TranceBreakers Newsletter

  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 Withdrawn.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 ...

  There's a voice in your head that judges. For a lot of us it points inward. It has opinions about how you look, what you said in that meeting, how you handled the thing with your sister, whether you're where you should be by now. For some people it barely points inward at all. It points at other people. The woman taking too long in the checkout line. Your brother-in-law. The way somebody drives. And for nearly all of us, it points at circumstance. This traffic is ridiculous. This weather is unbearable. This should not be happening to me. Different targets. Same voice. Why fighting it doesn't work Most of the advice about this voice says the same thing. Silence it. Fight it. Replace it with affirmations. Argue it down. I've watched that fail for twenty years, in other people and in myself, and I think I finally understand why. Arguing with that voice is like telling your partner not to feel angry. How has that ever gone for anyone? The moment you tell a feel...

  Everybody knows recovery groups work. What almost nobody can tell you is why. We assume it's the accountability, or the structure, or the steps. Those matter. But I think the real medicine is something quieter, and it happens in the first ten minutes, before anyone has done any work at all. You sit in a room and listen to a stranger describe the exact thing you have been carrying alone for years. And something in your chest lets go. Not because they solved it. Because it turns out you're not the only one. Shame needs you to be the only one That's the whole mechanism. Guilt says I did a bad thing. Shame says I am a bad thing. And shame can only survive if you believe the thing you did is uniquely yours. Something no decent person would have done. Something that separates you from the rest of the human family. The moment it becomes a human behavior instead of a you behavior, shame loses its grip. Not gradually. Almost immediately. That's why the room works. E...

  Somebody said something in a session recently that I have not stopped thinking about. He was explaining why he doesn't show up for certain things his partner needs. He had been at it a while. This reason, that reason, all of them fair, all of them true. Then he stopped mid-sentence and said something close to this: Actually, if I take you out of it entirely, do I do things that make me uncomfortable? For anyone? No. I don't. I don't do them, period. And the room went quiet. Because that was the whole thing. Twenty minutes of reasons, and then one sentence underneath all of them. What we think the problem is We think we have a communication problem. Or a priorities problem. Or a partner problem, or a time problem, or a boundaries problem. Most of the time what we have is a discomfort problem. Look at what's actually sitting in front of you right now. The conversation you keep not having. The apology you owe somebody. The thing you want to ask for and ...

For most of my life, I thought love meant protecting the people I cared about from uncomfortable feelings. If I thought something might make you sad... I wouldn't say it. If I thought you might become irritated... I'd soften it. If I thought you might feel disappointed... I'd try to fix it before you ever experienced it. It looked loving. It felt loving. But I'm beginning to see there was something quietly hidden underneath. I didn't trust that the people I loved could handle their own emotions. Somehow, I had unconsciously decided it was my job to manage everyone else's emotional weather. Here's what I'm learning instead. Every one of us was given the full palette. Joy. Wonder. Gratitude. Grief. Anger. Disappointment. Fear. Relief. Peace. We weren't handed a box of crayons with half the colors removed. Life intends for us to use all of them. Who am I to decide someone shouldn't experience sadness? Or frustration? Or grief? Or even be upset with ...

 We spend so much time trying to get rid of grief. We tell people to stay busy. Stay strong. Move on. Keep their chin up. We search for the right words, hoping they'll somehow lessen the pain. But what if grief isn't the enemy? What if grief is simply love…looking for somewhere to go? When we think of grief, most of us think of death. Yet grief shows up in countless forms throughout our lives. We grieve the end of a marriage. The retirement we thought we'd celebrate. A miscarriage and the future we had already begun imagining. The loss of our health. The children who grow up and leave home. The career that once gave us purpose. Even the version of ourselves we used to be. Grief isn't limited to losing someone we love. Often, we're grieving the life we expected to live. That's why every grief story is different. No one grieves correctly. No one grieves incorrectly. Every journey is uniquely human. Perhaps the greatest mistake we make is belie...

  One of life's great paradoxes is that certainty rarely comes from knowing what's going to happen. It comes from trusting who you'll be no matter what happens. Most of us spend enormous energy trying to make life predictable. We want certainty that the relationship will last. That the business will succeed. That our children will be okay. That our health will hold. That the economy will cooperate. So we try to control. We try to protect. We try to force. And eventually we discover something frustrating. Life refuses to become predictable. Transition doesn't ask us for certainty. It asks us for trust. I've been noticing something. The people who navigate life's biggest transitions most gracefully aren't the ones with the best plan. They're the ones who stop believing that uncertainty is dangerous. Fear narrows our vision. It asks, "What's the safest thing I can do?" Curiosity asks, "What else might be possible?" Innovation doesn...

  Today I taught a class on intuition to a group of coaches in training. Before we got into any theory, I gave them a little quiz. Eight everyday scenarios. Circle the answer that feels most true. Don't overthink it. Then we scored it, and something interesting happened. Almost everyone in the room landed in the same two categories. Feelers and knowers. Gut people and certainty people. Hardly anyone was a seer or a hearer. And that's when the real lesson arrived, the one I didn't have on a slide. Most of us spend years waiting for our intuition to show up in a form it never uses. We expect visions because that's what the movies show us. We wait to hear a voice because that's what the word "guidance" sounds like. And the whole time, our gut has been talking. Our knowing has been arriving, complete and quiet, and we've been dismissing it because it didn't come wrapped the way we expected. Your intuition speaks a native language. The question is wheth...

  I caught myself doing something this week that I've been teaching other people not to do for years. I was texting someone I care about, trying to be kind. I wrote, "no pressure, whenever you're ready." I wrote it half a dozen times to half a dozen different people, actually. It felt gentle. Considerate. The opposite of pushy. Then I remembered my own rule, and had to go back and rewrite every single one. Here's the thing about the mind. It doesn't process a negation the way we think it does. If I say don't think about a pink elephant, you just thought about a pink elephant. The "don't" doesn't erase the image, it just draws a circle around it first. So when you tell someone "no pressure," their mind hears pressure, then tries to cancel it. When you say "no rush," it hears rush, then tries to talk itself down. You've planted the exact feeling you were trying to remove, right at the front of their mind, and ask...

  The sensation was so ordinary I almost missed it. Just a number on a screen. A feeling in my chest that most people would never notice, let alone think twice about. But I've spent enough years paying attention to my own body that I caught it, and once I caught it, I couldn't unsee it. A doctor told me what I needed to do. He had the training. The credentials. Years of experience reading exactly this kind of situation. He looked at the evidence in front of him, weighed it against everything he'd learned, and made his recommendation with real confidence. He wasn't wrong to be confident. People like him are usually right, and that's exactly why it's so hard to disagree with them. And my body told me something different. Not once. Three times, with numbers I couldn't argue with. Every time I did what the expert recommended, I felt worse. Every time I trusted the quieter signal coming from inside my own skin, I felt better. The pattern wasn't subtle. ...