Hello Reader, Last weekend my partner and I drove out to the Oregon coast for a couple's weekend we'd been wanting for months. We'd talked ahead of time about wanting some physical intimacy, the kind you have to plan for when your life is full. Watching the sunset, held in Ari's arms, I mentioned that I no longer enjoyed the sensation of psychedelics in my body anymore, that it felt like too much. Then I said the sentence that almost changed the whole evening: "It's the same reason I don't...

Hello Reader, Okay, last time I wrote about thought stopping as a simple practice to increase self-esteem. You stop being so mean to yourself, and voila! Your self-esteem gets a lot better. If you missed it, you can read it here. Now I want to write about three reasons positive self-esteem matters for a happy relationship. Let me tell you a story. It's a personal one this time, no longer tender, but still hard to write about. Back in the day, my self-esteem was pretty shit. In my first...

Hi Reader, Tal and Eliza are dear clients (names are changed.) When we worked together initially several years ago, we completed a focused six-month container that ended in triumph: one of them got sober, and they decided to have a baby! I'd kept up with them over the years through monthly maintenance sessions, and the work had stuck. However, I'd begun to notice a lackluster heaviness creeping back in when we spoke. Under-resourced, exhausted, the grind of early parenting had erased their...