Differentiation, Shame, and the Exhaustion of Carrying What Was Never Yours Some people do not struggle because they lack insight. They struggle because they have absorbed too much responsibility. They feel responsible for how everyone around them feels. They monitor tone, energy shifts, and pauses in conversation. They adjust themselves constantly to keep the environment stable. If someone is upset, they assume they caused it. If they need space, they feel guilty. If they be

Most marriages do not collapse in one dramatic moment. They drift. Not because love vanished, but because love kept getting postponed. Work is demanding. Kids are exhausting. Money is tight. You are overwhelmed. Every one of those pressures is real. That is the tension. Because love always requires sacrifice, and sacrifice is rarely convenient. So let’s slow this down. What actually makes a spouse feel loved? And what slowly erodes connection, even when your reasons make sens

The Kind of Love That Feels Like Fate Until It Doesn’t There is a pattern I see in my office more often than people expect. Two people meet. It is intense. Immediate. Magnetic. They feel seen, steadied, chosen. It moves quickly. It feels spiritual. Serendipitous. Meant to be. And then a few years later they are sitting across from me saying: We used to be great. I do not know what changed. They are not who I married. Most of the time, no one deceived anyone. No one was secret

I am addressing this topic because many of the thoughtful people I counsel need more than slogans. They are not reckless. They are not indifferent. They love their children deeply. But they are navigating a culture that treats family structure as endlessly customizable — as though children will simply adapt to whatever configuration adults decide. What they often need is not moral scolding. They need clarity. Clarity about risk. Clarity about development. Clarity about what t

If you pay attention to public discourse right now, you will notice something unsettling. Every headline has a villain. Every disagreement becomes moral outrage. Every criticism becomes proof of oppression. And almost no one is wrong. At least not in their own mind. The louder our culture becomes, the more convinced we are that the problem is always out there. Politicians. Institutions. The other side. Our parents. Our spouse. Our boss. And to be clear, injustice exists. Corr

Let’s clear up one of the biggest internet myths right away: there’s no solid, population-level divorce rate for autistic–nonautistic marriages. Most of those scary numbers floating around (like the infamous ‘80% divorce rate’) aren’t actually about couples where one spouse is autistic, they’re about parents raising an autistic child. Different story, different stressors. In one of the most frequently cited studies, divorce was 23.5% for parents of a child with autism, compar

There’s a special kind of panic that shows up when a relationship is dying in real time. Not the dramatic, movie-scene panic. The quiet kind. The kind where you’re standing in the kitchen, staring at a cup someone left on the counter, and your body reacts like you’ve been betrayed by God Himself. Your chest tightens. Your thoughts speed up. You start building a courtroom case in your head. For the full interview, click the image above And you’re not even mad about the cup. Yo

If the first part of this series explored how overstimulation reshapes the nervous system, and the second examined the cultural ideas that quietly dismantle adulthood, this final part brings everything to its most personal level. Identity. Not the version of ourselves that performs well in public. Not the story we tell about who we are. Not the labels we use to explain ourselves. But the self we actually live from. The self that shows up when we are tired, threatened, disappo

Anxiety thrives in uncertainty, and today’s world offers plenty of it. News cycles spin faster than our nervous systems can keep up, life transitions arrive without warning, and plans change mid-stride. Future-proofing your mind doesn’t mean predicting what will happen next. It means strengthening your capacity to respond with steadiness, flexibility, and self-trust when things don’t go as expected.

They’d been married 27 years. Raised kids. Built a life. Paid off a house. From the outside, they looked like they had it together. From the inside? They were unraveling. Not because of some betrayal. Not because of dramatic fights or secret affairs. But because of something much quieter. Much harder to name. They sat in my office, both blinking back tears, and one of them said it out loud: “I’ve never thought of this before.” “I’m learning this for the first time.” They wer