I’ve learned something about myself that I can’t unsee, and now that I’m aware of it, I don’t have the luxury of making excuses anymore, so I have to fix it. In times of interpersonal conflict, especially with my wife and daughter, I’ve developed the ability to check out completely. It’s something I learned at a very young age, and it has followed me into adulthood. My dad helped teach me this, and he did it to try to protect me. When I was very young, six or seven years old,

Are you one-dimensional? Or do you have a thousand personas? Are you who social media says you are? Do you even get to decide? I ended my last post with those questions, and I’ve been thinking about them since, because I think they take us somewhere important but uncomfortable. When you actually get to know someone’s thousand personas, when you’ve done the hard work of vulnerability, of showing up during all the conflict and failure and all the messy in-between things, you re

This is a continuation of our last post: Your 1000 Personas. It goes back to the very first lie. Adam and Eve were living in the fullness and presence of God and they were protected by God from something called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That was God's boundary. That was God saying, "This isn't for you, and it's not because I'm trying to keep something from you. It's because I'm trying to protect you." Then Satan came and told them a lie. He said they were le

There's this Alan Watts quote that says (and I’m paraphrasing) there are a thousand different versions of you floating around in people's minds, and not a single one of them is the real you. A version of you exists in each person's experience, but your “you” itself isn't the only one. Isn’t that an interesting thing to think about? To some people you're the quiet one who doesn't speak much. To others you're the guy who won't shut up. Some see you as cold and distant, even mea