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.