Five years ago, I started having panic attacks. And before you picture someone breathing into a paper bag in a dramatic made-for-TV moment, let me tell you what mine looked like: driving my kids to swim practice on a Tuesday, nothing remarkable, and my heart suddenly doing something that convinced every cell in my body that I was dying. Not anxious. Dying. Heart attack dying. And the thought underneath that terror, the one that made it so much worse, was: if I go right now, I take them with me.

I pulled over. I sat on the side of the road with my hazards on and waited for something to pass.

It passed. And then it came back. And then it came back again.

Eventually, I stopped driving.

I want you to sit with that, because I had to sit with it for a long time. A therapist — someone who had spent years in a room with people at their most frightened, handing them tools, talking them through exactly this; could not get behind the wheel of a car. I rearranged my entire life around avoidance. I asked my wife Jesse to drive. I calculated every activity drop-off based on whether I could outsource it. This was during Covid, which meant the driving itself was already reduced; but Jesse was working in a hospital through all of it, which added its own low hum of dread underneath everything. She was out in the world facing real risk every day while I was managing a nervous system that had decided a Tuesday errand was a four-alarm emergency.

And then I did what any self-respecting mental health professional would do in that situation.

I went completely off the rails trying to fix it myself.

I read every book. Every single one. I tried breathwork. I tried cold exposure. I tried somatic work, progressive muscle relaxation, tapping, meditation, journaling, visualization. I tried a technique from an actual published book (I want to be clear this was a real book that real people bought) that suggested summoning the memory of a mental orgasm to interrupt the panic response, because of the hormones released. Reader, I tried it. I was that desperate. I was going down rabbit holes at midnight, clicking through forums, reading about people who had cured their panic with specific supplements or particular breathing ratios or a very specific kind of therapy I hadn't tried yet.

Nothing worked.

I walked out of at least three client sessions claiming illness when what was actually happening was that I was managing an internal panic attack I couldn't let anyone see. Once, I had to have someone come pick me up from the office. I sat there waiting, doing the deep breathing I'd described to a hundred clients, willing my face to look like everything was fine.

And I felt like I had failed at being a person. Completely, categorically, in every role that mattered to me.

As a mother, I was supposed to be the steady one. The safe one. The one my kids could count on to handle things. Instead I was the thing in the house that needed handling. I watched other parents coordinate activities the way you'd grab a coffee; effortlessly, without a second thought and I felt a grief I couldn't fully name and a fury at myself that I absolutely could. What kind of mother has to outsource cub scout pick-up because her nervous system is staging a coup?

As a therapist, the shame had its own particular flavor. Because I knew better. I had literally sat across from people in panic and walked them through it. I had explained the nervous system, normalized the fear, offered the tools. And now here I was, unable to use a single one of them on myself. I wasn't just struggling; I was a hypocrite. Every session felt like a performance. Like I was handing out maps to a place I couldn't find myself.

When I finally couldn't white-knuckle through it anymore, I found one of those online prescription services and paid out of pocket, full price, specifically to avoid having to look anyone I knew in the eye. I told myself it was convenience. It was embarrassment, plain and simple.

Twenty-five milligrams of Zoloft. An SSRI. And I wish I could tell you I made that decision with a lot of grace and self-compassion.

I did not. I made it feeling like I had lost.

But here's the thing: it worked. That stupid little blue pill fucking worked.

Around three weeks in, something shifted. Nothing dramatic, just a weekday where I got in the car and didn't think about it. I noticed it the way you notice a sound that's stopped; the absence was the thing. And that quiet forced me to reckon with something I hadn't been willing to fully accept: what I'd been fighting for months wasn't a character flaw or a spiritual failure. It was chemistry. My brain needed something I couldn't think or breathe or orgasm-memory my way into giving it. By week five or six the panic attacks were gone. I could take my kids to their activities and just be their mom, just run the errand, just exist in the ordinary mundane of it all without my nervous system treating it like a emergency dispatch situation.

That's a humbling thing to sit with when you've spent months believing effort should be enough.

I know some of you are nodding right now. Maybe you've been in the place where you've tried everything and the trying itself starts to feel like proof that something is fundamentally wrong with you. Maybe you've told yourself you should be past this by now, or that you know too much to still be struggling, or that asking for this particular kind of help means you've given up on the other kind. I thought all of those things. I thought them loudly and often.

The medication gave me my life back. But it also changed the texture of things. I felt muted.... like someone had turned the volume down on everything….the hard stuff, yes, but also the beautiful stuff. I felt like I was watching myself from one room over. Not checked out exactly; more like the channel was just slightly off.

So I decided to come off it after a year and a half. That took three tries over a couple of years.

The first time, the panic came back quietly, like familiar bad weather rolling in. The second time it came back loudly and I had to start over. Each setback felt like a verdict. Like my body was voting against me.

I'm not someone who shows a lot of emotion; I don't run to tears. So when I found myself completely undone over Jesse getting a speeding ticket (genuinely flooded, like she announced she had killed someone) I stopped and thought: hmmm. Maybe this is not okay. It wasn't the medication failing; it was my body's way of waving a flag. Something was off, and I'd been too busy managing to notice.

Last year I worked with my doctor to come off it so slowly that my nervous system barely noticed. Microdose after microdose, checking in, adjusting, being patient in a way that did not come naturally to me. I was cutting pills on my nightstand with drug dealer precision. This time it held. I am off it for now.

And I might need it again someday. That used to feel like a threat. Now it just feels like good information to have.

If you're somewhere in the middle of your own version of this story: you are not failing. You are not weak. You are not a fraud or a hypocrite or someone who should know better. You are a person whose brain needs what it needs; getting that thing is not surrender, it is the whole point.

The tools matter. The therapy matters. The breathing and the mindfulness matter— all of it matters, and it keeps mattering. Sometimes it just needs something underneath it to stand on.

I spent a long time quietly unsure whether needing medication meant I had failed as a mom, a therapist, a person. What I understand now is that taking it was the most honest thing I did. It was me finally telling the truth about what I actually needed instead of what I thought I was supposed to need.

The victory was never getting off it. The victory was taking it in the first place.

And if this resonates at all we want to hear from you. The parking lot version. The midnight rabbit hole version. The "I tried the mental orgasm technique and I'm not proud of it" version.

That's the story someone else needs to read right now. Share it with us. That's how we carry each other through. That's how community creates healing.

And the thing I keep landing on is this: most of us aren’t bad at acceptance because we’re not trying. We’re bad at it because we fundamentally misunderstand what it is. We think we’ve accepted something. We’ll even say the words. And then, almost immediately, the follow-up thought slips in: I just wish... if only... once this changes, then I’ll feel better.

That’s acceptance with an asterisk. And it costs us more than we realize.

There is a kind of exhaustion that doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. It comes from quietly believing life should be unfolding differently than it is.

You’re holding your actual life in one hand and a preferred version in the other, never fully putting either one down. It shows up as a low hum; an inability to quite settle, a sense that something needs to shift or resolve before you can feel okay.

A lot of us live here for a long time. Thoughtful, self-aware, doing the work and still, underneath it all, negotiating with reality.

· · ·

Buddhism has a teaching called the “two arrows.” The first arrow is the pain that actually lands: the loss, the diagnosis, the plan falling apart. The second arrow is what your mind adds on top: This shouldn’t be happening. Why is this happening. This is not how this was supposed to go.

The second arrow is where most of the suffering lives. And the tricky part? We don’t always notice we’re the ones holding the bow.

I see this in my work constantly. And I see it in myself with almost comedic regularity.

I take my dog Neli out every morning. She is the love of my life (I mean this sincerely) and I want to be present with her, on our mountain, in the quiet. This is the plan.

What actually happens is that her leash catches on a bush. Then a tree. Then somehow both my ankles simultaneously. I am now doing a kind of interpretive stumble through the woods, muttering things I will not repeat here, while Neli gazes back at me with the serene calm of someone who has never, not once, fired a second arrow in her life.

First arrow: the leash is tangled. Second arrow: why is this like this, I can’t even have one peaceful morning, this was supposed to be the good part of the day.

Meanwhile Neli is just here. Nose in the leaves. Profoundly untroubled. Basically a Buddhist monk in a golden retriever’s body.

· · ·

The mind organizes around where attention rests. When attention keeps anchoring in what isn’t here yet, what didn’t happen, what might go wrong, the body reads that as incompleteness. Something is off. Something needs fixing before you can relax. The brain runs the story it’s given, and when that story is about lack, even a genuinely full life can feel like it’s missing something essential.

Marisa Peer’s work on inherent worth gets at something important here: when your sense of okayness is tied to things going a certain way, any disruption hits at the level of identity. Which is why the second arrow fires so fast. It sounds completely reasonable. It feels like clarity. It is, in fact, you making yourself more miserable.

My wife Jesse is an extraordinary psychologist. On weekends she becomes a carpenter/ fixer-upper; she builds things, fixes things, looks at a problem and calmly executes a solution while I watch in the way you watch someone parallel park in a space that seems physically impossible.

She recently built a frame for our television. A 70-inch television that I agreed to solely because of the frame, for the record. The frame is beautiful. It is also currently living about 15 degrees to the left, in the sense that it is not quite done, and there are tools in the hallway, and half-finished paint cans that I have mentioned at least four times this week.

Jesse is in flow. She has the full picture in her head and she is moving toward it. I am circling the hallway every 20 minutes narrating the status of the paint cans.

First arrow: the project is ongoing. Second arrow: this should be finished, why is this still here, I agreed to the Jumbotron for the frame and the frame is stage left staring at me with mocking undertones.

I am, as they say, the problem.

· · ·

Acceptance is staying right there with what is actually happening ( tangled leash, tilted frame, and so on) without immediately trying to rewrite it. It interrupts the second arrow. It’s the moment you notice you’re holding the bow and you gently set it down.

You can still feel pain. You can still want things to be different. You can still take action. What softens is that extra layer that says this should not be happening. That layer is exhausting. It splits you in two: one part living your life, one part bracing against it.

There are moments where you actually land in full acceptance. No mental negotiation. No scanning for what’s missing. No quiet “once this changes” running in the background. Everything just feels... enough. Not because it’s perfect. Because nothing in you is resisting it.

It’s subtle and it’s kind of magical.

And then five minutes later you’re back in the hallway, assessing the paint cans.

That doesn’t mean you lost it. That is the rhythm of the practice. You notice the second arrow. You put the bow down. You come back. Over and over.

· · ·

Gratitude shifts from this place too. It stops being something you perform to feel better and becomes something you notice; quietly, alongside what is hard. Both can exist without canceling each other out.

Suffering is part of being human. Acceptance doesn’t remove it. It changes how we carry it.

Also: the TV frame is going to be stunning. And Neli had a great walk last night, (this morning it’s a bit rainy which I will not wish away but try and enjoy the lovely sound track it’s creating). Pics below :)

FROM OUR COMMUNITY

We believe that story is one of the most powerful tools we have ; for connection, for healing, and honestly, for remembering that none of us have this completely figured out.

So we want to hear from you. Where did you notice the second arrow this week? What was your moment of falling from grace ….the leash that tangled, the paint can you couldn’t let go of, the small thing that revealed a bigger resistance?

Share it with us. We’ll laugh together, hold each other up, and remember that the practice is exactly that - A Practice. You’re not behind. You’re in it, just like the rest of us twisted souls.

The reason revealing this is frightening is because I feel shame, even though I know better — and I don’t feel shame around too many things.

I understand it all — the social conditioning, the messaging, the way women are taught to tie their worth to how they’re seen. The impact on people from hundreds of years of society dictating what beauty is and isn’t.

I know it.

And still…this feels different when it’s your own body.

There was a time when being attractive felt like part of a bigger package. It was never the whole thing, but something I had alongside everything else. I’m not talking about my teenage years (those were…let’s just say…rough around the edges, and I’m still in awe on the daily at how young people today all look like supermodels).

I’m referring to my 20’s and 30’s. There was confidence that didn’t require outside reinforcement, though the random flirtation was nice.

These days I’m feeling like everything broke at once.

I’m hyper-aware of my aging.
More gray hair. More weight.
The changes I didn’t expect.

There are parts of my body, I admit, I’ve hidden my entire life — and now the parts I used to feel good about feel like they’ve been taken, too. It feels sudden and like it crept up on me at the same time.
I avoid photos.
I avoid people I haven’t seen in a while.

I’ve truly become a version of myself that I don’t fully recognize.

Sometimes, if I’m going to see someone who hasn’t seen me in a while, I feel like I need to lead with a disclaimer. A literal fucking warning that - hey, just so you know, I may not be what you remember.

It sounds absurd when I say it out loud. And by the way, that’s the real meat on the bones of what I truly didn’t want to admit to the world. That fact - that I actually warn people…like I’ve become some horrific troll who might turn them to stone if they look at me.

I do it because they’ll notice the changes. Almost everyone on the planet notices changes in other people, even if there’s no judgement of it. They notice. And the last time some of these people noticed me, it was to say that I was really holding it together and looked good. The truth is that it terrifies me to think any of those people would think something different now…even though in my own deep belief systems about the world, I know this is not the thing that truly matters.

I think I say it first because I want to prove that I’m aware. And I recognize clear as day that I’m trying to offset someone else’s judgement - BUT, I also recognize that it is because I care about it for myself. If I didn’t, then I wouldn’t be attached to what others thought. But I do care…so it’s a constant hum in my brain.

What I haven’t been able to do is really uncover why this is rooted so deeply in me. I don’t judge other people like this. I see beauty in everyone, just as they are. I mean that. It isn’t hard for me. That comes naturally.

But this…this is about how I see myself, and the voice in my head isn’t kind.

It’s not even neutral.

It’s brutal.

There are days I’d look in the mirror and think things I wouldn’t ever think to say to someone I love.

And so eventually… I just stopped looking.

I can talk about the reasons I got here…well, the extra pounds anyway. And maybe also the “feeling” of being older, a bit stiffer, and less frisky.

I told myself I got complacent. Covid. Sedentary. Not really watching what I ate as much as I had been.

And yes, some of that is true.

But if I’m being honest, it was also numbing. And rebellion. And exhaustion.

Because a lot was going on for me. And still is.

I’ve been in a space of tolerating, coping, pushing through… for longer than I’d like to admit. And I wonder sometimes how much my body has been carrying that.

Not as punishment. But as expression.

What’s strange is… even when I was “in shape,” I never really felt beautiful. Not fully.

There have always been parts of me I didn’t like.
Always compared.
Always noticed what other women had that I didn’t.

I don’t think I’ve ever stood in my body and just felt… at home.

Not once.

Even when the good-looking guys checked me out.
Even when I was being chosen.

Even when my partners repeatedly told me how beautiful I was; I don’t think I ever believed it.

That makes me so sad.

There’s a version of me I still picture sometimes.

She’s at the beach. She’s not thinking about how she’s sitting or if something is showing. She’s not adjusting or covering or calculating angles.

She’s just… there.

Comfortable. Secure.

In her body.

And yes — she’s sexy.

Not because someone else said so.

Because she feels it.

I want that. I won’t pretend I don’t.

I want to feel good in my body.
I want to feel confident being seen.
I want to feel attractive again.

And I’m also tired of everything being a project.

A plan.
A fix.
A transformation.

Sometimes I don’t want something to be a fucking journey.

Maybe I want to take my shoes off and walk slowly through tall, soft grass and just… meet myself again without having things to fix or change.

So for ten years I rebelled and resisted. And then last November, I just knew in my bones something had to change.

My feelings about myself were damaging me as much as anything physical I was or wasn’t doing. I knew I didn’t want to live that way for another 50 years.

What I’m doing is not fast or dramatic. But it is intentional, and I really like that.

I found a way to start taking care of my body differently.

Not punishing it.
Not starving it.
Not trying to force it into submission.

It’s slow. Painfully slow sometimes.

Five months in, and I’m still not even in a “weight loss phase.”

I’m eating more than I used to.
Trusting something I didn’t believe at first.
Trying to repair instead of restrict.

I’ve been consistent, and I’m proud of that.

Even on the days I don’t feel proud of my Self.

I don’t have a clean ending for this (surprise, surprise!). But mostly because, I’m nowhere near the end.

What I do know is sometimes we have to really get out of our own way, man-up, put the big-girl pants on — whatever phrase you like — because some things take effort and commitment, and there is just no way around that. I knew it and avoided it.

This is least about weight, and truly about so much more. My weight just happens to be what moved the needle for me. There is actually so much more I want to incorporate to honor this body that I’m in. The body that contains all the other beautiful things that make me, me.

I don’t have a transformation to show you.

I’m just… here.

Trying to embrace something I’ve been at war with for a long time.

Not by the door.
Not on a hook.
Not even in a junk drawer where things go to die.

In the pantry.
Next to the canned beans.

If you want to leave the house, you have to move aside a can of chickpeas like you’re unlocking a secret level.

This is intentional.

Because in his mind, this is what’s keeping us safe.

Not the half-mile driveway up a mountain.
Not the fact that we’re surrounded by woods with no clean exit.
Not the garage.
Not the sunroom.
Not the mudroom.

No. The real deterrent… is pantry logistics.

Because the scenario goes like this:

Someone drives all the way up here.
Breaks into the garage.
Then the sunroom.
Then the mudroom.
Makes it fully inside the house…

and then just freezes.

“Damn. If only the keys were more accessible.”

And look, when you say it out loud, it’s funny.

But it’s also not that far off from how most of us are living.

Just… slightly more socially acceptable versions.

Because the message is everywhere, all the time:

Be more careful.
Be more prepared.
Be better with money.
Be a better parent.
Lock it down. Fix it. Optimize it.

Or something bad is coming.

And it doesn’t even feel dramatic anymore.
It just feels responsible.

Like this low, constant hum in the background of life.

A quiet sense that you’re never quite covered.
Never quite done.
Never quite safe enough to fully exhale.

So we adjust.

We double check things.
We plan more.
We improve more.
We call it growth.

But if you follow that all the way through, you end up doing some version of what my dad is doing.

Arranging your life around threats that might never show up.

And again, I’m not above it.

I lock doors.
I think about worst-case scenarios.
I have definitely convinced myself that moving something three feet to the left made us safer.

We all do it.

But there’s a point where it quietly takes over.

Where life stops being something you experience
and starts being something you manage.

And that shift is subtle… but it costs you.

Because while you’re busy preventing every possible version of what could go wrong,
you’re also stepping right past what’s already right.

Which is… kind of insane, if you zoom out for a second.

We are on a rock.
Floating through space.
Orbiting a ball of fire that we did not build, earn, or schedule.

That is objectively wild.

That should feel like a party.

And instead, most days feel like:

Did I miss something?
Am I behind?
What’s the next thing I need to fix?

Somewhere along the way, awe got replaced with maintenance.

And I don’t think the answer is to swing all the way to “nothing matters.”

Fear has a place.
Caution has a place.

But not every seat at the table belongs to fear.

At some point, you have to notice when “being responsible”
has quietly turned into “living on edge.”

And decide if that’s actually how you want to spend this.

Because we don’t get out of this perfectly protected.

That was never an option.

So the trade isn’t: safe vs unsafe.

It’s: present vs braced.

My dad has made his call.

The keys are staying next to the beans.
That system is locked in.

But every time I reach into that pantry, I have the same thought:

I don’t want to spend my whole life preparing for a break-in that never comes…

and miss the fact that I was already at something pretty incredible.

And honestly?

If we’re all stuck here together,
on this spinning rock,
flying through space…

we might as well enjoy it a little.

Truly. It’s a toss-up.

On one hand, I have ideas. So many ideas. Business ideas, content ideas, life pivots, side quests, “this could be a thing,” “wait, no THIS could be the thing.” I can see patterns, connections, possibilities. I can zoom out, zoom in, analyze, reflect, reframe.

On the other hand?

I have approximately 47 tabs open in my brain at all times, none of them fully loading, and at least three of them are playing music I can’t figure out how to turn off.

It’s…exhausting.

I know I’m not alone in this. I think a lot of us who are self-aware, thoughtful, growth-oriented humans end up here at some point. We’ve done enough “work” to see everything; think about everything. Every angle. Every possibility. Every potential outcome.

Which sounds like a gift. Until it isn’t.

I fully subscribe to awareness being the foundation of personal superpower, but at some point, it can stop being helpful and start turning into…noise.

Too many options.
Too many directions.
Too many ways to do it “right.”

And suddenly the thing you wanted to do — write the article, start the project, make the move — gets buried under a pile of “but what about…” and “maybe I should…” and “is this the best way…”

So you sit there, fully capable, mildly (or spicy 😉) overwhelmed, doing…nothing.

Which is where I found myself today. Well, in truth, I’ve been visiting that place often the last few weeks.

I’m not uninspired. I’m not incapable. I’m just…tired.

Tired of trying to pick the right thing.
Tired of overthinking something that probably just needs to exist imperfectly.
Tired of my own brain trying to outsmart itself.

All the mental thinking creates physical exhaustion. If only it burned some calories…

Oh, and for me, there’s another hard truth: sometimes, I’m tired of being in charge. Sometimes it’s just so much easier to answer to someone else. There are times I crave someone to just tell me what to do.

There’s a sneaky layer to this that I don’t always admit.

This constant thinking isn’t always about clarity.

It’s about control.

If I can think it through enough, plan it enough, analyze it enough — then maybe I can guarantee the outcome. Maybe I can avoid failure, avoid judgment, avoid doing it “wrong.”

It’s an effort to minimize any waste of time.

Except…that’s not how any of this works.

Control is an illusion, and the more we chase it, the more it owns us. The more we try to make sure everything is right, the less gets done.

Slowly, intentionally, I have been trying (and not always succeeding) to make sure I’m taking actual action on things. I would say it’s messy sometimes, but that doesn’t even do it justice, honestly.

Sometimes, I feel like it’s worthless…and sometimes I even regret putting it out in the world a little bit…BUT, I can say that I did the thing.

And in and of itself, that helps me feel like I’m moving along.

Not quietly. Not unsure. I mean fully committed, windows down, eyes closed, main character energy…absolutely butchering the words and not caring even a little bit.

And then someone corrects you.

And suddenly, that tiny, harmless moment of joy gets…edited.

“Wait, that’s not the lyric.”

Oh.

Cool.

Thanks so much for that.

Because clearly what this moment needed was accuracy.

We don’t really talk about this, but somewhere along the way, we started prioritizing getting things right over actually enjoying them.

Over expressing something.

Over just…being in it.

And it shows up in the smallest, weirdest places.

We think wellness is green juice, routines, optimized mornings, some version of having your life together before 8am.

And sure, that’s part of it.

But also?

Part of feeling good in your life is way less polished than that.

It’s talking to a stranger when you normally wouldn’t.

It’s wearing something slightly unhinged that makes total sense to you and absolutely no one else.

It’s saying the thing that’s maybe a little too honest instead of the version that would land better.

It’s letting yourself exist without constantly running it through the filter of “is this normal?”

Because here’s the part that gets me.

Every single story we admire, every biography, every interview with someone who’s done something interesting with their life…

They all say the same thing.

They did it their way.
They didn’t follow the script.
They trusted their instincts.

We eat that up.

We love that version of the story.

But in real life?

We correct it in real time.

We smooth it out.

We give subtle side-eyes to the people who don’t quite fit and call it “concern” or “feedback” or “just trying to help.”

Not in a dramatic, villain-origin-story kind of way…just enough that most people get the message.

Hey…maybe tone it down a little.

And so we do.

We edit ourselves in small, almost invisible ways.

We adjust.
We tweak.
We become just a slightly more acceptable version of who we were five minutes ago.

And no one notices.

Except you.

Because there’s this quiet, hard-to-explain feeling that something is a little off.

Like you’re doing everything “right,” but it doesn’t fully feel like you anymore.

Which is a very confusing place to be, by the way.

For me, it’s this:

I will not be correcting my version of Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats.

I know the lyric is “carved my name into his leather seats.”

I’ve been informed. Repeatedly.

By people who care about accuracy and apparently cannot let this go.

And I get it.

I do.

But I will absolutely continue singing “carved my name into his legacy” with full conviction because, I’m sorry, that version? Superior. Cinematic. Slightly unhinged. I stand by it.

And more importantly, it’s mine.

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s not really about song lyrics.

It’s about how quickly we override ourselves.

How easily we hand over something that felt natural just because someone else decided it wasn’t quite right.

How often we trade a tiny moment of joy for the approval of being correct.

So maybe wellness isn’t just what you add to your life.

Maybe it’s also what you stop correcting.

What you stop apologizing for.

What you let exist exactly as it is, even if it’s a little off, a little weird, a little “that’s not the lyric.”

Talk to the stranger.
Wear the slightly unhinged outfit.
Say it how you would actually say it.
Sing the wrong words.

Not to prove a point.

Not to be rebellious.

Just because it feels like you.

And honestly…that might be the most normal thing you could do.

Not my most life-coachy catchphrase, but it happens.

Believe me, I’m fully aware that just because we’re adults doesn’t mean we’ve evolved past having emotions. I just turned fifty, and it’s really only been during the last decade that I’ve accepted that even as adults, some situations can hurt just like they did in middle school. Apparently the number of birthdays you’ve had does not grant immunity from feeling rejected, angry, betrayed, embarrassed, or heartbroken.

So yes, I deeply understand the feelings that cause people to lash out. I understand the pain that makes someone want to burn everything down after betrayal. I understand the urge to protect your ego, your dignity, your version of the story.

But one thing I know to be true about life, is that when things feel the most uncontrollable, the only place we still have power is in our own emotional responsibility. How we behave. What we say. The choices we make after we’ve been hurt.

And nowhere does that responsibility matter more than when children are involved.

This past week, I saw an article about Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s divorce. There was a detail that caught my attention. One of the conditions was that neither of them would speak badly about the other — or about the other’s family — and that both parents would actively support the children maintaining a close relationship with each of them.

I get it — that clause sounds simple on paper.

In real life, it can require extraordinary emotional maturity.

Because when relationships end badly — through betrayal, addiction, manipulation, abuse, or just deep incompatibility — the pain is real. The anger is real. The sense of injustice can be overwhelming.

And when you’re hurting, the urge to explain your side of the story and keep people on your side can feel almost impossible to resist.

I know this personally.

Before my current marriage, I was in a deeply abusive relationship. It would have been incredibly easy to paint my ex-husband as the villain when speaking to anyone, especially my daughter, who was an infant when we left.

But that wasn’t what I did.

It doesn’t mean I hid the truth, and it doesn’t mean I pretended things were okay when they weren’t.

What it meant was choosing words carefully.

When she would ask questions about him, I would say things like:

He was sick.
He struggled in ways that I couldn’t fix or support anymore.
His behavior was unacceptable, but I don’t believe in his heart that he woke up every morning thinking about how to hurt me.

Those distinctions matter.

Because children deserve honesty.

But they should never be handed the emotional shrapnel from adult relationships.

In moments of anger and severe dysregulation, it’s easy to lose sight of an important psychological truth: children see themselves as made from both parents.

So when a parent repeatedly says, your father is a terrible person or your mother ruined my life, what the child often hears — even if no one says it directly — is:

Half of me is bad.

That’s an unbearable emotional position for a child.

Kids shouldn’t have to choose between loving a parent and loving themselves.

Now, as always, I want to make sure I’m clear about something…

Sometimes people are truly terrible partners.

They lie.
They cheat.
They manipulate.
They hurt the people closest to them.

And sometimes the wounds they leave are deep and complicated.

But being a terrible partner does not always mean someone is incapable of being a decent parent.

Humans are messy. Contradictory. Imperfect.

Most of the time (not every time) people behave horribly because they are deeply wounded themselves. Understanding that doesn’t excuse harmful behavior, but it can help us approach the situation with clarity instead of pure rage.

Hoever, compassion never means allowing harm or abandoning boundaries.

It simply means refusing to turn your children into the battlefield where your pain gets fought out.

When my daughter was younger, I was open to the idea of my ex seeing her — under clear conditions.

He had to be sober.
Visits had to be supervised (this was court mandated).
The environment had to be safe.

After what I had been through with him, it would have been very easy for me to say: Your never seeing this child.

But that decision wouldn’t have been about my daughter.

It would have been about my disgust, my fears, my rage, and maybe even revenge.

I knew I didn’t want my daughter being the currency I used to settle emotional debts. There would come a time that she would be old enough to make her own decisions, and the best thing I could do was ensure parameters that would keep her safe, and guide her from a neutral place as best as possible - for her.

(For the record, he never got sober and those visits never happened. But the door was always there.)

Scorned people act out of pain. And why wouldn’t they?

When someone cheats on you, lies to you, manipulates you, or destroys a life you thought you were building together, the instinct to burn the bridge — and everything around it — is incredibly human.

But parenting asks something harder of us.

It asks us to step outside our emotional chaos long enough to ask one brutal question:

What is really best for my child, if I take my feelings out of it?

Parenting asks us to follow not what feels righteous, but what actually protects the emotional wellbeing of the small human watching all of this unfold.

And it is yet another reminder why parenting is the hardest job in the world.

The measure of our character isn’t how we behave when someone treats us well.

It’s how we behave when they don’t.

Being the bigger person isn’t about pretending nothing happened. It’s about refusing to let the next generation carry the damage of our emotional load.

Hello Friend!

Welcome to another installment in our Rooted and Real series, where we dive a little deeper each month into one of the core roots we are always returning to. These are the roots that anchor us, and that we hope will anchor you, too.

If you’re new here, welcome. We’re so glad you’re here. You can find the previous classes in the library.

This month, we’re digging into Support Systems — and more specifically, the connection between the relationships we keep and the boundaries we need.

Because support systems are about so much more than simply having people around you. They’re about the people who truly see you, support your growth, respect your capacity, and make it safer for you to be fully yourself. And they’re also about your willingness to notice what feels nourishing, what feels depleting, and where clearer boundaries may be needed.

This work asks for honesty. It asks us to look at who we are allowing close, how we are being impacted by the people around us, and whether the relationships in our lives are aligned with who we are becoming.

Boundaries are not punishment. They are not rejection. They are one of the clearest ways we honor our energy, our needs, and our healing. And the truth is, healthy connection and healthy boundaries are not in opposition to each other — they work together.

As always, this is gentle work. Honest work. Root-level work. And we’ve filled this class with reflection and practical ways to begin noticing what support really looks like for you.

Grab a piece of paper and a pen, and let’s get to it.

XO - Lauren and Corinne

**Physical Body coming next month!

We love hearing from you! Let us know how this lands for you and what you notice about your relationship with yourself right now.

You can also check out our FREE Workbook if you want to dive a bit deeper:

You’ve Always Been The One: 7 Roots of Owning Your Sh*t and Coming Home To Yourself.

It looks like discipline.
It sounds like ambition.
It hides inside words like growth, alignment, healing, expansion.

But sometimes it’s just disgust in a prettier outfit.

Better body.
Because this one feels unacceptable.

Better mindset.
Because sadness is inconvenient.

Better parenting.
Because your humanity feels dangerous.

Better sex.
Because desire suddenly feels like something you have to perform.

Better nervous system.
Because calm has quietly turned into a moral achievement.

Somewhere along the way, existing became a project.

There’s this low hum underneath modern wellness.
A constant message that says you are almost there.

Almost regulated.
Almost healed.
Almost secure.
Almost embodied.
Almost enough.

Almost is a powerful drug.

It keeps you buying.
Reading.
Optimizing.
Tracking.
Measuring.

It keeps you in a quiet war with yourself.

No one calls it violence because there are no bruises.

But look closer.

It’s in the way you flinch when you see a photo of yourself.

It’s in the way you narrate your own reactions like you’re grading them.

It’s in the way rest feels earned instead of allowed.

It’s in the way you apologize for being triggered, tired, too much, not enough.

Self improvement can slowly turn into self surveillance.

You start watching yourself the way a critic would.

Monitoring tone.
Monitoring calories.
Monitoring productivity.
Monitoring attachment style.
Monitoring whether you’re healing fast enough.

It is exhausting to be both the person and the project.

And look, I’m saying this as a therapist. Which is slightly awkward.

My entire profession is built on the premise that people come into a room and say
“Something is wrong with me, can you help.”

So yes, I make my living in the self improvement industrial complex.

I also spend a shocking amount of time trying to convince people they are not a problem that needs solving.

Therapy can be a place where you finally stop fixing yourself.

Or it can quietly become another performance review.

And the underbelly of a lot of “growth” is shame.

You don’t meditate because you love your mind.

You meditate because you hate how reactive you are.

You don’t go to therapy because you adore your complexity.

You go because you’re afraid you’re broken.

You don’t track your habits because you’re curious.

You track because you don’t trust yourself.

Wanting to evolve is human. Expansion is natural.

But if the engine underneath it is self rejection, you will never arrive.

Because shame moves the goalpost.

You lose the weight. Now it’s tone.

You regulate the anxiety. Now it’s productivity.

You fix the communication. Now it’s sexual polarity.

You master boundaries. Now it’s softness.

The list keeps growing if the core belief is
“I am unacceptable as I am.”

And here’s the wild part.

Your nervous system can feel when it’s being forced into improvement.

That’s why burnout shows up inside wellness spaces.

That’s why people who “do the work” still feel empty.

That’s why healing sometimes starts to feel like a performance review.

There’s a version of growth rooted in curiosity.

There’s another version rooted in self contempt.

From the outside they look identical.

Especially on Instagram.

The difference shows up the moment you fail.

Do you tighten or soften.

Do you shame yourself or get curious.

Do you escalate the plan or put a hand on your own chest.

Real healing has room for regression.

Real growth does not require self disgust.

Real wellness does not demand that you become someone else.

At some point you have to ask yourself a dangerous question.

If I stopped trying to fix myself for a year, what am I afraid would happen?

Would you gain weight.

Would you disappoint people.

Would you lose relevance.

Would you slow down.

Would you feel feelings you’ve been outrunning.

Or would you finally exhale.

Self acceptance isn’t giving up.

It’s ending the internal war.

Self love isn’t believing you’re perfect.

It’s deciding you are not a problem to solve.

You’re allowed to improve.

You’re allowed to want more.

You’re allowed to evolve.

Just not from hatred.

Not from panic.

Not from the belief that your worth is conditional.

What if growth was an offering instead of a punishment.

What if discipline came from devotion instead of disgust.

What if your body, your mind, your nervous system were not enemies to conquer, but parts of you asking to be met.

At some point you stop optimizing and start inhabiting.

You stop upgrading and start living in the life that’s already here.

You stop chasing better and start loving what is.

And from that place, ironically, the real growth begins.

Not because you had to change.

Because you were finally safe enough to.

I am an admitted streaming addict and lifelong book worm. Give me deep and complex character arcs, slow burns, morally gray villains, dragons, time travel, political intrigue — I’m in. I will happily suspend disbelief for magical portals, love at first sight and supernatural resurrections.

(Shameless plug alert: I actually have a separate publication just to dissect the shows I love. It currently has zero posts. Hello overwhelm and freeze mode. But it exists.
Which feels like a metaphor for at least three areas of my life. Back to that some other time…)

But I will not suspend disbelief for two grown adults who refuse to use their words.

I’m fully dating myself here, but you know what show did this all the time and made me crazy, even as a kid? Three’s Company. Hilarious, and also I remember clear as day being annoyed.

You know the scene.

Someone overhears half a sentence or thinks they see something sketchy.
There are assumptions. Someone storms out (or sneaks away quietly leaving the other person wondering what’s going on). Clarity is right there…but it slips away like the remote between the couch cushions — technically still in the room, suddenly unreachable.

Suddenly we have a three-season plot-line fueled entirely by avoidable miscommunication.

I get it. The writers need something to write about. Who’s really tuning in for a seven minute, perfectly regulated conversation where everyone clarifies their feelings and goes home peaceful. It’s the drama that keeps us engaged and interested, and yes, this is something to think about later if you find yourself in it a lot — but also, that’s a conversation for another day.

Still, I am known to pause the show and yell at the screen.

“JUST FUCKING TALK TO EACH OTHER!” For all things good and green. (huff huff)

It irritates me through the whole story, even if I’m otherwise loving it. And of course this isn’t limited to Netflix. This absolutely happens in real life, and while much of the time it’s not my place to get involved, and everyone is on their own journey…the active facepalming is REAL.

Assuming tone from punctuation.
Spiraling over a “K.”
When was it decided that a period at the end of a sentence means aggression?
We read “left on read” as abandonment.
We watch someone start typing, stop typing, and suddenly our nervous system is drafting a breakup speech.

I see it in younger generations constantly — entire emotional narratives built around digital breadcrumbs. And I’ve had to gently explain to my own kids that I don’t speak in punctuation code. A period is not a threat. “Okay.” is not an attack. Sometimes it just means… okay. Punctuation should not equal emotional doom, but I understand that many people do use it as it’s own language, and that can be so confusing.

Call me old school (hint: I am. I am proudly old school), but I’m still a fan of this revolutionary communication strategy:

Say what you mean.
Mean what you say.

Wild concept.

And this isn’t just about texting culture.

It shows up in arguments.

When we feel hurt, we get defensive.
When we feel defensive, we get petty.
When we get petty, we say the sharp thing instead of the honest thing.
Then we spend three days replaying the conversation in our heads, analyzing tone, inflection, word choice… building an internal courtroom drama instead of just asking one clarifying question.

Winning the point often slowly destroys the relationship. It’s like death by a thousand cuts.

I’m not here saying communication is easy, but I also don’t think it should be as hard as some of us make it. I get it:
It requires vulnerability. Clarifying feels risky.
It requires regulating yourself long enough to ask instead of accuse.
It requires tolerating the possibility that you might be wrong, and being wrong feels threatening.

And sometimes, if we’re being honest, we may not even want the truth…because the truth can be hard to handle.

If you know me by now, you know that I never pretend to have mastered something I haven’t. I still have moments where I want to defend, interpret, or win. I still get irritated when someone doesn’t use their words and I have to guess what’s happening. But where I have done work, and where I do think I’ve gotten fairly good at this, is recognizing when I might be interpreting something and knowing enough to ask for clarification.

Clear communication is rarely dramatic.
It’s regulated. It’s probably also boring.

There is nothing cinematic about saying:
“I’m feeling something about that — can we reset?”
or
“I might be misunderstanding you — can you clarify?”

No swelling music. No dramatic exit. No storming off into the rain. (Even though sometimes we enjoy that, and again, a different conversation 😉).

The best communication happens when two people just stay in the room.

I will most likely continue to yell at fictional adults who refuse to clarify their feelings.

Dragons? Fine.
Time travel? Sure.
Two emotionally capable humans refusing to communicate? Unacceptable.

I believe the bravest, least cinematic thing you can do in a relationship is use your words.

And while it might not make for great television, it makes for a much better life.

Not the obvious kind. Not the grief that has your name on it. I’m talking about the secondary pain that lands when someone you love is in the fire, sick, heartbroken, betrayed, scared, losing something or someone they cannot afford to lose.

You’re fine… and also not fine at all.

You wake up okay, and then remember. Your chest tightens before your brain catches up. You’re making coffee and suddenly you feel like crying over the sink for reasons that technically aren’t “yours.” You’re going about your day with this low-grade ache humming underneath everything, like emotional background radiation.

And the most brutal part? There is almost nothing useful to say.

You want to help. You want to fix it. You want to take it away. You want to do something that makes the universe less cruel for five damn minutes.

But you can’t.

So you default to language that feels hollow even as it leaves your mouth:

“I’m so sorry.”
“I’m here.”
“Sending prayers.”
“Everything happens for a reason.” (Hard pass.)
“Just stay positive.” (Harder pass.)

You can practically hear the emotional clank of these phrases hitting the floor.

I’ve been wishing for a word that captures this experience, something that holds empathy, presence, helplessness, love, and quiet reverence all at once. A word that means, I see your suffering, I feel it with you, I cannot take it away, and I am still here anyway.

But English gives us “sympathy,” which feels too polite, too Hallmark, too casserole-with-a-bow-on-it.

So for now, I’ll call it witnessing pain, and it’s one of the hardest roles we ever play in relationships.

You don’t get the release of being the one who gets comforted, and you don’t get the relief of being able to solve anything. You just stand there holding emotional electricity with nowhere to ground it.

Uncomfortable? Yes. Necessary? Also yes.

What I’ve been reading

Because I’m me, I went down a research rabbit hole instead of, say, processing my feelings like a normal person.

A few themes kept popping up in grief, trauma, and empathy studies. Conversations and life experiences as well.

People don’t actually want solutions. They want companionship in discomfort. We are allergic to silence, so we rush to fix, but that often makes the hurting person feel more alone, not less.

Specific offers tend to matter more than vague ones. “Let me know if you need anything” is kind and mostly useless. People in crisis rarely have the bandwidth to ask.

And being present matters more than being eloquent. Your calm, steady, slightly messy human presence does more than your perfectly worded text ever could.

All of that led me to two approaches that actually resonated with me when someone I love is going through hell.

The first is to say less and be more.

Instead of searching for the perfect line, I think I am going to try something simple:

“I don’t have the right words, but I care, and I’m here.”

Possible add ins:

“Do you want to talk, or do you want a distraction, or do you want me to just sit with you?”

It gives them control, which is often the first thing people lose in hard times.

The second is to do one small, specific, practical thing.

Instead of “Call me if you need anything,” I am going to try some version of these:

“I’m dropping soup on Tuesday, no pressure to chat.”
“I’ll walk your dog tomorrow at 9.”
“I’ll handle carpool this week.”
“I’m sending groceries. Don’t fight me.”

Tiny acts of care say, I see you, I remember, and I’m not disappearing now that it’s inconvenient.

Both of these felt deeply human to me as I played them out in my mental problem solving drama.

What still sucks…..

Even with better words and better gestures, I’m left with the same ache.

Why does love hurt this much?

Loving people means you don’t just get their joy, you get their devastation too. Their bad luck becomes your heartbreak. Their loss becomes your sleepless night. Their grief walks right into your living room and sits on your couch uninvited.

And yet, there’s a paradox here that I can’t shake.

We talk about wanting more light, more joy, more ease, more smiles, but none of that exists in isolation. Light only means anything because darkness is real. Joy lands so deeply precisely because sadness is familiar. We savor laughter because we know tears. We feel relief because we have felt pain.

It’s that old yin and yang truth. You cannot pull apart the beautiful from the brutal without losing both. The same capacity that lets us experience delight is the one that leaves us raw when someone we love is suffering.

In a weird way, this secondary pain is proof that our hearts are doing exactly what they’re meant to do, stay open, stay connected, stay tender in a world that often rewards the opposite.

I don’t love that reality. I wish it came with a gentler nervous system and clearer instructions. But I also don’t think I’d trade it.

Because if we weren’t willing to feel this kind of hurt, it would mean we didn’t care enough to be touched by others at all.

And that feels worse.

Over to you

If you’ve been in this spot, standing helplessly beside someone you love in their hardest chapter, what has actually helped?

What did someone say or do that landed?
What made you feel less alone in your own witnessing?

Drop it in the comments. I’d love to hear the real, messy, human wisdom here, not the platitudes (all though those can be fun).

We might as well learn together while we’re at it.

It will always be important to me to write, mentor, teach, and coach from a place of not being all‑knowing. From being someone who has her own experiences, her own cycles, her own days that don’t resolve neatly.

So many times I’ve worked with someone on a Monday on empowerment—watched them step into an unshakeable sense of strength, wisdom, and choice—and then on Tuesday I’m staring at the wall wondering why I’m here at all.

I have periods of time where nothing feels like it’s working, and the voices in my own mind are brutal in their judgments.

These periods have been a bit more frequent lately.

So today I’m not the leader, I’m the participant. And I want to share this with you.

It can be hard to know what I know, believe in all the tools, have access to the work and support I need, and then still have days where everything feels like it sucks. The negative stories take over so loudly that they must be true, and I’m judging myself because of course I should know better.

Sometimes that voice is internal, but sometimes it comes from people around me, reminding me that I “have all the answers.” That this is my work. That I understand this stuff.

How does it make sense for me to sit inside a cage of cranky, desperate, resentment when I spend my time speaking to others about how not to do that? If I’m being honest, sometimes it makes me feel like a hypocrite…even though the first thing I would say if I were talking to someone like me was that that wasn’t even close to being true.

The truth is, sometimes you’re too close to your own life to see everything clearly.

I can think I’m doing all the things: being aware, reflective, responsible. And what I fail to realize is what I’m not doing.

Twice now, Corinne has pointed something out to me that felt so obvious in hindsight it was almost embarrassing. Like I suddenly understood the meaning of words that have been spoken to me for years. And this is someone who has had hundreds of conversations with me. Someone who deeply respects and recognizes my self-awareness. And still, there was blindness.

That’s humbling, and It’s also instructive, because it reminds me that this work—this being human thing—requires a willingness to continuously peel ourselves open. To search for the right words. To stay connected to the feelings instead of managing them away. And to have people around us who can hopefully hold that space long enough for us to figure it out.

And then—only then—do we get to choose whether we’re willing to acknoweldge what’s being reflected back.

Lately, I have fallen hard into judging parts of myself.
The cranky parts. The cynical parts. The resentful, bitchy, exhausted ones.

I judged them. I got frustrated that they existed. I felt like a failure because they were there at all.

“Knowing better” became a punishing thought, and I felt I deserved the punishment.

And then, Corinne says:
I love that girl. You need to love her too.

Now here’s the thing, we talk about self-love a lot. But I realized, my way of loving her was ripe with expectation energy. I was thinking about loving as an action to help produce change, and that was missing the point.

The point was not to love her into something else; it was to love her just as she is.

That landed differently, and I needed the reminder.

Cranky, resentful Lauren isn’t broken. Those feelings aren’t evidence of some personal failure. She’s just asking for acknowledgment.

This is me remembering that I’m not here to transcend my humanity.
I’m here to stay in relationship with it.

If you’re reading this, perhaps it’s meant to serve as a reminder for you too.

XO - Lauren

They feel reasonable. Mature. Like proof that we have learned something about life.
I expect timely service.
I expect basic manners.
I expect someone to respond to my email.

That does not sound dramatic. It sounds like bare minimum stuff. So we carry these expectations quietly, almost proudly, telling ourselves we are not asking for much. Just normal.

But expectations rarely stay quiet.

They hover.
They keep score.
They decide ahead of time how the moment is supposed to go.

That is usually when joy starts slipping through the cracks.

The Quiet Theft

We have all done this.
You walk into a coffee shop already irritated because the line might be slow.
You send a text and feel that subtle tension build when an hour passes.
You sit down across from someone you care about and catch yourself hoping they will be warmer, calmer, more present than last time.

When reality does not match the picture in your head, something tightens.

You are still there, but part of you has pulled away.

Instead of being in the moment, you start monitoring it.
Instead of listening, you start comparing.
Instead of connecting, disappointment quietly takes the lead.

Often before anything has even gone wrong.

This happens over the smallest things.

A response that feels clipped.
A pause that feels personal.
A tone that lands differently than you hoped.
A delay that turns into a story about being forgotten, dismissed, or not important enough.

Expectation turns neutral moments into silent negotiations with reality. Reality tends to push back when we try to manage it too closely.

The Gentle Trap

The tricky part is that expectations sound gentle. Words like should, hope, wish, anticipate, and expect feel well intentioned. Sometimes they even pass as optimism or spiritual trust.

Yet they quietly convince us that we know what "good" looks like.

Most of the time, good means comfort. Ease. Flow. Things working out. People behaving in ways that help us feel settled and affirmed.

But our nervous systems grow through friction.
Our healing deepens through moments that feel awkward or disappointing.
Our lives expand through rupture, repair, and the pause in between.

Growth often shows up in moments that did not go as planned. Moments that ask us to stay with ourselves rather than smooth things over or perform calm.

When we hold tightly to expectation, we often try to skip that part.

We want the outcome without the stretch.
We want peace without discomfort.
We want life to confirm our story instead of reshaping it.

That makes sense. It is deeply human.

It is also limiting.

The Quiet Relief

Releasing expectations does not require abandoning boundaries or accepting poor treatment. What it asks is something subtler.

It asks us to notice how often we brace against reality instead of meeting it.
How often our disappointment comes from the story we wrote in advance rather than what actually happened.

There is a quiet relief in loosening the script.

In letting moments unfold without assigning meaning too quickly.
In allowing people to show us who they are rather than who we hoped they would be.
In trusting that even uncomfortable experiences are offering something if we stay present long enough to notice.

You do not need to wish your way into a better life.

You need to stay awake for the one that is already happening.

Joy lives in presence.
Presence appears when we stop arguing with reality long enough to listen.

This article may just say everything I've ever wanted to say to someone I care about, but didn't quite know how. It's been an evolution to get here, and I'm doubling down.

I'm the Queen of Validation. I have deeply rooted beliefs that everyone's experience is their own, and there is no wrong way to feel about things. Those feelings lead us. They are the signals that create actions and reactions, and when the stories hurt, or cause shame, or create fear…it makes sense that we would hide. When someone comes to me, whether it be a friend, a client, or even one of my kids — those precious humans I put above all else — if they convey their feelings to me, I will validate them. Because those feelings are true for them, and I want them to know that I will sit with them in that truth.

And also, I have recognized that too much of that often builds a cage.

The Power (and Prison) of Validation

I spent a significant amount of my life not being validated.

Sometimes it was someone on the outside telling me I should feel differently, or that things weren't as they seemed to me. After I became a life coach, I'd even have people call me out if I was feeling anything other than perfect. It was like I suddenly wasn't allowed to have human emotions anymore because I had been professionally trained to reframe things and develop positive thinking. As a matter of fact, those interactions were far worse than simply not being validated, they were actively invalidating. It was infuriating and shame-inducing all at the same time. So when the right people would show up, grab some eye contact, actively listen to me, and then engage in some true heart-to-heart validation, it would hit me right in the gut and crack me open.

For a few moments I would feel alive; worthy; understood. Those moments would feel like a heated blanket being wrapped around my shoulders after coming in from a snowstorm. I'd feel held, cozy, cared for. Those feelings are addictive when you're craving them.

The tricky part is that if all I ever get is the blanket and no one ever gently taps my shoulder and says "Hey…it's time to move", that warmth can quietly become a hiding place, and before you realize it, you're still sitting there months later, wrapped up tight, wondering why your life feels smaller instead of safer. It becomes a prison of your own making. Our brains are fighting us to stay comfortable anyway, so the odds of breaking the pattern are stacked against us.

I have been caught in patterns rooted in old wounds. Patterns that were once protective, but lingered too long because no one wanted to disrupt my comfort. When light finally shined on those patterns, it was uncomfortable as hell. But it was also freeing. Because I was reminded of something essential:

I still had choices.
I still had agency.
I still had power.

The Loving Truth

So, when someone seeks my counsel now, they get a loving version of the truth they need to at least consider acknowledging:

Yes, it makes complete sense that your nervous system shut down.
And, if you let that become your identity, your world will keep shrinking.

Yes, avoiding kept you safe once.
And, what protected you then is starving you now.

Yes, your pain deserves compassion.
And, your life deserves your participation.

When I pivoted in my professional life and began working with people, it took some time to train my brain and recognize my own tendencies to try and "save" people or fix their problems. It was a whole new skill set to learn to sit with them and let them be the leaders of their own lives. The more I did this work, the more it became clear that most people just needed someone to believe in their capacity to rise.

That is who I hope to be for you.

I'm speaking to the ones who can move… but haven't.
The ones who feel a quiet knowing that something has calcified.
The ones who have confused understanding with absolution.
The ones who, like me, might not realize they are choosing to stay under the blanket because people have consistently validated their reasons for it.

My Promise to You

My compassion allows me to understand you.

My empathy allows me to feel you.

And my respect for you will say: I see exactly why this happened, and staying here will cost you your life in some way or another.

I don't want you to disappear that way.

If this made you uncomfortable, sit with it, don't run from it.
A pull, a tightening, a quiet Oh shit moment — that's information.
There's something inside you this is speaking to, and that matters.

I believe in your capacity to rise.
Even if you don't yet.

XO - Lauren

Science tells a different story.

Belonging is not an emotional accessory. It is a biological and psychological requirement. Human beings evolved in connection. Our nervous systems, immune systems, and sense of self developed in relationship, not in isolation. When belonging is absent, the body does not interpret that as neutral. It interprets it as danger.

This is where most conversations about healing miss the mark.

Healing does not happen only through insight, mindset shifts, or coping strategies. Those tools matter, but they operate inside a nervous system that is constantly asking one question: am I safe here?

Belonging is one of the clearest ways the body receives a yes.

The Science of Belonging

From a physiological perspective, belonging directly affects the autonomic nervous system. When we feel excluded, rejected, or socially unsafe, the sympathetic nervous system activates. Cortisol increases. Inflammation rises. The brain shifts into vigilance and threat detection. Over time, this contributes to anxiety, depression, chronic stress, and stress related illness.

When we experience genuine belonging, the body responds differently. Cortisol levels decrease. Oxytocin increases, strengthening trust and emotional bonding. Heart rate variability improves, which is one of the strongest indicators of nervous system flexibility and resilience. Immune function becomes more regulated.

This is why chronic loneliness is now considered a major public health risk. Prolonged disconnection does not just affect mood. It alters how the body manages stress at a foundational level.

Belonging creates the internal conditions where repair can occur.

The Psychology of Belonging

Psychologically, belonging addresses a core human question that often lives beneath awareness: do I have a place where I can exist without performing?

When the answer is yes, shame loses much of its power. Shame thrives in isolation and secrecy. Belonging disrupts that cycle. Identity becomes more stable because we are not constantly adjusting ourselves to stay acceptable. Emotional regulation improves because the nervous system is not bracing for rejection. Self trust grows because we learn who we are through being accurately reflected by others.

This is why insight alone rarely heals people.

This is why years of individual therapy can still leave someone feeling disconnected.

Healing requires witness. Not fixing. Not advising. Being seen without being managed.

I saw the absence of belonging play out in its most extreme form when I worked in prisons. The most severe punishment we use is not physical force. It is isolation. Solitary confinement does not just remove stimulation. It breaks the human spirit. We intuitively understand that separating someone from connection is one of the most damaging things we can do to a nervous system.

We rarely name that when we talk about healing, but the parallel matters.

Belonging at the Cellular Level

Belonging also affects us at a cellular level. Research in social genomics shows that chronic stress and isolation are associated with changes in gene expression, particularly genes related to inflammation and immune response. Our social environment influences how genes are expressed without altering the DNA itself.

When people experience connection and relational safety, stress related genetic pathways become less active. In practical terms, feeling connected does not just change how we think. It changes how the body functions.

This is one reason healing often accelerates in environments where people feel emotionally safe together. The nervous system finally exits survival mode long enough to integrate and repair.

You cannot force that state through willpower.
You cannot affirm your way into it.
It has to be experienced.

Belonging vs. Membership

Many healing models focus almost exclusively on the individual. Individual insight. Individual regulation. Individual responsibility.

Those things are important, but without relational safety they often reach a ceiling. A person can have every tool and still feel chronically unsettled if their system does not experience belonging.

Belonging is the context that allows tools to work.

Healing does not happen because someone became better at managing themselves. It happens because their system learned it did not have to do everything alone.

This is where the difference between membership and belonging matters.

Being a member of something does not automatically mean belonging. People can be included and still feel invisible. They can follow the rules and still feel like they do not fit. Access does not equal safety.

Belonging is not about being allowed in. It is about being met.

It shows up as resonance.

Belonging happens when you're met.
You can feel it right away.
You're wanted, not just present.
Nothing in you is working to earn your place.
You stay as you are, and the connection holds.

True belonging does not require shrinking or performing. The nervous system relaxes. The body exhales before the mind catches up.

We know we belong when we do not rehearse who we are going to be. When our emotions are not treated as inconvenient. When growth is supported rather than demanded. When connection does not come at the cost of self abandonment.

Belonging feels like internal coherence. A sense that who you are and where you are finally align.

The human spirit does not heal in isolation. It heals in environments where authenticity is met with safety. Where presence matters more than polish. Where connection is not transactional.

Lauren and I are in the process of creating a community shaped by lived experience. One where belonging is felt, safety is built intentionally, connection is genuine, and healing unfolds in relationships.

More on that soon.

XOXO,

Corinne & Lauren

Welcome to the fourth installment in our Rooted and Real series, where we dive in a bit deeper each month to one of the core roots we are constantly referencing and circling back to. These are the roots that anchor us, and that we hope will anchor you, too.

If you are new here, welcome!! You can find the previous episodes in the library.

This month's class is all about our Relationship to Self, and it occurs to us that the timing of this one is perfect. Going into a new year, at a time when many people are thinking about what they want to do differently in the days/weeks/months ahead, and how they want the next year to unfold in different ways, really being anchored in to how you think of yourself and treat yourself is paramount.

This is the work…the witnessing of how you've previously related to yourself, and the intentional cultivating of a new, supportive and loving self-relationship. Think about it: the person you will have the longest relationship with is yourself. You deserve to treat yourself with the most love, care and respect possible.

Take it slowly. This work is always one small step at a time for big, compounded impact over time. And we've stacked this class with micro-actions you can take right in the moment.

We are walking with you. Grab a piece of paper and a pen, and let's get to it.

XO - Lauren and Corinne

We love hearing from you! Let us know how this lands for you and what you notice about your relationship with yourself right now.

You can also check out our FREE Workbook if you want to dive a bit deeper:

You've Always Been The One: 7 Roots of Owning Your Sh*t and Coming Home To Yourself.

It's the kind of stillness that settles in when the nights stretch long and the world seems to pause, just enough for us to hear ourselves again.

I personally find myself listening to the quiet deep into the hours of the night during this time of year.

We are standing at the threshold of the solstice — the deepest dark of the year — where nothing is rushed and nothing is asked to bloom yet. It's a necessary inhale. A holy pause before the days begin to lengthen again.

For generations, people have marked this moment with reverence. They understood that darkness isn't something to outrun, it's something to sit beside. To learn from. To let work on you quietly.

The stretch of time between solstice and the new year was treated differently for centuries.

Across cultures, calendars, and landscapes, people noticed something curious: these days didn't quite belong to the old year, and they didn't fully belong to the new one either. Work slowed. Rituals softened. Decisions were postponed. The world was understood to be in between. We even feel this jokingly in the now as reels and memes on social media poke fun at not knowing what day it is (and potentially being full of cheese).

Many traditions held that these twelve days mirrored the twelve months ahead not as prediction, but as orientation. A way of listening. Watching patterns. Paying attention to what surfaced when life grew quiet enough to hear it.

It was a time for reflection rather than action. For tending fires. For storytelling. For honoring what had passed and carefully considering what was yet to come.

Whether spoken of in myth, folklore, or seasonal custom, the shared understanding was this: how you moved through these days mattered. There was magic there, shaping the inner weather of the year to come.

And while many people may no longer live by those rhythms in obvious ways, the wisdom remains intact.

We still feel it in our bodies. Exhaustion, a call to rest. Introspection, the desire to pause before beginning again. We still sense that rushing straight into January misses something essential.

So while we may not burn a continuous Yule log (although if you do, that's freaking cool) we can claim these days as twelve days of noticing.

Twelve days to look back gently. Twelve days to name what changed us. Twelve days to acknowledge what we're ready to leave behind. Twelve days to imagine what we want to tend — slowly, intentionally — as the light returns.

We can take these twelve days to cultivate our stewardship. Of our energy. Of our attention. Of the year that is quietly taking shape beneath the surface.

This is fertile ground and sacred timing. This is where clarity grows.

We're honoring that rhythm here, too.

We'll be stepping back from publishing for a short pause and will return on January 4th, when the light is just a little stronger and the new year has had time to settle into its bones.

Until then, may you rest without guilt. May you reflect without judgment. May you trust that nothing is late. May you remember that you don't need to rush toward the light… it's already on its way.

We'll see you on the other side of the turning.

XO - Lauren and Corinne

It unexpectedly lit me up.

Not because we're new to this work, but because sometimes you need to revisit the beginning to remember where you're headed and why you chose this path at all.

Walking away from traditional therapy was one of the hardest choices I've ever made. I did it because I was getting deeply frustrated with what the mental health system had become. Everything was turning into forms, codes, limits, boxes, endless waits, fighting for insurance approvals, and sky-high costs. Therapy, this incredible, nuanced thing, was slowly being forced to be the catch-all for struggles it was never designed to hold.

Let me be clear. I am a therapist, and I am not anti-therapy. Therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists are essential, and mental illness deserves proper treatment. But somewhere along the way, the system grew tentacles and stretched into places it was never meant to be simply because insurance started paying for it.

We've seen therapy's scope expand to cover vital human needs like better communication, relationship healing, self-esteem improvement and simply having a trusted shoulder. While this work is essential, it's often not a diagnosable medical condition. We're grateful that insurance coverage created access, but it forced these deeply human needs into a medical framework; a coded, transactional approach that was never the right design for truly serving human connection.

What therapy was designed for and what it has become are often worlds apart.

That gap is where Twisted Willow was born.

Lauren calls it support for better humaning, and that phrase still makes me smile because it's exactly right. We are not here to diagnose, treat, or replace therapy. We are here to offer tools, support, accountability, and connection in a way that feels accessible, grounded, and real.

The wisdom we share in our classes and our paid content is the same profound stuff people often spend years absorbing in therapy. We've just figured out how to package it differently, delivering it so it actually fits into your real, messy, beautiful life. You show up. You learn the thing. You practice it. You live it.

One of the things that fills me with the most pride is the free workbook on our website. It is truly free. No games. No pressure. When I decided to become a social worker, my heart was set on helping people (all people) not just the ones with the best out-of-network coverage. To now be able to give this to someone fills my cup and makes me so clear that this is exactly what I was meant to build (with Lauren). For this I am incredibly grateful.

Download the free workbook, "7 Roots of Owning Your Sh*t and Coming Home To Yourself"; use it, and share it with someone who could use a little support right now.

I'm starting something new, simple, and honestly overdue: Human Connection Hour.

Every week at 7pm, I'll be on Zoom. You can join however you want to. Camera on, camera off, name shown, name hidden. You get to decide how visible you feel like being that day.

It's a quiet little corner of the internet where you can drop in, breathe, talk about what's been stirring, or just listen while you fold laundry and hide from your to-do list.

No pressure to share. No need to "be on." No forced positivity. Just a real human (hi, it's me) showing up at the same time each week so you know you're not navigating the hard stuff alone.

Some weeks we'll chat about a mental wellness skill. Some weeks it will be whatever people brought with them. Some weeks you might just sit and let the presence of other humans be enough.

Think of it as a soft landing place. A little weekly anchor point in the chaos.

If you want in, here's the link. Come when you can, leave when you need, lurk if that's all your energy allows.

Someone will be there. I will be there. Every week.

You're welcome exactly as you are.

XOXO,

Corinne

Topic: Twisted Willow Human Connection Hour

Time: Every Wednesday at 7:00 PM Eastern Time

Join Zoom Meeting: Click here to join

Meeting ID: 839 2478 4597 | Passcode: 392753

It's coming up on a year that a very dear friend of mine took his life.

It happened on my birthday, which is completely irrelevant except that there is now no chance that the day will ever pass me by and allow me the grace of missing it.

The grief I feel is a funny thing. Not funny - haha - but funny in that it has no rules. I suppose grief never does, really. Taking a shower on a random Tuesday, grief. Washing the dishes on any given night, grief. In the car and a certain song comes on, big grief.

Am I the only one that has those car moments?? Why the car? Always the fucking car, actually. It is where I have cried the most tears about any and every person I've ever lost. I don't know what the magic is. But I do know in this case, with this person, it's usually the music.

This past week it was "Don't Dream it's Over" by Crowded House. The song itself doesn't hold any specific meaning, but he and I would play music together, and this was a song we both liked and wanted to work on.

Middle school. Hackensack. We both lived over in the Fairmount area, a few blocks apart. This area was quiet.

There was a space during this time that we were really best friends. We talked about everything. We'd spend hours on the phone—the old school, curly wire, connected to the wall, phones. And at some point he'd just say, "I'm coming up". What he meant was that he'd grab his guitar and walk up the block to me. And what we'd do is go into my backyard, smoke cigarettes, talk and sing…for hours.

Even though we were close and comfortable with one another, there was still this…shyness that surrounded him. It was like he was bashful in certain moments. We'd sing these songs, and he'd avoid eye contact.

The song we sang the most, complete with beautiful harmonies (if I do say so myself), was "More Than Words" by Extreme. We never dated, but that song, at that time, was our song. For 35 years, every time I hear that song, I think about Craig.

On summer nights, sometimes when we weren't singing together, we'd walk up and down the block barefoot, just hanging out and being with each other. Why barefoot? No clue. But to this day I still prefer bare feet on the ground.

A year ago, he had come to my house, brought his friend Dan, their guitars and a keyboard, and we setup an impromptu jam session in my office. We sang "More Than Words". It was a really beautiful afternoon, and I had no idea just how meaningful it would actually be.

I'm not blind to the gift the Universe gave me. The things that had to fall into place for us to wind up in my house, with guitars, doing that thing we had done a thousand times when we were kids…

Craig was funny, and smart, and caring and so talented…and he had one of the most beautiful and caring hearts I'd ever known.

He was a cop. He was a marine. He was a husband. He was a father. He was a brother, a son, a friend. The list goes on.

I can still hear his laugh, clear as day, like he's sitting next to me avoiding eye contact.

If this touches something raw for you, please reach out to someone you trust or a mental health professional. You matter. You deserve help. And you don't have to do it alone. In the U.S., you can call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

In this class we're diving a bit deeper into Core Beliefs. They are the quiet, deeply held stories running in the background of your life, but they shape everything.

They shape how you see yourself, how you see others, how you respond to stress, how safe you feel being seen, and what you believe you're capable of. When you start to notice and question these inner narratives, you stop living on autopilot and start moving with intention. This class is your invitation to gently pull those stories into the light, so you can keep the ones that serve you and loosen your grip on the ones that don't.

XO - Lauren and Corinne

We love hearing from you! Let us know how this lands for you and what you notice about the Core Beliefs you have right now.

You can also check out our FREE Workbook if you want to dive a bit deeper:

You've Always Been The One: 7 Roots of Owning Your Sh*t and Coming Home To Yourself.

Because now… brace yourself: the holiday season is officially upon us. And that stretch from Christmas through New Year's? It's basically the Super Bowl of social interaction. Multiple parties, family visits, office shindigs, plus whatever festive traditions you've got on deck.

Small talk is the engine of these gatherings. Which, if we're being honest, is not my natural habitat. I adore humans, I adore animals, I adore feeding both… but the scripted questions that hit the second someone walks through the door? Whew. "How's work?" "Did you travel?" "Who brought what dish?" We've all played this game.

So instead of bracing for impact this year, let's soften the landing. Here's how to upgrade your conversation game with less pressure, more presence, and a sprinkle of actual connection.

Instead of the classic "How's work?" try something that actually opens a window instead of a trapdoor: "What's something you enjoyed this year that surprised you?" It's warm, it's specific, and it nudges people toward the good stuff.

If you want something even softer and more universal, go with: "What's a tiny moment lately that made you smile?" It's safe, light, and beautifully human.

I also love having one random but charming question in my back pocket. Try questions like:

• "What's a skill you wish you had, with absolutely zero intention of ever learning it?"

• "If you could outsource one life task forever, what's the first thing you would hand off?"

• "What's the funniest or weirdest thing you believed as a kid?"

And for that person who wants to grill you about your career, your relationship, your life trajectory, keep this in your pocket: "Oh, that's a long story. Tell me something good happening with you lately." Polite. Calm. Unbothered. A boundary wrapped in a bow and disguised as interest.

Here's the most important part: you are not responsible for carrying the energy of the room. If the vibe is weird, let it be weird. If the conversation stalls, let it.

Small talk is just the warm-up. The low-stakes gateway into actual connection. You don't need profundity. You just need presence.

Because Thanksgiving may have been the dress rehearsal…but this coming month is the championship game. And you, my friend, are ready.

I could picture her through her words:

Newborn on her chest. Toddler tugging at her leg. House in chaos. She hadn't slept in days. Her husband was focused on "providing," which is noble and necessary, but left every other responsibility on her depleted nervous system.

She wrote:

"I'm so tired. I wish I just had some help."

And I admit, I cracked a little.

Because this is the moment where the village should arrive. Actually, it should have happened already, but we'll get to that point in a bit.

Imagine it: A crew of people show up to make sure a new mom isn't alone. One person running a bath for the baby. One person cooking a meal. One person washing a sink of bottles. Someone else holding the baby so she can shower and eat something that isn't day old toast.

It shouldn't matter whether that person is a friend, a neighbor, a cousin, a fellow mom, or the lady three doors down. The whole point of a village is that someone always comes.

But increasingly… no one comes, at least for people who can't afford to pay someone. And it's been taking its toll for years.

The village was a biological strategy.

Think about the quote "It takes a village". We all understand the meaning, but it's more than just a throw-around phrase. The village was a human survival strategy, built into our species long before language even existed.

Hundreds of thousands of years ago (at least) humans evolved in small, tight-knit groups of 20–50 people.

We survived because on the business end of things, food gathering was shared and safety was shared. However, emotional regulation was also shared. Grief, birth, sickness…all shared. And babies had multiple caregivers (alloparents). These non-parents provided extra nurturing for children, and as a byproduct, the parents had room to thrive.

Dr. Sarah Hrdy, one of the leading evolutionary anthropologists, calls humans "cooperative breeders."

Translation: Humans were never meant to raise children alone.

Back to biology for a moment…

1. Human nervous systems require co-regulation.

Babies co-regulate with caregivers. Adults co-regulate with each other. Isolation sends the brain into a stress state.

2. Alloparenting is wired into our chemistry.

When a baby is passed between multiple caregivers, everyone's oxytocin rises, including the baby's. The baby becomes calmer. The mother becomes calmer. The community becomes bonded.

3. Loneliness is processed as physical danger.

Studies show that social isolation triggers the same threat responses as hunger. Your body interprets being alone as unsafe.

4. Community lowers cortisol.

Being around supportive humans automatically reduces stress hormones. Modern humans are living in a constant, low-grade stress state caused not by "weakness," but by lack of social buffering.

If You Don't Have a Village, Here's Where to Start

1. Start with Micro-Villages

Reach out to two or three people and propose: a weekly shared meal, a childcare swap, a rotating "care circle", co-working with kids, or "I'll do your laundry if you hold my baby" trades.

2. Use Existing Community Tools

• Buy Nothing groups (hyper-local giving + receiving)

• MealTrain.com

• The Peanut App

• Local postpartum or parent support groups

3. If You're Truly Alone

• Warmline.org (emotional support lines)

• Postpartum Support International

• 7 Cups of Tea (anonymous emotional support)

• Local libraries + YMCAs (unexpected hubs for community)

The Twisted Takeaway

I really believe we were never meant to do life alone. Not motherhood. Not healing. Not survival. Not grief. Not the everyday grind of being human.

The village wasn't a cute idea. It was the original nervous-system support system.

We feel overwhelmed today not because we're weak but because we're under-held.

So if you don't have a village, here's your permission:

Borrow one. Build one. Become one.

There's a cruel little irony in the modern mental-health crisis: The more "advanced" our lives become, the more miserable we seem to get.

We've automated discomfort right out of existence and with it, we've lost the primal satisfaction of doing things that actually keep us alive.

You used to have to move your body to survive. Hunt, gather, grow, fix, trade. Now you can get a week's worth of calories and dopamine delivered to your door without standing up. No risk, no real effort, no real feedback loop between your body, your environment, and your mind.

And our brains are absolutely glitching from it.

Disconnection by Convenience

Humans were built for friction. For cause and effect. For "I did that and it mattered." Every time you chop wood, cook a meal, or solve a real-world problem with your hands, your nervous system gets a little hit of regulation: effort → reward → satisfaction.

Now? We scroll, click, and outsource. Our "effort" is cognitive. We are all mind, no body. Our "rewards" are pixel-based — all hit, no depth. Our modern-day "rewards"; the fleeting pleasures and superficial validations we constantly seek are overwhelmingly pixel-based. They manifest as digital likes, rapid-fire notifications, momentary bursts of dopamine, and the endless scroll of curated perfection. These are stimuli designed for immediate, high-impact sensation: all hit, delivering a sharp, momentary psychological jolt. However, they lack any true resonance, sustainable satisfaction, or genuine substance, meaning they have no depth.

We've traded survival for simulation.

Responsibility Is Regulation

There's this modern myth that freedom means no responsibility, no obligations, no commitments, no pressure. But the opposite is true.

Taking responsibility for yourself, your people, your environment is one of the most grounding, regulating forces there is. It gives you structure. Meaning. A reason to get up that isn't just autopilot.

When everything is done for you, your nervous system gets bored. The subconscious wants to matter. It wants to know its efforts have weight.

So what happens when your biggest daily challenge is choosing between oat milk and almond? You start to feel invisible. The fog of "nothing matters" that people call depression often starts right there.

Tech Is the New Survival Skill & It's Eating Us Alive

As tech progresses, our brains are adapting in weird ways. We're hyperconnected but under-engaged. We can "contact" anyone but rarely connect with anyone. We're feeding the body data instead of experience.

The body doesn't know the difference between "I didn't hunt today" and "I haven't left my desk in a week." To your nervous system, both send the same signal: something's off. You're built to move, to act, to participate in your own survival. When that loop breaks, your body flags it as danger, not comfort.

So What's the Fix?

You don't need to move to a cabin in the woods (unless that's your thing, it is my thing 😉). But you do need to reclaim some agency in your day-to-day life.

• Do something your ancestors would recognize as work.

• Make something with your hands.

• Grow, cook, repair, sweat.

• Be responsible for something that depends on you! A plant, a pet, a purpose.

Every small act of real-world responsibility rewires your nervous system for aliveness. Because survival is what keeps the psyche sane.

Bottom Line

Mental health doesn't erode because life gets hard. It erodes because life stops asking anything real of us. Ease without engagement turns humans into ghosts; floating from one dopamine hit to the next, wondering why it all feels so pointless.

Maybe the cure for modern malaise isn't more self-examination, therapy or more tech. Maybe it's picking up a shovel, lighting a fire, and remembering what the hell you're made for. We are fundamentally resilient beings, and recognizing this pattern is the first step back toward genuine connection.

This week's article is a contemplation.

It started with a book that popped into my feed. It's interesting because the algorithm decides what we get to see, and this book wasn't the type of book I'd go searching for, but it intrigued me enough to wind up down a bit of a rabbit hole diving into what the book was aiming to teach. It was a book about attaining power, and how to go about it using all sorts of tactics one might not gravitate toward if they are trying to live with Love.

That even the ideas or practices of love, compassion, empathy, and connection — the things we build our lives around — are actually distractions. Wastes of time. They don't help us get what we actually want, and the key is to prioritize yourself above all else. To stop trying to belong, or fix, or love your way into meaning.

At first, I rolled my eyes. But the idea stuck.

What if there was an actual right and wrong way to do life here, and the whole framework we've built our humanity on was actually wrong, or at least — irrelevant.

This question hung in the air for me, and perhaps it just caught me at the right time, but I allowed myself to look into a future considering this. I was creating a Matrix scenario of sorts, but nuanced.

Here is the question:

If someone handed you irrefutable proof that you've been living life the "wrong" way… would you let yourself change?

I recognize that most people's instinct would be to say no. The picture that initially forms in your mind probably looks cold. Empty. A world stripped of tenderness, of small kindnesses, of meaning that comes from connection.

But what if I told you it wouldn't feel that way?

What if I told you this "other" way of living — this supposed truth — still felt good? That you would still experience happiness. Fulfillment. That you could provide for your family, still find satisfaction. Only the current running beneath it all would shift — from love to power. From empathy to strategy. From connection to calculated exchange.

Not cruelty. Just… neutrality. Connection wouldn't matter anymore. You'd speak and act in ways that got you what you needed, and it would feel normal. Like everyone learned the same new language, and no one missed the old one.

And remember — this isn't a hypothetical world of your choosing. It's the truth. The irrefutable reality of how life was meant to be lived.

Would you trust it? Would you let go of everything you thought made you human up until now — if you knew, without question, that this was the "right" way?

I thought about putting my own answer into this article, but honestly, I'm so fascinated by the question, and the reasons behind anyone else's answer, that I didn't want to influence anything.

We'd absolutely love to know what you think, and what this sparks for you. 💜

Welcome to October's class - a bit later than planned! Life lifed a bit too hard over the last month and we got slightly behind. We appreciate your grace and understanding of our Humanness!!

Now on to the good stuff.

Last month we did an overview of the 7 Roots as a system, for you to begin to understand and integrate, piece by piece. Doing this slowly, intentionally and with honor of what each piece means to you, and how it is a part of you already, will help you know yourself better. We are firm believers that your life should be lived fully by YOU, and once you know yourself inside and out, the power of authenticity is born.

Core Values is a perfect place to start. They are about remembering who you are when no one's watching. What you stand for when it's not convenient. What still matters when the dust settles—and being okay with it all.

The compass is inside of you. It's time to follow it.

Have a terrifically Twisted day (in the best way possible!),

XO - Lauren and Corinne

We love hearing from you! Let us know how this lands for you and what you notice about the Core Values you have right now.

You can also check out our FREE Workbook if you want to dive a bit deeper:

You've Always Been The One: 7 Roots of Owning Your Sh*t and Coming Home To Yourself.

We treat peace like a personality trait now. If you can hold your tongue and breathe through the bullshit, somehow you are enlightened. Calm has become a badge of honor, and rage has become the thing you are supposed to hide.

While rage can mean chaos in some cases, it doesn't always. Sometimes it is the moment you realize you have been tolerating too much for too long. It is the heat that rises when your boundaries wake up. It is the sound your spirit makes when it stops pretending everything is fine.

Sometimes, when you feel like the most alive part of you is furious, things get crystal clear.

The world trains us to flinch at our fire. Anger gets a bad reputation for being messy or unspiritual. But more often than not, it is pointing to something that matters. It tells you where you need to pay attention, where your life is out of alignment, where your energy is being drained.

The problem is what happens next.

Hiding our anger is when things get dangerous for us, and potentially others.

We stuff it down. We apologize before anyone even asks. We try to breathe it away or rationalize it. Underneath the heat, there is usually something vulnerable…..grief, disappointment, fear, feeling unseen.

Think of the Barbie monologue (America Ferrera's Iconic Barbie Speech) everyone lost their minds over last year. It wasn't just about frustration with patriarchy. It held a palpable ache. The invisible weight of having to hold it together while feeling erased. That's what anger really hides. There can be a part of you that's hurting and so, so, so tired of pretending it's fine.

You can say you are fine, that you do not care, that you are in control, but beneath the rage is a part of you that wants to be seen. That wants to be honored.

We learn to be quiet about that part. We smile through frustration and call it maturity. We forgive before anyone asks because it feels easier than standing our ground. Swallowing fire keeps us hollow. Eventually it starts to eat us from the inside out.

And the body keeps the score (great book BTW). Fatigue, headaches, simmering resentment. Rage with nowhere to go becomes bitterness; and rage is strongest when it is ignored.

But rage can exist without hitting anyone else. You can feel it fully and move it without hurting someone.

Think of Ryan Reynolds' role of Andrew in The Proposal. His father Joe (played by Craig Nelson) is laying the guilt on thick that Andrew is not interested in taking over the family business, stating that by Andrew pursuing his own passions he is being irresponsible and selfish. This appears to be an anger trigger in their relationship. The scene moves to Andrew taking an axe to a tree quite vigorously with headphones in, tuning the world out. He's furious, but the motion carries the feeling. The tree takes the impact, not a person.

So you're super pissed. What next?

Anger can travel through your body safely.

Run until your lungs burn. Write every word you won't send. Punch a pillow, or scream into one. Turn on music and dance ugly. Build something. Smash something that can be rebuilt.

When the energy flows, the space underneath opens. The part that actually needs attention gets seen. That's where clarity starts. (I firmly believe that this is the sweet spot that most Taylor Swift break up ballads are created in. Maybe one day we'll have her on the podcast and can ask her directly.)

Once you feel it without judgment, you begin to notice what lies beneath. You can face your vulnerability. You can act instead of react. You can choose how your power moves in the world.

When you live with that clarity, you discover a kind of peace that is earned - not pretending calmness is your default, and not ignoring the fire inside you. Just existing fully with what you feel and what you will no longer accept.

Being angry can make you feel awake. It shows you care. The moment you understand that, you can allow yourself to stop fearing it and start listening. You find out what you need, what you want, and where your energy belongs.

If you are angry right now, let yourself feel it. Move it. Speak it. Live it. Do not let the world teach you that quietness is more valuable than truth.

The world does not need more people pretending to be peaceful. The world needs people brave enough to feel and honest enough to act (in safe, socially responsible ways).

Once again, someone was reaching out for connection in an online space, searching for some shred of support and understanding in a difficult moment, but instead they received someone else's self-righteous certainty of what they were doing wrong.

Judgement is a sneaky SOB, and it's been getting on my nerves in different ways for a long time. Today, it's getting written about.

We all do it in some way or another. I'm certainly not perfect and would only be a hypocrite if I set out to write a whole article judging people on their judginess. But what I am noticing is a new flavor of judgement that feels like a new epidemic, and I believe it's damaging the Human spirit.

It's the way people assume authority over someone else's lived experience. The way online "support" spaces often turn into arenas of moral performance.

I'm seeing it constantly:

A woman posts in a parenting group asking for advice.
A person anonymously shares they're struggling; with kids, with their relationship, with their career.
Someone says they're lonely and having trouble making friends after 40.

Sometimes I cringe before I even hit the comments. More often than not, before kindness or empathy can enter the room, the feed is filled with moral superiority and condescension. Man, it breaks my heart.

And there's always someone who inevitably says:

"Well, if they didn't want opinions, they shouldn't have posted publicly."

Nope. Hard Stop. Absolutely not.

People share online because we are wired for connection, and it might be the easiest place they have access to. Maybe they don't have a safe circle offline. Maybe they don't have any close friends. Generally people join online groups based on things they have in common with the other people in the group — so posting there makes sense for them.

For some people, courage looks like typing into a box and hoping someone out there gets it.

The fact that "Please be kind" has become a standard disclaimer should give us pause to reflect on what the hell our default responses have become to one another.

Kindness shouldn't require a backstory.

We've made empathy conditional. We wait for a reason to soften.

Here's an example:
Someone cuts you in line at Starbucks. You decide they're rude.
Then you find out their child is in the hospital… and suddenly your tone changes.

Why did pain have to be proven before compassion was allowed?

Most of us are fighting some type of invisible battle, and judgement is just another way of protecting ourselves from facing them. It's easier than empathy, because empathy requires presence, capacity, and humility while judgement requires nothing but opinion and ego.

My point with all of this is that people are generally doing the best they can at any moment, and life is fucking hard…

What shouldn't be hard is choosing compassion over conflict, especially in a forum where you have the choice to scroll on by.

Thanks for listening. Let me know if you feel the same.

XO - Lauren

I have to start this article off by saying that Twisted Willow was born, in large part, out of the frustration I have felt for years with the processes and procedures involved with a person seeking therapy. Lauren and I were constantly discussing how things needed to change, and it is our hope that Twisted Willow - and everything it brings to the table - will be part of that evolution.

Below are my notes from a particularly powerful journaling session, where I allowed my frustrations to take shape and pour out of me.

My purpose in sharing this now is to be honest about a system that is meant to help but too often falls short. I would like it to also serve as a reminder to anyone who's ever felt unseen, labeled or let down by the system that you're not imagining it and you're definitely not alone.

What Nobody Tells You About Therapy

Therapy is supposed to help, but the system isn't set up to actually do that. Insurance decides how much you're worth, labels get pinned on you like a badge, and too many people who need support the most don't get access. I'm done acting like that's okay and it's time someone told you what's really going on.

I'm a therapist with 20 years of experience across public and private sectors. From schools and foster care to prisons and private practice, I've seen a lot. I've seen therapy save lives, and I've seen the system get in the way. Therapy can change your life, but the way it's delivered can be absurd. Most people have no clue of the ins and outs behind the scenes.

The Insurance Game

When you use insurance, you're not just paying a copay; you're handing over a piece of your story.

Insurance companies require a diagnosis, whether or not it fully fits, and that label doesn't go away. It can follow you through medical records and even affect things like life insurance down the line. I have seen it happen first hand.

The system, not surprisingly, is designed to pay the least it can. Coverage often favors severity over actual need, which encourages over-diagnosing and leaves people who need support without access.

The Therapist isn't Magical

Listen, I love the work I've done, and deeply respect my clients, their journey and our relationship. I think, if someone finds the right therapist, and everything falls into place, the work can be sacred. But here is therapy's best kept secret: the core skills of therapy don't change that drastically between anxiety, depression, relationship woes, communication, self-esteem or ADHD.

At the end of the day, the work always circles back to the same foundations: noticing your thoughts, regulating your emotions, and making choices that align with your values. Once you learn these tools, you can apply them anywhere, not just in the office.

Now that you know, what can you do?

Be intentional about your therapy:

• Ask what diagnosis your therapist is using if you're going through insurance.

• If you don't want a label on record, consider paying out-of-pocket if you can.

• Remember, therapy skills aren't secret codes—they're tools. Once you learn them, you can apply them anywhere.

• And perhaps most importantly, if you are seeking any type of help, be ready and willing to actually do the work.

The Twisted Takeaway

I chose to create Twisted Willow with a Life Coach rather than another therapist. Why? Because coaching uses more directive tools and in my opinion encompasses more "real life" solutions that someone can implement in their day to day.

We believe that healing (and Humaning) deserve better.

You don't have to settle for a system that doesn't serve you. Whether it's with us at Twisted Willow or any space that feels aligned, you get to choose healing and support that isn't dictated by red tape or diagnoses.

This is your permission slip to step outside the noise and into something that actually works for you.

The end of this week took a turn.
Some personal things needed my attention, and I'm sitting here with a pounding headache and a half-finished piece that doesn't feel like what I wanted it to be.

So instead of forcing it or pushing something subpar out into the world, I'm choosing to pause.

Because this — right here — is what self-care actually looks like sometimes.
It's not always bubble baths and journaling prompts.
It's saying nope, not today when your energy and clarity aren't lining up, and I'm choosing honesty over output.

Yes, for those of you who might be wondering, I didn't just throw my notecards and decide immediately to shift. I sat with some disappointment about how we are just getting on a roll of publishing consistently and with intended purpose. But if I'm going to write about awareness and conscious choice, then I have to live it, too.
And today, that means recognizing that my move is to reset.

So that's what I'm doing.
We'll be back next week with something that feels more aligned.

Until then, here's your reminder:
Choosing yourself is never a failure. It's a recalibration.

*Note: I decided after writing this to make it part of the Real Talk Series, because - you guessed it! - it's real talk. This is reality. Real life, in the moment, being true to myself and to you that I just couldn't pull it together today, and that's okay.

Now for the heating pad, some Advil, some water and maybe a nap.

XO - Lauren

And yet, for most of us, our experience of consciousness feels small. Finite. It's what we "know" on a daily basis—the ease of staying within the confines of what's familiar and how we experience life. Another example of fitting into the least we were told to be.

Our unconscious holds just as much truth—things we "know" but haven't allowed ourselves to become aware of. Beneath the surface it's quietly shaping how we experience life, but we don't realize it's running the show.

Over the past few years, I've been leaning into the practice of awareness…and make no mistake, it is a practice. Awareness is its own kind of muscle. When exercised, it not only grows stronger, but it can change your life in ways that reach all the way down to the roots.

Carl Jung said, "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate".

The unconscious gets what it wants.

So how do we begin to make the unconscious conscious?

We begin with awareness.

True awareness is sticking to the facts of any situation without assigning emotion to it. When emotion takes the wheel, we start labeling, judging, and interpreting through our own filters. We create stories about what's happening, even if they're not true. Those stories feed the emotions that created them, and the cycle continues.

We love to prove ourselves right.

Imagine you're driving in traffic and someone cuts you off. The automatic response for many of us is annoyance, maybe even anger.

We love to think that person is simply an inconsiderate asshole, or perhaps a distracted idiot. Simple. Justified. And it makes us feel righteous - bonus points. But what if you knew that person's child had just been rushed to the hospital and they were desperate to get there? Would your reaction shift?

You might not know the truth in that moment, but you do know what you don't know. And that, in itself, is a fact that can change perspective.

Now we go deeper.
Take a breath and notice why you feel frustrated at being cut off.

What does that reaction reveal about you?
What's going on for you right now?
How are you interpreting what happened?
When else do you fall into this same pattern of reaction without having the facts?

How does that shape your life, over and over again, without you realizing it?

That is the power of the unconscious.

When you start to practice the discipline of awareness, you begin to lift the veil. You become more conscious of what's actually happening around you, and that awareness opens the door to choice. Real, conscious choice.

When you have control over your choices, you're truly in the driver's seat of your life. From there, expansion is inevitable.

Without awareness, there's little room to grow.

Now that you know, what will you do?

Spoiler: shoulds are just other people's expectations in cheap disguise.

The moment you unsubscribe from what you think you should be doing, thinking, feeling…you get your life back. Suddenly, your focus isn't being wasted on whether your neighbor thought your lawn looked tragic or if your boss thought your email was too casual. Your energy—your actual, precious resource of attention—is freed up for the stuff that actually matters: your goals, your health, your joy.

Caring about everything is a fast-track to burnout. It's unsustainable, and it winds up hurting you more than it helps you. Constant "shoulding" spikes your cortisol, wrecks your sleep, tanks your immunity, and leaves you drained. When you cut the crap, your nervous system can breathe again. Less caring about nonsense means more capacity for the stuff you actually care about.

However…

Yeah, sorry—there's almost always a However…

Lauren and I always want to keep it real, and simply understanding the concept is unfortunately not the final destination. There's a mini house-of-horrors between actually unsubscribing and what you get on the other side, and almost all of it's rooms are filled with fear.

You see, the second you unsubscribe, people notice. Some roll their eyes. Some whisper behind your back. Some call you selfish. You'll feel the judgment, and maybe even lose the favor of people who thrived on you staying in your lane, which in reality was the lane they paved for you, keeping you caring about things that matter more for them, than they do for you. It's uncomfortable because most of us keep other people comfortable as a shortcut to keeping ourselves comfortable. So when we rock their boat, we are rocking ours too. And suddenly, life hands you the choice: disappoint others or disappoint yourself.

I had several "aha" moments where I realized my life was running on should: I should work this way. I should parent this way. I should tone it down, smooth it out, fit in everyone else's tiny box for me. Then one day, I just didn't. I quit. I unsubscribed. I refused to should myself into oblivion.

For me, by the time I felt ready to hit the button, I also felt ready to let some people go. For me, I had reconciled the fear and readiness became my driving force.

And suddenly doors began to open. I built my own business. I pursued opportunities I'd once labeled "too risky." I let friendships and habits that drained me die off like bad Wi-Fi connections. And here's the kicker: I ended up with everything I ever wanted. Well, almost everything. My wife vetoed the goats and chickens—apparently she doesn't trust me not to end up on a TLC special called Barnyard Hoarders. Fair enough. But those goats are coming.

That's the beauty of unsubscribing: you write your own playbook. You decide what success looks like. You put your energy where you want it. You choose what matters, what deserves your attention and what's worth chasing. Nobody hands out permission slips in adulthood. You either wait around for approval or you write your own in Sharpie.

We're here to give you permission to starve the nonsense and feed the stuff that matters. You'll be amazed at how fast life expands once you finally hit unsubscribe.

Honestly, it's an infuriating phrase sometimes.

It's meant to comfort, but when you're in the thick of the thing, it can feel profoundly unhelpful.

Sometimes shit just happens. Sometimes there's no immediate sense to be made and packaged neatly with a bow.

That said, there's a useful distinction worth holding: Reason vs. Meaning

Reason asks why. It's about having a cause. It suggests that something happened because it was destined, and falsely promises a tidy explanation that will make your feelings sensible.

Meaning asks what now. What will you do with the event? What will you let it teach you? You don't need a reason to make meaning. Meaning is the work you claim after the fact.

Every experience leaves a mark. Some show up as joy, some as heartbreak. Some arrive as a gift, others as a wrecking ball.

Either way, they shape us.

Life will never stop throwing curveballs. Plans will fall apart. People will disappoint us. Loss will find us. We don't get to control that.

What we do get to choose is how we meet it.

I know this is so much more easily said than done, but resistance is a curse that binds us to discomfort. It's where suffering is born.

At any given moment, we get to shift the narrative from Why is this happening to me? to, What can I make of what's here? This is an instant reclamation of our power. We are critical thinkers and feeling creatures, and we get to grow through every experience we have if we choose it.

Sometimes the hardest things in life are the teachers we didn't ask for. They hurt. They test us. And through it they shape us into someone we couldn't have become otherwise.

As the Stoics say: The obstacle isn't in the way. The obstacle is the way.

Your choice to shift doesn't make the pain disappear. It just means you aren't letting it own you. You get to decide whether the hard thing breaks you down, or builds you into something stronger.

Welcome to September's class.

This is as good a place as any to get started with us, and these special videos are only for Founding Members, so Thank you! for your support. It really means so much as we continue to build a platform (and ultimately a community) where people can come to feel supported through the humaning process - because let's face it, it's just not for the faint of heart some days.

When we sparked this whole thing up, we kept coming back to these cyclic areas of life, which deeply related to the self and ultimately the only thing we have control of in the world. We are deep believers in the power of self - knowing yourself well enough to pause, discern, acknowledge, accept and take responsibility where it's due - and how anchoring to who you are at your core can be the biggest source of living an empowered life.

I want to pause here and note that living an empowered life does not mean you never feel depleted, depressed, uncomfortable or otherwise. We are all having the Human Experience, and some days, it's just rough…and we need a minute. But when you subscribe to these 7 "Roots", and know how they show up in your life, you will always be at choice to choose who you are and what you need in any moment - and that's empowering.

This is the starting line. The overview. The introduction.

We'll be building from here.

Wishing you a twisted day (in the best possible way),

Lauren and Corinne

*Don't forget to talk to us! Leave us a comment or reach out and let us know what you think and what's currently going on for you.

And here's the kicker: half the time, you don't even need outside criticism, oh no you've internalized all that shit. That little voice in your head whispers: You should be grateful. You should do more. They need you. You should say yes. You should keep going. So instead of resting, you keep performing. Instead of caring for yourself, you swallow guilt for daring to need something. The invisible load isn't just chores and logistics—it's the constant management of everyone else's comfort at the expense of your own.

What if the most radical, rebellious thing you can do at this stage of life is to stop apologizing and start prioritizing yourself?

Real-Life Ways to Call Out the Invisible Load

The invisible load doesn't get lighter just because you notice it; it shifts when you say it out loud and invite others to carry it with you. That means being specific, not passive-aggressive, and actually asking for help. Here's what it looks like in real life:

• With a spouse (naming the mental labor):
  "I don't just cook dinner—I also meal plan, make the grocery list, and keep track of what everyone likes. That's a lot of invisible work. I need you to take over meal planning two nights a week, start to finish. That means choosing the meals, shopping for them, and cooking them."

• With a teen (teaching responsibility):
  "When you leave your sports uniform in your bag, I'm the one who ends up scrambling to wash it before your game. I need you to check your bag after every practice and get your stuff into the laundry yourself. From now on, if it's not clean, that's on you—not me."

• With younger kids (making it concrete):
  "I've been reminding you every morning to pack your lunchbox. That reminder is part of my invisible load. Starting this week, I'll show you how to make a checklist. You'll be responsible for checking it yourself."

• With yourself (breaking the guilt loop):
  "I don't need to justify taking a walk alone or reading a book in silence. My rest is not a luxury—it's fuel for everything else I do."

Don't just say it once. If your partner "forgets" the dentist appointments you asked them to own, resist the urge to jump in. Let the reminder call come to their phone. If your teen shows up with a dirty uniform, let them face the consequence. Transferring invisible labor means letting other people actually carry it—even when they drop it at first.

None of us can dismantle the invisible load in isolation. It was built on generations of women quietly carrying the weight of households, relationships, and families—so it takes community, not just individual willpower, to shift it.

Every time one of us says, "I can't do it all and I won't try to anymore," we give another woman permission to do the same. Every time we let the ball drop and resist the urge to pick it back up, we teach our partners, our kids, and ourselves that we are not the only engine keeping life moving.

This is the kind of rebellion that needs a text to a friend that says, "Guess what? I made them handle dinner tonight." It needs us to cheer one another on for choosing ourselves in tiny, ordinary ways.

Because this is how we take ourselves back: not in one giant leap, but in a thousand small steps. Together we make change stick.

Meet Melissa.

Melissa is cool beans. Melissa is someone who jumped in the deep end with me because she (like me) is a personal growth junkie, and never passes up an opportunity to know herself better.

I had offered this session to a few people for free because it can feel hard for me to truly explain what it is, and I hoped if I did it for a few people, they would be able to put it into words that could better describe the experience. Melissa jumped in to help me, and wound up helping herself - which I knew would probably happen, but there are no guarantees.

If you are looking to have more control over your life, I deeply believe it starts with true awareness.

This session may be the first step.

See what Melissa had to say and decide for yourself!

I've noticed a heartbreaking pattern lately: So many midlife women are posting in forums about the empty nest colliding with the hollow space of a marriage that doesn't hold them anymore. It's a particular ache, but one that seems to be the new experience for the majority of women. And it isn't really anyone's direct fault.

There seem to be two main categories:

1. The woman is realizing that no matter how balanced she thought she was, her kids actually filled the majority of the space in her life, and her husband is suddenly a roommate;

2. Or, the quiet truth finally gets named: this has been a dead relationship for years and now that there is no distraction, they are realizing they don't want to be in it anymore.

Sometimes there is still so much love there, and other times, they are saying out loud for the first time that they really just don't like their partner anymore—and maybe haven't for years.

I am seeing these women throwing a desperate line out to the water, not only hoping for someone to tell them they aren't alone, but looking for the village— the women that have navigated this and have made it through. And underneath, the true desire is to hear that the relationship can be mended and grow strong again…because nobody wants to face looking at a life alone when you've just invested three decades with someone and gotten through what was supposed to be the hard part. They are craving proof that what they have isn't actually in pieces.

A long time ago during a conversation with my mother, she told me that my father was her priority in many ways. Her job as a parent was to raise us to leave, and my father would be the person still there to spend her life with her.

I've always thought that made sense, but honestly, at the time it stung. The little imprint of not being chosen first. *Side note: this probably explains a lot about some of the tendencies I have.

Let me be clear though, our home was warm and loving. Both of my parents were caring, loving people. As young children, obviously, she was there in every capacity. But as we got older, I could definitely see that she focused on their relationship.

I don't think we see that as the norm very much these days, and I'm not sure what about my mother's upbringing led her to realize this was so important, and to have that mindset. But I do think it contributed to why they were able to weather a few storms and if my father were alive today, they would still be married.

My friend and I talked, too, about the dynamics of women and men.

How women are often biologically wired for nurturing, for emotional awareness. How we stretch ourselves toward connection almost by instinct. And yet, so many men are still trapped inside prisons of their own making — walls, armor, defenses. Not because they don't want love, but because they were raised to believe those walls were necessary.

So here we are: women aching for intimacy, men keeping their guard up, and marriages buckling under the weight of what doesn't get said.

In some ways it feels really complicated when all I want to do is believe it should be simple.

I am noticing a deluge of male coaches who are now coaching men to be more "in tune" with their wives. And what does it really come down to?

Taking the time to truly understand one another. What a concept.

But the key is: you have to want to.

We talked about parenting.

I coach a lot of parents, and talk about parenting a lot. This part probably deserves its own article. But this time it really boiled down to something I know now but wish I had recognized at the beginning:
Every day that I held my babies, breathed in the scent of them, traced the outlines of their faces with my fingers and my mind, I should have been asking:

What are you here to teach me?

I think about it now all the time.

What am I meant to learn about myself through my relationship with you?

What am I meant to understand about the world by taking time to see it through your eyes?

How am I meant to be better by showing up how you need me to, and not how I might want to?

So many questions to bring us the deepest knowledge of ourselves.

Because we get it wrong. We walk into parenting with this idea that we will be able to control. It makes sense that our focus is on what we are going to teach them. How we'll shape them, guide them, mold them into decent humans.

But there's a bigger invitation to also let them teach us. To leave room for their small souls and big questions to actually expand us.

Every tantrum, every messy dinner table conversation, every teenage eye roll carries a lesson—not about discipline or rules—but about patience, humility, humanity, and love.

What if parenting was less about controlling and more about listening?
Less about building them and more about becoming through them?

My kids are young adults now (according the law - though in my eyes they are still babies on this planet, trying to figure things out), and I love sitting in contemplation of these questions. It can definitely be easier to do when the hustle of young parenting has calmed down a bit. But if you are any type of parent, I lovingly invite you to take a minute for your own contemplations.

A long, deep conversation with a friend is my soul caffeine. These topics are on my heart a lot and they've been showing up in my own life lately as well. I'm always thinking about how I can serve others through what I'm learning, and how I can share any wisdom I derive from the experiences that I go through personally. As I continue to dig deeper, I trust whatever will be born from the process, and as always, I'll share it with you.

Until then, I see you.
I hold space for you.
And I trust that whatever your relationships are teaching you right now—you're not alone in it.

I've come to believe that every person I come across is enough.

That doesn't mean I like everyone. And I can tell you during this lovely phase of perimenopause I don't like most lol. It doesn't mean I understand everyone, agree with them, or even want them in my life.

But enoughness isn't about preference. It's not about approval. It's about dignity. And seeing that dignity in ourselves starts with recognizing it in others.

We live in a world built on metrics, hierarchies, comparisons. From the moment we can walk and talk, we're measured: grades, likes, salaries, bodies, productivity, performance. We're trained subtly and overtly to believe we need to be more to matter.

But what if we don't?

What if you, right now—without fixing, earning, proving—are already whole? What if the person who annoys you, the one you scroll past, the one you don't understand, is whole too? Not perfect. Not polished. Not "on the same page." Just… enough.

This doesn't sanitize the mess. Humans are messy. We contradict ourselves. We project. We lash out. We hide. We fail each other, often. Enoughness doesn't erase the complexity….it includes it. It holds the mess with tenderness instead of shame.

To lead with enoughness is a quiet rebellion. It means choosing to see yourself as worthy without prerequisites. It means walking into a room without needing to prove your right to be there. It means listening to someone even if you don't agree but because their existence carries value.

And here's the paradox: when you start recognizing enoughness in others, it becomes easier to feel it in yourself. When you stop scanning for what people lack, you slowly stop obsessing over your own perceived deficiencies. It's a mirror. It's a practice.

Some days, you'll forget. That's okay. It's not about being perfect at being enough. It's just about returning to the truth when you can: You were never broken. You were never behind. You don't need to be better to be enough.

You already are.

And so is everyone else.

We had this idea…that sometimes you just need to hear some uplifting words from a friend. We've tried to keep them bite-sized, unscripted, and human—based on things we've needed to hear and recognize others have needed as well. Sometimes, we'll jump in and ramble, and other times we may go off some notes we jotted down. Either way, we wanted to show up raw for you, and because they aren't practiced, there may be some slip-ups that we hope you'll forgive, all in the spirit of constantly being a work in progress.

Ultimately this will be a hub - some notes might be pep talks, some might be grounding practices… all are reminders that you're not broken, and you get to be yourself in all your current and exactly as-is glory. Use them like a playlist—tap what you need, when you need it.

We'll keep adding here.
If there's something specific you want to hear us speak to, message us or drop a comment.

We're listening.

Sample Topics Include:

• When you need to laugh at yourself
• When you want to quit
• The Morning Pep-Talk (Reminders for having an Authentic day)
• When you're "fine"…
• When being needed tricks you into staying stuck
• When you're over the over-doing
• When you feel like you can't
• Do my old choices have a shelf life?

The Root Truth Bomb Series 💣

If you've followed any of our work, you know we speak to these 7 main roots. We believe if you focus on strengthening these roots, they will help ground all the other areas of your life. Below are some short reminders to get your power in check!

• Core Values
• Core Beliefs
• Relationship to Self
• Support Systems
• Physical Body
• Habits
• Spirituality

Corinne and I have this habit of idea-dumping everywhere—meetings, texts, random voice notes, the Notes app (if our smartphones ever capped storage, we'd be screwed). It's a little chaotic, but it's also where the magic happens.

Out of that chaos came something we've been wanting to give you for a long time: a way to get a quick reset, without overthinking it.

Because some days you don't need a deep dive. You just need someone to say: hey, you're not crazy, this is hard, and you've got this.

That's what the Voice Note Library is—short pep talks, truth bombs, and little nuggets of wisdom you can listen to anywhere:

• On the way to Costco, screaming into your coffee

• Waiting at soccer practice, plotting your escape

• Staring down your lunch salad like it owes you something

• Or those deeper "what am I even doing here?" moments

We've set up a permanent home for it so you can come back anytime:

• Desktop - Check the nav bar in Root Awakening

• Mobile - Look for the pinned post "Link to Pep Talk Audio Library" (then save it!)

The first few notes are free, but if full access is your thing, a subscription gets you the whole collection plus more (affordable, accessible support—because you don't have to do this alone).

This library will continue to evolve and grow…like us.

We hope it feels like having us in your pocket whenever you need a shift. Quick, real, funny, and slightly magical.

With love (and a little Twist),
Lauren & Corinne

Let me clarify:
We do know what we're doing when it comes to talking about life.
We know how to hold space for the mess.
We understand the brain, human behavior, and what it means to grow through hard things.
We know how to support people who want to feel better, think clearer, and live with more intention.

But when it comes to building a perfectly polished brand or keeping our channels clean and seamless?
We're making that shit up as we go.

And honestly, it bothers me.
I'd be lying if I said it didn't.

Corinne is happily plugging away—doing the things, posting the posts, playing with the systems.
Meanwhile, my inner perfectionist is pulling the covers over my head, muttering something about fonts and workflows and maybe burning it all down.

Here's the weird part:
I'm not even a perfectionist in most areas of my life.
I actually generally exist in functional chaos.
My life is like a tapestry made of not-fully-woven-together fabric. It's held together just enough to work, but never fully finished or tidy.

Like, you could loan it to a friend in a crisis… but it's definitely not being featured in Better Homes and Gardens.

This new strain of perfectionism feels different.
It's rooted in wanting to do it right, and have what we are building look polished like other sites and profiles.
We want to set things up well.
To not waste time or energy, or risk looking unprofessional or unprepared.

We could talk about how this connects to "the mental load," and how women have carried that invisible weight for generations.
And yes, that plays a role.
But this isn't a mental load essay.
This is me naming the Truth of the Day that as a human and a business owner, I often have no idea where to put my focus.

Do we work on the Substack article, or do we post to social?
Do we create a new product for the store, or plan a live talk?
Do we polish the backend systems, or finally update the website bio?

Honestly?
Hell if I know.

And that just has to be okay right now.
Because the truth is, I've felt myself getting bogged down.
Not by the work but by the pressure to do the work right.

Corinne and I made a pact early on.
When it all starts to feel like too much, we say one word:
Simplify.

It's our safe word.
Our hard reset.
Our reminder that we don't need to do everything right now—or do it all perfectly—to still be doing something meaningful.

Corinne lives pretty comfortably in the land of "done is better than perfect."
Me? Not so much.
I like simplicity. I even chase it in certain parts of my life.
But when it comes to visibility, or systems, or structure?
I still want it to be… clean. Clear. Thought through.
And it nags at me when it's not.

The truth is, we don't have a full team yet.
We don't have every channel dialed in.
We don't always know how it all fits together.
But what we do have is a message.
A mission.
And a real desire to meet people where they are, with something honest, useful, and supportive.

So for now, simplifying means going back to that.
It means hitting "publish" without the preface.
It means posting the live video, even if we aren't centered, the lighting is terrible, and we can't figure out how to see comments in real-time.

It means trusting that the message matters more than the delivery.

Even though every part of me wants to say,
"Hey, we know this isn't the right way to do it,"
I'm learning to just do it anyway.

Perhaps that will be part of our charm.
We've actually always been the kind of people who show up real, show up messy, and still manage to hopefully say something that helps someone get through their day. For a while that was enough.

I suppose I'm just catching a core belief in action—an inner monologue that is loudly whispering: If it's not done "right", it won't work the best it can. Even if rationally I know that isn't true. So…

We don't know what we're doing.
But we're doing it anyway.
Strap in.

Growing up adopted meant getting hit with a lot of questions that weren't really questions.

"Do you know your real mom?"
"Don't you feel weird not knowing where you come from?"
"Were you, like, in an orphanage or something?"

These gems were tossed at me on the cracked blacktop of St. Mary's like dodgeballs. I was nine—already fluent in sarcasm and skilled at emotional deflection. My uniform jumper may have matched the other kiddos', but I knew I carried something extra. Something people couldn't quite place and I couldn't either.

I never felt rattled by the questions or comments. My parents had already handed me a version of my story that made sense. It wasn't sugarcoated or dramatic. It was sacred. I came from intention, from hope, from choice. My beginning was deliberate. And it was enough.

They had tried and waited over a decade to have a child. Then I arrived—loud, emotional, expressive, and, let's be honest, probably a bit much. But they didn't try to shrink me. They celebrated me. And when they adopted two more kids, we became a chaotic, hilarious, deeply bonded crew built not just on love but on the everyday decision to choose each other again and again.

They talked about my birth mother with reverence. She was never the ghost in the story, never the shadowy figure of loss. They told me she was thoughtful, kind, wise beyond her years. They said she had made the hardest choice, not because she didn't want me, but because she did—and wanted more for me than she could give at that moment.

That narrative……? It stuck; Even when I didn't want it to.

Because, of course, there were moments. Teenage nights where identity got heavy. Where I tried on words like "abandoned" just to see if they fit. Where I'd lob accusations at my parents like emotional grenades, just to feel something shake. But they never flinched. They stayed steady. They refused to let my story turn sour, and they refused to make my birth mom the villain. They held the line. That line became scaffolding.

And still… I wonder.

Why did I feel enough, even in the face of labels meant to signal rejection?

Gay. Adopted. Overweight. Emotional. Too sensitive. Too open. Too much.

Those aren't minor identity markers—especially not in the 90s in a Catholic Italian family, not in a society constantly telling you to shrink, assimilate, be easier to digest. I've seen those very labels hollow people out. I've sat with clients for the last two decades who carry those exact weights and feel crushed by them.

So why didn't I?

Why did I get to feel like they were awards?

I don't know. And honestly? That question haunts me sometimes. Not in a tortured way, just… curiously. Like a thread I keep tugging at.

Is feeling enough something you're born with? Is it built into the soil of your earliest experiences? Is it the stories you're told, or the ones you learn to tell yourself? Can it be taught? Rewired? Gifted to someone who's never known it?

I want to and have to believe yes. Yes holds all the possibility.

Because I've seen it happen. I've watched clients shift. I've seen the moment when someone stops relating to their life like it's evidence against them and starts seeing it as proof that they're still here, worthy and growing with every breath. I've watched people step into themselves and it looks like something inside them whispered, "you've got this."

I've had that voice in me for as long as I can remember. It's not loud. It's more like a low hum—"You'll figure this out. You're still you. You're allowed to be human here."

And maybe that's all it takes.

Not perfection. Not certainty. Just a voice that's willing to show up again and again and say: you are enough, even here. Especially here.

These days, through Twisted Willow Wellness, as I step more deeply into coaching, I see my job not as "fixing" or "finding solutions" (gross) or giving answers (I don't have them). My job is to sit with people at the intersection of their stories and their souls journey. To be curious with them. To help them untangle the inherited narratives from the ones they're ready to rewrite. To ask: What would shift if you believed you were never broken in the first place?

Life (mine too) never stops being messy. I mess up. I fall apart. I lose my way. But in the rubble, there's a steady part of me that goes, okay… let's figure out what this taught you. Let's get curious. Sometimes I'm good at this in the moment and sometimes days or weeks later; but I let the belief back in "you're ok Rin - not perfect but capable - don't sit in anything that doesn't serve you".

When you carry that kind of compassion for yourself—the gritty, stay-awake kind—it just makes you capable or at least open to the idea that you are.

So…… No, I don't know why I've always felt enough. I wish I could bottle it. That I could say, "Here, take this." But what I can do is honor it and know it's possible. I've always been a believer that if something is possible in A; and you've seen it created in B; then it has potential and a likelihood to be created in C; especially if we are to recreate as much of the formula as we can. I try to create spaces where that feeling has a shot at showing up. Where you can hear your own voice, tell your own story, and maybe, just maybe, start believing in the possibility that you were always enough too.

XOXO

Corinne

What isn't being shared is the actual conversation that led up to this clip, that may or may not have had to do with my dog's balls, and was the ultimate deciding factor as to why we slid the toggle button to "yes" for the explicit content option going forward.

We've done live videos and chats in our Facebook group, and creating a Podcast to go along with our publication has been a goal for a while. There's been a lot of building lately!

So this morning, we jumped in and tried to figure out some stuff.

Until now, our presence here has been in writing, and that offers a taste. But typically, articles and posts get to be a bit more thought out. We're hoping to build out our videos so people can get a real sense of who we are—in all of our glorious Human-ness, and hopefully feel more compelled to join in the conversations.

So, while that's being done, enjoy the most perfect clip of us that Substack served up this morning, from our test video.

This really does say a lot.

Have an amazing Friday!

While all that's happening, here's the hidden layer most people miss: when you run yourself dry long enough, you're also teaching the people around you that this is just how it's done. Your kids, your partner, your friends—they watch how you move through life and take notes, whether you're consciously modeling or not. Exhaustion gets normalized. Self-abandonment starts to look like strength.

Here's where I've shifted as a therapist-turned-mostly-coach: burnout treatment isn't just about helping people drag themselves across some invisible finish line. We need to be helping them step all the way back into alignment with what actually feeds them. Core values, core beliefs, and the day-to-day relationship with themselves—are the survival gear.

When you are living in sync with your core values, your nervous system feels it. Your heart rate steadies. Your ability to make decisions clears up. You start acting from self-trust rather than reflex or people-pleasing. I know I'm in the "well" zone when I say no to someone and feel proud of it instead of guilty.

When you become aware of your core beliefs—the silent rules running your life—you get the power to rewrite them. If you believe "I'm only valuable when I'm useful," burnout isn't far behind. Once you see that belief for what it is, you can start showing up for yourself differently.

The most important relationship you'll ever have (as corny as that sounds) is to you. Quiet things like how you talk to yourself when no one's around, what you allow yourself to need, whether you pause when your body says pause. Those micro-moments shape your entire experience of life.

One of my passions is helping people before they hit that breaking point. Creating spaces where you don't need to perform, or check off another box, or figure it all out perfectly. Where the goal is coming back to yourself without apology or hustle.

If you feel yourself burning low….. physically, emotionally, or just in that soul-tired way—you are not imagining it. And you don't have to power through it alone. Lauren and I have poured over the research, the techniques and the muck to make sure our folks feel a weight disappear when they work with us.

No one needs another project. We are passionate about creating spaces, techniques and community that are genuine. We want to feel the hell yes! The "Oh Thank god someone actually gets this shit" type of energy, come from each person we work with.

If coming back to you sounds like a trip you're ready for, join us; we would love to have you.

This post is especially for our friends poking around on mobile. The page doesn't show up in the navigation bar, so we wanted to make it easy for you to find.

TL;DR - We recorded some short pep talks, truth-bombs and real life in-the-moment words of wisdom to help perk up a tough day, or motivate when motivation feels…far away.

We're all doing the best we can.

XO - Lauren and Corinne

When you need to laugh at yourself…

Sometimes the best medicine is stepping back and finding humor in the chaos of being human.

When you want to quit…

A reminder that wanting to give up doesn't mean you're weak—it means you're tired. And tired is valid.

Support Systems (Preview from Root Truth Bomb Series)

A deeper dive into why the people around you matter more than you might think—and how to build a support system that actually supports you.

For me, this translated to being pretty enough.
Pretty enough meant being accepted.
Being accepted meant feeling wanted.
Feeling wanted meant feeling chosen.
Being chosen mattered.

It's hard to admit just how deep this runs.
Especially as someone who spends her days talking about growth, about self-trust, about empowerment and healing.

I know this terrain. I've mapped a lot of it. But this one…this one is somehow only just now baring its fangs.

I am realizing it was there all along, only dormant.

I try to name what's been sleeping in the shadows:

An aunt who used to lovingly call me ugly. "You're so ugly!" she would say, meaning the exact opposite and poisoning my soul at the same time.

The boy in middle (and high school - the same one) who called me Rex, but never quite committed to calling me an actual dog, or making ugly comments. I suppose that mostly created a really concrete sense of confusion. To this day, I'm not sure I understand why that nickname. Did he think I was ugly? I'll never know but my bones knew it wasn't a compliment.

The boy in my 20's who danced with me at a club, just to ask if I'd introduce him to my cousin.

These experiences planted a quiet question in me:
What if I'm not pretty enough to be loved?
And from there, I went looking for validation.

I put myself in unsafe situations. I looked in boys' eyes, and they looked everywhere else.
I welcomed any attention, even from boys who gave me the creeps.
This wasn't because I was boy-crazy, but because I was desperate for proof that I was desirable.

To me, desirable equaled worthy.

The cosmic joke is that when I got that attention, I didn't even trust it.
I assumed it was a setup. That I was the butt of the joke.

A punchline was coming.

That stuff settles into the body.
It becomes the architecture.

And now visibility feels like danger.

It's wild how old shame still sets the terms of engagement.
How something so seemingly small - an offhand nickname, a teasing phrase, a single moment on a dance floor - can anchor in a whole belief system.
And how long it can take to see it.

The work for me is simultaneously accepting it on the days it feels too hard to change, and changing it on the days I feel it calling the shots.

Sometimes I judge myself for how long it has taken me to see these patterns, or to acknowledge that these things affected me. I truly would never have described myself as someone who fell into the pitfalls of what "true beauty" should look like - meaning, the models we grew up with, and how only thin was in. I've always looked at all humans being beautiful in their own way, and I was never completely preoccupied with my weight.

But as I got older…like much older…the aging process has kicked in and things I never really worried about became front and center. Drier skin, more spots, more weight, coarser hair…it was a lot of things all at once, threatening the very core of fragile confidence I had built up in pieces - and at a time when becoming visible is the thing that really drives connection right now, in my work and personal life.

So what does all of this mean?

I suppose it means different things for different people.

For me right now, it means working through the realization and truth that how I look matters more than I thought, and that it mattered way back a long time ago when I didn't think it did. That I fell a bit victim to the culture of what was considered acceptable and beautiful. That while I didn't judge other people, I definitely judged myself. That I was not as confident and rooted in myself as I thought I was.

And that all of that is okay, and I am strong enough to make any changes that I want to, for myself, and not because other people expect it.

I tell myself that again: because I want to, and not because other people expect it.

Let this be the new current-cy that runs through me, filling me with diamonds from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.

XO - Lauren

Corinne here from Twisted Willow, reporting live from my cabin in the woods. The air's thick with that earthy, piney goodness, and my soul is doing a happy dance. It has rained every day until today! Wahoo! I needed some sun. The 7 Roots of Twisted Willow are woven into every single thread of any day. Some think wellness is all about meditating in the lotus position and sipping green juice—and that's great, applause to those who can do that—but that's not authentic to me. Lauren and I see wellness as real, grounded, flexible, and unapologetically authentic, capable of bending without breaking, and beautifully messy. So I thought a mini tour of my day, pointing out where the roots live in real time, might be fun.

Let's talk about my day. This morning kicked off with the usual parental rodeo – wrangling the kids for the pool. Core Values were called into action so I could focus on what was important rather than what was driving me nuts. My value of connection with my kids means enjoying these summer mornings at the cabin. I'm in there, splashing with them, making up games, even when my inner adult is screaming for quiet. I chose to focus on what those memories we are creating mean to each of us. There are days I cannot be this version of me, where the complaints, sunscreen, wet towels, mosquitoes, and a billion trips to the car because someone forgot something get to me. I consider that balance and that "come as you are" vibe are why Lauren and I created this 7-root system.

Then, the joy of tax season. As a small business owner this is not the joyful part of that title. As I stared at those forms, my Core Beliefs started doing a little jig. Was that old script of "I'm not good enough with numbers" trying to creep in? You bet your ass it was. I never honed in on it as a belief I should "work on" but it came in on ludicrous speed today. Math was always a struggle for me and I hadn't realized that belief was so ingrained and automatic in how I show up with numbers. Decided to do a mini-interference reframe and repeat - "I have always figured out what I needed to with numbers and today will be no different". Hey, the taxes got paid so I will own the win.

Later, I carved out some time for a pedicure – a moment of pure bliss. This is where my Relationship to Self truly shines. It's a micro-act of self-loyalty and love. This was my first pedicure in two years (no judgments, please). I showed up for myself today. I listened to my audiobook while playing a game on my phone and enjoyed every moment. You know the sayings, "you can't pour from an empty cup" and "put the mask on yourself first"—they are true. I don't know about anyone else, but although I know them to be true, I cannot always do it. My son's drum lessons are a higher priority to me than pretty feet, so when I am able to do it, I lean into it and give myself credit for it.

Cooking dinner tonight was a masterclass in Habits. The autopilot of chopping veggies, the familiar rhythm of the kitchen – this is my therapy. My kitchen at the cabin is big enough for one, which serves me well when I am in the zone. I don't have to kick anyone out because they don't fit!

I always feel a hum of Spirituality here at the cabin. Being in nature, truly immersed in it, is my most profound form of worship and connection to something bigger than myself. The way the sun dances through the trees to the forest floor always grabs me. The birds calling back and forth to one another eases me into that sense of wonder. My kids call me "crunchy" but I am known to hug an actual tree when out here.

My Support Systems are a beautifully messy cosmic explosion. There's my wife and our two boys, who operate on a unique frequency of chaos and love, constantly reminding me that life's best moments are often the loudest. Then, just a mile down the road, my sister's cabin serves as an outpost for more family mayhem, complete with nieces and nephews. It's a riot, honestly, and I wouldn't trade this unconventional crew for anything.

Physical Body is so interwoven throughout this day. My body carried all the supplies to the pool. My body holds the brain that did some math. My body navigated the kitchen with ease. My body melted into the pedicure chair, and skipped a few times while taking our dog Neli on her walks. Diaphragmatic breaths when I am able to pause in order to support my nervous system (which has been known to go rogue). Taking a moment to be grateful for all it allows me to do. Teenage me would have criticized and focused on the "package" over the "function" but flipping the script on that has allowed me to find more grace and peace.

So there you have it. A glimpse into one messy, real day, totally threaded with the 7 Roots. They're the gritty, honest tools for living a life that feels authentic to you.

Xoxo Corinne

Especially if you were raised on the gospel of self-sacrifice—where being kind meant being quiet, and being good meant being needed. Eventually, all that "loyalty" starts to look a lot like codependency with a halo.

We confuse saying yes with being loving. We confuse being helpful with being worthy. And somewhere in that mess, "no" starts to feel like a character flaw instead of what it actually is: a vital sign of emotional maturity.

I was raised Catholic Italian, which basically means I came out of the womb feeling guilty. Guilt was the seasoning in every dish. Love? Guilt. Holidays? Guilt with wine. Boundaries? Absolutely not—just guilt in a nicer outfit. Saying no didn't just feel bad, it felt wrong. Like I was betraying the Pope, my grandmother, and a thousand years of marinara-soaked tradition.

And then—just to really round it out—I came out as a lesbian. So now we're working with layers of guilt. Gay guilt. Good girl guilt. Catholic guilt. Cultural guilt. Add some cheese and you've got a full-blown existential lasagna.

So when I started saying no, setting boundaries, and prioritizing my own peace? It didn't feel empowered. It felt like I was defecting. Like I needed to send out a mass apology letter to every ancestor and probably do six Hail Marys just to balance the karmic books.

Your nervous system is not a customer service line

If saying no makes you feel like you're being chased by a bear, you're not broken. You're probably just stuck in a fawn response—a lesser-known trauma reaction where, instead of fighting or fleeing, you appease. You over-give, over-function, and say yes when your whole body is screaming please stop asking me for things.

Fawning keeps the peace. It gets you liked. It feels safe.

But it also disconnects you from yourself. Chronic appeasing doesn't make you loyal. It makes you resentful. And then you start snapping at baristas for putting too much ice in your latte, because you've been swallowing your needs for six straight days and now they're leaking out sideways.

Boundaries: the adult version of knowing your limits

Saying no doesn't make you cold. It makes you real.

You're allowed to say, "That's not mine to carry." You're allowed to say, "I don't have capacity for that right now." You're allowed to say, "Absolutely not," and then go take a nap without spiritually atoning for it.

People who have only known your compliance might not love your boundaries. That doesn't mean your boundaries are wrong—it just means they were benefiting from your burnout.

And for the record? You don't need a whole story to justify a no. "I don't want to" is enough. So is "I can't." So is silence, honestly.

It's not rejection. It's self-respect.

The real work here isn't crafting the perfect boundary script. It's believing you're still worthy of love when you're not bending over backwards.

You don't have to keep proving your goodness with exhaustion. You don't have to earn belonging by being emotionally frictionless. You can be messy, honest, unavailable, inconvenient—and still lovable.

That's not selfish. That's secure attachment.

So go ahead:
Say the no.
Let them be disappointed.
Let yourself be free.

You're not being mean. You're being a person who values their own nervous system.

Not in the sterile therapist voice where someone makes you rank "Integrity" and "Adventure" on a color-coded spreadsheet. I mean actually living your values—in the grocery store, on your lunch break, or when you're squinting at a movie theater seating chart and trying not to lose it in front of your kids.

At Twisted Willow Wellness, we call Core Values the first root of wellness—because without them, everything else gets wobbly. They're how we choose, how we pivot, how we make sure we're living on purpose—not just running on autopilot.

The Stitch Situation: Parenting, Priorities, and Popcorn

Memorial Day weekend. We promised the kids Stitch. It was chaotic in that nostalgic family-movie-night way. But when we got there? No four seats together. Just singles and awkward pairings.

We could've called it, chalked it up to bad timing. But instead, we paid more for the 3D version—because it had seats together.

Sure, it stung a little. But it wasn't a random "screw it" decision. It was rooted in something solid: we value time together more than we value saving twenty bucks.

That tiny moment—cramped seats, overpriced popcorn, foggy 3D glasses—hit like a grounding cord. This wasn't about indulgence. It was about alignment. And that feeling? It sticks with you.

Fast Forward to the Tuesday After Memorial Day

My schedule looked like a dare. Back-to-back sessions, admin catch-up, a to-do list that had clearly mated with another to-do list.

Old me would've powered through. Hustled hard. Bragged about surviving it.

But instead, I closed the laptop for ten damn minutes. I lit a candle, poured the strongest coffee I could find, dropped to the office floor, and did some breathing exercises while Ani DiFranco called me back to myself.

Comfort over achievement. Breath over burnout. That's a value I hold tight—and honoring it gave me just enough space to show up without burning out.

Core Values Aren't Just a Concept—They're a Way Through

They're how you make choices that feel like you.
How you recognize yourself in the middle of the mess.
How you remember: this matters, and this doesn't.

Lately, I've been feeling something new. A kind of alignment I didn't have when I was just "doing the work" without naming what I was working for. Now, it's clearer. More honest. Built from the inside out.

Twisted Willow isn't here to fix you—it's here to root with you.
Come as you are. Stay as long as you need. Let's grow from there.

xo, Corinne
Therapist. Rebel. Slightly feral wellness witch.

"I'm willing to put myself between harm and home.
For people I'll never meet.
For a future I might not be part of."

That kind of yes is humbling. It's haunting.
And it's tucked quietly into every single thing we get to do without thinking twice.

So today—Memorial Day—We want to invite you to notice it.
Really notice it.

Not in a guilt-trip kind of way. In a gratitude-as-a-practice kind of way.
Because gratitude isn't just for Thanksgiving or vision boards or Instagram captions.
It's a muscle. A habit. A mindset that makes your life deeper, more grounded, and more honest.

Let's take something small, like… say… ordering a bacon, egg & cheese.

A proper one. A New Jersey one. From a deli with a counter and a guy named Sal who knows how to wrap it tight so the roll stays warm.

You walk in, no fear, no second-guessing. You say:

"Bacon, egg, and cheese, SPK. On a roll. Toasted."

That order might feel like nothing. But baked into that sandwich are a hundred tiny freedoms:

You got to wake up late.
You picked your deli. You picked your sandwich. You picked your ketchup-to-egg ratio.

You moved through your day with choice, with safety, with your head up and your headphones in.

That's the gift. That's what someone else's yes made possible.

So while you're sipping your iced coffee or standing barefoot in the grass or letting your burger get cold because you're deep in conversation—take a second to say:

Thank you. I see what this moment costs. I'll make it count.

Gratitude doesn't mean you pretend life is perfect.
It means you remember that, even on hard days, you're still living inside of a gift someone else paid forward.

Let that shape the way you show up.
Not just today, but tomorrow. And the day after. And yes—even when your sandwich order gets messed up and you're already running late.

Let your life be a quiet, steady thank-you.

And if you've served, are serving, or have lost someone who did—

From the deepest part of my heart: thank you.
I won't waste what you've made possible.

With gratitude (and ketchup on my shirt),
Corinne & Lauren

Welcome to Root 2: Core Beliefs.

If Core Values are your compass, Core Beliefs are the lens you're seeing the damn map through. Distorted beliefs? Distorted decisions. It's that simple. You can meditate until your chakras sound like wind chimes, but if your beliefs are trash, the results will be, too.

Here's the thing: most of us are walking around with a subconscious script full of DOPs—beliefs we didn't choose, but internalized from childhood, culture, trauma, religion, social media, capitalism… pick your poison. These beliefs aren't facts. They're just sticky little stories that have been running your life from the shadows.

Stuff like:

• "I have to be productive to be worthy."

• "If I express my needs, I'll be rejected."

• "Rest is laziness."

• "People leave when you're vulnerable."

• "Love has to be earned."

Sound familiar? That's a DOP talking. And those beliefs? They're not just annoying. They're destructive. They drive anxiety, fuel burnout, destroy relationships, and keep you hustling for a version of yourself you secretly hate.

Enter the EOPs: Enhancers of Peace.

EOPs are Core Beliefs that actually serve you. The ones that keep your nervous system steady, your choices aligned, and your joy within reach. Things like:

• "My worth isn't tied to what I produce."

• "I'm allowed to take up space."

• "It's safe to rest."

• "I can belong without performing."

• "I'm enough—even when I'm messy."

These aren't affirmations you slap on a Post-It and forget. These are earned truths—beliefs you plant, water, and live into. One messy moment at a time.

And here's how we help that process actually stick:

We use something at Twisted Willow called Hypno-tation—our signature blend of hypnosis and meditation. It's not woo for woo's sake. It's science-meets-soul, designed to hit those deep subconscious layers where your core beliefs actually live.

Because here's the truth: you can't logic your way out of a belief your nervous system thinks is survival. You need tools that speak the language of your subconscious. Hypno-tation does just that. It bypasses the mental noise, anchors new truths, and creates real, lasting change from the inside out. You're not just thinking differently—you're feeling different. Acting different. Choosing different.

Let's talk about "Jeremy".

Smart as hell. Trauma-informed. Knew all the tools. But anytime something good came his way, he'd spiral—self-sabotage, disconnect, freeze. Not because he didn't want the good stuff—but because some deep, buried part of him didn't believe he deserved it.

At the root of it all? A nasty little DOP whispering, "I'm not enough."

Not smart enough. Not strong enough. Not worthy enough. Just… not enough.

We called it out. Rewrote the belief.

We planted a new EOP:
"I am already enough. Nothing to prove, nothing to earn."

It didn't click overnight. But over time? It shifted everything. When your nervous system starts to believe you're enough as you are, your entire life starts to align with that truth.

The Science of Belief (a.k.a., we didn't just make this up)

Cognitive behavioral research has shown for decades that core beliefs are the root system of mental health. They shape your self-talk, emotional patterns, and behaviors. According to Beck's Cognitive Theory, negative core beliefs create cognitive distortions—aka, thinking traps that make life harder than it needs to be.

And neuroscience backs the use of tools like guided hypnosis and meditation to shift deep-seated beliefs. Your brain is literally plastic—it can rewire, reframe, and rebuild when given the right inputs. That's what we're doing with Hypno-tation: rewiring the inner script.

You don't need to be "fixed."

You need to unlearn the bullshit and reclaim the truth.

So here's your homework (you knew it was coming):

• Name 1 DOP you've been living under. Be brutally honest.

• Write the opposite as an EOP. Something that feels radical but true.

• Say it out loud. Every day. Sing it to the tune of a song. Make it a rhyme. Write it where you can see it. Repeat and when you're annoying yourself repeat again.

This work isn't easy. But it's the doorway to actual peace—not performative peace, not Instagram peace, but peace in your bones. You deserve that.

Root 3 is coming next: Relationship to Self. Spoiler: you can't build one if it's based on a DOP.

Until then, keep poking the bear.

xoxo,
Lauren & Corinne
Twisted Willow Wellness

Core Values aren't just a cute Pinterest board exercise. They're the foundation. The bedrock. The North Star that keeps all the other roots of wellness from getting lost in the chaos of life. Without them, you can work on habits, self-talk, and relationship to self till the cows come home—and those things are powerful, don't get me wrong. But without Core Values to anchor them, it's like building a house on quicksand. You're just spinning your wheels without traction.

Science backs this up, too. Research shows that fulfilling core values like self-direction can significantly impact well-being. According to the Journal of Positive Psychology, people who live in alignment with their values report higher life satisfaction, less stress, and a stronger sense of purpose. And it doesn't stop there—self-affirmation practices that focus on core values have been proven to boost happiness, optimism, and overall psychological well-being. Why? Because when your actions and values are in sync, you're not wasting energy second-guessing every move. You know what's right for you.

Think about it: How many times have you set a goal because you thought you should—lose weight, get a promotion, 'be more productive'—only to feel like crap once you get it? That's the feeling of being out of alignment. When your goals don't sync with your values, you're just collecting 'achievements' that don't mean squat.

And here's the kicker—most people have no idea what their core values actually are. They're chasing goals that look good on paper but feel empty as hell. Studies even show that people who pursue goals that align with their true values, known as autonomous goals, are more likely to hit those targets and feel fulfilled when they do. Meanwhile, those chasing surface-level achievements are more likely to feel burned out, anxious, and totally unfulfilled. They think they do. They rattle off words like 'family' or 'success,' but when we start digging, they realize they're living someone else's script. That's why at Twisted Willow, we strip it all down. We ask the messy questions. We poke the bear. We get you to look at what really lights you up and what you've been pretending to care about.

Take Elaine, for example. She came to us feeling like a fraud despite having all the external signs of success—a high-paying job, a big house, the 'perfect' life. But she couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. After working through her core values, she realized she was living according to what her family and her industry expected, not what she actually wanted. Once she realigned with her true values—authenticity, creativity, and connection—she finally felt at home in her own life (with some tweaks). That's the power of knowing your core values—it's like putting on glasses after stumbling around in the dark. Everything clicks.

So before you dive into building habits or working on your self-talk (we hit those later), get to the root. Schwartz's Value Theory makes it crystal clear—values that emphasize personal growth and self-fulfillment are directly linked to greater life satisfaction, while values focused on external validation and self-protection actually correlate with more stress and dissatisfaction. Translation? If you're grinding toward goals that don't align with your values, you're signing up for frustration on a silver platter. Core values aren't just another to-do list item. They're the compass. The filter. The whole damn map. And when you know them, every other decision gets easier. You stop chasing shiny objects and start building a life that's yours, not someone else's.

Until next time, take a hot second to jot down three things you stand for, no matter what. And if you're unsure? That's your first clue that it's time to dig deeper.

You in?

xoxo

Lauren & Corinne

Let's be real: if moms were Greek gods, we'd be a cocktail of Athena, Hermes, and a dash of Dionysus by 8:30 p.m.—wise, fast, and on the edge of a wine-fueled dance break.

In our house, we honor the divinity of motherhood in stereo. Two moms, one home, and a deep respect for equal opportunity pampering. My wife gets celebrated on Mother's Day, as is tradition—and the very next month, I get my moment in the sun on the Saturday before Father's Day. We call it Otha Motha Day. Why? Because both moms deserve a throne, a mimosa, and a day where no one says, "What's for dinner?" at 9 a.m.

Tomorrow, we'll be honoring my wife—psychologist, carpenter, philosopher, problem-solver, and my best friend. She is both the wise sage and the one who finds the missing LEGO head at 11:00pm. She holds space for other people's healing all day, then comes home and somehow holds up the entire emotional architecture of our family. With one hand. While fixing a wobbly bookshelf. She is divine. She is my everything.

Cheers to her. Cheers to all moms. And cheers to the invisible hats we never knew we'd wear until motherhood handed them to us without warning or instruction.

Mine? Bad Mood Mute Interpreter.

Yes, I am fluent in sighs, eye rolls, and emotionally ambiguous silences. I can decode a teenager's mood based on the volume of their footsteps or the way they drop their backpack. It's part intuition, part emotional spelunking. I didn't apply for this job, but I now have tenure. My training as a therapist has been invaluable.

Motherhood is like improv theater with zero rehearsals and very high emotional stakes. You become a life coach, therapist, snack curator, motivational speaker, disaster response team, and, if you're lucky, the person your kids trust with their weirdest questions. It's relentless work—and no two moms or parents do it the same.

So whether you're celebrated in May, June, or spontaneously on a Wednesday because someone finally noticed, know this: you are amazing. You are vital. And you are doing sacred work, even if your altar is a kitchen counter covered in half-finished school projects and mystery crumbs.

To my wife: thank you for being a model of wisdom, strength, humor, and love. To all the moms out there: your crown may be invisible, but it's real. And it's heavy. Rest when you can. Dance when you feel like it. And never underestimate the power of a well-timed "Otha Motha Day" (you have to try and say it with my Jersey accent).

Xoxo 🩷 Corinne

Nothing huge.
Just off.

You wake up tired.
The weather's moody.
Your thoughts won't settle and everything feels vaguely… sticky.

You're not falling apart.
But you're definitely not thriving either.

Here's the truth, after 20 years of watching humans try their best:

Most days aren't breakthroughs.
They're maintenance.

And the good news is—your nervous system loves maintenance.

The Brain Bit

Your brain is designed to keep you alive, not necessarily happy.

Which means it loves the familiar. Patterns. Predictability. That's why it clings to old habits, even when they make you feel like trash.

Big change? That sends up alarms.
Too much too fast = stress response.

But small, low-threat shifts?

Those slip past the alarms. They help regulate your nervous system and build something called neuroplasticity—your brain's ability to rewire based on repeated experience.

When you do one manageable thing that brings relief, your brain notices.

It tags that experience as "safe," "doable," "worth repeating."

You don't have to overhaul your life. You just have to nudge it.

Let's talk about a few of those nudges—and what they're actually doing behind the scenes.

Slightly Better, Explained

1. Soft clothes that don't scream "I've given up."
Neuro tip: Interoception is your brain's ability to read your internal state. When your clothes are too tight or scratchy, it creates low-level stress signals your brain has to manage. Soothing textures free up space for your brain to focus on actual emotions—not your waistband.

2. Warm things.
Tea, a bath, even holding a heating pad.
Neuro tip: Warmth increases parasympathetic activation—aka the rest-and-digest part of your nervous system. It tells your body, "you're safe now," which makes everything feel 10% more manageable.

3. Music that meets you where you are.
Neuro tip: Your auditory system is tied to your vagus nerve (your body's main regulation highway). When you hear familiar, emotionally attuned music, it helps modulate mood and can even lower heart rate variability (a marker of stress). Bonus points if you sing—it lengthens your exhale and tells your nervous system to chill.

4. One thing, finished.
Neuro tip: Your brain gets a dopamine hit when you complete a task. Doesn't matter if it's folding a sock or paying a bill. Completion = reward = momentum. And momentum is magic when everything feels sluggish.

5. Ten slow breaths.
Neuro tip: Slowing your exhale (especially to twice the length of your inhale) activates your vagus nerve and shifts your brain from survival mode into regulation. It's free. It's available. And your body knows exactly what to do.

6. Touch something alive.
A plant. A pet. Your own hand.
Neuro tip: Tactile input—especially with living or textured surfaces—brings you back into the present. It pulls your focus out of looping thoughts and helps ground your sensory system.

None of this is revolutionary.

But that's the point.

These aren't hacks or healing shortcuts. They're small acts of care that tell your brain and body:
We're not spiraling. We're just having a day. And we know how to show up for it.

So no pressure to journal about your childhood or realign your chakras.
Just find a little warmth. Touch something soft. Breathe like you mean it.

And know that's enough.

xoxo Corinne

I came out to the woods because I hadn't been alone in a long time. Not "alone" like hiding in the bathroom while your kids slide notes under the door—but actual, no-one-talking-to-me, nothing-to-do kind of alone. No crisis. No meltdown. Just the quiet need to exist without being responsible for anyone else's snack, schedule, or emotional well-being.

Neli, the world's most intuitive dog, has been my ride-or-die these few days. We took long walks, ate good food, painted just for the hell of it. I stared at trees. No major revelations, just some small ones. I noticed things I usually miss because I'm too busy being "productive."

A couple friends came for the last night. We burned intentions, watched dumb comedy, and laughed until we forgot what was funny. It was the exact right kind of company—low effort, high meaning.

And now… the rain. Like nature's closing credits. I'm lying here in that weird limbo where you're not quite ready to get up, but you know you have to.

I miss my wife and the kids, of course. Miss the mess, the noise, the way they make life feel full and feral. But I also don't want to lose this. This stillness and peace.

So I'm writing this now, in the rain, to remind myself: when I'm back in the chaos, I can still reach for this feeling. Step outside. Close my eyes. Let the wind slap me in the face in a loving, grounding way. It's not the woods—but it's something.

XO - Corinne

Let's talk about something that doesn't get nearly enough airtime in the wellness world: resigned resistance.
It's not loud. It's not dramatic. It doesn't throw tantrums or set your life on fire.

Nope—this one's patient.
It waits.
And waits.
And waits.

It lives in the shadowy basement of your subconscious, pulling just enough strings to keep you stuck without making a scene. And it especially loves showing up when you're working toward a long-term goal—something big, meaningful, slow-burning. That's when it really gets comfy.

What Is Resigned Resistance?

Resigned resistance sounds like:

• "This probably won't work for me."
• "I'll do it, but I doubt it'll change anything."
• "Maybe I'm just not wired for this kind of progress."
• "It's fine. I'm fine. It's always been like this."

It's not active rebellion. It's resignation.
It's the subtle disruption of someone who keeps showing up but no longer believes the effort matters.

How to Spot It

This kind of resistance is tricky because it hides behind perfectly reasonable behavior. You're technically doing the work—reading the books, journaling, going to the retreats, even finishing the damn meditations. But the belief underneath is quietly muttering, "This won't actually change me."

Clues it's lurking in the background:

• Your actions don't feel connected to hope or excitement anymore—they feel mechanical.
• You're checking the boxes but not feeling any momentum.
• You fantasize about quitting, disappearing, or "taking a break" (forever).
• Everything feels harder than it used to. (Spoiler: That's not because you're lazy.)

The Cost of Letting It Linger

When resigned resistance goes unchecked, it leads straight to burnout and emotional fatigue.
Because doing the work while secretly believing it's useless? That's the ultimate energy drain.
You're showing up without fueling up. And over time, that gets heavy.

This is when clients tell me, "I've done all the right things and I'm still exhausted."
Well, yes. Because the belief under the behavior is doing all the wrong things.

The Twisted Willow Way: Healing Through the Roots

At Twisted Willow Wellness, we don't just slap affirmations on your self-doubt or tell you to think positive. We work with the 7 Roots of Wellness to get under the surface and rewrite the story where it actually lives: your subconscious.

Resigned resistance usually lives in two of those roots:

• Core Beliefs: the buried ideas about who you are and what you're capable of
• Relationship to Self: how you treat yourself when no one's watching

Once we expose the root, we begin healing with a combo of:

• Hypno-tation (our signature blend of guided meditation and subconscious reprogramming)
• Micro-shifts woven into your daily life (because transformation shouldn't feel like a second full-time job)
• Integration exercises that build new belief patterns in real time, as you live your life—not just when you're sitting cross-legged in stillness

This method isn't about bulldozing through resistance.
It's about softening it. Working with it. Helping it feel safe enough to step aside.

Awareness Isn't a Cure. It's a Guide.

Here's the real talk: just becoming aware of your resigned resistance won't magically fix it.
You won't journal it out in one night. You won't meditate it away by next Tuesday.

But awareness does carve a path. A clearer, kinder, and more effective one.
Once you see the belief for what it is, it loses power. And then you get to choose—with tools that work, and support that gets it.

Resigned resistance is like emotional sandbags tied to your ankles. Subtle, heavy, and designed to slow your roll.
Spot it. Expose it. Root it out with real tools.
And if you're ready to rewrite the belief that says "this won't work," come sit with us under the Twisted Willow. We've got you.

A man is deep in the woods, struggling to cut down a tree. He's been at it for hours, sweating, straining, frustrated that the tree isn't falling. His saw is dull, barely cutting. Another man passes by and watches for a moment.

"Why don't you stop and sharpen your saw?" he asks.

The man snaps, "I don't have time to sharpen the saw. I'm too busy cutting the tree."

Of course, the irony is the whole point. If he had just stopped for a few minutes to sharpen the tool he was relying on, he would've saved himself time, energy, and frustration. But in his urgency, in his drive to keep going, he couldn't see that pausing would have actually helped him move forward faster and better.

It's a familiar story. One I think about a lot. Because, truthfully, I'm that man in the woods (woman in this case).

I'm a mom, a therapist, a daughter, a friend — the kind of person who naturally wants to help, support, hold it all together. I care deeply. I stay up late finishing things that could probably wait. I say "yes" when I'm tired. I tell myself I'll rest after the next thing. Or the next.

And yet — when I'm exhausted, distracted, and stretched thin — I'm not showing up as my best self. Not for my kids, not for my clients, not for the people I love. And definitely not for me.

We live in a culture that rewards doing. We admire people who push through, keep going, never stop. We treat rest like a luxury instead of a necessity. But here's what I've come to understand: pausing isn't weakness. It's wisdom.

Taking time to check in with yourself — to rest, to breathe, to sharpen your saw — doesn't set you back. In fact, it's the only way to move forward with any clarity or purpose. It's how we protect our energy, our creativity, and our ability to be present in our lives.

And presence, real presence, is what so many of us are starving for.

When I slow down — not with guilt or judgment, but with intention — I notice more. I feel more connected. I appreciate the small things: the way my child laughs at something ridiculous, the warmth of my coffee, the quiet moments that would've rushed past me if I hadn't stopped to look.

I still get where I'm going. Sometimes faster. Sometimes better. But I also experience the journey in a fuller, more meaningful way.

So if you're feeling dull, burnt out, spread too thin — maybe it's not because you're failing.

Maybe it's because your saw needs sharpening.

And that's not laziness. That's smart.

That's sustainable.

That's human.

(Now if anyone has any suggestions on how I remember this I am open - )

xoxo - Corinne

There could be ten different reasons for this: having mom brain in full-effect and just worrying about my kids in general, not having slept well, my job is changing in June and with it the stability I had is also changing, I got in a stupid fight with my husband yesterday, there's a new bill added to my pile because I broke a freaking tooth last month, and as a friend of mine commented earlier today - it's the mondiest Monday ever. And with all of those things comes the overanalyzation of what I could be doing to just change everything in one fell swoop. Pack it up, pack it in, move to Bali and run away from it all - chasing greener grass that most surely grows…somewhere else.

I find myself judging my circumstances harshly, feeling a deep ache that there probably are some things that need to change, but knowing I'm probably not going to change them. I'm losing the "keep growing and evolving" rat race and am surely going to wind up ultimately unfulfilled and not having found true and complete joy.

Today I've had enough of the garden-variety gurus pushing me to excel and burn everything down so I can rise like the phoenix I'm meant to be. Today, I'm asking myself if what I already have is really enough.

Everywhere we turn, someone's telling us to chase joy. Find your purpose. Reinvent your life. Be fulfilled.

And if you're not doing that? If you're not completely lit up and radically aligned and vibrating at a higher frequency or whatever the hell the internet is saying today?

You must be doing it wrong. You're not really living. You're avoiding the life you're truly meant to have!

What if that's all bullshit?

There's always been societal pressure, but I feel like it went from "be successful by having a good job even if you are miserable" to "make sure you are doing absolutely everything to always feel fulfilled".

The pressure to feel constant fulfillment has become exhausting. The personal development world often pathologizes contentment and romanticizes chaos. When I left my previous job on principal and jumped into an unknown and unstable future, people applauded my courage - but how many of them were standing there willing to pick me up off the floor when things got dark and I had no idea what my next move was?

I'm not saying we should forever play it safe and settle into a life of…well settling. Ultimately I think that would be no fun. But what I am asking is if there are things in our lives that we look at as needing change but maybe don't?

xo Lauren

Hi. Welcome to Sunday.

Sundays are weird. They're supposed to be rest days, but somehow they became this manic to-do list sandwich filled with spiritual guilt and emotional bloat. You think you're resetting your life, but you're actually just rage-cleaning your baseboards and doom-scrolling TikTok wellness girlies who apparently live on matcha and manifestation.

You already know the drill. One of us is a therapist, the other's a coach, and between us we've seen just about every flavor of burnout, overthinking, and Sunday spiraling there is. We've sat with the women who are holding it all together with dry shampoo and sarcasm. We've lived it, too. So when we say you can't out-organize your way out of nervous system collapse, we're not guessing. We're speaking from our realities—hair in a messy bun, coffee in hand, fully aware that trying harder is not the answer.

Here's the truth: your nervous system doesn't need optimization. It needs permission to opt out.

A Sunday reset isn't a Pinterest board or a productivity contest. It's not about forcing yourself into a chore loop to earn rest. A real reset is more of a vibe. A mindset. A quiet, gentle "no thanks" to the chaos. It's telling your brain: you're not broken for needing rest. You don't have to accomplish something to deserve softness. You're allowed to be a little feral and still worthy of calm.

And no, you don't need to make sourdough or oil your scalp to qualify.

Your system is likely fried. You've got emotional tabs open from three + years ago. And your Sunday spirals aren't because you suck at life—they're because you've been overfunctioning for too long. Resting on Sunday is choosing not to carry all of that into another week. It's a quiet rebellion against the idea that you have to earn your peace.

A real Sunday reset might look like a stupidly long shower where you exfoliate your soul. Or wearing soft pants and absolutely refusing to apologize for them. Or turning your phone off for two hours, or better yet, throwing it in the freezer just for the thrill. You might reheat leftovers and congratulate your past self for cooking. You can stare out the window dramatically for no reason other than it feels oddly therapeutic. You might lay out clothes for tomorrow or hide a piece of chocolate in your coat pocket just to surprise Future You with something nice.

That's the magic. Nothing extreme. No full reinvention required. Just a soft, slow reset. A nudge toward calm. A whisper to your nervous system that says, "You're safe now. We're not sprinting today."

You don't have to become a new person by Monday. You just need a minute. Maybe an hour. Maybe a nap in a weird position that makes your dog head tilt. That counts. That heals.

Sundays aren't about transformation. They're about remembering who you are under all the noise. They're for doing less. Feeling more. Laughing at the absurdity of it all. They're for saying, "Okay. I'm gonna make this week suck slightly less," and meaning it.

So if you need someone to tell you it's okay to lie down, unplug, and rest without earning it first—hi. It's us. And if anyone tries to tell you that's lazy, please send them our way. We'd be more than happy to therapeutically destroy them.

xoxo

Lauren and Corinne

No breakdowns. No dramatic quitting of jobs via interpretive dance.

Just… quiet burnout.

You're still showing up.

You're still doing the thing.

But inside, you feel like a half-deflated balloon someone drew a smiley face on and left in the corner of a party three months ago.

Sound familiar?

Welcome to the club, friend. We don't have matching jackets because that sounds like a lot (although we have ideas), but we do have shared understanding and a mutual agreement that brushing your teeth absolutely counts as self-care.

What is Quiet Burnout?

It's the slow fade. The kind of burnout that flies under the radar because, technically, you're "fine." You're checking the boxes, meeting the deadlines, even laughing at your coworker's fourth Zoom pun of the day (kind of). But inside? You're hollow. Numb. Depleted.

It's not loud. It doesn't come with flashing signs. It's just… always there. A slow leak in your soul tire.

Still Showing Up (Even When You're on Empty)

You go to work.

You answer texts (eventually).

You feed the people and maybe even yourself.

From the outside, you're functioning. High-functioning, even. People might even tell you they admire how "on top of it" you are.

But you know better. You know it's costing you something. That you're writing checks from an emotional bank account that's been over drafted since 2021.

High-Functioning Fixes (That Don't Require Moving to the Woods Yet)

Let's talk about some real-world, low-lift strategies to start patching the soul tire. Because not all of us can "just take a sabbatical" or "go on a juice cleanse in Bali." Some of us have meetings. And kids. And weirdly codependent pets and houseplants.

1. Micro-Restoratives

Not self-care, but self-resuscitation.

Instead of aiming for a whole spa day, give yourself 3 minutes of silence.

A weird dance to a favorite song. (I pick They Might Be Giants —Corinne)

A hot drink you don't microwave three times.

Tiny moments of "you" time that help trick your nervous system into believing you're safe and cared for.

2. Lower the Bar, Lovingly

You don't have to kill it. You just have to show up-ish.

Can't write the perfect email? Send the mediocre one.

Can't cook dinner? Cereal counts.

Perfectionism fuels burnout. Permission dismantles it.

3. Choose One Thing That's Just for You

A book. A walk. A weird podcast about the art of the potato.

Claim one pocket of your day where no one gets to need anything from you. Not even Future You.

4. Start Saying No with Gusto

Or with a whisper. Whatever works.

But begin.

Because every "yes" you don't mean is a withdrawal from a very tired, very overextended version of you.

You're Not Lazy. You're Tired.

There's nothing wrong with you for feeling this way. Burnout isn't a personal failure—it's a systems issue. And quiet burnout? It's just the sneakiest version. The one that takes your light while applauding your productivity.

So here's your reminder:

• You are allowed to rest before you break.
• You are allowed to ask for help.
• You are allowed to not be impressive right now.

We're not meant to be machines. We're meant to be human. Messy, magnificent, inconsistent, tired humans—doing the best we can with what we have.

So if you're showing up while quietly falling apart?

We see you.

And I'm rooting for you to put the pieces down for a minute.

If this post resonates with you, consider subscribing or sharing it with someone who's running on fumes. Quiet burnout might be silent, but we don't have to go through it alone.

Xoxo

Lauren and Corinne

First of all, hey there fellow travelers on the road of this thing called Life! (Cue the Prince music - and yes, I just dated myself. Pretty sure that won't be the last time.)

If you haven't yet crossed the "About" section of who we are, there are two of us here. We are Corinne (the Therapist) and Lauren (the Life Coach) and this is the obligatory "Get to Know Us" post. We've been in each other's lives for about ten years and have worked with one another in different capacities. Our shared love of a good deep dive into the Human condition and the Spirit underneath finally compelled us to combine our work, lives and passions to create something a bit different…a bit twisted, but in a good way.

So let us introduce ourselves:

Corinne here, and let me tell you, the journey of Twisted Willow has been anything but a straight line. It's been more like a… well, a twisted one.

Ten years deep in private practice, and things were, dare I say, fine. Good living, happy clients, the whole nine yards. But between you and me? The paperwork was slowly turning me into a paperclip, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. I craved the connection, the real, raw, "let's tackle this together" energy I felt working with diverse communities in my social work days. I missed working with people on their terms.

Then, Atlantic City happened. What doesn't happen in AC, right? I was at the annual NASW conference and I stumbled upon a life coaching course that basically gave me permission to ditch the "shoulds" and embrace the "wants." Imagine: helping people on their budget, in their time, focusing on their goals. It was like discovering a secret level in a video game.

But how do you make that leap?

Back in my office the following week and I get a call from a woman looking for support. Her insurance didn't cover traditional therapy rates, and she didn't have wads of cash laying around to pay much out of pocket - so I made an on the spot decision to take her as a coaching client on a sliding scale.

In case you haven't guessed, that woman was Lauren. Working with her was refreshing. Her knowledge, her awareness, the questions she would ask…well, it just brought me into a whole different perspective of how I saw the work I was doing.

I'll let her tell you…

I'd love to say "There's something about Lauren" (that's me!) but the truth is I'm uncomfortable with any kind of praise. Just kidding, but not really - and all the more reason I think I connect with real people.

I suppose I've never been one for coloring completely inside the lines. I might stay in the lines for a while, but ultimately, I'll question it. Corporate America was paying the bills but not feeding my soul. I was thriving professionally, and yet had to face the super inconvenient truth that something was missing and my life was meant for something "more"…not that I knew what more was. And yes, this is cliche as fuck.

I've always been a student of human behavior and intrigued with how people think and act. I'm a fan of that messy, beautiful, sometimes chaotic journey we all take. Then one day, mid vent-session on Corinne's couch, she straight up asked me why I wasn't a therapist. Fun fact: I was going to major in psychology in college, but got pregnant and had my daughter instead. Anyway, I told Corinne that I wasn't going back to school because that sounded…awful. And then she mentioned Life Coaching. At first I literally laughed and asked if that was even a real thing. She looked surprised. I admit, I can be aloof sometimes. I'd just always thought of Corinne as a therapist, so it never occurred to me that she was using a whole different set of skills in our work together. She told me to go home and research, and I did. Remember when I said I didn't want to go back to school? Well, so much for that. I found an amazing, accredited, rigorous and legit certification program (iPEC for those interested) and was enrolled a month later. This was 5-1/2 years ago.

So why this, and why now?

While this plan of ours has been simmering for a long time, sometimes the Universe gets clever and drops things in your way to get you to bob and weave right into the place you're meant to be - and for us, that place is here, right now.

We have knowledge to share and support to give.

We have tools we've used and tools we've created.

We have empathy and understanding that runs deep.

And we have a healthy dose of foul language and dark humor.

We are obsessively, imperfectly human, but with some skill. And we have helped a lot of people over the years. Our hope now is that you'll find some of what we have to share helpful for your own journey, and that you'll appreciate our take on mental-wellness - with a twist.

Most importantly, our purpose is to empower you, provide a community where you feel seen and connected, and maybe cause a laugh along the way.

We hope you'll join us.

XO

Lauren and Corinne

PS - If you stick around, you'll hear us talking about the 7 Roots (hence Root Awakening). This is our framework for the aspects of life that need attention in order to have true fulfillment: Core Values, Core Beliefs, Relationship to Self, Support Systems, Physical Body, Habits and Spirituality. We'll be diving in, jumping around and weaving things together in what we hope will turn out to be a beautiful buffet of personal growth.