Key points

• Even when two people love each other, it can be difficult to have different opinions or beliefs.
• Many couples get entrenched in the same arguments over minor subjects because they need to be “right.”
• Being open to other people’s perspectives and versions of realities doesn’t have to invalidate your own.

As a couples therapist and also someone who’s been married a long time, I often wonder why it’s so difficult for two people who love each other to bear the experience of believing different things and holding different opinions. Of course, we want to feel aligned with our partner’s point of view; one of the reasons we choose a partner is because of how they see the world and what they believe. We like like-minded people. But when agreement is not there, when our partner has a different experience from ours, sees reality differently, it becomes a real problem, and harmony feels impossible.

It also surprises me to see the kinds of issues couples fight about and what they’re willing to go to war over. Even when the topic is utterly trivial, partners will argue viciously for whose version of reality is right, whose opinions are accurate in some imagined absolute reality. But as we all know, the cap on the toothpaste is never about the cap.

Couples get embroiled in winning the argument rather than understanding why the issue matters to their partner. The relationship then gets stuck in the land of right and wrong—in whose version of reality is reality. What moves the dial is when we drop the contents, unstick from the minutiae, and speak directly to the wound behind the toothpaste cap, to the pain that’s trying to speak through them. While the contents of the argument feel sticky and seductive, and it’s easy to take the bait—don’t. Don’t bite the hook.

On an existential level, we experience ourselves as our thoughts. We are thoroughly identified with our thoughts and opinions—we are what we think. Anyone who doesn’t accept our thoughts as valid (regard­less of the topic) doesn’t accept us. If someone holds a different opinion from ours, it means that our opinion is wrong, which means that we are wrong. If someone has a different experience of reality, it means that our experience is invalid—given that there can only be one true reality. As a result, our opinions and experience must be continually validated and affirmed for us to feel valid and for our experience to feel like it matters.

Problems arise when we listen to our partner’s thoughts and opinions through the filter of whether we agree with them. Do we like those thoughts and opinions? Do they make us feel good? Do they validate us? In this way, the attention we offer, at the core, is self-centered. The contents of their experience must validate our own so that we ourselves can feel justified and legitimate. Essentially, good about ourselves.

In couples therapy, I’m often asked to play umpire, to award one person’s story with my official seal of rightness—to confirm that their version of reality, their experience in a particular situation, is the psychologically correct one to be having, and most importantly, more correct than their partner’s. If their narrative is the right one, then it follows that they’re allowed to feel the feelings that come with it. They’re entitled to empathy for their experience, which, at the end of the day, is what everyone is trying to get, albeit in our primitive and misguided ways.

And yet, a deeper and more trustworthy kind of intimacy exists. One in which we’re not just trying to turn our partner into someone who works for our own ego needs. Rather, we want to know our partner’s actual experience, not just the experience we want them to have—the one that feels good for us. It’s an intimacy in which we come to trust and feel safe in the truth itself, as opposed to any particular truth. We want to know what’s actually true, not just what protects our ego. Ultimately, it’s an intimacy that requires choosing love over fear: love of the truth over the fear of being hurt.

But this way of relating is not how we’re taught to relate. We’re taught that other people’s experiences and beliefs, if they’re different from ours, pose a threat. An open and truth-loving way of being with another person’s experience requires a profound paradigm shift; it demands that we be willing to set aside our me-story and loosen our grip on the thoughts and opinions that define that me.

When we get it that our self-story is not who we are, but just something we’ve constructed to protect ourselves, then we can listen without an agenda and wear our selfness like a loose garment rather than our own skin. Then, we can experience ourselves as a loving space rather than a solid entity defined by our thoughts and opinions. And then, we can be that being that can welcome another’s experience in what­ever costume it arrives.

What I’m describing here is no small endeavor; it’s a shift at the deepest level of how we conceive of and experience ourselves. It’s extraordinary at every level, and with it comes a new life. Know this: A far richer and more satisfying way of living and loving is possible, but you have to be willing to release the separate you who’s doing the living and loving.

Excerpted from my upcoming book Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck (November 1, 2026).

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The assignment the college professor gave her students was to write about their experience of the course and how they felt about it. Twelve students from vastly different cultures, religions, and socioeconomic backgrounds were enrolled in the anthropology seminar, but what the professor received was a dozen iterations of essentially the same essay. Not only were the topics they covered the same: learning, growth, and concepts related to anthropology and cultural traditions. But at the same time, the essays all shared a language and structure far more sophisticated, organized, and complex compared with the language the students had used throughout the semester. Put simply, their final papers stunk of AI.

One particularly disturbing aspect of AI is that it encourages young people to look outside themselves for their own internal experience. Simultaneously, it may be preventing young people from actually developing a self at all. More and more, young people are looking for who they are, what they feel, want, and believe from the internet—Claude, ChatGPT, and other social media. The idea of turning their attention to themselves—exploring internally, has become a pointless and irrelevant venture. Young people are undeveloped as human beings, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually; they can hold information, but on their own are increasingly substanceless. Will AI eventually replace our personal selves altogether?

But it’s not just younger folks who are looking outside themselves for their internal experience. I’m an adult, and I write specifically about mindful technology; I wrote The Power of Off on this very topic. So too, I’ve been giving workshops for years on learning to trust your own experience and personal truth. Despite that, I too fall victim to the seduction of technology.

Every so often, I fall into the technology rabbit hole; I go hunting for my own north star inside my laptop. I go (anxiously) searching for what’s percolating in the ether. What does ChatGPT have to say about my search? Where should I put my attention? Who else is writing similar material? How are they saying it? And of course, how many people are reading it?

After a couple of days of sleepwalking through my own cortisol-fueled hellscape, I realize that I feel agitated and disconnected. By that point, I’ve probably also fallen back into a major caffeine addiction and feel twired, both tired and wired. But my relationships with my daughters, my husband, and myself feel frayed and untethered. After a few days of looking outward for what should matter to me, I usually feel like nothing matters.

An Existential Angst

Having fallen asleep, again, into the trance of technology and the fantasy that its limitless knowledge and delicious distractions will guide me home to myself, I am left feeling vacuumed out at my core, hopeless, and filled with craving, striving, and anxiety. My drive to be saved from my own existential angst only ends up intensifying that angst to what feels like a full-on Munchian scream.

Regardless of age, most humans are susceptible to the pull and pleasure of technology. We’re drawn to the intelligence and entertainment available on our screens, seduced by the distractions, and prone to looking for answers outside ourselves. We’re not taught to look inside for our own wisdom, substance, and truth—to relate to ourselves as a destination. Rather, we’re conditioned to see ourselves as a launching pad from which to seek and find answers in the world.

As we develop a greater sense of self, we’re better equipped to recognize when we’ve abandoned our internal home. We can discern when we disappear into the rabbit hole, scrolling the internet for what to do, know, think, or feel. But with young people, that “self” often hasn’t developed yet. As a result, they’re unaware that they’re turning over their internal authority to the AI masters, giving them the power to tell them who they are and what they’re experiencing. They haven’t yet built the awareness to notice when ChatGPT has become their personal truth-teller, and their north star is something they’re looking for on Instagram. Looking outward for their own experience will just be what is.

As a writer, I’ll often have an idea for a topic without a clear picture of what I want to say. The idea needs to marinate; I need to live in the questions, contemplate why it matters to me. If, at that embryonic stage, I start asking AI for its ideas on the topic, I end up walking away with a head full of other ideas, ones that ChatGPT thinks are relevant. While they may be interesting, they’re not my ideas, not my curiosities, and not the musings I might have pursued. My embryonic thoughts are faded and gone, crowded out by Claude and Gemini’s thoughts, at which point it all feels like a research paper. I have lots of new content to write about, but the excitement of the exploration process, the surprise and delight that comes with not knowing where my interest will lead or what will unfold—it’s all gone. With the help of ChatGPT, my “want” has become a “should,” and I usually end up ditching the whole project.

We can find a lot of fabulous things on the internet, intelligent and wise things, transformative things, but we can’t find ourselves in there. Our truth, our experience, what interests, delights, and matters to us—what creates meaning, wags our tail, and wants attention in us, none of it can be found through AI. Our voice and whatever magic fairy dust makes us uniquely us can only be accessed by looking inward. It’s only by using our inner GPS that we arrive at the destination of ourselves. The answers might not come as quickly or easily as with Google, but if we’re patient and trust the not knowing, the marinating process; if we trust our own wisdom and keep looking inward, we’re rewarded again and again with the real jewels of our own uniqueness—we get to meet who we really are.

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From a head perspective, through a rational lens, the truth can be figured out through empirical data, science, and facts that can be proven. The truth is one universal thing, separate from us and determined by exter­nal factors. This is rationalism, the narrative we’ve built our society and bet the farm on. From a heart perspective, however, the truth is subjective, internally based, a wisdom that’s personal and includes our senses, intuition, and emotional knowing. As a culture, we haven’t com­pleted the journey from the head to the heart—in fact, we seem to be walking backward on the path.

Based in the Western intellectual tradition of rationalism, this factual, science-based approach to life, reason, and logic is what’s valued. All truths can be figured out using the deductive and analytical mind. While non-Western traditions value other heart-and-body-based aspects of life, the rational narrative places all its eggs in the intellectual basket. In rationalism, reason is king.

What this rational narrative overlooks, however, is that reason always includes interpretation, which is always influenced, shaped, and transformed by our personal experience, emotions, language, culture, power structures, and social mores. Reasoning and interpretation don’t exist in a vacuum. Logical reason­ing has already been subverted by the mind, experience, and cultural condi­tioning of the person applying that reason.

Simultaneously, the rational narrative assumes there to be one singular truth, which means that when we’re arguing for the validity of our experience or personal truth, we’re arguing for what we believe is the one real truth (which also happens to be our truth). It’s difficult to accept or consider that what we see and experience is relative, a byproduct of our conditioning. That would mean that what other people see and experi­ence could also be true, through their personal lens and conditioning. Realizing that infinite truths exist and can coexist peacefully is precisely what allows us to wear our own stories with more lightness and ease.

When we stop believing that our story is the one universal truth, and that our reality is the one true reality, and furthermore, that anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong and must be converted to our version of reality, then we’re free. We no longer have to prove our rightness or get anyone else to agree with our reality for it to be true. We’re free to let other people’s versions of reality exist too, and accept their experience as also real—for them.

Differing realities are no longer a problem or a threat—we get it that there isn’t just one knowable and provable truth, but as many truths as there are people on this earth. Our truth is just one of infinite truths. To know this is to be liberated at our core.

Waking up from the narrative trance comes through this realization that reality is a perception, deeply personal, and always changing, a process fil­tered through our personal and cultural conditioning and lived experience. Ultimately, when we accept this as a paradigm for living, we open to radi­cally different and more fulfilling connections with other people, and infi­nitely more peace within ourselves. Our whole system relaxes; at last, the struggle is over—everyone can be right. Everyone is right.

Layered into rationalism is the idea that everything happens for a reason, and not just a reason but a knowable reason. An answer exists for all ques­tions, an answer that we can (and should) figure out. We feel compelled to understand and explain each moment and every experience—why it’s hap­pening, why we feel the way we feel, why people are the way they are, ad infinitum. Why is the question by which we live. Furthermore, the singular source we consult for the answers is our mind. Our personal story­lines then serve this purpose, to create an answer for our ever-present why—a reason for each of our experiences and perceptions, and a reason­able meaning to go with it.

The rational narrative has taught us that the unknown is unac­ceptable. It’s not okay if the mind can’t figure it out—not knowing is not an option. The idea that we could live in the questions, in the not knowing, is contrary to our deepest cultural conditioning. When we don’t know why something is, we can’t control it, or prevent it if need be, we feel vulnerable and unsafe. Not being able to figure it out means we’ve failed. There’s an answer out there; we just can’t find it.

The powerful message layered into the rational narrative is that we should understand everything. If we can’t, there’s a problem. The one thing we can know for sure is that “I don’t know” is not an answer—and not okay.

Our inner narrator is clever. When uncertainty exists, when we can’t know why, she solves the problem by providing a sensible and cohesive nar­rative for our experience—regardless of how she has to finagle the facts to get there. The story then gives us an explanation for what’s uncertain and unknowable. Even when our answers make us feel worse and make the situ­ation worse, we still choose to believe our why-stories. At the end of the day, a painful explanation is better than no explanation—an unwanted answer better than no answer at all.

The challenge, however, is that so much of our experience is in fact unex­plainable and unknowable, particularly when it comes to other people’s behavior! And, furthermore, life is infinitely vaster and more mysterious than just what the intellect can know and decipher. And yet, we hang on to our belief that a rational explanation exists for everything we experience, and that the way to know our experience is through the intellect. It’s precisely this belief that gives our inner narrator her tenure.

Waking up from the narrative trance, and from the stories that keep us stuck, is not just about becoming aware of our personal narratives, or seeing the assumptions we’re making and mental bridges we’re constructing. It’s also about noticing the soil in which our stories formed, the larger para­digms we’ve been fed, and how they became our truth and shape the way we see the world—in short, how we came to know what we know.

Excerpted from my upcoming book, Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck (November 1, 2026).

The post What if Everyone Else’s “Story” Is Also True? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

I was eavesdropping at my local diner—my favorite laboratory for human behavior. At the next table, a couple in their mid-forties was chatting about a movie they’d just seen. As the waiter zoomed by without stopping, the man became visibly agitated. I heard him tell his partner that it was the third time the waiter had “ignored” him and that if he were “a star,” if he were “somebody who people had heard of,” if he were somebody people “respected,” then they would already be enjoying their burgers. When the server finally did arrive, sweat bubbling above his lip, I heard this man aggressively asserting that the young man should be less obvious about whom he deems important enough to serve.

My dining neighbor was just a normal person doing what normal people do, creating a story and crafting meaning. But the particular meaning he made and we all make—the specific story we tell ourselves—this is our personal narrative, and more than anything else, what determines our reality.

The story we tell ourselves about ourselves answers two important questions in every situation we encounter: what’s happening and why it’s happening. In this example, what was happening to the man sitting next to me was that he was being ignored, snubbed, and treated disrespectfully. Why it was happening, in his story, was because he wasn’t important or famous; he was just an irrelevant, invisible, nobody. The narratives in our head are continually connecting the dots of our life, making links and forming cause and effect relationships between facts, situations, and events that we carefully select and design. This happened because of that for every aspect of our experience—whether related or not.

In this case, the insanely busy and overwhelmed waiter was passing him by, purposefully not taking his order, because he wasn’t publicly known or someone who mattered in the grand scheme. His story succeeded at making sense of what was happening and inventing a reason for it, but through an incredibly specific and narrow lens. He chose (or crafted) one of a thousand different explanations for the wait-time on taking his order and related to that one explanation as if it were the truth, sulking with his companion and erupting at the waiter in anger.

In accepting his self-designed narrative as fact, he validated a version of himself, a self-experience that was clearly frustrating, upsetting, and painful. He designed a reality that supported and strengthened a pre-existing storyline. His mind, like a heat-seeking missile, went searching for evidence that he could use, either on its own without alteration, or in this case, with his self-made bridges and personalized flavoring, to confirm his already written self-narrative.

The result of our story-making habit and basic nature is that we lock ourselves into being someone who can’t grow or change and into a life that can’t grow or change. We assume that the movie playing in our head is what’s actually happening outside the private cinema of our own mind, and that our explanation for why it’s happening is the accurate explanation. We take it as given that the intentions we’ve invented for everyone else in the world (and why they’re doing what they’re doing to us) are in fact their true intentions. And finally, we don’t question that the universe is behaving the way it’s behaving because of what we’ve determined the universe thinks of us. All of it is true, which then means that it must always be true, because we effectively make it the only thing that can be true.

The problem is, we all do this in one form or another, from the cradle to the grave, and few of us are even aware that we’re doing it. The most important thing, how we’re writing the story of our life, in the micro moments, in each situation, is what defines how we feel, see ourselves and experience our life. That said, we’re constantly limiting ourselves to a kind of Groundhog Day life, the same thing over and over again, day after day. We feel stuck because we’re keeping ourselves stuck with our stories. So many people say they want to change, and even more people say they want their lives to change. But neither can happen as long as we’re using the same writer to craft the story—of who we are and the possibilities that exist for our life. Nothing can change if the script and meaning are already written and we’re just filling in the details to make it all work—again.

We tell ourselves that our story makes sense and is justified, we have that story because it’s not a story; it’s reality—what always happens to us, and we have the track record to back it up. But we don’t see that we’re the ones making that reality a reality in the way that we’re writing the story. We are right because we make ourselves right. It is indeed what happens to us because we are the authors of what happens to us.

What allows you to break free from your stories (and resulting stuckness) is to become aware of yourself weaving your narratives, to notice when you’re telling yourself and everyone else the story of what’s happening to you and why. Freedom happens when you can see the leaps you’re making, and what you’re adding to reality. The way out of a life that doesn’t change, a you who always feels the same way and has the same kinds of things happen to her, is to become aware of where you’re inventing the narrative, constructing meaning, building bridges, and connecting self-selected dots between stand-alone events. Ask yourself, where am I making assumptions, and adding to the bones of reality where it doesn’t actually exist? Again and again, notice when you’re making self-constructed interpretations and generating meaning, writing the story of the situation through your own corrupted lens, accepting (and reacting) to your personal narrative as if it were the Truth. Notice and stop—pull the lens back; step out of the cinema of your mind. Return to the present moment, drop into your senses and the bare bones of what’s actually happening, without any spin and with nothing added. Simply put… let the thing be the thing.

The post Does Your Life Feel Like Groundhog Day? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Do you ever feel like no matter what you do or say, how you behave, or the choices you make, the results are the same? No matter how hard you try, you can’t move the dial forward: can’t experience new things, new people, and new opportunities—can’t change your life. Does it feel like you’re stuck in the same loop you’ve always been in?

If that feels true for you, it may be time to shift your attention—away from your circumstances and from trying to change outcomes, and toward something more fundamental: the stories you’re telling yourself—about your life, your possibilities, and yourself.

Ask yourself, what are the background narratives running in your head that you’re accepting as true? What is the reality your mind is constructing that you’re accepting as what is?

A Few Examples

My friend Francesca was furious. She’d been invited to be a bridesmaid at her friend’s destination wedding in the Bahamas. In the story she told me, the bride had only asked her to be a bridesmaid because she assumed that Francesca would never get married herself. And, because she couldn’t possibly have other plans and therefore could just slip off for a four-day trip to the Bahamas at the drop of a hat—with only nine months’ notice! In my friend’s narrative, the invitation to be a bridesmaid in the Bahamas was insulting; the bride obviously thought she was pathetic and was just “throwing her a bone.”

Just this morning, I was late to meet a colleague because I unexpectedly had to take my daughter to the doctor. My colleague made a comment about not being able to rely on anyone and always having to take care of herself. When I asked her what she meant, she brought up the fact that I’d been late despite our having twice confirmed the time.

I had been late, that part was true, but she’d also never asked why or inquired about what happened on my end. And ironically, she’d told me many times that I was someone she could count on, and how much she appreciated that aspect of our relationship. In the nine minutes she’d been waiting for me to arrive that day, she’d written a comprehensive story that used my tardiness as an endorsement for her preexisting storyline.

Anne (not her real name) hated being single; she was desperate to find a lasting relationship. A woman in her early 30s, she’d been in two important relationships in her life, both with men she wanted to marry. In the first, the man broke up with her after two years of dating, and then immediately paired up with her closest friend. Later, he told her that he’d only dated her to “get to her friend.” In the second relationship, something similar happened; that boyfriend also ended up with one of her friends, whom he also married.

On the outside, Anne presented as confident and outgoing. She described herself as flirty and fun—“the life of the party.” But her inner storyteller had her cast in a different role, namely the woman men “got their ya-yas out with,” but not the one they ultimately chose. What men really wanted was a more demure and mysterious woman, a woman with the magic fairy dust she didn’t have. The story hiding behind her claims of being fun and sexy was that no matter how fun and sexy she was, she would never be the one men picked for a wife or as the mother of their children. And that was because, as her story explained, she was too big of a presence, too loud, too opinionated, too…something.

As a result, Anne ended up acting in ways that were out of sync with how she actually felt. In social situations, she became that big presence—loud, brash, and wild. Fun at all costs. But even as she was performing this part she’d self-scripted, she was also resenting the men for whom she was performing it. Having already decided they didn’t really want her and would eventually choose someone else, she would go so far as to suggest quieter women to her boyfriends, women who were what she insisted they really wanted. Her self-sabotaging campaign, in the end, succeeded at convincing her partners to break up with her, which then re-created the same painful rejection she’d already decided would happen. And so she would be single and alone, once again, alone with her story—proven to her own satisfaction—and despair. She was not the woman men chose, and she had the track record to prove it.

Stories Creating Our Reality

The difficulty with our personal narratives is not just that they exist but that we don’t see them or recognize the fundamental role they’re playing in our lives. We don’t see that the story we’re injecting into reality is creating our reality, and that the reality we’re accepting as truth is of our own making. We don’t consider that the stories playing in our head are just that—stories playing in our head. We lose perspective, disappear into the story, and become its main character.

We bring our stories with us everywhere. They dictate how we fill in the gaps in our life, make meaning, and determine potential outcomes. Our stories are layered into the way we think, feel, interact, and make choices. Ultimately, we see what our story is willing to show us and then behave as if what it’s telling us were true. The story becomes our life, and our life becomes the story. If our stories were a backpack, we would drop it. But we don’t see the backpack, and we don’t see our stories—that’s the problem.

Breaking Free From the Unhealthy Cycle

What allows you to break free from these unhealthy cycles, to step out of your stories, is first to realize that you’re telling yourself stories, to recognize that what feels like truth may actually be a constructed narrative. Before anything new can happen, you have to be able to notice what you’re adding to and doing with reality, the overlay you’re placing on top of it.

But to get there, you have to ask yourself hard questions:

What assumptions did I bring into this situation?

Where did I make the leap from what actually happened to what I’ve decided is the meaning behind it?

Where have I constructed a bridge from fact to fiction?

Where did I shift from the bones of reality to my story?

And finally, how is my story shaping what happens next—locking me into an outcome I’ve already written, and situation that, ultimately, I don’t want.

More to come…and in my upcoming book, Narratives: Let Go of the Stories That Keep You Stuck (November)

The post What’s the Story You’re Telling Yourself About Yourself? appeared first on Nancy Colier.

I’ve written a lot about the habit of “shoulding” on ourselves, constantly telling ourselves all the things we should do, improve, become, know, achieve, the better version of ourselves we should be. And specifically, the self-aggression of shoulding on ourselves, and the damage it does to our quality of life and ability to enjoy the present moment.

Today, however, I want to investigate another self-aggressive activity we engage in, a close cousin of shoulding. It’s what I call “nexting.” Nexting is the habit of continually poking and prodding ourselves to know what’s next in our life, what we need to do, decide, attend to, accomplish, and create—next. In a nutshell, what else needs to happen. Nexting is the opposite of being in the present moment; it’s forcing ourselves to turn our attention away from what’s here right now.

I was recently speaking with a friend whose youngest child is about to leave for college. She was obsessing over what she could do next to fill her empty nest; should she get a puppy, take up gardening, learn to sail? Later, I had a conversation with a colleague who’d just finished his most recent novel. He literally handed in the final draft the day before. His mind had already begun frantically searching for the topic of his next book. He was frustrated that he didn’t know what was next, assuming it must be writer’s block. Truth be told, I do the same: The instant I finish a project, I start searching for my next idea.

We are conditioned to believe that we must keep moving forward in life, on to the next thing, and then the next, from the cradle to the grave. According to our grand cultural narrative, moving forward, otherwise known as “progress,” is the goal of a good life. It means we’re doing life right.

As women, we’re taught that we have to start reinventing ourselves the instant our last child leaves for college, or the day we miss our first period. And that’s not enough; after that initial reinvention, we have to reinvent the reinvention. We even have a next for after we die, the afterlife, another place to have to get to. The nexts just keep on coming—they never end.

While there’s a lot to be said for moving forward and progressing in life, personally, professionally, and spiritually, what we don’t know how to do is be where we are. We’re really not good at being in the present moment. And, we’re particularly not skilled at sitting in the unknown spaces, those moments when what’s next is not yet clear, when we don’t know what we want to do, explore, or pursue next. At the core, we don’t know how to not know.

Not knowing what’s next makes us anxious; it feels like we’re nowhere, doing nothing. And so our mind rushes to fill the empty space, offering a thousand plans, problems, obsessions, ideas, and whatever else it can come up with for us to do and attend to in the meantime. The mind finds something with which to busy itself, a metaphoric bone to chew on. Once again, it’s not a problem that we want to make use of free time or be productive, but the anxiety that comes along with it, the urgency with which we feel compelled to get on to what’s next, is troubling.

When we’re constantly nexting on ourselves, we’re missing out on the profound opportunity to get to know what it’s like in the unknown and not yet formed space, the in-between, still unclear space. We rush to lock it down and make it something we know. But becoming is a something—its own process. It might be one that’s uncomfortable and unfamiliar, that we’re not accustomed to sitting in, but it’s a place of its own.

Nexting on ourselves, like shoulding on ourselves, can become a form of self-aggression. We use “what’s next?” against ourselves, insisting that we should always know what we want to do next, where we’re headed, and who we want to become. While we may calm the anxiety that comes from having to hang out in the corridor before the next door opens, we create a different kind of anxiety and discontent, the kind that comes from fielding the unending demands to know what we don’t know and, essentially, stop being in the place we actually are.

If you suspect that you may be a habitual next-er, try this: Start paying attention to the voice inside you that asks you to decide or demands that you know what you don’t know yet. Start listening for the voice that tells you it’s not OK to be where you are, that the present moment is not enough, and not a place to land. Notice how often you hear some version of “what’s next?” inside your mind, or feel pressure to make a plan, have an experience, or be somewhere other than where you are. When you hear that voice, say to yourself (silently or aloud) “no next.” Then bring your attention back to what’s happening in this present moment—tune into your body, feel the sensations, drop into your now. Use your own attention to turn the transitional space, what feels like a non-space, into its own place—a destination, not just a launching pad. Ask yourself, “What’s it like right here if there’s nowhere else to get to—no next, just this.”

Play with these questions; see if becoming can become its own destination. Imagine the transitions in life, the corridors between rooms, as an opportunity to be curious about what’s percolating in you and what wants to come next. Relax and resist the urge to fill in the spaces so as to quell your own anxiety. Practice living in the questions rather than figuring out the answers. Not knowing is a place, and once you give yourself permission to be there, you may find that it’s one you can inhabit and even enjoy. The next time you start nexting on yourself, use it as an invitation—not to abandon the present moment, but to lean into it, and be curious about what it’s like to be right where you are. What you discover may surprise and even delight you.

The post Stop Demanding That You Know What’s Next appeared first on Nancy Colier.

In this post, rather than speak about both-and as it applies to your relationships with other people, I want to address how it plays out in your relationship with yourself.

As human beings, our feelings are complicated, fluid, and usually inconsistent. We feel both positively and negatively, about almost everything and everyone we encounter. You might feel profound love and gratitude for your parent and also feel angry that they weren’t able to encourage you in the ways that you needed. You might feel a friend is selfish, and also adore their sense of humor. You might cherish your child more than anything on earth, and also resent him for always demanding your attention. You might feel enormous respect for your partner, and simultaneously despise him, want to stay married and also desperately wish he would leave you alone. It’s normal to feel all of these things—all at once.

While coexisting and contradictory truths are the normal state of affairs for human beings, still, we’re taught to believe that if we feel one way about someone or something, we can’t also, simultaneously, feel something totally different. If you experience two opposing or differing emotions, one must invalidate the other. When contrasting feelings or thoughts exist, one side is necessarily false, and therefore, not how you really feel. Negative or ambivalent feelings wipe out all positive feelings. And so, to allow yourself to feel, make space for, or just acknowledge your difficult feelings and negative thoughts, the parts of something that are hard immediately make you feel bad—and guilty. If you allow yourself to feel a part of the relationship that’s painful and doesn’t work for you, the parts that are satisfying must not be true. Feeling the whole story, the miracle and catastrophe that’s part of every relationship, then means you’re ungrateful, because you’re effectively denying everything positive and saying that nothing good exists. To acknowledge any bad is to say that it’s all bad.

The Impact on Decision-Making

We often believe that there can only be one kind of feeling state about something at a time. As a result, we constantly have to choose between our feelings, to pick a side, and vehemently disown and disallow all feelings and thoughts that are not aligned with that side, this one way of feeling we’ve determined is acceptable.

Our misunderstanding of the both-and coexisting and contradictory nature of life also deeply impacts our ability to make decisions. In almost every choice we make, we get something and we lose something. Every choice in life comes with little deaths. If we take a particular path, we give up what might have come from taking a different path. Each decision we make gives us the opportunity to grow in certain ways and not in other ways. Whichever path we choose, we will encounter difficulty. The question is not which decision will bring only positive results but which will offer challenges that interest us. There is no perfect path in anything, no decision or choice that’s free from the reality of coexisting and contradictory truths. There is no reality that is absent of the both-and nature of life.

Still, we hold off making decisions and remain paralyzed waiting for choices to be 100 percent clear and consistent, perfect in their single-experience-ness. We wait, in vain, for there to be no difficulties involved in a particular decision, assuming that the right decision will come only when all downsides associated with that path have been annihilated. Then, without any inconsistency, it will be the right decision. Unfortunately, that never happens.

We must make choices with the awareness of what we’re gaining—and what we’re giving up. We opt for a certain path not just because it’s the one that will most likely deliver the results we desire but because its hard parts are bearable and can expand us in ways that we’re interested in expanding. We can stop demanding that the right decision be one that has only positive experiences and feelings attached to it. With everything in life, the right choice is one that includes things we like and things we don’t, gains and losses. All of life exists in both-and.

The post Our Feelings Contradict Each Other, and That’s OK appeared first on Nancy Colier.

The experience people long for more than any other in their relationships is a simple one, but nonetheless, one that doesn’t happen often. People long to be heard. But heard in a very particular way—without judgment, correction, or interpretation, and without being told to change. Ultimately, to be heard correctly, without anything being done to or added onto their experience.

More than anything, people want to be seen and known, to be given the space to share what they’re living—without being told what to do about it, what’s wrong with it, why it’s invalid and not the right experience to be having, why they’re to blame for that experience, and essentially how to make it go away. They long for a space where their experience can feel welcome and safe, where they can determine their own truth, and define, for themselves, what they feel, want, and need.

At the core, we all long to have our truth related to as a destination, a place to land and be received, as it is, rather than a place from which to launch a campaign of alteration. We want our truth to be known and offered the dignity and space to be.

When couples fight, they don’t usually hear each other. They don’t allow each other to express their real experience, not without trying to do something with or to it, even if that’s to try and make it better. Most people simply don’t know how to listen in the way we humans long to be listened to. At the end of the day, sadly, we often don’t give the ones we love the most what they really need.

When people listen to their partner, it’s through the filter of what it means and says about them (the person listening). They evaluate, judge, and respond to the other person’s experience through the lens of whether they agree with and share the same experience as the other person. In short, how does my truth compare with their truth? Does their truth make me feel good about myself, confirm my own self-esteem, and shore up my own identity? Does it validate my experience and the story I tell myself about myself?

In this way, while not malicious, the listening and attention we offer each other, at the core, is self-centered and protective; it’s about our own survival. The other’s experience is viewed in relation to and in comparison with our own. The other’s truth must validate our own, so that our truth can stand, be right—and matter.

Most couples operate on a system of “but-s.” “But” is the word we use to separate and join differing experiences. If our partner’s feelings are unwanted by us or difficult to tolerate, if they contrast with our own, then one of us has to be proven wrong. What the other is living must be faulty, inappropriate, pathological, or the wrong thing to be living. Contradictory realities cannot coexist and be equally valid and deserving of respect, curiosity, or empathy.

The other’s truth must not just be wrong, however, but proven wrong beyond a reasonable doubt. It must be disallowed, or put another way, annihilated. It goes like this: my experience is this, but your experience is that, which means that your experience, if I really hear it, and treat it like it matters, will make my own experience irrelevant and invalid (which will make me irrelevant and invalid). If I don’t prove your truth to be wrong, then I won’t be entitled to feel what I feel, to be attended to, and ultimately, to have my reality heard and known.

The problem we bump into, however, is that reality resolves in contradiction. It’s always both and. Experience is relative, not fixed, not one thing that’s either right or wrong. There’s no keeper of the real truth. What’s true for one person is rarely true for another. We don’t need to share the same experience with our partner or anyone else in order for both experiences to be true—for the person who is experiencing it. Another person’s truth can be utterly different from ours and also be true and valid, as true and valid as our own. Our experience is what we perceive, see, feel, and essentially live. It’s valid because it’s our experience.

What makes for a truly healthy relationship is an attitude of both and not either or. The other person’s experience—and—our experience, no matter how close or opposing their content. Both deserve a place at the table. A table, when it comes to love, that’s bigger than right and wrong, and wide enough to hold all contents.

It’s strange, we imagine that we’re all living in one world, one reality, one truth, one experience, and one what is. But in fact, there are 8.2 billion realities in this one world, as many realities as there are people. We’re all living inside our own private cinema inside our own private mind. What makes couples work and allows for true listening is when we connect different experiences with an “and,” not a “but.” Our experience—and—their experience, both true, and all welcome in a space of curiosity and kindness.

A trustworthy kind of listening is possible and can, in fact, be learned. It happens when we stop demanding that our partner be someone who agrees with and shares our experience, when we stop listening to the other through the filter of “me” and what protects our own rightness. In true intimacy, we realize that our rightness doesn’t depend on anything or anyone else. The rightness of our experience stands on the fact that it’s our experience. With that clarity, we then want to know our partner’s actual truth, not just the truth that feels good for us. This knowing creates a trustworthy and unshakable intimacy. Rather than any particular truth, we find refuge and love in the truth itself.

The post I Don’t Want to Be Fixed, I Just Want to Be Heard appeared first on Nancy Colier.

The unspeakable, un-shareable truth was this: Kate loved her child, but she didn’t like her very much. She was entirely devoted to her, would do anything for her, but she didn’t actually enjoy being with her.

When she confessed her feelings to her best friend, her friend immediately explained to Kate why everything she was “complaining” about, that she didn’t like, was age-appropriate behavior for a teenager. She told Kate that her feelings were not about her daughter at all, but about the parts of herself she didn’t like, and that she needed to get over it and stop blaming her child for her own issues. She asked Kate if she’d ever been “willing” to give her daughter a chance to be likable. She also reminded Kate (as if she didn’t think about it every day) how painful it must be for her daughter to intuit that her own mother didn’t like her. But all roads led back to the same place: Kate’s feelings were her fault and they meant that something was fundamentally wrong with her, and that she was a bad mother. It most certainly was not OK to feel the way she felt.

When Kate tried to share her experience with her husband (the girl’s father), he became agitated and angry. He defended their daughter and reminded Kate, as her friend had, that everything she didn’t enjoy was typical teenage behavior. He reiterated the sentiment too, that Kate’s feelings were Kate’s problem, which probably stemmed from her own childhood and the parenting she received. He instantly put on his judge and jury cap and made the giant leap from Kate’s ambivalent feelings to the accusation that she was thinking about abandoning their daughter. In a matter of minutes, Kate’s complicated confession had turned her into a coldhearted person who would leave his daughter (for whom, he made clear, he would never have similar feelings).

Kate discovered that there was no safe space to be heard about this particular experience, no place where her ambivalence could be received without harsh judgment and rejection. It seemed that regardless of whom she talked to, her feelings were held against her and used to blame, shame, and pathologize her. It was simply forbidden for a woman to love her child but not like her child’s personality.

Societal Expectations and Maternal Identity

The truth was, Kate’s feelings collided with one of the fiercest taboos women carry. They challenged what may be the strongest belief we hold: a good mother is supposed to feel endless love, enjoyment, gratitude, and the unending desire to spend time with her children. She’s expected to adore her children as people, no matter what, and be naturally and entirely fulfilled by caregiving. Any deviation from this ideal is deemed as a moral failure. Ultimately, maternal love should eliminate her own subjectivity. These beliefs, shared by both women and men, are hard-wired into our system from the beginning.

Regardless of how prevalent it is, women are ashamed to say they don’t always like their kids or want to spend time with them. Motherhood has been idealized to leave no room for contradictory feelings or ambivalence. But the hidden truth is that ambivalence in motherhood is remarkably commonplace, and may even be the norm. Still, when a woman feels boredom, resentment, aversion, or even just not liking her child at times, she often experiences that feeling, not as a normal human reaction, but as evidence that she is defective, guilty, and even dangerous.

Over my decades as a therapist, I’ve heard countless mothers talk about contradictory, difficult, and complicated feelings toward their kids. These feelings in motherhood are normal, part of the process of mothering. In order to shift the idealized, all-or-nothing, un-meetable expectations about what mothers should feel, women need to first release the judgments they perpetrate on themselves, and against each other. Before anything systemic can evolve, women need to stop shaming and blaming themselves for what are entirely natural feelings that ebb and flow, and that can also change. With permission to feel all her feelings, even about her kids, a woman gets to be a real human being, not just a cartoon cutout of an idealized mother who can’t exist without a host of harsh taboos to keep her in line.

It’s rare for women to find a space safe enough to talk about their relationship with their children, if it doesn’t look and sound a certain way. But when we can become that safe space for ourselves; when there can be space for everything, the whole truth, a space not contingent on the contents of what it holds, then we discover a safety that’s irrevocable and infinite. A safe space that includes everything and excludes nothing, that can hold the whole miracle and catastrophe that we are. We find ourselves as our real safe harbor and true home, a place where all of us is always welcome.

The post A Secret That Some Mothers Will Never Tell appeared first on Nancy Colier.

Diving into an article on sex, you might expect advice on love notes slipped into pockets, date nights in new locations, or, maybe, wearing a trench coat with nothing underneath—all good ideas and certainly ways to build sexiness in a relationship. But I want to address a different aspect of sexual desire, one that on first blush may not sound that sexy, but, in fact, delivers far more bang for its buck than all the trench coats you can drop to the floor.

The most important sex organ in the body, for women, is not below the waist, but rather above the shoulders. That powerful sex organ is the mind. The mind tells the rest of the body I am available for sex, or conversely, I am not available. The mind is the gatekeeper for physical intimacy. That said, if a woman feels emotionally connected to her partner, she is a thousand times (not an evidence-based statistic) more likely to want to have sex with that partner.

We tend to think of foreplay as something that happens in the bedroom, just before sex, as a kind of warmup exercise to prepare the mind and body for what’s to come, like stretching before a run. But foreplay is actually something that happens all day, from the breakfast table to the final toothbrushing. In fact, the least important part of foreplay may be what happens in the bedroom.

Men often view foreplay as a physical activity they do for their partner right before intercourse, to get her aroused mentally and physically and to lubricate the process. This is certainly a part of foreplay, but just a small part. The problem so many women describe is that their male partners don’t make the link (at least not with the clarity women do) between the way they listen to their partner, the quality of their attention throughout the day, and her interest in having sex later that night. For many men, the way they attend to their partner emotionally in the 16 hours leading up to intercourse is completely separate from the sexual event itself. The day is one thing and the night is another—with no thread line between the two. How they engaged with their partner that day has little connection with their partner’s willingness, desire, and availability to engage in intimacy when the time comes.

Feeling an Emotional Connection

The problem is that the strongest aphrodisiac for many women is connection—feeling emotionally connected to their partner. What so many women describe as the ultimate turn on is being listened to. Women tell me again and again that intimacy is most likely to happen when they feel heard, seen, and understood by their partner, when they can share their truth without being told what to do about it. Whether she’s in the mood often comes down to whether her partner was willing to listen and be with her with his full attention, if only for a few moments in the day. The ultimate aphrodisiac may be to simply land in her company and stop trying to get somewhere else.

So, too, women report a greater desire and willingness to have sex when their partner expresses interest in them, when they’re asked substantive questions, not just about the logistics of their life, but about how they are in the midst of those logistics. Women describe the aphrodisiac effect of a partner who’s able to listen with an open mind and heart, without a solution, correction, or answer; without judgment or defensiveness; and without assuming to know her experience.

Small Communications, Touches, and Glances

At the same time, the opportunity for foreplay exists in the seemingly throw-away comments that happen in everyday life: “The birds are singing, so spring must be coming.” “Wow, look at the light coming through the window.” “This coffee you made is perfect.” While these comments technically don’t require a response, in fact, they do need to be acknowledged, if only to confirm that they’ve been received and they matter. These small communications may look irrelevant, but they are important in a relational sense. They are, in fact, “bids” for connection (as the relationship expert John Gottman calls them), micro attempts to connect and create intimacy. When left unattended, unresponded to, or ignored, they break the connection and often leave a woman feeling invisible and irrelevant, and even resentful. When acknowledged, however, these small acknowledgments, particularly when offered with kindness, go a long way in making a woman feel like her thoughts matter. And, ultimately, like she matters. That said, when considering the amount of effort they require, the return on the investment is substantial.

Foreplay is also layered into the small touches and glances that occur in a day, when a hand is placed at the small of the back, or a glance is held for an extra beat. These deeply intimate gestures carry a lot of bang for their buck. They create closeness and, over the course of a day, add up to and create a climate of connection.

Men often report that their wives don’t want to have sex with them, at least not enough. Depending on their story, my advice is frequently the same:

• Listen when your partner speaks.
• When you’re with her, be with her, present and not distracted.
• Remember what she says. Ask follow-up questions.
• Ask her questions about herself, not just the contents of her life.
• Try to simply understand her experience—not solve, explain, improve, or do anything with it. (Listen to her without yourself in the way.)
• Show her that you hear her by responding or acknowledging her words.
• Offer small touches and glances throughout the day.

If you’re in a relationship with a woman and want to have more sex with her, don’t worry so much about upping your technique or sexual game. Instead, focus on how you can pay better attention, listen more attentively, know her more deeply, and be more present with her. Approach the small moments and conversations in a day as your real foreplay, and the most powerful lubricant for a juicy evening.

The post What Puts A Woman in the Mood appeared first on Nancy Colier.