TranceBreakers Newsletter

  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...

  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...

  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 ...