TranceBreakers Newsletter

  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...

  In any market there are three or four or five stations doing the news at the same hour, pulling from the same pile of stories. Different newsrooms. Different people. Different backgrounds, ages, politics, life experiences. Each group meeting on its own, arguing it out, making independent calls about what to cover and what order to put it in. Then the newscasts go on the air and they're nearly identical. Not similar. The same stories, often in the same order. I ran one of those newsrooms for years. And for years people told me it was a conspiracy. That we all got our marching orders from above, that the owners fed us what they wanted the public to hear, and that the matching newscasts were the proof. It wasn't true. Nobody from the top ever sat in one of my meetings. Nobody reviewed our decisions. The arguments in that room were real, sometimes heated, and we genuinely didn't know what the lineup would be when we walked in. And we still landed where everyone else lan...

  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...