what you carry

Dear Reader,

Most of us carry more than we realize.

In therapy, this shows up in unexpected ways. Someone arrives describing a fatigue they can't explain, or an irritability that feels out of proportion to their week. As we slow down together, their reality begins to emerge. An apology they've been waiting on from someone unlikely to ever give it. The version of themselves they thought they'd be by now. The small piece of unfinished business that has been sitting somewhere in their chest since before the season changed. None of it was on their list of "problems," and yet each piece had been drawing from the same reservoir of energy they kept wondering why they couldn't replenish.

We rarely make a deliberate decision to pick these things up. Some of what we carry is genuinely ours and worth carrying. Some were handed to us before we knew how to decline. And some of it we no longer recognize as a weight at all, because we've been bracing against it long enough that the bracing has begun to feel like a normal posture.

Naming what we carry, even before we know what to do with it, can be its own quiet form of care.

This week, we are not inviting you to set anything down. That can come later, when there is more clarity. For now, the invitation is simply to take stock. To notice what is sitting in the chest, the conversation that hasn't quite ended, the worry that has been keeping you company, the expectation you've been measuring yourself against without quite knowing why. Let it surface without rushing to fix it.

You may find more than you expected, and that is okay. Some of what surfaces, you will want to keep carrying, and you can. Some of it will surprise you with how long it has been there. And occasionally, in the simple act of being named, something becomes a little lighter, even though nothing about your circumstances has changed.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

repair

Dear Reader,

Someone in session last week told me her husband had apologized for something months ago. "So why does it still feel unresolved?" she asked. I told her what I tell a lot of people. The apology had happened, but the repair hadn't happened yet.

An apology can be offered from across a room, or in a text, or even quietly to yourself. It ends with the words said. Repair is what happens after, when you return to the place where something cracked and begin the slow work of mending it.

In his decades of research with couples, John Gottman found that the ability to repair after conflict was one of the strongest predictors of whether a relationship would last. He called these small reaching-back moves "repair attempts." All relationships have conflict. What seems to change the outcome is what comes after.

Repair is often slower than we want. It’s asking, "Are we okay?" and being willing to hear that you're not.  We hope one good conversation will put things back together. Sometimes one is enough. More often it takes a series of small returns. You bring something up gently when you'd rather move on. You remember a detail they mentioned weeks ago and let them see that you remembered. The work happens in places small enough that you could miss them. Those are the places where trust actually comes back.

If something between you and someone you love is still cracked even after the apology happened, that doesn't mean it's broken for good. They might just be waiting for the repair work that comes next.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

tending

Dear Reader,

There's a plant in our office I've watered for the better part of a year. It hasn't grown much. It hasn't died either. About once a month I notice it's gone a little limp, and I get up to fill the watering can. Most weeks, I'd be hard pressed to tell you what color the leaves looked like the time before. The plant doesn't thank me, and it doesn't ask. We have a quiet arrangement that asks nothing of either of us, and the arrangement itself, repeated, becomes the relationship.

A lot of life is held together this way.

Tending is what we do for the houseplant. It’s what we do for the long friendship that survives on a text every other Tuesday. It’s what we offer our partner when time and energy feel thin. None of this looks like love from the outside, but it often is. It’s the unglamorous half of how love behaves once it has settled into the long arc of a life.

The harder lesson is how steady this kind of work has to be to matter at all. The things we love rarely change in sudden ways under our hands. They shift over time, and the shape of having been cared for begins to show gradually, often without us noticing as it happens. A friendship held lightly and consistently may ask very little when a hard season comes. The years of small contact have already done work no single conversation could carry. What the body wants, most of the time, is the quiet reliability of sleep and movement and food it can recognize.

A marriage, too, is built this way. It gathers strength through small, repeated attentions. Over time, those moments make strain less likely to take hold. It forms in ordinary exchanges that rarely stand out, yet leave something durable behind.

Tending is the form love takes once it understands it will remain. It becomes a steady presence, one that no longer needs to prove itself through anything dramatic.

If there is any invitation today, it is simply to notice what you have already been tending without quite naming it. Let your attention rest there this week. Set aside what you’ve been meaning to begin and look instead at what is already in motion. These small, repeated acts have become so familiar you may have stopped seeing them. They are the quiet work of a life held together with care, and they have been carrying more than you think.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

re-entering

Dear Reader,

I've been thinking about how often clients come into session having just gotten back from something. A vacation, a hard week at the hospital with a parent, a retreat, a funeral, a stretch of time that asked something different of them than ordinary life does. They sit down and there's a particular look I've come to recognize. They're here, but not all the way here yet. Their body made it back before the rest of them did.

I think most of us re-enter too fast. We grab the pace again the moment our feet touch the ground, because the world didn't pause while we were gone, and now it expects us to slip back into the rhythm of it.

I do this myself. I'll come home from somewhere that mattered and within twenty minutes be triaging emails on my phone. The emails aren't genuinely urgent. Moving fast just feels easier than sitting with the gap between what I was just inside of and the kitchen I'm standing in.

Here is what I've come to believe about this rhythm. When we skip re-entry, the experience we just had does not get to change us. It just gets archived. The hospital week becomes a story we tell at dinner parties. The vacation becomes a row of photos on a phone. The grief becomes a thing we hand off to the next quiet moment, which never comes, because we keep filling our quiet moments with work emails. Whatever was actually happening to us in that other place gets sealed off, and we go back to being the person we were before, except slightly more tired and slightly more confused about why we feel off.

I see this play out in the therapy room months later. A client will be describing some low-grade weariness, some general sense that something is wrong, and we'll trace it back to a week in February they never really came home from. The week didn't cause the problem but the fact that they sprinted through it did. Whatever happened during that time never got the chance to land somewhere inside them and become part of who they are now.

This is what re-entering slowly does. It gives the experience a place to land. It lets what you went through change something about how you're living. Otherwise it gets stored on a shelf next to all the other things you didn't have time to feel.

Yours in the journey,

Looking for more Moments? Intentional Moments Archive

permission to change your mind

Dear Reader,

I've been watching a client struggle with something that feels familiar. Years ago, she decided she wasn't the kind of person who could handle conflict. She built a life around that belief, chose relationships where things stayed smooth and she structured her work to avoid confrontation. The problem is she's starting to realize that belief isn't serving her anymore. She's capable of more than she gave herself credit for, but changing her mind about who she is feels like admitting she's been wrong about herself all along.

I think that maybe we hold onto old conclusions about ourselves longer than we should. At some point, often early, we decide something is true about who we are. I'm not creative. I'm not good with people. I need a lot of alone time. I can't handle uncertainty. These assessments might have been accurate once, or they might have just been survival strategies that helped us get through a specific season. Either way, we carry them forward as fixed truths about our identity.

The hard part is that changing your mind about yourself requires more than just deciding differently. It means letting go of a story you've been telling for years, and that story has shaped real choices. The relationships you're in, the work you do, the way you spend your time, all of it was built around a version of yourself that you're now outgrowing. Changing your mind means facing the possibility that you've been living smaller than necessary.

I do also think some things shouldn't change. Commitments you've made, vows that matter, people you've promised to show up for. Those deserve endurance even when it's hard. But the beliefs you hold about your own limitations, the narratives about what you're capable of or what you need to be happy, those aren't vows. You're allowed to outgrow them.

Living intentionally means being willing to see yourself clearly now, even when that means releasing who you thought you had to be. It means giving yourself permission to change your mind about your own story and then living into the person you're actually becoming.

Yours in the journey,

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