If you have ever been told you shut down, pull away, or keep people at arm's length, you might recognize avoidant patterns in yourself. But from the inside, it rarely feels like avoidance. It feels like survival. This post is for the person who experiences those patterns and wants to understand them, and for the partner who loves them and is trying to figure out what is actually going on.

When is the right time to start couples therapy? Most people would say when things get bad enough. That answer makes sense. It is also, in my experience, about two or three years too late. The patterns that bring couples into therapy have almost always been running quietly in the background long before anyone made the appointment. This post is about what changes when you don't wait.

Summer has a way of making body image issues louder. Swimsuits, beach photos, a social media feed full of highlight reels, and suddenly there is less to hide behind. If you have spent any part of this summer with a low hum of shame about how you look, you are not alone. And it is almost never actually about your body. This post is about what it is really about, and a different way of relating to yourself that does not ask you to love your body. Just to stop the war with it.

July is a strange month for self-reflection. The pace slows, the calendar breathes a little, and somewhere in the back of your mind you are aware that the year is half over. This is not a post about getting back on track or a pep talk about the six months you still have left. It is an honest invitation to pause and ask yourself a question that is simple on the surface and often surprisingly hard to answer: how are you actually doing?

From the outside, a major life pivot can look like growth, like courage, like someone finally coming into themselves. From the inside it mostly feels like you're doing everything wrong. Therapist Amanda Jablon goes deeper into what pivot season actually feels like, and why the pain doesn't mean you made a mistake.

You did everything right. You worked hard, built a life that looked exactly like what you were aiming for. And then something shifted. Therapist Amanda Jablon writes about pivot season, and the particular disorientation of arriving at a destination that no longer fits.

When religion has been used against you, walking away makes complete sense. A lot of queer and gender diverse people leave religion and let go of spirituality along with it, not as a conscious choice, but because the two got so tangled together it felt impossible to separate them. This post is about that separation. About what was always yours, what nobody could actually take, and what it looks like to build a life of meaning entirely on your own terms.

There is a lot of conversation right now about transgender and non-binary identity. Almost none of it touches what it actually feels like to navigate dating when your gender is something the world is still learning to understand. When every new relationship brings a fresh set of decisions about how much to share and how soon. This post tries to say some things that don't get said enough.

If you are in a relationship with another woman, you may have noticed that things feel unlike anything you have experienced before. The connection goes deep quickly. The emotional attunement between you can be remarkable. And sometimes, in the same relationship, things can get really hard in ways that also feel unlike anything before. The intensity is not a problem. But understanding it changes everything.