TranceBreakers Newsletter

  On Sunday night, my heart slipped out of rhythm. It's something I've lived with for a while. My cardiologist knows. I know my body and my plan. Usually it settles on its own, and this time it did too. Eventually. But here's what kept me up most of the night. My watch. I have an amazing watch that can take a mini EKG in 30 seconds, any time I want. So I checked. And checked again. And again. Still out of rhythm. Heart rate up. Check again. All night long. Then morning came, and I had a client. For the next hour, I was completely with her. Her words. Her emotions. Her fears. Her life. That's what my work asks of me, and I love giving it. For 60 minutes, my world didn't exist. When the call ended, I finally remembered to check. Heart rate 69. Steady. Normal. Somewhere in that hour, my heart found its way home. And I missed the moment it happened, because I wasn't watching. I've been thinking about that ever since. Technology is a miracle. My watch gives me in...

  A couple sat in my office at the end of their relationship healing retreat in Sedona. He poured his heart out to her. All the love he'd been holding back for years. She listened. Then she looked him in the eye. "I will always love you unconditionally," she said. "But make no mistake. Our marriage is not unconditional. If you ever treat me the way you did before we came here, we're done." I've never forgotten it. She said both things in the same breath. She didn't take back any of the love, and she didn't soften the boundary. She held them side by side. That's the lesson. Unconditional love does not mean an unconditional relationship. Giving someone a special place in your heart doesn't give them permission to hurt you. Not in any way, shape, or form. I see people get stuck on one side or the other. Some hold the boundary but stop loving. They're hurt, so they pull their love back, and they watch the relationship slowly die without u...

My mother is eighty-six and has been a marriage and family therapist for more than forty years. This week she was on a call with me, talking to a group about relationships, and she said something I want to write down before it gets away. If you feel unloved, give what you need to get. Not ask for it. Not wait for it. Give it. If you’re starved for affection, be affectionate. If nobody’s listening to you, go find somebody and listen to them. If what you want is patience, go be patient with someone. I asked her what that actually looks like, because a line like that can float off if you let it. She said: open my heart instead of sitting there waiting for him to go first. Let myself be vulnerable. Look at where the pain hit and what I need to heal and where I’m afraid. Then she said the thing. She and my father were married almost sixty-three years. He died four years ago. And she told that room, on a live call, that she still catches herself reaching to blame him. It’s habitual, she said...

  Somebody you love is upset. And there's this thing that happens, almost automatically, before you've decided anything. You start explaining why they don't have to feel that way. It's not that bad. Here's another way to look at it. This will pass. It's going to be fine. Let me tell you three reasons this isn't worth getting upset about. You're being helpful. You genuinely are. You want them to stop hurting, and you can see a way out, so you hand it to them. And it never works. I've watched this in a lot of rooms over a lot of years, and I have never once seen the other person say, oh, thank you, that changes everything, I feel completely different now. What actually happens is they get louder. Or they go quiet and cold. Either way, something got worse rather than better, and you have no idea why, because you were trying to help. Here's what I think is going on. The answer is sitting right there in the word. Feelings are to be felt. That's th...

  I remember being brought home from the hospital I was born in. I remember the Kennedy assassination. I was seventeen months old. People don't believe me when I say that, and I've stopped trying to convince them. But I have thousands of details from the first few years of my life, and most people have almost none, and for a long time I had no idea why. Here's the only explanation I've ever had. When I was five my parents took me to a drive-in in Concord, California to see The Jungle Book. Colonel Hathi has a line in it. An elephant never forgets. I said it for days. I said it until everyone in the house was tired of hearing it. And at some point my dad looked at me and said, but you won't. You're a kid. You'll forget all of this. It horrified me. I went into my parents' bedroom, stood in front of the mirror, and decided I wasn't going to. Then I did something I still find strange. I stood there and went through them one at a time, out loud, delibera...

  People come to me carrying a sentence. Something somebody said to them years ago. Sometimes decades. And they can tell me everything about it. Where they were standing. What the room smelled like. What their own face did. How long they cried afterward and whether anybody noticed. And then I'll ask what the point was. Most of them can't tell me. The pain landed. The message didn't. I've seen that enough times now that it changed what I think about honesty. The delivery costs you the content Here's what I mean, practically. Somebody decides they have something important to say. They believe it's true and they believe it needs saying and they're probably right on both counts. So they gather themselves and they say it, and they use the sharpest available version because they want it to finally get through. And what happens inside the other person is not comprehension. It's injury. Injury produces defense, and defense is deaf. Nothing gets in after that poi...