Rivers don't fight their banks. They don't try to make the water stop flowing. They work with the landscape, carving new paths when needed, but always, always moving.

The river is powerful not because it's still, but because it's alive

Here's something that will make you uncomfortable: Your stability might be the very thing destroying your relationships.

This insight cuts to the heart of why so many relationships spiral into patterns of resentment and disconnection.

When you are stable, you enable.

Exposure to someone else’s trauma can be traumatizing in itself.

The weight of other people's worst moments can crush the helper just as surely as it crushed the person who lived through it.

But we also get to see people at their grittiest, resilient best.

There is a power dynamic that shows up uninvited to every dinner conversation, every decision about money, every moment when someone needs to be right and someone else needs to keep the peace.

Therapists have a name for what most of us are doing without realizing it:

One up and one down.

Here's what's interesting: we think this is natural. We think it's just how things work.

It's not.

Most people don't want a yard sale.

They don't want to confront the unused exercise equipment, the ill-fitting clothes, the forgotten hobbies, or the gifts they never truly wanted. They don't want to answer the unspoken question: "Why did you keep all this for so long?"

But yard sales happen for a reason. They create space. They generate possibility. They force us to confront what we've been carrying and decide what's worth keeping.

Some days, you just need to know what time it is.

Other days, you wonder how the gears inside the watch actually work.

This is the perpetual tension that therapists face: addressing the immediate vs. understanding the fundamental.

Most people walk into their first therapy session with the wrong mental model.

They arrive thinking they're meeting with a doctor who will diagnose their condition and prescribe the cure. Then they leave disappointed when transformation doesn't happen in fifty minutes.

They've made a category error.

People lie to themselves all the time.

This isn't news. It's just that when you sit across from someone who's actively deceiving themselves—when you witness the intricate dance between what they say they want and what their actions reveal—you realize that self-deception isn't just common. It's fundamental to how we function.

There's a moment that arrives in every therapeutic relationship. The client who once needed you desperately has found their footing. Their voice is stronger. Their eyes hold yours with newfound clarity.

And yet, the appointment book still shows their name, week after week.

We spend our lives performing.

On the playground, in boardrooms, on Instagram stories. Waiting for applause, hearts, promotions, and nods of approval.

This week, I made a discovery that shouldn't have surprised me but did:

Most self-esteem isn't authentic at all. It's performative.

Most therapy sessions revolve around problems. That's the contract, after all. Client arrives with a problem, therapist helps solve it. The dance is familiar—each week peeling back layers of anxiety, trauma, and neuroses in search of understanding and healing.

But what if, for just one session, we stopped?

When a therapist asks, "How are you arriving today?" or "What's happened since our last session?" they're not making small talk. They're extending an invitation to enter different territory—the landscape beyond pleasant fictions.

Here's something we don't talk about nearly enough in mental health:

Traditional talk therapy may be unintentionally failing half the population.

Labels don't just describe us. They begin to define us. They become the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

And the earlier we hear these stories, especially from people we trust and love (sorry, Mom and Dad), the more deeply they become woven into our sense of self.

Here's a truth that few people talk about:

Most depression in men goes unseen. Unacknowledged. Untreated.

Is this surprising? Not when you look closely.

Here's the truth: your mind creates thoughts the way your mouth creates saliva. Constantly. Involuntarily. By design.

Some brilliant. Some bizarre. Some downright terrifying.

And we all have them.

Here's something most of us get wrong about anger.

We confuse the emotion with the behavior it triggers. Think about it. You get angry. You react badly. You feel ashamed.

So what do you do? You make a vow - "I'll never get angry again." As if that were possible.

We therapists create a space that's free of judgment. A place where whatever you say or do or think doesn't diminish you in our eyes. That's essential. It's the foundation of trust.

But here's where it gets tricky: sometimes, in our effort to create that safe space, we tip too far. We cast you as the hero of your own story, without question or accountability.

Readiness is that moment of clarity. The recognition that something needs to change. The admission that the current path isn't working.

But readiness alone is just potential energy. It's the boulder at the top of the hill, stationary despite its capacity for movement.