TranceBreakers Newsletter

There's a kind of heartbreak that doesn't get talked about much. You're with someone you love. Someone who is genuinely good. Someone who shows up in real ways. And yet you keep walking away from conversations feeling unseen, unheard, and a little crazy. You start to wonder if you're asking too much. You're not. You're just shopping at the wrong store. Here's the picture I keep returning to. Imagine you walk into a hardware store hungry. You ask for a ham sandwich. The clerk looks at you like you've lost your mind. They don't sell sandwiches. They never have. But you keep going back, week after week, ordering the sandwich, getting more upset each time it doesn't arrive. That's what some relationships feel like. Not because the partner is bad. The hardware store is a good hardware store. He provides real things. Steadiness. Partnership. Logic. Reliability. Care expressed through fixing the leak and balancing the checkbook and showing up at eve...

  There is a question I've been sitting with lately: How do we know when we're facing a mindset challenge... and how do we know when something deeper is asking for our attention? As coaches, healers, and growth-minded people, we're trained to look inward. We ask: What belief is creating this? What fear is driving this? What story am I telling myself? What lesson is trying to emerge? These are powerful questions. But every now and then life offers a different answer. Sometimes the issue isn't a belief. Sometimes the issue isn't emotional. Sometimes the body is trying to get our attention. The Slow Fade Rarely does a person wake up one morning and announce: "Something is wrong." More often it begins quietly. The patience gets shorter. The joy feels harder to access. Small frustrations seem bigger than they used to. Things that once felt exciting now feel like obligations. Relationships become more difficult. Life starts to feel heavier. Most people assume th...

A simple practice for letting your feelings actually land. Most people don't pause long enough to let their own feelings land. We tell the story. We explain the situation. We give the context. We move quickly through the what happened and the why I'm upset and the what I should do about it . And the whole time, the feeling itself, the actual experience in the body, never gets a chance to be felt. So I've started using a phrase with my clients lately. Pause that for a second. Where do you feel that in your body? It's not stop . Stop sounds like put it away, we're done with that . Pause is different. Pause says we'll come back to the story in a minute. Right now, let's actually feel what's there. A Story About Grief That Wasn't About Death I did this with a long-term client recently. He'd been telling me about something that had been quietly bothering him for weeks. Surface story. Work frustration. Family logistics. I asked him to pause, dr...