I hear this all the time in sessions. A grandmother who died before you were born. An uncle no one talks about. A baby lost before you arrived. "How can they affect my life? I never knew them."

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.