Thriving Life Counseling

08/12/2025

There's no leaderboard for suffering. ❤️

As a therapist, I hear this all the time: “I know other people have it worse, but…”

Stop. Right. There.

There's no hierarchy of pain. Suffering shouldn't be ranked, because pain is not a contest.

The person crying over their breakup while someone else is grieving a death? Both deserve compassion. The teenager anxious about fitting in while adults face job loss? Both need support.

When we minimize our pain because "others have it worse," we're not being grateful or humble. We're abandoning ourselves when we need care most.

Your heartbreak doesn't become less real because someone else lost a spouse. Your anxiety doesn't matter less because others face bigger crises. Your depression isn't "smaller" because you have a roof over your head.

Pain hurts because it hurts, not because of how it stacks up against someone else's struggle.

There's enough compassion to go around. Your suffering doesn't take away from anyone else's. It just asks to be witnessed, honored, and tended to.

What would change if you stopped ranking your pain and started honoring it instead? Share your thoughts in the comments below 👇

08/04/2025

08/02/2025

In couples work, I say this a lot.

Not because people are mean—but because most people are scared, rushed, or reactive.

They say what they think, what they fear, what they **assume** the other person needs to hear.

But they rarely pause to ask, *How is this going to feel when it lands?*

The difference between defensiveness and empathy often comes down to that one pause.

One moment of imagining the impact before we deliver the words.

It doesn’t mean holding back the truth.

It just means delivering it in a way the other person can actually receive.

Has this worked for you? Share in the comments.

07/27/2025

You can feel grief, sadness, or nostalgia, and still know you made the right call ❤️

Save this post for the next time you need to hear it when emotions hit after making a decision.

07/27/2025

Creating truly safe systems and relationships requires flexibility —
The kind of flexibility that comes from internal groundedness,
which allows other people to be different than you.
When you're connected to you, it's easier to allow other people to be in different life stages, emotional states, to have different needs & values, to respond differently to an event, etc.

To develop this type of groundedness requires learning how to connect to yourself;
to your own feelings, needs, and limitations so that you can take responsibility for and share them with others as you need to.
This self-connectedness intuitively helps you respect others' needs to stay connected to themselves, too.

Politeness has its place,
but if you always default to "nice" and "easy" to keep the peace,
if you don't actually feel that way,
but you always default to the thing that will keep the moment light or the conflict at bay,
it means you're not sharing important information that will help people see, know, and respect you.

Conflict and rupture are a requirement in healthy relationships, too.
Uncomfortable feelings, hurt, and disagreement give us the opportunity to go deeper with the people we care about.
To learn more about ourselves and the other person.
Finding out where our edges bump up against one another helps us to see and respect each other more deeply.

And yes, I do understand that for many people this can be a trauma response, but that doesn't mean it's not worth explaining the impact this behavior has on relationships :)
I think understanding the impact can help increase the motivation to walk toward deeper healing —
fawning & people-pleasing are signals that there are parts of you that need your attention & care.

If you always live at the surface level, then your relationships (and your body) will feel the tension that you're avoiding.

If you're working on going more deeply with yourself and others, the Cycle Breakers year long program begins September 2nd (and early bird pricing ends soon!). If you're doing the slow, deep, and often quiet work of meeting yourself in new ways as you shift old patterns and break the cycles that are no longer serving you, then this program is for you.
It's small group, lead by me over the course of a year. Come practice in community and keep returning to yourself again and again. 4pm group is about halfway full!

https://theeqschool.co/cycle-breakers

07/24/2025

Today is International Self-Care Day! We invite you to be intentional about caring for yourself today as our team will be taking time to step back and care for ourselves as well. 💙

The concept of self-care has been warped into something marketable, and it’s not that chocolate, or skincare, or bubble baths aren’t self-care, but it’s so much more than that. Self-care can be picking up the clothes on the floor that have been there for months. Self-care can be cooking a meal at home rather than grabbing something quick again. Self-care can be checking in on friends and sharing how you’re doing.

Whatever self-care looks like for you, we hope you can set aside even a few moments today to remember that your mental health deserves to be a priority. We’ll see you tomorrow. ✨

07/15/2025

In therapy, grief doesn’t always show up with tears.

It shows up in the client who jokes through sessions. In the partner who nitpicks. In the endless scrolling late at night.

In Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, I show how what looks like “bad behavior” is often a disguise for unspoken pain.

We say someone isn’t feeling their grief—but maybe they’re just protecting themselves from a grief too big to name.

07/09/2025

Why is change so hard?

Because even when we know it’s for the better, change asks us to let go.
Of what’s familiar. Of the stories we’ve told ourselves.

Of who we’ve been—even if we’re ready to grow.

We don’t resist change because we’re stubborn.
We resist because change includes grief.

In the opening pages of I write, “You can’t have change without loss” … but in the pages that follow, I show what we all have to gain too.

For those who’ve read the book, how have you used my story & those of my patients to make changes in your own lives?

07/02/2025

From the outside, I think this is such a flex (kidding but also not kidding).
I am so impressed and heartened when I see this in action.

When I see someone who can stay present in difficult moments,
who is still able to listen even though the content might be hard to hear,
who can still bring in curiosity when emotions run high,
who can share limits without attacking or shaming,
who can maintain their groundedness in the face of someone else's dysregulation —
I think that's impressive. I'm definitely still working on it in many ways.

But over time I have found that the more I trust my own goodness, the more willing I am to step into these kinds of hard conversations, and the more I trust myself.
I can do this.
And I've also found that the people who have been willing to do this with me - who have seen my goodness even in my worst moments - have really helped me grow and develop some of my more immature parts, too.

We don't heal the world by shaming or cancelling people into who we want them to be.

We heal by finding our own grounding and not taking it personally when someone else is having a hard moment — because it's really not about you.
We heal by showing them what it looks and feels like to be in safe relationship, so that we can process the hard, unspoken thing.
We heal the world by being safe people for ourselves first, and then by extending that to everyone - not just those we agree with.

Who has helped you become a safer person?

If you're healing your relationship with you, I'm starting a new cycle of my year long program in September, working with Cycle Breakers - those who are working to heal and shift old patterns, and are looking to practice new ways of relating to self & others in supportive, reliable community.
Space is very limited for this year long program.
Sign up for the waitlist at the link below:
https://theeqschool.myflodesk.com/fb4ux9zhce