The last three newsletters were about a kind of false alarm — the body bracing for a loss that isn’t actually coming, treating an ordinary disagreement as if it were the end of a relationship. Most of the time, that’s exactly what it is: a false alarm, worth talking your nervous system down from. […]
Your Body Is Talking Before You Say a Word In the last newsletter, I gave you a piece of advice for hard conversations: say the bond out loud before you say the disagreement. Tell the person plainly that this isn’t going to change how you feel about them, before you tell them the thing they might […]
Last week I wrote about a pattern I see constantly in patients: a lot of the emotional tension they carry in their shoulders, jaw, low back, and gut isn’t really about disagreement itself. It’s about the fear underneath it — that if you don’t come around to someone else’s way of seeing things, they’ll pull […]
If you’ve come into my treatment room and talked with me about what’s been stressing you out lately, there’s a good chance it wasn’t about money, or work deadlines, or traffic. It was about a person. A spouse who won’t see it your way. A sibling who voted differently than you. A friend whose beliefs […]