“If you try this and hate it, we’ll learn something.”
Sometimes a great plan brings no relief. Many patients come into my practice having read, researched, consulted, and asked thoughtful questions for years. They have tried different diets, bought various supplements, gone to therapy, and seen multiple practitioners. Some things may have helped briefly, then outcomes faded. Other protocols or so-called solutions felt overwhelming and expensive, preventing them from even starting.
We are surrounded by conflicting advice, and each new option carries the burden of dashed hopes, “What if this doesn’t work either?” Over time, choosing starts to feel more challenging than staying uncertain. We want to feel better, but the act of committing to a plan, a practitioner, or a direction feels utterly exhausting.
This is a common experience for patients entering the holistic and natural health space, where treatment plans often involve lifestyle changes. Sometimes, even well-meaning practitioners dismiss it as “noncompliance” or “lack of readiness.” But the issue is rarely a lack of will, motivation or intelligence. Patients in this state are often highly active and engaged in healing. Over time, enough disappointment, overwhelm, or contradictory guidance leads their bodies to expect that effort won’t lead to results. Their system isn’t refusing to heal; it’s protecting them from the emotional cost of choosing and the heavy shame of bearing the responsibility.
When people are actively seeking solutions but repeatedly struggle to initiate or sustain action, the system responsible for authorship is already overburdened. Low agency arises when we feel that authorship of our lives is unsafe, exhausting or futile. Many who struggle with follow-through have lived for years, often since childhood, in environments where choice wasn’t safe.
If you struggle with decision-making and commitment, you may have grown up learning that trying often came at a cost, such as overwhelm, criticism, or collapse.
Over time, your body may have learned to conserve energy by waiting rather than acting. This was never a conscious decision you made, but an intelligent adaptation. In nervous system terms, chronic stress, trauma, illness, or prolonged uncertainty can pull the system into shutdown or freeze states, where initiating action feels heavy, confusing, or risky. You want to change, but struggle to implement change over time.
I’ve seen this pattern many times, often in people with complex histories. A patient might come in carrying a heavy file of childhood trauma. Perhaps they come to me with a history of disordered eating, chronic pain and fatigue, emotional volatility, panic, and depression. They’ve been waiting, sometimes for months, for the “right” referral, the specialist who will finally have the answer. When that appointment arrives, the encounter is brief and decisive. The recommendation may be a strict diet, testing and supplement protocol, or medication. Collaboration is non-existent, follow-ups are sporadic, and the style of care is directive: do this to feel better.
And sometimes, remarkably, it works, at least at first. Symptoms ease within days. Pain lessens and mood lifts; the relief is real. Through my years of practice, sometimes watching this from the outside, I’ve found it disorienting. After many sessions of careful pacing with clients facing many struggles, they seemed miraculously cured by authoritative, sometimes heavy-handed interventions, and I’ve often wondered whether my slower, gentler, collaborative approach was wrong.
But, over time, I came to understand what often unfolds next. Without ongoing support, context, or integration, these intensive plans become unsustainable. For patients with a history of restriction, control, or collapse, the intervention slots perfectly into an old binge-shame-control-restrict-rebel-shame cycle. After a period of deprivation, without nervous system scaffolding and the structure in place to hold these significant changes, patients inevitably slip through the cracks, falling off the plan and spiralling into shame and self-defeat.
Not only does relief disappear, but so does the sense of being held by an authority that had the answer. Disappointment deepens, leading to further collapse, and what remains is paralysis: no clear way to continue, no internal compass for deciding what changes mattered, what helped, or how to adapt.
Healing doesn’t fail because the intervention was wrong, misguided, or useless, but because something essential, something required for healing, was never named or built.
In these moments, agency, or rather the lack of it, becomes visible. Intense, immersive fixes can feel irresistible precisely because they temporarily relieve the burden of authorship. We don’t trust our capacity to steer, decide, or stay with change because our system has never been taught to do so. And so an external structure feels like salvation. We are exhausted, miserable, and in pain and in these states, containers like retreats, protocols, charismatic practitioners, and tightly defined rules offer certainty. And certainty temporarily regulates a system that feels uncertain and chaotic.
When these structures disappear or fail to fit our realities of daily life, we’re left holding the responsibility for our health and lives, and without support, it becomes too heavy to carry. The resulting collapse under this weight is a predictable nervous-system response, not failure.
Early in my practice, I felt this tension acutely. I understood, intuitively and philosophically, that patients heal themselves, and that my role was to guide, explain, and support. This is explicit in psychodynamic psychotherapy, where healing comes not from answers, but from understanding oneself in the presence of a steady, attuned other.
I noticed, however, that in medical settings, many patients are understandably impatient with nuance. Patients are dealing with troubling symptoms that demand an answer. In our healthcare system, we are trained to defer our bodies, agency and choice to an authoritarian expert. In this context, I could feel the pull to become that leader: more directive, more convincing, even more “magical.” But, I knew that while this stance might improve short-term compliance, it would undermine the very thing required to heal: agency.
Patients struggling with low agency want to heal but don’t yet trust themselves to carry the process. When patients appear indecisive, demand authority, or continue gathering information, they’re often asking not for more answers but for help tolerating the vulnerability of change. As clinicians, we can misread this (I often have) and respond by adding more plans, complex explanations, and intense structure, thereby unintentionally increasing the load on a system already at capacity.
Many so-called miracle cures follow this arc. They rely on pressure, urgency, restriction, or intensity to push a nervous system into action. For a time, this can feel like a transformation. But without integration, these highs often collapse into more profound shame, fatigue, pain, or shutdown. The lesson isn’t that these experiences are meaningless; in fact, they can teach us a great deal if they’re reflected on and metabolized. The problem is that without support, the learning often never consolidates. We usually view these experiences as something out there that works, but that we failed somehow.
The problem was never the plan, or practitioner; it was the mismatch between the agency the intervention required and the agency the patient had access to at that moment.
In psychology and medicine, several concepts overlap with what I’m describing here, including self-efficacy, locus of control, autonomy, and learned helplessness.
Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief that they can carry out a specific action. Self-efficacy predicts why confidence is needed for follow-through and why low confidence can trigger avoidance and early abandonment of plans, but agency is not just about beliefs. Low agency is not about a lack of doubt in one’s ability to act, but a system that can not tolerate the act of authorship itself. The problem isn’t confidence or belief, it’s capacity.
Locus of control describes whether someone experiences outcomes as internally or externally determined. In other words, do we believe our actions matter or that outside forces dictate them? An oscillating locus of control can overlap with the pattern of deference to authority, followed by rebellion and collapse when one struggles with agency. Still, it doesn’t account for the emotional or physiological costs of choosing.
In Self-Determination Theory, autonomy is a felt sense that one’s actions are self-endorsed. Research consistently shows that behaviour change is more durable when autonomy is supported rather than coerced. However, Self-Determination Theory assumes a baseline capacity for autonomy. This article points to something that lives upstream of that assumption: with patients whose systems are not yet able to tolerate autonomy without threat.
Learned helplessness comes closer to describing how repeated, uncontrollable stress can reduce action, even in the face of options. Learned helplessness maps well onto chronic illness, long diagnostic odysseys, healthcare trauma, and repeated disappointments over attempts to heal. However, it is often framed as passivity rather than high-effort, high-seeking, low-integration patterns that many chronically ill patients are trapped in.
In the late 1960s, psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues ran a series of experiments that came to be known as the Learned Helplessness Studies. In one version, dogs were placed in a situation where they received mild, unavoidable electric shocks. No matter what the dogs did, move, whine, or try to escape, the shocks continued. Later, those same dogs were placed in a new environment where escape was easy: a low barrier they could step over to stop the shock. But the dogs learned that their actions didn’t matter, and so many of them didn’t try. Their agency was extinguished.
In contrast, dogs who had never experienced uncontrollable shocks quickly learned to escape. This experiment has since been ethically criticized and is no longer conducted, but its implications have echoed through psychology, medicine, and trauma theory.
When we repeatedly encounter situations in which effort doesn’t change outcomes, we stop initiating action altogether. Seen through this lens, what we often call “lack of motivation,” “self-sabotage,” or “giving up,” can instead be understood as a learned nervous-system adaptation: why try, if trying hasn’t helped before?
Similar to learned helplessness, low agency is a state of the nervous system, not a personality trait. It often shows up alongside chronic fatigue, metabolic dysfunction that doesn’t respond to lifestyle change, health anxiety, autoimmune illness, and depression. Patients arrive depleted and foggy, frustrated by their inability to initiate or sustain change. They desperately want to feel better, so they ask for testing, supplements, diagnoses, and explanations. On the surface, they’re asking for energy. Underneath, they’re often asking for amelioration from the burden of choosing and carrying their lives. Their systems have been in collapse long enough that surrender feels like the only imaginable intervention.
Suggestions that require sustained action, like regular meals, movement, and supplement consistency, can feel intolerable because they demand a level of authorship the system doesn’t yet have access to.
As a clinician, I felt this as pressure to find the one thing: the right supplement, the proper test, the correct explanation that would finally ease all symptoms. Sometimes that treatment exists. More often, cases are complex and rooted in long-standing patterns that shift only with steady, consistent inputs: changes that require feeling the body change and tolerating what that change brings.
For years, I focused on insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction as key root causes of hormonal, cognitive, and mood symptoms. Often, this framing was correct. When the labs finally provided a coherent explanation, it felt like a solace for both of us: now we know what to do. I’d suggest a small set of actions, such as movement, nutritional guidance, a supplement, and sending patients off with hope.
Sometimes they improved, then abandoned the plan for something more extreme or restrictive that actually worsened the problem. Frequently, the issue wasn’t the plan. It was that the body was changing faster than the nervous system could metabolize the responsibility of maintaining that change.
Anxiety often reflects this same struggle with authorship. Many patients are highly vigilant: researching, anticipating side effects, seeking reassurance, listening to podcasts, tracking opinions. On the surface, they look engaged. But the engagement is often in the service of control rather than action. The moment a concrete choice is made, like starting a supplement, stopping a food, or setting a boundary, anxiety spikes, and the system retreats into analysis.
Depression, particularly with states of shutdown, involves a profound loss of agency, a loss of the felt sense that actions matter.
In chronic illness, where one feels betrayed by their body, low agency can appear as endless consultation without integration. Patients might move from practitioner to practitioner, accumulating opinions, tests, and plans that never consolidate. Each new expert destabilizes the last, but choosing one path means letting others go, and that loss can feel threatening. Authoritarian care can worsen this by overriding agency through pressure or shame.
Low agency can also show up as over-identification with external authority. Some defer completely to doctors, diets, and ideologies, only to rebel or collapse when asked to sustain the change. Rather than defiance, this reflects confusion about where the self ends and the other begins, often rooted in early experiences in which separation and autonomy were shamed, forbidden, or unsafe.
In practice, this can look like repeated requests for plans that are never used. Meal plans sit untouched. Supplement lists are partially followed, altered, and questioned. The plan becomes a symbolic container for hope rather than a tool for change.
Trauma is often at the center of this pattern. Trauma isn’t only about what happened to us, but what happened to our agency. When initiative was punished, ignored, or exploited, the body learned to stay still. In adulthood, this can look like indecision or endless seeking without consistent action. Beneath it is an intelligent truth: staying small once kept me safe.
Agency can be grown, however, in small, meaningful and survivable steps. It doesn’t come from overhauling your life, but from choosing one thing and staying with it long enough to feel the consequences and survive them emotionally. Agency isn’t a trait that you have or don’t have; it’s a capacity that can be rebuilt.
Consider the smallest action you could take that could be repeated without resentment or collapse. Maybe it’s laughably simple. Eating protein at breakfast, taking your iron supplement consistently, walking for 10 minutes after dinner, or not responding immediately to a triggering email. These are not trivial actions; they are repetitions of agency. Like each rep of a bicep curl, each one is an opportunity for the nervous system to learn: I chose this; something happened, and I survived it. That learning is what builds capacity.
Agency is the nervous system’s bandwidth to make a choice, feel what happens next, and remain intact, emotionally and relationally, through the consequences. Often this means doing less, not more. Complexity can destabilize collapsed systems.
If a plan immediately triggers anxiety, obsession, or the urge to rebel or abandon it, that’s not a moral failure; it’s information. The system is saying, This is too much right now. Plans that are too detailed, too perfect, or too ambitious can actually erode agency by reinforcing the sense that healing is too big to hold.
Time-limited experiments can help. Rather than framing changes as permanent commitments, saying things like, “This is my new diet,” or “This is who I am now,” frame them as experiments with a clear beginning, middle and end. This reduces the existential weight of choice. The nervous system relaxes when it knows there’s an exit: at two, four, or eight weeks. And this makes follow-through more likely.
When agency is fragile, the real task is not optimization. It is learning how to stay with one small choice long enough to experience yourself as the author of it.
A helpful practitioner for rebuilding agency is not the most impressive, directive, or confident one. It’s someone who can tolerate uncertainty without rushing to fill it, who doesn’t escalate complexity when things stall, who respects pacing. Someone who can say, “Let’s try this and see what happens. If you hate it, we can try something else,” and mean it. Someone who doesn’t confuse care with control.
If a practitioner feels all-knowing, rescuing, or possessing secret knowledge, this can feel comforting at first, but often undermines agency over time. It invites outsourcing rather than authorship. On the other hand, you might feel abandoned by a practitioner who offers too many choices and no structure at all.
The sweet spot is containment without domination, and guidance that leaves room for choice. The work of the clinician is not to find the perfect solution but to scaffold agency gently, through simplicity, repetition, containment, and tolerable choice.
Tolerating authorship is often the most challenging part of building agency. Authorship means accepting that outcomes are not fully controllable and that success or failure will belong, at least in part (but never in whole), to you. For many people, this is where shame, grief or fear surface. We might think, if I choose this and it doesn’t work, what does that say about me? About my body? About my capacity to heal? If I feel better, can I sustain it? If I take responsibility, will I be blamed?
Learning to tolerate authorship means staying present with those feelings rather than fleeing into analysis, seeking reassurance, or endlessly choosing. It means practicing saying, internally, I don’t know, but I’m willing to find out by trying something. That is a profound nervous-system shift.
The most challenging part of healing is often not doing something new. It’s staying with it. It’s tolerating the uncertainty, the effort, and the sense that now the outcome depends partly on us. In this realization, there is often grief. On the other side of the grieving process, however, is healing.
Reflection is also part of agency, but it needs to be simple and embodied, asking questions like, Did this feel stabilizing or destabilizing? Did this give me more energy, or did it drain me? Do I feel more resentful or vigilant? Is what I’m feeling a high of healing, a sense of relief, or actual change? These are questions that build interoception, the ability to read internal signals, which is foundational to agency.
Agency is relational; most of us don’t lose it alone, and we don’t rebuild it alone. Safe relationships with a practitioner, therapist, friend, or group provide external regulation that supports internal and self-regulation. The goal is not dependence, but supported autonomy from someone steady enough nearby that you don’t have to outsource your decisions, but don’t feel alone with them either.
It helps to let go of the idea that agency means doing everything yourself. Agency does not mean isolation. It means choosing consciously where you accept support and where you take responsibility. It’s the difference between saying, “Just tell me what I should do,” and asking, “Can you help me think through my options?
When we develop agency, choices become easier, less dramatic, and less charged. Healing stops feeling like a series of make-or-break decisions and becomes a rhythm of choosing, feeling, adjusting, repeating, and creating sustainable change over time.
Healing is not about finding the perfect plan. It’s about building the capacity to stay with yourself while living one.
References:
Apigian, A. (2025). The biology of trauma. Simon & Schuster.
Dana, D. (2020). Polyvagal exercises for safety and connection: 50 client-centred practices (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology) (1st ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327965pli1104_01
Maier, S. F., & Seligman, M. E. (1976). Learned helplessness: Theory and evidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 105(1), 3–46. https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.105.1.3
Maier, S. F., & Watkins, L. R. (2005). Stressor controllability and learned helplessness: The roles of the dorsal raphe nucleus, serotonin, and corticotropin-releasing factor. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 29(4-5), 829–841. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2005.03.021
van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma (1st ed.). Penguin Books.
In 2012, Facebook collaborated with university researchers to manipulate the news feeds of almost 700,000 users for a week (Frizell, 2014). Unbeknownst to them, one group of users was shown less positive content from their friends, filling their daily feeds with negativity, while the other group was shown more positive content. The study revealed that when their exposure to positive content was reduced, users wrote fewer positive words in their own comments and status updates (Kramer et al., 2014). In other words, the more we’re exposed to negativity in our online spaces, the more we amplify it to the rest of the world.
The users in the experiment never expressly consented to participate and were not informed that their algorithms were being manipulated. Their consent was implied in the general terms and policies that all users agree to when signing up for the platform. Facebook was clear: we’ll let you play on our platform if you agree to our rules.
While no data was collected on whether this exposure to more negativity impacted the user’s mental health, many who suffered from episodes of depression or anxiety around that time wonder if they were part of the study.
If you’re like me, reading this, you might be thinking the same. Was there a strange week in 2012 when I felt unhappy?
What might have been the effect of so much negativity on my mental health? How might I have affected others by amplifying that negativity?
How else is my social media exposure manipulating my mind, body and emotions?
The impact of social media on our thoughts and emotions has been well-documented, with data showing that social feeds can shift and amplify our political beliefs, and increase polarization, by separating users into information and opinion siloes that grow distrust and hostility (Brady et al., 2021). Likes and “retweets” can escalate moral outrage through reinforcement learning: the more you are rewarded for expressing anger, the angrier you feel.
Our anger then fuels the addictive nature of the algorithms, making us more likely to share and spend time on the apps, further amplifying our negative feelings (Han et al., 2023).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when many of us retreated to our screens, social media disseminated emotional content related to fear, anxiety, and distrust, while isolating people based on their beliefs and group identities (Lu & Hong, 2022). In a time of significant uncertainty and collective trauma, we lost connection with one another, focusing on our differences rather than our shared humanity. And, the more we engaged, the more this shaped our psychosocial and emotional worlds.
Social media platforms manipulate our thoughts, emotions and behaviours through our brain’s reward system.
Dopamine, the neurotransmitter that drives seeking behaviour, is involved in the experience of positive reward, rather than the pursuit of lasting pleasure. Still, its presence in our brains motivates and energizes us. Dopamine is the molecule of wanting, not having.
Unexpected “variable” rewards, like the random payoffs you get from playing a slot machine, trigger dopamine pathways that encourage repeated behaviour (Lieberman & Long, 2018). Every swipe, like, or notification delivers a burst of novelty and potential reward, triggering the release of dopamine. We feel energized, focused, and alert, and most of all, we crave more. Over time, these micro-hits of anticipation keep us hooked.
As we play (or scroll) on, the repeated stimulation desensitizes our dopamine receptors, which can decrease our overall satsifaction from natural, wholesome rewards and increase our craving for more cheap digital hits.
Emotionally charged content can elicit stronger responses, prompting us to engage by checking, scrolling, posting, commenting, and reacting, which keeps us hooked (Brady et al., 2021; Kramer et al., 2014). The result is a nervous system caught between stimulation and depletion, heightened reactivity, reduced presence, and a lingering sense of restlessness. We feel simultaneously wired and exhausted.
Since starting private practice, I’ve often noticed that particular types of clinical cases tend to come in waves, and, for the last two weeks, the theme among my psychotherapy and naturopathic patients has been burnout.
This week alone, ten clients described feeling trapped on a treadmill of constant doing that feels both meaningless and incredibly demanding. Even vacations and downtime no longer feel restorative. Virtually all of them confessed to fantasizing about escaping it all: moving to a sleepy beach town or buying land to garden and raise chickens on. Does this sound good to you, too?
Then, you’re not alone.
The central question is an existential one: why don’t I feel satisfied with my life?
It may be due to global and economic uncertainty, the side effects of late-stage capitalism, or the psychological and emotional aftermath of the pandemic. But the fact of the matter is, we’re running without an end, with a lost sense of purpose, and we’re exhausted.
This pattern in my practice feels bigger than individual moral exhaustion: it’s a kind of collective depletion of dopamine.
Dopamine is the molecule of more: do more, think more, consume more, produce more (Lieberman & Long, 2018). It is the molecule of desire: future thinking and forward momentum. While on our endless treadmills, dopamine urges us on, with cortisol close behind, nipping at our heels.
Having is a phenomenon regulated by other neurochemicals, such as serotonin, GABA, acetylcholine, or oxytocin. They are here-and-now chemicals present while we’re resting, enjoying, basking in the fruits of our labour.
There’s a curious paradox in this stressed-out state: we struggle to relax fully. We know we should do some yoga, go for a walk, meditate, or even sleep, but instead we scroll on the couch, shovel sugar into our mouths, and overconsume alcohol.
When dopamine and cortisol stimulate our stress and reward systems for too long, rest can feel impossible, leading to overwhelming feelings of guilt and restlessness. There’s still so much to do. Stillness can feel like a threat to stressed systems. And so our minds continue to seek stimulation, even when exhausted.
Why is rest so hard in a dopamine-depleted state? When the brain has been used to constant novelty, the nervous system can interpret stillness as deprivation. In that depleted state, rest can feel uncomfortable. Our minds search for something to do, to replenish our dopamine levels: scrolling, snacking, or even working more. Yet, as you might have guessed, these bursts only perpetuate depletion, which can keep our bodies in a low-grade state of constant stress arousal.
In dopamine-depleted states, the activation and motivation required to shift gears can feel impossible. Instead, we reach for easy hits of pleasure and connection through our phones, substances, or sugar, which fail to provide the deep replenishment or sustained pleasure that our often tired and overstimulated nervous systems need (Lieberman & Long, 2018).
After an initial boost, these activities drop our dopamine levels below baseline, leaving us feeling emptier and more exhausted than we were before—a state of unrestful rest—and a craving for more to right the balance (Lambke, 2022).
This drop in baseline pleasure leaves us feeling even more depleted, depressed, and unmotivated. We can’t seem to will ourselves off the couch—we can’t pull away. And, like any chemical drug, social media can mess with our mental health: increasing emotional volatility, impairing self-regulation, and producing stress, anxiety and attentional deficits (Tereschenko, 2023).
The passing of my dog, Coco, this spring left me emotionally and morally exhausted. After that, the summer tornado swept through, unleashing a surge of dopamine-boosting activities: trips to the East Coast, extended family visits, and concerts. I was social and busy, but overstimulated.
My depletion was apparent in how I spent my downtime. Rather than resting, I found myself scrolling through my phone in the evenings, unable to will myself to get up and do something meaningful, restorative, or productive. I felt ashamed and frustrated with myself, but at the same time, thanks to my training, I recognized that screen fatigue is not a result of weak willpower, moral failure, or misaligned values. It’s a neurochemical imbalance that necessitates mindful restoration.
I didn’t like how I felt while scrolling either. I could feel the images through my screen provoking feelings of comparison and inadequacy, desire, lack, depression, fear, or anger. Sometimes I’d find a cute dog video, connect with a friend, or learn something new, but these benefits didn’t seem to outweigh the downsides of spending time on the apps.
I decided to take action to break the cycle. In mid-August, I committed to a social media “dopamine fast” (Lambke, 2022). A dopamine fast involves abstaining from a high-dopamine-stimulating (and ultimately dopamine-depleting) behaviour for a prolonged period of time: usually a minimum of 30 days.
The fast isn’t about eliminating dopamine stimulation, which is impossible, but reducing overstimulation so that our reward pathways can recover and natural, lower-intensity rewards can start to feel satisfying again. In my case, the more restorative practices I wanted to incorporate were reading, writing, art, nature hikes, and meditation.
The brain strives to maintain a pain-pleasure balance: when we’re flooded with high-dopamine stimuli like the constant novelty of social media, our baseline shifts so that pleasure becomes harder to reach (Lambke, 2022). This can result in feelings of boredom, distraction, and general ennui, as well as a lower overall mood. We’re caught in a cycle of depletion-stimulation-depletion, leaving us feeling emotionally malnourished.
I didn’t want to lose the memories, content, and connections I’d created across various social media platforms, so I didn’t want to delete them completely. Instead, I decided to remove the apps from my phone. This is what Anna Lambke, in her book Dopamine Nation, calls “self-binding,” or placing physical, chronological, or categorical limits around behaviour to slow and interrupt the reward cycle. For me, it was removing the icons; for others, it might be setting tech-free hours or shutting off their phones.
At first, it sucked.
Sometimes I would reflexively check my phone before I remembered. A wave of disappointment would sometimes overcome me. I would open a book and stare at the page.
Lambke, a psychiatrist, notes that during the first two weeks of a dopamine fast, her patients often report feeling worse. Without the constant hits of pleasure, they remain stuck in a state of low motivation, boredom, and craving. Life is just pain. I felt that.
But, if we stay with our feelings of discomfort rather than trying to escape them through numbing or stimulating, we can restore our brain’s emotional reward balance. I tried to lean into the withdrawal symptoms as best I could. I sometimes felt restless, bored, and even irritable. I took these as signs that my brain’s pleasure-pain scales were recalibrating.
In the fashion of mindfulness, I tried to avoid suppressing or turning away from the urges and cravings, but to observe them: noticing them, naming them, and riding the wave with self-compassion until they passed.
To help shift the balance, Lambke also recommends “pressing on the pain side,” or introducing minor stressors, such as cold water therapy, exercise, or quiet solitude. These sometimes unpleasant, yet beneficial practices can help strengthen our brains’ capacities for delayed gratification and patience, thereby retraining our reward sensitivity. When we push through these discomforts, we are often left with a wonderful sense of well-being afterwards.
Over time, I started to notice a shift. I felt a sense of space and patience.As my reward system shifted, I began to enjoy more subtle things: walking without headphones, when I would typically need a podcast or music; and reading for hours, whereas before I would reach for my phone after a few pages.
Most of all, I felt more willing to rest fully.
After a few weeks, I forgot about scrolling. I also forgot about other dopamine-stimulating vices like snacking, sugar, and caffeine.
My appetite shifted. I experienced more explicit cues for food, hunger, and movement. It was as if my body’s subtle signals stopped being drowned out by the din of numbing cravings and distractions. I felt less urgency—it was okay to pause and wait before putting down my book or stepping away from my desk to go to the kitchen.
Dopamine fasting can help heal burnout, as the drop in constant stimulation helps the nervous system shift out of low-grade sympathetic (fight-or-flight) activation. We have permission to power off, which reduces cortisol levels, and this, in turn, can support sleep and blood sugar control.
Once the sympathetic nervous system and adrenals gear down, our parasymphathetic nervous systems can turn on, supporting rest, digestion, and feelings of calm. In this state, we can pay more attention to internal body cues, like signals of hunger, thirst, and fatigue.
One of the most potent effects of a dopamine fast is its impact on delayed gratification: the ability to wait for a more meaningful reward rather than reach for immediate pleasure. The prefrontal cortex, which governs impulse control and long-term planning, begins to reassert itself over the faster, dopamine-driven limbic system that tells us to grab that second donut despite the adult brain pleading that we’re trying to reduce sugar.
More prefrontal cortex activity is the neurobiological foundation of discipline and patience: the longer we can pause before acting on an urge, the more time the brain has to engage higher-order reasoning. Over time, this recalibration enables us to find genuine pleasure in slower, more intentional choices, rather than being pulled along by the next quick hit of stimulation that may be at odds with our longer-term goals and values.
We experience better executive functioning, including planning, decision-making, and sustained focus. Bandwidth increases.
At the end of September, I went on a family trip to Italy. It was my first time there in 23 years. I explored the towns of Pietralunga and Gubbio in the province of Umbria, where my late grandparents, Nonno and Nonna, grew up. We connected with my large extended family, and dove into our shared history. For days on end, I had no internet access.
When I got back, I paused before redownloading the apps. But I knew I needed to connect again and use them as the tools they were designed to be: to help me, not hijack me.
At first, I admittedly checked my phone instead of writing this. Eventually, I shifted back to my old, practical tools: Pomodoro timers, Google Calendar, waking early, and scheduling exercise—I “pressed on the pain.”
And it worked, because… well, here we are.
I’m not sure what my relationship with social media will look like moving forward.
For now, I’m pausing before posting, stopping my scroll, and being intentional about which accounts, messages, and conversations I amplify. I want to preserve the connection, sharing, sense of community, and learning I get from the technologies without getting pulled into the cycle of anger, comparison, craving, and anxiety that underlie their darker sides.
I want to utilize social media as an extension of my values, supporting what I care about: my practice, my patients, my passion for mental health and teaching, and my creativity.
I know I’ll always need to set and maintain boundaries with these apps. I’ll need to practice stepping away. But, thankfully, presence is a muscle—it gets stronger with use.
And for those of you reading who are feeling burnt out, apathetic, or unmotivated, you might also be in a state of dopamine depletion that keeps true joy, meaning, and focus just out of reach. It’s just not you: it’s the state so many of us are in.
You might engage with this state by reducing sources of excess stimulation for a few weeks: stepping away from your devices, simplifying your schedule, considering what loads you might put down, and leaning into stillness, even when it feels uncomfortable or impossible.
You might begin by reclaiming agency in small ways: one task, one boundary, or one decision at a time. Even seemingly insignificant choices can signal safety to the nervous system and restore a sense of self-efficacy.
Finally, remember that rest is an act of repair that allows creativity, compassion, appreciation, and peace to return. Grounding practices can help foster connection and presence, allowing the nervous system to calm down through activities such as breathwork, sunlight, unhurried movement, and sensory awareness. Stillness doesn’t have to be a threat. It’ll all get done.
When struggling with meaning and satisfaction, I often have clients re-anchor to their values: what truly matters, and what would remain if all the noise and obligation fell away? I provide them with a master list of common human values (they are easily searchable on the internet), and I encourage them to select their top five. You might try this exercise yourself and be surprised and validated by what you find.
In what ways does your daily life reflect and serve those values? In what ways does it not?
Nature and creativity can reconnect us to a world of meaning and slow the release of dopamine, whether it’s through journaling, cooking, or making art. Creativity reactivates intrinsic motivation, helping us feel alive again.
These are not quick fixes but pathways back to meaning, patience, and vitality.
Ultimately, a dopamine fast is about reclaiming agency over our stimulation: to choose it consciously.
I want to be the one deciding when to log on, to scroll, and most importantly, to stop. I want to use these tools, not fear them, escape them, or be ruled by them. Freedom is the power to choose: connection and presence over compulsion and impulse. It’s learning to participate while protecting our productivity and peace.
somewhere,
there is a version of me
who dared to take the leap
she knows the constellations
by name
her eyes are soft
from looking
outwards
i wonder what she wears
i wonder what her hobbies are,
and how she finds her way
i wonder
if she’s ever bored
or late
or lonely
without the glow
to hold her
References:
Brady, W. J., McLoughlin, K., Doan, T. N., & Crockett, M. J. (2021). How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. Science Advances, 7(33). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe5641
Dr. Talia Marcheggiani, ND. (2022, May 7). Dancing with Dopamine: Mood, Motivation & Movement on the Good Mood Podcast [Video]. YouTube.
Han, J., Lee, S., & Cha, M. (2023). The secret to successful evocative messages: Anger takes the lead in information sharing over anxiety. Communication Monographs, 90(4), 545–565. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2023.2236183
Kramer, A. I., Guillory, J. E., & Hancock, J. T. (2014). Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(24), 8788–8790. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1320040111
Lambke, A. (2022). Dopamine nation finding balance in the age of indulgence. Penguin LLC US.
Lieberman, D. Z., & Long, M. E. (2018). Molecule of more, the. BenBella Books.
Lu, D., & Hong, D. (2022). Emotional contagion: Research on the influencing factors of social media users’ negative emotional communication during the COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.931835
Tereshchenko, S. (2023). Neurobiological risk factors for problematic social media use as a specific form of internet addiction: A narrative review. World Journal of Psychiatry, 13(5), 160–173. https://doi.org/10.5498/wjp.v13.i5.160
“The patient is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be met.” — Rachel Naomi Remen
M was a mother of two, in her mid-50s. She booked an appointment because profound exhaustion had descended on her like a fog. She ate intentionally: fibre, fruits, and vegetables. She usually slept well. Recently, she started experiencing abdominal distension and a feeling of fullness. She read about intermittent fasting and decided to try it: skipping breakfast.
Her family doctor had ordered blood tests and called to tell her everything looked fine. I requested a copy and found that she had high triglycerides and liver enzymes. She said her doctor had mentioned something like that, but said nothing could be done. They advised her to keep eating well and exercising, and to repeat the tests in three months.
Within three months, the liver enzymes returned to the normal range. Her doctor offered her a statin drug for her elevated “cholesterol.” M declined, still feeling tired and bloated, but preferring to focus on lifestyle factors before trying medication.
L was in her 30s. She lived alone and worked from home—a repetitive and unfulfilling admin job. As a teenager, she was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and prescribed medication to correct the “chemical imbalance” in her brain. The medication might have helped a little; she wasn’t sure. Her depressive episodes would often last for weeks, during which she was unable to get out of bed.
When she booked her first appointment, she had tried more medications than she could remember and was currently taking three, her psychiatrist trying to get the cocktail right. She was still experiencing a chronically low mood, cloudy thinking, and troubling memory loss. Her doctor had recommended electroconvulsive therapy for her “treatment-resistant depression,” and suggested that her symptoms were worsening because of peri-menopause.
She wished she could pursue a more meaningful career, but with her depression, she didn’t think she could handle something challenging. She also needed the job security and health benefits to cover the medications for her chronic autoimmune disorder.
H was in his 40s and suffered from gastrointestinal bloating and erratic bowel movements most of his life. As a child, he was diagnosed with ADHD and generalized anxiety disorder. He remembers horrible stomach pain that would keep him home from elementary school. In many ways, this was a saving grace because he remembers the chronic bullying and devastating boredom he dealt with there.
His doctor ordered colonoscopies and gastroenterologist referrals, but when nothing showed up on testing, he was diagnosed with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), linked to stress.
To find relief, H researched alternative therapies like meditation, red light therapy, cold plunges, and ketogenic diets. Could his mental health issues be connected to his gut health? His doctor said that diet was unlikely to shift his symptoms and that his anxiety, ADHD and IBS were separate and unrelated.
These examples are from various patients I’ve seen over the years—their names and identifying details have been changed and combined with other patients to represent overarching patterns in everyday healthcare experiences. There are differences in the details, but they, I, and hundreds of other patients, have all found ourselves in a similar space: leaving an unproductive and invalidating healthcare encounter in tears, feeling utterly alone, unseen and unheard.
M, L, and H all presented with a constellation of symptoms affecting various body systems, including their digestive organs, brain and nervous system, hormones, immune system, muscles, and metabolism. Their doctors were supportive and well-meaning, ordering blood tests and imaging, making referrals, and providing solutions within their scope of knowledge.
However, when their tests were normal, medications failed to provide relief, or symptoms escaped defined diagnostic categories, they and their practitioners hit a wall.
Like many others, these patients are victims of a medical model that overlooks the broader context in which people seeking healthcare solutions often find themselves. Symptoms may be dismissed, data is prioritized over experience, mental health is either minimized or overmedicalized, and care is separated into systems: brain, body, digestive system, hormones, or heart.
What was the significance of M’s elevated liver enzymes on her bloating and fatigue? Did her history of caloric restriction and people-pleasing predispose her to the burnout and exhaustion she was experiencing? How might intermittent fasting and overfunctioning have perpetuated her condition? How did the absence of a clear and defined disease negate her experience of being unwell and prevent her from finding the tools and strategies that might have helped?
What is the connection between L’s longstanding untreatable depression, autoimmune disease, and inflammation? How did carrying her diagnostic labels since adolescence impact her identity, hope for the future, and career aspirations?
Is it true that H’s anxiety, ADHD, and IBS were unrelated? How might bullying have impacted his physical and mental health? How might biohacking give him a sense of agency, or even creativity (May, 1983)? When does striving to understand slip too far into micromanagement, health anxiety, orthorexia, and self-punishment?
One of the reasons I became a naturopathic doctor is to work within the space and framework to ask these questions: Who is the person in front of me? What is their story? How can I serve?
For all three case examples, their family doctor’s office was the first place they sought help. Patients in the current healthcare system are fragmented into signs, symptoms, diagnoses, and labels. They are offered reductionistic linear solutions: one drug, test, or treatment per problem. When solutions are exhausted, practitioners throw up their arms: “It’s peri-menopause/aging/stress.” The system leaves little room for curiosity, meaning-making, transformation, growth, or uncertainty.
The result is a breakdown in the doctor-patient relationship and a lack of faith in the healthcare system. For patients, this can lead to a sense of powerlessness and mistrust of their bodies. Practitioners can feel frustrated, compassion-fatigued, and burned out.
In 1977, the journal Science published a seminal paper by George Engel entitled “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Biomedicine.” In it, Engel outlines the limitations of the biomedical model and introduces a new approach to healing: the Biopsychosocial model, a holistic framework that acknowledges the interplay of biology, psychological, and social factors on health and illness.
Even nearly 50 years after Engel’s paper, modern medicine still largely adheres to the biomedical model. The model is based on the tenets of reductionism and dualism, which offer relative simplicity and a sense of certainty. These dogmas are difficult to release in favour of a more complex, flexible, multifaceted, and interconnected holistic framework.
Reductionism is a philosophical approach that seeks to understand the whole by breaking it down into its constituent parts. Health and illness can, therefore, be understood at the molecular and chemical levels: type I diabetes is a disease characterized by insulin deficiency, and coronary artery disease results from high cholesterol levels. However, a Lego sculpture cannot be recreated by turning over and examining the little coloured plastic pieces; the human organism is more than the sum of its parts. Our bodies are layered, interwoven, and interdependent dynamic systems that depend on and interact with the social world and environment.
We are wild, magical, and endlessly puzzling, with pieces and parts that weave, knot, and untangle in molecular dances that connect, disappear, and remanifest from the unseen depths of the mysterious beyond. The truth is as horrifying as it is accurate: despite the degrees, papers and expert-level bravado, we understand very little about ourselves.
Emerson M. Pugh puts it famously and beautifully: “If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn’t.”
The Human Genome Project is a prime example of the limitations of reductionism. Launched in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it aimed to decipher the body’s genetic code to understand the language of disease. While the project helped advance science in many ways, it failed to provide significant breakthroughs in disease research. It turns out that there is more to understanding Shakespeare’s works than reciting the alphabet.
Some diseases are caused by specific mutations in individual genes. Still, the reality is far more complex, with the relationship between genes and health involving combinations of mutations and epigenetics —interactions with the environment, life experiences, and behaviours that impact our DNA.
The second feature of the biomedical model is mind-body dualism, developed and promoted by Descartes in the 17th century. He postulated that the body is a material entity that could be dissected, examined, and altered without impacting the mind, which was considered ethereal and non-physical. The body might have been considered a temporary vessel for the mind, but the two were governed by different principles and troubles of the mind were not thought to impact the body, and vice versa.
The healthcare system still presumes mind-body dualism. We have psychiatrists for the mind and neurologists for the brain. Dead-end symptoms that evade disease categories are hand-waved as “stress” or “psychosomatic” (which paradoxically assumes a connection between mind and body).
Centuries of adopting this ill-fitting assumption have led to the obvious and pervasive mind-body problem: if the mind and body are distinct, then how can anxious thoughts quicken our heartbeat, trauma impact our immune system, stress lead to indigestion, and a placebo produce a healing effect?
The biomedical model views the body as a machine, with diseases representing deviations from normal functioning, and healing involving the restoration or replacement of broken parts. But, despite the comforts of certainty and control, biomedicine is no more scientific than leeches, bloodletting, and celery juice. It provides us with rituals in the form of tests, diagnoses, and prescriptions. The amulets we hold onto to ward off the demons of disease are chemical fixes for depression and ADHD, antibiotics for viral infections, and medications to lower lab values.
The biomedical model is the folk medicine of our time. It promises answers to the more complex questions of what is wrong and what can be done about it, while failing to address the why, how, what for, and, importantly, what this means (for me, my life, my family, my future).
On the other hand, the biopsychosocial model invites us to see the person as a constellation of living systems: interwoven body, mind, relationship, and spirit. It considers the rhythms of our biology, such as blood sugar, hormones, nerves, and neurotransmitters, inseparable from our inner world of thoughts, emotions, defences, and longings. It honours how we move through the world: in families, communities, and systems that shape our choices and burdens. It also asks how we make meaning through purpose, ancestry, connection, and the implicit possibility that links others to our suffering: we belong to something larger than ourselves.
The biopsychosocial model rests on a web of interconnected pillars, each supporting and shaping the others in a living system of feedback loops and resonance. No part can be isolated and touched without creating ripples that contact the whole.
Even a single intervention, such as a medication, sends ripples through the entire system because a pill, even a placebo, is not inert. It holds our beliefs about healing and medicine, our relationship with the prescriber, the meanings we attach to illness, and the social stories we carry about being unwell.
In “Why Make People Patients,” Marshall Marinker (1975) distinguishes between illness, sickness, and disease. The medical establishment diagnoses and treats diseases based on symptoms, signs, and lab tests that fit into neat categories, with defined biological treatments.
Illness is the experience of dysphoria and dysfunction that brings people to the doctor. It is the interpersonal and subjective experience of how unwellness is experienced or lived. Therefore, it is possible to feel ill (or unwell) without meeting the criteria for having a disease.
Sickness is a social role that an individual adopts when they are seen or see themselves as unwell. Those with chronic illness may experience being sick (and ill) without having a disease.
Within the biomedical model, disease receives the most attention. Its cause and course are known, and its treatments are rational and specific (Engel, 1977). Biomedicine can offer patients disease labels and treatments. The biological, psychological, and social dimensions of suffering are medicalized and collapsed into the narrow definition of disease. Care is often dehumanized, and people are treated as problems to be fixed (Marinker, 1975). People with chronic, invisible, or unexplainable symptoms or conditions that have yet to be classified and recognized as diseases are often dismissed, a phenomenon identified as “medical gaslighting.”
The Latin root of the word “patient” means “one who suffers” or “one who endures.” Life is suffering, and in this way, we are all patients. However, patient is a half-word, like confidant or lover (Marinker, 1975). A patient exists as one half of a dyadic whole, the doctor, physician, or healer forming the other half. This therapeutic relationship is the unit from which healing occurs.
The patient enters the therapeutic relationship because either they are unaware of what is wrong or, if they are, they don’t know how to help themselves (Engel, 1977). In this therapeutic dyad, the physician is not just a mechanic, identifying and fixing the broken parts, but also a teacher, mentor, and psychotherapist, requiring knowledge of body systems and medicine, as well as psychological and interpersonal skills. Their task is not only to diagnose, but to soothe uncertainty, offer meaning, and strengthen the patient’s trust in their body.
The physician is an agent of hope.
Research has shown that the biopsychosocial model can be used to treat pain and improve mood and life satisfaction in patients; it enhances clinician skills and improves disability outcomes ( Dossett et al., 2020; Fricchione, 2023; Kusnanto et al., 2018; Mankelow et al., 2022; Nakao et al., 2020).
Though decades of research and clinical evidence support the biopsychosocial model, conventional medicine, shaped by hierarchy and tradition, has been slow to integrate it, preferring power and old dominance structures over change.
Furthermore, the limitations of time and attention in holding space for the biopsychosocial model, the nuance of taking a thorough history, and systems thinking make it difficult to standardize into a rigid and overly complex system.
We need practice to bring the biopsychosocial model to healthcare. Below are real-world, grounded examples of how practitioners and patients can embody the model.
For practitioners:
Listen to Serve. Rachel Naomi Remen says that the doctor’s role should not be to fix or even help, but to serve.
She says, “If helping is an experience of strength, fixing is an experience of mastery and expertise. Service, on the other hand, is an experience of mystery, surrender and awe.”
In her book Narrative Medicine, Rita Charon (2006) recommends that doctors invite patients to speak without interrupting, asking them, “What do you think I should know about your case?” She listens for symptom onset, location, duration, and so on, but she also listens for nuance. How do the patients describe their symptoms? How are their lives impacted? What is important to them? Sometimes, she asks a patient, “Tell me about your scars.” Then, she listens.
In the biomedical model, where the doctor is on a hunt to uncover the broken or missing piece, patients are interrupted an average of 18 seconds after they begin speaking.
In many naturopathic consultations I’ve conducted, patients speak for thirty minutes or more, while I quietly listen, reflect nonverbally, and take notes before asking a single question.
In medical school, we were taught how to take a case, including mnemonics to help remember the key questions to ask. Now, 10 years in, I find that simply listening to patients provides me with the information I need to know, and more.
Perhaps this is why naturopathic doctors are often referred to as “Physicians Who Listen.”
According to Engel, doctors must learn to be high-level interviewers, versed in the cultural determinants of how patients communicate disease symptoms. How we talk about our bodies reveals our relationships with them, our experiences with symptoms, and the early life experiences that shape our bodies.
In the doctor-patient interview, the doctor must listen to understand and validate the unfolding story that led someone to feel unwell and seek help. This means identifying biological symptoms and holding space for the psychological and social elements shaping how the person suffers, and healing might begin.
Charon posits that a medical interview must allow for a layered, nonlinear, and metaphor-rich narrative. How does the patient tell their story, and what are their experiences with symptoms? What details do they choose to include? Or omit? Narrative thinkers like Rita Charon and Gabor Mate argue that our stories, or biography, shape our biology. They are just as important, if not more so, than the classic signs and symptoms that typically characterize a particular diagnostic category.
The doctor’s task is to help patients name their feelings and bear witness to the patient’s experience of dysphoria or dysfunction. They must listen for and begin to untangle the threads that shape the suffering and the individuals’ desire to wear the mantle of “patient” and entrust their body to care.
Begin with humility. The patient is the expert on their own body. While you may have spent hours studying this particular organ or condition, the patient has spent years, even a lifetime, living with it.
Science, while the best methodology we have for encountering the truth, is still just an approximation that we use until something better comes along. Knowledge is always incomplete. According to Babette Rothschild (2021), even the most evidence-based treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder will not help more than 50% of clients.
Even the most thoroughly researched cure will not benefit everyone. Nothing in medicine, psychology, or sociology is a hard fact. Science is a big, unanswered question.
In the words of Rachel Naomi Remen, “The patient is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be met.”
Remember why you wanted to be a doctor. If you’re like me, you were captivated by the awe and mystery of not knowing. You’ve studied and practiced medicine for years, and the not-knowing still hangs before you, lighting the way on.
My question to practitioners is this: Can you meet your patient, head down in reverence and awe, with curiosity and compassion, without the need to fix? Can you sit in the discomfort of uncertainty?
Practice systems thinking. From a systems perspective, rather than a reductionist one, each part is integrated and interacts with its layers and within the whole. What layer must be addressed first?
Consider how social forces like poverty, racism, and social categories may affect patients’ symptoms and their ability to heal. Ask how organs, cells, molecules, diagnoses, lab results, and the social and psychological interact. What threads are present, and how might they weave and knot together?
See the person, not the problem. Michael White (2016), the developer of Narrative Therapy, is famous for saying, “The person is not the problem, the problem is the problem.” When we separate people from their problems, we leave room for stories of suffering and strength. We can hold and better listen to their stories, while tackling the problem without erasing the person.
Centre patients as the experts on their own lives and their bodies. Flatten hierarchies and de-centre practitioner power. Educate with curiosity, not to fix or dictate. Leave room for questions and doubt. Learn to roll with resistance rather than fighting against it.
Instead, get curious. Why might these recommendations not be landing for the patient? Ask if the diagnoses and treatment plans make sense to them. And then ask: What matters most? What do you notice? What are you ready for?
Ask patients what threads they would like to tug first. Addressing patient issues and developing plans involves a patient-centred, collaborative approach in which courses of action are suggested, tried, and evaluated for feedback. This way, an intricate dance happens between the patient and the practitioner (Graham et al., 2023).
Self-care. Finally, practitioner burnout is real. Ensure you regulate your nervous system, make space for reflection, and seek support as needed.
For patients:
Trust yourself. Health is not just the absence of symptoms or the relief of pain; it is the sense of wholeness, coherence, and aliveness in your body and your being. Normal lab results don’t cancel out your suffering; a diagnosis cannot fully contain your story. Your instincts and insights are also essential data.
You are not a broken part needing repair, but a whole person, complex, relational, and worthy of care. If something feels wrong, trust that. If you feel unseen, trust it. Your frustration is valid. Your symptoms are messengers.
You deserve understanding, presence, comfort, care, and a path forward.
Empower yourself within the system. Our healthcare system is stretched thin, and sometimes, your suffering may be overlooked. This is not because you don’t matter; it isn’t always because your doctor doesn’t care. Sometimes, even the most well-meaning practitioners work within an overwhelmed structure.
Before your appointment, take a moment to ground yourself. Breathe into your belly. Feel your feet beneath you. Gather your thoughts and write them down. Bring someone who can hold space, ask thoughtful questions, and accurately remember what is said.
Write down your questions before you go. Appointments move quickly, and it’s easy to forget. Describe your top two or three concerns and how they shape your days, energy, and life. Be honest about what you’ve tried, what’s helped, and what hasn’t.
If something feels off, you can gently point it out. “Could we look at this another way?” “This doesn’t quite fit.” “Would you be open to checking this?” If it’s difficult to speak, consider having someone speak on your behalf. You deserve to be witnessed.
Afterward, write down what was said, how it landed, and what you wish you’d asked. Over time, this will build a personal health narrative you can revisit and share with future providers.
Participate in your healing. Responsibility is not about blame. You are not expected to carry everything alone, but you are invited to become a curious, compassionate student of your own body. We can reclaim our agency.
Start by paying attention. Track your symptoms, not obsessively, but as an act of self-witnessing. Look for patterns: what soothes, what aggravates, what precedes the flare or the crash. Learn the basics of your biology and mind: how stress ripples through your system, blood sugar, trauma, hormones, sleep, and your nervous system speak. What are their symptoms, signs, and sensations? You don’t need to diagnose yourself, but knowing your inner landscape helps you recognize when something feels true and when it doesn’t.
Your voice matters, too. Healing is a dialogue. Informed consent is about being an active participant in the conversation. This means learning to describe what you feel, notice, and need.
Pain, for instance, can be more than just “it hurts.” What kind of pain is it? Where does it live? Is it burning, tight, dull, or pulsing? Does it move or stay in place? Is it eased by warmth, made worse by movement, or does it come on with memories or moods? The more we can narrate what we carry, the more we can be seen.
When it comes to tools, focus on what’s within reach. You don’t need a life overhaul or expensive therapies. Sometimes, healing begins with the most minor shift: more rest, a nourishing meal, honouring a boundary, a walk in the sun, or a moment of joy.
The human body requires fresh air, water, sunlight, physical activity, restful sleep, nutritious food, and social connection. While finding a balance of these isn’t always easy, sometimes, the solutions are simpler than we think.
Build yourself a circle of care. No single practitioner can hold everything we carry. If it’s within reach, widen your support: consider consulting a naturopathic doctor to explore root causes, a therapist to help map your inner world, a nutritionist, an acupuncturist, or a massage therapist. Each practitioner can offer a different lens and a different kind of listening. Ask about referrals, covered services, sliding scales, or community programs.
You are allowed to ask for more, to want a second opinion, and to assemble a community of support that sees you more fully. If you have coverage, use it. If you need a referral, ask. If a door closes, it’s ok to knock on another.
Seek information from people you trust. Let wisdom be relational and guided intuitively. Be cautious of algorithms, especially those that induce fear or urgency.
Above all, refuse to give up on yourself. I always believe there is a path toward feeling better. Even when we can’t fully restore the body, healing can still occur through meaning, connection, presence, and peace. Your body is not betraying you. I believe symptoms are cries from the body that deserve to be heard.
Healing begins when we stop reducing people to their symptoms and begin seeing them as whole beings, complex, feeling, and worthy. You deserve care that honours not just your biology, but your personhood, spirit, and life.
You deserve to tell your story and have someone receive it with attention and care.
You deserve a physician who listens.
References:
Charon, R. (2006). Narrative medicine. Oxford University Press.
Dossett, M. L., Fricchione, G. L., & Benson, H. (2020). A new era for mind–body medicine. New England Journal of Medicine, 382(15), 1390–1391. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1917461
Fricchione, G. (2023). Mind body medicine: A modern bio-psycho-social model forty-five years after Engel. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-023-00268-3
Graham, K. D., Steel, A., & Wardle, J. (2023). The converging paradigms of holism and complexity: An exploration of naturopathic clinical case management using complexity science principles. Journal of evaluation in clinical practice, 29(4), 662–681. https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13721
Kusnanto, H., Agustian, D., & Hilmanto, D. (2018). Biopsychosocial model of illnesses in primary care: A hermeneutic literature review. Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care, 7(3), 497. https://doi.org/10.4103/jfmpc.jfmpc_145_17
Mankelow, J., Ryan, C., Taylor, P. C., Atkinson, G., & Martin, D. (2022). A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of biopsychosocial pain education upon health care professional pain attitudes, knowledge, behavior and patient outcomes. Journal of Pain, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2021.06.010
Nakao, M., Komaki, G., Yoshiuchi, K., Deter, H.-C., & Fukudo, S. (2020). Biopsychosocial medicine research trends: Connecting clinical medicine, psychology, and public health. BioPsychoSocial Medicine, 14(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13030-020-00204-9
What the Aubrey Marcus “Radical Monogamy” Spectacle Can Teach Us About Betrayal Trauma, DARVO, and Coercive Control
On the surface, this is just another drama involving a handful of relatively obscure wellness influencers. Many of you may not even know who Aubrey Marcus is. But after diving into the podcast and wading through thousands of now-deleted comments, I was captivated by something more profound, and my mind couldn’t let go. The story provides an unsettling case study of the exploitation of trauma, patriarchal belief systems, and coercive control that can poison spiritual communities.
The almost three-hour podcast permeated the health and wellness space with the pungent stench of a multi-layered onion of betrayal, trauma, and cult psychology. Viewers witnessed a popular spiritual wellness influencer gaslight his wife, younger girlfriend, and followers, with the help of a mentor accused of predatory behaviour.
Something stirs as we reflect on collective stories of self-abandonment and blurred boundaries. What so often stays hidden is now available to name as we gather the missing pieces of ourselves, lost in our own battles of betrayal.
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Aubrey Marcus founded the supplement company, Onnit, with podcaster Joe Rogan. After selling the brand to Unilever, Aubrey launched into the wellness influencer/spiritual guru space. His offerings include podcasts, books, and Fit for Service, which offers “courses, events, and a community to transform your life.” His podcasts vividly detail forays with psychedelic medicines and explorations in love and relationships.
Aubrey built his brand on a sort of authenticity porn, trading vulnerability for views. He gazes into the camera, voice earnest and sincere, sharing the often deeply personal revelations he’s gleaned along his journey.
Essential to his poetic persona are unfiltered confessions about his sometimes complicated love life. He drags his partners into the spotlight, having recorded multiple podcasts with his ex-fiancée, Whitney Miller, and their experimentation with polyamory. Whitney was initially reluctant to open the relationship, and both encountered difficulties, which they shared openly.
In 2020, Aubrey abruptly left Whitney for Vylana after a ketamine trip revealed they were already divinely paired. Vylana was monogamous and, all of a sudden, so was Aubrey. Two weeks later, they were married. They launched their relationship to their followers in a podcast called “How to Prepare for True Love”(Marcus, 2020). The YouTube title on the episode reads, “Life was preparing us for this,” and the episode plays like relationship self-help advice. I remember listening to it while doing laundry, still reeling from the end of my last partnership, and feeling painfully lonely.
The episode lays out their love story in a display of enlightened exhibitionism. Aubrey reads out loud from his love letter to Vylana as her head leans back, eyes cast skyward, seemingly savouring a memory:
Dear Vylana,
What would it feel like to know that you are chosen, beyond a doubt?
How would it feel to be fully seen, for the full potential of who you are?
How would your heart feel never to worry that you were too much or not enough?
The magic has since worn off, but it’s embarrassing to admit a part of me fell for it. At the time, love had forsaken me, and I was snatching at whatever hope I could reach. Here was a real-life Beauty and the Beast-like fantasy love story—Divine Sacred Union. It was proof that one can heal attachment traumas and fear of intimacy with ferocious self-love. Vylana, with her sound bowls, angelic voice, and chiselled abs, finally claimed by her masculine equal, was now Queen of the Marcus brand.
I followed the love story for another episode and then dropped off. Their oversharing and tone-deaf Burning Man-style Indigenous cosplay became a bit much. However, many people continued to listen to the podcasts, attend Fit for Service events, and buy their relationship courses. Many held up the Aubrey and Vy Sacred Union as relationship inspiration. And so when it all blew up at the release of “A New Pattern of Sacred Relationship Emerges,” people erupted (Marcus, 2025).
Without the flowery word salad, the podcast can be summarized as follows: Aubrey and Vylana decided to open up their relationship. Alana is Aubrey’s new (younger) girlfriend. The three of them all get along, but the road wasn’t easy, so their friend, Dr. Marc Gafni (more on him later), has served as their mentor as they navigate this new dynamic.
However, much more was said. And even more was said beyond the confusing and often nonsensical wall of words.
The almost three-hour conversation is a case study in coercive control. Aubrey and Gafni sit on either side of the two women, Vylana and Alana (I know, and they look alike too), who do not speak until at least 20 minutes in.
First, Gafni takes the reins. He outlines a sort of Hegelian Dialectic: monogamous relationships are beautiful in theory, but are riddled with dishonesty and infidelity in reality. Aubrey confirms this; his friends suffer from the stress of cheating with physical health conditions like psoriasis (there is no talk of how their partners suffer).
When Vylana eventually speaks, she concurs. She has suffered relationship betrayal at the hands of all her previous partners, and this trauma still lives in her body. The solution is a new model of relationships in which (it is implied male) sexuality can be liberated from shame and secrecy and live in the glorious light of honesty and trust.
So, if you’re thinking, this seems like they’re just describing an open relationship, you’d be right. Except that Gafni says,
“Paradoxically, this is not about polyamory. That’s the paradox. It’s about radical monogamy, a deep, exclusive, lifelong, committed relationship. But not in the classic monogamous sense, it’s an EXPANDED monogamy. There’s a radical monogamy, but it’s not just a monogamy of two; it’s a slightly bigger monogamy.
“It’s a radical monogamy of deep exclusivity. And then there’s a new goddess who will also step into this field of radical monogamy in the field of erotic mystics.”
Got it? Much of the podcast is Gafni besieging listeners with blocks of text filled with nonsensical double-speak. The name “Radical Monogamy” is loaded language that inverts the meaning and is needlessly confusing.
Why is all this necessary? Aubrey’s marital vows aside, using the existing Ethical Non-Monogamy framework based on honesty, integrity, open communication, vulnerability, and trust would probably be a better approach to open the relationship. This way, they would benefit from the research, advice, and resources of others who have already forged the path.
I’m not an expert. But, after perusing essays and resources (including Reddit), I know that ethical non-monogamy requires consent. Consent must be informed, enthusiastic, specific, and freely given, without undue pressure or influence.
And, as we listen to the podcast further, it’s clear that Vylana doesn’t really want this. Throughout the conversation, she becomes visibly distressed, her shoulders tense, and she cries several times. Vylana talks about how she’s been pushed “past her edges” repeatedly and has “died hundreds of times.” Far from the sacred relationship that frauded their audience, this doesn’t seem healthy. It sounds abusive.
When consent is lacking, coercion is required. The 5 Ds—Double-speak, Double-vision, Double-binds, Double standards, and DARVO, which stands for Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim, and Offender—characterize coercive control (Rankin, n.d.). Gafni starts the party with double-speak: this isn’t non-monogamy, it’s radical monogamy, Trojan-horsed under a different name, mixed into a bowl of word salad.
Double-speak confuses the listener. It reinvents words and uses dissociated, abstract language to obscure true meaning. In the podcast, virtually no one gives clear examples or context. Vylana and Alana speak almost entirely using metaphors.
One commenter pointed out that it sounds like Alana is using predictive text, one ethereal word following another. When words and meanings are twisted and inverted, one can assume they’re in doublespeak territory (IndoctriNation, 2023).
On the first listen, it worked on me, because while their speech is disembodied and devoid of substance, it’s also incredibly persuasive. Despite my gut feelings, frustration and impatience while listening, I also envied the certainty and conviction with which they all spoke. I remember thinking that maybe I was the close-minded one, while the rest were moving into higher plains of human evolution. However, two memorable whack-a-doodle moments in the episode keep even the most open-minded firmly on the earth.
First, Aubrey shares that he got a message from “Spirit” in the middle of a workout telling him to go on the exclusive dating app, Raya (“So, I’m in the middle of my workout and I just get this message. And the message is ‘Go on Raya right now and you’re going to find somebody there that’s important’… and to ignore God at the moment to finish my workout, would be absurd”).
He swipes past the first girl (“No, that’s not it”) and sees Alana, a 28-year-old model who describes herself as “lost” at the time, moving out of Miami in a few weeks. Even though Spirit required a swipe, Aubrey was aging out of her preferences in a month (he’s 44), which proves that the match was rapturously ordained. The synchronicities abound.
It gets more unhinged. Vylana bonds with and befriends Alana, but trouble finds them. While in Egypt, Aubrey receives another divine download, this time from Isis,
“And I was in the sanctum sanctorum of this temple. And I received a message as clear as any message I’ve ever received, and it felt to me like it was coming from the voice of Isis, and it says, ‘You need to have children with both of them.’
“And my heart sank into my belly, and I was like ‘Fuck!’ Because I knew that that was not the covenant I made with Vy that brought her in.”
…I know. What in the names of Joseph Smith, Warren Jeffs, Keith Raniere, and Samuel Bateman is this?
Why, rather than telling wealthy and powerful spiritual men to give all their money to starving children, does God always insist on telling them to impregnate a harem? I’m surprised that the God of a Poet King would resort to such a tired cliche.
When Aubrey tells Vylana this story, she sees no humour in it. As she recounts the story, she says, “It was bringing up that piece of me that feels like I always get hit out of left field as soon as I feel safe…” Her voice cracks.
This is the betrayal trauma her body remembers. Even though everything is out in the open, her boundaries are being bulldozed; She still isn’t safe, and her body knows it.
Betrayal trauma is defined as harm that occurs at the hands of someone we trust or are dependent on (Birrel & Freyd, 2006). Betrayal can occur at the hands of romantic partners, parents, caregivers, friends, colleagues, bosses, teachers, and even organizations and institutions. It puts the nervous system in the high-stress state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn, disrupting one’s mental, emotional, physical, social and spiritual health.
When traumatically bonded, cognitive dissonance and double-vision can be incredibly common. Vylana sobs as she talks about transcending, killing off, and eventually grieving the part of her that desires exclusivity. She talks about how free she’s felt as she leans into the pain and discomfort of being pressured into an open relationship. She talks about giving up her needs and desires for monogamy as part of a “unique sacrifice to the masculine.” Perhaps she can convince herself that she’s choosing this.
Betrayal blindness is a typical response when we depend on a relationship and can’t leave or fight back (Freyd & Birrell, 2013).
Vylana urges us not to project onto her. She tells the audience she’s making choices and is happy: she’s never felt so loved. Only she truly knows, but betrayal blindness can manifest as spiritual bypassing, in which individuals interpret their emotional discomfort as wounds they are responsible for healing and overcoming, rather than signs of harm.
Manipulators exploit spiritual beliefs to convince victims that freedom and enlightenment lie on the other side of their mental, emotional, relational (and sometimes even physical) pain. Spiritual bypassing cuts one off from the instincts that protect boundaries. Vylana speaks about her mission and destiny—she must override her gut feelings and accept this arrangement to serve their unborn children.
We might interpret Aubrey’s messages from God as spiritual bypassing to avoid accountability, i.e., “Yes, I made a vow, but this is not what I want; it’s what God wants.” He might even believe it.
Betrayal blindness can cause self-fragmentation and silencing as a way to survive, like a mirror shattered into a million pieces. Recovery often involves gathering these parts and finding a way to put them back together, not cutting them off.
Victims of betrayal blindness describe a foggy sense of self, confusion around trust, and difficulty forming attachments. Rumination is extremely common as their minds turn over what happened, trying to gain more information about the situation that might prevent further betrayal. Many ruminations turn self-hating, i.e., “If I’m at fault, I am empowered.”
DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender), a concept developed by Jennifer Freyd, is a tool of coercive control that can confuse, fragment, and silence a victim (Freyd & Birrell, 2013). It encompasses gaslighting, or denying any wrongdoing and making the victim feel that they are crazy. Even worse, it leaves them feeling at fault: rather than the perpetrator’s actions, their expectations, desires, and often reasonable reactions to abuse are to blame.
Vylana’s journey is described as one of sacrifice, spiritual growth, and healing, even as her body language says the opposite. She says she told the part of herself that grieved this arrangement, “I know this is not what you want, but it’s what you need.” This would be an excellent subtitle for a DARVO 101 manual.
Aubrey and Gafni’s theories frame Vylana’s desires as unreasonable and misguided. It is not Aubrey who needs to examine his unwillingness to commit. Vylana’s needs are the result of unhealed wounds, and she must amputate the infected parts. Her very normal reactions of anger and destabilization when her boundaries are violated are labelled “insane.” At one point, Vylana cries and thanks the rest of them for being so patient with her.
There are many problematic power imbalances in the group. Aubrey is a wealthy man with a lot of influence. There are gender and age gaps. The trio are speaking on Aubrey’s platform. To his credit, Aubrey points out that he doesn’t want to withhold resources from either of the women. If Vylana were to leave, he would ensure she was provided for. However, it’s impossible to know the details of this arrangement. What share does she have in the company she’s helped build for the last five years? Is there a non-disclosure or non-disparaging agreement preventing her from sharing her story? Vylana has built a public persona around the Marcus brand.
Further, bonding, particularly trauma-bonding, can obstruct our power to choose, keeping us in a double-bind.
Humans are wired to attach to people we love. Love is essential for survival, but attachment and emotional dependence can sometimes create power imbalances and leave one susceptible to abuse (Freyd & Birrell, 2013). Someone who has experienced relationship betrayal may learn that manipulation and love are wrapped in one another, and boundaries must be sacrificed to preserve relationships (DePrince, 2005).
Patterns of wounding can prevent individuals from seeing where they may be empowered to leave or stand up for themselves. In this way, Vylana’s history of betrayal leaves her vulnerable. Her comfort is challenged like a frog slowly boiling.
First, she agreed to be “monogamish.” Then, she accepted adding a third person to the dynamic. Next, Alana became Aubrey’s girlfriend. Vylana “can see the beauty” in Aubrey having children with Alana, even if the thought brings her to tears. Her boundaries are slowly eroded step by step. Whatever line she holds, she must eventually give up or lose the relationship.
What would it feel like to know that you are chosen, beyond a doubt?
Many people have pointed out the double standards present in the dynamic. While Vylana and Alana are allowed to have lovers, Aubrey emphasizes that Vylana’s relationship with Josh was not as deep as the one he shares with Alana. It is unclear if either of them can have children with other men.
Patriarchal gender essentialism is a covert theme in this brand of spiritual control. Gafni references Romanian men who work 17-hour days, an example of how men “pour” into women in different ways, so women can pour love back in their way (by letting them have a sidepiece). It’s fair, but not equal (or was it equal, but not fair? I can’t remember).
Alana references her teacher, Kelsey Kazarian, who runs workshops in which she teaches masculine devotion and promotes ideas like “Women love to hear the word no.” These theories frame women as submissive and nurturing and men as leaders, protectors, and providers.
Drawn out to its logical ends, gender essentialism can create a dynamic in which it is considered “unfeminine” (in a heterosexual dynamic) to uphold boundaries. It gaslights women into thinking that submission is empowering, while men occupy actual positions of power and influence in their relationships and society.
Alaska Wolfe (2025) released a podcast episode that eloquently unpacks the subtle misogyny and unequal relationship dynamics.
Altered states of consciousness through the use of psychedelics can make individuals susceptible and decrease their agency. Aubrey and Vylana share a disturbing story in which they offer Alana a “God Bomb Ceremony” on their second meeting. The ceremony involves powerful psychedelics, body work (i.e. physical touch), and sound healing. They joke that Alana has good instincts to trust them so early. But, plant medicines lower defences, increase openness and trust, blur boundaries, and increase bonding through feelings of intimacy and spiritual connection. Aubrey and Vylana love-bomb her, telling her they’ve never worked with energy so pure, and Alana says she’s never felt so seen. Later, Aubrey launches into an emotional monologue idealizing Alana’s purity. After watching Vylana break down several times, it’s the only instance we see him in tears. The whole thing smacks of cult grooming.
No doubt, the voices that speak to Aubrey have something to do with his heavy use of psychedelics. But the fact that his comments don’t immediately elicit an eye-roll from his posse suggests that they frequently enter the altered states that make these revelations fairly standard-issue.
The use of Marc Gafni as their therapist is problematic. Vylana states they wouldn’t have gotten this far without his theories that frame and anchor her experience. Gafni is an excommunicated rabbi accused of multiple counts of sexual misconduct, including sex with underage women (ages 13, 14, and 16).
He denies these allegations, blaming the victims for creating a witch hunt against him. Watch his interview with Dr. Phil for a textbook example of DARVO (24×7 Network, 2024). At the end of the interview, he lectures the viewer on the dangers of online smear campaigns. It’s really something to behold.
Online, you can find the testimonies of many of his (alleged) victims, including Sara Kabokov (2016), who was 13, and Donna Zerner (2016, 2019), who worked for him and with whom he had a sexual relationship with fuzzy boundaries and questionable consent. Zerner is an engaging storyteller, and her videos are worth watching.
Aubrey publicly stated that he believes Gafni. Donna Zerner said she kept her knowledge about Gafni a secret because she believed in his mission. I can’t help but wonder if Aubrey fears that the allegations against Gafni might prevent his teachings, which Aubrey openly praises, from reaching a wider audience, so he chooses to look away. Paul Levy (2016) writes about how organizations can become blind to sexual misconduct, especially when such denial helps them avoid confronting their shadows.
Aubrey’s decision to bring Gafni in as a teacher seems, in part, aimed at persuading Vylana and Alana to embrace this dynamic. Unsurprisingly, this situation appears infused with his (alleged) pathologies.
At one point, Alana talks about how she can feel the resonance of truth in her body. It has never failed her, leading her to places beyond her wildest dreams (i.e., in front of a 100,000-person podcast audience and inside a private RV at Burning Man). At first, her soft-spoken conviction persuades me. I wish I had her level of certainty. Then, I remember she is sitting next to Gafni.
Watching him through the screen, I have a gut feeling: a mixture of disgust and fear. I believe Gen Z call this “The Ick.” However, Aubrey, Vylana, and Alana lean in. They laugh at his unfunny jokes, defusing nervous tension. Vylana fawns the most. She turns to him to finish her thoughts and appears to monitor his reactions when she speaks.
So, does Alana not feel her stomach knot when Gafni floods the space with his rhythmic cadence of pressured speech that says nothing?
I wonder if anyone in the polycule has bothered to contact his accusers. How might the “truth resonate” (or not) in their bodies as they listen to Donna Zerner speak?
Aubrey and Vylana Marcus have accused the audience of projecting. “Don’t project on me that I’m not choosing this,” pleads Vylana. Of course, it’s impossible to tell what goes on between them when they are no longer performing. I don’t know any of them, so my impressions are filtered through my experiences. But, as many commenters have pointed out, we’re also forming and expressing opinions, judgments, concerns, moral outrage, and skepticism. People are naming what they see, and it’s not a projection to point out something looks unethical.
It’s also worth pointing out the irony of accusing the audience of projection when your marketing capitalizes on your parasocial relationship with them. Projection is the foundation of the brand.
Many followers feel misled and betrayed. They were invested in what they thought was an exemplary monogamous partnership, and many signed up for their courses and heeded their advice.
A commenter who attended a relationship workshop with them wrote, “They went on and on about their monogamous love… It was like he was making us all long for a love like that. I remember leaving feeling confused. I wouldn’t be surprised if a bunch of people went home and left their relationships, thinking ‘If I can’t have a love like that, I don’t want any love.'”
Thousands of comments were deleted from the YouTube video and Aubrey and Vylana’s social media posts. The majority were critical, but kind. People wrote about the gut feelings they were learning to trust again—in fact, the episode is a great way to practice feeling that sense we have often been taught to ignore. Women shared their disappointment that a relationship that brought them hope appeared to be another example of a woman being asked to abandon her needs and desires for a man. Something is cracking open as grounded psychological concepts like boundaries, gut instincts, and healthy relational conflict meet the disembodied wishful thinking of the spiritual community.
So, where do we go next? If Aubrey, Vylana, and Alana sat in my office, what would I tell them? What would I tell the thousands of disappointed followers and commenters?
First, remove the relationship from the public eye, but open the comments. Vylana already seems to be backing away, which appears healthy. Oversharing can be damaging when there is real pain involved. There’s a fine line to walk with performative vulnerability: How much do you share to appear sincere and open without baring everything?
However, Aubrey should consider republishing the comments and letting the audience talk, rather than DARVO’ing them and blaming them for Vylana and Alana’s distress. Many commenters are survivors of cults and abusive relationships. One commenter noted that the still-flowing conversations served as “sacred fire for abused women to take back their power.” Avoid silencing and fragmenting. Let the group process, offer support, and heal.
Thoroughly investigate the accusations against Marc Gafni. Marc Gafni’s presence in this dynamic raises serious ethical questions. Listen to his alleged victims. Read Paul Levy’s (2016) paper on wetiko to understand how followers can engage in collective betrayal blindness to preserve power structures, protect the “mission,” and avoid confronting their shadows.
Regardless of the allegations, Gafni does not appear to be a safe and appropriate person to provide relationship guidance. How does Gafni manage his dual roles as friend and mentor to Aubrey and therapist to the polycule? How does he maintain professional and ethical boundaries? How does he distance himself from his theories of male sexuality and gender roles and hold space for alternate worldviews?
Hire a licensed, regulated therapist. Look for a therapist in good standing with their regulatory body, who receives ongoing supervision, is transparent about their theoretical orientation, and is accountable to an ethical code of conduct and standard of practice (American Psychological Association, 2017).
Ask about their training. What psychological theories and frameworks inform their work? Do they have experience with non-monogamous dynamics and know how to support honest communication, boundaries, and consent? Are they trauma-informed and attuned to nervous system states such as hyperarousal, dissociation, and shutdown? How do their spiritual, political, or gender beliefs shape their work?
A good therapist honours their fiduciary relationship to the client, supports autonomy, recognizes double-binds, and monitors their biases.
On that note, be cautious of courses marketed as group therapy. Fit for Service course advertisements use peak emotional imagery: intense eye contact and streaming tears. I can’t help but compare these marketing videos to the evidence-based, quiet, regulated spaces of the retreats that social workers and couples therapists, like Melissa Johari, offer. Rooted in Gottman and EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) frameworks, against a simple backdrop of a suburban conference centre, the only “mind expansion” is the clarity and presence of mind participants might feel from leaving their phones in their rooms. The only “transformation” is the psychoeducation they receive and the skills they continue to work on. It’s the real, grounded work of learning to care for ourselves and others as we navigate daily life.
Pause the use of psychedelics. Psychedelic medicine can have profound healing effects. Currently, CAMH is running a trial on the use of psilocybin in treatment-resistant depression. But psychedelics render the individual highly vulnerable, putting them at risk of retraumatization, spiritual bypassing, and serious boundary violations. Integrating these experiences requires time, space, and a safe container to allow blasted open neural connections to settle.
Safe, ethical use means an accountable structure that ensures power dynamics between participants and facilitators are explicit, consensual, and trauma-informed. And, it should go without saying that sexual relationships with participants are a serious violation of this vulnerability and trust.
Learn about coercive control and cult psychology. Aubrey, Vylana, and Alana should become familiar with concepts like betrayal blindness, trauma bonding, DARVO and the other D’s (Double-speak, Double vision, Double standards, and Double-binds). They should be empowered to walk away. This might involve working out legal contracts that protect each individual’s agency and contribution to the brand.
I checked on Whitney Miller, Aubrey’s ex, in all the drama. She’s posted a few things without naming names. Overall, it seems she’s been vindicated.
She reminds followers dealing with heartbreak that one day, you will realize it was never about you not being enough. She’s had a lot of therapy.
A while back, she posted a video on Instagram about a self-defence class for women she helped facilitate. There is no forced vulnerability or crying on cue. The atmosphere is light. Women laugh, playfully fumble through the moves, and support each other with warmth and humour. They eat snacks. Rather than performative and pretentious, it feels wholesome.
But who knows?
It is social media, after all.
This Might Help with Dr. Talia ND is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed
References:
24×7 Network. (2024, June 14). Spiritual Leader in the Spotlight: Ex-Rabbi Marc Gafni [Video]. YouTube.
DePrince, A. P. (2005). Social cognition and revictimization risk. Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, 6(1), 125–141. https://doi.org/10.1300/j229v06n01_08
Freyd, J., & Birrell, P. (2013). Blind to betrayal. John Wiley & Sons.
IndoctriNation. (2023, March 22). Ending coercive control with Kate Amber [Video]. YouTube.
Wolfe, A. (2025). God told me to have children with two women: Aubrey marcus, feminine sacrifice and how the f*ck to choose yourself. [Podcast]. Heartbreak Alchemy.
We humans are relational beings. I once heard a beautiful quote that stated,
“Our wounds are formed in relationships, and therefore our wounds are healed by relationships.”
This sentiment highlights the importance of healthy relationships, particularly romantic partnerships, for supporting our overall health and well-being.
In this episode, I reconnect with Melissa, a registered social worker and seasoned couples therapist, whom I first met during our shared practice in Bloorwest Village. We delve into the significance of healthy relationships, the intricacies of communication, and the foundational concepts behind the Gottman Method, which underpins much of her therapeutic approach. After becoming a psychotherapist myself, I was eager to explore these topics further, particularly the psychological stressors that often reverberate in romantic partnerships.
Throughout our conversation, we explore how positive, nurturing relationships can enhance personal well-being, contribute to longevity, and benefit societal structures as a whole. Healthy connections not only enhance individual happiness, but they also serve as models for children, impacting family dynamics and workplace relationships. Melissa highlights the importance of acquiring skills that facilitate better communication, conflict resolution, and relationship building, underscoring that these tools are applicable beyond romantic partnerships.
We discuss Melissa’s recent retreat, dedicated to couples, where she incorporates the Gottman Method’s principles to strengthen relationships. She recounts the tranquil environment of the Queen of Apostles Renewal Centre in Mississauga, which provides a serene backdrop for couples to gather, share meals, and partake in activities that reflect on their relationships. Melissa emphasizes that strong marriages are built on fundamental principles such as love maps, fondness and admiration, and turning towards each other during moments of connection.
In addition, we dive into practical exercises from her retreat, where couples engaged with love maps—the groundwork of knowing each other’s preferences and dreams—as well as techniques for softening harsh communication. Melissa shares insights from her years working in social work and her experience managing a private practice, which has expanded to include associates passionate about couples therapy.
Her work encompasses a variety of approaches, integrating emotionally focused therapy and other methods to address the complexities of partnership dynamics. We touch on the relevance of her new initiatives, like the upcoming art therapy workshop and a financial well-being seminar for couples, highlighting how managing finances can also be a significant touchpoint for relational stress.
As our conversation wraps up, Melissa encourages couples to proactively seek opportunities for growth, whether through workshops, retreats, or simply ongoing communication practices. She stresses that relationships naturally require ongoing maintenance, similar to physical fitness—achieving a strong connection involves effort and investment from both partners.
Listeners who are interested in improving their relationships will find valuable insights in this episode, along with practical resources such as Melissa’s ILEAD communication framework, which serves as a guide for entering challenging conversations with sensitivity and empathy. We also cover the crucial concept of turning towards bids for connection and how small gestures can have a lasting impact on the relational bank account that supports a healthy partnership.
[0:01] Hi, Melissa. Welcome back. It’s been a while since I’ve had you on.
[0:09] You were a fellow practitioner at the clinic that we shared back in BC, before COVID times. Exactly. BC or AC. Yeah, or AC, after COVID.
[0:26] Um and uh yeah and i think the last time we talked a lot about your work as a couples therapist and the gotman method and but i think it’s you know since becoming a psychotherapist myself who doesn’t do a lot of couples therapy but sees a lot of um you know psychological stressors or concerns that are related to struggles within partnership i thought it would be cool to have be back on so we could talk about, you know, healthy couples, healthy relationships, communication.
[0:57] Yes, yes. All important things. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s important because it helps us. It helps with our own well-being. If we’re in a positive, healthy, committed, close relationship where we feel understood and we feel seen, that’s powerful, right? That’s good for our own personal well-being and it actually shows in the research that we live longer too. We have less diseases and we live longer.
[1:28] So it’s pretty powerful, right? We’re designed to be in community, to be in togetherness. So it’s important for ourselves, for our well-being, for our kids to see that modeling as well and then it trickles into our workplace into society so yeah it’s it’s important all around yeah totally yeah i mean if that’s not going right in your life like whether you’re single and you’re not happy about it or in a partnership and it’s not doesn’t feel healthy or it’s you know there’s stress around that that’s like it permeates your entire life you know it affects every.
[2:08] Everything in your life, you know? So yeah, I think it’s such a huge part of even how we structure our society, but how we structure our lives. Like we often start with the unit of partnership or, you know, romantic relationship or people that we live with, like the family structure. And so, yeah, and you’re right, getting that right or learning skills that help us in that area can translate into all of our other relationships. And we’re humans, we’re not just isolated beings. We exist in relationship to one another. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even in the retreat that I just had this past weekend, that came up, right? I’m talking about communication. I’m talking about conflict management. And then one of the participants said, oh, so wait a minute, this can also apply to my relationship with my family members. And oh, and also with my co-workers. I said, exactly, exactly. It permeates and the skills that you use to get close and to communicate openly and effectively with your romantic partner absolutely translates to other relationships. Totally. Yeah.
[3:20] Can you tell us about your retreat? We might as well jump right in because you had it just this past weekend.
[3:26] Yes, yes. Well, and also for those who don’t know me necessarily, I’m a registered social worker and I’ve been in social work for over 20 years now, which is… Wow, congrats. Yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago, but it also feels like it was yesterday. So it’s, yeah, it’s funny when I think about that Laurier graduation back then. But yeah, so since then, I worked in child protection and then I started my private practice working with couples specifically in 2012.
[4:02] And then after, so it was an overlap between, there was about a five years overlap. Between doing child protection and then also having my practice. So many long hours, long days. And then I had my son. And so after having him, I didn’t return to the government job after my mat leave. Just focused on the prior practice and really delved into that more. And now I’ve expanded. So now I have two associates and an intern on my team and I’m really grateful, very, very grateful because I’m very choosy in who I bring in on my team. They must have a passion for couples because it’s not for the faint of heart. Working with couples is complex and delicate and needs that neutrality, but also that tact with.
[5:09] Being uh gently confronting when needed so so you want to maintain that balance between both people to maintain that alliance with each of them but then also being able to be honest as well and and and use our uh you know self of the therapist where needed to be able to um uh gently confront and be able to address maybe mistaken beliefs or, yeah, some portion of their context that might be fueling their perspective, but it might not be what their partner intended. Or especially like in Gottman’s terms, if the couple is in negative sentiment override, then they might construe something that might have been quite neutral as a negative, right? Whereas if the couple is in positive sentiment override, then they would give the benefit, they’d be more apt to give the benefit of the doubt and be able to extend grace to their partner.
[6:14] So, so yeah, being able to do that is, is it takes some finesse. Um so so so when I grew my team that was one thing that I really wanted is are you passionate about couples and um are you interested in Gottman method or do you have Gottman training already um and so yeah those on my team have have those check marks uh so I’m really uh proud of my my team they’re wonderful um and then like just in terms of kind of background um so when my son was about two, I went back to school and I did a second master’s.
[6:55] I had actually, I had always thought about going back and doing PhD in psychology, or my undergrad is in psychology. So I had thought about PhD in psychology or PsyD or something like that. So I was looking into that, but then God led me to this program that was the Master of Theological Studies. And so it took five years part-time to do that and I finished that last year so wow yeah yeah so I’m grateful for that that that’s under my belt and done because it’s it was tough um being a single mom and working and going to school part-time so it was it was a juggle a balance but um but I loved it I really got a lot out of the program the the staff at um I did at Tyndale University The staff there are just fantastic, phenomenal. Like, the professors are so helpful and caring, and they really…
[7:55] It’s very clear that they want you to succeed. So there’s that care there. And even, you know, the building is a little bit difficult to navigate because there’s like a wing here and a wing there and some stairwells don’t go to certain floors and it’s like, oh, where am I going? And so, you know, even if you look lost walking down the hallway, like a professor will kind of guide you to, you know, where you need to go, which is really nice. But yeah, so that’s kind of just a little bit about me just for those who aren’t familiar.
[8:32] And yeah, so I started retreats last year.
[8:36] And so I had the first annual couples retreat last year at Queen of Apostles Renewal center in Mississauga. So it’s kind of nice because it’s within the GTA, right? So you don’t have to get on a plane and or travel for several hours like you, you know, a lot of the participants, they were there within half an hour of leaving their home. So it’s kind of convenient that way. But then it also feels like you’re, you’re, you’re retreating, you are getting away from the city because it’s a very quiet it’s a residential kind of area um and the renewal center itself has a lot of grassy area and trees and it’s near ravines so it’s just very um.
[9:24] One with nature and there’s you know seating areas outside and and inside too there’s some like nice little spots for reflection and so it’s just it’s a nice little getaway um for the weekend and and so and the rooms are very simple which i i quite like because and and i’ve got that feedback from my participants as well that they appreciated that as soon as they entered they felt like it was already like a calming side that’s what had said to me this past weekend was that they felt like it was they already felt calm just entering the building right so so it’s nice the rooms are simple there’s no tvs which is good because guess what today these days digital distractions is one of the barriers to communication right we always have a partner and then we’re not turning towards a partner so um so yeah the rooms don’t have any tvs if you wanted to do a digital detox for the weekend you could right like putting the phones away or like not bringing an ipad or whatever you could it’s it’s a it’s an option um and yeah the the the staff there are fantastic the food was great like it’s a lot of you know very comforting foods there’s you know pie.
[10:47] Hot like scrambled eggs and bacon and sausage and like heavier foods than probably I’m used to but um but it was nice nice kind of like comfort foods and you know um I remember there was one meal that had like sweet potato fries that were so good like they made them from scratch and so the outside was crispy but then the inside was nice and soft and they were massive fries, oh my gosh this is so good um so yeah so there and there’s always some kind of protein for every meal and um it’s salad options and oatmeal and yeah so so food was good the the um the group was good it was a good kind of group group energy group vibe um so that’s always important for these kind of things right because how people who attend will gel um but when i did it last year i was super grateful it was it was such a lovely group and um and a whole range right they were there were some pre-marrieds and there were some who were married like um you know kind of middle aged that were married maybe seven years eight years and then um and then there were some that were married longer like over 30 years so that was last year quite the range and then this year um they were all married like two three years and um.
[12:08] But like a range in age, which was kind of cool. So, yeah, it’s neat to kind of see, you know, who is there at any given group and like how everyone kind of gets along. And it’s nice to break bread together for the meals. And we’re just like chatting and laughing and sharing stories. And, yeah, it’s nice. It’s nice. That’s cool. Yeah. And the actual teaching itself. So it goes from Friday, four o’clock to Sunday, three o’clock. And there’s teaching throughout the days that we’re there together. So the basis of it is Gottman’s Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. So the book, I have it right here. I gave that to my brother and sister-in-law when they got married. Yeah, I had it and I was like, here’s my coffee. Oh, I love that. That’s awesome.
[13:04] Yeah, I had a financial advisor come this year. So last year it was me mainly being a speaker, but then I also had my personal Gottman trainer and supervisor, Mike Fidler. He came and he was there basically as a support, which was really nice. And then he just kind of shared some stories here and there.
[13:29] And then this year, I was the main, you know, the lecturer or facilitator throughout the weekend. But I did bring in a guest speaker Saturday afternoon. So, because I know that for a lot of couples, money is a big issue these days. And so, well, kind of always, but yeah, especially these days.
[13:54] And so I brought a financial advisor in to kind of give some advice and tips on money so, anyways that he I gave him one of these as well so yeah I love that like we did kind of a it wasn’t a retreat but it was sort of a program together I think maybe your first year or it was early on in our time at Blue Rose Wellness and I love the holistic nature like you bring in financial advisors you bring in like all the different elements that surround relationships right it’s not just about the couple, but the context the couple’s in. If there’s financial stress, you know, that can impact the relationship. So it’s cool that you have that. Yeah, I remember that. So you were one of the speakers for, I think it was physical wellness, or no, it was emotional wellness, right? Oh, yeah, emotional wellness. Yeah, emotional wellness. Yeah, because being a naturopathic doctor and then being able to address like anxiety, depression from that lens, like that was really helpful.
[14:48] Yeah, that was based on my wellness, my relational wellness wheel. Yeah. The social and financial and physical and emotional, vocational, environmental, spiritual. Yeah, there’s eight different areas. So yeah, I remember that that it was like a workshop series. And then I had one kind of specialist from each area come in and talk about it. So yeah, that was fun. I like that doing that. That was good and very holistic. That was impressive to me. It’s not just like taking a couple and sending them down. And I mean, there’s that in couples therapy, but then there’s also the bigger environment in which they find themselves. And how do you keep yourself and your partnership healthy by addressing and looking at all these different things? So that’s cool. Yeah. From that systemic lens, right?
[15:38] Yeah. And so you had, so what was the teaching like in the retreat? Like you followed the seven principles of making marriage work? Is that? Yes. Yeah. By Gottman, the Gottmans. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Which is the lean or I guess the lens through what you do most of your couples work, the Gottman method. Yeah. Predominantly. I lean on Gottman. The nice thing about Gottman is that it allows for integration quite readily so I also draw EFT so emotionally focused therapy or internal family systems or um some cognitive not much but like maybe some mindfulness um narrative so yeah it just kind of depends what’s in front of me and what tool I need to pull out of my toolbox but yeah predominantly I do lean on Gottman um and I I got certified so So there’s quite a lot of hoops to jump through to be able to get certified. And so I achieved that last November. Wow. Yeah, it’s exciting. Nice. A lot of things happened last year. It’s like the first training, the master’s, the Gauntman training. Exactly. Last year was kind of the end result of a lot of work, like a lot of years of work. Yeah.
[16:57] And that kind of continued on into this year, because this year I finally got approved as an AMFT supervisor. And that was many years in the works. So yeah, I don’t even know how many years.
[17:12] Probably yeah so it’s marriage family therapist yeah um so yeah so amos yeah american.
[17:23] Association for marriage and family therapy they and that was a lot of hoops too right you have to do do your your hours your uh your client hours your supervision hours your mentoring hours you have to take a course so yes it’s quite a lot involved with that as well so yeah a lot accomplishments and so i’m grateful i’m i’m really grateful and um and i’ll be moving to sarnia so my associates will be kind of staying in gta area um for the for that in person i mean we all do virtual so um so we we can see anyone in ontario all across ontario um and actually one of one of my associates is insured for other countries as well so that’s kind of nice so she’s kind of opened it up a little bit more um but yeah for most of us we’re we’re in true within Ontario unless we have some arrangement with like a particular province which I I did have with Newfoundland but that’s it’s it’s expired now but anyways predominantly Ontario and and then in person limited in person like really just Fridays in Mississauga and then I’m going to be moving to Sarnia in July so so I’ll be I’ll be offering in person there but yeah most of my sessions honestly are virtual like especially since the pandemic I find that people just they’ve kind of gotten used to doing it virtually and so it’s convenient they don’t.
[18:51] Have to worry about you know.
[18:53] Commuting and parking and all that rigmarole and so yeah they just find it really more convenient.
[19:01] Yeah I find that too I mean I’m still virtual and I’m considering going in person but I think, I might just to have some of that in-person connection because we’ve been missing out on that for so long but I think probably it’ll always stay at least 50% virtual yeah because of the convenience and and it works I mean there’s research to support that it’s just as effective.
[19:26] Yeah yeah and so yeah let’s talk about Gottman and some of the teachings because one of the things that always stood out to me with Gottman that I think a lot of people resonate with is this like concept of turning towards.
[19:40] Yes. Yeah. And yeah. Yeah. And then this is sort of the context that you create in this retreat where you’re taking away stimulation, like the rooms are simple, the landscape is simple. It’s also not that dramatic because like you said, they’re just traveling maybe 30 minutes. So it’s not like you’re booking a trip and you’re going to Costa Rica and you have this like customs and like you’re just driving to Mississauga. Lovely like yeah right but it’s but it’s like doing like international retreats too but yeah it’s it’s nice to have the option yeah it’s also less expensive probably because you’re not booking a whole trip um and then you’re removing like technology and all this stimulation distraction and and you’re just sitting you know having meals and lessons and things with your partner and then also other couples um yeah yeah yeah so there’s not i mean it’s psychoeducational right so there’s not any expectation to share about your personal stuff openly with everyone at all so um so there are some group exercises but that’s more like okay here’s a scenario um that i’m gonna i’m gonna give to you and what do you think would be an appropriate way to.
[20:58] For there to be a softened startup, for example, right? Like, so there might be a scenario given and then, okay, this is an example of a harsh startup, but what do you think could be ways to soften that and have a softened startup? So we kind of do that as a group exercise and then they do…
[21:17] Private couple exercises so i give them um the the uh the the instructions the exercise to do and then they go and do it like for example the first the first night we did love maps right so that’s one of the um the the friendship foundational uh principles of of strong marriage is is um is the the friendship is the bottom three so the love maps so that how well you know each other is what that means and then turning towards and um and then oh now i’m blanking what’s the other one i’m gonna have it right here uh love maps oh yeah fondness and admiration fondness and admiration turning towards so those three are the bottom the bottom three of the sound relationship house that formed that strong foundation.
[22:11] So, so yeah, for example, they would go off into their, into their couple spots and then, and then share with each other the, the love maps exercise and ask each other questions like, oh, so, you know, what, what’s your favorite tree or, you know, or, or they can make it into a game and kind of guess of okay the question is like what’s your partner’s favorite tree and then you you guess what it is and then if they if they get it wrong then amazing that’s a great opportunity for growth and learning that you you open your your repertoire of knowledge on your partner so then they can gently um correct and like and share with you what their tree what their favorite tree actually is if you don’t know it already um yeah it’s nice because you know so much i think that brings people to couples therapy is like a conflict or maybe they’re at an impasse or they are maybe both like at the end of the relationship and this is like the last ditch effort to salvage it sorry if there’s a lot of construct it’s really loud right now the constructions okay um, But it’s nice to like be considering and I’ll put a link like people can look up the sound relationship house because it’s a really beautiful image that like kind of, you know, what is your relationship built on? What are the walls, the foundation?
[23:33] But it’s also nice to use. Yeah. Okay, that’s perfect. That’s great. Yeah. Trust and commitment. I talk about this actually a lot with my individual clients, you know, because they’re like trying to sort out why a relationship doesn’t work. and then we find, okay, well, you don’t have walls on your house, you know? Yeah, exactly. But I love that it’s like, what’s your favorite tree? It’s not very charged, you know? Like, I don’t even know what my own tree is, but it gives the opportunity to work with that material. It’s like a starting material that’s kind of more benign, you know? It’s like, oh, why don’t I know my partner’s favorite tree?
[24:08] It’s probably because I’ve never asked, and why wouldn’t I have asked? And so it allows you to kind of, yeah, contemplate and think about it without it being like, how come you didn’t know how to, you know, celebrate my birthday properly? Like, it’s not emotionally charged necessarily, you know? Yes, yes. Yeah, it’s foundational. And with my couples, I often give that as a homework item as well. So they can work on that in between sessions. And like you said, it’s not emotionally charged. which is something that’s usually fun. It’s meant to be fun and a nice way to just refresh even the love maps. And John Gottman even says, you know, maybe there have been times where your partner might have shared about it, but then you might forget, like you don’t remember all these details about your partner. So then he says, okay, if you don’t remember.
[25:00] Here, write it down on a piece paper like now now you’ll remember right so it’s not only having the conversation and sharing it but also remembering it like retaining that information um and even at the retreat this past weekend i had told um right suggested to to the couples like to put even um like create a note in your in your phone or or jot it down on a paper like that is an accumulation of things about your partner. So even come, you know, birthday or anniversary or whatever that you’re looking for a gift idea, you can always access that list that might have their favorite color, their favorite restaurant, their favorite restaurant.
[25:47] I don’t know, their favorite author, their clothing sizes too, right? Clothing sizes and- That’s a good one, actually. Yeah, shoe sizes, ring sizes, like all those things, like preference on like they prefer silver jewelry over gold jewelry, for example. So being able to kind of have a little note that is continually growing and evolving and changing because their favorite restaurant now might be very different from what their favorite restaurant was five years ago so um so being able to update it along the way as well uh i know john and julie gotman do that every year they update their love maps and and um there’s an app for that um isn’t there an app for everything there’s an app for for that um called the the gotman card decks app. And so it has a lot of different kinds of card decks on there. And one of them is love maps. So you can even while you’re on the go, maybe you’re doing a road trip.
[26:53] Or waiting in line for something, or you’re at the grocery store, you can just kind of pull out that app and then share with each other some questions. There’s like a really interesting one on there called open ended questions as well. And it’s kind of asking those questions that don’t necessarily come up in conversation naturally like you know what do you think about our house is there anything that you’d want to change with that like what’s your five-year plan what do you want to do when we retire like there’s lots of really rich questions that you can kind of get the ball rolling with that and then you had mentioned about turning towards as well so in terms of that the the concept that Gottman talks about is bids for connection right so So bids for connection can be verbal or nonverbal.
[27:44] So it can be just a very explicit, hey, I’ve had a rough day. Can I have a hug? You know, that’s a very explicit bid for connection. Or it can be very subtle, like just coming in after a hard day and just kind of plopping on the couch and giving a sigh, right? You’re not necessarily verbalizing, I need you right now, but nonverbally you are. And so the partner can can respond to those bids for connection in one of three ways so the first way is to turn towards it so they kind of drop what they’re doing you know if they’re in the middle of doing dishes the dishes can wait like turning towards your partner and leaving the in that moment to just inquire like are you okay what’s wrong tell me what’s what’s going on and And so that’s turning towards, getting curious from a place of care and warmth.
[28:37] And then there’s turning away. So if you’re in the middle of doing dishes, you just like you might hear the sigh or see the sigh or see that they’re upset, but then you just keep doing the dishes. Like you’re just kind of on that task and you just continue on.
[28:52] And then turning against. So that’s where there might be some horsemen coming in the picture, whether it’s criticism or contempt and just kind of being harsh, like being, yeah, critical or hostile towards your partner of like, why you got to be so miserable all the time? Why are you sighing all the time or something like that, right? Like some kind of harsh statement, then that’s turning against. So Gottman calls these kind of sliding door moments. So these little tiny moments in time where you can do one of those three responses, and that will dictate the long-term happiness in the relationship if you’re responding and you’re contributing and you’re building that relational bank account, right? So if you’re turning towards, then you’ve made a deposit in that relationship bank account. So then over time, that builds up.
[29:59] And then eventually, if there is some kind of big stressor that happens, let’s say job loss or an unexpected pregnancy or a parent dying or something that’s a life stressor that it happens. And then you have a robust bank account to be able to survive and weather that storm. Right. So that’s the idea. Whereas if it’s already in deficit, if it’s already in the red and then that storm hits, then you’re kind of sitting in a, like going back to the house analogy, you’re kind of sitting in a straw house. Right. It’s not strong enough to be able to weather that storm. So, yeah. So that’s how turning towards kind of works as well. Yeah, because I can imagine all those little moments of either having a partner turn away or turn against creates resentment, this lack of trust, this lack of feeling like you’re in a partnership with them, you don’t feel like you matter, and frustration because… From the individual side of things, a lot of my clients will express this frustration with their partner. It’s like, how do I get him or her or them to do this or to respond this way?
[31:21] And there isn’t this trust that they’ll receive what they need from their partner. And so thanks for raising that because the needs are so, so important. And I tell my couples, like, you need to ask for 100% of what you need. And you might not get 100%, but it’s important to be able to put it out there. This is what I need. This is what’s really important to me. This is why it’s really important to me. And can we negotiate here? Is there some middle ground? Is there, like, I get you might not be able to do it 100% of the time, but where can we find some understanding, like mutual understanding? here. Um, so yeah, that’s the expressing needs exercise is, is one that I, it’s one of the first interventions that I usually do with my couples is just being able to share, have them share with each other their top three needs and, and be able to do that from, um, a, uh, a place of healthy communication. So I, I walk them through communication tools to be able to do that. Like I developed one called ILEAD. So would it be helpful to kind of walk through? Sure, yeah. That’d be great. Yeah. So it’s called ILEAD. So I-L-E-A-A-D.
[32:47] And then in between the two A’s is the little heart. So the heart indicates a transition between the speaker-listener kind of rule that happens first and then the open dialogue kind of role that happens after. So I’ll kind of walk through. I know some people might be seeing visually as well. So would it be helpful for me to just even share the screen? Sure, yeah. Yeah, that’d be great, actually.
[33:21] Can you see a send request?
[33:24] Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. There we go. Okay. That was easier than I thought. This is a whole nother. Oh, that’s beautiful. That’s great, actually. Technology. It’s good. Yeah, because you can watch this on YouTube or Spotify for everyone who’s just listening. And there’s some visuals. But we’ll also link to your site and…
[33:44] Yeah, yeah, which is great. Yeah, this is on the site. So it’s on like, if you subscribe to the newsletter, then this is like the freebie, right, that I’ll get. So if you if you want a copy, then you can, you can request it that way. And then yeah, at the beginning, I just kind of go over, you know, why is this important? Why is communication important? You know, we want to be able to model that for our kids. because they’re watching always um and yeah this just talks about the speaker listener dynamic so when one person when it’s their turn I always hold this my little pen with the flower this is when I used to officiate weddings I still have it um and so you have like the baton or the microphone um when you’re the speaker and you don’t let go of that until you feel heard and understood then you can pass the baton to the next person and then and then they switch roles so there’s a pretty specific um format to be able to feel understood so so firstly starting off the conversation with that like Gottman says soft and startup so um so the I feel statement so you’re leading with the feeling word. I feel X when Y, I need Z.
[35:04] I incorporated a little bit of internal family systems here of saying part of me because sometimes there is an internal conflict about some of the needs. So in this example, maybe it’s, you know, part of me feels lonely when you’re on the phone during dinner and I need you to engage in conversation with me. If that happened, I would feel loved and cared for. So you’re expressing how you feel, so in this case lonely, with that need not being met. And then you’re saying why, like what happens that makes you feel that way. And then you’re saying what you actually do need. So Gatman always says like, phrase it as a positive need. Because I have couples talk about what they don’t want at length, right? They can be very descriptive about what they don’t want. But then when I try to get them to explain what they do want, it’s a little harder, right? It’s hard for them to even conceptualize, like, what would that look like? So really thinking about what you actually do want, what you want to see happen.
[36:10] So in this case, it’s I need you to engage in conversation with me. And then sharing about how you’d feel if that need were met, right? They’d feel loved and cared for. So that’s how the communication starts out. You’re always leading with that feeling word and you’re saying what you need instead. Um and making that request and then the other person the the listener um can start with asking open-ended questions so this is the l for listen so the i was i statements l for listen um hmm, So you’re going to be coming with, like, wear the hat of empathy, right? You’re going to be coming in with really tapping into that empathetic part of yourself that wants to meet that need, right? That is open-minded and receptive. And so you’re going to come with any kind of curious, deepening questions or clarifying questions. That’s how you’re going to kind of start it off just so you can have a really good understanding of where they’re coming from and then summarize what they said so that’s all part of the l for listen so it’s not like what are you talking about i never go on my phone or i only did it.
[37:30] You’re more like exactly okay so last night how long did you think i was on like you know how long was on my phone or you know you’re getting more clarity as opposed to defending or critic you know you talked about the horseman defense criticism yeah yeah yeah and with this whole communication exercise exactly that’s the point avoid the four horsemen at all costs it’s so damaging right that predicts that puts divorce and separation later down the line so avoid the four horsemen, that’s the criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, right? So you’re going to come with that readiness, emotional readiness to be able to have this kind of conversation.
[38:16] That’s the first thing to do is both people to be ready for the conversation and agree on when you can have it. Because if one person is wanting to jump into this kind a conversation, but then the other person is hungry or tired or on their way out the door, or they have a deadline that they have to meet for work and they have to get that done, you’re going to set that whole situation up for failure. So set it up for success, choose the right time that makes sense for both of you, and then go in with that open mind. So yeah, the open-ended questions and then summarizing. And then E is for empathize. So we have the I for listen, the L for, or sorry, I for, I statements, L for listen, and then E for empathize. So being able to mirror back what you heard. And this is really hard sometimes for people because they might not agree, right? They might not agree with what their partner is saying. So then they’re like, well, how can I empathize and validate their experience if I don’t agree with what they’re saying. Okay, fair. But you don’t have to agree with them, right? You don’t have to agree with everything that they’re saying. You can…
[39:31] Put that aside that you don’t agree with xyz and tap into what part makes sense for you that they might have shared like is there even just a part of what they said that makes sense to you that you can understand where they’re coming from that you see okay from their point of view this is what they experienced and remember everyone has different contexts right so from their experience maybe they’re coming from a place of trauma or maybe they’re coming from a place where they yeah they experienced abuse whether it’s in the childhood or a previous relationship or maybe even earlier in this relationship like something happened that then triggers this emotional response so so being able to understand that you might not share their perspective and that’s okay. Everyone’s different. That’s all right. But at least to try to see it from their perspective, from their experience, this is how they’re feeling and what they’re looking for.
[40:34] So being able to say something like, okay, yeah, I get it. That must have felt X, Y, Z, right? And then using those feeling words that they might’ve said before, like lonely, Like, okay, yeah, I can understand how if I’m on my phone throughout our whole dinner, days on end, how you can be there kind of stewing and feeling disconnected and lonely. Yeah, I get it. Right? So being able to empathize in that way.
[41:04] And then A, the first A, it’s for apologize. So that might not be always applicable. It depends on the situation. But if it is applicable, if there is an apology, even like I said, for a small portion of what might have happened, then go for it, right? Extend that apology and be able to, you know, eat a piece of humble pie and be able to take that. Um apologizing is also something that gotman found that the masters do really well so um the masters of relationships were those who lasted the distance and they were happy in their relationship so they were really good at repairs right repairs includes apologizing or it can also include just saying okay yeah you know what you have a good point or um, Or calling a timeout of, okay, things are getting a little heated right now. Let’s just take a break and then come back. Or it can be like a touch on the shoulder, just like a hug when you’re kind of, things are getting a little bit too much. And so that just brings in that sense of connection again.
[42:16] So repairs are really good and that includes apologizing. Yeah, you’re not enemies. Like you’re reminding yourself and the other that you’re still connected, you still love them. Even if there’s a disagreement or there’s been a rupture. And I think the research, like, this is true for parenting, too. It’s like, it’s not about not having conflict. It’s about repairing after rupture. And that actually strengthens relationship more than no conflict at all.
[42:43] Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And it’s parallel with kids, for sure. And if there’s no conflict at all, then I wonder, like, is there communication happening? Like there’s just avoidance happening and neither person wants to really raise anything and then that by itself feels isolating so um so yeah it’s important to be able to share what’s on your mind because that brings more closeness and then be able to have that that repair so yeah for sure because i love like just to go back to what you said about ask for a hundred percent of your needs it’s like by default that will cause conflict because a hundred percent of needs will never be met but the fact that you’re able to recognize them and ask creates this opportunity for connection and you get maybe 99% in a really good world but if you’re not asking for 100%, Then, or if there’s no conflict, then maybe, yeah, it’s probably not asking for 100% of your needs. So how many needs are going unmet, you know?
[43:44] Yeah. And if they’re kind of unspoken needs, and finally keeping those to yourself and then building resentment over time, then that’s not healthy either, right? Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah.
[43:57] I was just going to say, yeah, because a lot of people will be like, oh, I feel so, you know, like I did this and I yelled at my kid or we had this fight. But it’s really the repair that matters. So it kind of lets you off the hook to have to be this perfect parent, quote, right? Yeah, exactly. We’re never going to be a perfect parent. I can say that for sure.
[44:20] We’re so experienced. Yeah, we’re never going to be perfect. And we’re never going to be perfect partners to our partner, our spouse or boyfriend or whatever. Um so yeah it’s we’re definitely not trying to strive for perfection at all because we are all fallen people um but um but being able to do our very best in this life that we have together and and be able to reconnect after there’s been a mishap right like that’s what the the masters do is they they they use the horsemen too right it’s not that they never use the horsemen the horsemen come galloping around with with masters as well but the difference is that it doesn’t happen as frequently and when it does happen they notice it pretty quickly and then they do a repair like fairly fast they they repair that rupture pretty quickly too so um so that’s that’s something that we can definitely take away and and apply in our own.
[45:22] Relationships. And kind of going back to what you had said about, you know, our partner won’t be able to meet all our needs. And that’s normal. That’s natural, of course. But that brings us to the second A, which is accept, right? Accept that our partner is also fallible. And maybe they They would try and they intend to do their very best and trusting that because of the commitment and care that you might have in the relationship, but knowing that they’re not going to be picked all the time, right?
[46:01] And so being able to accept what are they able to do. So in this whole conversation with the digital distraction with the phone idea they when they switch so just to backtrack when after the apology then the the listener can check in with a speaker to ask if they felt heard and understood and then if it’s a yes then they can switch roles here right after the apology they can switch roles and then and then the the new speaker who was the listener before can kind of share their perspective on this situation right because there’s always going to be another perspective and so then they can share their perspective so maybe the one who they’re they’re on the phone right they might say you know what I totally get what you’re saying and I and I want to be more present in the dinners but sometimes I do have like a work a work demand or a deadline to meet. And I, I have to, I have to meet that deadline. Like I have to get it done.
[47:07] And, um, and so they, they, they say, okay, you know, I might, I might be able to, um, have no phone rule, um, for, um, let’s say half an hour right like half an hour of the dinner like okay yes I can like be off my phone for half an hour that’s realistic that’s doable I can do that maybe maybe there will be sometimes where the latter part of the dinner I will have to excuse myself or I will have to kind of make some sense of messages over the phone um so so they they might they might say I can’t do a hundred percent but I can meet you here maybe it’s like 70 percent or 80 percent um that’s how much I’m able to do. So then going to the accept, the one who made the complaint, they might take that in and say, okay, you know what? They’re doing their best. I get where they’re coming from too.
[48:01] And I can extend that grace and know that they will and trust that they will do their very best to stay off the phone and like that half an hour is protected. But if they need to be on it after that, then I, I’m okay with that, right? I’m accepting that I’m embracing that my, my partner just has a really busy job. And this is, this is kind of the reality of what I, I am facing. Um, and that, that kind of ties in with Gottman’s concept of perpetual issues, right? So there are, there are those issues that are not going to go away, but you might be able to find some.
[48:42] Some temporary compromise with it so with this one maybe it’s like that half an hour that like okay we can do that but outside of that it might be hard um so so those perpetual issues are those those kind of ongoing the same thing keeps coming up in some kind of way over and over again um those are usually related to um personality differences or lifestyle differences or ideologies value differences maybe religious differences political differences so all these things that are harder to change about a person because it’s just part of like your identity um and and and being able to kind of navigate that as a couple um so so gotman found 69 percent are going to be perpetual issues all problems that we face are going to be yeah if you think of like just kind of the stereotypical in my head couple who’s been together for I don’t know 50 years or something and you know there’s sort of this old married couple they almost relate to those with humor right it’s like ah that’s just herb he’s just you know he just goes in his garage and he disappears for a few days so there’s like this acceptance there like this is just how he is and I’m like this and we always have this thing and that’s just the way it is so So, yeah, that’s actually refreshing.
[50:03] It’s like it helps to kind of navigate to when people are like, how much am I supposed to accept and how much should I try to fix? You know?
[50:13] Yeah. If there’s abuse happening, then that’s a bottom line, right? That’s a safety issue, then that’s a no-no. And there has to be very, very, very clear boundaries around that. If there’s any kind of safety issue, abuse, like certain things like maybe gambling, that might be interfering in the relationship. And it comes back to what we said earlier about financial well-being, right? That impacts on the financial household of the family. So addictions might be a difficult one to work through.
[50:50] I know for the Gottmans, they have a very specific way of working with addictions. So um because a lot of other couples therapy they they just say okay that’s um that’s that that is those who are are working through addictions they wouldn’t qualify to do couples work like the recommendations usually go and do um some individual work or get you know substance use treatment somewhere else and then come back and do couples work so it’s typically um that’s typically the recommendation out there in the couples therapy kind of world but um but the Gottman’s come from a different perspective which I respect and I I um it’s hard but I agree with it’s hard it’s in front of you but I do agree with it um is is you as a couple are going through it together and and the partner might be let’s say the sober one um the sober partner is there to support one who’s going through the addiction so um so that’s a whole other i mean that’s probably a podcast in and of itself but uh but just just to to know that that that.
[52:13] That committed relationship actually helps and supports the person who’s going through addiction to be able to overcome it.
[52:23] You’re leveraging the relationship to be able to build the strength of the person who’s trying to overcome the addiction. So, yeah, it’s complex. And yeah, the nuance, because it’s like without putting the responsibility on the sober partner or this also examining codependent dynamics. But yeah, that it’s like, again, it’s kind of this, we’re not in a isolation. So addiction affects the partnership and the partnership could also… Creates a healthy context around the person dealing with addiction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dynamics play out and all kinds of, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. There’s dynamics all over the place, like with extended family as well.
[53:10] So, yeah. So, how that kind of ties with the accept, like, yes, there’s certain things that there needs to be clear boundaries on for sure. But really thinking about what can you accept, right? What’s reasonable? What can there be some negotiation room there with and being able to accept it so so with this example it was i’m aware that part of me feels lonely when you’re on the phone during dinner i accept that there are times when you need to get back to someone urgently and i’m choosing to support you during those times so so this kind of reminds me of um let’s see if i can quickly find it i love it yeah i love bringing in the resource this is great i know it’s yeah this is yeah so i love this that’s you radical acceptance andrea miller so um so that kind of ties into this full concept of you know i need to accept um not only our partner but like other people around me because we can’t change anyone else we can only change our approach to it um in our our view of it. So being able to come to terms with those things that you can. Like I said, there’s certain boundaries that do need to be clear.
[54:28] And then the last piece. So I for I statements, L for listen,
[54:33] E for empathy. The first A is apology. The second A is accept. And then the D is for decide.
[54:43] So here they can decide together what what now okay we’ve had this conversation super helpful you shared your perspective i shared my perspective we both felt heard we both felt listened to there was an apology amazing there’s acceptance around whatever can be changed awesome so now what right now now what’s the next kind of step um maybe sometimes that’s enough like just having walked through that, that’s, that’s amazing. They feel already like better, right? So, so just having that conversation might’ve been enough. So then jointly they can decide like, yeah, I feel great. This was wonderful. Thanks for like sharing with me. And then, and then you just decide to, you know, extend a gratitude for each other. Like, thanks for being so amazing and in my life. And, and I love that we’re able to talk about these things. So, so extending gratitude might be what you decide on.
[55:39] Sometimes it might be having a more explicit action plan. Like if one person has said, okay, you know what? I promised you to do this. And then the other person says, okay, I promised you to do this. So with the phone example, like, okay, I promise, you know, 30, the first 30 minutes of dinner, my phone will be locked away. I’m not going to even touch it. It’s not going to be on the table. Having the phone on the table is also a distraction, by the way um so having the phone off the table and you know in another room locked away in your in your like pocket like jacket pocket in the closet um not your not your pocket that you can easily access but um but yeah so so one person is saying 30 minutes yes i can i can commit to that i’m agreeing to do that and then the other person saying okay outside of that then you know i’ll i’ll be understanding if you do need to use it for the latter part of dinner. So you have that action plan. Maybe just having it verbally is enough. Maybe it’s helpful to even write it down. So then you can revisit it later on, you know, try it out for a week or two and then come back and be like, okay, what did we decide on? Oh, right. It was this. How did that go? Okay. That’s going really great. Amazing. Let’s keep doing it. Or you know what? We need to tweak this. So let’s, let’s try to reconfigure a little bit more.
[57:01] And so being able to do that, just about the phone thing too. This past weekend, there was a couple there who shared something that I really loved. And that was that they don’t allow any phones or TV in the room at all in their bedroom. So I thought that was such a great rule. Because oftentimes, you know, I hear the couples that I work with, like that causes conflict, like one person’s kind of scrolling in bed and they’re just kind of not paying attention to their partner and then it’s the distraction in in the bed um and so to one another’s sleep you know yeah absolutely disrupting sleep and together time right um and so yeah i thought that was a really great um decision that they had made like a very intentional decision that they had made going into their relationship of no no screens in the bedroom so i think that’s great um so so yeah action plan might be helpful coming up with some kind of compromise um and and having having like like you said that that sense of humor and acceptance around those perpetual things that um that might might not necessarily go away so having some softening there um choosing that connection over distance and um and and being able to have that mind shift of, you’re more important than this issue.
[58:29] And then I also created some Spotify playlists for couples to use.
[58:38] Excuse me, as they kind of navigate different cycles. So if they’re, if they’re caught in a negative cycle, so it’s an EFT term. Um, if they’re caught in a negative cycle, then I made a list for that, like a, a Spotify playlist that they can, they can look at. Maybe they already have a, a song in mind, but, um, but if, if not, then the list can kind of give them some inspiration. And being able to kind of tie in your experience to music I find is really healing and being able to put words or emotion sometimes it’s it’s easier to like feel it viscerally listening to a song that you can identify with as opposed to talking about it per se so it gives a different energy And then I created a positive cycle playlist. So those that offer couples some hope and some like commitment of knowing, yeah, we can work through really difficult things, but we’ll get through it together. Like I’m committed to this relationship. And so, yeah, so sometimes that’s helpful. Cool, actually, that’s, yeah, I saw that point, and I’m like, that’s really, what’s, do you remember, like, an example of a song on the positive or the negative cycle playlist?
[1:00:06] I can pull it up. Here, let me pull it up. I can, like, even show you. Here, let me stop sharing screen. That’s so cool. Yeah. The second time, my podcast I recorded yesterday, we also discussed music.
[1:00:18] Oh, yeah? So, yeah, it’s so powerful for so many things. Like it puts feelings to things that we may struggle to express. Oh, cool. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, when I was going through some difficulties in my marriage, I’m divorced now, but when we are going through some challenges, even like five years before we actually divorced, we were going through some challenges. And um and I remember there was a day that I was driving to work and a song came on the radio and oh my Talia that hit home I just started bawling my eyes out and I went into work and I was like I can’t be here yeah so I I went home like one of my colleagues was like yeah you got to go home I don’t know what’s going on that’s a good boundary that’s a good Right, like, unleashes something. Oh, yeah, these are really cool songs. So You Love Me, Scientist by Coldplay. Yes. Poison One, Hurt, Christina. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Yeah, it, like, gives… I mean, there’s a reason that so many songs are about relationships and love, right? It’s, like, something that really…
[1:01:36] Even as you’re discussing the I lead steps, it’s so hard to stay emotionally regulated. And that’s the importance, I think, in probably so much what you do in couples therapy is just creating a context for them, a safe space for the couple to engage in those conversations and practice that communication and listening. Yes. Because you can feel like your partner is bringing something up, something that they’re not happy with. And even if they’re using I feel language and it’s a soft start, it can still trigger this toxic shame defensiveness, like this threat of like my attachment is being threatened, you know.
[1:02:23] A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. And so that’s a good point. If at any point in time, let’s say your listeners are trying out this eye lead, right? And that they come to a point where, oh, you know what? Things are getting heated. Like this isn’t what I expected. Then that’s fine. Take a pause, right? Take a minute to be able to calm and soothe and gain some composure and be able to just do that self-soothing. Um Gottman recommends anywhere between 20 minutes and 24 hours to be able to have that little break um then to be able to come back right back after that break um and during that break not ruminating of like all your counter arguments and how terrible your partner is right like no during that break you are actually doing self-soothing activities that you know are tri-tested and true for yourself. So you would have already known, okay, for me, you know, journaling really helps or like yoga really helps or walking in nature for even 10 minutes helps. So, so knowing that.
[1:03:29] Knowing yourself of what helps to calm in those situations um maybe it’s even just like watching funny cat videos for five minutes like it’s being able to get your mind off of it um because in in Gottman’s research it was very clear right like there was um they did they did some studies on on flooding itself what they call flooding so if your heart rate is over 100 beats per minute um and they they had monitors on the couples that they would bring in and study and so if the heart rate was going sky high, then they would come in and say, okay, you know what, we’re having an issue with our equipment. How about you guys go into this other room and just like, don’t say anything to each other, but here, just read these magazines and just, we’ll let you know when the equipment is working again, right? So they kind of did trick them a little bit. And then they still had the heart monitors on. So then when the heart monitors came down to like 85 or so.
[1:04:26] Then they brought them back in oh the equipment’s working better now okay let’s come back in and resume that conversation just you know take two here like resume where you left off exactly where you left off let’s continue so they would they’d resume the conversation and guess what they were like two different people were able to be open receptive the logical brain was back online they’re the the language brain was back online and so they weren’t in that fight fight flight freeze fawn mode anymore so they were able to really have a meaningful conversation so that’s so important yeah just being able to take that little pause yeah that’s so much of yeah.
[1:05:05] Like, I mean, we were talking before we started recording that I, in my internship or my practicum, I saw a few couples, but couples that were engaged in conflict, it was hard. It’s, you know, they’re like you were speaking about the passion for couples therapy and how it’s very particular type of therapy because so much of it is, yeah, you’re like laying ground rules. You’re creating a safe context and you’re really making sure, yeah, you’re almost, because the heart rate monitor is amazing and we’re rarely wearing heart rate monitors. So we have to be responsible in some way for like noticing when we’re becoming dysregulated. But so many of us don’t know that or we don’t have that relationship with ourselves. So you’re kind of watching like, okay, okay, okay. Like, let me pause you, you know, you’re having to, I’m not good at that. But I would leave sessions being like frazzled. And I’m like, oh my God.
[1:06:02] I know. Yeah. I mean, from a therapist perspective, that’s another piece, right? And I have a video on this on, I think I put on Instagram around like, what do you do as a therapist when that’s in front of you? And the first step was check in on yourself, like take a breath for yourself and regulate yourself because there might be countertransference going on for yourself. As a therapist like maybe it’s reminiscent of when your parents would argue with each other and you felt like you had to kind of mediate um you know a lot of therapists we have our own backstories um so like that’s what siding with one person over another you find yourself doing that yeah that triangulation so so we um we we are drawn into this field for for various reasons and so, we have to kind of check in on ourselves so take that breath yourself as a therapist before you kind of do anything before you say anything before you intervene but just just have a little mini check-in um and take that deep breath and then say okay let me pause you here let me pause you let’s take the heart rate right and even just like in the middle of a session if you take the heart rate, I find even just that exercise of pausing.
[1:07:23] Taking the heart rate, and then they’re like, they’re counting and they’re like, they’re waiting and I’m calculating. And, and so there’s a little bit of a break there. Right. And then even just that, like, however long, maybe two minutes that it took to measure the heart rate might have even been enough for them to just take a breath right um and then uh yeah this i i grabbed these because these are pulse oximeters so when i do meet in person then i put these on my couples so each of them has one so it’s just a little thing that they put on their like on their on their finger, And then I have it set up so that if it goes over 100 beats per minute, then it beeps.
[1:08:10] So these are great. But yeah, you’re right. People aren’t going to be walking around with these all day long. That’s really cool, actually. Because I think there’s one individual client I’m thinking of who would bring in this pattern with her partner. Where they would go from like 0 to 100 in like two steps. So even in trying to break down and identify the pattern, it was like, this would happen, then I would say this, then he would say this, then bam, we’re dysregulated. And a lot of that was like active dysregulation, like yelling, screaming, but crying. Like you know but um so many people are just their dysregulation shows and like they overwhelm and the distancing and avoidance and shutdown you know and um but sometimes often before that happens there’s an increase in heart rate and then it’s like you know kind of a shutdown.
[1:09:11] Um response where they’re just not you know so what do you think about that i don’t know i don’t care okay i’m done you know that kind of um so yeah yeah exactly yeah yeah and and like when when the person shuts down like that that’s part of the definition of stonewalling is internally like physiologically they are completely flooded so on the surface they might look like they don’t care or they’re just disengaged and they like oh they don’t they don’t care. The person who sees it, they might think they don’t care about me. They don’t care about the relationship.
[1:09:50] They don’t even want to have this conversation. But internally, they’re just completely overwhelmed and they actually care so much that they are completely dysregulated and flooded. And so they’re just trying to kind of survive that experience and just kind of get through um yeah that’s why they’re shutting down because they they care too they care so much yeah yeah that’s often yeah i always say like when when we feel numb like right when there’s a lot happening and we say i just feel numb i don’t feel anything it’s there’s too much emotion there’s an overwhelm of emotion so experiences i don’t feel anything but in fact there’s a lot going on yeah, Yeah, yeah. So bringing couples in to see that, okay, yes, there’s hope. We might be going through stuff, but there’s hope. And you can see some of the positive cycle songs on here too.
[1:10:46] Just that sense of like, I’m with you. We’ll get through the storm. So through the storm, Yolanda Adams, I’m by your side, Sade. Like, you know, just…
[1:10:56] Togetherness yeah to walk through together i choose you sarah barrett marae chasing cars cool yellow another cold play song i love it it’s good yeah i saw the um the candle lit concert oh yeah oh cool the concert yeah so so it’s instrumental only yes yeah cool yeah i’m getting ads for those they’re yeah yeah cool that’s a nice like calming sensory regulating thing to do too it’s like dim lighting and just instrumental music that you know yeah that you know and enjoy and yeah so good yeah thank you that was really helpful the eye lead, useful tips and, you know, and then this idea about, you know.
[1:11:54] Regulation and self-regulation and co-regulation to be able to have those conversations too.
[1:12:00] And then the awareness of the four horsemen that, okay, when you start to feel these coming online, it’s normal, actually, it will happen. So don’t feel discouraged, but it’s about kind of, okay, pausing and like, it’s okay I don’t you know let me undo that let me kind of you know rewind do the repairs yeah I mean that or okay oh I’m stonewalling okay let’s take a break let’s you know pause and watch cat videos and then we’ll come back yeah that’s all my uh like twitter is this is just like interesting animal videos and funny funny funny animal videos pets yeah I actually had a client tell me that recently she’s like the only thing she’s like i curate my instagram it’s just dogs i don’t want to see anything else i know yeah there’s a lot of stuff out there that that yeah stuff that is it can just um yeah when you’re not really necessarily looking for it that, can be like mini traumas that you’re watching or experiencing. Yeah, just like building in some control over what you’re exposed to and being able to monitor that. It helps. Do you have any… So one of the steps is empathy.
[1:13:27] And I’m wondering if there are… Tips for that like if somebody struggles with empathy or if they feel like their partner and maybe it’s because the partner struggles with their own shame and so their defenses like their defensiveness kicks in but yeah like is there yeah there’s actually the the same gotman app that i mentioned gotman card deck app if you go on there there is a empathy card deck expressing empathy yeah oh cool on the air sorry my my dog um snagged me i’m sorry i have a mandate um so yeah expressing empathy um so just give some ideas you can look through and see what might resonate because sometimes like you know we’re not we’re not trained necessarily generally to do these things right um we as therapists are but i mean the general public are not trained to like what’s validation like you know that that comes up a lot um with my couples is like that’s a part that’s missing in their conversations and then yeah of course they’re gonna feel unheard.
[1:14:44] Of course they’re they’re not gonna feel like their partner gets them because they’re they’re not feeling validated so yeah so things like um you must feel so hopeless so like kind of mirroring the the emotion back i feel such despair in you when you talk about this so being able to tap into what what what’s bringing what emotion is bringing up for you listening to it um you’re in a tough spot here so yeah empathizing with what they’re experiencing and, I can feel the pain you feel. The world needs to stop when you’re in this much pain. So that’s all turning to words, right? And the world needs to stop when you’re in pain.
[1:15:23] I’m in the middle of doing dishes, but I see you upset. My world in this moment can stop. And I can turn towards you when you’re feeling upset. So just that sense of connectedness together in it. Yeah. So powerful yeah yeah it’s a it’s yeah it’s really nice and it it’s like you can create space for that and then because often it’s like a yes but right like you said yeah the agreeing, part you know or um you’re like you know it can be possible to empathize even if you don’t agree right it’s like just making space for the other person’s experience and emotions and then you know and allowing that to be communicated um yeah whether you think the person’s right or you think you would respond that way or you know the whole thing where we can get into our heads and and uh or allowing the other to have their space and their.
[1:16:37] Empathy and their time and then you’ll get your time as well in this conversation you know exactly yeah exactly it’s a good point because the way that the eye lead is built each person does have a turn right and so sometimes when there’s just natural conversation happening you might interrupt because you’re trying to make your point and you’re just kind of thinking about what your point is going to be as a person’s talking but just the idea that you know you’re going to get to turn like once done you know that your turn is going to come um then just patiently waiting and in the meantime focusing on what they’re actually saying right sometimes even writing things down of what they’re saying might help just to kind.
[1:17:22] Of slow down the process and be able to be present and and remember some of the points right because when you’re summarizing back you want to be able to do that accurately so even just jotting down like little keywords as the as the person is talking might help or like if you think of questions that you don’t want to forget that question just write it down and then the like the keywords around their feeling their feeling words so jotting those down because you’re going to use those when you’re doing the empathy validation piece so yeah just having having that opportunity to take notes is really helpful too almost as you’re talking and describing this and like should be taught in school you know because that’s you’re talking about kind of like natural conversation or what people are used to the conversation patterns if we even sit down and talk at all without distractions right um.
[1:18:18] So there’s this structured approach with the steps, but it’s like, you know, learning how to snowboard when you’re teaching somebody, you’re breaking it down into these like micro steps. And then when you get good at it, then you don’t think about that. And you just kind of make art with your snowboarding or whatever the thing is. Yeah so but it can take a lot of time and a lot of practice to you know okay we have to sit down we have to do these steps together and okay that works better than whatever we were doing before or yeah weren’t doing you know and eventually that’ll just become part of how we talk to one another but you know after much repetition um yeah of practicing this skill so yeah I’m just thinking about like going into a high school and teaching people how to have conversations with their friends or partners you know yeah it’s a soft skill that more workplaces are looking for and that some people don’t necessarily have that skill and so it is super important not only in our personal relationships but also our our work the kind of work that we do and and being able to even like lead a team at the workplace, being able to hear your employees’ concerns and validate that, right? They feel heard, they feel respected in the workplace.
[1:19:48] So yeah, it touches on all kinds of areas. And I love that you mentioned about school because that’s like in my heart as well to be able to bring these kind of tools to…
[1:20:06] Two kids in classrooms and and I did it a couple like a couple years ago I I did speak to a classroom um actually at my son’s school and so um we we were able to kind of talk about feelings and like naming feelings and expressing feelings and so we kind of did that more um but yeah it starts early like that was maybe a grade four class I think it was cool so yeah I think it’s it’s wonderful to be able to start early and be able to foster that emotional intelligence yeah yeah like what am I feeling what word goes with that how do I speak that to people and because yeah you were speaking about you know soft starts and harsh starts and I can even you know so partners on their phone will use the example you use they’re on their phone at dinner it’s like can you get off your phone i’m trying to talk to you and already it’s not gonna go anywhere you know and then couples are trying to rewind and figure out where the impasse is and why don’t we connect and why don’t we like each other and and it’s like oh like we you know don’t have any starting point with which we can work with one another you know yeah like rebuilding these skills like rebuilding the relationship house kind of yes yes yeah going back to the relationship.
[1:21:32] One brick at a time yeah exactly yeah and this i mean this this house it took 50 years of research to figure it out right like it’s it’s it’s it was a long road and so to be able to implement these kinds of tools will also be a road like i feel like the next generation they’re more emotionally in tune past generations so I’m hopeful for the future in that respect um yeah I see that too actually like Gen Z is very aware and and very smart in a way that I don’t know if we were you know I’ve hoped I’ve hoped for them I know they get a lot of flack but I don’t believe it I like Gen Z’s they’re all right in my books yeah I think every generation has pros and cons right yeah that’s true yeah yeah yeah it’s interesting yeah like how um I see younger people kind of grapple with relationships and yeah the things that they’ve been exposed to and even these gender dynamics is interesting it’s an interesting conversation I think it’s pretty polarized on social media in the way that so much is polarized in order to drive kind of the negative emotion that catch your attention so there’s a way you know I think that that’s.
[1:22:57] Conversation could be a lot more nuanced, but there’s a lot of frustrations around partnership and gender dynamics and like roles in households and things like that.
[1:23:11] Yeah. Yeah. That Gen Z seems to have more of an awareness of or a transcendence of. But yeah, but that’s a general statement. I don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. There’s more awareness of equity and fairness.
[1:23:29] And yeah, thanks for raising that because I’m actually in the midst of writing a book. Oh, wow. Yeah. It’s good you’re up to a lot, Melissa. This is good we catch up. We have to do another one sooner. In the works, yeah. But yeah, the one I’m writing, I’ve been wanting to write a book on premarital work for many years. And so finally, I’m like, okay, I just,
[1:23:54] I got to do it. Just have to sit down and do it. So I started it a couple weeks ago, actually. And then, so I have the whole outline done.
[1:24:03] And last night, I started to like, write the prologue and then started to write the first chapter. So it’s early stages. But it’s, yeah, for premarital couples, primarily. But of course, like any couple can benefit from the information. But, yeah, that’s one of the topics. That’s why I thought of it, because that was one of the topics is roles, right? Rules and expectations and invisible labor. And so that’s all. That’s cool. Yeah. I know there’s like the card game fair play to kind of just visualize and lay it out and start having conversations around it. So there’s tools that are helpful. Which is great. Yeah, it’s a tough one. And it’s one where, and I don’t necessarily see this in just heterosexual dynamics either. It seems to be that there’s, This idea of fairness, and maybe it also reflects a difference in temperament, too. If I would rather there be no socks on the floor and my partner doesn’t care, then I’m probably going to be the one picking them up, right?
[1:25:10] Yeah, levels, differing expectations of cleanliness. Interesting. My student, she’s a MSW student from U of T. She’s with me for the summer, and so she’s really interested in blog writing. And I said, yeah, please. My blog, sometimes I’m delinquent with my blog and kind of a couple years will pass and there’s no entry.
[1:25:34] But yeah, she’s interested in blog writing. And I said, yes, please go for it. And so she gave me some topic ideas that she was thinking of. And then Invisible Labor was one of them. And so I said, yeah, go for it. And then so she she has a draft. We just have to finalize the draft.
[1:25:50] And then in that I had mentioned to her about the fair play card game. And she she hadn’t heard of it before. She’s like, oh, that’s fantastic. That’s so practical and fun. Like it makes it kind of fun, right? To kind of think about, okay, what are all the tasks that I do versus what you do? And let’s see how it stacks up. um and so yeah she incorporated that in her blog as well so yeah keep an eye out for that I don’t know oh that’s really cool yeah because it’s also like what goes into every task like if I if my job.
[1:26:22] In our relationship is to write the thank you cards yeah or birthday cards well that means I have to remember them I have to know I have to keep on track it’s not as simple as like you know I have to go buy the cards I have to think of every person’s personality what kind a card they were like there’s all this work around the managing that project um you know yeah so that’s that’s uh yeah cooking is cooking if my job is to cook the three meals every day and your job is to clean the gutters once of how often do you clean them a month that’s not necessarily like tit for tat right and yeah yeah yeah yeah interesting there’s a lot in in partner because there’s sort of this like.
[1:27:13] Team relationship of how do we manage a household or how do we manage a family um how are we partners in that it’s not that necessarily romantic sphere but it’s like how do we practically make it work where we can live and function together exactly yeah yeah yeah, so i think those are good like it’s it’s good conversations and um and that’s the piece right You have to be able to sit down, have these conversations with each other, and work through it, and come up with some agreed upon solution together if possible.
[1:27:55] Um and yeah kind of going back to the seven principles as well like that it walks through the friendship foundation the the conflict management piece so yeah how are we going to solve the solvable problems how are we going to manage the perpetual problems or gridlock issues sometimes it if you’re really butting heads on it becomes a gridlock issue and then the third part um, general general bucket that is is is the comprises the seven principles is the shared meaning, so so being able to get on the same uh aligned with what the expectations are what the roles are what the rituals of connection or like rhythms of our time together being able to connect together will be, and what kind of symbolizes or represents our relationship. And so being able to kind of walk through those areas of, and our goals, what are we setting out to accomplish with our relationship? So that’s all covered at the retreats as well, like all seven principles. So that’s the seventh principle is the shared meaning. And.
[1:29:17] One thing that came out of the retreat from this past weekend was um like wanting a little bit more on the symbols part um and so it it’s actually connected to a workshop that i i’ll have in august i’ll be collaborating with someone um someone who like she does more the art therapy stuff. And so in August, like we’re aiming at the end of August to do, um, like an art therapy for couples. Right. And so I kind of want to, I have to talk to her still about it, but I kind of want to incorporate symbolism.
[1:29:58] So like, you know, what does your relationship mean? Um, like for example, my, my student, she used to be a student last year, but now she’s an associate with me. Um, So she gave an example of in her relationship that they’ve been married over 30 years. Over time, their relationship has meant and continues to mean hospitality. So then it kind of caught me thinking like, okay, because when that person at the retreat said like, okay, this like symbols thing, like we’re, you know, we’re trying to get our mind wrapped around that. And so I was thinking about it more afterwards, last night actually. And um and so i was thinking about like okay like with that example that susan had shared about hospitality like how can how can we make that into a symbol and bring in like incorporate that in potentially the workshop in august right to like do some kind of art exercise for couples symbols um and so so then i was i well chet gpt is great for this kind of stuff and like, brainstorming right so then it came up with a whole bunch of different symbols for hospitality and then one of those symbols i really liked which was breaking bread.
[1:31:20] Basic like you know straightforward kind of symbol and so so then i asked it to um draw a picture of that like a like a couple breaking bread like with people around them kind of thing And so it created this like image, animated kind of image of breaking bread. And so like, oh, that’s so perfect. Like, I think that’s so wonderful. So then, you know, you could take that. And then and then and then in like the art workshop, for example, then like draw, draw you guys breaking bread or like just even drawing a loaf of bread and and just that that symbolizes the hospitality. So yeah so that that piece um cool it’s almost like uh creating like a logo or a what do you call those things like um.
[1:32:09] Cigna you know or like the the coat of arms for your relationship like what’s what’s you know what represents your partnership or your exactly yeah it’s beautiful because a lot of the time we do have images in our head or we yeah or even to think about what image would come to mind if you think about your relationship or what are the images um and how do we make those concrete or bring them to life or like yeah represent them to think of yeah what does our partnerships stand for what symbolizes it or yeah what are our shared shared values purpose direction you know yes past present future like the narrative like it’s a kind of leaving narrative therapy and yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah yeah and yeah so past present future would be and then that kind of ties in with the goals as well what we still want to accomplish you know five years 10 years 20 years in retirement etc so yeah yeah that’s really cool yeah so those are all the kind of topic areas that we that we cover in the retreat and then the next one is um i booked at the same place the queen of apostles and that’ll be may 29th to 31st next year 2026 yes and then And there’s something coming up in August. Do you still have spots open for that for people who are interested? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
[1:33:39] Honestly, we haven’t opened it yet. We haven’t opened the registration yet. So, yes. But if people are interested, just email me and then they can already be on the pre-registration list. Perfect. Yeah. Maybe what people can do is go to, I’ll put a link for your website. And if they go and grab the iLead freebie, then they’ll be on your mailing list and then they’ll get updates about what’s coming next. Exactly. Yeah. That’s the easiest way to do it. Yeah. Just to kind of get on the mailing list. And then they’ll be the first to know about when something’s open for registration. So I had that one in August. That’s the art one. And then this one, May 29th to 31st. And then September, this coming September, we have a money talk one. So an anti-budget couples edition. So I’m excited for that too. So I’m partnering with Angie Ross on that. So she’s a money coach. And I’m just trying to find a date. I think it’s September 25th. Let me just double check.
[1:34:49] That’s cool. Yeah, I love that there’s this, like, acknowledgement and then embracing of this financial piece, you know? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Important, yeah. Oh, yeah, here it is. September 23rd, it’s a Tuesday. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s at a 17th. It’s my niece’s birthday. Aw. Yeah.
[1:35:12] Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. Okay, that’s great. So it’s like, it sounds like it’s practical advice for financials. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, kind of aligning on what, again, what are our goals? And then depending on what the goals are, tying, you know, sometimes there’s money attached to the goal, right? So then being able to backtrack. So if we’re, if our goal, you know, we’re, we’re aligned on our, on our shared value of travel. So we love to travel. So then our goal is next year to go on an Alaskan cruise to see the Bora Borealis. Okay. I’m just like thinking out loud here. That is one of my bucket list items. Yeah, that’s cool. And so if that’s our goal, like let’s say next year to do that Alaskan cruise, then how much is that going to cost? And then backtracking. So if it’s going to cost like, I don’t know, they’re expensive. Let’s say $10,000 for both of us. I don’t know. And so then backtracking. So we have like, hey, let’s say a year and a half to save for it.
[1:36:22] Then how much do we need to save each month? And then creating its own separate account that is a savings account that doesn’t have any kind of bank charges, right? So you can just contribute to the savings account and it’s just money sitting there that you’re contributing to. And so every month saving for that Alaskan cruise. So then eventually you’ll be able to go on that cruise and not go into debt as a result, but actually have the money saved for it. So yeah so anyway little tips like that right that she’ll you know walk through that’s good yeah so it’s helping to kind of create a space to figure out okay how are we going to yeah because again money conversations are another of those sticky like unpleasant sometimes conversations that we don’t it’s like how do we even do this but then okay like if every month we’re putting aside a little bit we’re going to put it in.
[1:37:18] This tax-free mutual fund or whatever and then at the end of the year we have it so um yeah that’s good and then then we can go on our cruise and then it’s not a stress that we’re always kind of grappling with exactly yeah yeah christmas is another one right like um if christmas you know you’re gonna spend like two thousand dollars in total on entertainment food travel um gifts right decorations whatever the whole christmas budget is whatever that all entails if it adds up to like two thousand three thousand dollars then kind of backtracking okay what do we need to save each month to be able to survive christmas and not feel totally stressed out.
[1:38:03] So interesting i’ll say this um there’s a um manifestation uh kind of business uh called um to be magnetic so there’s like an influencer that works on this and she always talks about how relationships and money are intertwined and i think the the symbolism in both of those things is like security and um freedom responsibility like there’s so much tied up in money you know that uh in our relationship to money so it’s an interesting it’s good it’s bold to just bring it into the conversation and you know yeah yeah with the book that i’m writing there’s a there’s a on money too and um and then yeah kind of delving into just that right where did our story of money start where’s that from like what was our parents experience with money what did we witness to that um and what does money mean to us so yeah it’s it’s quite charged right it’s it goes quite quite deep yeah and especially in in marriage like there’s this like combining of finances very often yeah um and so it’s like i inherit your money issues you’re gonna take on mine now we have to sort through that if we’ve never looked at that before here it is it’s like in front of us yes so i don’t know.
[1:39:27] Yeah. Well, that’s so good. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks so much, Melissa. Any final thoughts or anything you want to wrap up with? We’ll put all your links in the show notes. Great yeah no i think that’s great like i i think that um you know if couples are kind of wondering about how to like maybe they don’t necessarily want to do couples counseling but they’re just curious about wanting to know more tools or have more tools or do something some kind of couple activity together like the workshops we have workshops pretty regularly on different topics. And then, and then the retreat, like, I think that’s a nice way to kind of, you know, if you don’t necessarily want to do the in-depth couples therapy,
[1:40:15] then there’s other options out there. And even for those couples who, like, they’re in a good place, right? They’re, they’re happy, they’re content, they’re in a good place. It’s for them too, right? To be able to maintain that good place, because that takes effort and work too, just to maintain.
[1:40:34] So yeah, I remember I had made that point at the retreat as well of like, you know, if you’re going to go to the gym and work out and you have a certain goal for your body to, you know, build a certain amount of muscle tone or like have a certain percent of body fat, whatever. And then you work really hard and then you attain your goal, you achieved your goal, then if you want to maintain that, even just maintaining that takes work.
[1:41:01] The relationship is the same way. Just to maintain it also takes that work. So maybe it’s not necessarily delving into full-on couples therapy, but maybe it’s doing a workshop or doing a retreat or something like that. Yeah. It’s good because the Gottmans, one thing I appreciate about them is the way they present their information is seems it’s very digestible I wouldn’t say simple but it has that like it’s not very complicated or very you know cognitive but there’s so much research and so for a couple who everything is working and they’re and they’re great and it’s like nice to just know oh this is what you’ve been doing maybe because you have these seven principles down pat it’s kind of like you hit your like muscle building goal like to use your analogy but you didn’t you don’t know what you did right and it’s like well you went to the gym you tracked your macros and it’s like oh right right okay okay so just keep doing that right otherwise it’s like okay I don’t know what what’s working maybe we just really get along but to know okay like you’re actually following these principles turns out um.
[1:42:09] And you’ve accepted the 69% of things that don’t align.
[1:42:14] So good for you because who can naturally just do that by accident, you know? No, that takes effort in and of itself. Yeah. And just like a lot of emotional maturity.
[1:42:26] Yeah. Yeah. And my team is obviously there for those couples who do want to do that deep dive and do that, you know, more traditional couples work. So they see they see couples for all kinds of different reasons whether it’s you know depression anxiety infidelity um communication issues conflict management okay we’re always having the same argument like how are we going to navigate that feeling disconnected like that’s one we see quite a lot is just you know where we’ve had kids like we’re just we’re busy with the kids and we just we don’t even know who each other are anymore um and so that that comes up um quite a bit as well just that sense of disconnection so then being able to bring them back together and reform that that bond again so yeah it was great cool yeah so anyone listening check out the show notes to get in touch with melissa go on a retreat or yeah access some of the resources and yeah this is really good thank you so much that was really helpful and i liked the lesson i think that’s going to be really beneficial for people the eyelid oh good yeah Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. I’m glad. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, um.
[1:43:48] Yeah, I, it was, it was, uh, uh, an exercise that I had put together and, and it was like, maybe for a good week or so, maybe 10 days. It just like, it was one of those things that just like consumed me. Like, oh, I could add this and, oh, I can add this. And so, so it started off without another, without a second A and, and without the heart of like, you know, defining the two different areas. And so it’s like over those maybe, maybe 10 days or so, I was like tweaking it, evolving it, you know, using it with my clients. And then they would give me feedback on even just the handout. When I, when I had, you know, the, what I showed you of just the content. Content and then my I remember a couple I was I am working with that said like this is amazing it’s so helpful but can you put it in just one summary cheat sheet page and so then I added that you’ll see if you if you download the the handout there is that at the end like I didn’t show it here but it was after the content part of the instructions then there’s another page that was just just like a cheat sheet yeah and that took um that took because i wanted it to be pretty.
[1:45:03] And like you know and and be able to you know i’m, bring in my logo and like bring in little emojis but then the emojis I wanted them to be my my my logo colors and anyway it was like a whole thing just to like put that cheat sheet together but yeah I hope people appreciate it and and find it useful so that was that was the whole idea um just to be able to provide some framework that um that couples can use like if there’s something just heavy on your heart heavy on your mind like how how can we navigate this so that we set that conversation up for success yeah and then you can just print out the cheat sheet or write down the points and then have it with you put it on the table okay wait we missed a step let’s go back okay empathize please yeah like they could even if they’re on the go like they can just take a picture of the cheat sheet right and then it’s in their photos and then they can just pull it up like if they’re on vacation or you know they’re they’re like at a family member’s house or something and then something comes up and they need to kind of have a conversation and they can pull up the cheat sheet from wherever they are just yeah is it yeah even just the um i statement it can be it can feel clunky and kind of foreign in your mouth if you’re not used to speaking that way so it’s like wait hey i stop using your okay no sorry wait i feel lonely when you’re right yes, But it changes the whole game. It does.
[1:46:29] If it’s an I statement that says, I feel that you always leave the dishes out or whatever, then it’s just a criticism under the disguise of an I statement. That’s not an I statement.
[1:46:47] I feel that whenever the next bit is that. No, no, no. Start again. It needs to be a feeling word. yeah like yeah otherwise you’re just kind of hiding a judgment or a criticism right yeah i feel that you are an idiot exactly yeah i feel frustrated when you do this thing and yeah that i think is idiotic but maybe you keep that part to yourself yeah yeah yeah keeping the harsh statements but stating what you feel about what’s going on that’s fair and what you need thank you so much Melissa yeah it was fun thanks for coming me thanks for coming.
On Thursday, June 20th, the Ontario government passed Bill C-59, exempting psychotherapy sessions from HST.
This is excellent news! This means that from now on, HST does not need to be charged for therapy visits (it was removed from Naturopathic Medicine appointments several years ago).
This makes therapy a little cheaper, as savings are passed onto you.
As many of you know, I have been a registered psychotherapist (qualifying) since the Summer of 2023 and have been accepting new clients since April 2024.
Sessions are covered by extended health benefits and are conducted online for Ontario and Quebec residents.
To learn more about working with me, feel free to book a 20-minute free meet and greet at taliand.janeapp.com
Therapy discussions involve:
burnout and stress
self-care
self-esteem, self-worth, self-talk
work stress and imposter syndrome
relationships
values and narrative therapy
grief
trauma
family systems, parental and intergenerational patterns, relational dynamics
cognitive behavioural tools
somatic and mindfulness tools
mental health care: dealing with depression, anxiety, ADHD symptoms, etc.
And so on.
I am an eclectic therapist who loves cognitive, psychodynamic, and humanistic approaches and therapy styles. I offer tools from various therapeutic modalities that might best suit clients and their needs.
I prefer not to rigidly adhere to one approach–you may choose to talk, prefer body-based tools, or want homework exercises or practical solutions to your problems. In the end, all therapy styles can be effective, but it comes down to the preferences and needs of the individual.
Therapy differs from naturopathic medicine appointments, which are more directive and prescriptive and involve bloodwork, supplements, herbs, and lifestyle recommendations.
In therapy sessions, we focus on building a nonjudgmental and supportive therapeutic relationship as we work on helping you gain self-understanding and insights to help you live by your goals and values.
Therapy and naturopathic medicine can pair well with one another.
Therapy can help remove obstacles to lifestyle changes, like self-talk or associations that can keep us feeling stuck. We can compassionately and non-judgementally explore factors that lower motivation or prevent us from taking the specific actions that we want.
Naturopathic medicine can support therapy by identifying the physical root causes of mental health symptoms and supporting the body through gut health, hormonal balance, and optimizing organs like the liver, blood sugar, stress response, and sleep.
They complement one another very well, and I often work with the same individual in both practices.
What does “Qualifying” after my registered psychotherapist title mean?
Therapists licensed by the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO) must put “qualifying” after their names until they have completed all three requirements.
450 hours of client session
100 hours supervision
completion of a Registration Exam
While psychotherapists qualify, they are still licensed, have a licence number, have sessions covered under insurance, and receive regular (weekly) supervision with a licensed supervisor.
Qualifying registrants typically have lower fees than psychotherapists who have completed these requirements.
My last step will be to complete the registration exam in Spring 2025, in which I expect to remove my title’s “qualifying” aspect.
Let me know if you have any questions about the registration and licensing of psychotherapists in Ontario!
It was a crappy week and I was chatting with a friend online. He said something that triggered me… it just hit some sort of nerve. I backed away from my computer, feeling heavy. I went to the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water and collapsed, elbows on the counter, head in my hands, my body shaking and wracking with deep, guttural sobs.
A few seconds later, I’m not sure how long exactly, I stood up. Tears and snot streaming down my face, I wiped them off with a tissue. I felt lighter, clearer. I was still heavy and sad, but there was a part of me that had opened. I went back to my computer and relayed some of this to my friend, “what you said triggered me, but it’s ok, it just hit a personal nerve. I’m ok now though, I know you didn’t mean any harm”. I typed to him.
Joan Rosenberg, PhD in her book 90 Seconds to a Life You Love, would have said that, in that moment, I had been open to feeling the moment-to-moment experience of my emotions and bodily sensations. I felt the waves of emotions run through my body, and let them flow for a total of up to 90 seconds. And, in so welcoming that experience and allowing it to happen rather than blocking it, fighting it, projecting it (onto my friend or others), I was able to release it and let it go.
For many of us, avoidance is our number one strategy when it comes to our emotions. We don’t like to feel uncomfortable. We don’t like unpleasant sensations, thoughts and feelings and, most of all, we don’t like feeling out of control. Emotions can be painful. In order to avoid these unpleasant experiences, we distract ourselves. We try to numb our bodies and minds to prevent these waves of emotion and bodily sensation from welling up inside of us. We cut ourselves off.
The problem, however is that we can’t just cut off one half of our emotional experience. When we cut off from the negative emotions, we dampen the positive ones as well.
This can result in something that Dr. Rosenberg titles, “soulful depression”, the result of being disconnected from your own personal experience, which includes your thoughts, emotions and body sensations.
Soulful depression is characterized by an internal numbness, or a feeling of emptiness. Over time it can transform into isolation, alienation and hopelessness–perhaps true depression.
Anxiety in many ways is a result of cutting ourselves off from emotional experience as well. It is a coping mechanism: a way that we distract ourselves from the unpleasant emotions we try to disconnect from.
When we worry or feel anxious our experience is often very mental. We might articulate that we are worried about a specific outcome. However, it’s not so much the outcome we are worried about but a fear and desire to avoid the unpleasant emotions that might result from the undesired outcome–the thing we are worrying about. In a sense, anxiety is a way that we distract from the experience of our emotions, and transmute them into more superficial thoughts or worries.
When you are feeling anxious, what are you really feeling?
Dr. Rosenberg writes that there are eight unpleasant feelings:
sadness
shame
helplessness
anger
embarrassment
disappointment
frustration
vulnerability
Often when we are feeling anxious we are actually feeling vulnerable, which is an awareness that we can get hurt (and often requires a willingness to put ourselves out there, despite this very real possibility).
When we are able to stay open to, identify and allow these emotions to come through us, Dr. Rosenberg assures us that we will be able to develop confidence, resilience, and a feeling of emotional strength. We will be more likely to speak to our truth, combat procrastination, and bypass negative self-talk.
She writes, “Your sense of feeling capable in the world is directly tied to your ability to experience and move through the eight difficult feelings”.
Like surfing a big wave, when we ride the waves of the eight difficult emotions we realize that we can handle anything, as the rivers of life are more able to flow through us and we feel more present to our experience: both negative and positive.
One of the important skills involved in “riding the waves” of difficult feelings is to learn to tolerate the body sensations that they produce. For many people, these sensations will feel very intense–especially if you haven’t practice turning towards them, but the important thing to remember is that they will eventually subside, in the majority of cases in under 90 seconds.
Therefore, the key is to stay open to the flow of the energy from these emotions and body sensations, breathe through them and watch them crescendo and dissipate.
This idea reminds me of the poem by Rumi, The Guest House:
This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
One of the reasons I was so drawn to Dr. Rosenberg’s book is this idea of the emotional waves lasting no more than 90 seconds. We are so daunted by these waves because they require our surrender. It is very difficult however, if you suffer from anxiety to let go of control. To gives these emotional waves a timeframe can help us stick it out. 90 seconds is the length of a short song! We can tolerate almost anything for 90 seconds. I found this knowledge provided me with a sense of freedom.
The 90 seconds thing comes from Dr. Jill Bolt Taylor who wrote the famous book My Stroke of Insight (watch her amazing Ted Talk by the same name). When an emotion is triggered, she states, chemicals from the brain are released into the bloodstream and surge through the body, causing body sensations.
Much like a wave washing through us, the initial sensation is a rush of the chemicals that flood our tissues, followed by a flush as they leave. The rush can occur as blushing, heat, heaviness, tingling, is over within 90 seconds after which the chemicals have completely been flushed out of the bloodstream.
Dr. Rosenberg created a method she calls the “Rosenberg Reset”, which involves three steps:
Stay aware of your moment-to-moment experience. Fully feel your feelings, thoughts, bodily sensations. Choose to be aware of and not avoid your experience.
Experience and move through the eight difficult feelings when they occur. These are: sadness, shame, helplessness, anger, embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, vulnerability.
Ride one or more 90 second waves of bodily sensations that these emotions produce.
Many therapeutic techniques such as mindfulness, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, somatic therapy, and so on utilize these principles. When we expand our window of tolerance and remain open to our physical and emotional experience we allow energy to move through us more gracefully. We move through our stuckness.
Oftentimes though, we can get stuck underwater, or hung up on the crest of a wave. Rumination and high levels of cortisol, our stress hormone can prolong the waves of unpleasant emotion. We may be more susceptible to this if we have a narrow window of tolerance due to trauma.
However, many of us can get stuck in the mind, and when we ruminate on an emotionally triggering memory over and over again, perhaps in an effort to solve it or to make sense of it, we continue to activate the chemicals in our body that produce the emotional sensation.
Therefore, it’s the mind that can keep us stuck, not the emotions themselves. Harsh self-criticism can also cause feelings to linger.
I have found that stories and memories, grief, terror and rage can become stuck in our bodies. Books like The Body Keeps the Score speak to this–when we block the waves, or when the waves are too big we can build up walls around them. We compartmentalize them, we shut them away and these little 90 second waves start to build up, creating energetic and emotional blockages.
In Vipassana they were referred to as sankharas, heaps of clinging from mental activity and formations that eventually solidify and get lodged in the physical body, but can be transformed and healed.
Perhaps this is why a lot of trauma work involves large emotional purges. Breathwork, plant medicines such as Ayahuasca, and other energetic healing modalities often encourage a type of purging to clear this “sludge” that tends to accumulate in our bodies.
My friend was commenting on the idea that her daughter, about two years old, rarely gets sick. “She’ll have random vomiting spells,” my friend remarked, “and then, when she’s finished, she recovers and plays again”.
“It reminds me of a mini Ayahuasca ceremony”, I remarked, jokingly, “maybe babies are always in some sort of Ayahuasca ceremony.”
This ability to cry, to purge, to excrete from the body is likely key to emotional healing. I was listening to a guest on the Aubrey Marcus podcast, Blu, describe this: when a story gets stuck in a person it often requires love and a permission to move it, so that it may be purged and released.
Fevers, food poisoning, deep fitful spells of sobbing may all be important for clearing up the backlog of old emotional baggage and sludge so that we can free up our bodies to ride these 90 second emotional waves in our moment-to-moment experience.
Grief is one of these primary sources of sludge in my opinion. Perhaps because we live in a culture that doesn’t quite know how to handle grief–that time-stamps it, limits it, compartmentalizes it, commercializes it, and medicates it–many of us suffer from an accumulation of suppressed grief sankharas that has become lodged in our bodies.
Frances Weller puts it this way,
“Depression isn’t depression, it’s oppression–the accumulated weight of decades of untouched losses that have turned into sediment, an oppressive weight on the soul. Processing loss is how the majority of therapies work, by touching sorrow upon sorry that was never honoured or given it’s rightful attention.”
Like a suppressed bowel movement, feelings can be covered up, distracted from. However, when we start to turn our attention to them we might find ourselves running to the nearest restroom. Perhaps in these moments it’s important to get in touch with someone to work with, a shaman of sorts, or a spiritual doula, someone who can help you process these large surges of energy that your body is asking you to purge.
However, it is possible to set our dial to physiological neutral to, with courage turn towards our experience, our emotions and body sensations. And to know that we can surf them, and even if we wipe out from time to time, we might end up coming out the other side, kicking out, as Rumi says, “laughing”.
The only way out is through.
As Jon Kabat Zinn says, “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf”.
It’s day one of my period and I’ve been healing a broken foot for 6 weeks. The weather is overcast, thick, humid and rainy.
My body feels thick and heavy. Clothing leaves an imprint on my skin–socks leave deep indentations in my ankles. My face and foot is swollen. My tongue feels heavy. My mind feels dull, achey, and foggy. It’s hard to put coherent words together.
I feel cloudy and sleepy. Small frustrations magnify. It’s hard to maintain perspective.
My muscles ache. My joints throb slightly. They feel stiffer and creakier.
This feeling is transient. The first few days of the menstrual cycle are characterized by an increase in prostaglandins that stimulate menstrual flow and so many women experience an aggravation of inflammatory symptoms like depression, arthritis, or autoimmune conditions around this time. You might get. a cold sore outbreak, or a migraine headache around this time of month. The phenomenon can be exaggerated with heavy, humid weather, and chronic inflammation–such as the prolonged healing process of mending a broken bone.
Inflammation.
It’s our body’s beautiful healing response, bringing water, nutrients, and immune cells to an area of injury or attack. The area involved swells, heats up, becomes red, and might radiate pain. And then, within a matter of days, weeks, or months, the pathogen is neutralized, the wound heals and the inflammatory process turns off, like a switch.
However, inflammation can be low-grade and chronic. Many chronic health conditions such as diabetes, arthritis, PMS or PMDD, depression, anxiety, migraines, even bowel and digestive issues, have an inflammatory component.
As I tell my patients. Inflammation is “everything that makes you feel bad”. Therefore anti-inflammatory practices make you feel good.
Many of us don’t realize how good we can feel because low-grade inflammation is our norm.
We just know that things could be better: we could feel more energy, more lightness of being and body, more uplifted, optimistic mood, clearer thinking and cognitive functioning, better focus, less stiffness and less swelling.
Obesity and weight gain are likely inflammatory processes. Insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome are inflammatory in nature. It’s hard to distinguish between chronic swelling and water retention due to underlying low-grade chronic inflammation and actual fat gain, and the two can be closely intertwined.
It’s unfortunate then, that weight loss is often prescribed as a treatment plan for things like hormonal imbalances, or other conditions caused by metabolic imbalance. Not only has the individual probably already made several attempts to lose weight, the unwanted weight gain is most likely a symptom, rather than a cause, of their chronic health complaint. (Learn how to get to the root of this with my course You Weigh Less on the Moon).
Both the main complaint (the migraines, the PMS, the endometriosis, the depression, the arthritis, etc.) and the weight gain, are likely due to an inflammatory process occurring in the body.
To simply try to cut calories, or eat less, or exercise more (which can be helpful for inflammation or aggravate it, depending on the level of stress someone is under), can only exacerbate the process by creating more stress and inflammation and do nothing to relieve the root cause of the issues at hand.
Even anti-inflammatory over the counter medications like Advil, prescription ones like naproxen, or natural supplements like turmeric (curcumin) have limiting effects. They work wonderfully if the inflammation is self-limiting: a day or two of terrible period cramps, or a migraine headache. However, they do little to resolve chronic low-grade inflammation. If anything they only succeed at temporarily suppressing it only to have it come back with a vengeance.
The issue then, is to uncover the root of the inflammation, and if the specific root can’t be found (like the piece of glass in your foot causing foot pain), then applying a general anti-inflammatory lifestyle is key.
The first place to start is with the gut and nutrition.
Nutrition is at once a complex, confusing, contradictory science and a very simple endeavour. Nutrition was the simplest thing for hundreds of thousands of years: we simply ate what tasted good. We ate meat, fish and all the parts of animals. We ate ripe fruit and vegetables and other plant matter that could be broken down with minimal processing.
That’s it.
We didn’t eat red dye #3, and artificial sweeteners, and heavily modified grains sprayed with glyphosate, and heavily processed flours, and seed oils that require several steps of solvent extraction. We didn’t eat modified corn products, or high fructose corn syrup, or carbonated drinks that are artificially coloured and taste like chemicals.
We knew our food—we knew it intimately because it was grown, raised, or hunted by us or someone we knew—and we knew where it came from.
Now we have no clue. And this onslaught of random food stuffs can wreck havoc on our systems over time. Our bodies are resilient and you probably know someone who apparently thrives on a diet full of random edible food-like products, who’s never touched a vegetable and eats waffles for lunch.
However, our capacity to heal and live without optimal nutrition, regular meals that nourish us and heal us rather than impose another adversity to overcome, can diminish when we start adding in environmental chemicals and toxins, mental and emotional stress, a lack of sleep, and invasion of blue light at all hours of the day, bodies that are prevented from experiencing their full range of motion, and so on.
And so to reduce inflammation, we have to start living more naturally. We need to reduce the inflammation in our environments. We need to put ourselves against a natural backdrop–go for a soothing walk in nature at least once a week.
We need to eat natural foods. Eat meats, natural sustainably raised and regeneratively farmed animal products, fruits and vegetables. Cook your own grains and legumes (i.e.: process your food yourself). Avoid random ingredients (take a look at your oat and almond milk–what’s in the ingredients list? Can you pronounce all the ingredients in those foods? Can you guess what plant or animal each of those ingredients came from? Have you ever seen a carageenan tree?).
Moving to a more natural diet can be hard. Sometimes results are felt immediately. Sometimes our partners notice a change in us before we notice in ourselves (“Hon, every time you have gluten and sugar, don’t you notice you’re snappier the next day, or are more likely to have a meltdown?”).
It often takes making a plan–grocery shopping, making a list of foods you’re going to eat and maybe foods you’re not going to eat, coming up with some recipes, developing a few systems for rushed nights and take-out and snacks–and patience.
Often we don’t feel better right away–it takes inflammation a while to resolve and it takes the gut time to heal. I notice that a lot of my patients are addicted to certain chemicals or ingredients in processed foods and, particularly if they’re suffering from the pain of gut inflammation, it can tempting to go back to the chemicals before that helped numb the pain and delivered the dopamine hit of pleasure that comes from dealing with an addiction. It might help to remember your why. Stick it on the fridge beside your smoothie recipe.
We need to sleep, and experience darkness. If you can’t get your bedroom 100%-can’t see you hand in front of your face-dark, then use an eye mask when sleeping. Give your body enough time for sleep. Less than 7 hours isn’t enough.
We need to move in all sorts of ways. Dance. Walk. Swim. Move in 3D. Do yoga to experience the full range of motion of your joints. Practice a sport that requires your body and mind, that challenges your skills and coordination. Learn balance both in your body and in your mind.
We need to manage our emotional life. Feeling our emotions, paying attention to the body sensations that arise in our bodies—what does hunger feel like? What does the need for a bowel movement feel like? How does thirst arise in your body? Can you recognize those feelings? What about your emotions? What sensations does anger produce? Can you feel anxiety building? What do you do with these emotions once they arise? Are you afraid of them? Do you try to push them back down? Do you let them arise and “meet them at the door laughing” as Rumi says in his poem The Guest House?
Journalling, meditation, mindfulness, hypnosis, breath-work, art, therapy, etc. can all be helpful tools for understanding the emotional life and understanding the role chronic stress (and how it arises, builds, and falls in the body) and toxic thoughts play in perpetuating inflammation.
Detox. No, I don’t mean go on some weird cleanse or drinks teas that keep you on the toilet all day. What I mean is: remove the gunk and clutter from your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional plumbing. This might look like taking a tech break. Or going off into the woods for a weekend. Eating animals and plants for a couple of months, cutting out alcohol, or coffee or processed foods for a time.
It might involve cleaning your house with vinegar and detergents that are mostly natural ingredients, dumping the fragrances from your cosmetics and cleaning products, storing food in steel and glass, rather than plastic. It might mean a beach clean-up. Or a purging of your closet–sometimes cleaning up the chaos in our living environments is the needed thing for reducing inflammation. It’s likely why Marie Kondo-ing and the Minimalist Movement gained so much popularity–our stuff can add extra gunk to our mental, emotional, and spiritual lives.
Finally, connect with your community. Loneliness is inflammatory. And this past year and a half have been very difficult, particularly for those of you who live alone, who are in transition, who aren’t in the place you’d like to be, or with the person or people you’d like to be–your soul family.
It takes work to find a soul family. I think the first steps are to connect and attune to oneself, to truly understand who you are and move toward that and in that way people can slowly trickle in.
We often need to take care of ourselves first, thereby establishing the boundaries and self-awareness needed to call in the people who will respect and inspire us the most. It’s about self-worth. How do you treat yourself as someone worthy of love and belonging?
Perhaps it first comes with removing the sources of inflammation from our lives, so we can address the deeper layers of our feelings and body sensations and relieve the foggy heaviness and depression and toxic thoughts that might keep us feeling stuck.
Once we clear up our minds and bodies, and cool the fires of inflammation, we start to see better—the fog lifts. We start to think more clearly. We know who we are. Our cravings subside. We can begin to process our shame, anger and sadness.
We start to crave nourishing things: the walk in nature, the quiet afternoon writing poetry, the phone call with a friend, the stewed apples with cinnamon (real sweetness). We free up our dopamine receptors for wholesome endeavours. We start to move in the direction of our own authenticity. I think this process naturally attracts people to us. And naturally attracts us to the people who have the capacity to love and accept us the way we deserve.
Once we start to build community, especially an anti-inflammatory community—you know, a non-toxic, nourishing, wholesome group of people who make your soul sing, the path becomes easier.
You see, when you are surrounded by people who live life the way you do–with a respect for nature, of which our bodies are apart–who prioritize sleep, natural nutrition, mental health, movement, emotional expression, and self-exploration, it becomes more natural to do these things. It no longer becomes a program or a plan, or a process you’re in. It becomes a way of life–why would anyone do it any other way?
The best way to overcome the toxicity of a sick society is to create a parallel one.
When you’re surrounded by people who share your values. You no longer need to spend as much energy fighting cravings, going against the grain, or succumbing to self-sabotage, feeling isolated if your stray from the herb and eat vegetables and go to sleep early.
You are part of a culture now. A culture in which caring for yourself and living according to your nature is, well… normal and natural.
There’s nothing to push against or detox from. You can simply rest in healing, because healing is the most natural thing there is.
About a month ago I fractured my right 5th metatarsal (an avulsion fracture, aka “The Dancer’s Fracture” or a “Pseudo-Jones Fracture”).
As soon as I laid eyes on the x-ray and the ER doctor declared, “Ms. Marcheggiani,” (actually, it’s doctor, but ok) “you broke your foot!” things changed.
I have never broken anything before, but if you have you know what it’s like. In a matter of seconds I couldn’t drive. I could barely put weight on it. I was given an Aircast boot to hobble around in, and told to ice and use anti-inflammatories sparingly. My activities: surfing, skateboarding, yoga, even my daily walks, came to a startling halt.
I spent the first few days on the couch, my foot alternating between being elevated in the boot and immersed in an ice bath. I took a tincture with herbs like Solomon’s Seal, mullein, comfrey, and boneset to help heal the bone faster. I was adding about 6 tbs of collagen to oats in the morning. I was taking a bone supplement with microcrystalline hydroxyapatite, pellets of homeopathic symphytum, zinc, and vitamin D.
We call this “treatment stacking”: throwing everything but the kitchen sink at something to give the body as many resources as possible that it may use to heal.
My brother’s wedding came and went. I was the emcee, and the best man. I bedazzled my boot and hobbled around during set-up, photos, presentations, and even tried shaking and shimmying, one-legged on the dance floor. The next few days I sat on the couch with my leg up.
I watched the Olympics and skateboarding videos. I read The Master and the Margarita and Infinite Jest. I got back into painting and created some pen drawings, trying to keep my mind busy.
I slept long hours–an amount that I would have previously assumed to be incapable. The sleep felt necessary and healing. I was taking melatonin to deepen it further.
I closed down social media apps on my phone to deal with the immense FOMO and stop mindlessly scrolling. I journaled instead, turning my focus from the outside world to my inner one.
It was a painful process, and not necessarily physically.
I was confined to my immediate surroundings–not able to walk far or drive. I was at the mercy of friends and family to help me grocery shop. The last year and a half has made many of us grow accustomed to social isolation and a lot of my social routines from years prior had fallen by the wayside.
My world, like the worlds of many, had gotten smaller over the last 18 months. With a broken foot, my world shrunk even further.
The loneliness was excruciating.
It would come in waves.
One moment I would relish the time spent idle and unproductive. The next I would be left stranded by my dopamine receptors, aimless, sobbing, grieving something… anything… from my previous life. And perhaps not just the life I had enjoyed pre-broken foot, but maybe a life before society had “broken”, or even before my heart had.
I thought I would be more mentally productive and buckle down on work projects but it became painfully obvious that my mental health and general productivity are tightly linked to my activity levels. And so I spent a lot of the weeks letting my bone heal in a state of waiting energy.
My best friend left me a voicemail that said, “Yes… you’re in that waiting energy. But, you know, something will come out of it. Don’t be hard on yourself. Try to enjoy things… watch George Carlin…”
During the moments where I feel completely useless and unproductive, waiting for life to begin, I was reminded of this quote by Cheryl Strayed. This quote speaks to me through the blurry, grey haze of boredom and the existential urgency of wasting time.
It says,
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”
These things are your becoming.
Something will come out of it.
When I did a 10-Day Vipassana (silent meditation) retreat in the summer of 2018, I learned about pain.
It was Day 3 or 4 and we had been instructed to sit for an entire hour without moving. The pain was excruciating. The resistance was intense. I was at war with myself and then, when the gong went off and there was nothing to push against, I noticed a complete relief of tension. I was fine.
The next time I sat to meditate (another hour after a 10 minute break), I observed the resistance and released it. It’s hard to describe exactly what I did. It was something like, letting the sensations of pain flow through me like leaves on a river, rather than trying to cup my hands around them, or understand or making meaning out of them.
The sensations ebbed and flowed. Some might have been called “unpleasant” but I wasn’t in a space to judge them while I was just a casual observer, watching them flow by. They just were.
And when I have intense feelings of loneliness, boredom or heart-break I try to remember the experience I had with pain and discomfort on my meditation cushion. I try to allow them.
“This too shall pass”.
When I have a craving to jump off my couch and surf, or an intense restlessness in the rest of my body, the parts that aren’t broken, I try to let those sensations move through me.
I notice how my foot feels. How while apparently still, beneath my external flesh my body is busy: it’s in a process. It’s becoming something different than it was before. It’s becoming more than a foot that is unbroken. It’s becoming callused and perhaps stronger.
Maybe my spirit is in such a process as well.
The antidote to boredom and loneliness very often is a process of letting them move through, of observing the sensations and stepped back, out of the river to watch them flow by. A patience. Letting go.
I can’t surf today. But, it is the nature of waves that there will always be more.
Pima Chodron in her book When Things Fall Apart also references physical pain and restless in meditation while speaking of loneliness.
She writes,
“Usually we regard loneliness as the enemy. Heartache is not something we choose to invite in. It’s restless and pregnant and hot with desire to escape and find something or someone to keep us company. When we can rest in the middle, we begin to have a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness, a relaxing and cooling loneliness that completely turns our usual fearful patterns upside down.”
She continues,
“When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart?
“The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.”
“The right to determine what shall or shall not be done with one’s own body, and to be free from non-consensual medical treatment is a right deeply rooted in Canadian common law. The right underlines the doctrine of informed consent.
“With very limited exceptions (such emergency use or incapacity), every person’s body is considered inviolate and accordingly every competent adult has the right to be free from unwanted medical treatment.
“The fact that serious risks or consequences may result from a refusal of medical treatment does not vititate the right of medical self-determination.
“The doctrine of informed consent ensures the freedom of individuals to make choices about their medical care. It is the patient, not the physician (or others) who ultimately must decide if treatment–any treatment–is to be administered.” Justice Robbins of the Ontario Court of Appeal.
I deeply believe that the key to optimal health is taking full responsibility and accepting all personal power for one’s own health. This may involve doing research, educating oneself, or assembling a team of trusted health professionals, with you, the patient at the centre.
We have a busy and overloaded healthcare system and even well-meaning professionals can find themselves hurriedly having a conversation in which they are not properly informing patients of the risks and benefits, or alternatives to treatment that they are recommending. I have had patients hurriedly scheduling for surgeries they weren’t sure they wanted, or pressured into hysterectomies or long-term treatments whose risks they didn’t understand.
I have also had patients make perplexing choices in the name of their own care–choices I didn’t necessarily agree with, such as forgoing conventional cancer treatments or further testing or screening.
However, it is the duty of the healthcare provider to provide advice. And it is the right of every patient to accept or reject that advice.
In light of recent, disturbing events, I have started posting some facts on Canadian law and Informed Consent only to be met with surprise–many people are not aware of their rights to refuse medical treatment, to be informed of the risks, and to be allowed to make a choice free of pressure or coercion.
Despite it being deeply enshrined in Canadian law, many patients are not aware of their right to full bodily integrity, autonomy, and choice.
Since 1980, the Supreme Court of Canada made it the right of every patient to be given full informed consent before any medical procedure such as taking blood, giving an injection or vaccination, performing a physical examination, exposing the patient to radiation, and so on.
“The underlying principle is the right of a patient to decide what, if anything, should be done with his body.” Is quote from the famous Supreme Court case of Hopp v. Lepp.
Every health professional under the Regulated Health Professions Act, including naturopathic doctors has a duty to uphold informed consent. We are well versed in it. We are required to uphold it, document it, and maintain it with every patient we see.
Our naturopathic guidelines on consent state, “The ability to direct one’s own health care needs and treatment is vital to an individual’s personal dignity and autonomy. A key component of dignity and autonomy is choice. Regulated health professionals hold a position of trust and power with respect to their patients and can often exercise influence over a patient; however, decision-making power must always rest with the patient.”
In 1996 Ontario passed the Health Care Consent Act, a legal framework for documenting, communicating, establishing and maintaining informed consent in all healthcare settings.
Informed consent is required before all treatment can be administered. Treatment includes: “anything that is done for a therapeutic, preventive, palliative, diagnostic, cosmetic or other health-related purpose, and includes a course of treatment, plan of treatment or community treatment plan.”
Informed consent must be present in 4 key areas:
The consent must relate to the treatment.
The consent must be informed.
The consent must be given voluntarily, i.e.: made by the patient, and under no coercion, pressure, or duress.
The consent must not be obtained through misrepresentation or fraud.
In order to obtain your full informed consent, you must be given the following information:
The nature of the treatment.
The expected benefits of the treatment.
The material risks of the treatment, no matter how small, especially if one of the risks of side effects is death. The risks should not be minimized for the purpose of influencing your decision-making. The risks should be in relation to your health history. For example, if you suffer from cardiovascular disease, you should be made aware of the the risk of blood clots or myocarditis. It should also be disclosed if certain risks remain unknown.
The material side effects of the treatment. Again, these side effects should be explicitly stated, no matter how small, and if long-term side effects are unknown, that should be stated.
Alternative courses of action.
The likely consequences of not having the treatment. These consequences should not be exaggerated and must be related to the particular patient at hand. What is the actual risk of the patient not receiving the treatment?
Consent cannot be given in a state of duress or coercion. Healthcare providers must be aware that they hold a position of authority and may maintain a power imbalance. They must not misrepresent the benefits of the treatment, and they must disclose any conflict of interest.
Healthcare providers must ensure that patients are not acting under the pressures of someone else, such as an employer, government agency or family member, and are making this decision on their own.
Finally,
The Informed Consent Guide for Canadian Physicians states, “Patients must always be free to consent to or refuse treatment, and be free of any suggestion of duress or coercion. Consent obtained under any suggestion of compulsion either by the actions or words of the physician or others may be no consent at all and therefore may be successfully repudiated. In this context physicians must keep clearly in mind there may be circumstances when the initiative to consult a physician was not the patient’s but was rather that of a third party, a friend, an employer, or even a police officer.
“Under such circumstances, the physician may be well aware that the paitent is only very reluctantly following the course of action suggested or insisted upon by a third person. Then, physicians should be more than usually careful to assure themselves that patients are in full agreement with what has been suggested, that there has been no coercion and that the will of other persons has not been imposed on the patient”.
It is your body and it is your choice. You always have the right to do what’s best for you. True, empowered health cannot come from a place of coercion or pressure.
Know that you always have a choice–your doctor has a duty to inform you of your choice, as well as the information necessary for you to make the right choice for you, regardless of what is happening in the media or in politics.
