When Other People’s Feelings Feel Like Yours

One of the most common themes I see with my clients and one I lived inside for decades is this experience of feeling other people’s feelings.

It’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived it.

It’s like being permeable. Like there’s no membrane between you and the emotional world around you. Other people’s emotions don’t just register. They enter. They move through you. They take up…

One of the most painful patterns I see, both in my own life and in my work with clients, is this
we often end up sabotaging the very thing we want most.

Nowhere is this more true than in romantic relationships.

We long for connection, security, belonging, intimacy.
And yet, without realizing it, we behave in ways that quietly undermine those very desires.

Let me show you what I mean.

First…

Featuring work by Beatriz Olson, MD

In Unmuted — The Return of Color, Beatriz Olson presents a body of work that traces her journey back to voice, embodiment, and the full spectrum of color that once lay quiet beneath the demands of culture, profession, and expectation. As a Cuban immigrant, physician, and woman shaped by systems that reward discipline and invisibility, Olson learned early to mute aspects of herself in order to navigate the world. These…

I once had a conversation with a sponsee who was sitting with a knot in her stomach. That conversation has stuck with me for years, and I’ve used it in coaching sessions with my clients.

She’d gifted a significant amount of money to one of her adult children. Her older child had always been financially independent. Paid their own way through college. Came up with their own down payment. Never needed rescuing.

Her younger child had a very different history,…