On Tuesday, I wrote about how much of our identity gets shaped by what other people expect from us, and there’s one piece of that I keep coming back to: how many of us have gotten really, really good at being useful.

Give us something to do and we’re fine. Give us a problem to solve, a deadline, a friend who needs advice, a family member who needs help, a project nobody else wants to deal with. We know how to operate there. There’s a purpose, there’s something to accomplish, and at the end of it we get the satisfaction of knowing we did something that mattered.

Give us a completely open Saturday with nowhere to be and nobody needing anything, though, and suddenly we’re cleaning out a closet that has apparently become an emergency.

I’m joking, but only a little. I think a lot of people have a hard time doing nothing

Read more

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we answer the question, “who are you?”

Most of us reach for the obvious things. What we do for work, whether we’re married, whether we have kids, where we live. If we go a little deeper, we might describe ourselves as responsible, independent, hardworking, helpful, easygoing, driven. We have all these ways of explaining ourselves that feel so familiar we rarely stop to wonder where they came from.

And I think that’s an interesting question.

Because none of us figured out who we were in a vacuum. Long before we were consciously thinking about identity, we were paying attention to what got a good response from the people around us.

Maybe you were the responsible kid. The one nobody had to worry about. You did well in school, followed the rules, remembered what needed to be done, and somewhere along the way being responsible stopped being something you did and became who you were.

Or you were easygoing. You didn’t complain much, didn’t ask for a lot, and learned how much easier things were when you just went with it.

You might have been the helper in your family, the one who noticed when someone was upset and tried to make things better. Maybe achievement got you attention. Being funny kept things light. Being independent meant nobody had to worry about you. Being the peacemaker kept everyone else from fighting.

I don’t think most of this happens because someone sits us down and says, “here is the role you will play for the next thirty years.”

We’re usually just paying attention:

• We notice what earns praise.

• We notice what creates tension.

• We figure out what makes us feel useful, safe, loved, or included.

Kids are pretty damn good at learning the rules of the room, even when nobody says them out loud. Then we grow up and take a lot of those rules with us.

When something you learned to do becomes who you think you are

I want to be careful here because I don’t think every role we learned is fake.

Maybe you really are responsible. Maybe you genuinely love taking care of people. You can be ambitious because you actually enjoy challenging yourself, not because you have some unresolved need to prove your worth to everyone in the room.

The point isn’t to pick apart your personality until nothing feels authentic anymore.

I’m more interested in what happens when you don’t feel like you have a choice.

There’s a difference between I like being someone people can depend on and I cannot let anyone down.

• There’s a difference between enjoying success and feeling like you don’t know who you are when you aren’t achieving something.

• There’s a difference between being a caring person and believing you always have to be the one taking care of everyone.

That line can get blurry, especially when you’ve been doing something for a very long time.

I’ve sat with people who can tell me exactly what everyone around them needs and then go completely blank when I ask what they want. Not because they don’t have wants. They’ve just had a lot more practice paying attention to everybody else’s.

The same thing happens with achievement. You spend years working toward the next degree, promotion, salary, house, project, or whatever the next marker of “doing well” is supposed to be. Then you finally get there and instead of feeling settled, your brain immediately starts looking for the next thing.

At some point it’s worth asking what all that accomplishment is doing for you. Are you building a life you actually like, or have you gotten really good at collecting evidence that you’re doing life correctly?

I think those are different things.

We get attached to being who people know us to be

There’s another part of this that I don’t think gets talked about enough. Our roles don’t only exist inside of us. Other people get used to them too.

• If you’ve always been the reliable one, people call you when something needs to get done.

• If you’re the person who never says no, your availability becomes something people expect.

• If you’re the successful one in your family, struggling can feel strangely embarrassing.

• If you’ve built an entire career around being competent and accomplished, admitting that you don’t actually like your work anymore can feel like a much bigger crisis than simply changing jobs.

It can make changing feel surprisingly uncomfortable because you aren’t only asking, who am I now? You may also be wondering what happens when other people meet a version of you they aren’t used to. That can bring up a lot.

People may be confused. They may miss the version of you who was always available. Someone might think you’ve changed, and the uncomfortable truth is that they may be right.

You have. That isn’t automatically a problem.

Productivity is a particularly convincing identity

I think our culture makes this whole thing harder because we’re very comfortable defining people by what they produce.

Ask someone how they’re doing and within about thirty seconds you’ll probably hear how busy they are.

Ask someone to tell you about themselves and work comes up almost immediately. Even rest has somehow become something we need to be good at. We track it, optimize it, turn it into a routine, and occasionally make resting feel like another task we’re failing.

It makes sense that so many of us have trouble separating what we do from who we are.

And this gets especially uncomfortable when life takes away one of the things we’ve been using to define ourselves:

• You lose the job.

• The kids grow up.

• The relationship ends.

• Your body can’t do what it used to do.

• You retire.

• You burn out on the career you spent years building.

• You reach the goal you thought would finally make you feel like enough and discover that you’re still you when you get there.

Those experiences can leave people saying, “I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

I don’t hear that and immediately assume something has gone wrong. Sometimes I wonder if the old answer just stopped working.

I don’t think you need to figure out your “true self”

I’m not going to end this by telling you to go find the real you underneath all those expectations. I’m not even sure I believe there’s one perfectly authentic version of us hiding underneath everything else, waiting to be uncovered.

You’ve been shaped by people. By relationships, experiences, culture, loss, love, mistakes, work, family, and a thousand other things. Of course those things are part of you.

I think the more useful question is whether you still want to keep living by all the rules you picked up along the way.

• Maybe being dependable is still deeply important to you, but being available to everyone all the time isn’t.

• Maybe you still care about doing meaningful work, but you’re tired of measuring your worth by how much you accomplish.

• Maybe you love caring for your family and also want a life that includes things that belong only to you.

• Maybe the identity itself doesn’t need to disappear. It just needs a little more room around it.

That’s where I’d start.

Not with some huge reinvention. Not with deciding who the new version of you is going to be for the next twenty years.

Just getting curious about the version that’s already here.

• Which parts feel like choices you would still make today?

• Which ones feel more like rules you’ve been following for so long that you forgot they were optional?

• And what gets uncomfortable when you imagine doing something differently?

I have a feeling those questions tell us a lot more about who we’re becoming than another personality test ever could.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

A quick note: This content is for education and reflection, not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care. If you need support specific to your situation, consider connecting with a qualified mental health professional.

Leave a comment

Knowing that something is “just a thought” sounds pretty straightforward until your brain gives you one that feels completely true.

• They’re mad at me.

• I’m going to fail.

• I can’t handle this.

• I’m being selfish.

• I’ve already screwed this up, so what’s the point?

In those moments, I don’t think it’s particularly helpful for someone to remind you that thoughts aren’t facts. You may already know that. You can understand it intellectually and still have a pit in your stomach because someone hasn’t texted you back, or spend half the night replaying something you said three days ago.

I see this in therapy all the time. Someone can give me a completely rational explanation for why the thing they’re worried about probably isn’t true, and then we spend another twenty minutes talking about it because knowing something and feeling like you know it are very different experiences.

Logically, they get it. One weird email probably doesn’t mean their boss hates them. Saying no to dinner doesn’t make them a terrible friend, and a rough week hasn’t erased six months of progress. But knowing all of that doesn’t always stop their brain from telling a very convincing story anyway.

And I don’t think the answer is always trying to convince ourselves harder that the thought isn’t true.

You don’t have to win the argument

This is one of the things I appreciate about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. It uses a process called cognitive defusion, which is really about changing the

Read more

There’s a sentence I hear in my office all the time: “I know this probably isn’t true, but I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Usually whatever comes next has been taking up a lot of space:

• They’re mad at me.

• I’m going to screw this up.

• I should be further along by now.

• Something bad is going to happen.

• I’m being selfish.

• Everyone else seems to be handling this better than I am.

And what’s interesting is that the person usually knows, at least on some level, that their brain may not be giving them the most objective version of events. They can tell me there’s probably another explanation, they can see the holes in the story, and sometimes they can even laugh about how predictable their brain is. But it still feels true.

I think that’s one of the stranger parts of being a person. You can know something is a thought and still organize your entire afternoon around it.

• Someone sends a shorter text than usual and suddenly you’re replaying the last three conversations looking for evidence that you did something wrong.

• You make a mistake at work and your brain skips right past “I made a mistake” and lands on “I’m terrible at my job.”

• You decide you want to start taking better care of yourself and before you’ve even really started, there’s already a voice reminding you of every other time you tried and stopped.

Our brains are incredibly good at making a thought feel like a fact, and if you’ve been following along with what we’ve been talking about this month, I think this matters.

We’ve talked about getting away from this idea that you need to get your whole life together, and about motivation being unreliable, building plans around your actual capacity, and beginning again when things fall apart.

But you can understand every bit of that and still have a brain saying: “yeah, but you’re going to fuck this up again.”

So what do we do with that? I don’t think the answer is trying to make your brain shut up.

Your brain is going to have opinions

I spent a lot of years thinking the goal was to get people to feel better before they could do better. If we could just get rid of the anxiety, quiet the self-doubt, stop the overthinking, fix the negative thoughts, then we could move forward.

I don’t really believe that anymore.

Part of what I appreciate about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, is that it doesn’t require us to win an argument with our thoughts before we’re allowed to live our lives. ACT focuses on something called psychological flexibility, which includes being able to notice thoughts and feelings without automatically letting them determine what we do next. Cognitive defusion and self-as-context are two of the processes ACT uses to help create that space (Levin et al., 20241; Macri & Rogge, 20242). Research on ACT increasingly supports psychological flexibility as an important mechanism through which ACT interventions work.

The chessboard

There’s an ACT metaphor I really like that uses a chessboard to explain some of this.

Imagine that all of your thoughts, emotions, memories, urges, and sensations are pieces on a chessboard. There are pieces you like having around and others you’d happily throw across the room.

Most of us spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to get the “right” pieces to win.

We want confidence to beat anxiety. Calm to beat anger. Motivation to beat exhaustion. Positive thoughts to beat negative ones. If we could just get all the good pieces on our side of the board, then we’d finally be okay.

Except the game never really ends.

You get rid of one anxious thought and your brain comes up with another one. You finally feel confident about something and then something happens that knocks you sideways. You have a great week followed by one where everything feels harder again.

ACT offers another way of looking at it: what if you aren’t one of the pieces? What if you’re the board?

Self-as-context is an ACT process involving a broader perspective from which thoughts, feelings, and other experiences can be noticed without any single experience completely defining the self. It is one of the six processes in ACT’s psychological flexibility model, and research has examined its relationship with flexible perspective-taking and emotional wellbeing.

I like the chessboard metaphor because I think most of us have spent enough time trying to defeat ourselves.

If I’m the board, anxiety can be here without me becoming an anxious person who can’t handle things. The thought that I’m failing can show up without becoming the final ruling on how my life is going. I can feel insecure, jealous, pissed off, sad, embarrassed, hopeful, grateful, and completely confused, sometimes within the same hour, and none of those things individually gets to tell me who I am.

There’s room for all of it.

That doesn’t mean I like all of it.

There’s a difference.

You don’t have to replace every negative thought

This is where I think people understandably get tired of some mental health advice.

If your brain says, “I’m going to screw this up,” and somebody tells you to replace it with, “I’m going to be amazing!,” there’s a decent chance another part of your brain is going to respond, “Well, that’s bullshit.”

Fair enough! You don’t necessarily need a more positive thought. Sometimes you just need a little distance from the one you’re already having.

ACT calls this cognitive defusion. Rather than getting completely tangled up with a thought, we practice noticing it as something our mind is producing. The point isn’t necessarily to make the thought disappear, but to change how we relate to it (Levin et al., 2024; Macri & Rogge, 2024).

So “I’m going to fail” can become “I’m having the thought that I’m going to fail.”

I know. That sounds almost annoyingly simple. But the point isn’t that adding six words magically makes the thought disappear. You’re reminding yourself what it is… A thought.

Personally, I also like: “oh, we’re doing this one again.” Because my brain has greatest hits. Yours probably does too!

There are certain stories our minds return to whenever we’re tired, scared, rejected, overwhelmed, or doing something unfamiliar. Once you start recognizing yours, they become a little easier to spot. Not necessarily easier to get rid of… easier to recognize. And that’s enough to give you a choice.

I want you to question who’s making the decisions

This is the part I want you to pay attention to this week.

Not whether you’re thinking positively enough or whether you’ve finally conquered your anxiety or whether your inner critic has packed its bags and left town.

Look at the decisions you’re making and get curious about who’s making them:

• Did you actually decide you don’t want to go, or did anxiety decide for you?

• Do you genuinely want to say yes, or are you trying to avoid feeling guilty?

• Are you changing the plan because it no longer makes sense, or did the thought “I’m never going to stick with this anyway” convince you to quit?

• Are you resting because you need rest, or are you avoiding something uncomfortable?

I can’t answer those questions for you, and sometimes the answer isn’t obvious. That’s the point of getting curious instead of immediately obeying whatever thought showed up first.

ACT isn’t asking us to stop having difficult internal experiences. The broader goal is developing enough psychological flexibility that those experiences don’t automatically pull us away from actions that matter to us. A recent systematic and meta-analytic review found that ACT interventions increased psychological flexibility processes, including defusion and values-based committed action, and that changes in these processes were associated with reductions in psychological distress (Macri & Rogge, 2024).

I think that’s a much more realistic goal than trying to feel good all the time.

• You can be anxious and go.

• You can doubt yourself and try.

• You can feel guilty and keep the boundary.

• You can hear the familiar “you’re going to screw this up again” story and begin again anyway.

Not because you’ve finally gotten control of your brain, because your brain isn’t the only thing that gets a vote.

Your brain can have an opinion about the answer. Of course it can! It just doesn’t get to be the whole board.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

A quick note: This content is for education and reflection, not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care. If you need support specific to your situation, consider connecting with a qualified mental health professional.

Leave a comment

Earlier this week, I wrote about the idea of “falling behind” and how quickly a hard week/month/season can turn into a much bigger story about who we are.

Today I want to talk about what happens after you realize you’ve gotten away from something that was helping you, because this is usually the point where people decide they need to get serious.

And by “get serious” they usually mean get mean.

From there, it can turn into a whole mental review of everything we screwed up and all the ways we’re going to do better this time. We make a stricter plan, decide we haven’t “earned” certain things until we get back on track, and somehow convince ourselves that being hard on ourselves is going to help.

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned that this is accountability. I want us to challenge that, because I really don’t think it is.

Being hard on yourself can feel weirdly productive

This is the tricky part. Self-criticism can feel like you’re doing something about the

Read more

I hear people say, “I was doing so well, and then...” all the time, and whatever comes after the “then” is usually just life. Work got insane… they got sick, their kid got sick, they went on vacation and never quite got back into their routine, or their relationship was struggling, they were grieving, or honestly, nothing particularly dramatic happened. They got tired, lost momentum, and a few days turned into a few weeks.

By the time they’re telling me about it, though, the story has usually gotten much bigger. Now it’s: “I don’t know what happened” or “I feel like I’m back at square one.” That last one always gets my attention because I’m not really sure what square one is supposed to mean.

• If you exercised consistently for six months and haven’t gone in three weeks, those six months didn’t disappear.

• If you got better at setting boundaries and then fell into an old pattern with your mom, you aren’t suddenly the person you were two years ago.

• If you were taking pretty good care of yourself and then went through a hard season where most of that fell apart, you still know what you learned before the hard season happened.

We know this logically, but we’re not always very good at applying it to ourselves.

I think part of the problem is that we have a weird relationship with progress. We assume that once we’ve gotten better at something, we should stay better at it. Once we’ve built the routine, figured out the coping skill, learned the lesson, or done the therapy, we should be able to maintain that version of ourselves indefinitely. Then life changes and we act like we’ve done something wrong because we changed with it.

That’s just not really how people work.

Your capacity is going to change throughout your life, and honestly, it can change from one Tuesday to the next. There will be times when you have more energy, patience, money, support, or time than you do right now. There will also be seasons when you are doing the absolute best you can and it doesn’t look anything like what “doing well” looked like six months ago.

Pretending otherwise doesn’t make us more disciplined. Mostly I think it gives us another reason to feel shitty about ourselves when life inevitably gets messy.

But I also don’t want to let us off the hook completely.

I don’t love when “progress isn’t linear” becomes something we say to ourselves without ever looking at what actually happened. There are absolutely times when life knocks us sideways and we have very little control over it, but there are also times when we stopped doing something that was helping us.

• Maybe you avoided the conversation because you didn’t want to deal with it.

• You kept saying you’d do something tomorrow until three weeks had passed.

• You started staying up way too late scrolling even though you know exactly how terrible you feel the next day.

• You stopped going to therapy, stopped moving your body, started saying yes to everyone again, or ignored something until it became a much bigger problem.

We do that. I do that. Being compassionate with yourself doesn’t require pretending otherwise.

What I think matters is what you do with that information. You can look at something and say, “Yeah, I played a part in this and I need to do something differently” without immediately jumping to “I’m lazy” “I have no discipline” or my personal favorite, “I always do this.”

Those statements might feel like accountability because you’re being hard on yourself, but I don’t think they’re particularly honest or useful. Calling yourself a failure is actually pretty vague. Figuring out why you stopped doing something that was helping you requires a lot more honesty.

Did your schedule change? Were you exhausted? Was the plan unrealistic? Did you avoid something because it was uncomfortable? Did you need help and refuse to ask for it? Were you trying to maintain a routine that required more energy than you actually had?

And probably the hardest question: What part of this was outside my control, and what part was actually mine?

That’s accountability. You can do something with that.

You have more information now.

This is another reason I have a hard time with the whole “back to square one” thing. Even when you find yourself in an old pattern, you’re meeting it with more experience than you had the first time.

You know what helped before. You probably know a little more about what tends to trip you up. You may recognize the warning signs sooner, or at least recognize them once you’re in the middle of it. You know what it felt like when things were working better. None of that guarantees that getting started again will be easy, but you aren’t starting with nothing.

And to be honest, I’m not sure “getting back” should always be the goal anyway.

The routine you had six months ago might not fit your life now. Something that worked before you changed jobs, had a kid, went through a loss, moved, got burned out, or just became a different person may need to look different now. We can waste a lot of energy trying to recreate a version of our lives that doesn’t exist anymore.

I’d rather figure out what would help from here.

That’s one of the things I appreciate about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. A big part of ACT is psychological flexibility, which is essentially our ability to stay connected to what matters while adjusting to what’s actually happening in our lives. The goal isn’t to execute the same plan perfectly no matter what happens, it’s to notice where you are and make choices from there.

That makes a lot more sense to me than constantly asking, “how do I get back on track?”

What track?! Who decided that was the track?? And does it even still take you somewhere you want to go?

You also don’t need to make up for lost time.

I see this one a lot too:

• We miss workouts, so now we need to go extra hard.

• We spend more than we planned, so we decide we’re not allowed to enjoy anything for the next month.

• We have an unproductive week at work and start Monday with an absolutely unhinged to-do list because apparently we need to compensate.

It’s like we think we owe some imaginary, more disciplined version of ourselves a debt.

I don’t think you do.

You can restart something without punishing yourself for stopping. You can also restart it differently. You don’t have to wait until Monday, next month, after vacation, or whenever life finally settles down enough for you to do it perfectly. Life has a pretty annoying habit of not settling down on schedule anyway.

Sometimes the next step is genuinely boring:

• Go for the walk after you haven’t exercised in a month.

• Make the appointment you’ve been avoiding.

• Go to bed a little earlier tonight.

• Text your therapist back.

• Put one boundary back in place after realizing you’ve been letting it slide.

None of that feels like a big reset, and I think that’s probably a good thing.

You don’t need to create enough momentum to change your entire life this week. Look at where you actually are, be honest with yourself about how you got there, give yourself credit for what you already know, and take responsibility for the pieces that are yours.

Then figure out what makes sense now. I think that’s a lot more useful than starting over.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

Earlier this week, I wrote about motivation and how much power we tend to give it. We wait until we feel ready, energized, focused, less overwhelmed, or whatever else we think needs to happen before we can begin.

But there’s another part of that conversation that I think matters just as much.

If motivation is unreliable, why do we keep building our lives around the assumption that we’re going to have plenty of it?

I see people do this all the time and I’ve done it too. We make plans when we’re feeling good. We decide we’re going to get up earlier, cook more, exercise regularly, stay on top of the house, stop scrolling at night, and finally become a person who remembers to move the laundry from the washer to the dryer before it smells weird.

Then Wednesday happens.

You slept like crap. Work was exhausting. Someone needed something from you. You forgot to thaw whatever ambitious dinner you planned on Sunday, and suddenly the routine that seemed completely reasonable three days ago feels impossible.

This is usually where people start blaming themselves.

• “I was doing so well.”

• “why can’t I ever stick with anything?”

• “I just need to be more disciplined.”

I’m not convinced discipline is always the problem. Sometimes we’ve built a plan that

Read more

I don’t actually think motivation is the problem… I think we’ve put way too much faith in it.

I can’t tell you how many times someone has sat in my office and said, “I know what I need to do, I just can’t seem to make myself do it.” Usually they follow it up with some version of: “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

I always want to slow that conversation down. Because somewhere along the way, we’ve decided that if we were really committed to something, we’d feel motivated to do it:

• We’d wake up excited to exercise

• We’d happily meal prep

• We’d clean the house without procrastinating

• We’d answer the emails, fold the laundry, meditate, drink enough water, and somehow enjoy every minute of it…

Have you met anyone who actually lives like that?! I haven’t.

What I have met are a lot of people who believe they’re failing because they keep waiting to feel like doing something before they allow themselves to begin.

I don’t know where we learned that. Honestly, it’s a strange expectation when you stop and think about it. How often do you feel wildly motivated to go to the dentist? Or schedule bloodwork? Or clean the bathroom? Or have a difficult conversation? Most of the important things we do in life aren’t things we’re excited to do. We do them because they matter!

So why do we expect taking care of ourselves to feel different?

One of the things I notice with clients is how quickly a lack of motivation turns into a judgment about who they are.

• “If I really cared, I’d be doing it”

• “I just have no discipline”

• “I’m lazy”

Those are pretty big conclusions to reach because you didn’t feel like going for a walk.

What if you’re not lazy?

What if you’re tired?

What if you’ve built a plan that doesn’t fit your actual life?

What if you’re trying to force yourself into a routine that belonged to a version of you from two years ago?

Those possibilities deserve at least as much consideration as “I’m just bad at this.”

One of the reasons I like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, is that it doesn’t put much weight on whether you feel motivated. Instead, it asks a different question:

What matters to you, and what would it look like to move one step in that direction today?

I love that question because it doesn’t require you to feel inspired first.

Let’s say you value your health. Your brain immediately jumps to, “I should work out more.”

Okay. But what if today all you’ve got is ten minutes? Does that still count?

A lot of people will say no. That’s exactly where I disagree though!

I think we’ve become so attached to doing things the “right” way that we miss opportunities to do them in a way that actually fits our lives.

I’ve watched people skip the ten-minute walk because they couldn’t do the hour, or they order takeout because cooking a healthy meal felt impossible, even though they had food in the freezer. They might even avoid calling a friend because they don’t have an hour to catch up, when a ten-minute conversation would have felt really good.

We do this all the time. We treat “not enough” like it’s the same thing as “not worth doing.” I don’t think that’s helping us, and I also don’t think your brain needs more convincing.

Most people already know what would probably help them feel a little better. The problem isn’t usually information. It’s that the version they’re asking themselves to do feels so big that it’s easier to wait until tomorrow. Then tomorrow becomes Monday… Monday becomes next month… next month becomes, “I’ll start after things settle down.” And somehow we’re still waiting for a version of life where everything lines up perfectly.

I’ve never seen that version arrive. Life keeps being life! People get sick, work gets busy, kids need things, you sleep badly, your mood changes, your energy changes, the week you planned for isn’t always the week you get… the list goes on.

So here’s the thing, I don’t think the answer is becoming more motivated. I think it’s building a life that still works on the days you aren’t.

1. That probably means making things smaller than your ego wants them to be.

2. It probably means choosing consistency over impressiveness.

3. And it almost certainly means letting go of the idea that if you can’t do it perfectly, there’s no point doing it at all.

I don’t know anyone whose life has changed because they waited until they felt ready, but I do know a lot of people whose lives changed because they stopped waiting.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

I think one of the fastest ways to overwhelm yourself is to decide that everything needs work at the same time.

You need to sleep more, move your body, drink more water, spend less money, cook at home, get off your phone, clean the house, call your friends, read more, finally make that appointment, and deal with the thing you’ve been putting off for six months.

Cool... Sounds relaxing!

I hear versions of this in my office all the time. Someone feels like their life is a little out of control and pretty quickly we have a running list of everything they think they should be doing differently. The list is almost always long.

But when we actually start talking through it, I notice something… Not everything on that list is making their life harder. Some of it absolutely is, they’re exhausted because they aren’t sleeping, they’ve taken on way too much at work, they’re saying yes to things they don’t have time for anymore or their schedule has become completely unsustainable and they know it.

Okay so, let’s look at that! But then mixed in with those things are a whole lot of shoulds:

• I should cook more

• I should have a morning routine

• I should work out more

• I should be better about keeping in touch

• I should be more organized

Whenever the word “should” starts showing up a lot, I get curious.

Not because whatever comes after it is automatically bullshit. You might genuinely want to exercise more or spend less time on your phone, but I want to know why.

Does this matter to you? Would it actually make your life better? Or have you decided somewhere along the way that this is what a functional adult is supposed to do?

Those are different conversations.

The ACT piece of this

This is one reason I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT, in my work.

Read more

I hear some version of this all the time: “I just need to get my life together.”

I’ve said this to myself too, many times.

Usually we mean that there’s some future version of us who has finally figured everything out:

• She wakes up on time.

• She remembers appointments.

• She works out regularly, drinks enough water, keeps up with laundry, answers texts, has a reasonable bedtime, knows what she’s making for dinner, and somehow has energy left over to enjoy her life…

I would love to meet her!

Because after years of sitting with people in therapy, and living my own very human life, I’m not convinced she exists.

I think a lot of us are walking around with this vague idea that eventually we’ll arrive at a point where life feels handled. We’ll finally find the right routine, get organized, heal the thing, become disciplined enough, and then we can relax. Until then, there’s always something we should be working on.

It’s exhausting.

And August seems to bring this out in people. Summer is winding down, school is starting, schedules are changing, and suddenly there’s this feeling that it’s time to get back on track:

• Buy the planner.

• Clean out the closet.

• Fix your sleep schedule!

• Meal prep!

• Start working out again…

• Become a person who has a Sunday routine!

There’s nothing wrong with wanting any of those things. I love a fresh start as much as anyone! What I have a problem with is the idea underneath it:

I’ll feel better about myself once I’m doing life better.

That’s a shitty deal to make with yourself, because the finish line keeps moving…

• You finally get consistent with exercise, but your house is a mess.

• You get the house under control, but work gets busy.

• You’re doing great at work, but you haven’t called your friends enough.

• You make more time for your relationships, but now you’re exhausted and wondering why you can’t seem to take better care of yourself.

There will always be another category.

I’ve watched people spend years trying to become a version of themselves they believe will finally be acceptable to them… more productive, more organized, less anxious, better with money, better at relationships, better at resting… (which is a particularly ridiculous thing to turn into another performance metric, but we absolutely do it!).

At some point, I think we have to ask how long we’re going to put off feeling okay about our lives until we’re doing them “better.”

Because there’s always going to be something:

• The laundry will pile up again.

• You’ll have a week where you order takeout three nights in a row.

• You’ll fall out of a routine that was working really well.

• Work will get busy, someone will need you, you’ll get tired, and suddenly the plan you made when life was calmer doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anymore.

I see people give themselves a really hard time for this. They’ll tell me they’ve been “so inconsistent” or that they need to get back on track, and then we actually talk about what their life has looked like lately. Usually there’s a pretty good reason things have fallen off.

And I think that’s worth paying attention to. We’re so quick to assume the problem is that we need more discipline when sometimes the thing we’re asking ourselves to keep up with just doesn’t fit our life right now.

That doesn’t mean you failed at the routine. It might just mean it’s time to rethink the routine.

I’m not suggesting we stop trying to grow. There are things in my own life I want to do differently, and I hope there always will be. Goals can give us direction and routines can make our lives easier. There’s nothing particularly enlightened about ignoring something that clearly isn’t working and calling it self-acceptance.

But there’s a difference between wanting to make a change and treating yourself like a renovation project. I think we cross that line more often than we realize.

I think we’ve gotten really good at turning normal parts of being a person into problems we need to solve. A bad week becomes evidence that we’ve fallen off track or we miss a few workouts and suddenly we need a whole new plan.

Meanwhile, there’s probably a lot in your life that’s working just fine, it just doesn’t look particularly impressive. Maybe you’ve gotten better at saying no when you’re exhausted or you actually reach out to someone when things are hard instead of disappearing for three days. Maybe dinner some nights is a girls dinner (frozen pizza is mine), but you ate. These things aren’t going to make anyone’s morning routine reel, but they matter.

I wish we gave ourselves more credit for that kind of progress. A lot of change is pretty boring when you’re actually living it. It’s easier to notice what still needs work than to recognize that you handle something differently now than you did a year ago (negativity bias!!).

So if something really isn’t working, I’d rather start there than with another promise to finally “get your shit together.” What specifically is making your life harder right now? What would actually help?

The answer may not be more discipline! You may need to make something easier, ask for help, lower an expectation, or admit that the routine you keep trying to get back to belonged to a version of your life that doesn’t exist anymore.

And honestly, some things might be fine as they are. Not everything needs to become a project.

There is no final version of you who has everything figured out. Life will change again, your capacity will change, what matters to you will change, and something that works beautifully right now may stop working six months from now.

That isn’t failure, that’s being a person.

So I’m not particularly interested in “getting back on track” this August. I’m more interested in figuring out whether the track was taking you somewhere you actually wanted to go.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

I’ve watched people apologize for perfectly reasonable boundaries.

Not because they changed their mind or because they were unkind; they apologized because someone else looked disappointed and suddenly they weren’t sure they were allowed to have the boundary in the first place.

One of the hardest parts of therapy isn’t helping people figure out what their boundary is, it’s helping them stop apologizing for having one.

Recently someone asked me, “How do I know if my boundary was actually okay?”

I remember sitting with that question for a minute because I didn’t think they were

Read more

One of the questions I hear most often from people after they’ve started setting healthier boundaries isn’t “How do I say no?” It’s something much more vulnerable:

“I don’t understand why everyone seems upset with me all of a sudden.”

They’ve started declining plans they don’t have the capacity for. They’re no longer answering every text immediately. They’ve stopped trying to fix every conflict or smooth over every uncomfortable moment. From their perspective, they’re simply trying to take better care of themselves. So when the people around them seem frustrated, hurt, or confused, it’s easy to wonder if becoming healthier has somehow made them a worse friend, partner, daughter, or son.

I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

Relationships naturally settle into patterns over time. We each take on certain roles without really talking about them. One person becomes the planner. Someone else becomes the caretaker. Another becomes the one who always keeps the peace or says yes or makes sure everyone else is okay. After a while, those roles stop feeling like choices and start feeling like the way the relationship simply works.

When one person changes, everyone has to adjust.

That doesn’t mean the relationship is unhealthy, and it doesn’t automatically mean the other person is trying to manipulate you. It simply means that something familiar has changed. If you’ve always been available and suddenly you’re not, people notice. If you’ve always absorbed the tension in the room and you decide you’re no longer willing to do that, the room feels different.

We tend to assume that if someone is uncomfortable, we’ve done something wrong. I see this all the time. Someone sets a thoughtful, respectful boundary, and within hours they’re replaying the conversation in their head, wondering if they were too harsh. They start drafting a text to explain themselves, soften what they said, or take it back altogether because the other person’s disappointment feels unbearable.

But disappointment isn’t the same thing as harm.

That’s a distinction I wish more of us had learned earlier.

Being disappointed because someone has a boundary doesn’t mean they’ve hurt you. It often just means you’re adjusting to a relationship that’s changing. The same is true in reverse. When you’ve spent years making yourself available, accommodating everyone else, or putting your own needs on hold, it’s understandable that people have grown used to that version of you.

That doesn’t mean you’re obligated to stay there.

One of the hardest parts of therapy isn’t helping people learn to set boundaries. It’s helping them tolerate what comes after. The silence, the awkwardness, the guilt… the urge to fix everyone else’s feelings so things can go back to the way they were.

I understand that urge. I also know that if every uncomfortable reaction sends us back into old patterns, nothing really changes.

One sentence I come back to often is this:

Someone else’s disappointment doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done something wrong.

Sit with that for a minute.

Not because it gives you permission to be careless. Healthy boundaries still require kindness, accountability, and repair when we’ve genuinely hurt someone. But there is a difference between repairing harm and trying to rescue someone from feelings that are a normal part of being in relationship with another human being.

Those aren’t the same job.

This week, if someone doesn’t like one of your boundaries, see if you can resist the urge to immediately explain yourself or make everything okay again. Instead, ask yourself whether you’re responding from your values or from your discomfort.

There’s a good chance the answer will tell you more than their reaction ever could.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

Earlier this week, we talked about the difference between caring and carrying. On the surface, it seems like an easy distinction to make, but in practice, it’s one of the hardest patterns I see people untangle.

Most people don’t come into therapy saying, “I think I’m carrying too much.” Instead, they describe what life feels like.

• “I can’t stop thinking about them.”

• “They’re having a hard time, and I feel guilty for enjoying myself.”

• “I know I can’t fix it, but I can’t stop trying.”

What they’re describing isn’t a lack of boundaries. It’s the weight of feeling responsible for things that were never theirs to hold.

I understand that feeling because it usually comes from a good place. When we love

Read more

A conversation I have in my sessions over and over again starts with some version of this:

“I know they’re an adult, but I can’t stop worrying about them.”

Or...

“If they’re upset, I can’t relax until I know they’re okay.”

I’ve heard it from parents worried about an adult child, partners trying to hold everything together while someone they love is struggling, and friends who feel guilty for not answering every text or fixing every problem.

The relationships are different, but the feeling underneath is often the same. Somewhere along the way, caring about someone quietly became feeling responsible for them.

I think that’s a distinction we don’t talk about enough.

Most of us want to be caring people. We want to show up for the people we love. We want to listen, offer support, and be someone others can count on. None of those things are the problem.

The problem is that caring can slowly become carrying, and we don’t always notice when the line between the two starts to blur.

I think it can be helpful to pause and ask what each one actually looks like.

Those are two very different jobs. One allows us to stay connected to the people we love. The other quietly asks us to carry a weight that was never ours to begin with.

I’ve noticed that people who carry other people’s emotions often don’t realize they’re doing it. It can look like replaying a conversation long after it’s over, wondering if you said the wrong thing. It can look like checking your phone repeatedly because you’re worried someone is upset with you, or losing sleep over decisions someone else has to make. Before long, you’re spending more energy managing someone else’s life than living your own.

That’s exhausting. Not because you care too much, but because you’ve slowly taken on responsibilities that don’t actually belong to you.

When I see this pattern, I’m usually less interested in changing it right away than I am in understanding where it came from.

For a lot of people, these patterns didn’t appear out of nowhere. They began early. You learned to read the room, keep the peace, or pay close attention to everyone else’s needs because, at one point, those things helped you navigate your world.

If that’s part of your story, it makes perfect sense that stepping back feels uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean you’re selfish or uncaring. It means your nervous system learned that paying close attention to other people helped you stay connected or helped you feel safe.

One question I come back to often, both for myself and with clients, is this:

Can I care about this?

Most of the time, the answer is yes.

Then I ask a second question.

Is it mine to carry?

That’s often where things become clearer.

Those two questions create just enough space to respond differently. They remind us that we can care deeply without becoming responsible for someone else’s emotions, choices, or healing. We can offer support without believing it’s our job to rescue.

One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that loving someone doesn’t always mean fixing what they’re going through. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is trust that they’re are capable of carrying what’s theirs while we continue carrying what’s ours.

Those two things can exist at the same time.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

Earlier this week, we talked about why boundaries feel so damn hard. If you found yourself nodding along, or thinking, “This is exactly what happens to me,” I want you to know you’re not alone. You’re also not doing boundaries wrong.

In my experience, one of the hardest parts of setting a boundary isn’t actually saying no. It’s everything that comes after. The overthinking. The second-guessing. The urge to send another text explaining yourself or soften what you said. That little voice that

Read more

If you’ve ever said no to something you genuinely didn’t have the time, energy, or capacity for, only to spend the rest of the day wondering if you made the wrong decision, you’re in good company.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “I know I needed to say no... so why do I feel so bad?” It’s such a common experience, and yet so many people assume it means they’re doing boundaries wrong.

I don’t think that’s true.

One of the biggest misconceptions about boundaries is that once you start setting them, you’re supposed to feel empowered. Sometimes you do. But sometimes you feel guilty, anxious, or like you’ve disappointed someone you care about. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve made the wrong choice. It often means you’re doing something that feels unfamiliar.

I think a lot of us grow up believing that guilt is proof we’ve done something wrong. But guilt isn’t always that straightforward. Sometimes it shows up because we’ve acted against one of our values. Other times, it shows up because we’ve acted against a rule we learned a long time ago, one that may not fit our life anymore.

That’s an important distinction.

I’ve worked with people who learned early that saying yes kept the peace. Others learned that being helpful earned approval, or that taking care of everyone else was simply what good people did. Some grew up in homes where saying no wasn’t really an option, so they became adults who apologized for having needs at all.

If any of that sounds familiar, it makes sense that boundaries feel uncomfortable. Your nervous system isn’t responding to today’s situation alone. It’s responding to years of learning what felt safe, what kept relationships intact, and what helped you avoid conflict.

That’s why I don’t love the phrase “people pleaser.” It makes it sound like a personality trait, when more often it’s a strategy. For many people, it was a very effective way of staying connected to the people around them. The problem is that what protected you at one point in your life may be exhausting you now.

One of the things I remind clients of often is that feeling guilty doesn’t automatically mean you’ve done something wrong. Sometimes it simply means you’ve done something differently than you’re used to. Those aren’t the same thing.

The next time guilt shows up after you’ve set a boundary, try resisting the urge to immediately explain yourself or take it back. Instead, pause for a moment and ask yourself a different question:

Am I feeling guilty because I’ve gone against one of my values? Or because I’ve gone against an old expectation?

You may find that the answer changes the conversation entirely.

And maybe that’s the work.

Not getting rid of guilt, but learning that it doesn’t always get to decide what happens next.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

Earlier this week, we talked about the roles we learn to play.

• The caretaker

• The responsible one

• The achiever

• The peacekeeper

• The independent one

• …and others

One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that people usually know their role almost immediately. They don’t need much time to figure it out. They know exactly which version of themselves they become when life gets stressful, when relationships feel uncertain, or when they’re trying to keep everything together.

What takes longer is understanding why that role showed up in the first place.

Read more

If I asked you to describe yourself, what would you say?

1. Responsible.

2. Independent.

3. The funny one.

4. The caretaker.

5. The peacemaker.

6. The one who always has it together.

Most of us have an answer. What we don’t often stop to ask is how we got there.

We don’t usually wake up one day and decide, I’m going to be the responsible one. It happens slowly:

• You notice that people rely on you, so you keep showing up.

• You realize making people laugh eases the tension, so you become funny.

• You stop asking for help because it never seemed to get you very far.

• You learn that keeping everyone else happy keeps the peace.

After enough time, those ways of coping stop feeling like choices. They just start to feel like who you are.

These roles often begin as acts of survival. They’re incredibly adaptive. At one point in your life, they probably served you well. The problem is that survival strategies have a way of becoming identities. Over time, people begin to know us by the role we play.

“You’ve always been the strong one.”

“You’re just so easygoing.”

“I never have to worry about you.”

Those comments are usually meant as compliments. But they can become cages. Because once people become comfortable with a version of us, it can feel risky to change.

• The caretaker wonders what happens if they start asking for help.

• The independent one wonders if people will see them differently if they admit they’re struggling.

• The funny one wonders what happens if they stop making everyone else comfortable.

• The responsible one wonders if everything will fall apart if they finally rest.

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t convincing other people you’re allowed to change. It’s believing it yourself. Healing doesn’t always mean becoming someone new. Sometimes it means realizing you were never meant to carry the same role forever. The version of you that protected you at fifteen may not be the version of you that serves you at forty-five.

Growth asks us to loosen our grip on identities that once kept us safe. Not because they were wrong; because they may no longer be necessary.

And maybe the most important question isn’t who you’ve been. Maybe it’s this:

Who are you when no one needs anything from you?

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

At first, people usually think they’re talking about work. Or parenting. Or stress. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they’re talking about something much older.

The exhaustion of constantly trying to be acceptable.

Most of us edit ourselves in ways we don’t even notice.

We leave certain stories out. We laugh instead of saying we’re hurt. We say, “It’s fine,” when it isn’t. We become the version of ourselves we think other people will be most comfortable with.

Sometimes that’s simply part of living alongside other people.

Sometimes it’s something much heavier.

For many LGBTQ+ people, self-editing isn’t occasional. It’s woven into everyday life.

You scan the room before mentioning your partner.

You wonder if it's worth correcting someone.

You choose your words carefully because you're still trying to figure out whether it's safe to be fully honest.

That kind of vigilance is exhausting.

It’s also understandable.

Our brains are designed to protect us. If you’ve learned that being fully yourself could lead to rejection, conflict, or even danger, your nervous system doesn’t simply forget that because your circumstances change. It keeps trying to keep you safe.

Constantly protecting yourself is exhausting.

Over time, many people become so good at adapting that they stop noticing they’re doing it.

They become everyone’s version of who they need them to be.

And then they wonder why they’re so tired.

This isn’t only an LGBTQ+ experience.

Many people learned early that being fully themselves came with consequences. Maybe you were told you were too emotional… too loud... too sensitive... too ambitious... too different...

So you adjusted. Again and again. Until it became automatic.

Eventually, you stop asking yourself who you are and start asking who everyone else needs you to be.

You can become so good at adapting that you forget what feels natural.

The problem is that constantly managing yourself leaves very little room to simply exist.

Healing doesn’t mean you’ll never adapt. We all adjust to different people and situations.

Healing is noticing when you’ve spent so much energy protecting yourself that you’ve forgotten what feels natural.

It’s finding people and places where your shoulders drop. Your breathing slows. You realize you’re no longer rehearsing every sentence before you speak.

That feeling can actually be unfamiliar at first.

Sometimes safety doesn’t feel exciting.

Sometimes it just feels... quiet.

This Pride, I hope we celebrate visibility, community, and joy.

I also hope we remember the quieter victories:

• The conversation where you told the truth.

• The relationship where you didn’t have to explain yourself.

• The first time you realized you could stop apologizing for who you are.

Those moments deserve celebrating too.

I don’t think healing means you’ll never edit yourself again.

I think it means you’ll slowly build a life where you don’t have to do it nearly as often.

And maybe one day, you’ll realize that the version of yourself you’ve been protecting is also the version that’s been waiting to be known all along.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment

I don’t think that’s what it’s really about.

Chosen family is about finding people who make it feel safe to be yourself.

Sometimes those people are your relatives. Sometimes they aren’t.

Family isn’t only built through biology. It’s built through consistency. Through care. Through showing up. Through the people who answer your phone calls, remember what you’ve been carrying, celebrate your wins without competition, and stay close when life gets messy.

For many LGBTQ+ people, chosen family becomes essential because acceptance isn’t always guaranteed at home.

But the truth is, chosen family isn’t unique to the LGBTQ+ community.

Many of us have relationships that nourished us in ways our families couldn’t. A teacher who believed in us. A friend who became a sibling. A neighbor. A mentor. A partner’s family that welcomed us like we’d always belonged.

Those relationships matter.

We sometimes underestimate how healing they can be.

As a therapist, I’ve seen people spend years trying to earn love from people who simply weren’t able to give it. Not because they weren’t worthy, but because not everyone has the capacity to offer the kind of care we need.

That realization can be painful.

It can also be freeing.

Healing isn’t always about changing the people around us. Sometimes it’s about allowing ourselves to receive love from the people who have been offering it all along.

The people who don’t make you audition for belonging.

The people who don’t ask you to explain yourself over and over.

The people who let you laugh loudly, cry honestly, change your mind, and grow without making you feel guilty for it.

If you’re fortunate enough to have those people, hold onto them.

Tell them they matter.

Let them know they’ve become part of your story.

And if you’re still looking for those relationships, don’t lose hope.

Healthy connection exists.

There are people who won’t ask you to become less of yourself in order to stay close to them.

Sometimes that’s what family looks like.

Amy Bradley, LICSW (she/her/hers)

www.holdingspace-fl.com

Leave a comment