Trust can also look like no longer speaking to your parents, quitting a well-paid job, or divorcing the "perfect match." Trust is not blind.

We repeat what we never saw done differently. We try to repair what was never repaired. I don't know who raised these young men. But in my work, two patterns come up again and again. A boy who watched his father being diminished  and/or emasculated by his mother, and who unconsciously wants revenge on the feminine.

Let's start there. You don't need to have had a traumatic childhood. You don't need to be in crisis. You don't need to have a complicated relationship with your parents.

The only consistency in life is change. We know this. We also know that we're scared of change, even though every day is a new one, we're never going to live the same day twice. And yet, when we're facing a change that requires our own impulse, our own command, we most often freeze. We get paralyzed.

Heavy periods. Periods that show up early. A cycle that feels louder than it used to. We tend to treat these as isolated problems, something to manage, medicate, or ignore. But in the body, nothing happens in isolation.

We run away from what we want, hoping that what we know will eventually become what we want. Such is the complexity of being human.