Same school.

The four-year-old is walking into the school where his brother began. Different building. I was in a different marriage then. I was at a different point in my life.

The parking lot has changed. It used to be an occasional old Mercedes and a lot of Camrys. Now it’s Rivians, maybe a few too many Teslas.

The school underneath is the same. We’ll see.

This morning the little one watched his brother.

His brother watched himself, and the little one, and the world, and his phone.

I watched them both. My wife watched all of it. I was texting his mother about the day, about the plan for him to meet his best friend at school for a final first-day pic, about his best friend’s mother.

A light but quite real web of people paying attention to two boys putting on their shoes.

I walked them out to the curb and we took the requisite first-day photographs.

My teen has the first symptoms of senioritis and clearly almost didn’t want to do it. He did it anyway. He is constitutionally kind like that. And there is this breeze of something like nostalgia already in him for a year just starting.

The little one couldn’t wait to get to school.

As my teen got in the car he gave me the look. Don’t cry, Dad. He knows what I’m like at these moments. I waited until he turned the corner, then sat and took a few parental deep breaths. Here we are.

Later, his best friend’s mother texted me photographs from the high-school curb. All these parents in a web of care, marking time. In the pictures you can see it in their faces. These children have been cared for. They’re walking into their next portal.

Then I walked the little one in to his. The chorus of parents and small children; it was hard to tell who was more excited, who was more nervous to leave.

In my work, I sit with people every week in their transitions.

I got the job. I lost the job. I met this person. This person left.

My friend is an ER doc. She meets people on arguably the worst day of their lives. That is the job. She walks in already knowing the day is broken, and her work is whatever happens next. We talk about this portal crossing guard life. Liminal spaces, they call it.

Some of us have work that holds transition points. In some ways all of us do.

So the question is how we organize for them.

I think of altars.

The first part of every one of my practices is to set an altar.

Puja. You make offering.

You offer a butter lamp. You offer incense. You pour water. You offer food, torma. You offer flowers. You can make mudras, use your hands in these offerings. It has impact. It gives the offering focus and beauty.

The offerings help settle the six realms. You can read these realms as psychological. You can read them as spiritual. You can read them as literal. All three.

Today my main practice was Yeshe Walmo. She protects the Bön teachings.

She is the fierce expression of the divine feminine. She dances on one foot inside a ring of fire. A flaming sword in her right hand, a vase of long life in her left, a cloak of peacock feathers.

She is extra tuff.

My four-year-old loves her.

I talk about altars with my clients often. An altar is a picture of what you care about. You build it, you put it where you will see it, and then you look at it.

That is the whole technology.

Because we pay attention to what we pay attention to.

If you watch the stock market all day, you care about money. No shade. If you look at pictures of flowers all day, you are probably a botanist.

What are we training ourselves to notice?

Look at what you have been looking at. That is the altar you already built.

Then there are the realms.

Six of them. Hell. Hungry ghost. Animal. Human. Demigod. God.

Read as states, they are the hindrances to recognizing our interdependence with any compassion. Greed. Pride. Endless thirst.

The offerings are the positive opposites. You offer a butter lamp for the ones burning in the hell realms. You offer incense for the ones who cannot stop craving.

A hungry ghost has a swollen belly and a throat the width of a needle. It can never eat enough. It can never really eat at all.

The Buddhists are not the only ones who saw this. Dante puts the gluttons on the sixth terrace of Purgatory, circling a tree whose fruit and water they can smell and never reach. Wasted by the wanting until their eye sockets look like rings with the stones missing.

Nowadays the hungry ghost has perfect skin and wants one more zero on the number.

We are so busy getting the reservation that we never taste the meal. American Psycho got the comedy of this exactly right. An entire life organized around a table at Dorsia.

It would be funny if it did not burn the one offering on the altar that is actually sacred, which is our time.

I live in Los Angeles. Hungry ghost 90210.

And if you are reading this on your phone, you’re holding a portable one.

Gabor Maté spent years in this realm, writing about addiction.

The hungry ghost is where we wander lost in desire. Food. Sex. Money. Whatever will not fill.

I work with adolescents facing addiction. A hunger that new is heartbreaking to watch, especially in a world that’s learned to manufacture hunger in children.

So again I lean toward the practice.

Here is the part that matters for transitions.

The human realm is the only one you can evolve in.

The animals are lovely and they are stuck. The hell realm is stuck. The hungry ghost is stuck, which is the entire definition of a hungry ghost.

Even the gods get bored. They cannot die. They want a billion, a hundred billion. Is a trillion a real thing?

According to the dharma we arrive in the human realm precisely because it is the one where something can change.

I’m having my own evolution. A marriage and a son. Then another marriage and another son.

The altar was there through all of it.

Some days I’m the hungriest, grumpiest ghost in hell. Other days I’m as lazy as the gods. Occasionally I hold the peace and presence of my cat, just right here and aware.

Most days I’m in the human realm.

I do not know if I’m more comfortable with the word source or the word God.

When people say Jesus I picture shiny new cars and big hair. I’m a child of the eighties, so I think of Tammy Faye. The people who said Jesus said it with the vigor of people who seemed angry about it. The people who said God said it like a threat. The people who say source always seem very attractive and on their way to a party I wasn’t invited to.

All of that language excludes somebody.

Maybe it’s good not to be comfortable with one word for everything.

When I speak of altars I am speaking of invitations.

This morning I set the altar in front of her and made the offering for my children. I thought about what protection means. She particularly protects the wisdom teachings. I thought about what wisdom I’m trying to protect with my children, for them.

Then for all children.

That is the ritual inside the ritual. Not the lamp, not the water. The turn where my two boys become every boy. Where paying attention to my children becomes paying attention to children.

The core teachings are interdependence and compassion. That we’re connected to one another like a web. That seeing it clearly asks something of you.

We are all children of source, if you want it that way. I am fine with that language.

I have had many teachers in Bön since 2017.

One of them stayed at my house. He told me, your children are your practice.

They are the practice. They are the direction. They are the opportunity.

So this morning is not an interruption of the practice.

The first day of school. The marking of time, however we mark it. Another door.

This weekend I had coffee with a clinician and we talked about the evolution of compassion.

There has been biological evolution. We are living through an enormous technological one.

The one nobody schedules is the evolution of our capacity for compassion.

It is available. It is not automatic.

Sacredness is not a separate category. It is an honest look at how unlikely it is to be here at all.

The altar you are willing to set can be a portal.

Into what.

Into this. Into the first day of school. Into the morning we are actually standing in.

Tonight my children will come home and we will have dinner.

A friend of ours, back from college and about to leave for a year abroad, is coming by. Another portal. We will all touch in.

The web is growing internationally now.

I bow to it. The web of time we’ve built out of friendships and relationships.

If you are reading this, lean into your community. Take care of it. Nurture it. Be aware of it. Support it.

It is the altar of your life. It is a portal to everything.

Your children are your practice.

With gratitude to my teachers in Bön: Dr. Daniel P. Brown, John Jackson, Geshe Sonam Gurung, Amchi Khedup Loden Gurung, Chaphur Kunzang Rinpoche, Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, and Lopön Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche.

It’s a joke because it’s absurd. We act like it’s a victory. Not only is it obvious to us how privileged we are to have enough money to press a few buttons on a phone and have someone bring food to our house, while there is unimaginable suffering as far as the eye can see in every direction.

But still, sometimes it’s just really fucking hard to get food on the table.

What I mean is that time feels beaten out of us.

Work, children, phones, appointments, emails, errands, texts, more emails. The thousands of tiny negotiations required to maintain attention, a family, a life. We are constantly mired in technologies supposedly designed to give time back to us, and somehow there is never enough.

I thought about all of this while watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

I’ve never actually read The Odyssey all the way through, although I’ve started again. Which is mildly embarrassing for someone who studied poetry and philosophy. Milton, Dante, Rilke, a lot of the greats, but never OG Homer front to back.

And I know The Odyssey through the bloodstream of Western culture, the way most of us do: the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, the Sirens. A man trying to get home.

But watching Nolan’s film, I realized I had never really thought about The Odyssey as a story about time.

Odysseus goes out into the world and becomes Odysseus.

And while he is becoming Odysseus, his son’s childhood disappears.

The Secure Base

In attachment theory, there is this idea called the secure base.

It can sound like a lofty, almost unachievable thing, especially in the pop-psychology and Instagram versions of attachment. I prefer the idea of a secure presence, or what some clinicians call secure relating.

A child who feels sufficiently safe in relationship becomes free to explore.

The child crawls away from the primary caregiver, encounters the world, and returns. Eventually the radius of exploration gets larger. The room becomes a playground. The playground becomes school. School becomes adolescence. Eventually, if things go pretty well, the child leaves.

And, ideally, comes back.

Attachment is not the opposite of exploration.

Secure attachment is what makes healthy exploration possible.

Safety. Exploration. Return.

Maybe this is one of the reasons The Odyssey has survived for nearly a bazillion years.

It takes this ordinary developmental movement of human life and blows it up to mythological proportions.

Odysseus leaves his secure base and encounters an entire world.

War. Monsters. Gods. Sex. Death. Lots of death. What have you.

And then he has to figure out how to get home.

The more I thought about the stops along the way, the more they began to look like different ways human beings lose the capacity to return.

The Cyclops can only see through one eye. Powerful, but imprisoned within a single field of vision.

The Lotus-Eaters offer something more seductive: forgetting.

Eat this and you don’t have to suffer anymore because you don’t have to remember that there was something you were trying to do.

Circe transforms men into animals. Appetites can overtake your identity.

Calypso offers an even stranger bargain: stay here. Stop traveling. Escape ordinary human time altogether.

And then there are the Sirens.

I was fascinated by Sirens when I was younger, still am.

Their song doesn’t repel you. It’s so beautiful that you willingly move toward your own destruction.

There’s something about that in art. And sex. Drugs. Ambition. Travel. Money. Recognition. Even spiritual seeking.

All the things that can make a human life enormous and beautiful are also things into which a human life can disappear.

The Ulysses in All of Us

My mornings start with an attempt to take care of a 51-year-old body well enough that I might get to grow old with my children.

I exercise. I stretch. I take an assortment of vitamins and supplements. There is a meticulousness to it that feels both adult and strangely childish: the hope that if I do enough of the right things in the right order, I might bargain successfully with time.

I have a place where I do my spiritual practice. I try not to touch my phone for the first hour.

Because once I touch it, I can feel the pull. A little object with the gravitational force of a planet, pulling me away from the time I had intended to inhabit.

And then the day begins.

Clinical work. Personal work. Family. Trying to remain educated. Trying to read literature. Look at art. Practice. Work. Answer the emails. Answer the texts.

By eight o’clock in the morning, I can feel like I’ve already lived three days.

I listen to others for my work, I try and understand, I fall through time. And yet the distance between 2pm and 2:30 can feel epically slow or so instantaneous I question if I have dementia.

And somehow, at the end of the day, I sometimes can’t remember what I did.

We have our own Cyclopes and Circes and Calypsos and Sirens.

We’re having blue lotus every day for lunch.

The lotus is not necessarily a particular drug, app, or technology. This isn’t as simple as saying phones are bad or DoorDash is destroying civilization.

The lotus is forgetting.

Forgetting what we intended to do with our finite lives.

Forgetting why we were working so hard in the first place.

Forgetting the person sitting across the table because something on the screen seems terribly important.

Forgetting that our children are getting older while we get everything done.

Forgetting that we’re getting older too.

I try to practice prayers and mantras throughout the day. And increasingly I don’t think I do this because I’m particularly spiritual.

I think I do it because I’m trying not to forget time.

Exploration is not the problem.

The problem is losing the capacity to come home.

Fathers Who Leave

I think a lot about fathers.

I think about my own father, who threw words fists drinks and silence at me for most of my childhood. The feeble repair later felt worse, as it seems to have been made to convince me none of it happened.

And I think about being a father myself. Not just as one but the capital F in it. The Father. Joining the ranks. It’s heavy. Bigger than me. Bigger than Dad. It was probably big for Odysseus too.

But the moment in the film that really undid me was smaller.

Odysseus comes home, and the one who recognizes him is the dog.

I have an aging dog. Billie Buckets. She’s blind now.

Watching that scene, I found myself thinking about what this dog has witnessed. She has been a fixture of my teenager’s life. My teen grew up with her. In some ways, Billie, my child, my wife, and I have all grown up together.

Now she’s old.

A dog can contain a marriage, a childhood, a house, an entire version of a family. Then one day you look at the gray around her face, or watch her negotiate a room she can no longer see, and realize that the life you thought you were simply living has become an era.

There is something elemental about an animal recognizing you.

Before explanation. Before status. Before the stories we construct about ourselves.

I know you.

After all that wandering, something at home still knows who he is.

And suddenly I wasn’t crying about ancient Greece.

I was thinking about my father.

I was thinking about my children.

I was thinking about Bill.

And I was thinking about the strange bargain parents make all the time:

I have to leave you in order to take care of you.

I have to work. I have to earn. I have to build something. I have to secure a future for you.

I’m doing all of this for you.

And sometimes every one of those statements is true.

That’s what makes the equation so painful.

Providing is an act of love.

But presence is also an act of love.

And there are moments when the two seem impossibly opposed.

We go out into the world to build a life for the people we love, only to discover years later that the life we built required us to be absent from them.

Odysseus is lost trying to get back to his son.

And his son goes out and gets lost trying to find his father.

Coming Home

I spent part of the film thinking about my childhood. Part of it thinking about my own failures. Part of it thinking about the things I keep private, the duplicities, appetites, and compromises that don’t fit neatly into the story I tell about myself.

I take refugee in the Dharma and try to hold it clearly, and I raise my voice more often than I would like.

I try to walk through the world with a kind thought, and my own head can be remarkably loud and angry. I crave endlessly.

I practice presence and spend enormous amounts of my life distracted.

I tell other people about rupture and repair and then discover, again and again, how difficult both can be in an actual human life.

And I found myself wondering whether coming home is partly that, too.

Not returning to some purified version of ourselves.

Returning as the person who actually made the journey.

Odysseus doesn’t return to Ithaca as the man who left it. How could he?

Neither do we.

We come home carrying what we’ve done and what has been done to us. The people we’ve loved. The people we’ve hurt. The things we pursued. The time we wasted. The things we still cannot forgive.

Maturity isn’t learning never to wander.

It’s learning how to keep returning.

As a therapist, I spend a lot of time talking with families about connection, rupture, and repair. Secure attachment isn’t a life without rupture. Such a life doesn’t exist.

Security is built, in part, through the experience that after rupture, someone comes back.

But sometimes someone comes back and the repair never happens. Sometimes it has to be made in absentia, without them.

My father came back. What he brought with him was a kind of prolonged amnesia. A steady, insisted-upon forgetting. A returning that was really an attempt to erase, to convince us both it hadn’t happened the way it happened.

For most of his life, my father crossed the river the wrong way.

A few days before he died, we were on a video call. I think I was trying to offer him something. I kept forgetting that he was the way he was, so I tried one more time. I said, Dad, I want you to know that you tried your best.

It seemed like the thing to say.

And in a tone I had never heard from him, he said, quickly, but I didn’t.

Then he stopped talking. And I stopped talking. We sat there on the phone and got off quickly. I’m fairly certain those were among the last words we ever exchanged.

Not long after, his wife and my aunt told me he had started waking in the night screaming. He was dreaming he was being dragged to hell.

He finally went down to Hades and let the dead come crowding around.

It was the closest I ever came to knowing him.

The question isn’t whether we wander.

The question is whether we can remember what we loved before we left, and find our way back to it while there is still time.

I lost you.

I found you.

I’m here.

I’m here again

The only thing my wife and I fought about when we were in Europe was time. Not money. Not all the flights. Not the ferries. Just time. Who’s gonna get the hour alone? Who stayed with the youngest if the other went out? Whether we’d spend enough time together. Whether there was enough time left. How are we spending our time?

One evening in Tinos, I watched the sun set over the impossibly beautiful Mediterranean, hanging there like it wasn’t quite ready to leave, and it hit me that most arguments about love are actually just fights about time.

We don’t talk about it this way.

We say, You’re always working.

You’re on your phone again.

How come we never spend enough time together?

But underneath these sentences is the real question.

Where is your attention?

When we arrived in Tinos, the WhatsApp thread became totally wild. It went from four to eight to thirty-four. Friends, then friends of friends, then some acquaintances, I think. There was a fixation on reservations. Is the table big enough? Whose villa? Is there a chef? Can we go there? What’s the password? What’s the wine like? How many people are coming to the boat? The boat’s off. The boat’s on. Are you gonna bring your kids?

There is something deeply human and completely hilarious about all of it. So much privilege, but it was expressed through wonderfully ordinary questions. We weren’t worried about survival. We were thinking about how we were gonna spend our precious time coordinating beauty, celebrating our friendships with food and wine and time together.

If anything, this is just an observation about gratitude.

Paris was very surprising. Not because it was Paris, though Paris is very much Paris, but because of children. Watching my four-year-old disappear into the Jardin du Luxembourg, I paid attention to the way children move through public spaces. In this beautiful garden, every language seemed to be spoken. I was wondering what it did to my little one’s mind, his brain developing. I watched parents push swings a little differently than we do in Glassell Park. Almost no screens were locked in hands. People seemed present.

In the pond, there were little sailboats floating around this huge fountain, and it fascinated me. A wooden stick. Wind. Some water. No algorithm. No batteries. Just kids pushing boats around with sticks, learning that the world itself can be enough.

I watched my teenager play with my little one,

and I noticed how imagination goes dormant.

It just waits for something young to invite it back in and open it up.

In Athens, we arrived to unbelievable heat. By evening, the whole city seemed to let out a breath of relief. Families flooded the streets in the darkness. We stood and watched Greek music in front of the lights of the Acropolis. Kids ran amok. Life seemed to begin in the evening.

Wyeth was tired. I asked him if we could go one more block.

I do this. I’m greedy for moments. One more conversation. One more street. One more.

I keep believing something beautiful is just waiting around the corner. It often is.

On the ferry from Rafina, Greek soap operas played silently on the television.

My wife couldn’t stop laughing.

“Look at how they use their hands,” she said.

She was right. Every conversation looked like a caricature, like Italian turned up another notch. I’d never noticed that before. Now I probably always will.

Travel doesn’t just show you new places. It gives you new eyes.

Tinos felt very different. Not because it’s more beautiful than everywhere else, but it felt inhabitable as much as it felt old. So old. It felt like we could live there. Of all the houses we visited, ours was the simplest. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of Leonard Cohen staying in Hydra. It quietly felt like home, but I think that had more to do with the people in it. Me, my wife, and my kids. That’s a home.

Every morning, goats wandered down from the hill to eat brush and drink from the pool. One morning, a baby goat got spooked by the others and fell in. The pool was so beautifully designed, an infinity pool, that it became a trap. Every time the little goat tried to climb out, screaming, its hooves slipped off the smooth edge, and it fell back in.

Lev and I watched. He was confused. I knew it was going to drown, so I pulled on my bathing suit and jumped in and pulled the goat out. I saved the goat that day.

Later that afternoon, I remembered more than twenty-five years ago. A drunk man had cornered the manager of a bar restaurant where I was working. She was a single mother trying to hold things together during a busy shift. Before I had time to think, I was over the bar, standing between them, pushing him back.

For some reason, those two memories found each other in Tinos.

I don’t think of myself as brave. I’m not especially large. I don’t mind conflict, but I don’t necessarily enjoy it, and I hate physical violence. It hurts. But there’s a part of me that moves before I have time to become anyone else.

I hope my sons get that from me.

That woman, the manager, I introduced to one of these friends twenty years ago. They got married. Three kids. To be in Tinos and see their family and think of all the moments that brought us to that table. It had me thinking about time again.

At a fancy lunch on my birthday, my brother and I fell into a very familiar way of disagreeing with each other. We tend to see things differently. We approach things differently. It hardly matters what it was about. What’s interesting is how quickly distraction can pull people away from one another. Take them out of time, if you will.

As the lunch went on and the wine kept coming, our father finally arrived at the table. He’s been dead since 2022, but he was there. Unmistakable in his shadow, in the conversation, and with weight.

I’ve come to understand that every family table, every time you sit down, you invite the invisible guests. The parents. The former selves. Any injuries. And the blessings. People who keep shaping how we love long after they’ve left the table.

I looked at my friends and my brother, his family and mine. The table behind us with the young people, all the kids of all the friends.

I thought about time.

And then mid-conversation, the sea rose up beneath the restaurant. A wave came under the table and soaked my pants and feet. Nobody panicked. People just laughed. The conversation kept going.

The sea just casually interrupted everything.

One night we ate at a small restaurant called Veranda, just my family. It felt less like being in a restaurant and more like being at someone’s home. The food was wonderful. The view, unbelievable. Picturesque in all the ways you’d like to think about Greece. But what I remember most is Lev disappearing into the yard to play with two little girls.

Angelique. Marguerite.

Those are the only words I could make out. Lev and these girls shared no language. Only names.

Kids don’t wait for the opportunity to become friends. It just happens.

I spent time with friends I hadn’t seen in decades. Some I met in my early twenties during the first internet revolution of ‘97 and ‘98. Others I’d been to school with. Friends I saw in Athens I was close with when I was nineteen. They were poets then. They are more than that now. Art critics. Activists. Academics.

Watching my teenage son meet them felt important, strangely so. I felt like I had a duty to put him in front of these people and these people in front of him. Books I’d read because of them eventually became books I handed to him, literally and metaphorically. Songs we discovered when we were younger became things I’ve shared with him throughout his life. Ideas had turned into conversations and ways of parenting.

Because you don’t just inherit your parents. You inherit the people who shaped them.

Attention is a lot like water. Whatever we keep returning to will begin to grow.

I thought about that wave under the table.

At another dinner, I looked across at my friends’ teenage children and watched their faces as they talked. I’d catch an expression or see how their eyes moved, and suddenly I could see their parents when they were in their twenties.

Time doesn’t erase things. It rearranges them.

Walking alone in Dublin one evening, I kept having this odd feeling that every Irish face could have been a cousin. I never experienced anything like that before. It wasn’t that I looked like all these people. There was just a subtlety. A recognition. Something underneath it.

The city felt familiar, but I can’t say why.

At some point during the trip, I found myself talking with two close friends about Abraham Joshua Heschel and his book The Sabbath, about the palace of time, architecture in time.

I’ve loved that phrase for years.

And this trip made me wonder if maybe we spend our whole lives building one. Not from stone. From attention.

What do we pay attention to?

I’m getting older, and I’m less interested in asking whether I’m spending my time well. I want to know if I’m spending my life well. Those aren’t the same question.

I think love gets deployed through attention over time. And if that’s true, then every day we’re deploying it somewhere. Into work. Into our phones. Into our kids. Into resentment. Into gratitude. Into whoever is sitting across from us.

The question isn’t whether we’re deploying love. It’s where.

Every meal. Every misunderstanding you go back and repair. Every walk with a kid. Every goat you pull out of a pool. Every old friend whose face shows up inside their own children. Every wave that rises under a table while you keep talking.

The palace isn’t somewhere you go when life slows down. It’s what you’ve been building the whole time.

Maybe that’s why I write. Not because I understand any of this before I start, but because writing is how I figure out what I’ve been paying attention to all long.

Home was the volatile place. The world was the refuge. The world was something I was trying to get to. Let me in!

The city. The venue. Bands I’d only heard of, names on flyers, acclaimed by people who seemed to know things. The cool kids just ahead. The places where it could happen, whatever it was. I couldn’t tell you, but I felt the need to know. That was the pull. Mysterious. Secret languages of unseen handshakes and nods.

I remember reading in the newspaper about an art show and wanting to know about art. So I got down by myself, to a part of town I didn’t know, and had my mind blown by art I saw in person. Helter Skelter, 1992. LA Art.

Another night I sat in the back of a pickup truck with four other teens, various flavors of trauma in us to be sure. Lance drove and we kept the back open because Allan was too drunk already and may puke. We all drove to Jabberjaw to see a small band from Northern California called Green Day. A total no show of course.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Figuring it out in a world, and a time, when you could.

The world hurt you in more analog ways back then. Someone left a nasty message on the answering machine. Beep. Someone TP’d your house. The tried and true method was rudimentary: beat you up at school. Cruelty required more effort. It required a bike, a phone cord, a location.

So did everything else.

If you wanted an experience, you went and got one. You left the house because everything real was somewhere else. Exploration was the default mode network expression of adolescence. Nobody taught it overtly. Nobody had to. It just was.

For some of us it was more than a setting. It was the way out. Looking back, there was terror, but there was no dread.

Then the internet arrived, and we noticed the pace of cruelty first. Trolling became an art form. A residence.!Cyberbullying came in waves. Revenge of the nerds in a way.

There was a real cost, and we were right to name it. But I think we watched the wrong thing.

Humans have always found ways to harm each other. The delivery system changed. The impulse did not. The deeper shift was quieter, and it had nothing to do with cruelty.

Experiences started circling closer.

Closer to the couch. Closer to the palm of the hand. Closer to a screen that renders the sunset so you never have to stand in front of one. My oldest was born in 2009, the year the feed became infinite. He has never known a world where experience required distance. How many sentences and sentiments became comments? When did you last look someone in the eye and say the words: love, hate, thanks. Have you?

My youngest was born in 2022, the year AI arrived. He will never know a world where you even have to search. For him, the world comes pre-explored, summarized, delivered.

One boy per revolution. I didn’t plan it this way, but I’m a student of it now.

I’m not anti-technology. I use these tools daily. Economists like to call this creative destruction. You win some, you lose some.

But we should be honest about what’s on the losing side of that ledger. I mean, I’m a therapist… Let’s talk about it

Exploration is not a hobby. In attachment research, it is one of the five conditions of security. Brown and Elliott named it alongside safety, attunement, soothing, and expressed delight. I spend a chapter on it in The Way Back Home, because it is the condition parents most misunderstand. A child who feels secure moves outward. Into the yard, into the woods, into the hard question, into the unfamiliar mind. The rhythm is ancient: venture out, check back, return. The parent stays steady, available, encouraging without hovering. Over time the rhythm teaches the child something no lecture can. The world is safe to discover, and I can handle it.

The secure base exists so the child can leave it. That base is held up by parents and community, but they too are screen-locked now.

We are rendering life before we live it.

What happens when outward is a feed?

The exploration instinct doesn’t die. It gets rerouted. It spends itself on infinite scroll, which feels like discovery and delivers none of it. The nervous system registers novelty without ever registering the world. And a kid who never tests the world against his own body never gets the answer the world was going to give him: you can handle this. Not quite evolution, but it is change.

The same thing is happening to the mind. Exploring your own interior used to mean sitting with something long enough for it to surprise you. Boredom was the trailhead. Now the trailhead is paved over monetized and polluted with a psychotic level of advertisements. Every empty moment has a device waiting in it.

So here is an ecopsychology question, and it is embarrassingly simple.

When did you last watch a sunset? Not photograph one. Watch one, start to finish, while it did nothing for you and asked nothing of you.

I’m not saying nature has all the answers. But it might be saying that.

I start there because we cannot hand our teens an appetite we’ve lost. The practice begins with us. Then it moves to them.

So what does encouraging exploration look like when the feed is the competition?

It does not look like ripping the phone away. It looks like the same paradox it always did. Teens need freedom and they need containment. Too much freedom feels like abandonment. Too much control feels like suffocation. The work is boundaries held with warmth. You set the limit, you hold it, and you communicate love while you do. Teens test boundaries not because they want you to say yes. They test them to find out if you will hold steady.

Then you sponsor the venture. Ask what they tried this week that felt hard. Ask what they want to try but feel scared to. When it goes badly, honor the attempt before you audit the outcome. You tried. That took courage. What did you learn?

Two moves from my book make this concrete.

When they ask for something real, a show, a trip, the city, and your instinct is no, pause. Try yes, and. “Yes, I hear you. And I have concerns. Let’s build a plan we can both live with.” Collaboration, not control. Every real yes is a vote for the world.

Then plan it side by side. Literally. Sit next to them, not across from them, and map it out. What do you need from me? What’s the plan if something goes wrong? Exploration requires preparation and a safety net, not just impulse. The planning session is the secure base doing its job.

And one more, from my own life. Once a week, at least, do a thing in nature, with nature. Go and watch that sunset with them. Sing a song. Chant, if that’s your practice. Walk with no destination. It doesn’t need a lesson attached. You are not teaching them anything. You are standing next to them in front of something older than both of you.

Be with them.

The pattern is simple. You are making the real world cooler than the feed.

Underneath all of it is: Go try. I’ll be here when you get back.

Not letting go. Holding steady while they reach.

I don’t think the fix is dramatic. I don’t think we delete the apps and move to a cabin. We start smaller. Tonight, or this week, go stand in front of something that wasn’t made for you. Don’t narrate it. Don’t post it.

Just let the world get a little farther away again, and then go meet it.

Your teenager said something sharp. You responded too quick. Now they’re gone, door closed; or worse, they’re still in the room but completely shut down.

You know the feeling: the one where nothing you say lands. Where sorry doesn’t work. Where explaining yourself only makes it worse.

Most parents call this the end of the conversation.

What they don’t know is that it’s the beginning of something else: a pattern. A stuck place where the same rupture happens again and again, and the repair never comes. The one thing that could actually rebuild the connection.

The connection doesn’t break because you’re a bad parent.

It breaks because rupture and repair are skills, not instincts. Most of us were never taught them. We were shown how to fight, how to shut down, how to smooth things over with distance. Actual repair, the kind that deepens trust instead of fraying it, is almost never modeled.

So your teenager pulls away. Or the conflicts escalate. Or you’re both so exhausted from trying that the relationship has gone quiet.

And you’re wondering: is this fixable?

Yes. Just not the way you’ve been trying.

Starting Monday, July 27 at 5pm PST, I’m opening a Parent Support Group for mothers and fathers stuck in exactly this place.

It’s structured. It’s capped at 12. It’s built for parents ready to do something different.

Together we’ll map your specific pattern: the shutdown, the escalation, the repair that never lands. Then we’ll learn the exact moves that change it.

This isn’t therapy. It’s a practical framework, practiced alongside clinically trained peers doing the same work.

The details:

- Eight weeks, on Zoom

- Mondays, 5pm PST

- $60 per session

- 12 seats

If you’ve been reading The Way Back Home or following this work, you already know this isn’t theory; it’s the framework in action. If you’re new here: I’m an LMFT and attachment therapist, and I’ve worked clinically with teenagers and their families for more than a decade. This is what I do in my practice, distilled for a group.

To enroll: Sign up

Not sure yet? Book a free consult and we’ll talk through whether it’s a fit:

Let’s talk

It’s small by design. If this is yours, I’d love to have you in the room/zoom.

Years ago, I was using Robert Thurman’s Jewel Tree meditation. Because of my work, I could teach it daily, for years. It’s funny writing it now, but in my desire to embed myself in the dharma, my good fortune was I found a path, right livelihood I think it’s called, that let me sit daily and share practices. Sharing Bob Thurman’s Jewel Tree practice was always a legit favorite. It’s like playing someone a song you know they will love. It’s like saying he sit down let me show you your mind is a thousand sunsets, look at it with me, remember it. Bask in it.

I had the chance to share this practice as an opportunity to teach compassion to young people. Kids who’d been hurt, who were hurting and needed to know they weren’t alone in their suffering. I reached out to him to share what we were doing with his teaching. To ask, in a way, for his blessing.

He wrote back.

He said how important this work is. How critical it is that the teachings reach young people. That they feel them. That they know they’re not alone. I think about that idea of ‘reach them’ an extension, a finding, a connection to them. I think about what it was like to write that email at eighty-two. To see the dharma you’ve been building for over fifty years moving through the world in forms you never imagined. Moving through trauma rooms and therapist’s offices. Moving through the hands of kids who desperately need to know they can heal.

When I heard he’d passed, I cried. Out loud I said ‘No, oh no.’ I texted my wife. I can’t stop crying. She said “Good job, Bob”

I cried more. Not only at the loss, though it’s a loss, but at what we gained. We gained so much. The door was opened wide because of his work and joy.

Late last night, I couldn’t sleep.

I was watching videos, interviews. Sitting in meditation at three in the morning, getting over an illness as my youngest is getting over an illness. Thinking about generosity. Thinking about benevolence. Thinking about kindness, and the great opportunity. And my own personal shortcomings with it.

I thought more about the Jewel Tree meditation, the refuge field. The interdependence of us all moving through time and space. The teaching that moved me to reach out to him in the first place. The generosity of Bob Thurman turning his human life towards this work so we could find it. That is no small task. If you know of Tibetan Buddhism and you are not a monastic, you probably owe him a thanks. That’s life well spent. In a culture of accumulation, he is the swaggiest expression of give it all away.

If you live in New York City or ever go to New York City, go to the Tibet House, go sit in the shrine room. Breathe. Think about how wild and cool it was to build it - in the 1980s. Shout out Richard Gere. When the world was all about Reaganomics and whatnot. Bob Thurman said we should probably be spending time with the jewel tree of Tibet.

Talk about actually radical. The Jewel Tree.

The imagery of it. So elegant and steeped in naturalism. The tree itself vast and radiant. The lineage of enlightened beings seated on its branches. Light flowing toward you, filling you with warmth and understanding. But there’s something else. Something harder. Cooler.

You have to include the people you hate on that tree. You have to feel, across lifetimes, that they have been your mother. Your father. That every being that has ever hurt you has also sustained you. That the separation between self and other is paper-thin, a story we tell.

This is not a teaching that resolves itself neatly.

When I wept for Thurman, I wept for the loss. But I also wept for the recognition in that email - that the work done in clinics and trauma rooms and therapist’s offices matters because it’s part of something much larger than any of us. That mental health isn’t the eradication of illness. It’s about making space for the flourishing of human beings becoming more free, more capable of feeling better, more in touch with compassion for one another.

He built the bridges. He did the work of connecting. He saw that when a teaching reaches a young person who is desperate to know they can heal, when it moves through hands that are trying to hold others that is interdependence. That is the Dharma.

The Jewel Tree also teaches something else. It teaches that generosity and benevolence aren’t destinations. They’re ongoing opportunities to open up to life and let it happen through you and with you. Hard? Maybe. Worth it? Looked really beautiful on Bob, so I’m saying yes.

He was before for me but now for always he will be part of that tree. Always teaching. Always showing us what it means to build something that moves beyond yourself, across generations, into forms you’ll never see. A teacher told me the path shows itself to itself for itself. That same teacher was told to study Tibetan by Bob so many decades ago. Interconnection and interdependence. What a beautiful tree we are a part of.

The Jewel Tree Practice

Settle your body and take a posture that respects the practice. Take a few breaths, breathing in and out, allowing the body to settle more and more. Allow yourself to set a clear intention for this practice.

Focus on cultivating love and compassion and wisdom. Set the intention to awaken. Awaken to what? To the precious gift of this life. And may that awakening be named, be served, to support the awakening of everyone everywhere, throughout all space and time.

This precious gift of life that we have. May we all remember it. May this practice today support that. Let that be your intention.

Now begin to imagine in front of you a vast and radiant tree. A Jewel Tree. This wish-fulfilling gem tree.

On the branches of this tree, come to discover enlightened beings. Wisdom teachers, lineage holders, non-ordinary beings, masters. Teachers of all times and all ages. On the branches of these trees, shining, resplendent like jewels and gems.

These are teachers of all lineages. All awakened beings, looking down on you in this moment. Shining down upon you with joy, with compassion. They are so happy that you’re here. They’re so happy that you’re practicing, that you’ve turned your life in this moment towards awakening.

All of their collected energy is focused on you, supporting you, cheering you on. Encouraging you to keep waking up to this precious gift.

This tree shining. This beautiful tree dripping with gems and jewels. Each of these representing a different deity, enlightened, awake, filled with wakefulness.

And on the top of the tree is whoever is most important to you. Buddha. Krishna. Tara, Shiva, Christ. Topa Shenrab, Muhammad. Whoever you count as the most important being in your wakefulness - that being, that wakefulness, the Christ crystal consciousness looking down upon you, encouraging you to embrace your wakefulness, this precious gift of life.

Include on the tree those that you don’t love, those you hate. Know they too are sentient. See them as connected to you, an opportunity for compassion and love. Come to see this as possible in this moment.

See this tree as an expansion of all you can be capable of when you let go of your egoic self. See these beings all harmonizing in the joy of, yes, this is possible, this is our natural state, let’s get with this.

Feel that presence sending you blessings and positive energy.

Notice in this moment that the entire tree is radiating with life and wisdom and compassion. See yourself connecting with the entire tree, with all the branches, with all the jewels. Come to accept their guidance, their wisdom, and their blessings.

And from each jewel and each gem, each leaf, each branch, each root, imagine a stream of light emanating from each being, flowing towards you and into you. This light represents all of these blessings, all of these teachings, all of this wisdom of all of these enlightened beings.

Allow that light to enter your body and fill you with warmth and love and with understanding. Understanding for all the suffering and misunderstanding that we face. Allow it to give you courage and compassion and patience.

In this moment, reflect on the interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings and their desire to be free from all suffering. Continue to generate and stimulate feelings of compassion and loving-kindness towards yourself - your actual self, not your egoic self - and all sentient beings.

Let this happen in you and through you and with you and for you.

Letting the path showing itself to itself for itself.

And then bring this entire visual field together into one radiant jewel. A wish-fulfilling gem. An infinity stone. Pure compassion. Mahakuruna. Great compassion. Inexhaustible compassion.

See this jewel and this gem in front of you. And then shrink it down to an acceptable size. Allow yourself to bring it into the crown of your skull, down deep into your heart center, filling and flooding you, supplying you.

Reminding you that you are this. This is you.

Allow yourself to rest in a deep sense of gratitude for these teachings and this opportunity to remember this connection, this natural state.

Take a few deep breaths. Slowly open your eyes.

Allow yourself to dedicate the positive energy and merit of this practice to all beings everywhere. May all beings be free from suffering. And may our practices today, now, and forever, support that.

Thank you, Bob, for your beautiful life. Enjoy your next one.

Om Mani Padme Hum.

A father stood up at the back of a parent workshop I was leading. We were there to talk about repairing attachment with a teenager: what it means, how to do it, why it’s needed.

He was tall, broad, the kind of man who carries himself squarely. Not one you would pick to mess with.

I asked the group to close their eyes and imagine the last time they raised their voice at their teenager. Then to imagine being on the other side of it. To put themselves in the body of their teen, their nervous system. How did it feel to feel that volume in their kid’s body.

He stayed standing afterward.

His face had changed. His body looked different.

“When I thought about it from my son’s experience,” he said, “I realized that when I get loud, it’s not because I’m angry. It’s because I’m scared. I don’t feel safe. I’m making him feel scared because I don’t feel safe.”

The room got quiet around him. Not the heavy quiet of an audience waiting for the next thing. The other kind of quiet. There’s a line from a poem somewhere, I can’t quite remember it, that said ‘the truth went off like a gun in a car.’

It was that kind of truth; that kind of quiet.

An exactitude. This father realized something that changed his life. I think about that moment. A lot. About that dad’s car ride home that day. What it was like for him.

In fifth grade there was trouble at my home. There was often trouble at my home. In an effort to get away, I packed a bag and ran away to Matt’s house. It took me forty-five minutes to get there. I had headphones and listened to Master of Puppets on the walk up the many hills.

When I got there I was sweaty. A small, pudgy kid with a bag of clothes and spongy headphones, at the door at sundown on a weekday. His mother asked silently what I was doing. “Can I spend the night. I ran away.”

She looked at me with curiosity and kindness, which is normal but felt uncommon to me at the time. She said I could, as long as I called my parents and told them where I was.

My father picked up on the third ring. He hated the phone ringing after dark. I said, “I ran away, Dad, but…” Before I could say anything more he screamed through the phone: “Go fuck yourself, I don’t care!” And hung up.

I stood in the kitchen with the oversized phone to my ear, trying very hard not to cry. Trying to look like this was normal. Matt’s mom looked through me. She’d heard my dad. She could see what was happening, but could not understand what was happening.

I hung up in a daze and walked to Matt’s room. Ten minutes later my mother came to take me home. The car ride was silent. But the greater silence existed in my home.

I walked in, was told to go to my room. My father didn’t look at me or speak to me for two and a half months. The weight of that.

This happened often. I’d crossed a line I didn’t understand. I was told I’d done something wrong, or I hadn’t done something right, and the silence was one of the ways of letting me know.

Silence as an epic and hostile withdrawal. The drawbridge closed.

There are many types of silence. Some from trauma, of trauma, by trauma. Some by folly and the failure of skill to build and care for connection. Some of this silence, if I may, is simply in the process of being slowly, hopefully, currently built by men and their boys, as if the architecture of the masculine valued its absence in the past for some reason. I can speculate but won’t. Let’s say our bad. Let’s say, let’s move on.

What I can say is that that heavy silence operated in me like a tundra. It was an arctic isolation, informing distance between word and deed, a frozenness, keeping me from connecting. Especially when I wanted to. It formed a late to thaw manner to connect with another. Any other. And even then it was often sloppy and wet and cold. It did damage.

Not to flame my dad brutally for all his failings; for he too was born into chaos. But the damage continues until it’s repaired. He taught what he learned. Like most fathers. Anger. Isolation. Silence. Violence. It’s an inheritance, learned in action and in inaction. He did not invent his silence. He received it, the way I received it from him. What becomes common in your home is attachment. For me, there were many, many a wall with holes from fists. Many broken doors, bottles. The hum of screams, or the fry from their recent absence. The loudest on the quiet block.

In my work, I can say most of the fathers I work with struggle with silence out of fear more than anger. But their teens do not know it, especially the boys.

Most of these fathers don’t want to get it wrong, so they don’t bother trying to get it at all. They don’t reach.

Most are operating with two different silences, and they cannot tell them apart.

The first silence is the one they were taught. I’m looking at you, dads. The one their own fathers used. The silence of a man who handles it, or doesn’t. One who doesn’t burden the family with what he’s feeling, or rather burdens them with his inability to move through it. He may not outwardly complain, but this, in fact, may be a long and extensive act of complaining. A silence that was framed, for a generation of men, as a form of love.

The second silence is the one their teenager actually receives. Not strength. Not love. Withdrawal. A father who is in the house and not in the room. A father whose body is at the dinner table and whose attention is somewhere they cannot reach. The silence of a man who is gone.

Same man. Same mouth not moving. Two completely different experiences across the gap of one teenage nervous system.

This is the part most fathers don’t see. They are giving what they believe is restraint, dignity, protection. Their teenager is receiving what feels like absence. The teenager isn’t wrong. The body knows. A nervous system can feel the difference between a parent who is silent and present and a parent who is silent and gone.

In the Integrative Attachment Therapy framework I trained in with Daniel P. Brown and David Elliott, Safety is the first of the five conditions of secure attachment. People hear safety and think of physical safety. The deeper layer is felt safety: the body’s read on whether the person across from it is regulated and reachable. A teenager who lives with a father whose silence reads as gone does not feel safety, no matter how solid the roof is.

This is the gap the dad in the workshop walked across when he said it out loud. He thought his loudness was anger. It was fear. And the loudness was running underneath the silence too. His son wasn’t reacting to volume. His son was reacting to a nervous system that wasn’t available.

There is a silence that pushes a son further away. There is a silence that lets him come back.

The difference isn’t the silence. It’s what’s underneath it.

The first one is reactive. Shut down. The body bracing. The kid feels it. He doesn’t have the language for it; he just knows that being in the room is unsafe, that nothing he says will be met, that whatever comes next is going to require him to manage his father instead of being with him.

The second one is settled. The body relaxed. Attention available. Nothing performed. The kid feels that too. He can’t articulate it either. He just knows that he can stop bracing.

Most of what teenagers want from their fathers is a regulated nervous system in the room with them. Not advice. Not a lecture. Not even a question, most of the time. Just the felt sense that the man across from them is okay, and is staying.

The anger is what had me run away at eleven; the silence is what I had to come back to and raise myself under. Lost in it.

A practical move, for any father reading this.

When something feels off with your son, ask him to take a twenty minute walk. Not a conversation. A walk. Side by side, not face to face. No eye contact required. The rhythm of walking lowers both nervous systems. Twenty minutes is the threshold where the stress hormones start to clear.

Let this silence be okay. Let nature do the heavy lifting.

Take a walk with your son. Often. Spend time with them in silence. Cultivate shared silence. Normalize it. Familiarize yourself with the rhythms of being together. You can do this watching movies. Looking at nature. Listening to music. Be with them. Don’t wait for crisis. Put money in the bank, if you will.

You are not trying to get him to talk. You are practicing being silent next to him in a way that doesn’t feel like absence.

That’s it. That’s the whole intervention.

The work for fathers isn’t to talk more. It isn’t more lectures. It isn’t more podcasts. You don’t need more techniques. It is to learn the difference between the silences, and to stay in the one your son can actually feel you in. That is the practice.

The moment a teenager feels his father’s silence as presence instead of absence is the moment something starts to come back. Not all at once. But the door cracks. And then, sometimes weeks later, sometimes on the next walk, he says the thing he couldn’t say in the kitchen.

Daniel J. Ahearn, LMFT. The Way Back Home is on Amazon and Audible. A free daily practice companion lives at waybackhome.app. For therapy and consulting: danieljahearnlmft.com.

I almost left this out of the book. I almost didn’t tell you it sits in my office, that I see it every day, because I wasn’t sure what message it sends.

It felt personal in a way I struggle with the balance of. The private, the personal, the clinical. Those relationships are supposed to belong in rooms; and they should.

When you work with teenagers, it is easy to forget the obvious.

They are children.

The child who made this for me was in real pain. A trans child.

In the book, I wrote about how we struggled to connect. I frightened the child; which is to say, the child was frightened by everything and everyone, not just me. The child was leery of meditation. Of anything that quieted the mind. The child was frightened of what the mind did when you tried to focus it. The noise and the pain were a constant companion. They wanted help, but they didn’t want change.

I left the trans part out of the book, and I almost cut the line completely.

Not because I needed to protect the child’s privacy. I am confident I am doing that. I cut it because I didn’t know how to say what it meant.

The child learned compassion practice through the jewel tree meditation, and it brought him peace. So much peace that he made a gift, and asked that I receive it.

A jewel tree.

This wild and brave child navigating things most adults never have language for, much less the courage. A child who came through a full season of understanding his life through treatment, and on his way out, left this behind for me. Damn.

A ceramic tree with jewels hanging from the branches. The branches are a little uneven.

It’s perfect.

I see it when I begin to sit in the morning.

It has become a part of the practice I do, and why I do the work I do.

I think and ramble often about Robert Thurman’s framing of the dharma.

Especially the jewel tree.

It was a teaching I had the chance to share with these children as we sat beneath an actual oak tree in Santa Clarita.

That day was not supposed to happen. A schedule mix-up had two houses crossing paths, and I worked with the EcoPsych team to spontaneously share meditation under the oaks. Highly sophisticated trees, with communicative root systems and a canopy distributing sunlight with tempered precision.

And this child found peace.

Sat with me and stilled whatever had been loud and unkind. It worked deeply.

The roots of that practice live in that child now.

And that child, in turn, made this gift for me.

I want to be clear here, as I’m not always sure I am: the dharma is not a religion.

It is not even spirituality. It is a system of practices.

And those practices are a doorway to freedom.

The dharma is not the tree. It is what lets you see the tree.

Some of this came back to me recently, in a different form.

A few weeks ago, some teenagers came to my office for a school project about dharma. I waxed poetic; perhaps a little rhapsodic.

As a person interested in tantra, I can get a little lost in the sauce.

I told them: it is about the relationship. I can introduce you to things, but if you want a deeper relationship, you have to go to it. Spend time with it.

So I invited them to a teaching.

This past weekend I sat with Orgyen Chowang Rinpoche, founder of the Pristine Mind Foundation. He gave a Dharma talk at a friend’s house.

He said the dharma helps you see the tree.

Not the distortion. Not the film of anger. The tree.

Some of those teenagers showed up. The introduction had encouraged them to go deeper.

Afterward, they asked if they could come back and sit with me again.

So they did. I showed them how I do my altar practice. My ngöndro practice.

The Mandala mudra: a shape you make with your hands to offer your very

consciousness to life. Your gift to the gift.

We chanted ohm.

Afterward, they told me they could hear the birds more clearly.

That they saw the world more clearly.

They had heard what Rinpoche said. Now they felt it.

That sentence is not lost on me. It is so poetic. It is also so practical.

This is what I try to share with my own children, in the small ways I’m available as a father trying not to over-teach.

Look at nature. Look at that tree. See how it knows what to do.

Honor it. Protect it. Take care of it.

Same with children. Protect them. Cherish them. Honor them.

Do not harm them.

The instruction is the same in both directions, at the same time.

A practice interrupts the line that runs from a person’s untended pain through to a child. It gets interrupted, somewhere upstream, by attention, by breath, by the willingness to look at a tree and see the tree.

The ceramic one on my desk is a reminder of that.

A gift from a child who came through pain, sitting in the morning light,

where I can see it.

Next time you find yourself in a room with a teenager who is suffering,

remember: they are also a tree. Our world to come.

And underneath the teenager: a child. Underneath the distortion, the anger, the fear, there is a being still trying to grow. Their roots are still there. Their reach toward the light is still there.

The child received the practice as a gift, and returned it to me as a tree. You can do the same with the suffering teenager in front of you: receive them, and become one more person in a hopefully long line of people who help them see themselves.

That is the gift, giving back to the gift.

You open the door with practice.

The first time I heard the recording of my book out loud, I was in the car - the parking lot at my littlest’s school. We’d just found a rose on the ground and were taking turns smelling it.

My voice in the audiobook mentioned, in passing, growing up in a house filled with chaos.

He looked up at me and said, ”Which house?”

He had no idea.

I sat there for a second longer than I needed to. The engine off. The rose in his lap. And I understood, not as an idea, but as a fact in my body, that whatever I’d been carrying for all those years, this child does not carry. Whatever house I meant, he doesn’t live in it. He doesn’t even know it exists.

The Way Back Home is on Audible today.

It is one of the great gifts of my life that I have gotten to raise children outside of a chaotic house. That my youngest son did not know which house I meant. That for him, the only house is the one we live in — the one where we stop and literally smell the roses.

That gift is not given. It is built. It is built slowly, over years, in the kind of ordinary moments that no one will photograph and no one will remember except, possibly, the children who grow up inside them. It’s built by a parent who’s done their own work, and willing to keep doing it.

That’s what this book is about.

A note on why audio matters for this material specifically.

Most of what I write about — Attachment, the five conditions, the R.E.A.L. method, the Integrative Attachment Therapy framework I trained in with Dr. Daniel P. Brown and Dr. David Elliott — operates, in the clinical phrasing, at the level of ‘implicit memory’. Translation: the part of the mind that holds how connection has felt in your body, separate from any story you tell about it.

The body remembering before the mind.

You can read a perfectly clear sentence on the page and your mind will say '“yes, makes sense”, and nothing in your body will move.

Audio is different.

Audio is somatic. It has keys. Unlocks. Cadence, pause, breath - they land in different systems in us. They reach parts of you books can not.

I recorded the audiobook over several months, getting up at 5 a.m., alone in my office. Headphones. Microphone. Coffee. Tibetan thangkas and objects I call sacred all around me.

Some mornings the birds outside were too loud to record. I would get to my chair and sit in the dark and wait. Listening as the sun came up, the birds quieted, the room settled. Sometimes I wouldn’t even record.

One morning I stopped reading partway through a sentence. I sat with the headphones still on, the microphone on, and I cried. Not from anything in the line itself, but from getting to do this. From gratitude of a life that arrived here. From knowing what this work does in families and in people. I marvel at it. Truly. I’m so grateful to share.

You can really hear your own book by reading it back to yourself, slowly, into a microphone, over and over again. It is, I would imagine, the closest you come to being a stranger to your own work.

I wrote the book over years. I tried to write it many times. I’ve lived in this material for over a decade. But it was in those early mornings — birds, dark room, gratitude, sentences I had written months ago coming out new — that I first understood what it was actually saying.

If your teenager has pulled away. If you are doing everything right and they still feel far away. If you have a steering wheel and a coffee, a dog leash, or it’s 2:47 a.m. and you get the fear — this is the version that will meet you there.

It’s built for parents who do not have time to sit down with a 185-page book about their relationship with their kid. Who have eight free minutes between drop-off and a Zoom they’re late for. They have the meeting, the laundry, the kid who isn’t speaking to them, or the kid who may be speaking over them. Maybe their kid doesn’t know how to hear what they have to say. Maybe they don’t know how to say it.

The book was written for those minutes.

A note for the clinicians who read me. The audiobook isn’t a substitute for IAT training and it doesn’t claim to be. It is a translation. Brown and Elliott did the harder work — built the model, named the protocols, ran the studies. My contribution is to take the material out of the consulting room and put it in a format a father can listen to on a Tuesday while picking up his daughter, who hasn’t really looked at him in nine months.

If you are a clinician sending it to families, that is the use case I imagined.

If you are a parent who has been reading me and waiting — this is the version that will probably do the most for you the fastest. The voice can do work the page can’t. It can feel like a collaboration. Like we are hanging out.

This Substack is biweekly from here forward. Twelve weeks, six posts. The next one is about a sentence I almost cut from chapter 3. After that, I want to write about teen boys and silence — the specific texture of it, what it is actually communicating, why fathers misread it most often. After that, I don’t know yet. That’s part of the point.

This book is, in some way, a secret message back to myself. Which can be hard sometimes.

Back to the boy in the school photo with the bowl haircut. Back to the one sleeping on the carpet with the cat.

Back to the one on the porch behind his older brothers and sisters.

Back to all of us, in some way, who are quietly, slowly — in the way that real things happen — finding our way back home.

If the audiobook lands somewhere in you, I’d love to hear where.

— Daniel

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Expressed Delight is the most underestimated condition for secure attachment. Most parents have never been on the receiving end of it.

A father sat in on a men’s group and talked about his fifteen-year-old. He’s a good kid.

He listed all the evidence. Honor roll. Sports. Volunteers at the food bank with his friends. Nobody ever calls about him from the school. Different from when he was a kid, he said. He said it a few times. His friends are good kids too.

I asked him: when’s the last time your son saw you light up when he walked into a room.

He went quiet. For a long time. The whole room shuffled a bit.

That silence is the thing I want to talk about.

Most parents of teenagers are doing more praising than ever before. The performance feedback is constant. Good job on the test. Proud of you for finishing that project. Great game tonight. You’re working so hard.

Some of this is genuine. Some anxious: a parent trying to make sure a kid who is starting to seem far away knows they’re still seen. Some of it is on the to-do list of parenting 2026. Whether you feel like you’re raising lions or raising snowflakes, there is a lot of talk from parent to teen. A lot of praise.

But praise is not the same thing as delight.

And teens know the difference in their body before their mind can name it.

Expressed Delight is one of the five conditions of secure attachment in the Integrative Attachment Therapy model: the framework I trained in with Daniel P. Brown and David Elliott. Of the five conditions:

Safety. Attunement. Soothing. Expressed Delight. Exploration.

It’s the one most underestimated in mainstream parenting content. Most attachment writing leans hard on safety and attunement. Delight gets treated like a nice-to-have.

It isn’t.

Delight is the felt sense, in your teen’s nervous system, that their existence is welcomed. Not their grades. Not their effort. Not their behavior. Them.

Brown and Elliott put it this way in their model: when delight is missing, the self forms around performance instead of essence. The kid develops an identity built on what they produce, because that’s the part of them that got received. The being underneath stays hidden, because nobody ever asked it to come out.

This is why so many high-achieving teens are hollow. They aren’t lying about doing well. They actually are doing well. But the part of them that’s doing well is the only part that’s ever been wanted, and they are starting to suspect that the rest of them is not.

When a teen checks every box and still feels see-through, that’s the gap. Over-praised. No delight.

So if delight isn’t praise, what is it.

It’s the look on your face when they walk into the room.

It’s “I love the way your mind works.”

It’s “You make me laugh every time.”

It’s actually looking at them. Hi. Oh, it’s you. I love you.

It’s noticing the specific weird thing about your kid that you would not trade for anything: the way they argue with you about the TV remote; the way they hum when they’re concentrating; the way they care about animals more than most adults do. The way they know the names of every baseball player. They know the best boots for the best jeans. Things you do not know. Even if you think you do.

Feeling that is delight.

What delight is not:

Praise for performance. Grades, sports, college admissions.

Conditional approval. “I’m proud of you when you do x.”

Managed tolerance. “Fine. Whatever. Go do your thing.”

The absence of criticism, mistaken for warmth.

Please read that again.

A lot of parents I work with are doing the fourth one. They’ve stopped criticizing. They think that’s the same as being a warm presence.

It’s not. At all. Honestly, it may be worse.

Silence isn’t delight. Restraint isn’t delight. Delight is active. Delight has a face.

Here is the hard part.

Most parents in my office cannot easily express delight in their teenager because nobody ever expressed it in them. You can’t easily give what you didn’t receive. The body has to learn the shape of it first.

This is why the work is slower than parenting advice makes it sound. You don’t read this essay and then start doing it tonight. You read this essay and then notice, this week, how often your face stays neutral when your kid walks in. You notice the small reflex of correction that arrives first, before warmth. You notice that the warmth has been there all along; you just haven’t been letting it show.

The contemplative traditions I’ve practiced in for many years describe this as awareness; attachment psychology describes it as attunement to the self before attunement to the other. Same instruction, two languages. The body has to know the feeling before it can give it.

One thing to try this week.

The next time your teenager walks into the room: stop whatever you’re doing. Look up. Let your face change.

Don’t say anything if nothing comes. The look on your face is the whole intervention.

That is the practice.

I built a free daily version of it at waybackhome.app. The chapter this piece is drawn from is in The Way Back Home.

But honestly: before any of that, just look up.

Daniel

I did the work.

But reading it aloud was different.

I’d wake up at 5am to record in bursts. I’d stop not because I fumbled my words, though that happens often, but because when I read about the teens, when I thought of the parents, the sound of my own voice brought the memory into my body. It was alive.

Vocal cords are funny that way. Songs move us more than lyrics on a page.

The melody of the work was powerful to me. It felt like a genuine reaching out. I’d sit in my office and watch the light come in as the sun crept above the mountains. Listen to the morning birds finish their calls to the day. And I’d imagine my words being heard by a parent who is struggling.

I found myself humbled. And proud.

The work lives now. It lives in a way that writing alone didn’t give it.

The audiobook comes to Audible in May.

This week, a 5,000-word essay by AI investor Matt Shumer went massively viral. Over 80 million views in just a few days. The headline was “Something Big Is Happening.” The comparison was February 2020, right before COVID shut the world down, only bigger.

The message to parents was clear. Rethink what you are telling your kids. The traditional path of good grades, good college, stable professional job now points directly at the roles most exposed to automation. AI is coming for nearly all knowledge work. If you are not already restructuring your family’s future, you are behind.

My brother sent it to me. At first, I took the bait. A few holy shit texts went out. Are you reading this? Should we be buying more canned goods?

Then the cyber dust settled. I caught my breath. And I thought, parents everywhere are going to be just as activated as I was.

Not because the essay is wrong. Not because it is right. But because it is perfectly designed to hit the part of a parent’s nervous system that wants to grab their child and do something. Fix something. Control something.

I noticed what was happening in my body. The tightening. The urgency. The reflex to act. And I remembered something that has proven true again and again, both clinically and contemplatively. Fear is a powerful sales pitch.

So I slowed down. I read other responses. I regulated myself. I let the initial activation pass instead of amplifying it. And I came back to the few things I actually know something about. Attachment. The nervous system. And the lessons that come from years of meditation practice.

From there, the essay looked very different.

I am an attachment therapist, which means I work with people’s experiences of their central nervous system. I have spent the past decade training in Integrative Attachment Therapy and working with adolescents in residential treatment and their families. I also have a 16-year-old looking at colleges and a 3-year-old just beginning to explore the world. I am not writing this from the outside. I am inside it with you.

The most dangerous thing about AI anxiety is not AI. It is what that anxiety does to parenting.

What the Data Actually Says

The disruption of entry-level knowledge work is real. AI is already eliminating tasks that once trained new professionals. Recent graduates are facing higher unemployment. Young workers in AI-exposed fields are seeing declines even as older colleagues benefit.

That matters.

What is not supported by evidence is the claim that nearly all knowledge work will be automated in the near future. AI systems still fail too often for most professional contexts. The benchmarks cited as proof of inevitability fall far below acceptable accuracy for high-stakes decisions. Gary Marcus has called this kind of narrative weaponized hype.

The truth lives in the middle. AI will transform work significantly. It will do so unevenly and over time. Fields that require physical presence, licensed responsibility, relational judgment, and human ambiguity remain far more protected.

The disruption is real. The panic is disproportionate. And that gap is where your attachment system gets hijacked.

Your Nervous System Cannot Tell the Difference

The Shumer essay activates what attachment research calls the threat system. It tells parents the future is unstable, that the ground beneath their child is shifting, and that the strategies that worked for previous generations may no longer work.

That is not an abstract idea. That is a felt sense of danger. And your nervous system responds to perceived danger with urgency, narrowed focus, and a drive toward control.

When parents feel the future is unsafe, they default to their own attachment strategies. Not the ones they wish they could use. The ones that were wired early in life.

If your style leans anxious, you may find yourself researching AI-proof careers, scanning college programs, subtly steering your teenager toward paths that feel safer to you. Your child may experience this as pressure or as the sense that who they are right now is not enough.

If your style leans avoidant, you may dismiss the whole conversation. Every generation has disruption. They will figure it out. Your child experiences this as distance right when they need presence.

If your style is disorganized, you may oscillate. Panic one moment, detachment the next. Your child cannot find a stable signal.

None of these are failures. They are survival strategies. But they all share the same problem. They manage the parent’s distress rather than attune to the child’s developmental needs.

What Actually Protects Kids During Disruption

I have spent my career working with young people whose worlds have already collapsed. Not hypothetically. In real time. The same protective factor shows up again and again.

It is not the right major. It is not early exposure to coding. It is not elite institutions.

It is secure attachment.

Children who internalize the sense that they are fundamentally okay, that they can handle uncertainty, and that they have a safe base to return to adapt better in every environment. They regulate emotions more effectively. They tolerate ambiguity. They collaborate. They remain intrinsically motivated.

These are not soft traits. They are the very capacities that serious analysts identify as irreplaceable in an AI-shaped economy.

Here is the painful irony. The parents most desperate to protect their child from an uncertain future are often the ones most likely to disrupt the attachment relationship that would actually protect them.

So What Do You Actually Do

Regulate first. Before you have the conversation about AI, college, or the future with your kid, notice what is happening in your own body. If you are activated, your child will feel your anxiety before they hear your words. You cannot be a secure base from fight or flight.

Then get curious about what is actually underneath your fear. For most parents, the anxiety is not really about AI. It is about the unbearable truth that you cannot guarantee your child’s safety. That fear deserves attention, not enactment.

Then listen. Ask your child what they are actually feeling. Many teens are far less anxious than their parents. Some are curious. Some are indifferent. Some are worried about entirely different things. Attunement means listening without projecting.

Then come back to the relationship. I am here. I believe in you. We will figure this out together. That does more for your child’s long-term resilience than any career strategy ever could.

The Middle Way

I have studied meditation for over twenty years. That training has taught me to distrust both catastrophism and denial. One sells urgency. The other sells comfort. Both offer certainty. And certainty is what an anxious nervous system wants most.

The real path is harder. Stay present without panicking. Take grounded action without transmitting fear. Hold uncertainty without collapsing into control.

Your child’s future has always been uncertain. The question is not whether the world will change. It is whether your child has the internal resources to meet it.

Those resources are built in relationship. With you. Right now.

Not by optimizing for an economy that does not yet exist. Not by pushing technical fluency before emotional fluency. Not by letting fear shape the relational field.

But by being a parent regulated enough to say, I do not know exactly what is coming. And I am right here.

That is the secure base. It always has been.

And no AI system is coming for that.

Daniel J. Ahearn, LMFT | Attachment Therapist | Author of The Way Back Home: Healing Attachment Wounds with Your Teen (April 2026)

So why do most of us parent our teenagers like collaboration is a weakness?

The Model Most of Us Inherited

We inherited a parenting model that says we don’t need to collaborate with our kids. That we need to be the undying authority — the unquestioned voice in the room. And for a certain developmental stage, there’s truth to that. Younger children need more structure and clear leadership, even though the best parenting at every age is responsive.

But as your child becomes a teenager, collaboration becomes your secret power. And to be clear — collaboration doesn’t mean you stop leading. It means you lead differently.

Connecting Over Correcting

Think about how often you’re in a state of correcting your teen. Even conversationally — they say something and you immediately respond with, “No, that’s not true.” They share a thought and you tell them they’re wrong. Rather than being curious about their experience. Rather than wondering what’s going on in their mind.

If this is your default, you’re headed for trouble: the kind where your teen stops talking to you altogether. Not because they don’t need you, but because they’ve learned that sharing what’s inside leads to being shut down.

In conflict, connection over correction is a peacemaker. It’s one of the most effective paths back to a calm moment in your family. When you lead with curiosity instead of correction, you’re not just resolving the moment. You’re building something.

I know what you might be thinking: That sounds great, but in the heat of it, I can’t do that. I hear you. This shift is one of the hardest things you’ll do as a parent. When your teen says something that triggers you, every instinct fires toward correction. That’s normal. But the move is learnable, and it starts smaller than you think.

Here’s what it looks like in practice. Your teen comes home and says, “School is pointless. I’m not going anymore.”

The correction response: “That’s ridiculous. You’re going to school. End of discussion.”

The connection response: “That sounds like a rough day. What’s making it feel pointless right now?”

Same parent. Same concern about their kid’s future. But the second response opens a door. The first one slams it shut.

You’re Building a Mind That Can Think for Itself

What you’re actually building with connection is your teen’s reflective capacity — their ability to step back, notice what they’re feeling, and make sense of it. In psychology we call this mentalization, and it’s one of the most important developmental skills your child can carry into adulthood. This is the skill that doesn’t just bring peace to your family right now. It prepares your child for the rest of their life.

You want your child to be able to think for themselves. And you want them to carry a deep sense of connection — to you, and to the people in their life.

These aren’t competing goals. They grow from the same root: collaboration.

Remember How We Got Here

Working together is how our species survived and thrived. It’s wired into us. Your teen isn’t the enemy. They’re becoming a person and they need you to shift from commander to collaborator.

Learn to work with your teen.

—

In my book The Way Back Home: Healing Attachment Wounds with Your Teen, I walk through exactly how to make these shifts — what to say, what to stop saying, and how to repair when you’ve already blown it. Coming April 2026

Parents say this. Teens say it too. Different rooms, same sentence.

I’ve been doing this work for over a decade - teens in crisis, families at the end of their rope and that sentence comes up more than almost anything else. Not “my kid is failing” or “we fight too much.” Just: I don’t feel seen.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe: most of the heartbreak in parent-teen relationships isn’t about behavior. It’s about two people who love each other and have completely lost the signal.

The teen acts out. The parent reacts to what they did instead of listening for what they need. The teen feels unheard, goes further. The parent doubles down. And on it goes.

What actually interrupts the cycle isn’t a better strategy. It’s presence. Real attention. Curiosity instead of correction.

I know easier said than done. Life is full. You’re tired. You’re probably parenting from your own unhealed stuff, which, same. We all are.

But John Bowlby said something I’ve never forgotten: we are only as needy as our unmet needs. Your teen’s “neediness” isn’t the problem. It’s information. What do they actually need from you right now?

That’s the question worth sitting with.

More on this in my book, The Way Back Home, out April 2026.