The good news is that we do not have to take every thought at face value. We can take a step back, look at what we are believing, and change our mind about the beliefs that are not helping us.

Below I want to walk through four common places people get stuck, with a real example in each and some suggestions for changing your mind. Feel free to scan them and settle in on the one or two that feel closest to home.

If you would like to take this further, I go deep on exactly this in my course, Change Your Mind. As a reader here you can take 10% off with the code substack10.

When Someone Else Seems Like the Problem

We often project our own insecurities and frustrations onto other people, and build a story in which they are the source of our discomfort. Left alone, that story tends to strain the relationship and keep us circling in blame and resentment.

For example, you might believe that a colleague is deliberately trying to undermine you, because they are often critical of your work. Believe that, and every interaction gets tense, and it becomes hard to work together at all.

How to change your mind: try on some empathy, and consider other explanations for what they are doing. Maybe your colleague is under a lot of pressure themselves, and the criticism has more to do with their own worries than with your performance. Or maybe they are the kind of person who runs on constructive feedback, and in their own way they think they are being helpful to you. You do not have to know for sure. Just holding the possibility can soften how you come at the situation, and that usually makes for a healthier relationship.

When You Cannot Get Yourself to Do the Thing

A lack of motivation can quietly block us from the goals and the activities that are actually good for us. When we decide, deep down, that we do not have the energy or the ability to do something, we tend not to take action, which then seems to prove the belief.

For example, you might believe that you do not exercise regularly because you lack the discipline. That belief alone can keep a healthier way of living just out of reach.

How to change your mind: start with small, doable goals, and build from there. Get clear on the benefits, and on how the activity connects to what you actually care about. Then build a little routine around it, and find ways to make it enjoyable rather than a chore. You might begin with a short daily walk and slowly stretch the time. Notice your progress, and remind yourself of the good it is doing you. Where you can, spend time with people who are rooting for you. When you keep your attention on the good outcomes and make small, steady efforts, motivation tends to grow on its own.

When You Feel Not Enough

Feelings of inadequacy usually come from measuring ourselves against other people, and taking in standards that were never realistic to begin with. Those beliefs wear away at our self-esteem and keep us from recognizing our own worth.

For example, you might believe that you are not attractive enough, because you do not match the images of beauty you see in the media. Believe that, and it colors how you see yourself and how you feel day to day.

How to change your mind: practice some self-compassion, and remind yourself that every person has qualities that make them worth knowing. Rest your attention on what you do appreciate about yourself, and let a little gratitude for your own body and mind come through. Surround yourself, where you can, with influences that make room for difference and individuality. As you come to appreciate your own worth, the feeling of not being enough starts to lose its grip.

When You Hold Yourself Back

The fear of being judged or rejected can quiet our self-expression, until we are hiding our real selves. When we believe we have to fit ourselves to what others expect, we miss the plain joy of living as who we actually are.

For example, you might believe that you should not share your creative work, because someone might decide it is not good enough. Believe that, and the work stays in a drawer, and your talents stay with it.

How to change your mind: let yourself be a little vulnerable, and recognize that real self-expression asks for some courage. Your perspective is worth offering, and it is yours to give. Spend more time around people who welcome you being yourself. As you dare to show up as you are, you tend to find more fulfillment, and more real connection.

You Can Step Out of the Old Story

Our thoughts shape how reality looks to us, and untrue beliefs can cause a lot of unnecessary suffering. But we are not stuck with them. When we question the harmful ones and take up perspectives that are both more compassionate and more realistic, our relationships get easier, our goals get closer, and our sense of our own worth grows.

You can step out of old assumptions and attitudes. And you can step into more useful, more hopeful thoughts about yourself and other people. Not by pretending, but by looking honestly and choosing again. Moment by moment, that is how a mind gets changed.

If working with your own mind this way speaks to you, it is the heart of what I teach in my course, Change Your Mind. We slow down and really practice it, so that stepping out of an old story and into a truer one starts to become second nature, rather than something you only manage on your best days. As a reader here, you can take 10% off with the code substack10 at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Something surprised me along the way, and it may be the most hopeful thing I have learned. It took me years to really see it.

The old reactions do not necessarily go away.

For years I assumed that “getting better” meant the painful reaction would stop showing up. That the flash of anger, the sense of inadequacy, the old “yes, but” would eventually be gone. That is not usually how it works, at least not at first. What tends to happen instead is that the reaction still arises, based on your history and maybe some trauma, and yet your relationship to that reaction begins to change.

Think of it as a playlist running in the background of your mind. Some old song gets triggered and starts playing. “I’ve been cheated and mistreated. When will I be loved?” A good country western song. And for a long time you believe it. Over time, though, you can turn down the volume. And over time, you do not have to believe that song so much. The reaction is there, but you are increasingly less identified with it, less swept along by it.

That is a fundamentally important point, so let me say it plainly: we can shift our reactions to our reactions.

Why does this matter so much? Because most of the ways we see ourselves and other people were learned. We learned them, often as kids, and often they served a real purpose back then. But a way of seeing that protected you at ten can be like walking around in a suit of armor that is three sizes too small. It did a job once. Today it mostly costs you, often a lot of unnecessary cost.

You do not have to keep wearing it. You can actually shift the internal factors, the stuff inside you that shapes how you react to events and situations and relationships. The causes outside you are what they are. But as you come to understand what is inside you that shapes your reactions, you begin to have more control over it. Be patient with this. It may take years to really shift a longstanding habit of being. It still works. Step by step, bit by bit, drop by drop, we can really change our mind over time. And there is a lot of evidence for it, in the research on personal growth and on formal psychotherapy.

There is a lot of material on how to do this. Just think about those really thick textbooks on cognitive therapy. Ways to change your mind, ways to deal with doubts, the cognitive processes that keep us stuck, the general process of forming wiser views. I have tried to summarize all of it into one user-friendly acronym you can actually remember when you are upset: PASS. Through it, we pass beyond old, limiting, harmful, painful ways of seeing ourselves, other people, the world, the past, and the future.

Let me walk you through all four steps, with the specific questions to ask yourself at each one, so you have something to actually reach for the next time an old reaction gets triggered.

Before we continue, I want you to know that I explain this in depth in my course Change Your Mind. You can save 10% with code substack10.

P: Pause

Something has happened. Maybe you got irritated with somebody. Maybe you have become aware of an attitude, a belief, a should, a doubt, a “yes, but” coming at you. You are aware of something.

The first step is simply to pause.

There is an old first rule of warfare: secure a base of operations. We are not at war here, but we are doing something like that for ourselves. We slow it down. We get a little centered. We recognize what is happening: oh, I’m upset. Oh, I’m so mad. Oh, I think certain things. We observe it rather than getting hijacked by it.

If it helps, physically pause. Step back from the other person or the situation. Buy yourself a little time. “Excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom, I’ll be back in five minutes.” Whatever it takes to get your head together. This step is very, very important, because everything after it depends on you not being swept away.

A: Appreciate What Is Also Okay

This one gets misunderstood, so let me be clear about what it is not. It is not positive thinking. It is not rose colored glasses. We are not overlooking what is genuinely problematic or difficult.

But it really helps, when you are trying to change your mind, to appreciate what is also going okay right now. It leaves you feeling more reassured, and more willing to budge, to shift an old way of looking at things. To afford to let go of armor that did serve a purpose once, it helps to feel resourced enough in the present that you can spare it.

So you appreciate that you are still breathing. Your heart is still beating. You are basically all right, right now. The lights are still working. There is food in the cupboard. The sun is still rising, the flowers are still blooming, you still have some friends. Alongside whatever the hard thing is, certain other things are okay.

As you do this, you start to rest in what I call the Green Zone.

When you have a sense that your needs are met enough in this moment- not perfectly; there are always things to work on, but enough safety, enough satisfaction, and enough connection- you start disengaging from the Red Zone. The Red Zone is fight, flight, freeze. It hijacks us, floods us, immobilizes us, and it makes changing your mind almost impossible, because it has already carried you off. Even if the edges of you are still pretty agitated, see if you can find, in the core of your being, a sense of basic grit and calm strength, a little gratitude, your own warm heart with some caring flowing out and, hopefully, some flowing in. That is what lets the rest of this work happen.

S: Shift Your View

This is the heart of it, and it has three parts. The first two intertwine, and you can take them in either order depending on the situation.

Get objective. See what is actually the case. What are the facts here? What is the history, the context? Is it really that big a deal? I am not minimizing genuine harm. But put it on a scale of zero to ten, where global nuclear war is a ten and a mosquito bite is a one. Where does this actually land? Usually it is lower than it feels in the heat of the moment.

Understand your reactions. What is driving the bus here? A few questions worth sitting with:

• How has what happened been turbocharged by your own personal history?

• What thoughts are you adding to the situation?

• What intentions are you attributing to the other person?

• What old script is this getting sucked into, about what you are allowed to say to authority figures, what you are allowed to ask for, or what you are supposed to do when someone acts a certain way?

As you understand your reactions, including the deeper layers of them, something starts to loosen. You realize: oh, I have some choices here. Yes, those ways of being were learned. Yes, they may have served a purpose. And as I understand them, I get a little distance from them, some space between me and the reaction. It is there, but I am less identified with it. This is where you can meet the old reaction with some compassion: of course I feel that way, given how I have been treated. That is understandable. And that is not the whole of me. It is one part of me, and I can increasingly establish myself over here among the flowers and fruit in the garden of my mind, while allowing some of the weeds to be there without being carried away by them.

Think again. It is an old instruction, and a good one. Know your priorities. What is actually most important to you? How do you really want to be? Now that you can see the bigger picture, what is the wiser path, the higher road you actually want to walk? Can you take it a little less personally? Can you decide what meaning you want to give this? Can you find the exceptions to the thing you have been telling yourself? Can you know, deep down, what you want to encourage in yourself?

And do not worry about getting it perfect. We go through these steps again and again, so they get deeply learned inside you.

S: Step Into It

You have made a shift. Now step into this new way of being. Embody it. Live it. Help it actually sink in, so it does not just leave again the moment you get busy.

A big part of this is bodily. When you land on a view you want to hold, notice what it feels like in your body. Antonio Damasio called these somatic markers, the felt sense of a belief or a perspective. What does this new way of looking at yourself or another person actually feel like in your chest, your shoulders, your gut? The more you can tune into that felt sense, the more you can find your way back to it later. It grounds the new view in you.

Then anticipate the rewards. We are all drawn to rewards, so let yourself see the good coming: how will this new way of being help your relationships? How will you feel happier, more effective? When you notice that good things tend to come from a new way of looking at things, that reinforces it and trains your brain to keep coming from there.

And take action. This is not faking it till you make it. You are not faking anything. You are deliberately enacting a new way of thinking that is not yet a habit. So you have to do it on purpose for a while. You prod yourself, you encourage yourself, you speak to yourself in the new way and act from it, and over time, with repetition, it becomes your habit.

Let It Become Who You Are

This last part matters more than people tend to think. Once you have made the shift, marinate in it. Do not rush off. Let it establish itself in you.

What you are doing is converting a state into a trait. A passing moment of seeing yourself more kindly, or seeing another person more clearly, becomes, with enough repetition, a lasting part of how you are. And then, instead of having to work at it, you get increasingly lived by it. Carried along by it.

That old song may still cue up now and then in the background. That is all right. You know it now. You have compassion for it. And you no longer have to believe it. Step by step, bit by bit, drop by drop, you really can change your own mind.

If working with your own mind in this way speaks to you, it is the heart of what I teach in my course, Change Your Mind. We slow down and really practice this, step by step, so that pausing, appreciating, shifting, and stepping into a new way of being start to become second nature, rather than something you only reach for once you are already flooded. As a reader here, you can take 10% off with the code substack10 at checkout. Read more about the course and sign up here.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

That belief didn’t feel like a belief. It felt like a fact.

Here’s what I eventually understood. The meaning of a thing is not actually in the thing. We add it. Something happens, a person does whatever they do, and we decide what it means, and very often what it means about us. And because we’re the ones adding the meaning, we have some say over it. More than it feels like, most days.

Our sense of who we are is also layered. There’s often a surface belief, I’m okay, I’m fine, sitting right on top of a much older and harsher one way down deep: no, I’m bad. And it’s situational. In a work setting, you might think, oh yeah, I’m pretty good, I’m pretty capable here. Then you get dropped into a relationship where you depend on somebody, and a very different view of yourself can show up, something like damaged goods, not really someone another person would want to care for and love. Same person, different room, and a completely different verdict.

Most of these hard beliefs got laid down a long time ago, and back then a lot of them made sense. Something painful happened, once or over and over, and a young mind did what young minds do and drew a conclusion. A reasonable one, from the evidence it had at the time. The trouble is we carry that conclusion forward for thirty or forty years, keep applying it to a life that has completely changed, and rarely go back to check whether it’s still true, or was ever the whole story.

A friend of mine said something to another person once that stuck with me. “I’m sorry I push your buttons,” he said, “but I did not install them.” So much of believing the worst about yourself is exactly that. You take on the blame for buttons somebody else installed long before you got there. Their upset becomes your badness, their reaction, which has a whole history that has nothing to do with you, gets treated as a verdict on you.

This is a lot of what my Change Your Mind course is really about: getting clear on the thoughts that run us, and then learning how to work with them. It starts August 8, and there’s a code, SUBSTACK10, for 10% off if you’d like it. You can find it here.

What I want to give you now is the practice I use for this, more or less the way I’d walk you through it in person. It isn’t complicated. But you have to actually do it, not just read it.

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In a nutshell, the brain is the meat. It’s gushy; it’s physical; it’s made of matter and energy together—three pounds or so of tissue, sitting in the dark inside your skull, doing its work.

The mind, as I use that word, and as most people in neuropsychology basically use it, refers to information that is being processed by the nervous system.

Notice the distinction there. The nervous system is tangible. Information is intangible. Both tangible meat and intangible information exist. And intangible information needs something material to represent it. But the information itself is different from the underlying material substrate, like the nervous system that represents it.

That’s fundamentally what’s happening. As you read these words right now, the experiences you’re having are based on information being processed in your nervous system. The meaning of this sentence, the little flicker of recognition or doubt or interest as you take it in: that’s mind, running on brain.

And here’s something that surprises people. Most of the information in the nervous system is outside of awareness. Forever outside of awareness. Most of the mind is below the waterline. We’re aware of the part of the mind that is conscious, and that part is small compared to everything humming along underneath: the regulation of your heartbeat, the assembling of your perceptions, the old learnings that shape how you react before you’ve had a single conscious thought.

This isn’t a human specialty, by the way. Cats have minds. Any creature with a sufficiently complex nervous system has some rudimentary mind. And of course, we human beings have the most complex mind of all.

So why does any of this matter? Why should you care whether the mind is information and the brain is meat?

Because the mind and the brain are connected. They’re a single, looping system. Which means you can use your mind to change your brain to change your mind for the better.

That’s the whole game. Every time you deliberately rest your attention on something, you’re shaping the information flowing through your nervous system, and over time that flow leaves physical traces in neural structure. What you attend to, what you practice, what you let land in you: it’s all quietly sculpting the meat, and the sculpted meat then shapes the mind that arises next.

So here’s the takeaway. Your experiences are not just passing weather. They are, little by little, building the brain you’ll be living with tomorrow. Choose a few good ones today, let them sink in, and let the loop work in your favor.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

I once asked the meditation teacher Joseph Goldstein a question I like to put to people: if you could get a billion people to do one thing for five minutes a day, what would it be? His answer stuck with me. He’d have them spend five minutes listening to another person with no agenda at all. Imagine that much real listening in the world, and that much being listened to. It’s hard to think of a simpler practice that would change more.

We tend to treat listening as something passive, the empty space where we wait for our turn to talk. But real listening is active, and it’s a skill, made of identifiable parts that can be learned and strengthened. It’s worth saying what listening is not. It isn’t agreeing, and it isn’t silencing yourself or letting someone steamroll you. Good boundaries and good listening go together. When listening would genuinely help, though, four things tend to make the difference: being available, attentive, empathic, and responsive.

The most important communication of all is simply this: message received. People need to know they’ve landed in someone.

Learning to listen well, and to be heard in return, is one of the most practical skills in any close relationship, and it’s much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program, which opens again in July. You can learn more about it here and if you decide to join us, use code substack10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll go through each of the four parts of good listening in depth, and then turn it around: how to help the people in your life listen to you.

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It’s a real and common longing, and it’s worth taking seriously. Our relationships with the people around us shape us more than we tend to think. There’s good evidence that our friendships and peer relationships, especially early in life, can influence how we turn out at least as much as our own families do. Friends matter. The people we spend our ordinary days with matter.

When we want more closeness, we often reach for something big: more love, more openness, a deeper bond. But there’s a smaller, and I think more reliable, place to start.

Consider the word lovingkindness. It can sound lofty, even a little exotic, the kind of quality you go on retreat to cultivate. Yet the ancient root of the word, in Pali, simply means friend. Friendliness. Something as elevated as lovingkindness turns out, at bottom, to be a matter of plain friendliness.

I find that genuinely encouraging, for a specific reason. You can’t make another person be friendly. You can’t make them want to grow closer, or open up on your timing. But your own friendliness is entirely yours to offer. It doesn’t wait on anyone else’s cooperation. In almost any relationship, in almost any moment, you can bring a little more of it, and that turns out to be one of the few things about closeness that’s genuinely in your hands.

Ask yourself: In the relationships where I most want to feel closer, am I bringing friendliness, or mostly waiting to receive it?

Start With the Open Hand

Friendliness has a particular feeling to it. At its simplest, it’s approaching another person without giving them any cause to fear you: an open hand rather than a closed one. There’s a groundedness in it. You’re not anxious, not performing, not overdoing things for the other person in the hope of being liked. And you’re not depending on them to return it in order to keep offering it. That independence is part of what makes friendliness so steady. It can survive a bad mood, a slow reply, an off day.

Ask yourself: When I’m with someone I care about, do my tone, my attention, and my body language say, “you’re safe with me”?

Bring It Home to the People You Live With

It’s easy to save our friendliness for new people and let it thin out with the ones closest to us. So picture an ordinary moment. You walk into the kitchen in the morning, bleary-eyed, and the other person is already there. Is there friendliness in the look, the first words, maybe a touch on the shoulder? For most of us, that small thing changes the whole feeling of the room. The same holds with an adult child, a longtime partner, a roommate. Not a grand gesture, just a plain and reliable warmth in how we meet each other.

Ask yourself: With the person I’m closest to, what would one degree more friendliness look like tomorrow morning?

Offer Small Bids

Friendliness also opens a door. It puts out small bids, an invitation to walk, a question that shows real interest, a bit of easy contact, that can draw someone into a closer relationship if they’re ready for it. The point is to offer without forcing. You’re not demanding closeness or engineering it. You’re simply making it easier for the other person to come nearer, and leaving them free to meet you or not.

Ask yourself: What small bid could I offer this week to someone I’d like to feel closer to?

Let a Friendship Be What It Is

Much of the strain we feel in relationships comes from asking them to be more than they are. It helps to let a friendship be its actual size. A friendly acquaintance, the neighbor you chat with, the person you sometimes walk with, is its own good thing, and it doesn’t have to deepen into something more to be worth having. Held lightly, without pressure to become bigger, these ordinary connections often grow on their own, and they offer a real sense of belonging in the meantime.

Ask yourself: Is there a light, friendly connection I’ve been discounting because it isn’t “deep,” that I could simply enjoy for what it is?

When Someone Can’t Meet You

Sometimes you offer the open hand and the other person, for their own reasons, can’t take it. After a few honest tries, it’s worth accepting that, and grieving it a little. But two things remain. One is to look for more fertile ground: people and settings more able to meet you, including the small, easy-to-overlook contact that’s often right nearby. The other is the relationship you have with yourself. We tend to treat ourselves roughly the way we’ve been treated, so learning to be plainly friendly toward yourself, on your own side and warm rather than harsh, is worth as much as anything. And it’s always available, whatever anyone else does.

Ask yourself: Where might there be more fertile ground for me, and can I offer myself the same friendliness I keep hoping to receive?

A Short Practice

Here’s a place to begin today. Once, offer a small, unforced piece of friendliness: a warmer hello, a real question, a touch on the arm, and notice what happens, in them and in you. Then, just as importantly, let yourself receive one when it comes your way, rather than moving past it. You won’t do it perfectly, and you don’t need to. Each small offering, and each one taken in, adds up.

What’s Underneath It

For most of our history as a species, we lived in small bands, hunting, gathering, struggling, and enjoying life together, held by a web of everyday friendliness. That capacity is still in us. It hasn’t gone anywhere; for many of us it has simply gotten a little out of practice. And friendliness is less a fixed trait than a skill, and skills grow with repetition. Offered again and again, in small and ordinary ways, it slowly warms the relationships you already have, and, over time, a whole life.

If you’d like to go further with this- the practical, repeatable ways of being that help a close relationship feel warmer and steadier over time- it’s much of what we work with in Strong Heart. You can use the code substack10 for 10% off at checkout.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

There is an old story in the Buddhist tradition about the young man who would become the Buddha. He was raised in a sheltered palace, protected from anything unlovely or unwell. One day he slipped past his caretakers and out through the gate, and for the first time in his life he saw someone old and frail, then someone gravely ill, and then a dead body lying on the ground. He was shaken to the core. And then he saw one more person: someone moving through the same world with a deep and radiant peace, at ease in the midst of it all.

Those four encounters are traditionally called the heavenly messengers: aging, illness, death, and the possibility of a peaceful, awakened heart. It’s worth pausing on that word, messenger. It suggests that aging, illness, and death are not only threats to be fended off, but bearers of something, carriers of a teaching, if we’re willing to receive it.

Our first instinct, of course, is aversion. We brace against these things, push them out of sight, and turn away. That’s completely understandable, and it also tends to make the suffering worse. There is another way to meet them. In your imagination, you can invite each one in, the way you might welcome a guest to sit down and share a cup of tea, and ask it plainly: what do you have to teach me, here, at this point in my life?

These truths lose some of their terror when we stop treating them as intruders and begin treating them as teachers.

None of this is about rising above it all, or getting cosmic in order to escape the ache. It’s tender to admit that you’re getting older, if you are. It’s tender to face illness in your own body, or in someone you love. Meeting these messengers well begins right there, with that tenderness, and with resourcing yourself enough to be able to let them in at all.

In the rest of this piece, I’ll explore how to actually be with these realities: how to feel them fully rather than flinch from them, how to counter the mind’s pull to fixate on what is hardest, and how two ancient qualities, equanimity and love, can hold even this.

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When people want peace after a betrayal, they sometimes go looking for it in the wrong place. They try to feel calm about something that hasn’t actually been repaired, or they paper over the breach to keep things smooth, and then wonder why the peace won’t hold.

Real peace after a betrayal usually rests on two different kinds of work, and it helps to keep them separate. One is the repair between the two of you: whether the betrayal has genuinely been faced, rather than rushed past. The other is the work inside yourself: setting down what was never yours to carry in the first place. Much of the lingering pain comes from quietly taking on responsibility for someone else’s choice, as though their betrayal said something about your worth.

It was never your job to make them faithful. That was always their job, and breaking that trust was their doing, not yours.

None of this means forgetting, or pretending it didn’t matter. It means facing what happened honestly, which is what finally allows the wound to close. And that is possible, even when it doesn’t feel that way yet.

Repairing a relationship after a real rupture, and finding your own steady ground again, is much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program.

Make Sure the Repair Is Real

Peace built on avoidance doesn’t last. If the betrayal was smoothed over for the sake of keeping things calm, some part of you keeps registering that it was never truly addressed, and the wound stays live underneath. Real repair means the betrayal is actually faced together: acknowledged plainly, understood, and grieved, rather than hurried past.

This is the both-and that’s easy to miss. You can be actively strengthening the relationship, building warmth and connection in the present, while also making sure the breach itself gets the honest attention it needs. One doesn’t replace the other. For many couples, a skilled therapist makes this kind of repair go better, because it’s hard to hold both the hurt and the hope on your own.

Close the Door Completely

If there is any continuing thread to the affair, a lingering message, an occasional card, ongoing access of any kind, part of repair is ending it fully. It’s entirely reasonable to ask your partner to close that door, clearly and completely, and to expect that they will.

How they respond tells you something worth paying attention to. A partner who is genuinely committed to repair will generally want to shut that door themselves, without much argument, because they understand what it costs you to leave it open. Real reluctance to do so is information. It isn’t proof of anything by itself, but it’s worth taking seriously as a signal of where things actually stand, rather than explaining it away.

Set Down What Was Never Yours to Carry

Now the inner work. The betrayal was your partner’s choice and your partner’s responsibility. It was not a verdict on your worth, your desirability, or anything you failed to do. A way of holding this that I find useful: my job is to be a good partner, and your job is to be a good partner, and it was never my job to keep you faithful, because faithfulness was only ever yours to give.

You can tend your own side of the street, being honest, being decent, doing your genuine part in the relationship, and set down the part that was always theirs to carry. Many people, and often women in particular, were trained to take on responsibility for other people’s behavior, to feel that someone else’s choices are somehow their fault to fix or prevent. This is a place to hand that responsibility back to where it belongs.

When the Memory Returns

Even with good repair, old images and memories can still surface. When one does, you don’t have to follow it down or treat it as a fresh emergency. You can notice it, remind yourself that it belongs to the past and to your partner’s choice rather than to your present worth, and gently bring your attention back to where you actually are now.

The aim isn’t to force the memory away or to relive it again in detail, but simply to stop feeding the loop each time it arises. With the outside door closed and the responsibility set down where it belongs, these returns tend to lose their charge over time. They come less often, and they hurt less when they do.

Standing on Your Own Ground

Peace after a betrayal isn’t forgetting, and it isn’t pretending nothing happened. It’s repairing what can be repaired, closing what needs to be closed, and setting down what was never yours to hold. From that ground, you get to decide freely how you want to go forward, whether toward trust rebuilt patiently over time, or toward a different choice entirely. Either way, you’re standing on your own steadiness rather than continuing to relive someone else’s decision.

Rebuilding after a rupture like this, and coming back to solid ground in yourself, is the heart of my Strong Heart program, which opens again in July. You can learn more about it here, and if you decide to sign up, use code substack10 for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

It can feel like a choice between two bad options: stay close and lose yourself, or stay yourself and keep people at arm’s length.

This is one of the harder things in any close relationship, being fully your own person while fully in connection with another. The two pulls, merging into someone or backing away from them, are really two attempts to solve the same problem: how to be close without feeling overwhelmed or erased. Underneath, there’s often something else as well, a quiet tendency to want your sense of worth or okayness to come from the other person. When that’s running, their mood and their approval can flood your inner world or threaten it, which makes closeness feel high-stakes in an exhausting way.

You don’t actually have to choose between being close and being yourself. The skill is staying in contact with your own center while you stay in contact with them.

That skill can be learned. It’s a bit like a dive into deeper water: unfamiliar at first, and then, with practice, something you can do with more and more ease. Learning it is much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program. You can use the code substack10 to get 10% off at checkout.

In the rest of this article, I’ll go through four things that make it possible: staying anchored in your own body, remembering that you’re the author of your own life, using ordinary interactions as a kind of practice ground, and meeting another person with deep curiosity without being absorbed by them.

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That small moment points to something that turns out to be foundational. Inside your own mind, you always have the capacity to step back: to observe what’s happening, to weigh it against what you care about, and to choose how you want to respond, rather than being carried along by whatever the other person wants. It sounds simple. For many people it isn’t, because somewhere along the way they came to feel they don’t have the right to it.

Part of what makes the step back possible is empathy, which we usually think of as feeling with another person. Empathy does something else as well: it lets us sense what someone is after, their intentions, and not only their feelings. Sometimes, when you tune in honestly, you discern that a person is relating to you mainly as a means to their own ends. Seeing that clearly is not cynicism, and it is not unkind. It is simply declining to look away from what is actually there.

The freedom to step back and take this kind of private measure is a foundation of autonomy. And many people, often women in particular, were raised to feel they don’t have it, that they should stay agreeable, available, and merged, and that holding a separate inner vantage point is a kind of betrayal. It isn’t.

You always have the right to step back inside your own mind and take your own measure of what’s happening. You don’t have to announce it, and you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

This inner step back is not coldness, and it is not the end of closeness. It’s actually what lets closeness be something you choose rather than something that happens to you. Learning to do it steadily, without losing your warmth, is much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk through how to make that inner step back in the moment, and then the three things it opens up: seeing clearly what’s actually going on, weighing it against what you value, and deciding what, if anything, to do.

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This is one of the hardest places to stand in a relationship: loving someone who is suffering, who could be helped, and who won’t, or can’t yet, take the help.

When I think through a situation like this, I find it useful to sort it into three separate piles, three kinds of work that are easy to confuse with one another:

1. Staying in goodwill toward the person: a basic stance of kindness and good wishes.

2. Influencing what you can, doing what you skillfully can to nudge them in a good direction.

3. Taking care of yourself, the one that people tend to drop first.

It’s worth being clear that staying in goodwill does not mean giving up your rights, letting yourself be mistreated, or committing to stay forever, no matter what. It’s an inner posture, not a vow of self-erasure. And much of the exhaustion in a situation like this comes from trying to carry all three of these jobs at once, as though they were one, and from taking on a fourth that was never yours: doing the person’s healing for them.

You can love someone with your whole heart and still not be the one who can fix them.

Holding steady here, with both warmth and self-respect, is much of what we work on in my Strong Heart program.

In the rest of this article, I’ll go through each of these three jobs in turn, and then look at the honest, non-threatening conversation that can help when someone you love keeps choosing not to take the help that’s there.

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If you recognize yourself in any of that, you’re in good company. And it’s worth saying at the outset that not all of this is a problem. There’s a normal, healthy kind of pleasing in which we’re simply there to like and be liked, prepared to find what’s good in other people. There’s also an ordinary, sensible warmth in being a positive presence, like when you want to deepen a friendship or get along with the person fixing your sink. Some of us are also just more amiable by temperament than others; people vary in this the way they vary in height. None of that needs fixing.

The question is whether the pleasing has started to run you, rather than the other way around.

Notice What You’re Seeking and Avoiding

A useful place to begin is with a plain question: what experience am I seeking through pleasing this person, and what experience am I trying to avoid? Often there are two things underneath at once. There’s something we’re reaching for: to be approved of, included, seen as good, perhaps an old wish to be noticed and cherished that goes back a long way. And there’s something we’re trying to head off, usually the discomfort of someone being displeased with us, which for many people can feel out of proportion to the actual stakes.

When pleasing is being driven by that second thing, by the need to avoid anyone’s displeasure, it tends to cost us. We drop our own preferences, agree to things we don’t want, and lose track of what we think, all to keep the other person’s face friendly. For many people this is an old strategy, learned early, when keeping the people around us pleased may have felt necessary for staying connected and safe.

Can You Tolerate Someone Not Being Pleased With You?

If the engine is avoiding displeasure, then the work is learning, gradually, to tolerate it. This doesn’t mean becoming careless about other people’s feelings, or going looking for conflict. It means letting yourself find out that someone can be a little disappointed in you, or mildly put out, and that you remain intact. The world does not end. You are still here.

It helps to start small. You might decline an invitation you’d normally have accepted out of obligation, voice a mild preference that differs from the group’s, or let a small silence sit instead of rushing to smooth it. As you do, notice the feelings that come up, and notice, too, that they pass, and that you’re still standing. There’s a great deal to be gained from practicing this in low-stakes ways, because the capacity you build in small moments becomes available in the larger ones.

When Someone Is Pleased, Let It In

There’s another half to this, and it’s the part people tend to skip. When someone is pleased with you, when warmth or appreciation actually comes your way, are you taking it in? Many of us don’t. The good moment arrives and slides off, or we discount it and move on. So the hunger underneath never gets fed, and we go looking for more approval to fill a cup that has a hole in the bottom.

So when appreciation comes, slow down for a few seconds and let it register. Feel it in your body. Let it reach the part of you that has wanted to be liked and valued. This is what turns a passing moment of being appreciated into something that gradually settles in and steadies you, so that over time you need the next person’s approval a little less.

Find Someone to Model

It can also help to bring to mind someone you like and respect who gets along with people perfectly well, someone who can manage the contractor, the colleague, or the difficult relative, but who doesn’t seem hijacked by the need to please, and doesn’t crumble when someone is briefly unhappy with them. Watch, in your mind, how that person carries themselves. You’re not trying to become them. You’re using them as a kind of reference point, a living reminder that it’s possible to be warm and well-liked and still have firm ground under your feet. You can be amiable and have good boundaries; the two go together more easily than we tend to assume.

A Small Experiment

For the next week, try holding both halves of this at once. Pick one small place to risk someone not being fully pleased with you, and let yourself feel what comes up without rushing to repair it. And when someone is warm toward you, whether it’s a thank-you, a real smile, or a word of appreciation, pause for a breath and take it in rather than brushing past it. Risking the displeasure loosens the grip of the fear. Taking in the approval feeds the part of you that has been hungry for it. Worked together, over time, they slowly return the steering wheel to you.

A Quieter Kind of Warmth

Being liked is a good thing, and wanting it is human. The trouble comes only when the wish to be liked is in the driver’s seat, quietly steering your choices and dimming your own preferences. As you become more able to tolerate someone’s passing displeasure, and more able to receive the warmth that’s genuinely offered, the pleasing tends to settle back into its rightful, smaller place. You can still be kind, still a warm presence. You’re simply no longer paying for it with yourself.

This kind of pleasing is one of the threads that often runs through insecure attachment, where the wish to keep other people’s approval can have deep and tender roots. If you’d like to understand where it comes from and work with it directly, my Healing Insecure Attachment course explores these patterns in depth, and you can use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

The content in this article has been adapted from my spoken word.

Some of us recognize some version of this, even if we’ve never named it so plainly. We give and give in a relationship, and somewhere beneath the giving is a question we’re quietly hoping the other person will keep answering.

It helps to start by noticing that affection like this usually has more than one motivation running at the same time. I sometimes picture two ponies pulling the same carriage down the same road. One is the loving pony: you care about this person, you’re naturally warm, and expressing that warmth is simply you being yourself. The other is the anxious pony: the part that gives to get something back, that offers affection partly to quiet a worried question inside. Both ponies are pulling toward the same affectionate act, which is exactly why they can be so hard to tell apart from the inside.

The loving pony needs no fixing. The work is only ever with the other one. And the giving-to-get pony tends to come from a particular place, a felt sense that something is missing, that the care you need isn’t quite there or isn’t quite secure. That sense of deficit is what gives the giving its subtle, almost compulsive quality, the way it can start to feel less like a choice and more like a reflex.

The trouble isn’t your warmth. It’s that some of it has become a way of asking whether you’re still loved.

This is common, and there’s nothing shameful in it. It usually means an old and tender need is still looking to be met. The encouraging part is that it can be worked with directly and gently, and this balance between warmth and steadiness is much of what we explore in my Strong Heart program.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk through three things I’d suggest to anyone caught in this pattern: how to start meeting the underlying need yourself so the giving isn’t doing that job, how to slow the impulse down and read what the other person actually wants, and how to talk with them, in concrete terms, about the kind of affection that works for you both.

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Later, you may wonder why reassurance never seems to fill you for long, or why you can long for closeness and then hold it at a slight distance the moment it actually arrives.

This shows up in different ways. For some people, it looks anxious: no amount of reassurance quite sinks in, so you find yourself needing it again and again. For others it looks more avoidant: closeness starts to feel like too much, and you keep a quiet, optimal distance even from people you care about. Either way, the good is being offered, and something in you isn’t able to take it in.

It’s tempting to read this as proof that you’re too guarded, or somehow hard to love. More often, it’s something understandable: an old protection, learned early. If, when you were young, letting yourself need and receive tended to end in disappointment — or if letting yourself want more once led somewhere painful — the mind learns a sensible response, which is to keep the whole process at arm’s length. The absence of good early on can shape us as deeply as the presence of harm.

There’s a logic to it. Letting something good in can stir up a strong wish for more, and if wanting more once led to real hurt, the safest move was to shut the wanting down. So when care arrives now, an old part of you keeps it at the edge, to protect you from needing what might be taken away again.

The problem usually isn’t that love isn’t there. It’s that an old part of you learned it wasn’t safe to take in.

Taking in the good, though, is more a skill than a fixed trait, and skills can be built over time. The brain changes with repeated experience; what was shaped by the past can be reshaped, gradually, through enough moments of letting something good actually register.

This is much of what we work with in my Healing Insecure Attachment course — the practical process of receiving the experiences that help fill the hole in the heart. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll look at how to recognize your own particular block to receiving, a simple three-part way of working with strong feelings as they come up, how to take in a good experience so it begins to leave a trace, and what to do when the people around you can’t give you what you need — including how this still works when you’re largely on your own.

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This can happen with a partner, a parent, a friend, a boss. The details differ, but the pattern is familiar: another person’s distress arrives, and your own center of gravity slides toward them, sometimes completely.

It’s tempting to read this as oversensitivity, or simply as being a caring person. Some of it is care, but for many people, the speed and the totality of it point to something else — an old pattern in the nervous system, learned long before the present relationship.

Human beings are deeply attuned to the emotional signals of the people who matter to us. Early in life, another person’s upset can carry real stakes; a caregiver’s anger or withdrawal can feel like a threat to our safety or our place in the relationship. So the nervous system learns a strategy: when someone important becomes upset, do whatever restores the connection — agree, soothe, fix, disappear. For a child, this is intelligent, it works. The difficulty is that it tends to keep running in adulthood, automatically, even when nothing is truly at stake beyond a disagreement.

There is an important difference between feeling with someone and losing yourself in them. In the first, you can sense what another person is going through and still know where you end and they begin. In the second, their state seems to overwrite yours: their upset becomes your emergency, their disapproval becomes proof you’ve done something wrong. Often the reaction is out of proportion to what is actually happening — a flicker of tension in them, and a flood of alarm in you. The problem isn’t that you feel what they feel. It’s that you go missing while you do it.

For many people, this is the anxious side of insecure attachment showing up. Underneath the scramble to fix someone’s mood is an older fear: if they’re upset with me, they might leave me. So you work to resolve their feelings as fast as possible — not only for them, but to quiet that fear in yourself. The cost is that it teaches you, again and again, that your own footing depends entirely on someone else’s emotional state.

Understanding where this pattern comes from, and learning to stay steady inside it is much of what I explore in my Healing Insecure Attachment course. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll look at the difference between connecting with someone and merging with them, how to catch the exact moment you begin to leave yourself, a few ways to stay in contact with your own experience while another person is activated, and what it means to do your part in a hard moment without taking on feelings that were never yours to carry.

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You find yourself replaying conversations, wondering whether you should have said something differently, imagining alternate outcomes, or revisiting moments. Sometimes this happens even when you understand why the relationship ended and have no real desire to get back together.

This can be confusing. If the relationship is over, why does the mind keep going back? Part of the answer is that the mind is often trying to do something useful.

It may be trying to understand what happened, it may be trying to learn from mistakes, or it may be trying to make sense of a painful experience or find some kind of emotional resolution. In that sense, returning to the relationship is not necessarily a problem. Reflection can be healthy. Looking honestly at our lives is one of the ways we grow.

But there is an important distinction between reflection and rumination.

Reflection helps us understand something more clearly. It moves us forward. Rumination keeps circling the same territory without producing much new understanding. We revisit the same memories, ask the same questions, and arrive at the same conclusions, yet somehow feel compelled to do it all again tomorrow.

The challenge is that these two processes can feel very similar from the inside.

A person can spend months believing they are working through something when, in reality, they have become caught in a loop. Their attention keeps returning to the relationship, not because there is still something important to discover, but because the habit of returning has become deeply established.

There is another layer as well.

Breakups do not only involve the loss of a person. They often involve the loss of a future we imagined, a role we occupied, or a sense of security we associated with the relationship. Sometimes what we miss is not the relationship itself, but what it represented. Sometimes old attachment wounds become activated, and the mind continues searching for understanding, reassurance, or completion long after the relationship has ended.

If you’ve noticed that certain relationships continue occupying your mind long after they’ve ended, it may be worth looking beneath the breakup itself and exploring the attachment patterns that keep the wound alive. These are some of the themes we’ll be exploring in my upcoming Healing Insecure Attachment course. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for 10% off.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore a framework I find very helpful for understanding relationship regrets, why grief and rumination are not the same thing, and what it means to “turn a corner” without suppressing your feelings or pretending the relationship never mattered.

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You may have seen the pattern plainly, explained it carefully, approached the conversation thoughtfully, and tried to stay patient, compassionate, and open. You may have returned to the same issue many times, hoping that eventually the other person will understand what has been painful, recognize their impact, or begin relating differently.

And sometimes people do change. Human beings are capable of real growth. Relationships can improve significantly when there is sincerity, self-awareness, goodwill, and a genuine willingness to repair.

But sometimes, despite repeated conversations and sincere effort, the relationship continues settling back into the same patterns. The other person may become defensive, dismissive, emotionally closed off, or simply unable to engage with the issue in the deeper way you are hoping for.

This can be painful because what often keeps people trying is not only the present relationship itself, but also the hope that clarity will finally lead to change, and that if they explain themselves carefully enough, lovingly enough, calmly enough, the other person will eventually understand.

And when that hoped-for change does not happen, many people don’t know what to do next. Part of the difficulty is that letting go of this hope can feel like giving up on the relationship entirely. But those are not always the same thing.

Sometimes the deeper question is: What do you do when another person may not become who you need them to be?

If this is something you struggle with in your own relationships, my Healing Insecure Attachment course explores many of these patterns in greater depth, including boundaries, emotional regulation, attachment dynamics, and the practical process of relating more wisely to yourself and others. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore why we sometimes become emotionally stuck trying to create change in other people, how grief becomes part of this process, and what it can look like to protect your well-being without becoming harsh, closed off, or hopeless.

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This often doesn’t happen all at once. It can look like constantly accommodating, suppressing certain feelings, over-focusing on another person’s emotional state, or becoming so preoccupied with preserving the connection that you stop fully listening to yourself. Over time, this can become a deeply ingrained relational pattern.

Many people learned early in life, often without realizing it, that staying connected to others required some degree of self-abandonment. Perhaps there was pressure to accommodate, to stay agreeable, to suppress certain feelings, or to prioritize the emotional states of other people above their own.

These adaptations are understandable. Children naturally organize themselves around attachment needs, they learn what helps preserve connection and what threatens it.

But patterns that once helped us maintain closeness can eventually create a different kind of suffering in adult relationships.

A person may become highly attuned to others while remaining disconnected from themselves. They may sense everyone else’s feelings very clearly while struggling to recognize their own needs, limits, or emotional reality in real time.

And because this pattern develops gradually, many people don’t initially recognize it as self-abandonment at all. It can simply feel like being caring, empathic, accommodating, or relationship-oriented.

But caring about others and staying connected to yourself are not opposites. In fact, healthy relationships depend on both.

If this dynamic feels familiar to you, my Healing Insecure Attachment course explores these patterns in much greater depth, including practical ways to build a more secure and grounded relationship with yourself and others. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore how self-abandonment develops, why it often persists even in adulthood, and several practical ways we can begin rebuilding a more trustworthy relationship with ourselves from the inside out.

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On the one hand, it can be deeply validating to recognize your own patterns in a clear way. You begin to understand why certain relationships feel so activating, why closeness may feel difficult, why reassurance sometimes never quite feels like enough, or why conflict can affect you so intensely. Experiences that once felt confusing or personal begin to make more sense in the context of early relationships and nervous system learning.

At the same time, many people begin to feel that something is fundamentally wrong with them.

If attachment patterns run deep, especially when they were shaped early in life or reinforced repeatedly over time, it can feel discouraging to see how automatic some reactions have become. You may notice yourself repeating familiar patterns even when part of you already understands them intellectually. You may find yourself reacting in ways that do not fully reflect who you want to be.

And after a while, people can start relating to themselves primarily through the lens of what is wounded, insecure, anxious, avoidant, reactive, or unfinished.

But that is not the whole picture.

One of the most important things to understand about insecure attachment is that these patterns are not the entirety of who you are. They are learned adaptations. They are ways the mind, body, and nervous system learned to cope with particular environments and experiences. Some people carry these patterns lightly. Others carry them much more deeply because life has simply been harder and more painful.

Both are understandable, and in both cases, growth remains possible.

Compassion Comes First

A useful place to begin is with compassion.

Compassion simply means recognizing suffering and responding to it with some degree of care instead of condemnation.

This matters because attachment wounds often generate shame very quickly. People become frustrated with themselves for needing reassurance, for struggling with closeness, for becoming reactive, for pulling away, or for repeating familiar relationship dynamics despite years of effort to change them.

But shame rarely helps people heal. Usually, it makes the nervous system more defended and less flexible.

Compassion, by contrast, creates conditions in which understanding and change become more possible. It allows people to look honestly at their patterns without immediately collapsing into self-judgment.

And importantly, compassion does not make a person weak. You can still have boundaries, you can still be clear, direct, strong, or discerning with other people while also relating to yourself with basic kindness.

If this is an area you’d like to explore more deeply, my Healing Insecure Attachment course goes much further into these patterns and the practical process of working with them over time. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

Understanding the Pattern Without Becoming the Pattern

Another important part of healing is learning to understand your own relational patterns clearly. This requires honesty, but not harshness.

Over time, many people begin to notice recurring tendencies in how they relate to others. Perhaps they become highly anxious when there is distance in a relationship. Perhaps they avoid closeness when vulnerability increases. Perhaps they repeatedly choose emotionally unavailable people, over-accommodate others, or lose touch with themselves in relationships altogether.

These patterns often feel deeply personal, but in many ways, they are learned expectations about closeness, safety, conflict, and connection.

And once they are recognized, you begin to separate your identity from the pattern itself. Instead of saying, “This is just who I am,” it becomes possible to recognize: “This is something I learned.”

That distinction matters because what is learned can gradually be worked with, reshaped, and softened over time.

In the rest of this article, I’ll explore why insecure attachment patterns tend to repeat themselves, how healing happens through experience rather than insight alone, what it means to find “fertile ground” in relationships, and why there may be something fundamentally healthy in you even beneath long-standing fear, insecurity, or reactivity.

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Someone takes longer than usual to text back, their attention shifts elsewhere, they seem distracted, distant, or less emotionally available than they were a few hours ago. Sometimes nothing explicit has happened at all, and yet something inside you begins reacting as though the relationship itself is under threat.

At those moments, the mind naturally moves toward reassurance. You may want confirmation that everything is okay, signs that the person still cares, or some kind of emotional certainty that the connection remains intact.

And of course, this is deeply human. Human beings are relational creatures. We are affected by closeness and distance with other people, especially in important relationships.

But anxious attachment adds another layer on top of normal relational sensitivity. The need for reassurance is frequently driven not only by care or affection, but also by doubt. Doubt fuels anxiety, and anxiety fuels more doubt in return. The two can reinforce each other until even ordinary moments of separation begin to feel emotionally loaded.

One of the difficulties here is that reassurance often helps only briefly. You may feel better for a moment, but then the uncertainty returns, and the mind begins scanning again for signs of distance, disconnection, or change.

Over time, this can become exhausting for both people, and it can distort the way normal relationship experiences are interpreted.

When Separation Starts to Feel Like Threat

Part of the challenge of anxious attachment is that ordinary separations can feel much bigger than they are.

People get distracted, stressed, tired, preoccupied, or temporarily emotionally out of sync with each other. None of this necessarily means something is wrong in the relationship itself.

These things happen in all relationships. No two people are perfectly synchronized all the time.

But when anxious attachment is active, the nervous system can interpret these ordinary relational frictions as signs of danger. A moment that might objectively be small begins to feel overwhelming internally.

You may already recognize this pattern in yourself. Something happens that is realistically a two or a three on the scale of relational difficulty, but internally it quickly becomes an eight or a nine.

And once that escalation happens, it becomes harder to respond clearly.

If you recognize this pattern in your own relationships and want a more structured way to work with it, my course Healing Insecure Attachment explores these dynamics in depth, including practical ways to build greater security, steadiness, and trust in relationships over time. You can use the code SUBSTACK10 for a 10% discount.

In the rest of this article, I’ll walk through how anxious attachment shapes perception, why reassurance alone often fails to resolve it, and what helps foster a greater sense of stability and security from the inside out.

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