger rather than toward it. Those two voices aren’t separate for me. What I’ve learned professionally has grown out of what I’ve had to learn personally.

Over the years, I’ve noticed something again and again in my work:

The more comfortable people are with their anger—
along with contempt and healthy skepticism—
the less distress they experience in their closest relationships.

Not because they’re “angrier,”
but because they’re more at home in themselves.

I vividly remember my grandmother’s response to anger—a face of utter disgust. Like many people, I learned to banish my protests rather than give them a home.

When I say I’m choosing anger now, I don’t mean indulging it or acting it out.
I mean something quieter—and harder.

I’ve learned that anger wants company.
Not agreement or solutions—just presence.

To be heard.
To be joined for a time.

This is a shift that transforms relationships.

Anger becomes constructive the moment it’s appreciated and supported rather than feared or dismissed.

We were never meant to carry anger alone.

In isolation, it hardens into bitterness and resentment.

When met with presence, it becomes clarity, strength, and courage.

Over time—listening to my clients and being supported myself—I’ve learned that beneath almost every expression of anger is a simple truth waiting to emerge:

A longing for closeness without disappearing.
A longing to matter without having to earn it.
A desire for connection without conditions or demands.

This is also why I don’t want to sharpen my anger into blame.

Anger is an emotion.
Blame is a strategy.

Anger says, Something matters here.
Blame says, I don’t know how to stay with this feeling—someone has to carry it.

When anger has no safe relational landing place, it often turns into blame—not because it’s wrong, but because it’s alone.

There’s a bodily difference, too.

Anger, when it’s owned, has energy and strength.

Eyes sparkle; there’s something solid in the chest or belly.

Blame is tighter and sharper.

It narrows the breath and points—inward, outward, or both.

Unowned anger doesn’t disappear—it leaks.

It shows up as: irritation, withdrawal, moral superiority, or quiet contempt.

But anger that’s met—early and honestly—doesn’t need to accuse.

It can speak in the first person.

It can stay connected to what matters.

I see what happens when people don’t have this option.
They become tired—and sometimes, quite literally, sick.

A client once said to me:
“I’m not angry. I’m just tired.”

She was tired of saying yes when she meant no.
Tired of carrying the emotional weight of the relationship while calling it love.

As we stayed with it, her anger took shape—and her body changed.

Her shoulders dropped.
Her breath deepened.
There was less edge in her voice, not more.

Not rage, but a steady, aching clarity.

Her anger didn’t turn into blame.
It organized her.
It showed her where she had disappeared.

This is the kind of anger I’m choosing to take more seriously.

I’m angry about how many of us were conditioned to give up ourselves to keep others comfortable.

I’m angry that so many of us don’t know how to say no clearly—or how to ask cleanly for what we want—without guilt or collapse.

And I’m angry that relationships between people who care for one another can become so painful and threatening that distance feels safer than closeness. That conflict goes unresolved. That silence masquerades as peace.

This anger doesn’t feel hot to me.
It feels like deep caring—grieving and awake.

When I stay with it, when I don’t rush to be reasonable or understanding, it sharpens into something useful.

It tells me where I’ve over-adapted, where I’ve swallowed protest in the name of harmony, where I’ve accepted too little and called it maturity.

Owning my anger isn’t about becoming harsher.
It’s about becoming more honest—and more honest sooner.

Because anger, when it’s allowed to have company, often becomes the doorway back to self-respect— and from there, back to authentic connection.

This year, I’m practicing something simple — though I know I may never master it:

Listening more closely to myself.
Naming more clearly.
Letting anger be known before it hardens.

Not carrying it alone.

Photo by icecloudxx from Pexels.

This reflection is part of the work we explore more deeply in our approach to relational healing.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a pattern in therapy: the more comfortable people are with their anger—likewise contempt and cynicism—the less distress they experience in their closest relationships.

Not because they’re “angrier,” but because they’re more comfortable with these emotions. They seem more authentic—closer to themselves.

Many of us learned to hide, rather than be comfortable with these emotions. To be angry at a parent or authority figure was met with disapproval or punishment. Sometimes it was framed as a moral failure: Turn the other cheek. Don’t make a scene. Be grateful.

Anger became a threat or a sin. Witnessing rage in our homes—physical, verbal, or emotional—reinforced the belief that anger destroys connection. So we learned to swallow it, minimize it, rationalize it, or exile it altogether.

It makes perfect sense that we don’t recognize anger in ourselves, especially toward the people we love. If the only model of rage we’ve seen is destructive, the last thing we want to do is allow it.

But anger denied does not disappear. It finds other routes:

• Control, including burdened caretaking and accommodation

• Withdrawal

• Addiction and numbing

• “Being fine” while resentment builds

• Erupting or seeping out sideways

Anger is energy. If we don’t allow it to move honestly, it moves in disguise.

And when it finally comes out, it often arrives with justification, defensiveness, and righteousness—long explanations trying to prove it’s valid. The anger itself, somewhere in the body, is far away. So it sounds like criticism rather than vulnerability, like uncaring rather than fear of harm, like control rather than truth.

But the problem isn’t anger. The problem is isolation.

The body feels alone with an experience it doesn’t know how to express. Connection becomes a battleground of self-protection rather than curiosity.

So what do we do? We welcome the anger. Not to unleash it, justify it, or moralize it, but to witness it.

I’m struck by how amazed, relieved, and confused people are when, in a session, I say:

Those words are usually met with skepticism. We are not used to anger being appreciated.

But anger is often the only part of us that still believes we deserve better.

It says:

Because anger has been so powerfully conditioned as wrong or dangerous, welcoming it home can be a long and complex journey. As anger learns it is welcome, the nervous system settles—not because the conflict is resolved, but because the person is no longer alone inside it. When it arrives, it’s seen as both desirable and needed, like a warming, crackling fire in the wood stove on a cold winter day.

Welcoming anger doesn’t mean hurting anyone. It means shifting from blame to presence.

We move from: Who’s at fault?
To: What is this anger standing up for?

Anger stops being a weapon and becomes information.

Anger, when resonated with—not analyzed or fixed—creates connection:

• The body stops bracing.

• Shame loosens.

• Stories become clearer.

• Needs become speakable.

Anger wants company. Not agreement. Just company. To be met. To be heard. To be joined.

This is the shift that changes relationships: anger becomes constructive the moment it is allowed to be relational.

We were never meant to carry anger alone. In isolation, anger becomes bitterness, resentment, and hopelessness. Met with presence, anger becomes clarity and courage.

And beneath almost every expression of anger, there is a softer truth waiting for permission to emerge:

These are not destructive needs. They are deeply human ones.

We don’t heal by getting rid of anger. We heal by bringing it into connection—held, witnessed, respected.

Because anger was never the enemy. Isolation was.

Photo by Bruno Silva, from Pexels.

People in close relationships often come to me after years—sometimes decades—of being stuck in painful cycles. Individuals come for similar reasons, hoping to find relief from internal patterns so deeply ingrained that nothing they do touches them.

They’ve read books, listened to podcasts, and tried to “communicate better.” They’ve tried to be more patient, more open, more empathic. Nothing seems to make a difference.

Sometimes therapy does loosen something. Sometimes it changes enough. But when it does, it’s rarely because people suddenly figured out how to do something new. It’s because the conditions around them changed enough to support their natural evolution.

People don’t evolve under pressure. We transform when the air becomes breathable and healthy.

A therapist in the room—with enough steadiness, attunement, and emotional capacity to hold the heat—changes the emotional climate. The nervous system registers, Oh… It’s safe enough now. I can unfold.

And what once felt impossible suddenly becomes available. New choices appear. Old reflexes loosen. A different conversation becomes thinkable.

While it can be a precious gift to those who receive it, therapy is not the only place where this can happen.

Because suffering is so widespread, and because therapy is expensive, time-limited, and not consistently effective, I’ve been focusing on other ways we might support transformation. Ways that don’t rely on professional hours or an office setting.

I’d love to see more spaces outside therapy rooms where human beings can practice what their bodies were never taught:

• How to feel and express anger without collapsing or attacking

• How to be with each other in places of vulnerability

• How to hear the truth of another person whose perspective is different from ours without losing or betraying ourselves

Most of us avoid conflict until it overwhelms us and spills out sideways—reactively, defensively, and painfully. The fight emerges only after weeks or months of quiet internal bracing. We then judge ourselves (and each other) for the mess we’ve made, sure that the pain is some personal failing rather than the predictable outcome of a skill we never learned.

Imagine if we approached relational awareness the same way we approach our chosen profession or creative discipline. Not as a moral virtue we should already possess, but as a practice—a skill set that develops over time when we place ourselves in the right environments.

Every profession has its training grounds: rehearsal studios, kitchens, universities, coding boot camps, dojos, internships, and weight rooms. But in relationships, we expect mastery without practice. We assume that love should somehow give us the capacity to stay open, honest, and grounded in the moments we’re most overwhelmed.

What if we created intentional spaces where we could:

• Build discernment and awareness for more precise, shared emotional concepts.

• Express anger and contempt productively so they don’t erupt or poison the air.

• Slow down enough to feel the truth in our body.

• Experiment with new ways of responding.

• Receive feedback and support from others who are also learning?

Our reactive, stuck patterns wouldn’t change instantly. But over time, under the right conditions, the nervous system would begin carving new pathways to deeper connection.

We would find ourselves responding differently—not because we tried harder, but because a different way of being had become possible.

This is something I’m keenly interested in these days: How to build environments—communities, practice groups—where the air is clean enough, supportive enough, curious enough, to allow for relational evolution.

If transformation is less about force and more about climate, then this work is not about “fixing” anyone. It’s about giving people the conditions for their most human capacities to emerge.

By Lori Marchak and Craig Stein

We all know those inner refrains: I’m not good enough. I’m too much.
They’re not random wounds. They make sense in context.

For many men, the conditioned strategies of working hard, staying ahead, accommodating, and withdrawing once ensured belonging and survival. But they rarely meet the emotional needs of their partners or children. Nor do they address men’s own needs for connection, love, and genuine intimacy. These strategies keep life functioning—but they keep love at a distance.

For many women, the deeply ingrained pattern of caring—of tending to everyone’s needs, including their own—can lead to emotions that feel too big for others to hold. The result is a painful paradox: the more they reach for connection, the more others retreat.

Both make sense. Both are rational responses to the worlds we came from—family, culture, and generations of adaptation etched into our nervous systems. They were the best we could do.

When conditions for healing draw near, what begins to shift is not that we suddenly become enough or learn to be less. It’s that we stop believing we’re supposed to be either.

We stop trying to perform emotional perfection—to share our feelings in just the right way, to communicate without rupture, to carry each other’s pain gracefully and without fatigue. These are noble attempts, but underlying them is fear and anxiety. Often, that is the message that others feel and receive, rather than the love we intend to communicate.

The problem isn’t our failure to be good at relationships. It’s that we were never taught how to bear the enormity of the pain and alienation that we’ve inherited.

When we begin to see that we’re not bad or wrong, but lack experience of safety and support, something softens. We can say, with more honesty and less defense:

I want to care for you, but it’s too hard. I’m too frustrated and overwhelmed.

I get to have these feelings, even if they’re too much for you.

I don’t know what I want or need—or how to assert myself without being a burden.

There is no shame in not being enough, and no guilt in being too much. There’s only the invitation to be human, together, amidst it all.

This is what we’re really trying to say: Can we go through this together? Can we be bad at this for a while, and hold hands while we get better at it? I’d rather struggle through our messy but real life together with you than have some fantasy of a “safe” but shallow life without you.

When we stop trying to be the right kind of person in a relationship—strong enough, calm enough, caring enough, not too much—we begin to move beyond the roles that keep us trapped. We start to meet one another as humans, not as performances of masculinity or femininity, competence or sensitivity.

This is the real work of healing: learning to stay present inside the messiness of being two imperfect nervous systems trying, sincerely, to love.

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We all carry negative beliefs and accompanying strategies we picked up along the way—working to please, keeping the peace, staying calm and rational, or taking care of everyone around us.  Most of the time, we refer to the negative beliefs behind these “coping mechanisms” as irrational and belonging to the past.

But what if they aren’t just old baggage? What if they actually make sense, even now?

When I say that views of self like “I’m not good enough” or “I’m unlovable” are rational—not irrational—I usually get puzzled looks.

People often respond with, “Right, those negative beliefs were adaptive when people were kids.”

But here’s what I really mean: they are rational now, in adulthood. They still make sense. They still help us survive.

Think about someone who grew up in a typical middle- or upper-class home in Western society.

She might have learned that the safest way to belong was to stay responsible—organizing things, anticipating others’ needs, taking care of herself and everyone else. He might have learned that the safest way to belong was to meet expectations in the eyes of others or else stay under the radar.

These weren’t just childhood coping strategies. These adaptations may still be needed today. They may still create a sense of relative safety and belonging. They likely still protect against unbearable feelings like emptiness, exhaustion, rage, and shame.

“Letting go” of core beliefs and their accompanying strategies is incredibly hard. It’s not just dropping old habits or seeing things differently. It’s dismantling the very scaffolding that holds up our inner world. Without that scaffolding, we risk being overwhelmed by feelings we’ve never had support to face.

I recently worked with someone—let’s call her Mia—who was the glue that held everyone together.

At work, she was the one who stayed late, sending the emails no one else thought to send, catching the mistakes before they caused problems. At home, she was the planner, the one who kept the calendar straight, who anticipated what her partner or kids would need before they asked. With friends, she was the reliable one who showed up when others didn’t.

On the outside, Mia looked composed and competent. Inside, she was tired—so tired she sometimes fantasized about disappearing for a week with no phone, no one needing anything from her. But that fantasy was terrifying, too. If she collapsed into her exhaustion and pain, who would want her?

So she pressed harder. When things didn’t go according to plan, she blamed herself, raising the bar higher still. And when people told her to “relax,” or “lighten up,” she didn’t feel liberated— she felt judged and unseen. They didn’t understand: her strategy wasn’t irrational. It was the thing keeping her world from collapsing.

No one had truly seen or been prepared to support Mia with what her strategies were holding: profound fatigue, anger, shame, and the raw fear of being unwanted if she stopped holding it all together. In survival mode, she couldn’t fully recognize this herself.

Of course, she clung tightly to her way of being. Anyone would. Until she had enough support to face those buried feelings, letting go would have risked chaos and retraumatization.

Strategies don’t soften when we sense others see them as irrational or unhealthy. That suggests others are ignorant of the wisdom inside them.

What helps is being fully seen and understood.

When Mia finally felt that I could see, and helped her see for herself, how much her strategies had been carrying—with no one else to see or support her—she could relax from defending herself. Something softened.  She could begin to imagine that transformation might be possible.

Healing doesn’t start with trying to change our negative beliefs and strategies.

It starts with recognizing their intelligence. By honoring their ongoing truth.

When someone can look at us and say not just, “Of course you did that. It makes sense.” But also, “Of course you’re still doing that. No one has truly seen and had the capacity to support you with all that you’re carrying.”

With that degree of understanding and acceptance, a new reality begins to form.

We can rest. And in that resting, new possibilities emerge.

Photo by Harry Phạm from Pexels.

The turning points in my life have most often shown up unexpectedly. A door closes. A new path appears. Something shifts—sometimes before I have words for what’s happening. Those moments have asked me to change before I fully understood it.

Sue Johnson and Emotionally Focused Therapy arrived at just the right moment and opened a door that changed my life.

EFT changed how I understood myself and other people. It helped me see the intelligence in our defenses and the longing that lives underneath reactivity. It inspired me and gave me a map to appreciate people rather than try to fix them. I’m deeply grateful to the mentors and the EFT community; their influence stays with me.

But like every doorway, EFT eventually led me to another threshold—one I resisted crossing. A quiet whisper told me something was missing. I denied it. I fought it. And then, in another unplanned turning point, I had to accept it: EFT isn’t enough.

It wasn’t that the model was wrong. I was the one who needed to grow beyond it—to explore what felt most alive for me.

What I struggled with most wasn’t the model itself—it was  the culture of loyalty and allegiance that I grew up in, and bought into. At times, it felt like there wasn’t space to experiment, to cross-pollinate, or to bring in the body, spirit, or other modalities without being seen as disloyal. I doubted myself when I was drawn to different ways of working—like EMDR in the beginning, when emotions felt too big, IFS when parts work brought space and clarity, and plant medicine when ordinary consciousness wasn’t powerful enough.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t enough for me to idealize Sue and EFT; it was time for me to step into trusting myself.

These are some principles and forces that guide me today:

• Healing isn’t about doing the “right” thing. It’s about who we are. More than acquiring tools, I’ve come to value the lifelong process of healing myself.

• Appreciating models and mentors for what they offer—without needing to idealize them. We’re all human, fallible, doing our best, and in this together.

• Working with the body’s survival states—not just big emotions like anger or shame, but the deeper currents of contempt, cynicism, freeze, collapse, and dissociation, and what they need to move.

• Honoring mistrust as wisdom, not pathology. We all have good reason not to trust—and deserve to be met there with dignity. Prioritizing trust too quickly can be a disservice to ourselves and our clients.

• Seeing “negative views of self and other” not just as formerly adaptive in childhood, but as necessary, ongoing adaptations in couple, family, and community systems.

• Seeing cultural and systemic burdens not as side notes, but as central to our work.

• Embracing the spiritual—welcoming the mystery and intelligence that emerges beyond thought, but is perceived in the body through faculties that are usually called intuition as well as feeling.

EFT remains one of the most beautiful models I’ve learned. But like every significant turning point, it was a stepping stone. I didn’t walk away in rejection—I followed what felt most alive. That path has led me to a way of working that’s more intuitive, embodied, and spacious.

Trusting myself turned out to be the way to connect with healing powers that are more than personal, more than material, and more than words can ever adequately name—but that each of us can know and experience for ourselves.

These days, I don’t align myself with any one method. What I care about is presence—being open to the forces that move through us when we’re not trying so hard to get it right.

To follow what is most alive—this, to me, is the heart of healing.

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