TranceBreakers Newsletter

  Something came up enough times this year that I finally sat down and wrote the whole thing out. Two people you love stop talking to each other and start talking through you. She tells you what he said. He tells you what she meant. You explain each of them to the other, the temperature comes down, and everyone feels a little better. It works. So you keep doing it. Here is what I did not see for years. You are not passing messages. You are explaining motive. She did not mean it that way. He is just tired. That is just how she talks. And to explain somebody, you have to make them smaller. You cannot hand over the whole person. You hand over a version that fits in a sentence. And a shorter version of a person is much easier to be angry at than the real one. So you build a small character out of someone you love, and you hand it to someone else you love. Then you do it in the other direction, because you are fair. Two villains. One in each house. Built entirely out of kindness. That i...

  This Saturday morning, for the first time in almost six months, I have nothing. No students. No Zoom. Twenty-five weeks of Saturdays and then, suddenly, one that's mine. And I'm already missing them. That's how you know you actually loved something. The absence shows up before the relief does. Will I teach that program again next year? I don't know. I never know year to year. It would be sad if that were the last one, and it might be. But I know for certain I'll teach again, because it turns out it's just in me. Years ago, during my hypnotherapy training, I did a trance journey back to before I was born, looking for what I came here to do. What came back was simple. Love people. Connect people with people. Be a healing presence. And teach what I know. That last one didn't land at first. I didn't think of myself as a teacher. Then the journey walked me through my own life, and I watched the theme show up everywhere. I'm five years old, home from kin...

  What if the person your partner misses is also the person you miss being? I stumbled onto an idea in a coaching conversation recently that hasn't left me alone. It started with a coin. Imagine holding one in your hand. On one side is the version of you that people tend to fall in love with. Maybe you're playful on that side. Warm. Curious. Affectionate. Adventurous. Confident. Generous. Present. You laugh easily. You listen. You create. You flirt. You notice things. You feel alive. Then flip the coin. There's another side. This is the version that tends to appear when you feel threatened. Maybe you're defensive. Controlling. Critical. Withdrawn. Anxious. Cold. Demanding. Unavailable. Still you. Same coin. And that distinction matters. Because I've spent enough time working with couples to notice something strange: We frequently fall in love with one side of someone and then spend years trying to eliminate the other. The Package Deal Think about someone you love. S...

  There's a fight I've watched a few hundred times now, in a few hundred living rooms, and it always runs the same way. She says: You never have my back. And he does the most reasonable thing a person can do. He checks the claim. I had your back Tuesday when your mother went off. I had your back Thursday when our son tried to slide one past us. I had your back at the school thing in March. Every one of those is true. He isn't making them up. He could produce witnesses. And every single one of them makes it worse. Because by about the third example, she says: You're not listening to me. Which, from where he's standing, is insane. He's been listening so hard he built a timeline. So now he's exasperated. And out it comes: I will never be able to please you. I guess I'll never be enough. And there it is. Two people who love each other, both feeling unseen, both certain the other one started it. The word "never" is not a claim ...

 You decided to change something. Maybe you decided to stop snapping at your kid over small things. Maybe you decided to stop apologizing when you haven't done anything. Maybe you decided that this time, when the conversation goes sideways, you're going to stay in the room. And for a while, you do it. Three days, a week, maybe two. You feel it working. Then something happens. You're tired, or you're rushed, or somebody says the thing. And the old reaction arrives right on schedule, fully formed, before you've had a chance to decide anything. And underneath it, a quieter thought: see, I haven't changed. I want to give you a better explanation than that one. If you've ever driven a stick shift for years and then switched to an automatic, you already know how this works. For weeks afterward, your left foot goes hunting for a clutch that isn't there. Your right hand reaches for a gear shift that doesn't exist. You are not confused about wh...

  A man told me last week that he goes from zero to ten in about a second. I asked him a different question. On an ordinary day, when nothing is wrong, nobody is bothering him, no argument, no bad news, where is he? He thought about it for a while. Then he said, honestly, probably a two to four. Rarely a zero. And there it was. He was never going from zero to ten. He was starting at four and traveling six points. To everyone watching, including him, it looked like he lost his mind over something small. He didn't overreact. He started high. Most of us are working on the wrong problem. We think the issue is our temper, so we try to fix our temper. We look for the technique that will let us stay calm when someone says the thing. We read about breathing. We promise ourselves we'll handle it better next time. Then next time comes and none of it is available, because by the time we remember there was a plan, we're already past the point where plans work. Here's a more useful ...