Neither skill had been covered in my training.

My Brief Career in Miraculous Dermatology

The poison ivy miracle happened first. A woman came to see me to quit smoking. At least, I think it was smoking. It has been many years, and apparently miraculous healing crowds out certain administrative details.

During hypnosis, I would sometimes touch a client lightly on the arm or hand. Before we began, she pointed out that she had poison ivy on one hand. It was already going away, but the rash was still visible.

I touched her hand during the session. Not the poison ivy.

She called me the next day, astonished. The poison ivy was gone. I had taken it away by touching her hand.

This was exciting news, especially to me. Until that phone call, I had no idea I could do that.

Unfortunately, I also knew the rash had already been healing. Poison ivy does, eventually, go away. The fact that it finished doing so after our appointment did not mean I had personally escorted it from her body.

I told her this. She preferred the miracle.

Miracles are like that. They rarely improve when burdened with additional information.

Then she referred two people to me. Both were in pain. Both had heard about the touch. Both wanted me to take their pain away.

One person tells a story. Two people repeat it. By Thursday, you have a gift.

I had to explain to each of them that I had not cured the woman’s poison ivy. It was already disappearing. I had simply touched a hand at an opportune moment and received credit for what her immune system was already doing.

It was terrible marketing. It was also true. Miracle stories are good for business, and “I happened to touch her shortly before her immune system finished the job” lacks testimonial energy.

But taking credit for another person’s body is not healing. It is theft with mood lighting.

My career as a faith healer ended almost as quickly as it began. But my unexplained powers were not finished with me.

The Choir Incident

Another woman came to see me for weight loss. During one of our conversations, she mentioned that she sang in her church choir and was having some tension with another woman in the group.

I did not mention the conflict during hypnosis. I certainly did not slip a hostile choir member into the recording between suggestions about food and feeling good in her body.

The following week, she returned with a complaint. I had said something during hypnosis that caused her to dream about this woman. In the dream, they had a fight.

I was stunned. Not only had I entered the dream-production business without realizing it, my specialty seemed to be church conflict. Apparently, her subconscious had subpoenaed the choir, and I was being held responsible for the proceedings.

Fortunately, I recorded my hypnosis sessions. She had a copy of the audio, and so did I. I offered to review it with her.

One advantage of recording the hypnosis portion of a session is that, on rare occasions, we are accused of inserting something into another person’s subconscious. It is easier to explain that I didn’t when both parties have the recording that supposedly proves I did.

I also reminded her that she had told me about the conflict the previous week. “Do you think talking about the difficulty you were having with her might have stimulated the dream?” I asked.

It was less exciting, but plausible enough. She let it go.

Hypnosis Did It

Our minds do not enjoy loose ends.

“The rash happened to finish healing” barely qualifies as a story. “My hypnotherapist removed it with her hand” has a plot, a mechanism, and someone to call the next time your back hurts.

The dream worked the same way in reverse. Something uncomfortable happened after hypnosis, so hypnosis must have caused it. When the result was welcome, I got the credit. When it was disturbing, I got the blame.

Either way, I got the power.

The Most Profitable Trance

There is comfort in believing someone else did it. Even when the result is frightening, at least the mystery has a name and somebody appears to be in charge.

I would be lying if I said that kind of power is not seductive from the practitioner’s side too. A client tells you that you have a miraculous gift and sends you two paying referrals. It is flattering. It also pays.

Some practitioners accept it.

They cultivate the mystery because mystery sells. The client no longer has to contend with a complicated mind or a body that heals on its own schedule. The practitioner gets to be the unusually powerful person in the room.

That is one reason hypnosis has collected so much mythology. People often arrive expecting me to put something into them, remove something from them, or take control of a part of them they cannot control themselves.

Sometimes they expect all three before lunch.

But hypnosis is not power passing from my hand into yours. I am not sneaking material into your dreams or conducting a psychological hostage situation beside a reclining chair.

Your mind is already making associations, rehearsing conflicts, responding to expectations, telling stories, and trying to create meaning. Hypnosis can help focus that process. It can help you work with patterns that have been operating outside your usual attention.

You are not absent from any of it.

If I am the one with the power, you have to keep coming back whenever something hurts, frightens you, or refuses to change.

Some hypnotists use that to their advantage. They build the very trance they claim to remove: the belief that change depends on them.

The healer gets the glory.

The client gets dependence.

What I Do Instead

I spend much of the consultation, and often part of the first session, explaining that I am not placing anyone under my control. I am helping expose and loosen the beliefs that may be blocking the change they came to make.

Often, that happens in conversation before anyone closes their eyes.

The eyes-closed portion gets all the publicity. Conversation is where a surprising amount of contraband is found.

People arrive believing food is the only comfort available, cigarettes are what calm them down, anxiety is keeping them safe, or some part of the past still gets to decide what is possible now. Nobody had to formally hypnotize them into those beliefs for the beliefs to function like trance.

That does not mean I believe every symptom was created by a thought. Exposing a belief does not make a disease disappear. Sometimes it helps change a symptom. Sometimes it reveals why change has become emotionally complicated.

Agency is not culpability. A person can understand more about what has been happening without being blamed for making it happen.

My job is not to replace those beliefs with a new one about my extraordinary powers. You cannot dehypnotize someone into dependence.

I am trained to recognize the trance, expose the belief holding it together, and help a person create a different response. That is skilled work, even if it does not qualify me for sainthood.

Although if your poison ivy happens to disappear the next morning, I would appreciate it if you did not send me everyone you know with lower-back pain.

She wasn’t a terrible mother. We had a fairly good relationship. I love her.

But she is 89 now, and much of her daily life is in my sister’s hands.

Last night, they took my mother to the Mexican restaurant they always go to. This morning, she told me they were going out again because my sister would be too tired to cook after working on a bathroom renovation.

She couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant.

“The Mediterranean place?” I asked.

“That sounds right,” she said.

I didn’t say anything.

My mother has a heart condition. She has been told to watch her sodium by a dietitian, a medical doctor, an exercise physiologist, and probably several other people with actual credentials.

My sister apparently outranks them all.

There was a time when I would have mentioned the sodium. I would have reminded my mother what the dietitian said and questioned the wisdom of two restaurant meals in a row when her heart is already struggling.

I’m not a dietitian either. But I have the same heart condition. If I’m not supposed to eat certain foods, it seems like I might know at least as much as my sister about what our mother shouldn’t be eating.

But my sister has something I don’t have.

Proximity.

She has the car, the schedule, the medical information, and the power to decide what happens next. She is also certain that whatever she decides is right. Expertise becomes strangely irrelevant when it disagrees with her.

For a while, I thought my mother had simply stopped making her own decisions. That her agency had gradually left the room and my sister had taken its chair.

That isn’t quite what happened.

My mother has not been diagnosed with dementia. She doesn’t remember everything, but she knows what she likes, where she wants to go, and when she doesn’t agree.

The problem is not that she has no preferences. The problem is that exercising them can cost her.

My mother loves fudge pops. Once, when she stood up to my sister, my sister withheld them from her.

My 89-year-old mother was punished by having her fudge pops taken away as though she were a disobedient child.

It sounds ridiculous. It’s a fudge pop. Except it wasn’t about the fudge pop. It was a reminder that something my mother enjoyed could be taken away if she displeased the person controlling her daily life.

My sister comes over every single day except when I visit. That is one of the few times my mother tells her no.

Sometimes my mother cries because she knows my sister is coming. She says she would like one evening alone, just to make herself dinner and have some peace.

My sister is loud. She talks about everything wrong with her own world, most of it eventually circling back to how someone has inconvenienced her or how stupid everyone is. My mother gets tired just thinking about it.

Sometimes she cries when I leave because she knows my sister will be over again.

Once, my mother told me, “I’m supposed to call your sister when you leave, but I wait until you call me so I know you made it home. Then I wait a little more.”

We still laugh about that, although it isn’t really funny that she has to sneak a little extra time alone in her own home.

From the outside, coming over every day probably makes my sister look devoted. My mother experiences it as something she cannot refuse.

My mother depends on my sister for meals, transportation, appointments, and countless ordinary things. She knows disagreement may come with a price, so she often goes along.

Maybe her agency hasn’t disappeared. Maybe she is using what she has left to avoid being punished.

My sister does a great deal for my mother. She also controls and punishes her. Both things are true.

I used to argue. I explained the risks, repeated what the doctors said, and kept believing that if I found the right words, someone would finally listen. I thought my mother might say no, my sister might reconsider, or someone might at least remember that I am also her daughter.

Mostly, I made myself frightened and furious.

Nothing changed.

So this morning, when my mother mentioned another restaurant, I said nothing. Not because it didn’t matter, but because nothing I said mattered.

My mother is still here. I can call her. I can visit her. We can talk.

But there is a sister between us now.

She has the access and the authority. She treats our mother like a fucking child and calls it taking care of her.

What looks like my mother freely handing over her life is more complicated. She has become older, sicker, and more dependent, and she knows that disagreement can cost her.

I can see what is happening, and I cannot stop it.

I’m not sure I have accepted that. I may have simply stopped arguing.

For years, vigilance was one of the ways I loved my mother. I paid attention. I worried. I objected. I tried to protect her from decisions that could hurt her.

Now I’m stepping back, and it feels disturbingly similar to abandonment.

Maybe I haven’t let go of my mother. Maybe I have only let go of the job of trying to keep her alive when I have none of the power required to do it.

I would like those to feel like two different things.

Right now, they don’t.

That wasn’t what caught my attention.

I saw worship.

In the letters, Harp apologizes for embarrassing Trump and worries about losing his good opinion. She describes herself as unworthy and calls him her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

My husband had read at least one of them and found it alarming. What he hadn’t realized was that Harp had been homeschooled in a deeply conservative Christian family.

That detail changed the frame.

According to reporting about her upbringing, Harp and her brother, Preston, were homeschooled together. Preston says their mother used a conservative Christian curriculum and taught them American exceptionalism.

Religion, politics, family authority, and national identity all came from the same place.

Preston believes his sister never broke out of what they were taught. He did.

He also says Harp’s fascination with presidential authority began long before Trump. Around age 16, she was already writing to George W. Bush during the Iraq War. Preston hadn’t seen the letter himself, but he remembered the pattern.

Trump may not have created her need for a powerful protector. He may simply have recognized it and welcomed it.

I need to say this plainly: I don’t know Natalie Harp. I cannot reverse-engineer her psychology from news stories, and the letters have not been independently authenticated by People magazine.

But I know the language.

I grew up evangelical.

I wasn’t homeschooled, but I understand what happens when religion is not simply something your family practices. It becomes the explanation for everything. It tells you what is true, who can be trusted, what makes someone good, and what will happen if you get it wrong.

At the evangelical school I attended, the principal numbered the students.

I was number 25.

There is probably another essay in the fact that an authority figure looked at a group of children and decided names were an unnecessary indulgence.

I was the kid who questioned things. I resisted and eventually left. For a long time, I thought that meant I had escaped.

Evangelism can create two adults who look like opposites. One learns to survive by aligning with authority. The other learns to survive by resisting it. Both may spend years with authority at the center of their lives.

Evangelism didn’t only teach me what to believe about God. It taught me what it meant to be good.

Good people obeyed and trusted the right people. Doubt could lead you away from God, and trusting your own understanding could send you straight to hell. Somehow, the people interpreting God for you were exempt from that suspicion.

Convenient arrangement.

I rejected the doctrine long before I recognized how much of its structure was still operating inside me.

Even after leaving the church, I remained terrified of being wrong. I held trials inside my own head, gathering evidence, cross-examining my perception, and refusing to trust myself until I had proved my case beyond any possible doubt.

Then I explained myself to people who hadn’t asked.

Apparently, the church moved out but left a full judicial system in the basement.

This is what I mean by leftover evangelism.

It isn’t always believing in hell or worrying that you missed the Rapture. It can look like searching for the rule you may have broken or feeling guilty when someone is disappointed in you, even when disappointing them was the healthiest choice available.

You can leave the church, stop believing in hell, and still wait for someone else to certify your reality. Sometimes the doctrine leaves first. The obedience takes longer.

That is what disturbed me in Harp’s letters. Not the speculation about romance, but the familiar structure underneath her devotion.

When the authority is disappointed in you, you have sinned. When he humiliates you, perhaps you deserved it. When he presents himself as your protection from a frightening world, obedience can begin to feel like love.

The structure transfers easily from religion to politics. It only requires a leader willing to accept the worship.

My rebellion protected something essential in me, and I’m not going to rewrite it as another personal defect. It helped me preserve enough of myself to leave.

But leaving wasn’t the end.

I’m still deconstructing.

I’m spiritual, but I’m no longer religious. I remain open to deity. I just don’t worship the biblical God presented to me, because once I stepped back, he looked less like unconditional love and more like a psychopath with unlimited power.

I could no longer admire a deity for demanding the obedience I had learned to recognize as coercive when a human demanded it.

Calling it holy did not make it less controlling.

I haven’t abandoned mystery. I still leave room for spiritual experiences, ritual, and things I cannot explain. What I have abandoned is compulsory certainty.

Certainty made the world smaller, but it also made it feel organized. Someone knew what God wanted. Someone knew who was saved and who had been deceived. There was comfort in believing an answer existed for everything, even when the answers were terrifying.

Not knowing can feel frightening after that.

It can also feel like freedom.

I don’t need to replace one absolute authority with another. I don’t need a new person, doctrine, or deity to tell me which questions I’m allowed to ask.

And I no longer believe unworthiness is a virtue.

I rebelled against evangelicalism years ago.

I am still learning how to stop obeying it.

Others wake up to Amy G. Dala standing at the foot of the bed with a clipboard.

“Here’s everything you didn’t finish yesterday, everyone who might be upset with you, and six disasters that haven’t happened yet.”

Good morning.

Amy’s real name is the amygdala. Calling her the part of the brain responsible for fear would be an oversimplification, but she is heavily involved in noticing what might be emotionally important, especially if it resembles something that caused trouble before.

She means well. Unfortunately, Amy has no sense of proportion.

A bill that isn’t due for two weeks and a bear entering the kitchen both go on the clipboard. She is not in charge of determining the size of the threat. She just circles it in red and wakes you up.

She is particularly ambitious in the morning. Before you have opened both eyes, she has reviewed your finances, your health, your relationships, your unfinished work, and something embarrassing you said in 2009. Then she hands the whole mess to your waking mind and asks what you intend to do about it.

No wonder some people wake up exhausted.

We tend to assume anxiety begins with a thought. We think about something frightening, then our body reacts. But sometimes the uncomfortable feeling arrives first.

Your chest is tight. Your stomach drops. Something feels wrong, but nothing has happened yet.

The mind hates an unexplained alarm, so it starts looking for a reason. Maybe it’s money. Maybe it’s my marriage. Maybe it’s my health. Maybe it’s that email I forgot to answer. Maybe it’s the fact that I have no idea what I’m doing with my life.

There is rarely a shortage of material.

Eventually the mind finds something believable and attaches it to the feeling. Now the alarm has a story, and the story feels true because your body is already reacting to it.

This is where many of us make the mistake of attending the meeting. We begin answering every concern Amy places on the agenda.

No, that person probably isn’t angry. But what if they are?

The bill will get paid. But what if something else happens?

That sensation is probably nothing. Remember what happened to that woman you read about online?

Amy has charts.

The problem with arguing every point is that she can always produce another one. You may resolve the unanswered text, but she has already moved on to a strange noise the car made last Thursday.

This doesn’t mean every concern is imaginary. Sometimes the bill needs attention. Sometimes someone really is angry. Sometimes something is wrong. Amy does catch actual problems. That’s why we don’t get rid of her.

But not everything she hands us at 7 a.m. requires a full investigation before coffee.

It can help to notice what is happening before deciding what it means. My chest feels tight is something that is happening. My entire life is about to collapse is Amy finishing the screenplay.

You can put your feet on the floor. Look around the room. Give your body a chance to arrive in the morning before allowing your mind to explain it.

If there is something you need to handle, it will still be there in twenty minutes. Real problems are remarkably patient that way.

Amy may continue following you through the house with updates. She is committed to her position. Let her talk. She can keep the clipboard.

She just doesn’t get to schedule the meeting before coffee.

A few weeks? A year? Several years, if you are particularly stubborn?

I have been calling a lot of things temporary. My business will come back. My health will settle down. My marriage will get better. I will feel more connected to people. I will eventually recognize my own life again.

None of those hopes is ridiculous. Things do change. Bodies recover. Businesses rebuild. People surprise us.

But sometimes they don’t.

That is the part we aren’t supposed to say out loud. We are supposed to keep believing. Keep trying. Keep visualizing the better outcome. Look for the lesson. Find the opportunity. Adjust our attitude.

There always seems to be one more thing we could do before admitting that something may not turn out the way we wanted. I know how to keep going. I’m very good at it.

I can find an explanation for almost anything. I can understand why someone behaves the way they do. I can find the childhood wound underneath it, the fear behind it, the reason they protect themselves by withholding something from me.

Understanding people has helped me let go of a great deal. It has also helped me stay in situations long after understanding made any difference.

I’ve done the same thing with my business. I can explain the economy, social media, Google, changing attention spans, artificial intelligence, and the growing belief that anything we need can be found online for free.

All of that may be true.

The business still isn’t supporting me.

My reasons are not wrong. They simply don’t change what is happening. Maybe that is what I am finally running out of. Not hope, exactly. Explanations.

I’m tired of constructing a reassuring story around every painful fact.

A rough patch is comforting because it has an implied ending. You lower your head, keep walking, and eventually arrive somewhere smoother.

But what if you keep walking and the terrain doesn’t change?

At some point, you have to consider that you may not be crossing a rough patch. You may be standing in the landscape of your actual life.

That thought should depress me. Strangely, it doesn’t.

There is something freeing about letting a fact remain a fact without immediately dressing it in optimism.

This is lonely. This isn’t working. I don’t know how to fix it. I may not be able to get back what I had.

Those sentences don’t require me to make a dramatic decision by Friday. They don’t mean I have stopped caring or that nothing will ever improve. They only mean I have stopped demanding that reality reassure me before I am willing to look at it.

Maybe we cling to the idea of a rough patch because the alternative sounds too much like failure. If it is temporary, we only have to endure it. If it isn’t, we may have to change our expectations, our plans, or our understanding of who we are.

We may even have to grieve something that technically still exists. That is harder. It may also be the first useful thing we have done in a long time.

I don’t know what happens next. I wish I did. I would love to end this by telling you I have developed a new plan and feel unexpectedly excited about the future.

I haven’t. I am tired. Some parts of my life are not what I want them to be, and I no longer know how much of that I can change.

But I know where I am now.

I have been thinking of this as starting over, which makes me feel as if everything behind me was wasted and I have somehow been sent back to the beginning.

That isn’t true. I am not at the beginning. I am standing here with everything I have learned, everything I survived, and considerably fewer illusions.

Maybe what I’ve been calling starting over is simply starting from the truth.

When I first became a hypnotherapist, I had a ridiculously informative website.

Page after page after page.

This was before blogging was really a thing. If there was something I thought a prospective client might want to know about hypnosis, I wrote a page about it.

How hypnosis worked. What it felt like. What it could help with. What to expect. Why you wouldn’t lose control. Why you weren’t going to start clucking like a chicken unless, presumably, you had some deep personal desire to cluck like a chicken.

And people read it.

I know they read it because they called me and told me.

“I chose you because you had so much information on your website.”

They had apparently spent actual time there.

Reading.

Twenty-four years later, I’m being taught how to get your attention in the first two seconds of a Reel.

Two seconds.

Apparently that’s what I’ve got now.

I’m a hypnotherapist.

The irony is not lost on me.

I am now professionally concerned about your thumb

I’ve spent the last few weeks learning more about short-form video.

Hooks. Pattern interrupts. Text on the screen. Don’t start with an introduction. Don’t take too long to get to the point. Give people a reason not to scroll.

I’ve looked at skip rates to see how quickly people leave my videos. I’ve shortened things. I’ve experimented with editing. I’ve learned that something I find perfectly interesting at second twelve doesn’t matter very much if everyone left at second four.

And I’m enjoying it.

That’s the uncomfortable part of this essay.

I’m not standing outside TikTok and Instagram shaking my fist at the children.

I make Reels. I make Shorts.

I just celebrated because a little demonstration I did with a lemon reached 1,400 views on YouTube and brought me five new subscribers.

I’m learning how to play the game.

But I’m also becoming increasingly fascinated by the game we’re all playing.

Because somewhere along the way, we didn’t just start making things shorter.

We started treating a moment without stimulation as a problem.

We used to edit for clarity. Now we’re editing out the breath.

If you’ve watched enough short-form video, you’ve probably encountered those videos where the speaker seems almost superhumanly efficient.

No pauses. No ums. No searching for a word. Sometimes barely a visible breath between sentences.

That’s not necessarily how the person spoke.

Those spaces were removed.

I’ve done it myself.

Editing software can find the silences and cut them out automatically. I’ve put my own videos through software and watched it tighten my speech for me.

A second here. Half a second there.

Suddenly Amy has apparently evolved beyond the biological need to inhale.

And there’s a perfectly logical reason for doing it.

We might lose you.

A pause might be enough time for your thumb to remember that there are approximately four billion other things it could be looking at.

I’m exaggerating.

But not by as much as I’d like.

Writer and broadcaster Adrian Chiles recently noticed the same phenomenon, writing about the strange rhythm created when breaths and pauses are deliberately removed from short-form videos in the name of keeping things moving.

Think about how strange that is.

We’ve become so concerned about holding human attention that we’re removing some of the things that make human speech sound human.

There is growing research connecting heavier short-form video use with poorer performance in areas involving attention and cognitive control.

But I want to be careful here.

The internet loves a clean villain almost as much as it loves a fifteen-second video.

The research is interesting, but it doesn’t give us license to announce that watching Reels has turned everyone’s brain into mashed potatoes. A lot of it is still emerging. Association isn’t the same thing as causation, and “attention span” isn’t one simple thing we can measure with a stopwatch.

So I’m interested in a slightly different question.

What are we practicing?

I work with patterns for a living.

The brain gets very good at things we repeatedly ask it to do.

And short-form media asks us to do something very specific.

Watch.

Evaluate.

Swipe.

New subject.

Watch.

Evaluate.

Swipe.

New person.

New emotion.

New song.

New idea.

New outrage.

New dog wearing shoes.

Swipe.

I’m not sure the dog wearing shoes is the greatest threat to civilization.

But the rhythm interests me.

Because reading this essay asks something different of you.

There isn’t a new surprise arriving every eight seconds.

You have to stay with an idea long enough for it to develop.

A book asks even more.

So does learning something difficult. So does listening to another human being tell a complicated story without mentally reaching for the skip button.

So does sitting with a problem when the answer doesn’t arrive immediately.

And maybe that’s where the conversation about attention becomes much bigger than social media.

Everyone wants a piece of your mind

Attention has always been valuable.

Advertisers know it. Politicians know it. News organizations know it. Entertainers know it.

Social-media platforms certainly know it.

And hypnotists know it too.

Hypnosis is, among other things, an experience involving focused attention.

Where attention goes matters.

What you repeatedly attend to becomes easier to notice. What holds your attention gets an opportunity to influence what you think about, what you feel, what you remember and sometimes what you do next.

That’s why I’m less interested in declaring short-form content good or bad than I am in something else:

Can you still decide where your attention goes?

Can you watch three Reels and leave?

Can you read something that takes ten minutes without checking something else?

Can you be bored for a minute without immediately reaching for stimulation?

That’s what interests me. Not whether you have some objectively “good” attention span, but whether you still get to decide what deserves your attention.

That’s agency.

I recently came across someone suggesting that the next great class divide won’t be wealth, but attention.

I’m not willing to go that far.

Wealth appears to be maintaining a fairly enthusiastic commitment to class division.

But I understood the point.

The ability to sustain attention may become increasingly valuable in an environment designed to fracture it.

Someone who can stay with complexity has access to things that don’t reveal themselves instantly. A difficult book. Learning something that takes time. A conversation where the answer isn’t obvious. A complicated problem you can’t solve in fifteen seconds.

Even our own thoughts sometimes require us to stay around long enough to discover what we actually think.

And perhaps that’s what concerns me most.

Not that we’ve become incapable of watching a two-hour movie.

Not that nobody reads anymore.

Not that short-form video is evil.

I don’t believe any of those things.

I wonder whether we’re becoming accustomed to having our attention continually captured for us.

Because there is a difference between something getting your attention and you giving it your attention.

One is a reflex.

The other is a choice.

Twenty-four years later

I still have information on my website.

Not nearly as much.

Today I’m told that the most important information needs to be above the fold, the part of the page you can see before you have to scroll.

So I’ve adapted.

I make the headline clearer. I get to the point faster. I put the important thing first.

I make short videos. I learn better hooks.

And tomorrow I’ll probably look at another skip rate and wonder what happened at second seven.

That’s the world I’m communicating in now.

I’m not interested in pretending it isn’t.

But I also don’t want to become so good at capturing your attention that I forget to encourage you to own it.

So if you’ve made it all the way down here, congratulations.

You just spent considerably more than two seconds on one idea.

Maybe your attention span isn’t dead after all.

Or maybe this was simply worth giving your attention to.

I like that possibility better.

If you want to go deeper

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis looked at 71 studies involving 98,299 participants. Greater short-form video use was associated with poorer cognitive outcomes overall, with some of the strongest associations involving attention and inhibitory control. Because much of the underlying evidence is correlational, that does not establish that short-form video use caused those differences.

Feeds, feelings, and focus: A syste

matic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use

A 2026 experimental study involving college students compared short-form and longer-form video viewing and found that prolonged short-form video viewing reduced accuracy on prospective-memory tasks, particularly under conditions requiring greater attentional resources.

The Influence of Short-Video Usage on Prospective Memory Under Different Cue Type Conditions

A 2026 study in npj Science of Learning compared participants learning from a continuous video with those viewing fragmented short videos matched for duration and content. The fragmented condition was associated with poorer memory performance and differences in neural activity and connectivity during memory retrieval.

Fragmented learning from short videos modulates neural activity and connectivity during memory retrieval

And Adrian Chiles recently wrote about something I’d already noticed in my own video editing: the increasingly common practice of removing breaths and pauses from short-form speech to keep the pace moving.

In the bizarre world of short-form video, nobody is allowed to take a breath

For the past month, I’ve been studying algorithms, experimenting with content, deleting ghost followers, and wondering why I felt more exhausted than inspired.

The strange part is that none of those things were actually the problem.

They were simply where my attention had drifted.

A few days ago, while writing, something quietly shifted.

I noticed that every idea I couldn’t stop thinking about had the same question hiding underneath it:

What beliefs do we carry that we never consciously chose?

Not just about religion.

Relationships.

Aging.

Money.

Being “too much.”

Success.

About what it means to be lovable.

It suddenly felt like someone had turned on a light.

I’ve spent more than twenty years helping people change patterns, and I don’t think I realized until this week that there has always been one thread running underneath nearly all of it.

Helping them notice the stories they’ve mistaken for truth.

Writing has a funny way of doing that to me.

I almost never sit down knowing exactly what I think.

I usually discover it somewhere around the middle of the page.

That’s one of the reasons I’ve missed writing so much.

It doesn’t just produce words.

It changes the person writing them.

I don’t know exactly where this path is leading yet.

But for the first time in a while, it feels like I’m walking toward something instead of chasing something.

That feels worth paying attention to.

If you’d like to read the essay that started this realization, you can find it here:

Click Here For The Essay

I’m glad you’re here.

I have a feeling this is the beginning of a very different kind of conversation.

Amy

It happens much more quietly than that.

You bite your tongue because you’re tired.

You let the comment go because you don’t want another argument.

You tell yourself it’s not worth bringing up.

You convince yourself that maybe you’re being too sensitive, too emotional, too demanding, too much.

And honestly? Sometimes you’re just exhausted and don’t have the energy for another round of bullshit.

So you let it slide.

Then you let something else slide.

Then another thing.

Not because you’re weak. Not because you’re stupid.

Because you’re trying to survive your own life.

The trouble is that every compromise takes a tiny piece of something with it.

Not enough to notice right away.

Just enough.

A little less certainty.

A little less confidence.

A little less trust in your own instincts.

A little less willingness to say, “Actually, that’s not okay with me.”

People think losing yourself happens during the big moments. The affair. The betrayal. The screaming match. The divorce. The firing.

But most people lose themselves long before any of those things happen.

They lose themselves in a thousand ordinary Tuesdays.

In conversations where they stay silent.

In decisions they didn’t really agree with.

In pretending things are fine when they haven’t been fine for years.

I’ve come to think that what we’re really giving away in those moments are tiny shreds of dignity.

Not dignity in the grand, heroic sense.

Just the everyday dignity of being able to look at yourself and know you didn’t abandon your own truth to make someone else comfortable.

The worst part is that many people become so accustomed to it they think this is what maturity looks like.

Be agreeable.

Be accommodating.

Be understanding.

Be the bigger person.

Keep the peace.

And sometimes keeping the peace is the right thing to do.

But not when the price is yourself.

Not when you’re swallowing every opinion, every need, every disappointment, every dream because someone else might be uncomfortable.

That’s not peace.

That’s surrender wearing a nicer outfit.

The good news is that people usually find themselves the same way they lost themselves.

Gradually.

A boundary here.

An honest conversation there.

A decision that disappoints somebody.

A moment when you stop explaining and simply say no.

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing anyone writes movies about.

Just small acts of self-respect stacked on top of each other until one day you realize something has changed.

You trust yourself again.

You hear your own voice again.

You stop asking for permission to exist the way you are.

And maybe that’s what dignity really is.

Not something you either have or don’t have.

Something you reclaim, one tiny shred at a time.

He came back. Now it was a pipe.

He quit that too.

He came back again. Now it was drinking.

I’ve been doing this work for 24 years. And I’ve watched this happen more times than I can count. The form changes. The function doesn’t.

Most people celebrate when the habit disappears. And they should — quitting something hard is real. It takes something.

But here’s what nobody is asking:

Did the pattern disappear? Or just the behavior?

Because your nervous system doesn’t care whether it’s cigars or a pipe or a drink at the end of the day. It cares about one thing: relief. Familiarity. The feeling of something predictable in a life that doesn’t always feel that way.

When you take away the thing that was providing that — the smoking, the scrolling, the eating after everyone goes to bed, the staying busy so you never have to feel how tired you actually are — the system doesn’t just quietly accept it.

It goes looking.

Not because you’re weak. Not because you lack willpower. Because the original need is still there, still looking for relief, and it will find the nearest available exit.

The cigarette disappears. The food shows up.

The food disappears. The shopping shows up.

The shopping disappears. The relationship shows up.

The form keeps changing. The thing underneath stays exactly where it was.

This is what I mean when I say I dehypnotize people from who they learned to be.

The habit isn’t the problem. The habit is the solution your nervous system found to a problem that’s much older than the habit. Usually older than you realize. Usually learned so early and so quietly that it doesn’t feel like a learned thing at all. It just feels like you.

The work isn’t to take the habit away and white-knuckle your way through the urge.

The work is to go back and find what the habit was solving.

Because once that part of you finally feels heard — actually heard, not managed, not redirected, not replaced — it stops screaming for the thing.

Not always fast. Not always clean. But it stops.

If you’re reading this and you already know what I’m talking about — if you’ve quit something and watched something else quietly take its place — that’s not failure.

That’s information.

And it means you haven’t gotten to the thing underneath yet.

That’s the work. And it’s exactly what I do.

If you’re ready to stop swapping one thing for another and actually get to the root of it, you can work with me privately. Details are at changing-lanes.com.

Amy Hale is a certified advanced hypnotherapist with 24 years of clinical experience. She works with people who are done managing symptoms and ready to go underneath them.

What interests me isn’t the technology.

It’s the people.

More specifically, it’s the stories people tell about why they use it.

The comments are surprisingly consistent. People describe feeling understood. They talk about having a place where they can say what they’re thinking without worrying about judgment, interruption, or criticism. They talk about feeling less alone.

The first time I encountered these conversations, I found myself reacting the way many people do. I wondered whether we were becoming too dependent on technology. I wondered whether people were replacing real relationships with artificial ones.

But the more I listened, the less interested I became in the technology itself.

I became interested in the hunger underneath it.

For years, we’ve been told that loneliness is one of the defining problems of modern life. We have become increasingly connected through devices while often feeling disconnected from one another. We know more about people’s lives than any generation before us, yet many of us struggle to feel genuinely known.

The older I get, the more I question whether loneliness is always the right word.

Loneliness suggests an absence of people.

Yet many people feel lonely while surrounded by them.

They feel lonely in marriages. They feel lonely in families. They feel lonely in workplaces, friend groups, and communities. They attend gatherings, answer messages, show up for responsibilities, and still carry the quiet feeling that nobody really sees them.

Perhaps what we’re describing isn’t always loneliness.

Perhaps it’s the experience of being unseen.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from repeatedly reaching for connection and failing to find it. Not dramatic rejection. Not abandonment. Something much quieter.

A conversation where your words are barely acknowledged.

A question that goes unanswered.

An attempt to explain yourself that somehow never lands.

A moment when you realize you’ve spent years talking without feeling understood.

Most people don’t need perfect advice.

In fact, much of the time they aren’t looking for advice at all.

They want to know that what they said mattered. They want to know another human being heard them. They want to feel that their experience registered somewhere outside of themselves.

Reading discussions about AI companionship, I began to wonder whether people are searching for something different than we assume.

Perhaps they are not primarily searching for conversation.

Perhaps they are searching for recognition.

That possibility changes the conversation entirely.

If people are turning to artificial intelligence because it makes them feel heard, then the most important question may not be about technology. It may be about the conditions that exist in modern life.

What happens when people feel unseen for too long?

What happens when acknowledgment becomes so rare that even a simulated version of it feels meaningful?

I don’t believe artificial intelligence can replace genuine human connection. Human relationships are infinitely more complex than any machine can replicate. They require reciprocity, vulnerability, accountability, and shared experience.

Yet I can’t shake the feeling that AI companionship is revealing something important about us.

Not because people are talking to machines.

Because of what they were looking for when they started.

Perhaps the rise of AI companionship isn’t a story about artificial intelligence at all.

Perhaps it’s a story about recognition.

About belonging.

About the deeply human need to feel that our thoughts, feelings, fears, and experiences matter to someone.

And perhaps the question worth asking isn’t whether people are becoming attached to artificial intelligence.

What conditions exist in a person’s life that make a conversation with artificial intelligence feel more emotionally nourishing than a conversation with another human being?

One day you realize you built your entire life around keeping yourself functioning.

Not happy. Not free. Functioning.

You look around and realize most of your decisions were made while trying to avoid pain, conflict, rejection, abandonment, exhaustion, uncertainty — whatever your system learned to brace against.

So survival picked the relationships. Survival picked what felt “safe.” Survival picked who got access to you. Survival picked the job, the silence, the overexplaining, the overthinking, the staying.

And after a while, you can lose track of the difference between a life that feels peaceful and a life that simply doesn’t trigger anyone.

That realization can mess with you because from the outside your life may not even look bad. You may be the dependable one. The capable one. The one everyone leans on. You may look calm while internally feeling like you can never fully exhale.

Because your life stopped being about living a long time ago. It became about management.

Managing emotions. Managing conflict. Managing other people’s reactions. Managing yourself. Managing the room. Managing disappointment before it happens.

Eventually your body starts noticing before your mind does. You get tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix. Small things start feeling heavier than they should. You fantasize about disappearing for a week just so nobody needs anything from you.

Not because you’re lazy. Because your entire existence has been organized around holding everything together.

A lot of people don’t recognize this at first because they mistake survival skills for personality traits.

Hyper-independence becomes “I’m just strong.” Emotional shutdown becomes “I’m low maintenance.” People-pleasing becomes “I’m just nice.” Chronic vigilance becomes “I’m responsible.”

Until one day something inside starts pushing back.

You can’t keep overriding yourself the same way anymore. Things that used to feel normal suddenly feel unbearable. Conversations leave you drained. Noise feels louder. Certain relationships start feeling impossible to tolerate for long periods of time.

And what’s confusing is that nothing dramatic may have happened.

You just started waking up.

That’s the part people don’t talk about enough. Waking up doesn’t always look inspiring at first. Sometimes it looks like irritation. Grief. Exhaustion. Pulling away. Questioning your entire life. Realizing you’ve spent years shape-shifting to keep connection. Realizing how often you abandoned yourself just to avoid losing other people.

And no — you do not need to have your future figured out before you admit that something feels wrong.

You don’t need a five-year plan before honesty. You don’t need certainty before change.

Sometimes healing starts in much smaller places than people expect.

Saying no faster. Not explaining yourself so much. Resting before you’ve earned it. Letting someone be disappointed without rushing to fix it. Admitting you want more from your life than just surviving it.

That matters.

Because every time you stop leaving yourself behind, even in small ways, your system starts learning something new:

Your life belongs to you too.

She called it tension.

And that one word told me something important.

Tension sounds manageable. Tension sounds practical. Tension sounds like something a capable person can stretch, soothe, organize, breathe through, or push past.

Anxiety sounds different.

Anxiety sounds like something has gotten underneath you. Like something is moving faster than your conscious mind can explain.

So a lot of people don’t call it anxiety.

They call it stress.

They call it pressure.

They call it being particular.

They call it needing a plan.

They call it being responsible.

They call it I just like to know what’s going on.

But underneath all of those words, the nervous system may be saying the same thing:

I don’t feel safe unless I’m in control.

Here’s the thing about anxiety: it doesn’t always show up looking like anxiety.

It doesn’t always show up as panic attacks on the bathroom floor, or spiraling thoughts at 3am, or a fear so visible you can name it and point at it. Sometimes it shows up perfectly dressed, highly functional, and running fifteen minutes early.

Sometimes anxiety shows up as competence.

As preparedness. As precision. As the person in every meeting who already thought of the thing no one else thought of. As the one who has a backup plan for the backup plan. As the one who is never, ever caught off guard, because they have worked very hard to make sure of it.

That person doesn’t think: I’m anxious.

They think: I’m thorough.

They think: I’m responsible.

They think: I just don’t like surprises.

And honestly? In a lot of situations, that wiring has served them beautifully. It has made them someone people rely on. Someone who delivers. Someone who keeps things from falling apart.

Until it costs too much to keep it running.

A lot of the people I work with don’t come in saying they’re anxious. They come in because they’re tired. Or because something specific stopped working and they can’t figure out why. Or because they’ve done a lot of the right things, and they’re still running the same loop, and they just want it to stop.

They’re not collapsing. They’re not panicking. They’re managing.

But they’ve been managing for so long that managing has become the whole personality.

Anticipating. Scanning. Preparing. Preventing. Monitoring. Holding everything together.

That is not peace. That is a person doing a full-time job inside their own nervous system.

Control doesn’t come from nowhere.

For a lot of people, it came from somewhere very specific: a time when unpredictability felt dangerous. When someone else’s mood had to be tracked and managed. When being caught off guard came with consequences. When staying ready was the only way to stay safe.

The nervous system learned the lesson. And it has been faithfully running that lesson ever since.

So now the adult self says: I’m just a little tense.

But the deeper system says: Please don’t surprise me. Please don’t push me. Please let me stay in charge of what happens next.

This is not a character flaw. It is not stubbornness or arrogance or being difficult. It is a survival strategy that outlived the situation that made it necessary.

The problem isn’t that it was wrong. The problem is that it never got the memo that things changed.

The word tension is interesting to me because of what it doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say afraid. It doesn’t say overwhelmed. It doesn’t say I need help with this.

Tension is active. Tension implies someone doing something. You hold tension. You carry tension. You manage it.

And I think for a lot of people, calling it tension is a way of staying in the driver’s seat of their own discomfort. As long as it’s tension, it’s something they’re handling. The moment it becomes anxiety, it’s something that’s handling them.

I understand that distinction. I respect it, actually.

But I also think it costs people. Because if you only allow yourself to tend to what you can name, and the name you’ve chosen keeps it at arm’s length, you might spend years managing something you never quite let yourself look at.

Sometimes the work isn’t forcing the fear to disappear.

Sometimes the work is helping a person feel safe enough to stop gripping so hard.

Not because control is bad. Not because preparedness is wrong. But because there is a version of you that doesn’t have to work quite so hard to feel okay. A version that can let something be uncertain without it registering as a threat.

The nervous system can learn that too.

It just needs a different kind of evidence.

If any of this sounds familiar, not as a crisis, just as a quiet recognition, that’s usually the beginning of something.

There is a misunderstanding about gratitude that makes a lot of people quietly reject it. They think they have to feel grateful first. They think gratitude is supposed to arrive as a warm, glowing emotional state – something soft, peaceful, and naturally available when life feels beautiful.

And sometimes it is. Sometimes gratitude is easy. The light comes through the window just right. The coffee tastes perfect. The dog curls up beside you. Your body feels strong. Your heart has enough room to notice what is good without effort.

But other days, gratitude can feel almost offensive. When you are exhausted, grieving, overloaded, worried about money, confused by relationships, frustrated with your body, or simply trying to get through the day, the invitation to “be grateful” can feel like someone is asking you to skip over the truth.

It can sound like: Don’t feel what you feel. Don’t name what is wrong. Don’t be disappointed, angry, tired, or honest. Just look on the bright side.

And that is not gratitude. That is emotional bypassing.

Real gratitude does not require you to lie. It does not ask you to pretend your life is easier than it is. It does not ask you to deny pain. It does not ask you to perform positivity so other people feel more comfortable around your suffering.

Real gratitude can exist beside the truth. It can sit next to grief. It can sit next to frustration. It can sit next to uncertainty. It can sit next to a nervous system that does not yet feel safe.

That is what makes it powerful.

Because gratitude is not always a feeling you begin with. Sometimes gratitude is the practice that helps the feeling become possible again.

You don’t have to feel grateful before you practice gratitude. That is actually what makes it different from almost every other emotional state. You cannot decide to feel joy. You cannot force grief to stop. You cannot command your body to feel safe when it has spent years bracing for impact. You cannot shame yourself into peace.

But gratitude works a little differently. The action can come before the feeling. You can name one good thing before you fully believe it matters. You can write one sentence before your mood has shifted. You can notice one small mercy before your whole life feels merciful.

You can say, “My body carried me today,” even if you are not feeling particularly kind toward your body. You can say, “The sun came through the trees,” even if the rest of the day felt heavy. You can say, “I had clean water. I had a place to sit. I heard a song I liked. I took one deep breath. I made it through the morning.”

Not because those things erase the hard things, but because they keep the hard things from becoming the only things.

That is the part we miss. Gratitude is not always about making life feel good. Sometimes it is about interrupting the mind’s habit of only scanning for threat.

And if you have lived through enough disappointment, stress, trauma, instability, or emotional exhaustion, your mind may have become very good at scanning for what is wrong. It may scan for rejection, danger, the shift in someone’s tone, the thing that might fall apart next, the mistake you made, the need you forgot to meet, or the way you are still not doing enough.

This is not because you are negative. It may be because your nervous system learned that noticing danger mattered more than noticing beauty. It may be because, at some point, paying attention to what was wrong helped you survive.

So when someone says, “Just be grateful,” it can feel dismissive because your system is not being difficult. It is being trained.

And this is where a gratitude practice becomes more than a pleasant little self-help exercise. It becomes a reorientation. Not forced cheerfulness. Not denial. Not pretending the wound is not there. A reorientation.

A way of saying: I know my mind knows how to find what hurts. Now I am teaching it how to find what holds me.

That is very different. You are not trying to become a person who never feels pain. You are trying to become a person who can feel pain without losing access to everything else.

Because when life gets difficult, our awareness can narrow. The hard thing becomes the whole story. The unanswered text becomes the whole relationship. The unpaid bill becomes the whole future. The bad morning becomes the whole day. The ache in the body becomes the whole body. The moment of loneliness becomes proof that nothing will ever change.

Gratitude widens the frame. Not all at once. Usually not dramatically. But enough to let one small piece of reality back in.

A bird outside the window. A body that is still breathing. A friend who sent a message. A meal that nourished you. A walk that reminded you you are still here. A bed waiting at the end of the day. A moment when your shoulders dropped without you forcing them to.

These things may seem too small to count. But small things are often where the nervous system starts to come back. Not through grand transformations. Through repeated evidence.

Evidence that not everything is danger. Evidence that not everything is loss. Evidence that not everything requires bracing. Evidence that some things are still quietly supporting you.

This is why I like the practice of naming one good thing. Not ten. Not a gratitude journal full of beautiful sentences. Not a forced list when you are already overwhelmed.

One good thing.

Just one.

Because one is small enough to reach for when you are tired. One is honest. One does not require you to become a different person. One does not demand a personality change.

One simply asks: What is one thing I can notice today that my survival brain might have skipped?

And some days, your one good thing may be beautiful: the walk, the sky, the conversation, the clean sheets, the unexpected laugh.

Other days, your one good thing may be basic: I got through the day. I drank water. I opened the window. I answered one email. I rested instead of pushing. I did not abandon myself completely.

That counts. Especially that.

Because gratitude is not more valid when it sounds poetic. Sometimes the most sacred gratitude is plain.

My legs held me. My lungs kept breathing. My hands carried the groceries. My heart kept going. My body stayed with me, even when I forgot to thank it.

There is something quietly humbling about thanking the body. Many of us only notice the body when we are criticizing it. We notice it when it hurts, changes, lacks energy, gains weight, asks for rest, or refuses to keep performing at the pace we expected.

But your body is not only something to fix. It is also something that has carried you. Through years you did not know how to survive. Through stress you minimized. Through rooms where you had to hold yourself together. Through mornings you did not want to get up. Through seasons where no one knew how much effort it took to keep going.

Your body may not be perfect. But it has been loyal.

And maybe gratitude begins there. Not with loving everything. Not with pretending you have no frustration. But with one honest acknowledgment: something in me is still helping me live.

That matters.

So if gratitude feels out of reach, you do not have to wait until you feel inspired. You do not have to wait until your life is calm. You do not have to wait until your nervous system is fully regulated. You do not have to wait until the hard season is over.

You can begin with one good thing. A sentence. A breath. A small moment of recognition.

Let the action lead. Let the feeling catch up when it can.

And if it does not catch up today, the practice still counts.

Because you are not performing gratitude. You are practicing orientation. You are teaching your mind to notice support again. You are teaching your body that the whole world is not only threat. You are teaching yourself that even in a complicated life, goodness can still be named.

Not because everything is fine.

But because everything is not only pain.

So I’ll ask you the same question I’ve been asking in my 30 Days of One Good Thing practice:

What is one thing your body did today that you usually take for granted?

I’ll go first. My body carried me two miles for a great walk.

That’s mine. What’s yours?

And for today:

I don’t have to earn rest. I am allowed to receive it.

That happens sometimes. The mind goes quiet in a way that doesn’t feel restful — more like a signal. Like the body before weather.

I typed the word deadhead into a search box because that’s what it felt like. Dead in the head. No thoughts coming through.

And then I read what deadheading actually is.

It’s the gardening practice of removing spent blooms from a plant. Not the dying ones. Not the diseased ones. The ones that have simply finished. You cut them away so the plant stops putting energy into something that’s already done, and redirects it toward what’s still growing.

I’ve been doing this in my house lately.

Linens my great aunt embroidered by hand. Cookware I never used, or used once, or fully intended to use someday. Books that informed me just by owning them. Clothing in a size I probably won’t wear again.

None of it is broken. None of it was bad for me. Most of it was loved, or at least held in a kind of quiet reverence — kept because of what it meant, or what it represented, or who I was when I got it.

And at some point the meaning stopped being enough to make it feel like mine.

That’s the part nobody talks about. We have a whole vocabulary for releasing what harmed us. Toxic relationships. Unhealthy patterns. The things we should have walked away from sooner. There’s a whole industry built around helping people let go of what hurt them.

But what about the things that didn’t?

The role that genuinely fit you once. The dream you tended carefully and for a long time. The version of yourself who kept trying in ways that cost her something real. The friendships that were true, just finished. The ambitions that made complete sense at the time.

What about your great aunt’s linens, folded in a closet, that you can’t bring yourself to use because they feel too precious, and can’t bring yourself to release because they feel too much like her?

There’s grief in that. Quieter than the other kind, but grief nonetheless.

I almost wrote, when I started thinking about this, that I don’t have anything to let go of. That I’ve never had anything to begin with.

I notice I do that. Reach for I never had it before I’ll admit it’s over. Minimize the loss before anyone — including me — can witness it.

A person who learned not to take up too much space with her feelings will also have a hard time claiming her own history. Even when the evidence is folded in a closet. Even when it’s hanging in a garment bag in a size she used to be, or was going to be, or was quietly loyal to becoming.

Keeping the clothing in that size is a kind of faithfulness. To a plan. To a self. Releasing it means admitting something concluded that maybe didn’t get to conclude on your own terms.

That’s the hardest kind of deadheading. Not the dramatic releases. The quiet ones. The ones where you finally stop putting energy into something finished so that something living has more room.

I don’t think midlife is a crisis. I think it’s a season where the spent blooms become impossible to ignore. Where you finally have enough distance from the original planting to see clearly what’s still growing and what’s just taking up space.

And sometimes the thing taking up space was genuinely beautiful.

It bloomed. It fed you. It was the best you knew how to grow at the time.

You’re allowed to grieve it and release it in the same breath.

That’s not falling apart.

That’s gardening.

She said I would attract clients who had similar struggles to my own. Not the same presenting problem. Not the same story. But something underneath it that we’d recognize in each other.

I filed that away and kept moving.

And then I watched it prove itself. Over and over. For years.

This past winter was hard.

Not dramatically hard. Not the kind of hard that has a clear story you can tell at a dinner party. Just — heavy. The kind of heavy that follows you into every room.

My environment started to look like how I felt inside. Cluttered. Waiting. Things piling up that I kept meaning to deal with. A clear bin sitting in the middle of the bedroom floor just waiting for me to do something with it.

There’s a particular kind of exhausting that comes from that. When the outside looks exactly like the inside and there’s nowhere to go that doesn’t remind you.

I’m a hypnotherapist. I help people with this for a living.

And I was sitting in the middle of it.

I’ve spent a lot of years crafting content that sounded like I was further along than I was. Not dishonest exactly. Just — curated. The professional distance that says I’ve been through this rather than I’m in it right now.

It felt safer. More credible. Like the person you’d trust to guide you through something difficult.

But something shifted this year.

I started to wonder if the distance was actually the problem. If the people who needed to find me couldn’t recognize themselves in content that was too polished to feel real.

So I decided to do something I’ve never done before.

I started a gratitude challenge. Not because I had it figured out. Because I needed it. Because I was in a hard winter and I know from experience that the way back isn’t one giant leap — it’s one small thing, noticed, every day. And I know myself well enough to know I do better when I’m not doing it alone.

So I opened the door and said — I’m doing this, come with me.

Twenty-two people walked through it.

That’s 30 Days of One Good Thing. It starts May 1st. It’s free. And I’m doing it because I need it — which is the most honest thing I’ve said publicly in a long time.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about since I opened that door.

You don’t attract clients because you have the answers. You attract them because something in them recognizes something in you. Not your credentials. Not your methodology. Something quieter.

The recognition that you’ve been somewhere similar. That you won’t pathologize what they’re carrying because you know the weight of it from the inside.

This week a client walked in whose environment looked exactly like how she felt. Cluttered. Waiting. Things piling up. I recognized her immediately.

Not because I’d studied her presentation.

Because I’ve been her. I am her right now in some ways.

Your life is your curriculum. And your clients confirm it every time they walk through the door.

I don’t know what you’re carrying this week.

But if you help other people for a living — if you’re a therapist, a coach, a practitioner of any kind — and you’re quietly running on empty while showing up fully for everyone else —

I want to say something directly to you.

You’re allowed to need this too.

You’re allowed to be in the middle of it while you’re helping people through it. You’re allowed to start something because you need it. You’re allowed to not have it figured out.

That’s not a liability.

That’s what makes you the real thing.

If you want to spend May with me — I’m running 30 Days of One Good Thing starting May 1st. A free gratitude challenge. One good thing per day. A daily video from me. Weekly hypnosis audio. A small community of people doing the same thing at the same time.

You don’t have to have it together to show up.

You just have to show up.

Join me here for the 30 Days of One Good Thing challenge.

My husband said something offhand the other day about someone he knew. “I don’t understand why drama follows some people everywhere they go.”

I didn’t answer right away. Because the honest answer is that drama doesn’t follow people. It finds them. And it finds them because somewhere along the way, their nervous system got calibrated to a frequency where chaos feels like familiarity, where intensity feels like love, and where the familiar — however painful — feels safer than the unknown.

That’s not a character flaw. That’s an installation. And it happened before anyone had language for it.

I’ve been sitting with an essay by Jeffrey Rediger, the Harvard psychiatrist who appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2010 alongside João Teixeira de Faria — the Brazilian “healer” later convicted of sexually assaulting over six hundred women. Rediger has written with unusual honesty about his own complicity, his own silence, and his own reckoning with how someone of his credentials ended up lending legitimacy to a predator.

He asks a question I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. What responsibility do we carry when our presence, our platform, our credibility helps build trust in someone who later causes harm?

It’s the right question. But underneath it is another one. A quieter one. The one I work with every day.

How does a person end up trusting the untrustworthy in the first place?

Rediger writes about growing up in a coercively controlling household. About having his “spidey senses” trained out of him. About learning to feel safe around unsafe people and unsafe around safe ones. He knows, intellectually, how it happened. He’s still untangling it.

That untangling is the work. And it doesn’t happen at the level of insight. It happens deeper than that — in the part of us that was shaped before we had words, before we had the capacity to evaluate, before we knew there was anything to question.

The nervous system learns early. It learns from repetition. It learns from what was rewarded and what was punished, from what felt like belonging and what felt like exile. And once it learns, it goes looking for the familiar. Not because we’re broken. Because that’s what nervous systems do. They move toward what they recognize as home.

There’s a concept in social theory about how desire and belief spread — not through individual reasoning, but through imitation. We don’t arrive at our convictions alone. We absorb them from the groups we belong to, the people we admire, the circles that make us feel like we exist.

Belonging is not a luxury. For the nervous system, it is survival. And so we will distort a great deal — including our own perception of reality — to maintain it.

This is how communities become closed systems. You don’t just join the group. You’re taught, gradually and often unconsciously, that the world outside the group is dangerous. That the people out there don’t understand. That they’re misguided at best and malevolent at worst. The language varies. The mechanism doesn’t.

Once that architecture is in place, facts don’t move people. Arguments don’t move people. Ridicule and contempt — which confirm everything they were already told about the outside world — push them deeper in.

You cannot shame a nervous system into feeling safe enough to leave.

Megan Phelps-Roper grew up at Westboro Baptist Church. If you don’t know the name, Westboro is the congregation that protests military funerals carrying signs with messages so vile I won’t reproduce them here. She didn’t just attend that church. She was one of its most visible members. She believed, with her whole self, that she was doing God’s work.

She left because someone on Twitter was kind to her.

Not persuasive. Not clever. Not armed with counter-arguments. Kind. Genuinely curious. Willing to engage her as a human being worth talking to rather than a target to be defeated.

That kindness created a crack. And into that crack crept her own doubt, which had been there all along, waiting for enough safety to breathe.

She didn’t need better information. She needed someone to treat her as though she were capable of finding her own way to it.

I think about this constantly in the context of the cultural moment we’re living in. The bewilderment so many people feel watching others defend the indefensible. The frustration of watching people contort their most deeply held beliefs — including their faith — to accommodate someone who has given them a place to belong.

It looks like delusion from the outside. From the inside, it feels like loyalty. Like survival. Like the only coherent response to a world that has made them feel, at some earlier and formative moment, that they were not quite worth seeing.

Contempt confirms that story. It always has. It always will.

What interrupts the pattern — what has always interrupted the pattern — is the same thing that reached Megan Phelps-Roper through a screen. Someone willing to stay curious instead of superior. Someone who understood that you don’t argue a person out of a nervous system response. You create the conditions where their own knowing has room to surface.

This is what I do in my work. Not with politics. With the quieter versions of the same dynamic — the relationship that felt like home because chaos was home, the community that felt like safety because it was the only safety ever offered, the authority figure who felt trustworthy because authority had always been the thing that decided whether you were okay or not.

The intervention is never the argument. It’s the experience of something different. Something safe enough to stay present with. Something that doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to belong.

Rediger ends his essay by saying he is still learning. Still listening. That this is not a conclusion but the beginning of an inquiry.

I think that’s right. And I think the inquiry has to include this: that the people we are most frustrated with, most bewildered by, most tempted to write off — they didn’t arrive at their positions through stupidity or moral failure. They arrived through the same human need that drives all of us.

The need to belong somewhere.

The need to feel, finally, like they are not alone.

That need is not the enemy. It’s the door.

The question is whether we’re willing to stand on the other side of it without contempt long enough for someone to consider opening it.

She didn’t do it on purpose. That’s the part worth sitting with.

She loved her family. She was present — dinner on the table, school events attended, holidays decorated. From the outside, and often from the inside, it looked like a normal, functioning home. The kind you’d describe as happy if someone asked.

But there was a texture to the way she moved through it. The way she’d redirect a conversation before her husband finished his thought. The way his preferences were consulted last, or not quite consulted at all — absorbed into what was already decided. The way he’d offer something — an opinion, a plan, an observation — and it would land without weight. Acknowledged, maybe. But not received.

It wasn’t cruel. That’s the thing. It looked like efficiency. Like confidence. Like a woman who simply knew what she wanted and moved toward it.

The children were watching. They always are.

Not watching and thinking — not cataloguing it, not naming it. Just absorbing. The way children absorb everything that happens before they have language for it. The way a nervous system learns what is normal long before the mind has any say in the matter.

What they learned wasn’t a lesson. It was a frequency. A particular way of orienting toward the person who was always there — always present, always peripheral. Dad was factored in the way you factor in the weather. Accounted for. Not quite centered.

This is the part that doesn’t show up in the usual conversations about family wounds. We talk about the dramatic moments — the blow-ups, the absences, the things that were said and shouldn’t have been. Those leave marks we can point to. What we talk about less is this: the slow, steady instruction of ordinary dismissal. The lessons that arrived not in what was done but in what was never quite done. The presence that was always slightly turned away.

Here’s what’s worth knowing about dismissive patterns: they run below the level of conscious choice. That’s not a defense — it’s a distinction. The woman in this story didn’t decide each morning to make her husband optional. She moved from a groove worn deep long before she had children, long before she had a husband, long before she knew she was moving at all.

And the children didn’t decide to inherit it. They just did. The way you inherit a posture, a tone of voice, a way of leaving a room. It becomes part of how you understand intimacy — not through thought, but through repetition. Through ten thousand small moments that added up to a map.

This is why so many people arrive in adulthood confused about why their closest relationships feel slightly off in ways they can’t articulate. Why they find themselves mid-conversation realizing they’ve turned away from someone who was speaking. Why they manage rather than meet. Why the people who love them most sometimes feel like background.

It doesn’t feel like a wound. It feels like personality.

That distinction — between what feels like you and what was installed in you — is where change becomes possible. Not at the level of behavior modification. Not through deciding to do better. But at the level where the original instruction lived: below language, below memory, below the part of you that reads articles on Sunday mornings and nods along.

The family looked happy. It probably was, in many of the ways that count. But inside it, something was being quietly taught. And it moved forward, the way these things do — not with intention, not with malice. Just with the ordinary, invisible momentum of what we absorb before we know to question it.

The first step is usually just this: noticing the groove. Feeling, for the first time, that it is a groove — and not the ground itself.

She didn’t tell my client that when they started working together.

My client had been managing chronic pain for months. Real work. Hard won. She’d learned something most people never do — that you cannot make another person understand your pain exactly as it is. Once she accepted that, something shifted. The pain became manageable. Sometimes almost absent.

Then one session with someone else.

One question.

What’s it like to know you’ll always have this pain?

She called me sobbing.

The question wasn’t clinical. It was personal. A wound looking for company in another wound. The therapist had never made peace with her own pain and handed that unresolved grief directly to my client.

In one session. Months of work. Gone.

She didn’t come back to me. Not because she didn’t want to. She simply didn’t have the funds to start over.

That’s the part that stays with me.

There’s another story. Different building. Different woman.

She’d been working with a therapist for two years on hoarding. Twice a week. Expensive sessions in a well-appointed office. The work circled the same drain — her mother, her patterns, her mother, her patterns.

She walked past my door one day. Got curious. Made an appointment.

We were just talking when she mentioned her mother again. Something caught my attention.

I asked one question.

How is that not like your mother?

I watched her mind reorganize in real time. You could see it in her eyes. Something shifting. Decades of circling suddenly resolving into a single clear point.

She called me the following week about sleep. She had started cleaning.

Two years. One question.

I’m not telling this story to be competitive. I’m telling it because something about that two years has never sat right with me. Whether it was the money or the method or simply the wrong fit — I don’t know. I wasn’t in those sessions.

What I do know is that the right question at the right moment can do what years of the wrong approach cannot.

And I know the therapist spent the next year trying to get me removed from the building.

She eventually succeeded. It was 2009. The recession. She offered the landlord more money for my office.

A year later she moved her entire practice somewhere else.

I found an office I kept for over ten years.

This is what nobody says out loud in the wellness space:

Not every practitioner is the right practitioner for you.

Some will project their unresolved wounds onto yours without knowing it. Some will keep you circling because circling is comfortable and funded. Some will feel threatened when someone else helps you move.

None of this means therapy is bad. It means practitioners are human. And humans carry things.

The ones worth trusting have done enough of their own work to stay out of your way.

Not perfect. Not finished.

Just not actively bleeding on you while handing you a bandage.

If a session ever left you feeling worse about yourself than when you walked in —

If you’ve been circling the same drain for years without moving —

If something felt off but you couldn’t name it —

That may not have been about you at all.

You’re allowed to leave. You’re allowed to find someone else. You’re allowed to trust what you felt in that room even when the person with the credentials told you otherwise.

Healing doesn’t always look like what we were told it would look like.

Sometimes it looks like one question.

And eyes that change.

Why Follow: Follow if you’ve ever left a session feeling worse than when you walked in — and wondered if it was you.

I came across a couple posts - one about emotional independence in long-term relationships, another about “not knowing what you feel” - and they mirrored what I’ve been seeing in sessions.

Different voices. Same underlying themes.

Not confusion.

Recognition.

1. People aren’t confused. They’re overriding themselves.

I came across a Substack post this week about “not knowing what you feel.”

And I see versions of this in sessions all the time.

But when I sit with it longer, something feels off.

Most people I work with aren’t confused.

They do feel something.

You can hear it in the way they describe a moment.
You can see it in how quickly they correct themselves after.

“I mean… maybe I’m overthinking it.”
“It’s probably not a big deal.”

That’s not confusion.

That’s someone feeling something clearly
and then stepping away from it just as quickly.

It’s a habit of self-abandonment that’s gotten very quiet.

2. Emotional neglect is still being mislabeled as “independence”

This showed up in three different places this week:

• a Substack post about long-term marriage

• a comment thread where someone said “we just don’t need much from each other”

• and a session where everything was “fine”… except nothing felt connected

No fighting.
No obvious conflict.

But also no emotional presence.

And instead of naming that,
it gets reframed as:

“We’re just independent.”
“We give each other space.”

Sometimes that’s true.

But sometimes…

It’s not independence.

It’s absence.

And the body registers that long before the mind explains it.

3. “We’re just different” is often where the conversation stops too early

I’ve seen this phrase come up repeatedly:

• in relationship posts

• in DMs

• and almost word-for-word in sessions

“We’re just different.”

And sometimes that’s accurate.

But a lot of the time, it’s where the deeper conversation stops.

Different needs for closeness.
Different tolerance for emotional depth.
Different ways of engaging.

And instead of exploring that, it gets simplified.

Not because it’s resolved
but because no one knows what to do next.

Difference isn’t the problem.

Unaddressed difference is.

What ties all of this together

Across everything I saw this week, one thing was consistent:

People aren’t lacking information.

They’re navigating patterns that were learned
long before they had language for them.

So they keep trying to think their way out
of something that isn’t happening at the level of thought.

If any of this feels familiar

It’s not because something is wrong with you.

It’s because you’re starting to see something
you used to override.

And that moment -
the one where you recognize it clearly
without immediately explaining it away -

that’s where things actually begin to change.

Why follow:

I pay attention to patterns that show up across real conversations, client work, and what people are quietly sharing online.

Not quick fixes.
Not motivation.

Just clear recognition of what’s actually happening
so you can stop working against yourself.

There are moments that don’t look like anything from the outside.

No argument.
No tension.
Nothing you could point to and say, that’s the problem.

And yet…

something shifts.

It’s usually something small.

Something that could easily be brushed off.
Explained away.
Forgotten by the other person entirely.

But not by you.

Because what registers isn’t what happened.

It’s what didn’t.

There was no pause.

No curiosity.
No moment of wondering, “What is this? Why is it here?”

No awareness that you exist inside the same space.

And something in you notices that.

Quietly.

You don’t explode.
You don’t even necessarily react.

But internally, something moves.

Because what you feel isn’t anger.

It’s distance.

A subtle realization that you are sharing a life with someone…

but not necessarily being considered by them.

And if you’ve felt this, you’ve probably tried to explain it at some point.

Not dramatically.
Just clearly.

And somehow…

it still didn’t land.

Which makes the loneliness sharper.

Because now it’s not just unseen.

It’s unshared.

This is the kind of loneliness that’s hard to explain.

Because nothing is obviously wrong.

There’s no defining moment.
No clear incident you can point to.

Just a pattern of small things that slowly change how it feels to be there.

Moments where:

You notice.
You adjust.
You think ahead.
You hold the awareness of the relationship.

And the other person…

moves through it.

Not intentionally hurtful.
Not deliberately neglectful.

Just…

not attuned.

And over time, that creates a very specific kind of exhaustion.

Not from conflict.

From carrying something that was meant to be shared.

So something inside you adapts.

You stop expecting to be considered.

You stop bringing things up in the same way.

You stop reaching as often.

Not because you don’t care.

But because it’s tiring to keep extending yourself into a space where nothing meets you.

This is where the questions start.

Am I asking for too much?
Is this just what relationships become?
Should I let this go?

But being considered isn’t a high standard.

It’s a relational one.

It lives in the smallest moments.

The pause.
The thought.
The awareness that someone else exists alongside you.

And when that’s missing consistently, the relationship doesn’t necessarily end.

But something else does.

The feeling of being with someone.

The hardest loneliness isn’t being alone.

It’s being in a relationship where no one reaches back.

And the shift doesn’t begin with a big decision.

It begins with a quiet recognition:

I don’t feel met here.

Not judged.
Not attacked.

Just…

not met.

And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

Not in the small moments.
Not in the conversations.
Not in the spaces where something could have been different…

and wasn’t.

Sometimes the most important moment isn’t the one where everything falls apart.

It’s the one where you quietly realize:

I’ve been here… but I haven’t been felt.

This is the kind of pattern I work with often.

Not the obvious ones.

The quiet ones people struggle to name.

Why follow

I write about the moments most people dismiss but can’t stop thinking about.
The patterns underneath relationships, behavior, and self-sabotage that don’t change through insight alone.

Not advice.
Not fixing.