This past weekend, my wife and I just moved to a new home for the 9th time since 2022. You ever heard the term, “ambiguous loss”? It describes that kind of loss that defies closure, that can be hard to explain, not only to others but even to yourself. In the past 5 years – … Read more
First, I’ve got huuuuuuge news: My wife (Silvy Khoucasian) and I just signed with a literary agent to write a book together. Yeah. We’re super pumped. While not a literal baby (if you’ve been following my work a while you might have thought/wished that the big news), but it is .. *ahem … a literary … Read more
Part 3: Beyond Right and Wrong .. and Betrayal. “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there’s a field. I’ll meet you there.” ~ Rumi Many years ago, I discovered a powerful practice that helps couples tell better stories in their relationships. Whether of past painful breakdowns, or happy memories they remember differently, this simple … Read more
Part 2: Relationship Isn’t a Real Thing. If you’ve experienced someone close to you – a sibling, parent, old friend, or intimate lover – hold (tell) some story about you in a way that felt harsh, one-sided, dismissive of your actual experience, or perhaps ignorant and devoid of curiosity, or simply lacked generosity in how … Read more
Part 1: My Story Isn’t The Same As Our Story The story of how I met my wife, Silvy, ten years ago is straight up magic. And for the first few months after we met, whenever she and I were with friends, I delighted in telling it to anyone who asked. But after patiently enduring … Read more
As a child I learned to not need much – or at least pretend I didn’t. Like many kids I had great parents who loved me, kept me safe and provided for. Also like many kids, I experienced a consistent absence of empathetic emotional attunement from the adults around me. So when my sensitive little … Read more
There’s a dangerous idea floating around our world like poisonous spore that masculine leadership means simply: “man leads, woman follows.” This ideal obviously runs deep in many patriarchal religions, but you’ll also run into it in the world of “conscious polarity” where often charismatic teachers insist relationships work best when a ”man is in his … Read more
Daddy issues.Only women have daddy issues … is what I was led to believe by countless other boys and men I know now were themselves just teeming with unexamined daddy issues.(like nipples, men have ‘em, too.)My father has been overwhelmingly absent throughout my life. I used to think, “How could he have messed me up? … Read more
Earlier this week, my wife showed me three photos of young children, two girls and a little boy each maybe 3 or 4 years old, that she’d made using an app that combined her image with mine. This is what our children might have looked like, children we learned not long ago we are biologically … Read more
This week, I’m off to the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for my annual ELEVATE Men’s Retreat. It is an unspoken epidemic – with unfathomable repercussions – that so many men do not trust other men. For when a man cannot trust other men, it may reflect in the struggle to fully trust … Read more