Anger Is Not What You Think It Is

Anger has a reputation problem. In most of the contexts in which people discuss it — therapy, coaching, personal development, organisational culture — it is treated primarily as something to manage. Something to understand the roots of, ideally to process and release, and ultimately to reduce. A problem state. A signal that something has gone […]

Set Three Alarms. Call One “Remember Your Source.”

This is a practical article about a small thing that turns out to matter more than it looks. The instruction is this: set three alarms on your phone, at points throughout your waking day that are realistic and sustainable. Name each one. Not “alarm” or a time. A name that, when you look at it […]

We Are Not Fundamentally Selfish. We Just Built Systems that Forgot That.

The dominant story about human nature, at least in the West, runs something like this: people are fundamentally self-interested. Left to their own devices, they will prioritise themselves. Compassion and cooperation happen when individuals calculate that it is in their interest to cooperate, or when social pressure makes selfishness too costly. Generosity is the exception. […]

Chunking Up: The Technique That Links Your Sister’s Anger to Your Business Finances

There is a moment in certain kinds of inner work when two things connect that have absolutely no business being connected. A participant in a recent session came in carrying a year-long conflict with her sister: passive aggression, a major outburst, months of silence, and an upcoming family gathering she was already dreading. We spent […]

Forgiveness Is Not the Goal

The personal development world has a complicated relationship with forgiveness. It is held up, almost universally, as the destination — the resolution, the release, the thing you are trying to get to. Forgive, we are told, and you will be free. The work is the work of forgiving. Once you’ve forgiven, it’s done. I’ve worked […]

The Person Irritating You Most is Carrying a Message. It’s from You.

This morning I was about to skip yoga. Someone in my team had something that needed to be done. I could feel the familiar sequence beginning: she won’t get it done in time, I’ll step in and sort it, I’ll feel vaguely resentful about the fact that I stepped in, she’ll sense the resentment, nothing […]

The Danger of the “Messy Middle” in Toxic Relationships

There is a zone in every controlling dynamic that is the most dangerous — not because it is the most harmful, but because it is the hardest to name. It sits between the clean, empowering communication that characterizes healthy relating and the obviously toxic, abusive communication that everyone can recognize. It is the space where […]

When Sickness Is an Initiatory Process

There is a tradition in almost every wisdom culture on earth that recognizes illness not just as a malfunction to be fixed, but as a threshold — a crossing point between one version of yourself and another. The shamanic traditions speak of the “wounded healer.” The alchemical traditions speak of the nigredo — the blackening, […]

You Don’t Have a Relationship. You Relate.

We talk about relationships as if they are objects. Things we have. Things we build. Things we maintain. Things we lose. We say “my relationship” the way we say “my car” or “my house” — as if it is a possession that exists independently of the people in it. But this framing is not just […]

Why Abusers Use Guilt Instead of Force

When most people think about controlling dynamics, they think about force. They think about someone being physically prevented from leaving, being threatened with violence, being held against their will. And while these things do happen, they represent a small fraction of the controlling dynamics that actually exist. The far more common mechanism is far more […]