Picture the most organized office you've ever seen. Every document has its place. Every memory, every experience, every moment gets sorted, classified, and filed away properly. The drawer slides open when you need something, you retrieve what you're looking for, and then it closes with a satisfying click.

This is how our minds are supposed to work. Experience something, process it, understand it, file it away. Next.

But what happens when the system breaks down?

The human mind is a curious thing. It collects voices like a radio collector gathers vintage sets, storing them away for moments when clarity seems impossible to find.

But here's what most people don't realize: the voice offering you guidance in your most crucial moments might not actually be yours.

Think about the last time you took a real road trip. Not a commute, but an actual journey with people you care about. Remember how different it felt when you hit construction, got stuck in traffic, or took a wrong turn?

Instead of rage and frustration, there was conversation. Instead of isolation, there was connection. The same obstacles that would ruin a commute became part of the story, part of the adventure.

Pain works the same way.

It's never just one thing.

We tell ourselves stories about single moments, isolated incidents, the one bad thing that happened. But trauma doesn't work that way. It cascades.

We think we're having the same conversation.

We're not.

You're speaking rapport. They're speaking report. Or maybe it's the other way around. Either way, you're both frustrated, both convinced the other person isn't listening, both certain you're right.

An RCMP member stood up and described a line of duty shooting. Not the moment of violence itself, but what came after. The silence from leadership. The bureaucratic shuffle. The people in the "white shirts" who suddenly became strangers when support was needed most.

Their words were simple but devastating: the lack of support was more damaging than the shooting itself.

This is moral injury. And it's time we understood what it's really costing

Pop culture has a way of holding up a mirror to society, reflecting back truths we'd rather not face. This week, it's Sabrina Carpenter doing the reflecting with her summer anthem about men's incompetence. The song is brutal in its honesty:

"Never heard of self care / Half your brain isn't there."

Ouch.

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.