On the Blog
Relationships, Psychology & Being Human
Essays on love, conflict, connection, identity, community, and the strange business of being human.
Browse Topics
Breaking Up: How to End a Relationship When Your Partner Didn't See It Coming
You don't need your partner's permission to leave, but how you leave still matters. A couples therapist's guide to breaking up with care and honesty.
What Is Relational Repair? Beyond Apologies, Communication Skills, and Reconciliation
What is relational repair? A couples therapist explores why apologies and communication skills aren't enough and how unconscious relationship patterns shape conflict.
Why Am I Always Burnt Out? Overfunctioning and Underfunctioning Relationship Dynamics
Burnt out from always doing more? Learn how overfunctioning and underfunctioning create hidden power dynamics -- and what your nervous system is actually protecting.
We Forgot We Were Human: Why Self-Optimization Is Making Us Less Alive
What if the problem isn't that you're broken but that you've learned to treat yourself like a machine? A therapist explores certainty, AI, and what makes us fully alive.
Why Your Partner Is Emotionally Unavailable and Shuts Down (And How To Help )
He doesn't need to become a different man. You don't need to stop needing connection. You just need a few very specific moves and the nerve to let them actually work.
How We Are Psychologically Creating the Political World We Fear
We are stuck because the ways we learned to protect ourselves keep recreating the very situations we are trying to avoid.
Cyclical psychodynamics focuses less on origins and more on maintenance. Not “Where did this come from?” but:
What keeps this going right now in my life?
Burnout in the Age of 996: A Bay Area Therapist on Silicon Valley’s New Survival Mode
Bay Area therapist, Traci Ruble, explains the rapid rise of tech burnout, the return of 996 work culture in Silicon Valley, and how AI-driven stress is reshaping mental health, survival mode, and therapy itself. Learn what is happening, why it’s different, and how therapy must adapt.
Why Couples Fights Trigger Us On Instagram: Attachment, Patriarchy, and Nervous System Truths
A therapist explains why viral couples fights trigger us, exploring attachment patterns, patriarchy, and how the nervous system responds to relational stress.
Are You Emotionally Immature If You Need Social Media Validation? A Trauma Informed Perspective
Healthy maturity does not eliminate the need for validation. It transforms the need for validation into something steadier, with more capacity for failure, and calm in that failure. Read this trauma informed explaination.
Are You Spiritually Bypassing On Your Psychedelic Journey? Warning Signs to Watch For
As I’ve entered the world of plant medicines and psychedelic journeying, spiritual bypassing and spiritual materialism have become even more relevant, as psychedelic journeys can veer from transformation to avoidance. This article is to help make the distinction between healing and avoiding.
A Note About How I Write
I write from more than 20 years of clinical experience, ongoing professional study, and a fairly relentless curiosity about why humans do what we do.
I use AI as a thinking and writing partner to research, chase ideas, develop drafts, and edit. Then I question it, fact-check it, rewrite it, and make the final piece mine. The clinical thinking and conclusions here are my own.
Any clinical stories are composites drawn from patterns across many years of practice, with details changed to protect confidentiality.
The fine print: This blog is for education and reflection, not individualized psychotherapy, mental health care, medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
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