Olivia Dean’s “Ladies Room” tells a love story — and an attachment story — that we rarely hear in pop culture. A story in which she stays connected to herself, while also navigating the complexity of attachment dynamics in her relationship. Rather than collapsing into the relationship (the “I’m nothing without you” trope) or fleeing the relationship (the “I don’t need you. I don’t need anybody” trope), Dean rejects both scripts and shows us a third option.

The track, from her 2023 album MESSY, opens by naming the dynamic directly: her partner gets anxious when she’s feeling independent, and she meets him with both boundaries and reassurance.

Don’t kick up a fuss when I’m feeling independent/ Don’t mean you’re not enough/

What’s so striking to me, as a therapist, is that she meets her anxiously attached partner with compassion, without getting pulled into the cycle that anxious attachment tends to create. She’s saying, My independence isn’t intended to be a threat to you. You are enough. You are whole. I am enough. I am whole. I want to connect from that place within ourselves.

This stance is a throughline in Dean’s work. She makes a similar point in “Something Inbetween” from her 2025 album, The Art of Loving: “I’m not leaving/ Just feel tightly squeezed in/ Love needs breathing.” This conversation between songs, and across albums, expresses that love, gripped too tightly, is hard to live inside. And she’s showing us what it sounds like to ask for air without running out the door.

First, some language: anxious attachment and the pursue-withdraw cycle

Attachment strategies are survival strategies. They are the ways we learned to relate to our closest people, rooted in our earliest relationships: our parent-child or caregiver-child relationships. In childhood, these strategies were incredibly adaptive. They were unconscious attempts to get our needs met and protect ourselves by maintaining connection to the people we were dependent upon for survival. They also get recreated in adult romantic relationships. Attachment is how the past lives through the present.

Anxious attachment is a hyperactivating strategy. When connection feels threatened, the anxious partner’s system turns the volume up: clinging, pursuing, protesting, seeking constant reassurance.

Avoidant attachment is the mirror image: a deactivating strategy. When intimacy feels engulfing, the avoidant partner’s system turns the volume down — withdrawing, shutting down, and retreating into the self.

When these two strategies meet, they lock into what Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, calls the pursue-withdraw cycle (Johnson, 2004). The anxious partner pursues; the pursuit overwhelms the avoidant partner, who withdraws; the withdrawal confirms the anxious partner’s deepest fear of abandonment, so they pursue harder — and round and round the couple goes, each partner triggering the other’s oldest wounds (Johnson, 2017). It’s a cycle of disconnection where both people are fighting for the relationship in ways that slowly erode it.

When you listen to the pre-chorus through this lens, you can pick up on the attachment dynamics.

You’re projecting, overstepping, no, I don’t have to choose/ This is way less about me and way more about you/ I love being in your space, sometimes I need some room/

Her partner is exhibiting the signatures of anxious attachment: projecting, overstepping, reading her independence as evidence that he isn’t enough. His system, likely shaped long before she arrived, registers the space between them as a threat. She nods to this, reflecting to him this is “way more about you,” about his past, about the relational template he formed long before her.

Here’s what makes the song interesting: she doesn’t withdraw

Given the pursue-withdraw model, you might expect Dean to play the avoidant role — to answer his pursuit by pulling away, going cold, retreating into herself. But she doesn’t.

Instead, she teaches us that independence and avoidance are not the same thing.

Avoidance says: connection feels threatening, so I need to retreat into myself.

Independence says: for this to work, my self has to exist within our connection.

What’s challenging is that, to an anxiously attached partner, independence and avoidance can both register as a threat. Both sound like I need some room.

When he reads her independence as the beginning of her leaving, he’s reading it through the lens of his own attachment history. He’s taking an ordinary situation — she wants to stay at the party a little longer — and running it through a relational template formed a long time ago, in a parent-child relationship where that signal probably did mean leaving.

Which leaves her with what looks like two options: contort herself to placate him, or pull back from the whole exchange. She takes neither. She stays connected to herself and sends him a signal of safety: you still belong to me.

This is what separates independence from avoidance. Avoidance is a deactivating strategy, so retreat is the knee-jerk response — less contact, not more. Her affirmation is the tell. She is reaching toward him in the same gesture that asks for space. She isn’t pulling away from the relationship itself, but from the pattern that asks her to leave herself.

So, darling, don’t do that with me/ I need you to see/ Darling, you still belong to me/ And it’s not that deep

This is pretty close to what secure attachment sounds like. Securely attached individuals are comfortable with both intimacy and autonomy, flowing between “we” and “me” positions with ease (Lloyd, 2020). You can feel this ease from Dean as she holds the connection in one hand and selfhood in the other. She sets limits and affirms the connection in the same breath, allowing both to coexist.

Though dismissive on the surface, her line “it’s not that deep” is trying to communicate something important. I don’t think she is trying to shrug his pain here; I think she’s trying to locate it accurately. His panic is real, and it is surfacing in their present-day dynamic — but it wasn’t built there. The fear, and the strategy he uses to manage it, were formed elsewhere, long before this relationship, in a context where that fear made sense.

The dual needs every relationship has to hold

Underneath the attachment dynamics, “Ladies Room” reveals a structural truth of romantic love: relationships have to hold two opposing needs at once.

Esther Perel, a renowned couples and sex therapist, has spent much of her career illuminating this tension. In Mating in Captivity, she argues that love and desire, while living in the same relational space, run on different fuel. Love means “to have”; desire means “to want” (Perel, 2006). Love thrives on intimacy, closeness, the known. Desire requires a hint of autonomy: elusiveness, otherness, the space between self and other. Relationships need both.

The research reinforces Perel’s observations from the therapy room. Neff and Harter (2002) found that the most successful relationships are the ones characterized by mutuality: high intimacy paired with high autonomy, held together rather than traded off.

This is the arrangement Dean seems to be advocating for. She’s not asking for less relationship. She’s asking for a relationship spacious enough to hold intimacy and autonomy, closeness and independence. For a relationship where they can belong to each other and still belong to themselves.

So what does it look like to be in a relationship with an anxiously attached partner?

This is where Dean’s song becomes a masterclass on love — because the anxious-secure pairing has work on both sides.

For the anxious partner, the work is both practical and historical. On a practical level, the anxious partner needs to learn how to self-soothe enough to tolerate their partner having an independent self. When this practical step feels difficult, it’s time to turn to the past, to reprocess the attachment trauma underneath the protective strategy, so the nervous system can stop reading ordinary space as abandonment. Modalities like attachment-focused EMDR and parts work (Internal Family Systems) are particularly suited to this, because they go to the origin of the strategy rather than just managing its symptoms.

A note to the anxious partner (hello, it’s me) reading this: these attachment strategies are not your fault. They stem from painful experiences when you were a child. But they are your responsibility to work through, so that you can leave the past in the past and meet your partner more fully in the present.

For the partner on the receiving end — in Dean’s position — the work is a dance: staying connected to yourself, setting limits, and affirming the relationship.

Name the cycle, don’t point fingers at your partner. In Emotionally Focused Therapy, the cycle is the enemy — not your partner, and not you. The moment you can describe the loop you’re both caught in, you stop being opponents and start being two people with a shared problem. So rather than saying “You’re projecting and overstepping,” use observational language to describe the pattern.

The cycle: “I think we get caught in a cycle. When I make plans on my own, I can feel you start to reach for me — which makes me want my independence even more, which makes you reach harder. Then we’re both stuck. I don’t want us to keep doing that.”

The feeling underneath: “When I feel that pull, what comes up for me is a fear that I’ll lose myself in this. That’s not about you not being enough. It’s about me needing to maintain myself in here — in our relationship.”

The need: “I want to be able to go, and I want to be able to come back to you. How can we collaborate to make that happen?”

Pair space with reassurance. This interrupts the cycle. You can take space for yourself (your needs), while also affirming the connection (your anxiously attached partner’s needs). For example, “I’m going to go out dancing with the girls for a few hours. When I get back, I’d love to have some quality time with you.” Or, “I need some time to myself to decompress, can we reconvene in one hour?” Space and connection, held in the same breath. You can be compassionate without self-abandoning.

The conclusion the song already knows

“Ladies Room” reminds us that the autonomy-intimacy dialectic is not a problem to be solved. It’s a tension to be managed — continuously and imperfectly, for the life cycle of the relationship.

Dean intuits this. When the song ends, we aren’t left with a clean resolution. But we are left with the impression that she is still in the relationship and still in herself, holding both. She’s not going home — not leaving the party, not leaving the partnership, not leaving her own body to manage this.

Perhaps this is the deepest teaching here. Perel writes that in long-term relationships, we tend to reduce our own complexity (2017). Over time, we simplify ourselves to stay close, abandoning or softening the parts of us that feel inconvenient to the “we.” The tragedy is that in flattening ourselves, we also flatten the relationship. The complexity and multidimensionality that the person once fell in love with, and that once invigorated the relationship, can slowly disintegrate if we’re not mindful. This is exactly the dynamic that Dean is refusing. She’s retaining her dimensionality, her authenticity, herself. She’s saying: if I get to keep me, then you get to keep me. This relationship does not require my disappearance. It requires my full presence.

References

Johnson, S. (2004). The practice of emotionally focused couple therapy: Creating connection (2nd ed.). Brunner/Routledge.

Johnson, S. (2017). An emotionally focused approach to sex therapy. In Z. D. Peterson (Ed.), The Wiley handbook of sex therapy (1st ed., pp. 250–265). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118510384.ch16

Lloyd, R. (2020). A temporal approach to communicating relationship styles in romantic relationships. Qualitative Research Reports in Communication, 21(1), 36–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/17459435.2020.1737189

Neff, K. D., & Harter, S. (2002). The role of power and authenticity in relationship styles emphasizing autonomy, connectedness, or mutuality among adult couples. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 19(6), 835–857. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407502196006

Perel, E. (2006). Mating in captivity. HarperCollins.

Perel, E. (2017). The state of affairs: Rethinking infidelity. HarperCollins.

⚖️ Disclaimer: The content in Inner Currents is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

Note that I am a registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC #16545) in the state of California. Under the supervision of Cyla Fisk, LMFT, at Her Space Therapy LA.

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

I almost didn’t start my Substack (and what a tragedy that would have been, because it is now one of my favorite parts of my creative and professional life).

Last August was when I first got the ping of intuition to start again, to start writing here. The intuition itself felt calm and clear.

Yes I want to do this. Yes this feels true.

But what came after felt like a familiar tug-of-war between the part of me that knows what is true for me, and the part of me that is terrified about what that asks of me.

What if I say the wrong thing?
What if I get judged and criticized?
What if it’s too much work on top of my clinical work?
What if my account doesn’t grow and everybody sees and thinks I’m a failure and I cannot handle the embarrassment so I have to move to a remote corner of Ireland where nobody knows me?

Thanks to the chokehold of my perfectionism, I didn’t start my Substack until February 23, 2026, about 7 months after I knew what I wanted to do.

The altruistic intent of perfectionism

Perfectionism is an old, familiar protective pattern of mine. Like all protective patterns (or “parts” or “defenses,” the language varies depending on the theoretical approach), my perfectionism was trying to serve me in some way. It was trying to protect me from feeling pain, rejection, and humiliation.

When I was growing up in a hyper-competitive public school system where getting an A felt like a life or death experience and kids walked around in Harvard and MIT sweatshirts, my perfectionism was a really adaptive strategy. My perfectionism ensured that I made detailed, color-coded study guides, which I reviewed until I knew everything by heart. That I edited my essay ten times, reviewing for structure, cohesion, grammar, spelling, before even considering turning it in. My perfectionism guaranteed that I would get the A, so that I could maintain social acceptance, and belonging. My perfectionism was the number one survival strategy of my teenage self.

My perfectionism resurfacing when I went to start my Substack is an example of how the past lives through the present via our protective patterns. When my system started to feel the social threat of starting a Substack, it reached for my old, knee-jerk response of perfectionism. It reached for the one strategy it knows would protect me, without asking:

Does perfectionism still have a place here?

The cost of perfectionism

Seven months is what my perfectionism cost me. Seven months of not doing the thing I now love to do.

Instead of writing and creating, I was ruminating on all the terrible things that would happen when I hit post. Drafts of ideas sat in my Notes app — the surge of creative inspiration that went untouched. Something that felt true to express in August or October no longer felt true by February. I was spinning in circles in my own head rather than spilling out onto the page. What a tragic example of worry as a misuse of my imagination.

Insofar as my perfectionism was trying to protect me from a past that may or may not exist anymore, it was robbing me of the life I am living today. Part of what drives an unlived life are the old survival strategies that pull us back every time we go to take a step forward. I do not want a graveyard of the meaningful things I didn’t do. But that is what happens when some younger part of me jumps into the driver’s seat and says:

WHAT IF!?!?!

If I tap into the energy of my 80 year old self, she would say, “Sweet girl, you are afraid of a whole fire and there is barely smoke. Write. Create. You are not going to regret living your life.” Nothing like an existential jolt to shake up an old protective strategy.

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What I did instead

As a perfectionist (recovering perfectionist?), there is truly nothing less helpful or more infuriating than someone saying “Just start!” or “Just do it!” or “Dive on in!”

Like, yes, thank you. Obviously I know I have to fucking start. It’s just that the idea of starting makes me tremble.

What gets missed in these pieces of advice is the part of you that is scared. If we “just do it” and ignore the part of you that’s scared, that fear doesn’t go anywhere. It stays living in you. Rearing its head at every turn.

When there is a gap between knowing and doing, there is usually an old protective pattern standing in it. My clinical supervisor and mentor gets at this with two questions: What do you practically want to be able to do? And then, what feels hard about doing that? The second question is the one that finds the pattern. Rather than overriding this once-essential survival strategy, we work with it while taking the actions that are meaningful to us now.

So this is my offer to you, both as a human working through her own flavors of perfectionism and as a therapist with a few extra tools: hold the perfectionist part of you while you take imperfect actions.

Here is what that looked like for me.

My first imperfect action was in October, on the porch of an Airbnb in Sausalito, laptop and coffee in hand, overlooking the bay. I enrolled in a Substack course — the technical setup, a launch plan, how audience growth works. Sometimes we just need more information to get going. Over the next few weeks I set up the backend, drafted a welcome sequence and an about page, wrote a few pieces of seed content so subscribers would have something to land on. Note what I had not done: hit post on anything.

I just kept moving in the direction of the goal, one small step at a time. I ran a series of tiny experiments that gave my brain a new piece of evidence: I can do something imperfectly, before I feel completely ready, and I can be okay.

Then I started dropping hints on my Instagram stories. Substack coming soon! That was the next step, and the scariest step so far, because now other people were holding me to it.

That’s when my perfectionism flared again. Are these pieces really worth reading? Are you sure you don’t want to rewrite them?

I had taken every practical step except putting it out in the world. Remembering my mentor’s second question, I knew it was time to work with the perfectionistic pattern.

I started by noticing how I felt toward it — a mix of gratitude for how hard it was trying to protect me and frustration that it was standing in my way. The frustration, I realized, was its own separate thing, and once I asked it to give me a little room I could find enough compassion to keep going.

Perfectionism, thank you for working so hard to protect me for so long. I really see how important you have been.

It softened a little then. Nodding. Appreciative of being seen.

What are you scared will happen if you step back?

I am terrified that you are going to fail, and that there will be consequences for you, personally and socially.

And there she was, behind all of it. My fifteen year old self sat at the wooden desk in my bedroom. Brow furrowed, tears brimming in her eyes – my eyes. Gripping a yellow highlighter, as I went over my world history study guide one more time, convinced that if I got anything wrong, my world would fall apart.

Can I say something to her? I asked. Perfectionism moved aside, warily, the way you’d let someone into a room you had been guarding for twenty years.

I told her I knew how frightened she had been, and for how long. That she had not been wrong about her world — it really did work that way back then. That no one is grading her anymore.

Then I turned back to the perfectionist.

I also want you to know that it’s 2026. We live in a little cottage in Southern California. We work as a therapist. We have an Instagram account that is far more public-facing than this. We are doing creative writing — we are not submitting a college application essay.

A pause.

So this is different.

Yes. This is different. Can you see that I am not fifteen?

Okay, said perfectionism. We’re not in high school anymore.

I could feel the grip loosening.

February 23, 2026

And then February 23rd arrived, the day I had planned to launch. I went surfing in the morning. Low tide at a reef break, and getting out of the water I tripped and dragged my foot across a rock, splitting my big toe open. I went to urgent care and fainted when the doctor said I needed stitches. I woke up to my fiancé telling me we’d been accepted for the cottage we had applied for. I found out later that it was the last day of my Saturn return.

Talk about an imperfect launch day.

I got home from urgent care and hit publish anyway. Bandage around my toe, adrenaline still going, and then I linked it to my Instagram stories before I could think about it any longer.

To my perfectionism’s surprise, I have not had to run off to a remote corner of Ireland. I just have to keep showing up, week after week.

My metric of success is no longer how popular a post is. It is not the growth, the likes, the comments. The win is that I let myself show up imperfectly again and again — that there is no longer a seven-month gap between what I know is true for me and what I actually do about it.

I still feel a twinge of fear before sending out a new piece. I feel the echo of the teenage girl in me and her color-coded study guides, certain that the only way to belong is by getting it right. I don’t need to get rid of her. I just need to let her know that things are different now — and then hit publish.

⚖️ Disclaimer: The content in Inner Currents is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

Note that I am a registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC #16545) in the state of California. Under the supervision of Cyla Fisk, LMFT, at Her Space Therapy LA.

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

I returned from Guatemala two days ago and I can feel a familiar uneasiness settling into my bones: the sense that I know myself better when I am traveling than when I am home.

I was on a wedding planning trip in Antigua (my fiancé is Guatemalan on his maternal side). And in the time between meeting with the florist and tasting cakes, I would wander the cobblestone streets, popping in and out of textile shops, and sipping coffee in historic courtyards.

In these in-between moments, it felt like I settled back into an essential part of myself.

I felt curious, open, and warm. I found myself furiously jotting down creative ideas in my Notes app. I felt more clarity about my life, my values, and my priorities than I had in months. Like I could see myself—and my life—from a bird’s-eye view.

I even found that I was dressing differently: experimenting with colors and textures, reaching for my favorite red bandana that I’m too shy to wear at home. My outsides matched more of how I felt on the inside.

I have a working theory on why this is.

When we travel, we get to step outside of our contexts and what those contexts ask of us. And when the context changes, some of the ways we learned to be within it may soften too.

The adaptive self and the authentic self

Each of us grows up in a particular set of circumstances—in our families and our communities, within a particular set of systems, structures, and expectations. When we are young, we become masters at adapting to those circumstances in ways that promote our safety and survival.

If you grew up in an emotionally unpredictable household, maybe you adapted by walking on eggshells and keeping the peace.

If you experienced emotional neglect as a child, maybe you became hyper-independent and self-reliant because you were tired of waiting for your needs to be met.

If you grew up in a community (like me) where achievement meant belonging, maybe you adapted by pleasing, perfecting, and performing.

In the contexts in which they emerged, these adaptations were brilliant and wise. They helped you stay safe and connected to the people you depended upon for survival.

However, these adaptations are not necessarily who you are. They are who you had to be.

They are the adaptive self, not the authentic self.

I find that travel gives me just enough space to remember the authentic self.

In stepping outside of my context, I am able to shrug off some of the familiar masks and roles and protective strategies. And as my outer layer of overachievement and hyper-vigilance softens, I get to sit back into the seat of myself.

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“Wherever you go, there you are?”

As I write this, I can hear the counterargument surfacing in my mind.

“But Lyla, what about the saying ‘Wherever you go, there you are’?”

Yes. True.

We carry ourselves and our baggage with us wherever we go.

Even in Antigua, I carry my trauma in my cells, my lived experiences in my tissues, my protective postures in the tightness of my chest and the twist in my gut.

It is not that we outrun ourselves in travel (although we can try).

Certainly, travel and the flight response can be twin flames. We can change cities, countries, relationships, jobs—anything to avoid sitting still long enough to feel what is underneath.

But I don’t think that is the only thing travel can be.

Travel doesn’t erase our adaptive patterns. We still carry them with us. But when the context changes, some of those patterns may not need to work so hard.

And when those patterns soften—even just a little—we can see ourselves differently. We can feel our authentic self more clearly, while also seeing our adaptive self from a little more distance.

This reminds me of the documentaries I like to watch, of mountaineers summiting Meru Peak or surfers seeking untouched waves in the Bering Sea. There is a primal human instinct to seek and explore.

But I don’t think we are just seeking what else is out there. I think we are also seeking what else is in here.

And perhaps that is why I don’t always experience travel as running away from myself.

Sometimes, it feels more like stepping away from who I had to be long enough to turn toward who I am.

Travel illuminates the work

Traveling illuminates the gap between the authentic self and the adaptive self. Who we feel we are inside, and who we learned we had to be on the outside.

It also reveals something about the life I return to. Feeling more open, creative, and free when I travel makes me curious about why those parts of me can feel harder to access in my everyday life.

Where am I still organizing my life around achievement, vigilance, people pleasing, and control? Where am I still living as though the old conditions are present, even when they are not?

And maybe noticing that contrast can show us the path forward: toward the much less glamorous work of dismantling the protective strategies still shaping our ordinary lives– the ones that once helped us stay safe and connected, but now keep us stuck and disconnected from ourselves.

To acknowledge that they are there. To understand the ways in which they once served us, and the ways in which they limit us today. To sit with what we fear would happen if these strategies—these masks and roles and armor—stepped back.

Perhaps part of that work is becoming curious about what it would take to let our authentic self step forward in our home life.

What would it mean for me to wear my red bandana at home?

What would it mean for me to slow down enough at home to feel the surge of curiosity, creativity, and openness that emerged for me in Antigua?

Maybe the point is not to recreate Antigua at home, but rather to let Antigua show me which parts of myself need more room there.

I do not want a life where I have to get on a plane every time I want to access myself.

I also do not want a life of staying in one place forever.

I want to weave travel into the fabric of my life, and notice who emerges when my armor softens.

And then I want to come home and build a life where she gets to exist more often.

P.S. This kind of work—understanding the protective strategies we developed, the ways they once served us, and the ways they may keep us stuck today—can be difficult to do alone. I highly recommend working with a trauma-informed therapist, particularly one who draws on reprocessing approaches like EMDR, parts work, and somatic approaches like Somatic Experiencing or the Trauma Resiliency Model.

A little guide to Antigua, Guatemala 🇬🇹

As part of wedding planning, I’ve been putting together a list of our favorite places in Antigua to send to our wedding guests—and I figured I’d share it here too :)

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One of my childhood friends — who is about to start graduate school to become a therapist — voice noted me asking about my process for growing my Instagram. I get some version of this question a lot on Instagram and Substack too, so I thought I would synthesize my answer here.

This is not a how-to guide or a set of rules that may or may not work for you. It is a peek into my messy, imperfect process of growing a social ecosystem that feels good to me. There is no one size fits all approach to this stuff. The real practice is finding a sustainable path that feels like your own.

Here is how I found mine — mirroring the mundane, my name for a habit I picked up studying anthropology, and the practices I’ve built around it.

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I have recently become obsessed with vlogs, partially inspired by my dear friend Helen. She visited me last weekend, and instead of watching movies at night we binged YouTube vlogs. We loved getting a window into the mundane moments of another person’s life. How they drink their coffee in a thick knit sweater and then pull on their rainboots to go for a morning walk along the lush fields of the Isle of Skye. How they spend their days backpacking in the Dolomites, and what they carry in their pack. How they wash their face at 7am and which non-toxic products they’re using.

I think there’s a reason these small, ordinary moments are so captivating to me. Before I became a therapist, I was aiming to get my PhD in anthropology. I studied anthro in college and was truly obsessed (Helen did too — maybe there’s a theme here). It felt like my mind had finally found its intellectual home, because let me tell you, physics and calculus certainly weren’t it for me.

The work of an anthropologist (ethnography) is to study the mundane, because that is where culture actually lives. How someone makes their coffee, greets a neighbor, arranges their shelf — these are the units. The discipline hinges on the idea that if you attend closely to the mundane, larger structures surface: kinship, ritual, value, belonging. You live in and observe the daily texture. You notice the small things. And, over time, the small gestures of daily life reveal larger meanings.

This is why the vlogs are so compelling! They are accidental ethnography. A stranger isn’t performing a thesis about their life; they’re just buttering their toast — and somehow, in the butter and the rainboots and the 7am face wash, a whole world shows itself. These small observations, over time, signal something larger about this person, the culture they both shape and are shaped by.

Ethnography tends to flow outward — the anthropologist travels into the field and observes what happens around them. What I find curious now, as a therapist, is what it would be like to flip the script- to make our inner worlds the field sites. Of course, our inner worlds are in constant conversation with the outer world, so there’s a fluidity and symmetry between the two. But what about the small units of our internal existence? These small units or artifacts, albeit inner ones, carry a larger structure about how we are metabolizing life right now.

So here is my inner anthropology. The field notes from my life lately — what I’ve been saying to my friends, blurting to my fiancé, turning over in my own head. It’s a little more personal, so I’m tucking it behind the paywall. And at the very end, there’s a guide for running your own little inner anthropological experiment :)

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Romantic relationships have a loose cultural script: the falling, the landing, and either the breaking or the lasting. That script is double-edged — it can flatten one of the more complex human experiences into something overly simplified and idealized, even as it gives us a shared language for what we’re moving through.

Friendship doesn’t seem to come with the same shared language. Without it, so much of friendship can feel like a mystery: how to make new friends in adulthood; why we can sit across from someone we’ve known our whole life and still feel alone; how to tell a rupture or a breakup from the natural process of growing and shedding.

In this Q+A style article, three friends — who also happen to be therapists — take on female friendship: how we find our people, how we deepen them, how we grieve the ones that end, and how all of it mirrors the relationship we’re each building with ourselves. What follows is less a set of expert answers and more a peek into the kind of conversation we have with each other all the time. These questions were polled from my — Lyla’s — Instagram audience, grouped into themes, and explored conversationally by Jackie Lalanne (LMFT), Julia Papale (APCC), and Lyla Connolly (APCC).

Take what resonates, leave what doesn’t, and stay attuned to your own experience as you read. This isn’t meant to be a script — those can constrain as much as they comfort. It’s meant to be something gentler: some shared language, some company in the contradictions and growing edges of friendship, and a place to start.

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Making & Deepening Friendships as Adults

How do we find our people and deepen relationships in adulthood?

How to make good friends as adults?

Jackie: I really believe it starts with having a strong relationship with yourself. Whether it's deepening existing friendships or cultivating new ones, it starts within. The more you are able to show up to life as your authentic self, the right friendships will come… and if you're struggling to connect with your authenticity ("who am I!?"), perhaps focus first on yourself via therapy or otherwise (Lyla's Substack is a great resource!). I believe we can't force the timing, unfortunately, so it may take some time, moments (or seasons) of loneliness and a little faith in the journey.

Lyla: I echo that having a strong relationship with yourself is a foundation. And, maintaining that connection to self as you engage with new people and potential friends. One way to do this is to be attuned to your experience in friendship. For example, when this friend reaches out, do you feel excited or filled with dread? When you are around them, do you feel expanded or contracted? Do you have to shut off parts of yourself in order to be in connection with them, or do you feel like more of yourself when you are in connection with them? There is so much information when you stay attuned to your body, emotions, and intuition.

I would also add that making good friends requires a dance of vulnerability and connection - a kind of titration of vulnerability over time. We take a small risk: sharing a bit more of ourselves, asking the deeper question in our mind, saying how we’re actually doing. Then we watch how the other person holds and meets that vulnerability. If it begets deeper connection, we can keep leaning in as it feels safe, and the bond deepens. If the small dose isn’t met, that’s information.

Julia and Jackie are my proof that this works. I met Julia in graduate school during COVID - we were in class virtually, she was living in Brooklyn and I was in the Bay Area. I just really liked her energy and resonated with what she’d share in class. One day, I sent her an email saying so and asking if she’d want to hop on the phone. That was the risk. We hit it off, had phone calls for about a year, and then both moved to San Francisco. By the time we were hanging out in person - hiking in the Marin Headlands, cooking dinner for each other- we already felt like soul friends. Our connection has only deepened since. Julia then introduced me to Jackie, having us both over for dinner, thinking we’d hit it off. And we did! Jackie and I now joke that it was the “night we fell in friend love.” This is the same vulnerability at work: sharing how excited we were to become friends deepened our connection.

Jackie: Yes!! I really agree with this last piece.

How do we meet people and make real deep friendships in our 30s?

Jackie: I think this is so personal, and for me it starts with the practice of connecting with intuition, and getting to know what feels right for you, first. One way I do this is through Human Design - I'm a Generator, so rather than going out searching for people, I do best when I wait for the right person or opportunity to cross my path, and then I get a full body yes. But whether or not Human Design is your thing, you can notice how you feel when you're in certain environments and with certain people. Like Lyla said, that felt sense — energized or depleted, expansive or contracted — is all information, and if you feel ready to, follow what feels good! This can apply to settings too and environments too: do you prefer one-on-one or group settings, or a mix? Do you prefer meeting in cafes or outdoors? Sitting or moving? All these environmental factors, especially if you're sensitive, really do matter. One last thing here is that consistency really helps. When Julia and I reconnected in adulthood, we went to a dance class each week together at the same time for a few months. This helped us create a new foundation of our friendship. When Lyla and I were getting to know one another, we got together in different ways that we both enjoyed - at the beach, on a walk, at a coffee shop, and then once she moved south, continued with voice notes between visits!

Julia: ^ Yes to this! Be open – ask people for connections. Oh you have a friend who just moved to San Francisco – I’d love to connect with them. Oh your sister lives in SF, do you think she’d ever want to get coffee? Oh you know someone who’s a therapist – I’m always looking for more therapist friends, do you think they’d be open to chatting? Bridging connections and making friends is one of my greatest joys. If it doesn’t come naturally, it might require a little bravery in putting yourself out there. But people want connection and are usually flattered and grateful when someone else makes ‘the first move.’

Jackie: I remember when Julia reached out to me when she moved from New York back to San Francisco. We met at Nourish Cafe on 6th (RIP) and I just knew from that moment, I love her energy! I’m so grateful she took the first step in reaching out.

Julia: To cast a wide net is one thing – having conversations and friend dates. The second piece is, like Jackie and Lyla have pointed to, having a strong enough relationship with yourself that you can determine from an intuitive place – how did it feel for me to be around this person? Was I able to show up fully as myself? Did being in their presence feel warm, energy-giving or energy-taking? In what I now understand is perhaps a bit of my Gemini moon (thank you @FarStellar), I know someone is a truly safe person if I can let my wild, overly intellectualized mind go without filtering myself – someone eager to engage with all that goes on in my inner world, ready to meet me in my exploration and hunger for the depths. And if they haven't had an experience I'm talking about, they want to know about it. There's a curiosity. And vice versa. This question of what makes you feel safe is important, and it becomes clear once you feel safe.

Jackie: Julia I love that you brought in your moon sign (and as a fellow air moon sign, I feel you!). One thing to add is that the 30's can be a decade of a lot of change. It may be the first time where you're less likely to be on the same schedule than your friends, in the way that you were during school years and even in your twenties. It may feel like people are starting to peel off in different directions, and whether you're the first, the last or somewhere in between, it's an adjustment! Of course, this is different for everyone, so I'll speak for myself: in my twenties, my friends and I were mostly on the same page - similar incomes, similar schedules, similar interests. Then our late twenties and thirties brought about new jobs and grad school (sometimes that required a big move), COVID and other health challenges or changes (or choices!) that shifted our former lifestyles, new partnerships and/or marriage and then for some, children! As we each started new chapters, we also needed (and wanted) to connect with others who could relate to what we were going through - whether it was navigating becoming a new therapist or a new mother (or something else). Lastly, shoutout to voice notes in your thirties. It can be a great way to stay in touch with friends who you don't get to see or speak with as often.

How to deepen friendships?

Jackie: When you are already friends with someone with whom you'd like to deepen your relationship, take a risk and share something a little vulnerable! Or ask a question about them, something you’re curious about or want to know better! Making friends in your 30’s offers up lots of material to work with - I think at one point I literally asked Lyla, so tell me about everything about yourself leading up to now. Also, I really love what Lyla said above about the dance between vulnerability and connection, re: sharing something and then noticing how it felt to share it (always coming back to the body and intuition). If it's someone new who you feel like: this is someone who I'd love to get to know more, be vulnerable by asking them out! Truly, asking a friend out on a first date can be terrifying but someone needs to do it (thank goodness for Julia). I think we all crave deeper connections and sometimes it just takes someone making the first move. Sounds a lot like dating, right? It kind of is!

Julia: When I think about deepening I think of quality over quantity. Maybe it's one phone call or FaceTime where the convo really gets into it. Or time spent together doing an activity that's a shared interest. For me, quality time goes a long way to establish 'oh there's something here between us that we both want to continue exploring'. And in the time you do have together, ask questions! Get curious about the other person and be ready to share on your end too.

Julia: I also think there is something to be said about effort, consistency, and momentum. If you have a lot going on and there isn't as much room for longer form conversations – I love a simple 'thinking of you' text or voice note, letting the friend know you're holding them in mind.

Lyla: I love these notes on leaning in, taking the risk, and prioritizing quality over quantity. I would add that it may be important to define what a 'deep friendship' means to you. For me, a deep friendship is one that has range. One of the greatest reliefs and joys of being in friendship with Jackie and Julia is that all parts of us get to exist in this friendship. I can show up in tears, in silliness, in exhaustion, in my intensity… and it would all be okay. We can meet each other and find each other in each mode (of course, this has built up over time). For example, two weekends ago I flew up to San Francisco to go wedding dress shopping. I was staying with Julia, and she texted me to let me know she was feeling exhausted, but was excited to see me. Both/And. To me, that transparency was a signal of safety and closeness. The next day, I was crying in As Quoted (my fave SF coffee shop) to Jackie and Julia about one of my biggest fears in life. They met my sadness, and also made me laugh. Again, deep friendship is one that can hold range. I also don't think that it's a coincidence that we have learned to hold range within ourselves too (we have all been in therapy working through our “stuff” for years), so we can see it, recognize it, and be with it in the other too.

How to navigate chronic aloneness while desiring close friendships?

Jackie: Ugh, I'm so sorry you're feeling this and I want to normalize that there really can be a season of loneliness when calling in close friendships. I've been there! I think therapy can be really important during these seasons, especially if you've been struggling, so that you have someone in your corner. Sometimes chronic feelings of aloneness are remnants from early childhood, which is why working with a professional who specializes in relational development is a great place to start. If you sense that the aloneness is more about present-day relationships (and it can be both!), perhaps reflect on: where are you currently investing your time and energy? Do you keep getting together with people who you don't feel safe enough to open up to? Sometimes we feel most alone when we're with others and yet don't feel like we can be our full selves. Whether they are old relationships that have run their course, or simply you're in a new season that is asking for a different type of friendship, being honest with yourself about where your time and energy is going and how it is or isn't serving you is essential! It doesn't mean you need to end all these relationships. Perhaps just take note and reflect. It also doesn't make the other person bad nor does it make the relationship toxic, it may just be time to let go a little bit, for now, to make space for something new.

Julia: Oh I get this one and echo Jackie all the way. Having a therapist who can meet all parts of me – and help me understand the parts of me at play – has been essential as I’ve continued to deepen the relationship with myself first and foremost, and through that, it gets easier to tell who really lights you up and which friendships nourish you.

Like Jackie said, sometimes it’s actually more lonely when we’re spending time with the wrong people. But what if this is actually okay, and it’s just part of the process? An anthropological experiment around what’s important to us and who we are – sometimes we are accurately mirrored and other times we aren’t and that’s all important information working in our favor to move us closer and closer into alignment.

For me that’s what it’s all been about. How can I ruthlessly prioritize self care and get closer to what really fills me up. What are my genuine interests? Once I get clear on this, I find myself in the right spaces with likeminded people. How can I follow my own inner navigational system to build a strong foundation within myself. And in this process, I have started to naturally meet my soul people along the way.

Lyla: Oooo!!! My inner anthropology major is jumping up and down at this one. I love this framing of running an anthropological experiment: going out into the “field” aka your everyday life, collecting data, witnessing patterns, observing what’s there, and checking in with yourself. This is such a helpful way to shift out of all or nothing thinking, and to approach the building of friendships from the more gentle place of curiosity.

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Friendship Breakups & Endings

Why are friendship breakups so painful? How do we navigate outgrowing friendships and friendship breakups?

Why are friendship breakups more painful than romantic ones?

Jackie: This is SUCH a good question and I'm so glad we're talking about it more collectively. Friendship breakups can be so, so painful. On one hand, I think female friendships are sort of like sisters, deep relationships that we perhaps envision having for a lifetime? When in reality that's not always the case. There's a term called ambiguous loss, coined by Dr. Pauline Boss, PhD in the 1970s, which refers to "a loss that's unclear, without closure" (Alison, 2025). As Lyla mentioned above, our culture has a 'playbook' for romantic breakups, but less so with friendship breakups, so I think they can feel more stigmatized and isolating. Even terms like ‘BFF’ imply that we're supposed to stay best friends forever, which in some cases is true, and in other cases (most cases?) ebb and flow is natural.

How to deal with the guilt of ending a friendship that didn’t serve me anymore?

Jackie: This can be so tough. I would say, what is your relationship with guilt in general? Notice the guilt, get curious about it, observe it (if you know me, I always come back to mindfulness). Guilt is usually here for a reason in the sense that sometimes it's an adaptive response that drives us to stay in relationships even when we don't want to: as children we are wired for connection, for survival - so even when a relationship doesn't feel good, sometimes we instinctively (and unconsciously) learn to suppress our own desires and authenticity in order to remain in the relationship. I'm not saying that this is necessarily true for you, but perhaps it's something to be curious about?

Lyla: Sometimes when we say guilt in this context, I think we actually mean grief. Guilt technically means "I have done something wrong." If you know this friendship isn't serving you anymore, and you ended the friendship with care, then you have not done anything wrong. You might, however, be grieving this chapter of friendship coming to a close. You might be sitting with discomfort, because having hard conversations and outgrowing friendships can be uncomfortable. Can you allow for your emotional experience without making it wrong? You are allowed to grieve. You are allowed for this experience to feel uncomfortable or crunchy or awkward or painful whatever it feels like.

Jackie: Ohhhh I love this Lyla.

How to deal with letting go of friends who cannot stay as you grow?

Jackie: This can be really hard, and it also can be freeing! Sometimes letting go is what is necessary in order to let in. If you are really calling in deeper aligned connections, letting go of friendships, with gratitude (and grief), that no longer serve you, will make room for new ones. And, sometimes it doesn't have to be black-and-white. Just because some friends cannot stay with you as you grow in the way that you wish they could, perhaps they can stay with you in a different way. While at times you may know that you need to let go of friendships that really were just meant to be there for a season, at other times you may find that friendships can ebb and flow. For example, some friends may move between your "inner circle" and "outer circles" depending on life circumstances, life stages and lifestyles. I like the idea of just letting things unfold naturally, versus needing to force anything either way. You never know who may circle back into your life.

Julia: When I was in my early 20s, my friend's therapist gave her the metaphor that friends are like planets in a solar system – sometimes the planets are orbiting close to one another and sometimes they're on opposite sides of the solar system. People grow at different paces, and sometimes space is important as you're on your own path of discovery, whatever that may be. Just because someone isn't tapped into the "work" you are doing on yourself, it doesn't mean that the friendship can’t still have a place in your life, it may just be taking a different shape. Or, it might just be the real messy middle – when you're in between friendships that used to feel like home and haven't necessarily found the ones that do yet. This is where radical self compassion comes in, or ruthlessly taking care of yourself and tending to your inner garden as I like to say – getting cozy within your truth and joys and holding appreciation for the friendships that are either shapeshifting or fading to the background. Sometimes loneliness will be a part of this. In fact, it often will. So embrace it – because that's where we get to start anew, and while that can be terrifying it's also exciting. That's where the flowers bloom.

Jackie: I love this solar system idea, Julia!! I can share on a personal note, that I've changed a lot between my twenties and thirties. For me, choosing to go back to grad school and become a therapist rocked me in a lot of ways, and unearthed a lot of "stuff" I had never looked at within myself previously. My friends were super supportive of my path, and I was the only one on it. I needed friends who could "go there with me" and yet it took a lot of time for me to find those people. Even though I knew I was on the right path, I had to face the pain of realizing not everyone could, nor should they have to, understand my experience - in the same way that I cannot always understand theirs. I think this is important too, owning when we also can’t fully show up for our friends in the way we were once able to, it’s really hard to be on both ends! This was a bit of a reckoning and I struggled for a while to be honest with myself - to let go of friendships that were no longer serving me, to shift my expectations in friendships (and in myself) that I wanted to maintain while we were growing in different directions and to also trust, as Julia said above, that sometimes a little space is okay. It was around the time that I did let go of some relationships that Julia and Lyla entered my life, and it wasn't a coincidence!

How to acknowledge the ending of a long friendship and grow apart?

Jackie: Ah great question. So many feelings can come with the ending of a long friendship, and I would invite you to acknowledge those feelings within yourself first. Then, in terms of outward acknowledgment I think it depends. Sometimes you may find that addressing the ending or change in a long friendship together is really important for the both of you, and at other times it may be more of a natural drifting apart that doesn't need words. Especially if you're sensitive, you may find that you feel these changes and endings more deeply, so you can also acknowledge an ending on your own if you find that your friend isn't up for a conversation. This could be through gratitude, journaling, therapy, a spiritual practice or something else! You can also always share how you feel, even if the other person isn't able to meet you there, and of course check in to see what feels safe, resonant and authentic to you. If you’re growing apart and also want to maintain a connection, I really love the question (as long as you mean it), what do you need from me? This can open up an honest conversation about both of your needs in this new season of life.

Lyla: I have been through this, and it can feel really painful. What helped me, both while it was happening and since, is holding both. Holding that we had a good run of years together - beautiful memories, lots of love for each other, a chapter of deep friendship. AND that we’re having a hard time meeting each other in this season of life, growing in different directions, finding it harder to find each other. Holding both lets you honor multiple truths at once: the truth of your friendship and the honesty of its ending. I find that grief and growth usually happen in the same breath. If you’re growing, you’re outgrowing; and if you’re outgrowing, you’re grieving. Let both be there - they can coexist.

Jackie: LOVE ^^

Discernment & Healthy Expectations

How do we recognize true friendship and set realistic expectations?

Julia: Part of my journey has been becoming a bit more discerning about how open I am and with who. So, it's a process of checking in with what it feels like when you share something more tender with a friend – are they able to hold you in this place? And if not, maybe there's an acceptance around what the relationship will be for now. If they can, then the relationship will likely deepen as there becomes more spaciousness for openness on both sides.

Lyla: Yes to the discernment! One way to practice this is by taking inventory of your friendships. There's room for a multiplicity of friendship experiences — but those friendships might play different roles, and these roles might shift over time. An inventory means looking holistically at your social ecosystem, and then at each friendship in it. Which friendships are you always initiating, and which feel mutual? Where are you giving more than you have to give, and where are you not letting yourself be met? Who can you call in a crisis, or share the real highs and lows with? And who is better kept light and easy? (As a highly sensitive person, that kind of friendship is hard for me — so if it's hard for you too, I just want to normalize that.) And it's worth turning some of this inward too: what's your own capacity this season — how much do you actually have to give? Have your needs or values shifted, and do you have people who can meet you there? You don't have to do anything urgent or immediate with the answers — just check in, with honesty and care, about what's actually here.

Julia: For me true friendship is knowing I have these friends I can call at 2am and they'd be there if I needed them, but also recognizing that no one person can be our everything. I have to delight in myself and my life first, and then the people I get to be in relationships with beyond that are a bonus. I really believe everyone is just doing their best, and when we start to take things personally is when we can fall into a trap – and then hopefully there's enough safety in the relationship to bring it to the table when it does happen. We are human and relationships are messy. Nothing like a good belly laugh at ourselves and all of our anxieties about being ourselves or not feeling like we're doing it right. That, to me, is friendship.

Jackie: Julia is a huge expander for me in terms of being vulnerable. She’s the first person who modeled for me what it’s like to be emotionally raw, authentic and 100% herself in a relationship, and it has made me feel safer to open up in so many ways, with her and with others!

How to know who is a genuine friend versus a jealous one?

Jackie: I know it doesn't feel great to be on the receiving end of jealousy, especially when I can imagine you just want your friend to be happy for you! One thing I think that often gets missed is that jealousy is a natural human emotional state. We all feel it at times. I'm curious if you're sensing that this friend doesn't have your best interest in mind? In that case, and, I will die on this hill… build a connection with your intuition! You can start by paying attention to how your body responds to different people and relationships, as Lyla mentioned above. It's normal to be jealous of your friends at times, or to have your friends be jealous of you, but if it's a recurring feeling vs. a passing one, and if you feel like you have to consistently shrink around them, protect or defend your experience, and/or aren't able to authentically celebrate your joy, it may be worth paying more attention… depending on the friendship and if you think they can hear you, you may choose to share with them how you're feeling (I love Nonviolent Communication for this!), otherwise it may be time to reflect on whether or not the friendship is serving you.

Julia: A spiritual teacher of mine, Ally Bogard, would always say that jealousy shows you what you think you can’t have and envy shows you what it is you want. Both deserve some attention and rewiring - I would bring them to therapy.

Lyla: This is such a helpful reframe, Julia! It reminds us that, at times, jealousy and envy can be signs that our own stuff is coming up. If we feel envy, can we turn inwards and ask, what is it that they have that I want for myself? If we feel jealous, can we get curious about what parts of us believe we can’t have those things? In both situations, the friend might be mirroring back to us material that lives within ourselves.

Sources

Alison, D. (2025). When Grief Has No Grave: Rebuilding After a Childhood You Never Got | CPTSDfoundation.org.https://cptsdfoundation.org/2025/04/30/when-grief-has-no-grave-rebuilding-after-a-childhood-yu-never-got/

⚖️ Disclaimer: This content is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

Note that I am a registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC #16545) in the state of California. Under the supervision of Cyla Fisk, LMFT, at Her Space Therapy LA.

Julia Papale, quoted in this article, is an Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC #16005) in the state of California. Under the supervision of John Clarke, LPCC.

Jackie Lalanne, also quoted in this article, is an LMFT (#162160).

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

I am both highly sensitive and highly ambitious.

For most of my life, I have referred to these as two opposing forces of my identity. On the one hand, I feel things deeply. I have a rich inner world. I get claustrophobic with too many plans on my calendar. I am allergic to small talk and crave emotional intensity. I could do without fluorescent lights, people revving their motorcycles on the street, and large crowds.

On the other hand, I am motivated, driven, and high achieving. I have always felt the tug of something big inside of me (literally no idea where that comes from—it is just an energy that I feel on the inside), and an enduring commitment to see how that unfurls in my life.

For years, I was sure these two forces couldn’t coexist, and I unconsciously split them across the calendar.

Summers were when I got to be my sensitive self. Running wild around Nantucket, barefoot, in and out of the ocean. I felt most connected to myself with this space and time, and notably, without the scoreboard.

Then the school year would start, and the other force took over.

I went to a hyper-competitive public high school not far from Harvard and MIT, and there I absorbed a definition of ambition built on external markers:

I HAVE to get an A. I HAVE to get a 4.0. I HAVE to get into the “right” college. OR ELSE.

I’d be holed up in my room grinding through SAT prep and a parent would knock. “Hey, want to take a break? You’re pushing yourself really hard.” They didn’t care if I came home with an A or a C; they just wanted a healthy, happy kid. And it infuriated me. Ugh, MOM, you don’t get it. This is life or death. If I don’t perform, I’ll get kicked out of the herd.

That kind of ambition felt like hell to the sensitive part of me—the part that needs depth, meaning, space to daydream and decompress and resource my nervous system. So I drew the teenage conclusion: to be ambitious, I’d have to disavow my sensitivity.

I had it all backwards.

I don’t see those two parts as opposed anymore. I see my sensitivity as in service of my ambition. But to get there, I had to deconstruct the definitions of ambition and sensitivity that I had been handed.

And if you’re reading this, I suspect they were handed to you too: that you’ve felt the same split, and been told the same thing—that to want big things, you have to toughen up and leave the tender part behind. You don’t.

This guide is my case for why—and, more importantly, what to do about it.

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My maternal grandfather died at thirty-seven. I never met him.

One year before he passed, he and his parents pooled their money and bought a tiny beach cottage on Nantucket for $17,000. I’ve come to believe that house is the closest thing I have to knowing him. It holds us. It steadies us. It has now gathered five generations of my family under one weathered roof — a family member in its own right, one that has known my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my mom, and now me.

It is where my parents got married. Where I first touched sand. Where my grandparents’ ashes rest, alongside our family dog’s. Where I got engaged. It is my home base, and in a spiritual way, it is also my grandfather — still holding the people he never got to grow old with.

I spent every childhood summer there — with my family and grandmother, and a constellation of aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends in the houses nearby. Mornings meant coffee on the front porch and the smell of salt and honeysuckle. Afternoons meant long swims in the sea — I can still picture my grandmother breaststroking along the shoreline, eyes peeled for the occasional seal. We picked wild blueberries until our fingers stained purple. We biked the path to the Sconset Market for the best blueberry muffins you will ever eat. We walked barefoot down dirt roads to the farm stand for heirloom tomatoes. We foraged for clams in summer and scallops in fall. And for a post-beach treat, we’d head to Cisco Brewers — back when it was still a dirt parking lot with a scatter of Adirondack chairs, not the whole production it is now (this was 20 years ago) — to play ring toss, drink cream soda with our summer friends, and ride around on the motorized cooler while our parents drank beer on top.

It was a wholesome, old-fashioned, quirky kind of summer.

I still return to Nantucket a few times a year. But recently, I moved into a coastal cottage in a small surf town in Southern California — and I’ve found myself instinctively recreating the rhythm I was raised in. Coffee in the backyard while Ladybug, our puppy, runs circles around me. Morning beach walks searching for shells. Surfing as often as I can. Frequenting farmers markets. Though I’m a whole country away from that Nantucket porch, the cadence of coastal life feels familiar in my body — comforting on a visceral level.

It’s taken me years, and a career in mental health, to understand why. Looking back now — through a therapist’s lens — I can see that so much of what my family was doing on that island wasn’t just summer. It was, in hindsight, deeply good for us. We were in nature. We were away from screens. We were together. My grandmother didn’t call it wellness. It was simply how she taught us to live. And the more I learn about the research, the more I want to hand these rhythms to you — wherever your coast happens to be.

So here is what that cottage taught me, translated into a guide you can borrow.

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1. Instead of a color walk, take a beach-combing walk. Walk barefoot along the shore and let yourself hunt — for shells, pieces of sea glass, stones worn smooth by the tide. (You may have seen the “color walk” trend, where you notice every shade around you; this is its coastal cousin.) Walking the shore and scanning the sand for the next lovely thing is a form of what researchers call soft fascination — the effortless, gentle attention that natural settings invite, like watching the waves swell and crash on the shore. According to Attention Restoration Theory, this is precisely the kind of attention that lets a depleted, overworked mind recover (Basu et al., 2019). Where the hustle of modern life drains us, the immersion in nature and a slow, low-effort search for natural treasure restores us.

2. Take your morning beverage outside. At the cottage, the day always began on the porch — coffee in hand, the green bushes still wet with dew, the ocean humming somewhere past the dunes, a deer occasionally stepping through the yard like it owned the place. It turns out this ritual was doing more than I knew. Catching sunlight in the first 30–60 minutes after waking helps anchor your circadian rhythm; a 2025 study of nearly 1,800 adults found that greater morning sun exposure was associated with better sleep quality (de Menezes-Júnior et al., 2025). So take your coffee, tea, or matcha outside, and let the morning find you slowly.

3. Experiment with foraging. As a kid, foraging for wild blueberries felt like the ultimate scavenger hunt. We’d pull on long sleeves to fend off ticks and head down the dirt roads where my mom and grandmother had spent weeks tracking which bushes would fruit. We’d race to fill our beach pails first, fingers stained blue and purple, and come home to make blueberry crisp with vanilla ice cream — an objectively 11/10 coastal granddaughter experience. Foraging didn’t stop at berries, either: we’d dig for clams in the summer and go scalloping in the fall. Look up what grows — or swims — near you. Maybe there are wild berries. Maybe you can dig for clams or cast a line. Maybe there’s a farm where a few dollars buys you a basket of strawberries and an afternoon in the sun.

4. Host a dinner party — for family, friends, or both. Try a new recipe. Shake up a beautiful mocktail. Thrift a charming tablecloth. Make a reason to gather your people around a table. This one isn’t merely nice — it may be the most protective thing on this entire list. In a landmark meta-analysis, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues (2010) found that the strength of our social relationships influences our risk of mortality as much as well-established factors like smoking. Connection isn’t a luxury; it’s one of the most powerful forms of care we have. (For inspiration on the craft of gathering, try Priya Parker’s The Art of Gathering.)

5. Use sunset as your screen curfew. When the sun goes down, set the screens down too. Reach for a book, or a board game, instead. Some of my most competitive childhood memories live right here — Racing Demon, Backgammon, Solitaire, the whole family diving across the dining room table to slam a card down first. There’s real science beneath the ritual: evening light, especially from screens, suppresses melatonin and delays sleep. A 2022 systematic review and meta-analysis (Cajochen et al., 2022) confirmed that evening light exposure can acutely suppress melatonin and disrupt the sleep that follows. Let the dimming of dusk be the signal that the day is done.

6. Take a dip in the sea. One of my core memories is running down the hot sand with my mom, grandmother, and little brother, all of us racing toward the relief of the cold ocean. The research here is still young — mostly small feasibility studies — but it’s promising: in a 2022 study of a sea-swimming course for people experiencing anxiety and depression, 81% of participants felt “recovered” and 62% showed reliable improvement in their mental wellbeing (Burlingham et al., 2022). Cold, salty, alive. There’s something about going under that resets you.

7. Find some blue space. A growing body of research points to the mental health benefits of time in and around water — what scientists call "blue space." It's why there's a growing field of therapeutic activities set in natural outdoor water — surfing, sailing, kayaking, swimming — used to support wellbeing (Britton et al., 2020). The research is still young and needs more study. But I think my grandmother was onto something — I always just feel better around the water.

I don’t think my family knew we were tending to our nervous systems and our mental health on that island. We thought we were just having summer — and it felt really good. A lot of life is held in that little cottage: grief alongside joy, my grandfather’s absence and five generations of presence, all in the same small house. I’ve come to think that’s what these practices really offer — not optimization, but a way back to the people and places that hold us.

However you spend it, I hope your coastal granddaughter summer holds you the way that little cottage has always held me.

⚖️ Disclaimer: The content in Inner Currents is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

Note that I am a registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC #16545) in the state of California. Under the supervision of Cyla Fisk, LMFT, at Her Space Therapy LA.

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

References

Basu, A., Duvall, J., & Kaplan, R. (2019). Attention restoration theory: Exploring the role of soft fascination and mental bandwidth. Environment and Behavior, 51(9–10), 1055–1081. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916518774400

Britton, E., Kindermann, G., Domegan, C., & Carlin, C. (2020). Blue care: A systematic review of blue space interventions for health and wellbeing. Health Promotion International, 35(1), 50–69. https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/day103

Burlingham, A., Denton, H., Massey, H., Vides, N., & Harper, C. M. (2022). Exploring the engagement and effectiveness of a sea swimming course as a novel intervention for anxiety and depression: A feasibility study. Mental Health and Physical Activity, 23, Article 100472. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mhpa.2022.100472

Cajochen, C., Stefani, O., Schöllhorn, I., Lang, D., & Chellappa, S. L. (2022). Influence of evening light exposure on polysomnographically assessed night-time sleep: A systematic review with meta-analysis. Lighting Research & Technology, 54(6), 609–624. https://doi.org/10.1177/14771535221078765

de Menezes-Júnior, L. A. A., Sabião, T. da S., Carraro, J. C. C., Machado-Coelho, G. L. L., & Meireles, A. L. (2025). The role of sunlight in sleep regulation: Analysis of morning, evening and late exposure. BMC Public Health, 25, Article 3362. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-025-24618-8

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: A meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), Article e1000316. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316

E. Lyla Connolly, Registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor, APCC 16545, employed by Her Space Therapy LA and supervised by Cyla Fisk, LMFT.

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Hello from the Messy Middle of Becoming a Therapist

As I write this, I am sitting at my desk in the little cottage in the Southern California surf town I just moved to, in the liminal space between the life I once imagined and the life I am still building.

Right now, I have completed 2,386 of the 3,000 hours of supervised post-degree professional experience required to qualify for licensure as a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor in California. I work fully remotely as a Registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor at Her Space Therapy LA under clinical supervision. I recently reached 100,000 followers on Instagram, and here on Substack, 1,395 of you have joined me as I begin writing in a longer, more expansive way.

I am close enough to licensure that I can feel the next chapter within reach: finishing my hours, completing the remaining licensure requirements, becoming licensed, and continuing to grow both my clinical and creative work. But I am not there yet. I am still accumulating hours, still under clinical supervision, still figuring out what kind of life I want this career to hold.

Consider this a peek into my lived experience of becoming a therapist: the choices I have made, what I wish I had known, the ambition I have had to adjust, the uncertainty I am learning to tolerate, and the values that continue guiding me toward a life that feels like mine.

The deeper I get into this process, the clearer it becomes that two values have shaped nearly every decision I have made along the way: freedom and creativity.

Why I Chose to Become a Therapist: Freedom and Creativity

Becoming a therapist first began to pique my interest when I found myself on the therapy couch in college. I was studying anthropology at the time, already fascinated by human stories, patterns, and the invisible forces that shape who we become. I was also struggling with disordered eating and anxiety. I loved the weekly ritual of walking down College Hill and devoting an hour to knowing myself at a deeper level.

Therapy helped me restore my relationship with food and my body, reconnect with my emotional self, and soften my tendency to intellectualize everything. But it also expanded my sense of what meaningful work—and a life built around that work—could look like. My therapist had created a beautiful, intentional environment. She ran her own business. She had autonomy over her schedule, her caseload, and what she charged. And she was supporting people in their healing. Therapy appealed to me both because of the work itself and because of the kind of life it might allow me to build.

A year after college, I was living in Oakland, California, working for a food-as-medicine organization and voraciously reading every therapy, mental health, and trauma book I could get my hands on. I was listening to podcasts about therapists building private practices, starting businesses, and marketing themselves in modern ways. I was drawn to the clinical work, of course, but I was also drawn to the creative and entrepreneurial possibilities around it. I began to imagine a career that could hold both: the depth and intimacy of sitting with clients, and the freedom to write, build, create, and eventually shape a business of my own.

Looking back, I can see that two values were guiding me before I had fully named them: freedom and creativity. For some therapists, the dream is to grow a group practice or build a large clinical business. I have so much respect for that path, but it has never been mine. My dream has always been smaller in one way and more expansive in another: meaningful clinical work balanced with creative and entrepreneurial work—writing, perhaps a book someday, and eventually shaping a practice that feels deeply aligned with who I am.

I did not know—and still do not exactly know—how all of those pieces fit together. I just knew I did not want to build a career that required me to choose between meaningful clinical work and the creative, entrepreneurial parts of myself.

Those values became especially important when it was time to decide which path into the therapy profession actually made sense for me.

Choosing a Path to Become a Therapist: Alignment > Ego

Once I knew I wanted to become a therapist, I started sifting through two questions: What kind of therapist did I want to be, and through which path? There is no single route to becoming a therapist. There are master’s-level paths in marriage and family therapy, clinical social work, and clinical mental health counseling, as well as doctoral paths through clinical psychology programs. The specific license titles and requirements vary by state, but each route comes with different training, timelines, costs, emphases, and professional possibilities. The right path depends on the work you want to do, the training you want to receive, and the life you want to build around it.

I was initially researching PhD programs. I have always been a high-achieving person, and I had spent my college years preparing for a PhD in anthropology. A part of me equated the longest, most prestigious route with the “best” one.

I had to check my ego and get honest with myself. I did not want research to be the central component of my career. I wanted to work directly with clients. And I wanted a career that left room for creativity, writing, and entrepreneurship alongside clinical work.

Once I let go of the idea that I needed the most impressive path, I could ask myself much clearer questions—questions that would lead me toward the most aligned one:

• Did I want to work primarily with individuals, couples, or families?

• Did I want research or assessment to be central to my career?

• What kind of theoretical orientation was I drawn to?

• What path best supported the kind of private practice and creative life I eventually wanted?

As I sat with these questions, the answers became clearer. I wanted to work primarily with individuals rather than couples or families. I wanted a well-rounded clinical training that I could later build on through additional training in the modalities that most interested me. And I was deeply drawn to depth-oriented work: understanding not only a person’s symptoms, but the unconscious patterns, attachment histories, defenses, and emotional worlds underneath them.

That is what drew me to Northwestern’s master’s program in clinical mental health counseling. It was the only program I applied to. The program was grounded in contemporary psychodynamic theory, while integrating other evidence-based and multicultural perspectives. I was especially drawn to the depth-oriented piece—the kind of therapy that is interested in what lives underneath the surface. Which, as a triple Scorpio, felt about right.

Choosing a master’s-level counseling path over a doctoral one was a big lesson in choosing alignment over ego. I know in my bones that it was exactly the right choice for me. A doctoral path can be amazing for some people, but it was not necessary for the work I wanted to do or the kind of life I wanted to build.

Once I chose my path to becoming a therapist, the next question became what it would actually look like to begin walking it.

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Graduate School: Training and Building a Creative Life

In the winter of 2020, I applied to one graduate program, and in the fall of 2021, I began Northwestern’s master’s program in clinical mental health counseling from my apartment in Oakland, California. I chose to take my courses virtually for two reasons: we were still in the thick of COVID, and freedom has always been one of the values I organize my life around.

The first year of my two-and-a-half-year program was primarily coursework. Before my second year, my partner and I moved to Philadelphia for his JD/MBA program. There, I began balancing classes with seeing clients in person at a private practice, first in practicum and then in internship, when my caseload increased. In the spring of 2024, I delivered my capstone presentation on attachment dynamics and sexual desire, completed my master’s degree, and moved back west to San Francisco—our third cross-country move in four years.

At the same time that I was taking classes and completing my clinical hours, I began teaching myself something graduate school did not teach me: how to begin building a public professional voice ethically as a future therapist. I knew that wherever I worked after graduate school, I wanted to be able to fill my own caseload. I also wanted a creative outlet—a way to translate what I was learning and observing into language that people could connect with.

So, during graduate school, I started experimenting with Instagram. There were plenty of flopped reels and carousels, many cringe moments, and a great deal of discomfort around being seen. By the end of graduate school, I was hovering around 2,000 to 3,000 followers. It was not an overnight success story, and, to be honest, I still feel like I am learning and relearning the platform.

Still, it was completely worth it. For graduate students who imagine building a private-pay practice one day, I think it is worth beginning to learn some form of ethical marketing before graduating—whether that means building a website and understanding SEO, experimenting with social media, networking, or simply learning how the right clients may eventually find you. Graduate school teaches you how to begin becoming a therapist. It does not always teach you how to build a practice, create opportunities, or shape a career that gives you more autonomy. For me, learning that alongside my clinical training made a big difference.

Becoming an Associate Therapist in California: Supervision and Starting Over

When I finished graduate school and moved back to California, I was not just looking for my first job as an associate therapist; I was looking for the practice, supervisor, and clinical environment that would shape the therapist I was becoming.

There was also an unexpected twist: I had already completed roughly 1,000 clinical hours during practicum and internship in Pennsylvania, but in my particular California LPCC application path, those hours did not count toward my 3,000-hour requirement. Because I ultimately wanted to live and practice in California, I decided to pursue licensure there anyway, even though it meant beginning the 3,000-hour process from the start.

I was gritty and relentless about finding the right supervisor. I knew I wanted to work with someone who ran her own practice and specialized in depth-oriented psychotherapy with a trauma focus. I would literally go on Psychology Today and search for therapists in San Francisco and Los Angeles, filtering by the specialties I wanted to grow into: psychodynamic therapy, internal family systems, EMDR, and somatic approaches. I made an Excel spreadsheet of practices. I emailed probably 30 of them. Some did not have associate openings; some pointed me toward practices that did. I interviewed. There were many twists and turns. And I feel so grateful to have ultimately landed at Her Space Therapy LA, where I have been supervised by Cyla Fisk. Cyla has offered the kind of thoughtful, depth-oriented mentorship I had hoped to find in these formative years, and I feel so lucky to learn from her.

One of the biggest lessons I have learned is that an associate position is not merely a place to collect hours. The associate years are a kind of apprenticeship. You are learning, growing, finding your voice, and beginning to understand what kind of therapist you are. Of course, that continues long after licensure. But I can confidently say that my clinical skills have up-leveled immeasurably because I have had an extremely knowledgeable, specialized supervisor—and because I have worked hard to absorb everything this season has had to teach me.

Looking back, these are the questions I am most grateful I took seriously—and the questions I would encourage anyone choosing an associate position to ask:

Are they specialized in what you want to learn?

Your supervisor will shape the way you think clinically. I knew I wanted to become a therapist who could work deeply with trauma, attachment, parts, the body, and the unconscious patterns underneath a client’s symptoms. Finding a supervisor grounded in those approaches has given me the clinical foundation I hoped for.

Do they run a business you respect?

During my associate years, I wanted to learn not only how to become a better therapist, but also how a thoughtful private practice operates: how clients find you, how referral relationships are built, what software supports the practice, how inquiry calls and onboarding work, what forms clients receive, how scheduling is handled, and how policies are communicated clearly and compassionately.

Can you receive feedback from them?

Just as therapist-client fit matters, supervisor-associate fit matters. You need your supervisor to be someone who can teach you, correct you, challenge you, celebrate you, and help you grow.. These years require humility and courage. You want to learn from someone whose perspective you trust.

Will they pay you a living wage?

Compensation structures can vary significantly across practices, and it is worth understanding them clearly before accepting an associate position. In the boutique, private-pay practices I considered during my job search, compensation was generally structured as a fee split, and the range I encountered varied meaningfully. The larger lesson for me was that associates deserve to ask direct questions about pay, supervision, and support before committing to a training environment.

The associate position is not merely the job you take while you wait to become licensed. It is the environment in which you begin becoming the therapist you will eventually be on your own. Starting over in California was not the easiest route, but because I imagine building my life here longer term, finding the right practice and supervisor has made it deeply worthwhile.

The Associate Years: Burnout, Caseload, and Sustainability

Being an associate feels a little like walking—running?—through a dark tunnel. You can see the light at the end, but you do not know exactly how long it will take to reach it, and you are carrying a heavy backpack filled with graduate school loans, the looming pressure to accumulate hours, and the expectation that you are somehow supposed to “find yourself” as a therapist along the way.

Once I began working as an associate, the 3,000-hour requirement became the background hum of my life. Every client session brought me closer to licensure; every open spot in my schedule could feel like time lost. There was a natural pressure to build my caseload quickly, see as many clients as I could sustain, and keep moving toward the freedom I imagined waiting on the other side of licensure.

Ironically, the part I was most worried about—finding enough clients to fill my schedule—became the part that happened much faster than I expected. The Instagram account I had started experimenting with during graduate school began gaining traction in the spring of 2024, right as my associateship began. By July, I had reached around 10,000 followers. I had been told by many therapists that it could take close to a year to build a full caseload as a new associate therapist. Through Instagram, I filled mine in about two and a half months and have maintained a full caseload since.

At first, this felt like the best-case scenario: the creative work I had started in graduate school was helping me connect with clients whose needs aligned with my approach, while also moving me quickly toward licensure. But eventually, I had to confront the fact that filling my caseload and finding a sustainable caseload were two different things.

At my fullest, I was seeing 23 to 25 clients per week. Every therapist has a different capacity, and this was ultimately something I had to learn about my own: for me—as a highly sensitive person and an introvert—that number became too much. About a year into carrying that caseload, I began to feel burned out.

Over the next few months, my schedule naturally came down to approximately 18 to 20 clients per week. This not only feels better for my nervous system, but also gives me more space to pour into my creative projects—like this Substack I have been growing.

Realizing that my caseload needed to change was only part of the lesson. I was also learning that doing this work well required me to be supported, too. For me, this has meant a combination of depth-oriented and somatic-focused therapy of my own, with adjunct EMDR trauma therapy. It has also meant finding therapist friends who just get it: how demanding and complex these years can be. As I was learning to hold so many people, I needed to be held by more people.

I have also continued investing in the kind of clinician I want to become, most recently by completing basic training in EMDR through the Center for Excellence in EMDR. Within my supervised clinical work, that training has deepened my capacity to help clients not only understand the patterns shaping their lives, but process experiences that may still be affecting them in the present.

Letting my caseload become more sustainable did not feel like stepping away from ambition. It felt like getting more honest about the life I was actually trying to build. I wanted to continue becoming a more skilled, grounded clinician, but I did not want to arrive at licensure having become so efficient at seeing clients that I had lost access to the other parts of myself. During the associate years, it became increasingly important to have something outside of the therapy room that felt uniquely mine—something creative I could build, shape, and call my own.

Creativity During the Associate Years: Building Something of My Own

For a while, Instagram was that something: a creative project that was mine, even while my clinical work still existed within the structure of someone else’s practice. It allowed me to create, develop a public voice, fill my caseload with clients whose needs aligned with my approach, and begin building the foundation for my future practice.

Then I started feeling the intuitive whisper to write long-form again. Over the past three months, Substack has become the next version of that creative outlet. It gives me space for deeper, more complex topics: to write rather than just distill, to build a community, and to connect with people in a more meaningful way. And it feels like a practice ground for what may come next—hopefully, a book is in my future, a sentence that gives me a small vulnerability hangover even as I write it.

What has made both Instagram and Substack feel so meaningful is that they are not only creative outlets for me; they are also a way of offering something beyond the therapy room. Through them, I get to name the patterns so many people live inside of: high-functioning anxiety, fawning, over-responsibility, and the ways old attachment wounds continue to shape adult relationships. When people tell me that something I shared made them feel seen or gave language to something they had never understood about themselves, I am reminded that this creative work can offer a meaningful form of language and reflection beyond the therapy room—though, of course, this is not a substitute for individualized mental health care.

Instagram and Substack, for me, are not about building a platform for the sake of having a platform. They give me a sense of authorship over my professional life during a season that requires supervision, patience, and delayed independence. And they allow me to offer language, reflection, and psychoeducation to people who may never sit across from me in a therapy room. They are where my creative and clinical selves get to meet—and where I get to begin building something that serves both me and the people I hope to reach.

Building a Therapy Career in a Values-Aligned Direction

I do not know what the final shape of my career will be. Is there even a final shape? I am not working toward one fixed destination. For me, freedom and creativity are partly in allowing the shape to emerge as I go. I am moving in a values-aligned direction, and the next steps are beginning to come into focus.

Right now, I am on track to complete my associate hours by late summer or early fall, complete the remaining licensure requirements, and continue growing into the kind of therapist I hope to become. Beyond that, I know I want to continue writing—here on Substack, and hopefully in a book one day. And over time, I hope to build a clinical and creative life that feels increasingly like my own.

I do not know exactly how these pieces will fit together, but I am learning to trust that they do not need to fit neatly yet. Each one is pointing me toward the same kind of life: one where I can do meaningful clinical work, create freely, build something of my own, and keep listening for what wants to come next.

What I Would Tell Someone Considering Becoming a Therapist

I am still writing this from inside the tunnel: 2,386 hours down, licensure close enough to imagine, but not yet mine. It has been an imperfect, meaningful, messy, beautiful journey so far. And writing this piece has reminded me that sometimes the middle is the most honest place from which to reflect.

From this middle place, here are the five things I would tell anyone considering becoming a therapist—or anyone already somewhere in the process:

1. There is no single path to becoming a therapist.

Choose the degree and license that align with the work you want to do and the life you want to build. The most prestigious path is not necessarily the most aligned one.

2. Do your research early.

Graduate programs, internship locations, licensure requirements, state moves, associate pay, and supervision structures matter more than you may realize at the beginning.

3. Choose your training environment carefully.

The right supervisor and practice can shape your clinical voice, your confidence, and the kind of therapist you become. Your associate position is not only where you accumulate hours; it is where you begin learning how you want to practice.

4. Do not confuse speed with alignment.

Filling a caseload quickly and finishing your hours efficiently are not the same as building a sustainable clinical life. The goal is not simply to reach licensure as fast as possible. It is to arrive there still connected to yourself and the life you are trying to build.

5. Do not abandon the parts of yourself that made you want freedom in the first place.

Clinical training during the associate years can be demanding, but your creative dreams do not have to wait until you have fully arrived. In fact, those may be the very parts of you that keep the work sustainable and make the eventual career feel like your own.

When I first imagined becoming a therapist, I thought freedom and creativity were part of the life I might eventually earn once I was established. Now, from the messy middle, I can see that they were never waiting at the end of the path.

I used to think licensure would be the moment this career began to feel like mine. But in many ways, I have been practicing that authorship all along: in the degree I chose, the moves I made, the supervisor I sought out, the caseload I adjusted, and the creative work I refused to postpone. Freedom and creativity have been my compass, reshaping my personal definition of ambition.

For now, I am still in the middle. Let’s see what unfolds next.

Embedded in modern love is a tall task: to build a relationship that can hold both our history and our becoming. We are asking love to be both a place where our old wounds can be met, and a place where our aliveness, desire, and growth can continue to unfold.

This is part of what makes romantic relationships so loaded and complex: they are carrying two big assignments at once.

First, they are where the past lives through the present. Love has a way of collapsing timelines. In romantic partnership, we are not just two adults relating in the here and now. We are two adults carrying old attachment wounds, unmet needs, longings, heartbreaks, and protective strategies. Our relationships mirror this material back to us, sometimes painfully, and invite us into deeper healing and conscious partnership.

Second, romantic relationships are asked to hold dual and opposing needs. We want comfort, stability, and security: the grocery runs, the debriefs over dinner, the shared rituals, the “rest of your life” feeling. And we also want novelty, adventure, aliveness, the spark: the trip to Italy, the unexpected laugh, the moment you look across the room at your partner and think, How lucky am I?

Olivia Dean said it best in her song “So Easy (To Fall in Love).” We are looking for a love that is “the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life” (I wrote a whole article on this). This begs the question: How do we keep desire alive in a long-term relationship? How do we infuse adventure and novelty into the mundane? How do we nurture emotional closeness while also remembering that our partner is an autonomous human being, separate from us?

These tensions are what make love so dynamic, confusing, beautiful, and brutal.

To help you navigate the complexity of modern love, I have assembled my top seven favorite books on romantic relationships. This list is for you if you are interested in:

• understanding attachment patterns in romantic relationships

• building secure love without losing desire

• deepening emotional intimacy

• navigating conflict with more self-awareness

• keeping long-term relationships alive, curious, and connected

• exploring the tension between comfort and aliveness

• creating a healthy relationship that can hold both healing and growth

My hope is that they offer insight into how to co-create a healthy romantic relationship that feels uniquely satisfying, dynamic, and alive for you.

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Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel

Best for: Understanding desire in long-term relationships and how to balance intimacy with autonomy.

Why I recommend this book:

This is a paradigm shifting book for those wondering why desire fades overtime despite deep love in long-term relationships. The answer is less about time itself, and more about the relational dynamics that accumulate over time that flatten the paradox of love and desire. Perel clarifies that while related and existing within the same relationship, love and desire necessitate slightly different conditions. Love is rooted in closeness- safety, attachment, comfort, the building of a shared life. Love is to have. Desire, on the other hand, requires a degree of separateness - a sense of ‘otherness,’ of not fully possessing the other person. Desire is to want. Many relationship books focus on the former, while neglecting the latter. In Mating in Captivity, Perel invites us to learn how to live inside the contradiction. To nurture love and desire with equal force. To move between closeness and space, intimacy and individuality without collapsing into either, in order to reinvigorate the relational bond.

Sex Talks by Vanessa Marin and Xander Marin

Best for: Learning how to communicate openly about sex and intimacy.

Why I recommend this book:

I’ve been a big fan of Vanessa and Xander, and their podcast, Pillow Talks for a while. Vanessa is a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in sex therapy, and her husband, Xander is a self-proclaimed “regular dude.” As a couple, their superpower is humanizing conversations around sex and giving you language to understand what’s happening and feel empowered navigating the more intimate aspects of romantic relationships. Their book walks you through the 5 foundational conversations around sex, “sex talks,” if you will:

• Acknowledgment — “Sex is a thing, and we have it.”

• Connection — “What do we need to feel connected to each other?”

• Desire — “What do we each need to get turned on?”

• Pleasure — “What do we each need to feel good?”

• Exploration — “What should we try next?”

These five conversations make intimacy feel safer, more alive, and more collaborative- a language that you can learn together.

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My intention is that these conversations offer examples of what’s possible, give you a glimpse into the messy middle of becoming, and inspire you to find your own current.

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Content note: This interview includes discussion of childhood trauma, death of a parent, addiction, bulimia, and eating disorder recovery. Please take care of yourself while reading. You are welcome to skip this piece if these topics don’t feel supportive right now.

There will be some swearing, because we are talking to a chef after all. Also, you will find mom’s recipe for spaghetti alle vongole at the end :)

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My mom, now in her early sixties, is many things.

A cycle breaker. A chef. A wife. A mother. The most down-to-earth, soulful — and hilarious — woman you will ever meet.

She was born and raised in Princeton, New Jersey, and spent every summer on Nantucket, a place that remains sacred in our family. The first ten years of her life felt all-American, with blissfully in-love parents, three kids, and memories that felt sun-soaked and salt-stained.

And then, when she was ten years old, her father died suddenly and her mother understandably fell into a deep despair.

My mom lost one parent to death, and in a different, more complicated way, she lost parts of the other to grief and the comfort of alcohol.

Sometimes the pain we cannot speak finds another language. For my mom, in her teens and early twenties, that pain began expressing itself through an eating disorder.

As a daughter, this story is deeply personal to me. As a therapist, it is also one I recognize: the way our protective parts form around pain, the way the body carries what the mind cannot yet metabolize, and the way healing often begins as a subtle shift inward — and a willingness to ask for help.

This conversation is about my mom’s twenties and thirties — the years when she began listening to her gut, following a thread that would eventually lead her into restaurant kitchens in Boston and Italy, where she found community and slowly restored her connection to food, body, and self.

It is a conversation about nourishment, grief, intuition, purpose, and the messy, brave process of becoming yourself.

But mostly, it is a conversation with my mom.

And I feel really lucky to share her with you.

Let’s dive in.

Mom, can you take me back to your early twenties, when you were planning to become a therapist? How did you begin to realize that path wasn’t right for you yet?

I graduated from college with a degree in psychology. I had always wanted to be a therapist. I wanted to help alleviate pain in the world, so I was preparing for graduate school by doing neurological research with a doctor from Mass General Hospital.

But then I was sitting at a desk doing research, and I remember thinking, this does not feel right. I was stuck in a cubicle. I was compiling data. I did not want to compile data. It was too much of a reminder of being a dyslexic student.

When it came time to apply to graduate school, something in me knew that, with my dyslexic brain and my traumatic childhood, I didn’t feel ready to help other people yet.

I needed to help myself first.

Around the same time, all the pain I had been trying to manage with my eating disorder came to a head. I was around twenty-four years old, isolated socially, living away from home, and panicking: what the fuck do I do if I am not going to graduate school? This is all I have ever wanted to do.

I would go home from work, panic, and the eating disorder would take over. I wanted to be understood and supported, but I felt there was no one to talk to. I wasn’t able to reach out and ask for help yet.

One night, when I was deep in the eating disorder, it dawned on me that my mother was not coming to save me in Boston. It became clear to me that the bulimia was expressing something I could not yet say out loud: I needed help. I had been hoping she would find out my secret and rescue me when I was in high school, but she didn’t know how to see it.

I hit rock bottom on the floor of my apartment. And once I was there, I literally thought, okay, this is not working for me. I cannot run away from the fact that I am hurting myself. Something has to change.

That was the first moment I acted on behalf of myself — on my own team — instead of fighting with myself.

That is why I understand that moment differently now. I would never wish that kind of pain on anyone, but for me, it became clarifying. Life boiled down to a very silent moment of knowing. There was nothing left to argue with. A part of me whispered: Can I let something change?

I was one of the lucky ones. I am a very introspective person, and I thought, okay, I have to start choosing myself — and that means letting help in.

After that rock-bottom moment, how did you begin to choose a new direction?

Having concluded that I was not going to graduate school, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do. My gut, which I had just started listening to, was urging me to work with my hands and get away from my head.

I started reaching out, which is something you do not do when you are feeling shame. I called Lolli, a high school friend from Princeton. She felt like a safe person to ask for help.

She had gone to cooking school in Cambridge and said, “You know, there is this new restaurant in town that is really busy. They would probably hire you because you have two hands.” That restaurant was Michaela’s.

I had no direction, and somebody just pointed me in one. So I got off my ass and pursued it. I was so clueless about what was needed to work in a kitchen. But my naïveté actually helped me, because if I had gotten all wrapped up in my head, I probably would not have gone.

While waiting to talk to Chef Todd English, a creative talent that changed the food scene in Boston, I stood there staring at a glass jar filled with chocolate chip cookies, wondering how I could ever work in a place like this given my relationship with food.

Yet as the universe would have it, on my drive home from that meeting, I was listening to an NPR radio talk show. I heard something about how babies are born knowing when they are full. That fact rolled around in my brain for a while. I realized how disconnected I had become from my own body.

When I got offered the job at Michaela’s, I gave myself an out: if it didn’t work for me, I could quit. Slowly and imperfectly, I began approaching food not as something to control, but as a place where I might practice listening.

Once you started working at Michaela’s, what did the kitchen teach you about yourself?

I first started working at Michaela’s in the take-out shop, then making pizzas and salads, then at the pasta station behind the line.

At first, I was a deer in the headlights. I was not tuned in. Someone was relying on me to have a sense of self and direction, and I did not know who I was yet.

This was one of my first lessons in the kitchen: I had to ask for help.

Everyone around me seemed to have gone to cooking school, so I enrolled at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts while working full-time. It was the busiest year of my life, but probably one of the years with the most growth. I was making choices for myself and feeling my way toward alignment.

The kitchen suited my temperament. There was no social pressure, no academic pressure, no societal pressure. It resonated with my physicality, my humanity, my curiosity, and my need for human connection.

Restaurant kitchens seem to draw raw, real people. In Princeton, everybody looked perfect and seemingly had it all together. But in the kitchen, people were finding refuge. I found other people who were like me. There was no time for pretenses. I could just show up and be who I was, and everyone else was who they were too. I finally thought, oh, I’m not broken. I am one of these people.

One day, a chef was teaching me to make mayonnaise, and he saw something familiar in me. He asked if I was an ACOA. I did not know what that meant until he told me: adult child of an alcoholic. Turns out he was one too. I felt shocked that something I had worked so hard to hide could be seen by someone else. But I also felt understood and accepted as the person I was. It was the beginning of connection and belonging.

You always told me growing up, “You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going. You’re going to feel your way there.” Where did you learn that kind of trust?

I learned that gradually, one step at a time. But it wasn’t a straight line.

First there was rock bottom. Then there was my sense that something had to change — the first sign of being on my own team. Then I listened to the inner voice telling me that I needed to work with my hands and get out of my head, which had become a painful place to live.

Each little voice I listened to built on itself. My identity had been in relation to my mom and her needs. I did not know what I needed or wanted. Turning inward was where I found answers, and slowly, I began to feel more at home in my body.

So when I told you growing up, “feel your way there,” it was because that was my biggest revelation. The answer was not in my head. The answer was in feeling, taking action, and gathering information along the way.

When you moved to Italy the first time, what did you discover there?

In my mid to late twenties, things were tough on the home front with my mom, and I was angry, exhausted, and feeling powerless. I needed to get away from trying to fix pain I could not fix.

So I went to Italy. Part of it was, get me the fuck out of here. And part of it was, food is so much more than I thought. I want to learn more. I started with a culinary trip through my cooking school, and when everyone else boarded a plane home, I went off on my own.

I felt like I had been dropped by the stork in the middle of a field. I really had to muster up all my bravery.

The first restaurant I went to was in the tiny town of Goito, in the Lombardy region, known for butternut squash ravioli. I walked in between the lunch and dinner shift and saw two women standing around a huge table the size of a kitchen island. One had a long broom handle and was rolling out a tablecloth-sized sheet of pasta, orange from duck eggs.

It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Silky and thin and evenly hand-rolled with this broom handle. I could not believe it. Then they got ravioli cutters, put the butternut squash filling in, and next thing you knew there were a thousand butternut squash ravioli. I thought, what the fuck is going on? This is the coolest thing ever.

Italy was amazing for me. Food is life there. There is a reverence for food that I had not understood before. I worked in four restaurants on that first trip, and each one brought me closer and closer to the soil, to where the food began.

All the restaurants I worked at were owned and run by families, and I was folded in as one of them. When I picked grapes with women from the countryside, like Maria, I was taken in as one of them too.

After picking one day, Maria offered to teach me to roll pasta out by hand. We scampered over the hill to her cottage, collecting wild greens for lunch and pine cones for her fire. We unsettled the chickens to retrieve eggs for the dough. She showed me how to make a well of flour on her table, crack the eggs in the center, and add a “goccia di vino” to render a silky, tender dough.

Her arthritic yet muscular hands wielded the rolling pin with machine-like precision. I was clumsy trying to get the feel for rolling, pressing, and spreading my hands down evenly at the same time. She had made a tomato sauce, enhancing its flavor with chicken heads and feet, the night before. Offering the head to me, she placed it on top of my bowl of pasta; after all, I was her honored guest.

“Mangia,” my Italian mothers would say to me. And I did. I ate. I tasted. I cooked. I learned that food could also be how people loved, worked, gathered, and lived.

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After your first stay in Italy, how did that thread continue — from Olives and Figs to becoming head chef at Davio’s?

After Italy, I came back to Michaela’s, but Todd had left to open Olives, and he was my inspiration, so I followed him.

At Olives, I started by making bread and ravioli with Manon. I loved how tactile and meditative it was — kneading pasta and bread dough, drinking coffee, blaring music, laughing from five in the morning until two in the afternoon. Then I moved to the pasta station, where we did not stop moving from two in the afternoon until midnight.

After your dad and I got married, we lived outside Rome in the Castelli Romani for a year. I worked in restaurants, apprenticed in a fish kitchen in Venice, baked bread in a wood-fired oven, and picked grapes with Maria during vendemmia.

When we came back to the U.S., Steve DiFillippo asked me to be head chef at Davio’s. On my first day, I realized the immense responsibility I had taken on and thought, oh my God, I am so fucking in over my head again. I went into the walk-in refrigerator and cried by myself. I was panicking. It felt like too much.

All I could do was take it one day at a time, like I had learned in Al-Anon. Break it down into small pieces. Ask for help.

The big learning curve was asking. It was easier for me to do it myself than tell somebody else to do it. But I could not do it all by myself, or I would burn out. I had to say, can you peel a bucket of onions? Can you butcher the chickens?

That instinct to do everything myself, for fear of burdening others, was old caretaker stuff — the codependent child in me trying to stay safe.

You cannot be like that in a kitchen. You have to ask for help, or the kitchen can’t function. It gave my brain a new, healing experience.

What expectations or ‘shoulds’ did you have to move away from in order to find what was actually true for you?

My biggest “should” was to save my mom. When my father died suddenly at thirty-seven, she was left with three little kids: seven, ten, and twelve. We needed her. I made it my self-imposed task, as the middle child, to save our only parent.

It was impossible and all-consuming.

I could not disconnect from trying to save and fix. It became who I was. My whole identity was wrapped up in being there for my mom. I loved her and needed her, and tried to become an expert at reading her needs and nurturing her.

The eating disorder became a place where all of that unexpressed anxiety, grief, and need went. It was my coping strategy — a painful way of trying to survive.

Hitting rock bottom at twenty-four helped me realize I needed to let go of both: trying to save my mom and trying to manage my pain through food.

When I hear you talk about food, I hear so much more than cooking. I hear a cycle of rupture and repair. What did cooking restore in you?

The kitchen had been a warm place, a sacred place before my father died and everything changed.

It was where I baked cookies with my mom, watched her fry green tomatoes from her garden, steam quahogs she and I dug, and flip wild blueberry pancakes with berries we had just picked on back roads in Nantucket.

So when my gut led me back to a restaurant kitchen, and then to Italy, I reclaimed myself. Food was my connection to my family.

I cooked my way back to self.

I do not even really think of myself as a creative person. Connection to food is what allows me to create. It starts with tuning into my senses: What is my body hungry for? What will be satisfying? Who am I cooking for — and what do I want to share with them?

If it is a hot day, I need a watermelon salad. If it is winter, I need a big bowl of polenta. If it is my period, I better make myself some brownies. The answer is in there.

Cooking is a kind of medicine for me. It is connection, and eating is love.

How do you feel towards the woman you were in your 20s?

When I look back at the woman I was then, I hug her. I love her. I honor her. And I am just so … grateful she had the strength to listen and to go with the tide that pulled her.

What wisdom would you offer women contemplating a big pivot or learning how to trust the life that is calling them?

If you are contemplating a big pivot, you are probably running in overdrive like I was. I distracted myself from feeling too much.

“Stay busy, do not feel,” was my mode of operation. But that is how burnout happens.

The wisdom is: lay on the fucking ground and start listening to yourself.

The stillness will be uncomfortable. You do not have to force anything, and sometimes you may need to step away and take care of yourself first — but if you can stay with yourself gently, there is probably a voice, a knowing, a hint.

Honor it. Who knows where it will take you.

If you had to choose one recipe that carries the spirit of this story, what would it be — and why?

Pasta, to me, represents the most nurturing meal.

I am transported to the steamy Italian kitchen where a momma is at the stove, the aroma of sautéing garlic and herbs permeating the air, and an elder daughter helps serve the rest of the family bowls of freshly rolled pasta.

From the first forkful, I am thrilled by the bounce of the noodle, the slickness of the olive oil, the tang of the wine, the richness of the briny clams, the pungency of toasted garlic, the fiery bite of peperoncini, and the freshness of sun-infused parsley.

It has to be clam pasta because it connects my Italian mamas with my actual mama. I had all these lovely food experiences with my mother in Nantucket: blueberrying, clamming, picking tomatoes off her plants.

So clam pasta holds them both.

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Mom’s Recipe for Spaghetti alle Vongole

Serves: 4

Ingredients

For the clams and sauce

• 4 pounds clams, such as quahogs or Manila clams

  • If using quahogs, reserve 3 small clams per person to steam in the shell at the end.

• 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for finishing

• 4 cloves garlic, minced

• 1 fiery Italian peperoncino, or red pepper flakes to taste

• 1 cup dry white wine

• ½ bunch flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped

• Optional: 2 tablespoons grass-fed butter, for finishing

For the pasta

• 1 pound spaghetti

• ½ cup reserved pasta water

Instructions

1. Rinse and sort the clams.
   Rinse the clams well. If using quahogs, set aside 3 small clams per person to steam in the shell at the end.
   If using Manila clams, you can skip this sorting step.

2. Steam the larger clams.
   Place the larger clams in a pot with 1 cup white wine and 1 cup water. Steam just until the clams open, removing them immediately with tongs as they do. Do not let them continue cooking.

3. Chop the clams and reduce the broth.
   Remove the steamed clams from their shells and roughly chop them. Set aside. Strain the clam broth to remove any sand, then return it to the pot and reduce until you have about 1 cup.

4. Cook the pasta.
   Bring a separate pot of salted water to a boil. Cook the spaghetti according to the package directions. Before draining, reserve ½ cup of the pasta water.

5. Build the sauce.
   Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add the olive oil, garlic, and peperoncino. Once the garlic becomes fragrant, add the reserved small clams in the shell, or the Manila clams if using. Pour in 1 cup of the reduced clam broth and steam until the clams open.

6. Finish the pasta.
   Add the cooked spaghetti to the skillet and toss with the clams and broth. Add the chopped clams and parsley. If the pasta needs more liquid, add additional clam broth if you have it, or a splash of reserved pasta water.

7. Serve.
   Drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil, or swirl in a couple tablespoons of grass-fed butter to bring the sauce together. Serve immediately.

Cook’s Note

The key is not to overcook the clams. Steam them only until they open, then remove them right away so they stay tender.

⚖️ Disclaimer: The content in Inner Currents is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

Note that I am a registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC #16545) in the state of California. Under the supervision of Cyla Fisk, LMFT, at Her Space Therapy LA.

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

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I went to a hyper-competitive, “pressure cooker” public high school on the outskirts of Boston, where kids walk around in Harvard sweatshirts and small talk is, “What’s your GPA?” Sometime in the middle of my time there, the school held an event for parents where they showed The Race to Nowhere, a documentary about how students are pushed to the edge of burnout and mental health crises under the relentless pressure of achievement—AP classes, grades, elite universities, the “right” job.

In my work with anxious overachieving women (like me), I see that this doesn’t end in high school. Many of us just keep racing. Pushing to work at the right companies, to buy the right house, to build the right life. And then, and then, and then.

We live in the death grip of a 5-year plan that says, When I get this promotion. When I make this much money. When I build this kind of life—then I’ll be okay. Then I’ll be happy. Then I’ll finally follow what I actually want.

We think a 5-year plan signals clarity, ambition, direction. More often, it signals something deeper: a need to feel safe.

We are trying to wrap a gilded bow around uncertainty. But the real issue isn’t uncertainty—it’s what we use to protect ourselves inside of it.

Emotional Safety, Inside and Out

Emotional safety is the felt sense of security, attunement, and stability we experience in relationships and in our environment. It is shaped by how available connection feels to us—because, as children, connection is bound up with survival.

When emotional safety is inconsistent or unpredictable in childhood, we often learn to organize ourselves around the outside world. We develop protective strategies—like peacekeeping, overachieving, caretaking—to stabilize the system, preserve connection, reduce threat, and feel as okay as we can within it.

We learn an outside-in way of living. And for many of us, the 5-year plan becomes an extension of that. We try to manage the external world so that we can finally feel okay inside. We continue pleasing, perfecting, and performing our way through adulthood. And while that strategy may succeed in helping us build a certain kind of life, it often leaves us feeling empty, disconnected, and unfulfilled—because we’ve lost touch with ourselves in the process.

The shift is learning to cultivate enough internal safety and steadiness that we can live from the inside out. We will always need connection, but this pivot allows us to seek it without abandoning ourselves in the process. When we connect with ourselves first, and from that place engage with the world around us, we no longer need complete certainty or control in order to feel okay. We trust our capacity to meet what happens and move with life as it unfolds.

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Modern relationships ask us to do something almost impossible: to stay close without losing ourselves, to feel secure without getting bored, to grow without growing apart.

In her Grammy award–winning record, Olivia Dean captures this tension with remarkable clarity, putting words to what most of us only feel in our chests—the paradoxes, contradictions, and growth edges of love. The more I listened to The Art of Loving, the more convinced I became: it’s a masterclass in how modern love actually works.

At its core, the album reveals three truths: attachment is the invisible architecture of relationships; love is a paradox to hold, not a problem to solve; and growth is a dual movement—a becoming and a shedding, all at once. These are Dean’s lessons in love—the mechanisms through which she rewrites the script of modern relationships.

1. Attachment: The Invisible Architecture of Love

Attachment shapes how we love—often without us realizing it. In Let Alone the One You Love and Close Up, Olivia Dean animates the attachment dynamics that underlie modern love stories. Across both tracks, she captures a central tension: the pull between authenticity and attachment—the moments when it can feel like we have to choose between staying connected to someone else and staying connected to ourselves.

Attachment is the past living through the present. It reflects the ways we learned to stay connected to caregivers—and how those strategies resurface in adult relationships. In this way, attachment becomes the invisible architecture of love: the unconscious patterns that shape how we relate to the people closest to us.

Dean gestures toward the authenticity versus attachment dilemma in Let Alone the One You Love with the lyric, “And if you knew me at all / You wouldn’t try to keep me small / Who would do that to a friend / Let alone the one you love?” The line reveals a familiar bind: the sense that, in order to maintain connection, we have to disavow parts of ourselves—to trade authenticity for attachment.

For many of us, this strategy was once adaptive. As children, we depended on caregivers for survival, and so we learned—often unconsciously—how to preserve connection, even at the cost of self-abandonment. But adulthood introduces something new: choice. And as Dean says later in the song, “Well, well, I’m not having it, babe.” Here, she exercises that choice—refusing an attachment that requires her to shrink, and in doing so, making space for a more secure kind of love. One that can hold both authenticity and attachment within the same relational container.

Dean deepens this portrait of attachment in Close Up, where she captures what it feels like to love someone with avoidant tendencies. The emotional core of the song hinges on the question: “How do you get close to / someone you keep out of reach / And where does that leave me?”

With avoidant attachment, the desire for connection exists alongside an equally strong impulse to retreat from it. As intimacy deepens, an internal alarm can sound—pulling the person back into distance. This, too, is a learned adaptation. When emotional needs are repeatedly unmet, needing itself can begin to feel risky—so we learn to rely on ourselves instead, turning away from the very closeness we still long for.

The need for connection doesn’t disappear—it just goes underground. And when this pattern resurfaces in adult relationships, it no longer protects connection—it disrupts it, leaving the other person to wonder, “Where does that leave me?”

What Dean captures so precisely is that love is never just about the present moment—it’s shaped by the ghosts of how we learned to need, to reach, to stay. The work isn’t to outrun these patterns, but to notice when the past is bleeding into the present, to have compassion for the ways they once protected us, and to gently reorient toward the relationship that is actually in front of us.

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2. The Paradox of Love: Holding Opposites in Relationships

The goal isn’t to resolve love’s contradictions—it’s to learn how to move with them. When I first listened to this album, I became obsessed with two songs—So Easy (To Fall in Love) and Something in Between—because their lyrics insist on a truth we feel, but rarely articulate: relationships are meant to hold opposing needs. We flow between adventure and comfort, stability and novelty, individuality and intimacy. These tensions give relationships their texture and aliveness. In other words, love is not a problem to solve, but a paradox to hold.

Olivia Dean captures this perfectly in So Easy (To Fall in Love) when she sings, “I’m the perfect mix of Saturday night and the rest of your life.” In love, we crave “Saturday night”—the energy, novelty, and sense of discovery that makes you look across a crowded room and think, “How lucky am I that they’re mine? “ And we crave “the rest of your life”—the stability, safety, and comfort of something that lasts. We want a durable love—someone to grieve, grow, and pay taxes with. Dean doesn’t suggest we have to choose. She gestures toward a kind of love that makes space for both.

In Something in Between, she returns to this tension through the line, “I’m not leaving, just feel tightly squeezed in / Love needs breathing.” Here, she names something essential: the need for both intimacy and individuality within the same relationship. She is saying, I want to be with you without losing myself. I’ll stay—I just don’t want to feel suffocated. It’s not one or the other; it’s both—closeness and space, held together.

In honoring this paradox, Dean echoes the work of renowned couples therapist and author of Mating in Captivity, Esther Perel, whose work centers on learning how to live inside the opposing truths of our romantic relationships.

Perel often distinguishes between love and desire as a way of illuminating this tension. Love is about closeness—safety, attachment, the building of a shared life. Desire, on the other hand, requires a degree of separateness—a sense of distance, of otherness, of not fully possessing the other person. Both exist within the same relationship, but they ask for different conditions.

Relationships pull us toward togetherness—toward building a “we.” But when that togetherness tips into total merging, we can lose the very separateness that keeps the relationship feeling alive. The paradox flattens. To build “the rest of your life” with someone requires giving up some autonomy—enough to form a bond—but not so much that you disappear inside of it.

Perel invites us to re-locate our Self - and our partner’s- within the relationship. Because desire, too, needs breathing.

Dean and Perel converge on the same truth: the art of loving isn’t about resolving these contradictions, but learning how to live inside them—to move between closeness and space, intimacy and individuality, Saturday night and the rest of your life, without collapsing into either.

(If you want more on this topic, I wrote a full article for Verily Magazine).

3. Growth in Relationships: Becoming and Letting Go

There is a particular type of grief that accompanies growth—a grief that metabolizes what was to make space for what will be. It emerges as we shed old relationships, parts of self, and places we have outgrown—the terrain of Baby Steps and Lady Lady. This grief is the portal to becoming, and Olivia Dean captures it with striking accuracy.

Baby Steps holds heartbreak and rebuilding, grief and growth, within the same breath. The first verse traces the roles her partner used to play—the one who would plug her back in when she was “down to ten percent,” the one she would “text when the plane lands,” and the one she would “call when it’s taking off.” There is a visceral ache in this remembering.

But then Dean pivots: “I’ll be my own pair of safe hands / It’s not the end, it’s the making of.” The grief gives way to growth—the “making of” a relationship with herself rooted in love, trust, and care.

The second verse deepens this shift: “There’ll be roses on the shelf / ‘Cause this house gon’ love itself / Yeah, this house gon’ love itself.” These lyrics point to a secure attachment to self. As the narrator grieves the ways her partner showed up for her, she begins to recognize that she, too, can create a sense of safety and nurturance from within. Not in a hyper-independent way, but in an interdependent one that says: I can rely on you, and I can also rely on me.

The grief clears the way for her return to self.

Lady Lady reinforces this dual movement of growth—the pull toward who we are becoming, and the shedding of what once held us together. At first glance, the track reads as a meditation on transformation and trusting the unfolding of life. But underneath, Dean reveals the mechanisms that make that transformation possible.

Lines like “God I’m gonna miss this house / But I guess I’m moving out / Sunday morning” and “So if that was our last kiss, now we know that / Now we know that dream ain’t coming true / There’s room for something new” hold both forces at once. There is the pull forward—the quiet acceptance that it’s time to move on. And there is the accompanying grief—the missing, the nostalgia, the ache.

As the verse unfolds, the shedding becomes more visible: “All the things I couldn’t live without / I don’t need ’em now” and “Overnight the clothes I always wore / Don’t suit me anymore.” We shed the house, the hair, the clothes—the external scaffolding that once held us together. But what we’re really shedding are the versions of ourselves that needed that scaffolding—the parts of us that relied on those things to feel stability, security, and comfort from the outside in.

As we begin to resource those qualities within ourselves, we naturally outgrow what we once needed. Growth asks us to release that scaffolding; grief allows us to transform it into something new.

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Living Inside The Paradox

Modern relationships stretch us. How do I love you without losing myself? How do I rely on you—and also rely on me?

Olivia Dean shows us that living inside these tensions and in-betweens is the task of modern love itself.

To love someone is to move within these contradictions. To feel the pull between attachment and authenticity—and create a relationship that makes space for both. To hold the paradox of intimacy and individuality without collapsing into either. To let growth ask something of you—to release what once felt essential, and trust what is emerging in its place.

Love, in all its complexity, is not something we solve.

It’s something we learn to live inside.

⚖️ Disclaimer: The content in Inner Currents is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

Note that I am a registered Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC #16545) in the state of California. Under the supervision of Cyla Fisk, LMFT, at Her Space Therapy LA.

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

Your new coworker walks into the office. Her resumé is flawless- it’s clear she has made all of the “right moves.” She responds as if she can anticipate what your boss is about to say next. You just know her Notion is color-coded and immaculate. And of course, she’s friendly and unfailingly polite.

She has it all together, you think to yourself.

But beneath this impressive façade, her internal experience tells a different story. She lives with a deep fear of failure, has been struggling with IBS for the past decade, frequently questions whether she is actually good enough, feels exhausted by a mind that races a mile a minute, and can’t seem to get through a Netflix show without also answering emails or washing the dishes.

She embodies the paradox of high-functioning anxiety: what is displayed on the outside is often in tension with what is actually happening inside.

Why High-Functioning Anxiety Often Goes Unrecognized

High-functioning anxiety is a term often used to describe people whose anxiety is significant internally while remaining partially masked by achievement and external functioning. This is part of what makes it so difficult to recognize. On the outside, they are performing at a high level in many areas of their professional and personal lives. And yet, internally, it can feel like a relentless undercurrent of pressure, fear, and hypervigilance.

HFA can look like chronic overthinking, perfectionism, people-pleasing, fear of failure, difficulty resting, chronic worry about the future, somatic symptoms, or working to the point of burnout. These outward expressions often point to a deeper pattern at work.

As a depth-oriented therapist, I see the origin story of high-functioning anxiety as rooted in childhood and reinforced by culture. Many times, the perfectionism, overachieving, and people-pleasing that accompany HFA began as unconscious attempts to protect ourselves and stay connected to the people we depended on for survival. We then carry those patterns with us for decades, in a culture that continues to reward them. When those childhood survival strategies are socially reinforced, they can become deeply entrenched - keeping us socially safe while slowly disconnecting us from ourselves.

The Best Books for High Functioning Anxiety

There is no one-size-fits-all presentation of high-functioning anxiety. One woman may index more on people-pleasing. Another may live with chronic pain. Another may have climbed the corporate ladder and still feel deeply empty inside. The expression may vary, but the organizing force is often the same: a disconnect between what is shown externally and what is felt internally.

That is why I curated this list of books (and podcasts) for the many archetypes of the ambitious woman with high-functioning anxiety. In fact, book recommendations are the number one thing I get asked for on Instagram. These books offer language and new lenses for understanding the many facets of high-functioning anxiety - and for finding our way back to ourselves. I hope you see yourself somewhere in this list, and feel some relief in the process.

If you want to skip ahead, here’s who this list is for:

• the eternal “good girl”

• the woman with chronic pain

• the wellness lover who still feels anxious

• the overachiever who feels unfulfilled

• the highly sensitive, high achieving woman

• the woman trying to understand her patterns

• the people-pleaser

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The particular kind of heartbreak that comes from choosing authenticity- and realizing the life you want is also going to cost you something you love.

As I stood at the edge of my decision, I could feel the tug-of-war unfolding inside my chest- the “this is right” and “this hurts” pulling with equal force.

Heartbreaks like this remind me that grief and growth are held within the same breath.

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The Kind of Heartbreak That Comes With Authenticity

Last June, my fiancé and I packed up our sweet 650-square-foot San Francisco apartment and began a nine-month nomadic stint. It has been equally life-giving and destabilizing. In the moments of shakiness, I would cry, “I need to go back to San Francisco.”

“April 1st,” he agreed. “We’ll go back April 1st.”

April 1st became my prayer.

April 1st is now two weeks away, and we are not, in fact, going back to San Francisco. We are staying in a small surf town in Southern California. I realized that while I was saying (screaming?) San Francisco, what I was really trying to say was: I want to feel settled.

San Francisco was one way I knew how to feel settled. But I found another version down here, too. For a highly sensitive human, something in me has clicked into place with the sun, salt water, and simplicity. Dare I say, alignment?

And yet, I am breaking my own heart.

I am leaving a home behind in San Francisco. I am leaving soul friends - the type you wait your whole life to meet - in the Golden Gate city. Yes, we will reimagine what long-distance friendships look like. And I have cried on the bathroom floor because I am acutely aware that this moment in time - getting to share that place with those people - is ephemeral.

As I hold grief in one hand and growth in the other, I am reminded of Cheryl Strayed’s words: “be brave enough to break your own heart.”

Okay, Cheryl.

Grief vs. Anxiety: Learning the Difference

Walking away from the Northern California chapter of my life, I am still grieving. But the grief feels like the truth.

Here’s how I know.

The grief lives in my chest like a slow, heavy tidal pull that says, “You really love that place. You really love those people. It’s so painful to walk away from all of that.”

Of course. Of course. Of course.

And yet, I do not feel anxiety.

Anxiety lives in my chest like a feral little monster trying to strangle me from the inside out. It burns hot and sharp. It pulls the inner fire alarm and screams, “Something is wrong!!! Panic immediately!!! Stop drop and roll!!!”

This feels different.

As I inch closer to moving into my new home, my inner alarm is not sounding. The grief does not tell me that my decision was wrong. It asks me to hold the grief and the growth at the same time.

So, I let both be there and I soften.

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Why Softening Matters (What Big Wave Surfers Know)

While I am forever a baby wave surfer, I am fascinated by the psyche and science behind big wave surfing.

To survive a crash from a 20- to 80-foot wave at Maverick’s or Nazaré, big wave surfers must soften their bodies. Counterintuitive, I know. A rigid body is more likely to sustain injury under the violent pressure of a wave. A soft body can keep the heart rate lower and move with the spin cycle, rather than against it.

Moving through grief feels like that.

If you tighten and brace and say, “Holy shit. Not this!!!! Please not fucking this!!!,” you are fighting against the natural rise and fall of your emotional experience. If, instead, you soften and say, “Grief is allowed to be here too. This makes sense,” something shifts. The big wave still comes, but you are flowing with it.

Allowing emotions to fully express shifts something within us.

1. It ensures that nothing gets stuck. Emotions want to move. And when they don’t - when they go unprocessed - they keep the nervous system in a chronic state of high alert, sometimes even showing up in the body as physical symptoms.

2. We remain whole. When we cut off parts of our emotional experience, we fracture something inside of ourselves. Right now, growing and grieving are both alive in me. To disown one would be to create a fissure within myself. Letting both exist - at the same time, in the same body - is a return to my multiplicity, my wholeness.

3. And something in us loosens. “There is a freedom,” I told my therapist last session, “in being able to hold my grief. If I can hold my grief, I can do anything.” I might collapse into a puddle of tears from time to time, but I know in my bones that I’m going to be okay. There is a freedom in letting the wave move through me.

And so we weep, and we ache, and we grieve, and we build, and we breathe, and we grow.

The Courage to Break Your Own Heart

Growth and grief are like an inhale and an exhale.

Growth asks us to grieve what once was. Grief clears space for what’s next.

I’m starting to understand that being brave enough to break our own hearts is also how we build our lives.

Moving from Northern California to Southern California echoes - and reopens - the pain of moving across the country from my family six years ago. That grief is tucked into the corner of my chest. I will carry it forever. It is a reminder of my love for my people, and of my love for myself - of my permission to grow and create a life that feels like me.

I expect that I will break my own heart many more times in this life. If I am breaking my heart in the pursuit of authenticity, I’m okay with that.

And when the grief comes, I can feel the tidal pull in my chest. I can let it move through me. I can soften, instead of brace.

And then, at some point, the wave will pass, and I will take another breath.

⚖️ Disclaimer: The content in Inner Currents is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

Last September, I heard the intuitive whisper to start writing again.

For six months, I carried this intuition, shared my idea with close friends, and gathered information. I also froze at the idea of taking any meaningful action.

If you’ve ever known exactly what to do - and still found yourself not doing it - you understand this.

I was living out what I call the gap between Knowing and Doing. This gap has nothing to do with intelligence or drive, and everything to do with the dissonance between self-protection and self-connection.

I know I’m not alone in this. I see many high-achieving women in business and entrepreneurship play out this same pattern. We know what to do. We have the drive. We know how to execute. We have a strategy. And yet - we are not moving.

This is a story about that gap, and how to close it.

The Gap Between Knowing and Doing

Six months ago, I started to daydream about balancing my clinical work with more creative and reflective work. I would fantasize about a life that allowed me to write for a few hours in the morning, and then see three or four clients in the afternoon. A rhythm that felt more spacious and sustainable for my nervous system.

And then I remembered - I had lived a version of this life before.

During my senior year of college, I was writing my anthropology thesis (I was the only one in the entire anthropology department to write one - I know, I’m kind of a nerd), but it was truly the time I felt the most intellectually engaged and aligned with my nature.

I would wake up in my little apartment that I shared with two friends. Walk down the historic red brick sidewalks of Benefit Street to my favorite coffee shop along the Providence River. I would be the first one there, at 7am. I would order my coffee with almond milk and honey. Curl up in a corner with my laptop and write for two or three hours. Then I would go to a late morning yoga class (shout out to Providence Power Yoga), go home, shower, and off to campus for afternoon classes.

I was a girl in flow, moving in rhythm with myself.

Writing felt like how I made sense of the world - of patterns and themes and the inner currents that shape who we are and what we do.

I missed this mode of working. I began to toy with the idea of starting a Substack. A complement to the work I do as a therapist. A place where ambitious women could slow down, reconnect with their most creative, sensitive, intuitive selves - and uncover the patterns that pull us away from this most authentic core.

I started a page in my Notes app and the ideas began pouring out.

I took the Authentic Audience Substack course. I had a strategy. I had the structure. I understood the technical back-end setup that once felt intimidating. I had the inner knowing.

But I still wasn’t Doing The Thing.

Why High-Achieving Women Procrastinate (I say this with love)

Usually in these moments, Type A high-achievers like us reach for more strategy. Another book. Another course. Or we push harder. We try to resolve inner friction with an external solution. We reach outside of ourselves to manage what is happening inside.

And this keeps us in a state of force rather than flow.

You might be in the Knowing–Doing gap if:

• You have the strategy but aren’t taking action

• You keep signing up for courses and reading books instead of publishing

• You tweak and edit and refine - but it never feels like enough

• You wait to feel “ready”

• You feel internal resistance when visibility increases

Yes, business requires structure and systems. But it also requires self-connection and self-trust - the ability to tolerate visibility, uncertainty, being misunderstood, disappointing someone, outgrowing something, and taking risks.

To build something visible is to make yourself visible.

Business - especially heart-led business - is inherently vulnerable.

We need to be able to meet and hold ourselves in that vulnerability in order to Do The Thing.

This requires shifting from self-protection to self-connection.

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My anxiety had been flaring for six months - panic, spiraling, old wounds resurfacing - and for the first time in a long time, it felt quieter.

“I’m the most regulated I’ve been since last summer,” I confessed to my sweet therapist who has held me through a very intense season in my life.

She nodded in that knowing way and asked what I thought was contributing to the shift.

Here is what I said:

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I Took Care of My Body (Nervous System Regulation Starts Here)

Over the past decade, I’ve honed rituals that help my body feel safe. During this season, I returned to them with devotion- giving my system the predictability and containment it needed.

Think of it like this: Our bodies are the hardware for our mental health. Our thoughts and patterns are the software. We cannot neglect the hardware and expect the software to run optimally.

• Sleep: I was in bed by 8:30 or 9, screens off, reading or chatting with my partner before drifting off. Going to bed and waking up at a similar time, 8 hours every night, because the body likes predictability.

• Movement: I moved in ways that helped me metabolize my stress and remind me that I am strong. I love lifting weights, taking long walks, and surfing.

• Nourishment: I focused on eating full, balanced meals with protein, fats, carbs, and fiber at regular times throughout the day. Breakfast upon waking was crucial to signal to my body - “you’re safe, you’re fed.”

• Caffeine: I love my morning cup of coffee. But my limit now is 1 cup of Four Sigmatic Half Caf coffee.

This focus on cultivating physiological safety intersects with the work of Dr. Ellen Vora. In her book The Anatomy of Anxiety, she distinguishes between false anxiety - driven by physiological factors like sleep deprivation, blood sugar dips, caffeine and alcohol - and true anxiety, which is information.

Reducing the false anxiety allowed me to hear the true anxiety more clearly.

Trauma Work and Therapy Support

As someone who does a lot of holding - in my personal and professional life - I recognized that I needed more holding in this intense period.

So I stayed consistent with my San Francisco-based therapist who I adore and who I’ve been seeing for a while. This is long-term depth-oriented, somatic, and relational work.

In addition, I started adjunct EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy for targeted trauma reprocessing.

The idea with EMDR is that the past lives through the present - present day reactions are often old information playing out in real time - until it is reprocessed. When experiences are too overwhelming to process at the time they occurred (when we were 6, 16, 26 years old), they get frozen in our memory networks - stuck in the same emotional, sensory, and cognitive state as when they occurred.

EMDR helps the brain do now what it couldn’t do then, so the past can be in the past and life can be lived more fully in the present.

I’ve found this combination of targeted trauma reprocessing work with longer-term somatic and relational work to be so supportive. These are also the modalities I use with my clients.

Daily Nervous System Regulation Practices

Like many women with high-functioning anxiety, I was racing through life because this was my familiar default mode. By 7am, I would be brushing my teeth while making the bed while listening to voice notes at 1.5x speed.

This was my nervous system waving a red flag.

Slowing down is not optional for me anymore. If I don’t slow down, my body will make me slow down (think: chronic pain, burnout etc). Here’s what I did:

• Slower mornings: Allowing myself at least 20 minutes in the morning to sip my coffee, read, journal, and ease into the day. Then into some form of movement.

• Intentional practices: I got into JournalSpeak, a raw unfiltered journaling practice designed by therapist Nicole Sachs to help empty the “emotional reservoir” - the well of repressed anger, pain, shame, and grief that our bodies perceive as internal predators, pushing the nervous system into overdrive. JournalSpeak gives voice to the material your nervous system has been holding onto so it no longer needs to send alarm signals throughout the body.

• A few times per week I weave in meditation or breath work from Open and/or a Deep Imagining from To Be Magnetic — all of which help me drop back in.

• Slower evenings: My sessions usually finish at 5pm, at which point I close my laptop and go for a sunset stroll. Cook dinner, shower and skincare (I’m obsessed with ClearStem), and then go into full chill mode. Sometimes it’s reading a book (recently I loved Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez and City of Nightbirds by Juhea Kim), and sometimes it’s watching a comfort show (Heated Rivalry, Bridgerton, Shrinking - so much good stuff right now) before winding down for bed.

Flexibility over rigidity, always.

High-Functioning Anxiety at Work

I’m a highly sensitive person armored in Type A perfectionistic overachieving patterns. For a long time, those patterns were the parts of me that kept me safe. They were my protectors - wise and adaptive when I was younger, but keeping me stuck and exhausted in outdated patterns as an adult.

Some therapists can see 20+ clients per week. I simply cannot (I tried for over a year).

Admitting this has been hard, especially to the inner pusher part of me that’s been yelling “Just do more!!!! Keep going!!!!!” for the past couple decades.

Lately, I’ve been practicing something different: instead of letting that protective part take the lead, I’m learning to let it soften and step back - making space for the part of me that knows what I actually need.

Practically, that looked like:

• I stopped taking new clients for a few months.

• I shuffled my schedule (no more than 5 clients per day, ever).

• I took 2.5 weeks off over the winter holidays, which I was terrified to do financially - but my nervous system needed it.

• I reflected on times in my life when work has been the most satisfying. My brain immediately floated back to being tucked into a nook at Dave’s Coffee in Providence, Rhode Island, warm beverage in hand, writing my anthropology thesis. So I leaned into my creativity and writing again.

Hello, Substack.

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Environmental Alignment and Sensitivity

There’s a quote that circulates in mental health circles on Instagram about “you can’t regulate your way out of a misaligned life.” I understood this cognitively, but not in an embodied way - until recently.

For the past 8 weeks, my fiancé and I have been living in a small surf town in Southern California. I am still doing deep work - both clinical and creative - and planning a wedding, but I am also surfing multiple days a week and eating my body weight in fish tacos.

I feel deeply connected to the natural environment around me - an environmental container that holds and soothes me as a highly sensitive person.

I’m having a hard time recognizing myself because the sense of flow, groundedness, and calm that I feel is so new.

I’m still holding on a lot of life- I just feel like my nervous system finally has the inner and outer architecture necessary to hold it.

I think this is what people mean when they talk about alignment.

To be clear, this did not happen overnight - it has been years in the making. I’ve done 6+ years of therapy. I’ve moved across the country 3x in 4 years to make graduate school happen for me and my fiancé. I worked my way through my Master’s and am still working my way through thousands of clinical hours for licensure.

It has been a gritty past few years (decades?) and something both internally and externally clicked more into place upon our arrival in a mellow coastal town.

Back in the Therapy Room

So when my therapist asked what was contributing to the shift, this was the answer:

I took care of my body. I let myself be held.I slowed the f*ck down. I changed how I work. I found an environmental container that could hold me.

Six months ago I was curled up in a fetal position crying from overwhelm.

Yesterday in therapy, I was crying from relief.

⚖️ Disclaimer: The content in Inner Currents is for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy or individualized mental health care.

Please subscribe and engage at your own discretion. I assume no liability for any diagnosis, treatment decision, or purchase made in response to content here.

If you are a current or former client, please note that engaging through Substack may compromise confidentiality. Please contact me via email, lyla@herspacela.com, rather than this platform.

I thought creativity belonged to other people - musicians, chefs, artists. I didn’t yet understand what creativity really is.

When I was young, my dad was a touring musician and my mom was the head chef at a popular Italian restaurant in Boston. Dad would be on the road for days at a time, and then come home and watch me while mom worked long hours behind the line.

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Sometimes dad would put me in my car seat in the white Volkswagen camper van (our car for the first five years of my life), put on a Bob Dylan CD, and drive me downtown to visit mom. There she was in her chef’s whites, smelling like olive oil and garlic. The other chefs - her restaurant family - would help me break into the cereal closet, where they kept the fun things like Fruit Loops.

Mom and dad’s friends were largely other musicians and chefs, music club owners, artists, sports writers. My childhood hinged on good music and good food - on my parents’ creative gifts.

Which I felt like I did not have.

Why I Didn’t Think I Was Creative

I attempted to learn the guitar. I cooked with my mom, but was more interested in spending time with her than preparing the food. I struggled in art class and preferred when the teacher would come over and fix my painting for me.

I was more of a studious and sporty kid - three seasons of sports, obsessing over my grades (hello, anxious overachiever). I attended a hyper-competitive public school on the outskirts of Boston and was just trying to leverage my perfectionism and (anxiety-fueled) work ethic enough to survive.

While I loved the energy of creativity, I didn’t identify as creative.

Until recently - when I reimagined what creativity meant to me.

What Is Creativity, Really?

Here’s my hypothesis:

Creativity is a mode of being.

To me, creativity is the practice of going inward - connecting to something true within ourselves - and bringing it into existence.

Dad went inward and transmuted feelings into lyrics, melodies, songs. Mom went inward and translated something ineffable into flavor profiles, handmade pasta, food that made people feel loved and inspired.

But they also went inward in another way. They connected with a way of being that felt aligned for them - and began living from that place.

Rethinking my parents’ creativity unlocked something for me.

Their creativity was partially about what they were making - the songs, the pasta. But it was also about how they were living. They turned inward. Got quiet enough to hear the still, small voice that said, I want to do something different. And they began living from that place.

It was imperfect and messy and stressful at times, especially when two kids came along. They adapted and pivoted and let the dream evolve, while continuing to honor that creative impulse within.

Why Do We Struggle With Creativity?

Creativity can feel terrifying because it asks us to tolerate the discomfort of doing something different.

Following the social script may mean less outer friction, but it often creates more inner friction - the chronic stress that comes from living out of alignment with ourselves.

By definition, creativity requires departing from the “shoulds” and external expectations that we may have internalized as our blueprint. Our nervous system perceives this pivot as a threat because those social scripts are the very guardrails we once used to keep ourselves safe.

When we were younger, meeting external expectations - with our parents, with our communities - helped us stay in connection and belong to the people we depended on. This was a survival strategy: adaptive, intelligent, even genius in our early years.

But it can imprint us with an entirely other-oriented way of living that gets stuck in time.

When we grow up and continue to live from the protective stance of:

• What do I do to keep them happy?

• To keep the peace?

• To be seen by them?

We can become chronically disconnected from ourselves.

This stance might keep us safe - but it can also keep us stuck in jobs, living situations, and relationships that don’t actually feel good to our Self.

Too often, this disconnection from Self is mistaken for a lack of creativity.

We Are All Creatives

Remember this: you are innately creative - the creative force within you is probably just hidden beneath a few layers of self-protection.

From my new point of view, creativity is less about fixed talent and more about a way of living - being deeply connected to yourself, and willing to risk veering from the social script (even just a little bit!).

The greatest creative project we can undertake is building a life that feels like us. I don’t mean for this to sound daunting or grandiose. Creativity can exist in small, everyday moments. We exercise our creativity every time we choose alignment over approval.

When we accept a part of ourselves that we previously disavowed. When we say “no” to the romantic interest who leaves us feeling confused and dysregulated. When we say “yes” to the friendship that soothes our nervous system. When we start a new hobby - even if we are “bad” at it - because something inside us lights up. When we follow our curiosities - including the ones that don’t seem “productive.” When we move to a place that resonates with our soul. When we make the decision that breaks our heart but feels deeply right to a part of us. When something inside of us just clicks into place.

The deep work is building a nervous system that can tolerate that. One that can stay with the discomfort of doing something different, of choosing self-connection over self-protection, even when the old guardrails whisper, Don’t.

Creativity, then, is not about performance.
It is about the ongoing practice of reconnecting to yourself.

Recommended Reading for a Creative Life

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear - Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert argues that creativity is available to anyone willing to follow curiosity, and accept that fear might come along for the ride.

Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose - Martha Beck
Beck reframes anxiety as a signal that you may be living out of alignment. Through research, stories, and practical exercise, she helps you notice what is expanding you versus constricting you, nudging you towards your curiosity, creativity, and purpose.

Journal Prompts for a Creative Life

1. What is your gut reaction to the word creativity?
   Do you bristle? Cringe? Feel fear? Get excited? What do you notice in your body as you read the word?

2. Where do you think you learned that response?
   Was there a moment - or a person - that taught you what “creative” meant, or who it was for? What did you start believing about yourself because of that?

3. When do you feel in a state of flow?
   When do you access that optimal state of effortless absorption in an activity - where time softens, your inner critic quiets, and you feel fully engaged? What are you doing? Who are you with? What qualities are present?

4. What is something you’ve been wanting to do - something that feels aligned - but have not yet done?
   What protective pattern might be standing in the way?

5. When have you taken an action that felt deeply aligned - where you felt expanded and something clicked into place?
   What thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations accompanied that experience?

6. Who inspires you as someone living creatively?
   In your personal life or in the larger world, who is living guided by self-connection? What is it about their way of being that moves you? Be specific.

Eldest daughter syndrome has gone viral, and for good reason. It captures the lived experience of eldest daughters who often inherit a disproportionate sense of responsibility and an outsized emotional burden in their families of origin.

While I love a catchy phrase like eldest daughter syndrome, I don’t love how pathologizing it sounds. In reality, what it labels as a “syndrome” is really a collection of survival strategies that eldest daughters reached for when they were young and there weren’t many other options. The perfectionism. The hypervigilance. The parentification. The people pleasing. At the time, these were brilliant and wise forms of self-protection. Not a syndrome or a pathology, but a protective pattern and survival strategy.

The Fawn Response - The “Good Girl” Nervous System Strategy

At the root of the patterns we colloquially lump into eldest daughter syndrome is often a nervous system fawn response. When we, eldest daughters, couldn’t fight because we were so much smaller than our parents or it felt unsafe in a chaotic or high-conflict household. And we couldn’t flee - because as children we are dependent on our parents for survival. We found ourselves in a survival bind. And so we learned to fawn - the survival mechanism we could access.

We became the “good girl,” the “easy kid no one had to worry about,” the “responsible one.” We created safety by staying hypervigilant to everybody’s moods and needs and smoothing over any tension with our people pleasing, perfectionism, or peacekeeping behaviors.

Therapist and New York Times bestselling author Meg Josephson, LCSW, explains the fawn response in her new book Are You Mad At Me? She writes, “The fawn response is about becoming more appealing to the threat - being liked by the threat, satisfying the threat, being helpful, and agreeable to the threat - so you can feel safe” (pg. 12, 2025).

For eldest daughters, the threat or perceived threat is often the chaos, unpredictability, conflict, or outsized emotional burden in the childhood home… and beyond.

From this primal instinct to fawn comes a set of protective patterns that help us survive.

From Lamb to Wolf: How Eldest Daughters Protect Themselves

Taylor Swift’s ballad “Eldest Daughter” helps us make this pivot from pathology to protection through a single lyric:

“Every eldest daughter was the first lamb to the slaughter / So we all dressed up as wolves.”

As a therapist (and an eldest daughter), I love this lyric because it highlights both the innocent inner child and the adaptation to protect that inner child. “The first lamb to the slaughter” nods to the youth and innocence of the firstborn child who often faces the emotional energy - and perhaps unpredictability - of her family system alone.

Given this vulnerable position, eldest daughters “all dressed up as wolves.” We learned to protect ourselves with a tough, industrious, I’ve got it all together, don’t worry about me mask.

Taylor’s analogy to a “wolf” here is so powerful. Wolves are fierce protectors. They have strategic defenses to protect themselves and ensure the safety of their packs. So too are eldest daughters. Our wolf-like parts developed because our five-year-old selves were adapting to the circumstances in the only way available at the time. Whether that meant trying to stabilize the family system by meeting everyone’s emotional needs, or getting perfect grades so as not to contribute to the chaos, eldest daughters were attempting to protect the system upon which they depended for survival — and, in turn, protect themselves.

How Survival Strategies Become Mistaken For Identity

From this place, a familiar set of protective strategies emerged:

Perfectionism: “If I’m perfect, no one will be upset, and I’ll be safe.”

People pleasing: “If I can make everyone else okay around me, then I will be okay.”

Peacekeeping: “If I smooth things over and absorb the tension, then I’ll be safe.”

Overachievement: “If I succeed, I can control - or at least not contribute to - the chaos and make others proud, and so I’ll be safe.”

Inner critic: “It’s not safe to express my anger, fear, or sadness outward, so I’ll attack myself instead.”

Some of these strategies turn outward. Others turn inward. All of them are wolf-like parts protecting a vulnerable inner child - the first lamb.

When Protection Gets Stuck in Time

These strategies were deeply adaptive when we were five, ten, or even fifteen years old. They allowed us to attune to our family system, fill in the gaps to stabilize it however we could, and create some sense of safety for ourselves. The catch is this: these parts tend to get stuck in time. These unconscious survival strategies still think it’s 2006, when it’s really 2026.

And so we are still pleasing, perfecting, and performing our way through life.

You’ve probably noticed that these parts can get you pretty far - until they don’t.

Stuck in the impossible task of trying to make other people happy. Stuck in the job we secretly hate with a boss who disrespects us but somehow reminds us of our mom or dad. Stuck in the tendency to look outside of ourselves first - because that’s how we survived childhood - before we look inward, leaving us unsure of what we actually want or how we really feel.

This is past-present confusion: the subtle ways the past continues to live in the present, carried by the unconscious mind and these survival strategies we’ve been relying on for years.

Rebranding the Eldest Daughter: From "Syndrome” to Archetype

So what we’ve been calling eldest daughter syndrome is really a set of survival strategies the little girl in you once turned to. Instead of pathologizing eldest daughters, we need to understand them. Which brings me to the rebrand.

When I shared this idea on my Instagram, many of you said you preferred the eldest daughter archetype. And I agree. An archetype honors the protective pattern without pathologizing language. It recognizes both the wound and the wisdom. The innocence of the lamb. The strength of the wolf. Something shaped by circumstance, adaptation, and survival.

You can begin tending to this archetype gently, starting here:

Journal Prompts for the Eldest Daughter Archetype

• What is the survival strategy (the protective pattern) you picked up at a young age that you’re still repeating today? For example: people pleasing, perfectionism, overachieving, peacekeeping, intellectualizing.

• How does this part of you show up? What thoughts and emotions arise when it’s active?

• What does this protective part do for you?

• How has it served you or been helpful in the past?

• How do you feel toward this protective pattern?

• When this protective pattern is active, how old do you feel? (This is probably where it is stuck in time)

• Can you acknowledge how hard this part has worked for you for so long?

• What is this part afraid would happen if it didn’t do its job? Can you validate that fear?

I slapped the label Type A perfectionist overachiever across my forehead when I was about 11 years old - the day I cried over a less-than-perfect score on my math test. Each year, I peel that label off a little bit more, redefining what ambition and identity actually mean to me.

I grew up in hyper-intellectual Boston, where I learned at a young age how to put my head down and work my ass off.

I lost myself a little bit in the process.

At my core, I was a sensitive, creative, intuitive kid - the daughter of a chef and a musician.

But I did what most of us do. I disavowed those parts of myself for a period of time, exchanging them for more durable masks: good student, good athlete, so mature for my age, responsible, easy kid, a pleasure to have in class.

I unconsciously opted for attachment over authenticity - prioritizing belonging to others over belonging to myself. (That’s okay: I have so much compassion for that younger part of me).

The Type A perfectionist overachiever label was my protective posture. My pile of defenses. It was adaptive - actually pretty genius - when I was growing up. It helped me get through school, be accepted by my peers, and move forward in many ways.

But it came with a cost.

• Feeling disconnected from my true self.

• Anxious as f*ck (hint: sometimes anxiety is a sign we’re out of alignment)

• Living in chronic fight-or-flight mode.

• Gut issues + other chronic pain

These were my alarm bells - my internal signals telling me to slow down and drop into what moves beneath.

Through a series of one-degree pivots, I am slowly finding my way back. Back into my body. Back into my creative, sensitive, intuitive core.

I studied anthropology at Brown University. I worked for a food-as-medicine initiative in Oakland. I earned my Master’s of Counseling from Northwestern University. And my 11-year-old self would freak out - in the best way - if she knew I now live in California, work as a psychodynamic therapist for high-achieving women, surf multiple days a week, and take Spanish classes so I can raise a bilingual family one day.

I’m still in the messy middle, but I feel like I’m slowly settling back into my Self.

I now own that I’m equal parts sensitive and intense - a triple water sign (Scorpio sun, Scorpio moon, Pisces rising) and a Projector in Human Design. I’m allergic to small talk. My nervous system wants me to live slower than I’m comfortable with - which is… a process (ugh). I’m full of love and existential anxiety. I’ve always had this acute sense that our earth minutes are ticking, so I should start living fully like… yesterday.

I’m happier barefoot. My Spotify Wrapped is equal parts Olivia Dean and Bad Bunny. Dirt roads to the ocean send my dopamine receptors over the edge. I’m planning my wedding in Guatemala (spoiler!!!). And my morning cup of coffee (half-caf, obviously, so I don’t have a panic attack) is both a devotional and desperate experience.

I care deeply about patterns, meaning, and the unseen forces that shape how we live - and what becomes possible when we stop overriding ourselves.

I believe that ambition, in its truest form, is an inside job. It’s living a relentlessly authentic life - and that will look different for each of us.

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Inner Currents is for you if…

• You look successful on paper but feel disconnected from yourself

• Slowing down makes you anxious (the paradox, I know)

• You’ve built an identity around being “the responsible one”

• You crave depth in your relationships

• You want ambition to feel aligned, not performative

• You suspect anxiety may be protecting something tender

• You want to reconnect with your sensitivity, creativity, and intuition

That’s what this space is for.

Inner Currents is about the forces that shape how we strive, become, and relate.

I write about ambition and identity, the wisdom of anxiety, love and desire, attachment dynamics, creativity and authenticity, and pop culture as a mirror for our inner worlds.

Think depth with levity and cultural fluency.

Here, you’ll find reflections and frameworks that blend depth psychology, my lived experience, pop culture, and holistic mental-health tools.

I publish intentionally - depth > noise.

One post per month for free subscribers, plus one additional deep dive per month for paid subscribers: longer essays, Q&As, interviews with thought leaders and other therapists, curated tools, and resources for those who want to go further beneath the surface. From time to time, a bonus newsletter or small freebie may drift into your inbox.

If you’re craving a cozy corner of the internet — one that honors sensitivity, curiosity, and the slow work of becoming — you’re in the right place.

Welcome to Inner Currents.

The water’s warm.

- Lyla