The Mind, Brain, Body Digest

7 Types of Situationships, Ranked by Recovery Time 🧠

Cody Isabel | Neuroscience — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:34:20 GMT

TL;DR Summary:

There’s a criterion for ranking these that has nothing to do with duration, chemistry, or whether you ever slept together. Once you see it, the ranking gets obvious and a little horrifying.
The number one spot goes to the one with the least physical evidence. No sex. Sometimes not even a kiss.
One of these ranks LOWER than you’d expect for a reason you’re not gonna like: it wrecked you loudly, and everyone knew about it.
There’s a psychologist at Columbia who studies secrets, and his main finding explains exactly why the one you never told anyone about is the one still running at 2am.
Three reasons these hold on this long. Only one of them is about him.
And a three-step protocol for closing the loop yourself, since nobody is coming over here to close it for you.

Let’s Talk About the Ones That “Didn’t Count”

I’ve had women describe a six-week talking stage to me in more detail than I get about their marriages.

Same specificity. More emotion. And way more shame about still being upset, because “it wasn’t even a relationship, I don’t know why I’m like this.”

So lemme say something I’ve noticed after nearly a decade doing this…

Oftentimes the relationship that takes you the longest to get over is the one you can’t prove happened.

Not the marriage. Not the four-year one with the shared lease and the dog you still think about.

The one with no photos, no anniversary, no mutual friends who’d validate you, and no moment you could point to and say “that’s when it ended.”

I’ve watched women walk out of a divorce in eleven months and still be carrying a five-month situationship from 2022 around in their purse.

Not because she’s dramatic. Because her brain never got the one thing it needed to file it away, and I’m gonna show you exactly what that is.

So today we’re ranking seven types of almost-relationships by how long each one keeps you.

Then the three reasons they stick (the third one is gonna sting, sorry).

And of course, a protocol for actually closing the loop, you know, I wouldn’t leave you hanging :)

Let’s dive in!

First, How I’m Ranking These

I ranked these thinking about how your nervous system keeps score.

Which means recovery time doesn’t track how long it lasted or how much it hurt.

It tracks how much unfinished prediction it left behind, and how little permission you had to grieve it.

Two dials. That’s it.

Unfinished prediction: your brain forecast that this was going somewhere and never got a result. Confirmed or denied, either would do. It got static instead, and a prediction that never resolves stays active. Which is why you’re still running scenarios about a man who stopped texting in March.
Permission: whether anybody, including you, treated the loss as real. Witnessed grief moves. Dismissed grief goes underground and keeps running. Dr. Kenneth Doka calls this disenfranchised grief. It’s loss the world doesn’t consider legitimate, so it never gets the rituals or the check-in texts or the three days off work.

Run those two dials on any almost-relationship, and the ranking builds itself, which is how the short ones end up outranking the long ones.

Ight, let’s break ‘em down!

#7: The Talking Stage That Never Graduated

Four months of texting. Maybe three dates. Possibly zero.

Voice notes, memes at midnight, a thread so long it had its own inside jokes and a shared vocabulary.

And then it just... thinned out. Slower replies. Shorter ones. Now he likes your stories but doesn’t respond to them, which is somehow worse than nothing???

It lands at seven because the investment was genuinely low, and there’s usually enough absurdity available to snap you out of it (”I have never seen this man eat food in person”).

But it’s ON the list. If you’ve been carrying one for eight months while telling everybody you’re fine, you’re not crazy.

You just got hit by the cleanest reinforcement schedule ever invented.

Why It Sticks

Dopamine doesn’t fire hardest for reward. It fires hardest for reward you can’t predict.

A man who responds instantly every time is pleasant and forgettable.

A man who responds Tuesday instantly, vanishes Wednesday, and sends a paragraph at 1am Thursday is running a variable ratio schedule on your reward system.

As I’ve mentioned many times, this is the same schedule slot machines use, and for that same reason, it’s the hardest one to extinguish.

Then there’s the second problem… You had almost no data.

You never watched him handle a canceled flight, or be boring on a Sunday, or get weird about money.

Your brain is a prediction machine, and it does not tolerate blank space, so it filled every gap with the most available material, which was YOU.

You weren’t obsessed with him. You were obsessed with a character you were mostly writing. (Sorry, not sorry...)

What She Calls It in Session

Nobody walks in and says “talking stage.” What I actually get is:

“We were basically together, we just never really...” and then a trail off
“I know it sounds stupid because we only met up twice”
“It was just really easy to talk to him, you know?”
“I think I built it up in my head” (said as self-criticism, when it’s actually the correct diagnosis)
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#6: The Friend You Started Sleeping With…

You’ve known him for years. Then one night the category changed, and nobody announced it.

Which means there was never a day it changed back.

He’s still in the group chat, still at the birthday dinners, still gonna be at the wedding in October…

Number six, and the ONLY reason it isn’t higher is that proximity cuts both ways: you get to watch him be mediocre in real time, which quietly does some of the work for you.

Why It Sticks

Extinction learning doesn’t delete the old association.

It builds a competing one on top, and the new learning is heavily context-dependent.

Which is a technical way of saying: your brain can learn “he’s not mine” in your apartment on a Tuesday, and then completely lose that learning the second you walk into a bar where he’s standing by the pool table doing the thing he does.

Same room, same people, same lighting. Old file reopens.

And there’s no ending to point at. A breakup is at minimum an event.

This had no event. Nothing announced, nothing severed, nothing mourned, and the man never went anywhere.

So how would your nervous system know it’s over? Nothing ever happened.

#5: The Label Ban

He told you. Up front, first month, clear as day: he’s not looking for anything serious right now.

And then he called you every night for five months.

Met your sister. Kept a toothbrush at your place. Got visibly weird when you mentioned another guy.

So which one was the truth?

Your body already answered that question, and it wasn’t wrong to.

Why It Sticks

Your attachment system doesn’t run on announcements. It runs on contingency, meaning it tracks what predicts what, over and over, below the level of your opinions about it.

He said “nothing serious” once. Then he behaved like a partner roughly 400 times.

You weighted the 400 over the one comment.

That’s not a malfunction. What a man repeatedly DOES has always been the better predictor of what he’ll do next than what he announced at the start.

When it ends, though, you get zero grief permission.

Not from your friends (”babe, he told you”), not from him (”I was always honest with you”), and worst of all, not from yourself.

So the pain converts into something more socially acceptable, and what it converts into is self-blame.

Which you can hold indefinitely, because unlike grief, self-blame has no endpoint. Grief burns out. Self-criticism compounds.

You didn’t ignore a red flag.

You correctly read five months of behavioral evidence, and he collected the benefits of a relationship while keeping a sentence in his back pocket that made it your fault.

Both things are true: he was technically honest, and what he did was unkind. Those don’t cancel out.

“He was just emotionally unavailable”
“I knew what I was signing up for” (she did not sign up for five months of it)
“That’s on me for catching feelings”
“I should’ve left at like week three”

#4: The On-Again, Off-Again

Four rounds. Maybe six. You genuinely can’t remember if the Barcelona trip was round two or round three.

Every time you get about three weeks of clarity, he shows up different. Softer. Self-aware. Sometimes he’s been to therapy, which is the most dangerous version of him, lowkey.

You’re probably expecting this at number one, and I get it. By sheer volume of suffering, it’s a heavyweight.

But it’s number four for a reason. I’ll explain.

Why It Sticks

Two mechanisms, stacked.

First, partial reinforcement. Behavior that gets rewarded intermittently is MORE resistant to extinction than behavior rewarded every time.

So every reunion isn’t just a reunion. It’s a training rep, and what it trains is: waiting works.

Second, the bigger one: memories become briefly editable when they’re reactivated, then they re-stabilize.

That window is where old emotional learning actually updates.

In fact, it’s the neuroscience mechanism underneath most real therapeutic change.

You were about four weeks into that window every single time he came back.

So the file never finished updating.

It kept getting reopened at the exact moment it was starting to close, which is why you can have three years of evidence and still not KNOW your safe.

Dr. René Dailey’s research lab has studied cyclical relationships for over a decade, and the consistent finding is that on-off partners report more relational uncertainty and more distress than stable couples OR people who ended it cleanly.

Uncertainty is the active ingredient. Not the breakups.

So why only four?

Because you have an absolute MOUNTAIN of data on this man. You’ve seen him at his worst, repeatedly, with witnesses. Idealization can’t survive that.

And you had permission. Your friends knew. They had a dossier and a group chat named after him. You cried in public about it more than once.

Loud grief is grief that gets to finish.

That’s the whole reason this one recovers faster than the four quiet ones below, once you actually make the final cut.

#3: The Wrong Timing One

I’ve lived this one out in real time; it sucks.

He was moving to Denver. Or he was two months out of a seven-year relationship.

Or you were in different life stages, or he was “just not in a place to give you what you deserve,” which he said while looking devastated about it.

And the connection was REAL.

That’s what makes this one different from everything above it. There was something actually there.

There was also an obstacle, and the obstacle is the problem.

Why This One Won’t Close

The obstacle protected him from ever being evaluated.

You never watched him get bored of you. Never saw how he handles your bad week, whether he shows up when it’s inconvenient, or what he’s like when there’s nothing left to be charming about.

Love is built on capacity, not potential. Who is he on average, not at his best?

And the whole thing lived at his best, because the circumstances never let it run long enough to average out.

So what’s preserved in your memory isn’t a man. It’s an unfalsified hypothesis.

And a hypothesis you were never allowed to test stays interesting forever, which is why he shows up in your head at inconvenient times looking suspiciously well-lit.

There’s a second trap the other six don’t have: this one gets socially rewarded.

Tell people about the wrong-timing guy, and they don’t reality-test you.

They go, “aw, that’s so sad.” Sometimes “you never know, maybe in a few years.”

Your friends are accidentally maintaining the loop for you, which is a hell of a thing to accuse them of at brunch, so maybe don’t do that lol…

“The timing was just off” might be the most expensive sentence in modern dating, and it gets said to me at least once a week.

#2: The One That Ended Right Before It Got Real

This one’s cruel, and it’s cruel in a very specific way.

It was ESCALATING. That’s the whole thing.

More frequent, more intimate, more future-tense.

He was introducing you to people. There was a trip being loosely discussed. You’d started saying “we” without noticing.

And then it stopped.

No fight. No obstacle. No speech.

Just a gradual cooling that you noticed about nine days after it started, and by the time you could name it, it had already happened.

Why This One Won’t Close

You lost two things, and you’ve only been grieving one of them.

Him, and the version of your life you’d already started living in.

Researchers studied what happens to the self after a relationship ends, and found that the drop in self-concept clarity (how clearly you know who you are) independently predicted emotional distress.

Separate from sadness about the partner. Its own thing.

You’d started reorganizing around a future.

Then the future got deleted, and the part of you living there had nowhere to go.

Then there’s the ambiguity, which is the real killer.

Dr. Pauline Boss built a framework around what she calls ambiguous loss: loss with no verification, no confirmation, nothing to point at.

Her core finding across decades is that ambiguity itself freezes grief.

Not the severity of the loss. The uncertainty.

Dr. Leslie LeFebvre studied this in people who’d been ghosted and found they engage in ongoing “account-making,” constructing and reconstructing explanations that never terminate, because no external information exists to stop the process.

You’re not overthinking.

You’re running an unbounded search on a problem with no answer key in the room :/

“I think I overthought it and scared him off”
“I must have done something; it was going so well”
“I just want to know what happened, that’s all”
“I’m not even mad, I’m just confused” (she is extremely mad, and the confusion is what’s been holding the anger hostage)

#1: The Emotional Affair

One of you was taken. Maybe both of you.

And nothing happened. That’s the part everyone leads with, including you, and it’s the exact reason this is number one instead of unranked.

Nothing happened, technically.

No sex. Maybe not even a kiss.

What there WAS, was the entire emotional architecture of a relationship.

He knew about your dad. You knew what he sounded like when he was tired.

He was the first person you wanted to tell when anything happened, and at some point that stopped seeming remarkable.

Then it ended. He recommitted, or you ended it because you couldn’t keep living in it, or someone found out, or it just went quiet.

And you told absolutely nobody.

It’s number one because it’s the only one where all three engines run at once with the pressure valve welded shut.

Let’s start with the data.

Whatever you had was assembled entirely out of peak material.

No logistics, no dishes, no money conversations, no watching him be short with a waiter because his day was bad.

So there’s nothing to disconfirm.

Less counter-evidence than on any of the six above this one, and more emotional intimacy.

That combination is unique to this one.

Plus the grief has nowhere to land, because guilt gets there first.

You can’t be sad about him without first prosecuting yourself, and the prosecution is very good at its job.

So the sadness never gets processed as sadness. It gets filed as evidence against you.

And then the secrecy, which is where this gets dark.

Dr. Michael Slepian at Columbia has the most interesting work on this.

Across ten studies and more than 13,000 secrets, he found the harm of a secret doesn’t come from the moments of actively hiding it.

Those are rare, brief, and people handle them fine.

It comes from mind-wandering to it. From being alone with it.

It was the frequency of spontaneously thinking about a secret that predicted lower well-being.

Not the frequency of concealing it.

It was never the hiding that was hurting you.

It’s that you’ve been alone with it, at red lights and in the shower and at 2am, with no one to say it out loud to and no one to tell you it made sense.

Every other loss on this list got SOMETHING.

A friend who said “he was trash anyway.” A cry in a car with somebody in the passenger seat. One drunk 45-minute recap that got it outta your body for a night.

This one got nothing. Not a single witness, start to finish.

A loss with no witness doesn’t get smaller with time. It just gets quieter, and quiet is not the same as resolved.

So it’s still running. Years later, on a random Thursday, fully intact, because it never got the one thing every other grief gets by default: somebody else agreeing it happened.

Oh, and it never arrives in session as “I had an emotional affair.”

It arrives as:

“There’s someone from work I was close to, it’s not a big deal”
“It was never physical, so it’s not like it counts”
“He’s just a really good friend, or he was”
“I’ve never actually said this out loud to anyone”

That last one is usually said about twenty minutes in, right after a long pause.

Alright, So Why Are You Still In This

The ranking explains why these are hard.

It doesn’t explain what led you to each of them.

I’ve found 3 common reasons when working with my peeps.

Reason 1: Unfinished Heartbreak

Different man. Different city. Different story about why this one’s complicated.

Same shape.

And at some point you’ve done the math and landed on “I must just attract these men,” but that’s not what’s happening.

What’s actually happening is quieter and a lot more fixable: certain Parts of you find certain dynamics unusually compelling.

Not good. Not safe. Familiar.

And familiar is the thing your system keeps mistaking for right.

Because a Part that spent years doing a job is very, very good at spotting an opening to do it again.

Here’s the roster of Parts I see the most often. See who you recognize:

The Chosen One. “If someone this unavailable picks me, it proves I’m enough.”
The Fixer. “He’s not unavailable, he’s hurt.”
The Cool Girl. “Don’t ask for too much.”
The Panic. “Don’t lose him.”
The Translator. “This is chemistry.”

Every one of these was built at a time in your life when it worked, and it protected something real.

They’re just still running the protocol in rooms where it isn’t needed anymore.

The hardest part is that you almost always clock the problem correctly; you just ignore the signal…

You notice: he disappears after we get close. A Part of you says: “he’s scared because he likes me so much.”
You notice: I can’t bring up what I need. A Part of you says: “I just need to give him more space.”
You notice: I’m doing all of the emotional labor. A Part of you says: “relationships take work.”
You notice: his words and his behavior don’t match. A Part of you says: “but I know who he really is underneath all this.”

You didn’t miss a red flag. Not one. You saw every one of them.

They just got explained away in under two seconds by a Part with a job to protect you.

So you don’t need a better detector.

Your detector is excellent. What you need to do is listen to it.

So the question is: What did I notice, before a Part explained it away?

That’s the whole compass, and it’s inside of you, not outside.

Reason 2: You Were Sold on What COULD Be, Not What IS

You weren’t in a relationship with him. You were in a relationship with the version of him that was always about to show up.

The one who was gonna be ready in a few months. The one who was like this because of his ex.

The one you saw ONE time, for maybe an hour, when he was open and vulnerable, and you thought, “there he is, that’s who he actually is.”

He wasn’t. That was his ceiling, not his floor. And you’ve been dating the ceiling.

And the almost is the perfect habitat for this, because it never lasts long enough to produce an average.

A real relationship forces the average on you whether you like it or not.

An almost gives you a handful of spectacular data points and cuts before the mean shows up.

You didn’t misjudge him. You graded him on a sample too small to be real, and he picked the sample.

Reason 3: Some PART of You Picked the Ambiguity

An almost-relationship gives you the full experience of longing with none of the exposure.

You get to be devoted. You get the enormity of it. You get intensity a real relationship rarely delivers past month eight.

And you never once have to be fully known by someone who stays.

Now think about which of those is more dangerous to a nervous system that learned early that being fully seen gets followed by being left.

Longing is survivable. It hurts, but it’s a pain you already know how to hold.

Being chosen, consistently, by a man who sticks around long enough to see all of it? That’s the unrehearsed one.

If every relationship you’ve picked in five years had a built-in exit, that is not bad luck, unfortunately...

That’s a selection strategy, and it’s protecting you from something.

And that Part of you is not sabotaging you.

It built this strategy at a point in your life when it was correct.

Something taught it that full exposure gets punished; it believed that, and it’s been running protection ever since.

It’s not the enemy. It’s working off a wildly outdated threat assessment, and it’s never once been asked to update.

So, what can you do about these things?

You read my mind (or did I read yours?) :)

What To Actually Do About It

Three steps, one per reason.

Figure out which reason is loudest and start there.

Step 1: Deliver the Verdict Yourself (for unfinished heartbreak)

Dr. Pauline Boss wrote a paper with Dr. Donna Carnes called “The Myth of Closure,” arguing that closure as most people picture it (a clean external event that ends the pain) mostly doesn’t exist, and waiting on it keeps people frozen for years.

So stop waiting for him to hand it over. You’re issuing it.

This has 3 parts.

Part One

Write the behavioral record.

Every significant thing he DID, in order, with dates where you’ve got them.

Only behavior. “Told me he wasn’t ready, then asked to meet my sister in April.”

Not “he was scared of intimacy.”

Motive lines are what keep this open.

A story with an unknown variable can be re-run forever, and yours has been running on that variable since the day it ended.

Part Two

Write the verdict.

One sentence, plain language, no “but,” no generous interpretation tacked on the end.

“He was not willing to be in a relationship with me, and he was willing to take all the benefits of one.”

That’s a verdict.

“I think he had a lot going on and maybe wasn’t in a place to...” is a defense attorney, and she’s been billing you for a year.

Part Three

Say it out loud, then destroy the record.

Out loud matters. Reading it silently keeps this inside the same rumination loop that’s been failing you.

Speaking engages your body, which is the system actually holding it.

Then burn it, shred it, delete it. The destruction IS the ritual, and this loss never got one.

Hard rule: you run this ONCE. Going back to reread it isn’t processing, that’s relapse in a productive outfit.

I go through the full version of this process in my free masterclass, including what to do when the verdict won’t stick and you catch yourself relitigating it a week later.

Free Masterclass

Step 2: Capacity Column, Potential Column (for what COULD be)

Two columns on one page.

Left column, capacity: what he consistently, repeatedly provided. Things that happened more than twice.
Right column, potential: what he said, implied, showed you once, or what you filled in yourself.

Be brutal about the sorting. “He was so emotionally intelligent” goes right, unless he used that intelligence ON you in a moment when it cost him something.

Then count. For most women running this, the left column has four items and the right one runs off the page.

That gap is the relationship you’ve been grieving.

It never existed outside your head, and I’m not saying that to be cruel.

I’m saying it because you can’t grieve your way out of something that didn’t happen.

You can only stop maintaining it.

Step 3: Find the PART That Keeps Picking the Exit (for choosing the ambiguity)

Steps one and two clean up what already happened.

This one is about what happens next.

And actually do it, don’t just read it. Hour alone, phone in another room.

Find it in your body. Picture yourself with someone stable, consistent, available, who isn’t going anywhere. Notice what happens physically. Chest tightens? Something drops? Sudden boredom (the most common one, and the most misread)? Don’t analyze it. Just locate it.
Notice how you feel toward it. Annoyed? Ashamed? See if you can find even 5% curiosity instead. You can’t get to know a part of yourself you’re currently prosecuting.
Unblend. “This is a part of me. It’s not all of me.” You’re not a woman addicted to unavailable men. You’re a woman with a PART of her that’s committed to keeping an exit open.
Ask what it’s afraid would happen if it didn’t do this job. Don’t tell it it’s wrong. Just ask. The answer is almost always some version of if he never fully has me, he can never fully leave. If something from age 6 shows up, that’s not a tangent. That’s the source.
Update it. That part gathered its information when you were small, had no power, and couldn’t leave. Nobody’s told it you’re an adult with your own money, your own home, and the demonstrated ability to survive being left. Tell it. Not as a mantra. As new information for a system working off a file it wrote decades ago.

Then two rules, so you don’t end up back here in March with somebody new:

The ambiguity clock. Undefined is fine early. Undefined past a point you set IN ADVANCE, in writing, before you’re attached, is information. Pick the number today. Eight weeks, ten, whatever fits your life. Deciding what you’ll tolerate while you’re already bonded isn’t deciding; that’s negotiating with yourself on his behalf.
The narration catch. The second you hear yourself explaining his potential to a friend, that’s the tripwire. Not a red flag about him. A data point about which column you’re living in.

These are small reps. They’re boring.

And they’re the difference between reading this blog and not doing this again next year.

One Last Thing

The thing you’ve been calling “I’m still not over him” has mostly never been about him.

It’s been a question your brain hasn’t been able to close, and a grief that nobody ever gave you permission to have.

Neither of those requires his participation to resolve, which is convenient, because he was never going to participate.

You’ve been waiting on a verdict from a man who left the building.

You can issue it yourself this week, and your nervous system will accept it, because it was never about who delivered it.

It was about whether it ever got delivered at all.

The ones you can’t prove happened are still real.

You just have to be the one who says so.

Start there.

Everything else gets easier once that loop is closed, promise!

You’ve got this, and until next time… Live Heroically 🧠

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Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Bouton, M. E. (2004). Context and behavioral processes in extinction. Learning & Memory, 11(5), 485-494. https://doi.org/10.1101/lm.78804
Monfils, M. H., Cowansage, K. K., Klann, E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2009). Extinction-reconsolidation boundaries: Key to persistent attenuation of fear memories. Science, 324(5929), 951-955. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1167975
Schiller, D., Monfils, M. H., Raio, C. M., Johnson, D. C., LeDoux, J. E., & Phelps, E. A. (2010). Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms. Nature, 463(7277), 49-53. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08637
Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Which one did I rank wrong? Lemme know below!

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This article is educational in nature and not a substitute for therapy. If attachment wounds or relational trauma are impacting your well-being, working with a trauma therapist can help your nervous system relearn safety in connection.

“How Do I Say It So He'll Finally Hear Me?" (You Already Did.) 🧠

Cody Isabel | Neuroscience — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:51:39 GMT

TL;DR Summary:

There’s a sentence sitting in paragraph two of almost every message I get about this, and it’s the answer to the question being asked in paragraph five.
You’ve been treating the boundary like a lever. It was never a lever. It was an instrument, and it already gave you a reading.
The reason you can’t stop rewording it has a name in learning theory, and it’s the same reason slot machines work. It is not weakness and it is not stupidity.
There’s a variable in the research on why people stay that has almost nothing to do with him, and it’s the one quietly running your entire decision.
One study found it wasn’t the years that made people stay in an unhappy relationship. It was something else you’ve been doing more of every single week.
Being a project still has hope in it. A decision doesn’t. That’s the whole blog, and you’re gonna hate the last layer.

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The Message I’ve Read Four Hundred Times

It shows up in my DMs, in my She Rises Community, in comments, in first sessions with clients.

Four paragraphs, sometimes six. A timeline. Occasionally a screenshot.

She’s tried saying it soft. She’s tried saying it direct. She waited for a calm moment because last time she brought it up during a fight and figured that was the problem. She used an “I feel” statement. She used the one from the podcast. She’s read two books on this. She’s in therapy.

And NOTHING is working; she’s tried EVERYTHING…

And then the last line is always the same: What should I do? Or should I give him a consequence?

Here’s the part that took me a few hundred of these to notice.

The answer is already in the message. Usually by paragraph two. Written by her, in her own words, in more detail than I could ever collect myself.

She has documented eighteen months of behavior with better recall than most people have for their own childhoods.

She knows what he said in March. She knows what he did in June. She knows exactly how long the good stretch lasted after the last big conversation.

You’ve tried EVERYTHING except the ONE THING that will change anything.

So this isn’t a blog about what to say to him. There are nine thousand of those, and you’ve read most of ‘em.

This is about what you’re doing with answers you already have, and why you can’t act on them yet.

We’re gonna go one layer at a time, step by excruciating step.

Let’s dive in!

Your Experiments Are Broken

You came for a better sentence. Or a better boundary, or a consequence framework, or the magic phrasing that finally gets through.

And I think some part of you is expecting me to say your tools weren’t good enough.

Nah.

The tools worked perfectly. That’s the problem. Every single boundary you set came back with a clean result, and you didn’t like the result, so you ran it again.

A boundary is an experiment.

You set it, and then you watch what happens, and what happens tells you who you’re dealing with.

It’s a diagnostic that you’ve been swinging like a crowbar.

Which means you’re not failing to communicate, and you’re not bad at this.

You’re running broken experiments. Dozens of them, actually.

They’re broken in four specific ways, and underneath each is a reason you need it broken.

Layer One: The Bad Experiment

Let’s start with the mechanics, because they’re the least threatening part and they’re also embarrassingly easy to verify against your own text history.

Here’s what a bad experiment looks like:

You change every variable at once. New phrasing, new tone, new timing, plus you’ve also decided to be less reactive this month. Something shifts a little, and you have no idea which input did it. Neither does he.
You never define failure in advance. You never once decided, before the conversation, what result would mean “this isn’t happening.” So no result can ever mean that.
There’s no endpoint. No round count, no window, no deadline. An experiment with no stopping rule cannot produce a conclusion. It can only produce another round.
A bad result triggers a redesign instead of a decision. Nothing changed after the last talk, so you refine the talk. That’s not analysis, that’s a rewrite.

Notice that all four of those keep the experiment open.

An experiment with no falsifiable outcome isn’t an experiment.

It’s a ritual. And rituals aren’t designed to produce findings.

They’re designed to make you feel less powerless while you wait…

Layer Two: You’re Not Missing the Data. You’re Disqualifying It.

Okay, so why doesn’t the bad design get fixed?

Because you’re not actually missing the results.

You saw every one of them in real time. And then you threw each one out with a reason.

Nobody comes into a first session and says “he doesn’t care that this hurts me.” Nobody.

In thousands of sessions I’ve heard it maybe twice, and both times the woman was already halfway out the door.

What I hear instead:

“He’s under a lot of stress right now.”
“He never had this modeled for him growing up.”
“I probably came in a little hot, so.”
“He’s just not great with emotional stuff.”
“He did do it that one time, though.”
“I don’t think he even realizes he’s doing it.”

Every one of those might be true. That’s what makes them work.

This is motivated reasoning, and it’s one of the most replicated findings in social psychology.

You don’t reason toward the truth. You reason toward the conclusion you can afford, and then you stop looking.

The searching feels exactly like thinking. It feels rigorous. It feels fair-minded, even.

And notice the direction of the excuses.

Every single one moves the cause off of “what he chose” and onto something neither of you can be blamed for.

Stress. Upbringing. Her tone.

This is not a perception problem. Your perception is excellent.

It’s just aimed at a conclusion you picked before you started looking…

Layer Three: It Worked Once

Now we get to the compassionate part, because the disqualifying isn’t delusional.

It’s evidence-based, which is what makes it so sticky.

He did change once for six days, or two weeks, or that whole month in the spring.

And it was real. He wasn’t running a con. He meant it when he said it, and he did it, and it was so good that you can still describe that stretch in detail.

Then it faded. And every conversation since has been an attempt to get back to that month.

In learning theory, the most persistent behavior on earth isn’t the behavior that gets rewarded every time.

It’s the behavior that gets rewarded unpredictably.

Rats, pigeons, humans, slot machines… Same finding since the 1930s: when the payoff is intermittent, the behavior takes dramatically longer to extinguish.

The not-knowing is the engine. Predictable failure is easy to quit. It’s the maybe that keeps you pulling.

To be clear, this is lab work on reinforcement schedules, so I’m applying it to your relationship by analogy, not claiming somebody ran this study on your boyfriend, but you get my point.

Here’s where most people get this wrong and start writing him off as a manipulator.

He probably wasn’t performing. Those six days weren’t bait.

They were the top of his capacity, and capacity is not a promise. It’s a ceiling.

He showed you what he can do at maximum effort under maximum motivation, and it turns out he can’t live there.

That’s not evil… That’s a nervous system with a limit.

But you filed it under “proof of what’s possible,” when the actual finding was “this is the sample he cannot sustain.”

Same six days. Two completely different readings.

One of them keeps you here for another year.

Layer Four: You’d Rather Be a Project

Why is that, you ask? Easy.

Rewriting the sentence is the activity that lets you avoid the decision.

And you’d rather be a project than a person who has to grieve, because a project still has hope in it and a decision doesn’t.

As long as you are the variable, the outcome is still open.

As long as the outcome is open, nothing has to be mourned.

There’s still a version where you find the words, and he softens and the last three years turn out to have been the hard part of a good story.

Making yourself the project isn’t laziness. It’s the opposite, and that’s exactly why it’s so effective.

It’s effortful, sincere, expensive, and completely uncriticizable.

Nobody in your life is gonna tell you to stop working on yourself.

Your therapist won’t. Your friends won’t.

I, on the other hand, have no issue telling you this :)

It’s the most sophisticated stalling mechanism available to a high-achieving woman, because it’s indistinguishable from growth.

In fact, when a research team tested this with about nine hundred people, giving them an unhappy relationship scenario and varying what had already been invested, time invested didn’t reliably move the decision to stay.

Effort did.

It’s not the years that trap you. It’s the work.

Every draft you write raises the cost of concluding it didn’t work, which makes you more likely to write another one.

The loop feeds itself.

You are not stuck because you haven’t tried hard enough. You’re stuck partly because of how hard you’ve tried.

Me Too…

I did this in my last relationship…

I worked on myself and the relationship, like it was my job.

I got more emotionally available. I got better at regulating instead of going quiet. I worked on being less passive, on asking for what I wanted, on all the stuff I teach.

And I was genuinely improving. That part wasn’t fake.

What I was not doing was looking directly at the fact that her capacity was shrinking. Month over month. Less presence, less reaching, less of her in the room.

I had the data. I could’ve drawn you the graph.

But I had a much more comfortable project available, which was me.

And as long as I was the variable, I never had to sit down and ask what I was gonna do about a partner who had less for me every month.

Then it ended, “out of nowhere.”

Except it wasn’t out of nowhere.

It was out of eleven months of somewhere that I had watched happen and filed under “things I can fix by being better.”

Blindsided is what I called it for a long time.

What actually happened is that I ignored the information that was right in front of my face because accepting it would mean I’d have to make a very difficult decision.

Layer Five: You Already Thought You Were the Problem

This is the floor. Everything above has been sitting on this the whole time.

Making yourself the project only feels natural if some Part of you was already pretty sure you were the reason.

Yep, I said it.

And that Part did not show up when he did. She was there WAY before him.

Nobody says this out loud, obviously. In a first session it comes out like:

“I know I’m a lot.”
“I just need to work on my communication.”
“I don’t wanna be needy about it.”
“I’m honestly not the easiest person to be with.”
“He’s got his stuff, but I’ve got mine too, so.”

Underneath all five of those is one belief, and it’s older than this relationship: love is something you earn by being enough, and when it goes wrong, the math says you weren’t.

Which is why the project feels safe.

It doesn’t threaten the belief. It confirms it.

Every draft you write is one more piece of evidence that yes, this is on you, and yes, you can fix it if you’re good enough, and that hurts a lot less than the alternative.

The alternative being: he’s not giving you what you asked for, you are not the reason, and you’d have to leave a relationship you can’t prove you did anything wrong in.

And me? Same floor, different room.

What I actually believed, underneath eleven months of self-improvement, was that her capacity was a referendum on me.

That if I got emotionally available enough, regulated enough, present enough, she’d have more to give.

Her shrinking was a scoreboard, and I was losing, and I could still win.

It never once occurred to me that she just had less, and it wasn’t about me at all.

You cannot work your way out of a worthiness problem.

That’s why nothing you said worked, and it’s why nothing you say next will either.

The sentence was never the variable.

What you believe you’re allowed to want is the variable.

Ok, Cody, thank you for dissecting my brain yet again…

What can I DO about this???

Great question, so glad you asked :)

The Evidence Protocol

Five steps. Four of them are the things you’ve been skipping, in order.

The fifth is the one that makes the other four possible, and it’s the only one that isn’t about him at all.

Oh, and none of them involves finding better words.

Step 1: Listen

Not to what he says. To what has happened since the last time you said it.

Pick a window. Thirty days, backwards from today.

Write down what actually occurred, behavior only, no interpretation and no context you added to make it make sense.

He said he’d handle it. Did the thing happen or not?

Written down matters. Your memory is not neutral here, and it will smooth this for you if you let it work from vibes.

Step 2: Discern

Now sort what you wrote into two piles: can’t and won’t.

Can’t is a capacity problem. He doesn’t have the skill, the bandwidth, the nervous system regulation.

It’s real, it deserves compassion, and it is still not your project to solve on his behalf.

Won’t is a willingness problem. He understood, he was able, and he chose the version that cost him less.

Only one of these has a path forward, and mistaking one for the other is why you’re on round nine.

You’ve been treating a won’t like a can’t for a very long time, because can’t is the kinder read and you are a kind person.

Step 3: Accept

The one everybody skips. And by everybody I mean you specifically. 😅

Accepting isn’t approving, and it isn’t forgiving, and it definitely isn’t deciding you were wrong to want what you wanted.

It’s ending the practice of treating the last eight months as a data collection error.

The results are the results.

They were the results in March too.

Step 4: Act

Sometimes that’s leaving; oftentimes, unfortunately, it is.

Sometimes it’s a consequence that you genuinely intend to follow through on, which is different from a consequence you announce and then quietly withdraw when he gets sad.

If you don’t intend to do it, don’t say it, because now you’ve taught him what your words are worth.

But it’s for sure not running another broken experiment; it’s time to LISTEN to the data.

Step 5: Go Get the Part That Set the Number

Here’s the problem with everything I just gave you.

You can run the first four steps perfectly and still not move.

And then you’ll stay anyway, because Layer Five hasn’t budged an inch.

So this last one goes inward, and it’s slower than the rest, and it’s the only step here that actually changes what you’re able to do with the evidence.

Somewhere in you is a part that decided a long time ago that love has to be earned.

She’s usually young. She’s not stupid, and she’s not dramatic.

She built that conclusion out of real evidence, in a house or a friendship or a first relationship where the evidence honestly did point that way.

She was right, back then, about the room she was standing in.

She’s just never been told the room changed.

You can’t argue her out of it. People have been trying for years.

Your friends have made the case, your therapist has made the case, I’m making it right now in a blog, and none of us have moved her a millimeter, which should tell you something about the method.

So don’t argue.

Do this instead (Yes, this is IFS):

Find her in your body. Imagine walking away for good, done, no more drafts. Notice where that lands physically. Chest, throat, stomach, the back of your neck. Don’t analyze it, just locate it. That’s her.
Check how you feel toward her. Annoyed? Embarrassed? Wanna tell her to shut up and get it together? See if you can extend some Curiosity and Compassion toward her instead.
Unblend. “This is a part of me. Not all of me.” Out loud, if you’re by yourself. Yes, it feels ridiculous. Do it anyway.
Ask, don’t fix. How old is she? What does she think happens if she’s wrong about what you’re worth? Then shut up long enough to actually hear an answer, which for a lot of you is gonna be the hardest instruction in this entire blog.
Update her. She’s been running on information collected from people who are not in your life anymore. She doesn’t know what you know now. She’s never once been shown the evidence you’ve spent the last year collecting. Bring her up to speed.

Steps one through four tell you what the evidence says.

This one decides whether you’re allowed to act on it.

These are small, unglamorous reps and none of them will feel like a breakthrough.

But they are how you stop being a person who collects evidence and start being a person who uses it.

You Got Your Answer a Long Time Ago

You came in asking for a better way to say it.

What you’ve actually been doing is requesting a second opinion on a result that came back clearly the first time, and then a third, and then a ninth.

The evidence was never ambiguous. Your willingness to look at it and act on it was.

And I’m not gonna tell you what to do with it, because I don’t know your life and because the whole point is that the reading is yours.

You collected it. You’re the only one who was in the room for all of it.

Nobody else gets to deliver this verdict, including me, and that’s the terrible part and the good part at the same time.

You don’t need a better way to say it.

You need to believe the answer you already got.

You’ve got this, and until next time… Live Heroically 🧠

Ready to Complete Heartbreak in 63 Days?

Start Here: She Rises Community.

Inside is a 63-day program of the exact things I did myself to go from wrecked to regulated using neuroscience.

Plus, You’ll Have Access To:

A 63-day program to go from wrecked to regulated
Live coaching calls with me every week
A team of IFS practitioners
Private workshops and masterclasses with therapists and scientists
1-on-1 sessions
A room full of women doing this beside you

If you’re ready to become emotionally available, develop secure attachment, and attract healthy potential partners, this is for you!

The first 7 days are free. Join below!

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Supporting Research

Le, B., & Agnew, C. R. (2003). Commitment and its theorized determinants: A meta-analysis of the Investment Model. Personal Relationships, 10(1), 37-57.
Rusbult, C. E., Martz, J. M., & Agnew, C. R. (1998). The Investment Model Scale: Measuring commitment level, satisfaction level, quality of alternatives, and investment size. Personal Relationships, 5(4), 357-387.
Tran, P., Judge, M., & Kashima, Y. (2019). Commitment in relationships: An updated meta-analysis of the Investment Model. Personal Relationships, 26(1), 158-180.
Goodfriend, W., & Agnew, C. R. (2008). Sunken costs and desired plans: Examining different types of investments in close relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(12), 1639-1652.
Rego, S., Arantes, J., & Magalhães, P. (2018). Is there a sunk cost effect in committed relationships? Current Psychology, 37(3), 508-519.
Arkes, H. R., & Blumer, C. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 35(1), 124-140.
Staw, B. M., & Fox, F. V. (1977). Escalation: The determinants of commitment to a chosen course of action. Human Relations, 30(5), 431-450.
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480-498.
Nickerson, R. S. (1998). Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Review of General Psychology, 2(2), 175-220.
Ferster, C. B., & Skinner, B. F. (1957). Schedules of reinforcement. Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Humphreys, L. G. (1939). The effect of random alternation of reinforcement on the acquisition and extinction of conditioned eyelid reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 25(2), 141-158.
Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

What data have you been ignoring? I know it just popped into your head… Tell me below!

Leave a comment

5 Questions I'd Ask on a First Date (If I Were a Woman) 🧠

Cody Isabel | Neuroscience — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 16:51:44 GMT

TL;DR Summary:

There’s a question about his last relationship that has almost nothing to do with his ex. It sorts men faster than anything else I know, and it’s first for a reason.
Ask him what he does when he’s stressed. If the answer routes entirely through a person, you just found out what your job is going to be.
“He’s just not a big friends guy.” I hear that one a lot. Usually about eight months before the rest of the story shows up.
One of these five you’ve definitely heard from me before. I’m running it again, last, because I think most women are reading the answer completely wrong.
The questions were never the hard part. What you do in the four seconds after he answers is.

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Lemme Tell You About the Worst Version of Me

Years ago, someone I was seriously considering for marriage cheated on me.

And I did absolutely nothing with it.

I mean, I did things. I got in the best shape of my life. I ate clean, I worked more, I went out constantly, I slept with people whose last names I’d have to think about.

From the outside it looked a lot like healing…

HOWEVER, it was actually just a very disciplined way of not sitting down, though. (Turns out cardio is not processing. Who knew.)

And if you’d asked me during that entire year what my part was in why it ended, I’d have had a fantastic answer for you.

Clean. Airtight. Completely useless.

Because she cheated. I was the wronged one. Which meant I got a free pass on the only question that would have actually changed anything…

That’s the thing about the questions in this blog. Most men have never been asked a single one of them.

Not by a partner, not by a friend, not by their mother, not once.

Which is exactly why they work.

I’ve now spent thousands of hours with women breaking down their relationships AFTER they’re over.

And what gets me almost every time is that the information they needed was almost always available in the first three weeks!

It wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t buried under some elaborate mask.

It’s just that nobody asked for it.

So here are the five questions I’d ask.

They’re free, they don’t require a confrontation, and every one of them sounds like normal conversation.

Let’s dive in!

You’re Not Catching a Liar.

In 1977, two psychologists published a paper that quietly wrecked how researchers thought about self-report.

Their finding was that people routinely lack real access to the causes of their own behavior, and when you ask them to explain themselves, they don’t retrieve an explanation.

They GENERATE one.

Not lying. They called it “confabulating.”

The mouth produces something plausible, and the person believes it on the way out. (This is also why “why did you do that?” almost never gets you anywhere useful with anybody. Including yourself.)

This is the whole engine of what follows.

When you ask a man who has never once examined himself why his last relationship ended, he isn’t pulling a file. There is no file.

He’s writing one live, at conversational speed, in front of you.

You’ve gotta remember this as we dive in.

Constructed answers have a signature.

They’re fast, they’re tidy, and they have no texture.

Real self-knowledge comes out slower and messier because it’s being dragged up from somewhere real, and it usually comes with a little wince.

So you’re not running a lie detector here.

You’re checking whether there’s anything on the shelf.

Charm is rehearsed. He’s got great material for the questions he’s been asked a hundred times (what he does, where he grew up, the funny thing about his roommate).

These five aren’t on the list, so there’s nothing prepped, and what comes out is his off-duty character in verbal form.

So, pay attention.

Ight, here are the questions.

1. “What did you actually like about being in a relationship?”

This one sounds like small talk. It is not small talk. It’s the most efficient question on this list, and almost nobody asks it.

The answers sort into two buckets.

Bucket one is what she did.

She kept me organized
She got me out of the house
She calmed me down
She handled the social stuff
My family loved her
She made me a better person

Bucket two is who they were. What it felt like. Something specific about her that had nothing to do with him.

Relationship researchers have a clean distinction for this.

“Communal Orientation” means you respond to your partner’s needs because they’re needs.
“Exchange Orientation” means you’re tracking contributions and returns, keeping a quiet ledger.

And exchange orientation tends to predict lower satisfaction for everyone involved.

Bucket two isn’t evil. It’s just describing a role.

And roles are fillable.

He’s not telling you about a woman he loved. He’s telling you about a position that recently opened up, and you are extremely qualified.

My clients almost never call this what it is.

They say “he really needed me,” and they say it like it was the best part.

Other times it’s “I brought out the best in him,” which is the same sentence wearing a nicer coat…

The Follow-Up

“What was she like when you weren’t around?”

A man who actually saw a person answers this instantly and with detail.

A man who saw a function goes quiet, because he never really looked at her when she wasn’t pointed at him.

What You’re Watching For Bottomline

Whether she exists in the story as a person, or only as a set of services.

2. “What do you do when you’re stressed?”

You’re not evaluating the strategy here.

Some men run, some men drive around, some men sit in a hot shower for forty-five minutes like a large sad noodle. Fine. Whatever.

You’re checking whether there IS one.

The answers come in three shapes.

He names something he does.
He names a substance.
Or he names nothing at all, and the answer routes entirely through another person.

Now, let’s be careful here, because this is where people get it twisted.

Co-regulation is not weakness. It’s the design.

There’s a well-known fMRI study where women anticipating a mild electric shock showed measurably reduced threat activity in the brain when they were holding their partner’s hand.

Another nervous system genuinely takes load off yours. That’s supposed to happen.

The problem isn’t co-regulation. It’s sole regulation.

A man with no internal system and no other humans is not looking for a partner to co-regulate with.

He’s looking for infrastructure.

And ya’ll are going to take that job. Enthusiastically.

Because you’re good at it, and because being irreplaceable feels almost exactly like being loved when you learned early that safety had to be earned.

That’s emotional capitalism, and it will run in the background for years.

I usually hear this described as “he’s just a private person.”

Or the version that always makes me sit up: “he doesn’t really open up to anyone but me.”

They say it as evidence of intimacy, but nine times out of ten it’s a map of his isolation, and it’s about to become her whole calendar.

The Follow-Up

“Who do you talk to when it’s really bad?”

If the honest answer today is nobody, and three weeks from now the answer is you, do not let that go unnoticed…

What You’re Watching For Bottomline

Whether he has anywhere to put it that isn’t you.

You’re not asking whether he needs support. You’re asking whether you’re about to become the only place it can go.

This isn’t romantic, it’s not a “normal” amount of pressure to put on a relationship, and I can assure you it doesn’t lead anywhere you wanna go.

3. “Who’s your oldest friend? And what happened with the ones you lost?”

Yes, technically two questions, I know, I know. He won’t notice :)

Besides, both halves are needed!

The first half answers: does anybody stay?

Friendships don’t survive on affection.

There’s longitudinal research tracking relationships over eighteen months showing that closeness decays without active investment, and that the ones that last are the ones being actively maintained.

So a man with a genuine fifteen-year friendship is showing you receipts. He has shown up repeatedly when nothing was on fire, and nothing was owed.

The second half is the real one, though.

Listen to how he narrates the ones who left.

There’s a well-documented pattern called “hostile attribution bias”, where some people reliably read neutral events as deliberate disrespect.

If every lost friendship in his story has a villain in it, and the villain is never him, you’re watching that bias operate in real time on people he once loved.

Remember, this is a read, not a verdict.

People lose friends for completely real reasons. Moves, kids, careers, one brutal year where everything fell apart at once. (Been there lol)

No need to crucify him for no reason, just pay attention to the stories!

What I listen for in sessions is the softening language.

“He’s more of a lone wolf.” “He’s not really a friends guy, he’s more of a family guy.”

That last one is kinda insidious, because the family stories show up eventually, and there’s usually a villain in those too…

The Follow-Up

“Do you miss any of them?”

A man who can miss someone he’s still a little angry at has repair capacity.

He can hold a grievance and affection in the same hand without one deleting the other, which is the exact skill your relationship will need at month fourteen.

What You’re Watching For Bottomline

Not whether he’s popular. Whether anything in his life has ever survived a rupture.

4. “Has anyone ever changed your mind about something that mattered?”

This one lowkey shoulda been number 1, it’s that important, but alas…

I didn’t think about it until now, so here we are.

In Dr. Gottman’s newlywed research, one of the findings that stuck with me most is that a man’s willingness to accept influence from his partner, to genuinely let her position move his, was meaningfully tied to whether the marriage made it.

Not whether he agreed with her. Whether anything of hers could get in.

That’s what this question measures. Permeability.

Permeability is whether another human being’s reality can currently reach him and move something.

You can absolutely have the first without the second.

Plenty of men have a beautifully rehearsed inventory of their flaws and a door that has been welded shut since 2011.

A man who’s never been changed by anyone hears this as a competence question, and he’ll answer it like one. “I mean, I’m pretty open-minded.” (That’s not an answer. That’s a performance review he wrote about himself.)

A real answer has a person in it.

Someone specific changed something specific.

You can also run the live version, which I kinda love: disagree with him about something small and genuinely unimportant while he’s mid-take on it.

Not a fight. Just real, friendly pushback on a low-stakes opinion.

Then watch whether he gets curious or gets bigger.

The softener I hear on this one is “he just really knows who he is,” or “he’s not a pushover.”

Sometimes that’s completely true, and it’s wonderful.

Sometimes it means nothing that has ever entered him has been allowed to stay.

The Follow-Up

“What did you think before?”

You want the old position, in detail. A man who genuinely changed can describe who he used to be, usually with a little embarrassment.

A man who’s claiming growth he hasn’t done can’t produce the earlier version, because there wasn’t one.

5. “What was your part in why your last relationship ended?”

Alright. Ya’ll have heard this one from me before.

It’s the most-quoted thing I’ve ever written and I genuinely almost cut it from this list for exactly that reason. I don’t love reruns.

I kept it, and put it last, because I’ve now watched enough women run it to know that a lot of you are reading the answer wrong.

It is not a lie detector. Most men who fail this question are not lying to you.

It’s an absence detector.

Same mechanism as everything above: he’s not retrieving; he’s constructing, and you’re watching him find out in real time that the shelf is empty.

The men who fail this question worst are frequently the ones who were genuinely wronged.

Cheated on. Blindsided. Left with no warning.

Because a clean grievance is the single best excuse ever invented for never looking at yourself.

It gets handed to you. You don’t even have to build it.

I know, because I had one, and I rode that thing for a year.

So the question is not “was he at fault.” Half the time he wasn’t, and it doesn’t matter.

The question is whether he has ever been curious about himself when nothing was forcing him to be.

A real answer to this question is small, specific, unflattering, and not performed.

“I stopped asking her questions somewhere around year two.” “I checked out for like a year and told myself I was just busy with work.”

A four-minute summary of her behavior with one sentence of self-criticism bolted onto the end, on the other hand...

Is the universal version of “I guess I could’ve communicated better.”

Note the “I guess.” (I have heard that exact sentence so many times I could explode...)

But watch for the polished failure too, because this one is newer and it fools smart women constantly.

Therapy vocabulary. Clean framework. Attachment style named correctly. Zero discomfort anywhere in his body while he says it.

A man who has actually reckoned with his part still looks a little uncomfortable saying it out loud years later. (Myself included)

Fluency without discomfort usually means the answer was rehearsed, not metabolized.

The Follow-Up

“What would you do differently?”

Insight without a behavioral answer is useless.

He’s bought the understanding and never made a single payment on the change, and you would be the one servicing that loan.

The Questions Were Never the Hard Part

Now, let’s get into the fun part, because I bet you thought this blog was just about him…

Come on, you know me better than that by now!

I’ve seen this a million times…

You’re going to ask these questions. He’s going to give you a bad answer.

AND THEN, somewhere in the next four seconds… You’re going to fix it for him.

He says “I guess I could’ve communicated better” and you hear he’s still processing it, he’s being humble, he doesn’t want to trash her, that’s actually kind of classy.

Uhhhhh, ma'am… What just happened???

You asked a question. Got an answer, and then wrote him a better one…??!

I watch this happen constantly.

A woman will give me the sentence he said, verbatim, eight months later, word for word, and then immediately follow it with the improved version she built out of it.

Both are still sitting in there.

She kept the receipt AND the forgery!

That translating part of you is not stupid, and I’m not going to let you call it that.

It learned to do that early, in rooms where hope was the only available resource, and it kept you functioning through things that would have flattened a lot of people.

It’s protective.

It’s also, right now, deleting your data.

You don’t just need better questions.

You need to stop editing the answers. :)

How to Use These Without Sounding Like HR

Please, God, do not just drop all of these on him all at once…

I could write a whole blog on the Part of you that wants to do that, honestly.

In fact, maybe I will, but for today, run through this lil checklist before taking these bad boys out into the wild.

ESPECIALLY number 5!!

1. Spread them out.

One-ish per date, max.

Five of these in a single dinner isn’t discernment; it’s a deposition, and he will absolutely ask if he needs a lawyer.

2. Ask like a person.

Every one of these is normal conversation.

You’re allowed to be warm and curious while you’re doing it.

In fact, I highly recommend it, and one of the best ways to do this is to remember, you’ve got nothing to lose.

You’re collecting data, and aren’t tied to any outcome yet! You’re a scientist running an experiment.

3. Then shut up.

I’m serious, this is the whole technique.

The most useful part of all five questions is the two seconds before he starts talking, and you are going to want to fill that silence so badly.

Let it sit there and get a little awkward.

That’s where the data lives!

4. Write down what he actually said within 24 hours.

Verbatim, before the editing starts.

Your memory of that sentence will be softer by Thursday and unrecognizable by next month.

I suggest your notes app, in the car, before you’re even home.

This is NOT a character flaw; that’s just how memory behaves around something you want.

5. Answer all five yourself.

Yep, thought you’d get outta here without putting yourself through the same questions?

No way… You’ll be able to ask these WAY better once you’ve had to go through them yourself with the same criteria.

Do not skip this step.

It’s a mistake I see over and over again.

Five Questions, One Question

These questions aren’t tests with a pass and a fail stamped on the bottom.

Look at what they’re all asking underneath.

Whether he can see a person instead of a role. Whether he’s ever carried himself. Whether anyone has stayed. Whether anything can get in. Whether he’s ever turned around and looked.

That’s one question, asked five ways.

Has he ever been curious about himself when nothing was making him?

Because a man who has done it once will do it again when it’s about you, at 2am, in the middle of something hard.

And a man who never has is not going to start because he loves you enough.

That isn’t how capacity works, and loving him harder has never once installed it.

You already know how to ask. You’ve been asking excellent questions your whole life, just silently, and usually about him instead of to him.

All you’re changing is the volume. And then letting his answer be his answer.

Asking is free. It’s the four seconds afterward you’ll have to practice.

You’ve got this, I believe in you, and as always… Live Heroically 🧠

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Supporting Research

Nisbett, R. E., & Wilson, T. D. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231–259.
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1979). Interpersonal attraction in exchange and communal relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(1), 12–24.
Clark, M. S., & Mills, J. (1993). The difference between communal and exchange relationships: What it is and is not. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19(6), 684–691.
Buunk, B. P., & Van Yperen, N. W. (1991). Referential comparisons, relational comparisons, and exchange orientation: Their relation to marital satisfaction. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(6), 709–717.
Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Lending a hand: Social regulation of the neural response to threat. Psychological Science, 17(12), 1032–1039.
Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.
Butler, E. A., Egloff, B., Wilhelm, F. H., Smith, N. C., Erickson, E. A., & Gross, J. J. (2003). The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion, 3(1), 48–67.
Cooper, M. L., Frone, M. R., Russell, M., & Mudar, P. (1995). Drinking to regulate positive and negative emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(5), 990–1005.
Roberts, S. G. B., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2011). The costs of family and friends: An 18-month longitudinal study of relationship maintenance and decay. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32(3), 186–197.
Epps, J., & Kendall, P. C. (1995). Hostile attributional bias in adults. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 19(2), 159–178.
Malouff, J. M., Thorsteinsson, E. B., Schutte, N. S., Bhullar, N., & Rooke, S. E. (2010). The five-factor model of personality and relationship satisfaction of intimate partners: A meta-analysis. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(1), 124–127.
Gottman, J. M., Coan, J., Carrère, S., & Swanson, C. (1998). Predicting marital happiness and stability from newlywed interactions. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 60(1), 5–22.
Gottman, J. M., & Levenson, R. W. (1992). Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: Behavior, physiology, and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(2), 221–233.
Buehlman, K. T., Gottman, J. M., & Katz, L. F. (1992). How a couple views their past predicts their future: Predicting divorce from an oral history interview. Journal of Family Psychology, 5(3–4), 295–318.
Bradbury, T. N., & Fincham, F. D. (1990). Attributions in marriage: Review and critique. Psychological Bulletin, 107(1), 3–33.
Fincham, F. D. (2000). The kiss of the porcupines: From attributing responsibility to forgiving. Personal Relationships, 7(1), 1–23.

Which question is hardest for YOU to answer? Tell me below!

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He Discarded You and You're Furious. (Good.) 🧠

Cody Isabel | Neuroscience — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:15:07 GMT

TL;DR Summary:

A review of 154 studies quietly torched the most common advice you’ve been given about anger. One popular activity in there made people measurably angrier.
The anger after a discard is a different animal than regular anger, and the reason has nothing to do with him. It has to do with what your body got ready for.
“I’m not angry, I just want to understand what happened” is the single most common thing said to me in these sessions. It is almost never true.
Sitting on it isn’t free. Eight minutes of remembering something that made you furious does something measurable to your arteries. Sadness didn’t do it. Anxiety didn’t either.
Inside: 4 pieces of anger advice that don’t work (plus where each one came from), and 5 that do.
And the thing that finally moved mine wasn’t on any list. It took six months and someone else in the room.

Subscribe now

The Baggie

About two weeks after I got discarded, I watched my ex slide something under my gym bag.

We went to the same CrossFit gym. (Which was every bit as fun as it sounds.)

I was mid-workout, and I caught her walking over to the cubbies, crouching down, and putting something under my stuff.

I spent the entire rest of that hour buzzing.

A note. It had to be a note. Maybe an explanation, maybe an apology, maybe just something. I didn’t even care if it was mean. I wanted words.

Class ended. I walked over as casually as a man has ever walked anywhere in his life. Lifted my bag.

A ziploc baggie. Inside: a neurotech device I’d given her months earlier, and the stack of relationship question cards we used to do together at night.

No note. Nothing.

Like she was cleaning out a junk drawer, and I was the junk.

I stood there for a second. And then, for the first time since the whole thing happened, I got angry. Not spiraling, not sad. Angry, in a way that felt weirdly clean.

In that moment, I realized my grief had been lying to me about what happened, but my anger hadn’t…

Grief tells you the story where they were wonderful, you were lucky, and something tragic and nameless got in the way. Anger is the only Part of you willing to say the more accurate sentence out loud: that was not okay, and a person did it.

This topic came from a live Q&A call inside my She Rises community. A woman asked, more or less, “what am I supposed to do with the rage?”

So, I went and read the actual research on anger.

Turns out a solid chunk of the advice you’ve been given, including a piece I’d been giving/doing for years, is wrong.

In fact, one extremely popular piece of advice actually made people MORE angry, not less...

So, today, we’re gonna break down why discard anger is its own species, what it’s doing in your brain, four things everyone recommends that don’t work, and five that do.

Let’s dive in, baby!

This Ain’t Regular Anger

Anger is a mobilizing emotion.

Of every negative emotion, anger is the only one that moves you toward something.

Fear pulls you back. Sadness folds you inward. Disgust turns you away.

Anger walks you straight at the problem with a body full of fuel to do it.

Which is useful, and appropriate, and works beautifully…

…when there’s someone to walk toward.

A discard removes that. There was no fight. No negotiation. No conversation where you got to say the thing and he had to answer for it.

In my case, the entire ending took about one evening, and then the person I’d planned a life with was just gone.

So your body armed you for a confrontation that is never going to be scheduled.

I call this stranded anger.

Borrowed from stranded assets in economics, which is value that’s completely real and completely useless, because the market it was built for disappeared overnight.

Your anger isn’t excessive. It’s stranded. Fully funded, nowhere to spend it.

You’ll Know It By Where It Leaks

Stranded anger almost never shows up as anger. It shows up as:

The argument you win in the shower, at full volume, in your head
The text you draft at 1am and don’t send (and the seven revisions after)
Snapping at your mom, your coworker, the guy taking too long at the light
Going ice cold at the friend who says “maybe he was just avoidant”
Rehearsing the exact sentence you’d say if you ran into him. For months.
Feeling nothing at all, and calling it closure

That last one is the most common and the most expensive.

Lemme give you my own worst example.

Her birthday landed about a week after she ended it. I’d spent a month planning it. Invited friends from out of town, coordinated the whole thing, because that’s just who I am in relationships. I show up. I plan. I make people feel held.

After the breakup, she told me she’d be gone that weekend, so I cancelled everything and told everyone she couldn’t make it.

Then I went to the Saturday CrossFit class that I don’t usually go to, but thought it would be nice to be around other people since I thought she was gonna be outta town.

Naturally, she was there. She hadn’t gone anywhere. And I found out afterward that her friends had quietly thrown her a pickleball party instead.

Which I’m not spiteful about; of course they did. Their friend is going through a breakup; makes sense, AND it still hurts.

It was a day I built from scratch over a month, and then ended up being the only one not invited, totally alone the whole weekend.

And you wanna know what I wrote in my journal that night?

“That was a really shitty moment lmao.”

That “lmao” at the end is the doing all the work in that sentence…

That’s stranded anger. It doesn’t get to be anger, so it becomes a joke you make at your own expense at 11pm.

If you’ve been laughing about something that genuinely humiliated you, that isn’t perspective.

That’s your anger with the volume knob taped down.

The Open Verdict

There’s a second thing that makes discard anger stick, and almost nobody names it.

Anger doesn’t just need energy. It needs a finding.

For anger to complete, your brain has to land somewhere specific: this was unfair, and this person is responsible. That conclusion is what lets the system stand down.

A discard denies you the conclusion.

They gave you no reason, or a reason so vague it evaporates the second you touch it.

“I can’t be who you need.”
“You deserve better.”
“I’m just not in a place for this.”

Which are all sentences, but not explanations…

So there’s a part of you that has been building the case ever since. Collecting evidence. Re-reading old texts like an attorney prepping for trial. Drafting the closing argument you’d deliver if you ever got him in a room.

In coroners’ offices, there’s a term for a case where the cause can’t be determined and the file never closes.

They call it an open verdict.

That’s what they handed you. Not a no. An open file.

And nobody has ever walked into a session with me and said “I’m enraged.” They say, “I just want to understand what happened.”

Shit, I said this exact thing to my therapist a hundred times when I was going through this myself!

So ask yourself honestly: does your understanding have a defendant? When you replay it, are you trying to comprehend a person, or are you trying to establish guilt?

If it’s the second one, that’s not confusion. That’s a trial you’re holding without a judge, a jury, or a defendant who agreed to show up.

And the part of you running that trial isn’t your enemy. It’s doing an honest job.

It believes that if it can just build a strong enough case, someone will finally rule that what happened to you was wrong, and then you’ll be allowed to put it down.

It’s not stupid. It’s loyal.

It just picked a courthouse that closed :/

Sitting On It Isn’t Free Either

I know some of you are reading all this and thinking: fine, I’ll just let it fade on its own.

Here’s why that’s a worse plan than it sounds.

In 2024, a team at Columbia ran a study where healthy young adults spent eight minutes recalling something that had made them furious.

They were alone in a room. Nobody to confront, nothing to do about it.

Yet, their bodies mobilized anyway. Measurably, in the blood vessels, and it took about forty minutes to come back down.

They ran the exact same protocol using sadness. And using anxiety.

Neither one did it. Only anger.

So, if one episode does that. What about ten thousand episodes over a lifetime?

This is where anger being an approach emotion stops being a fun fact.

Your body doesn’t allocate that fuel and then quietly refund it. It allocates it for an action. When the action never comes, the activation just idles.

Engine running. Car in park. For months.

And clamping down on it doesn’t solve that either.

This is well documented: when people deliberately suppress the outward expression of an emotion, the visible signs go away while the physical activation underneath holds steady or climbs.

You look calmer, but your body is working harder.

So What Does That Actually Cost You

Ok, but how much harder is it working, Cody?

Great question. Anger is an extremely powerful emotion, so it takes a toll on you to have to continuously shove it down!

Here’s what a body that’s been armed for months with nowhere to aim actually looks like:

You’re exhausted and can’t point at why. Sustained activation is metabolically expensive. You did nothing today, and you’re wrecked by 2pm.
Your sleep breaks in a specific way. Not trouble falling asleep. Waking at 3am with the argument already running, mid-sentence, like it never stopped.
It leaks onto people who did nothing. Your mom, your friend, the guy at the light. The anger has to go somewhere, so it goes wherever the cost is lowest.
It converts. Anger that never gets a target doesn’t dissolve. It turns into resentment, and resentment is what you’ll carry into the next relationship with someone who never did any of this to you.

So, what should you do with anger instead?

Another great question, but before we get there, lemme tell you what you absolutely should NOT do…

Four Pieces of Advice That Don’t Work

In March 2024, two researchers at Ohio State published a review of 154 studies covering more than 10,000 people, testing common anger management activities against each other.

It’s the largest thing we have on this question.

And it quietly torched about half of the internet’s advice, including some of mine, which I have since updated!

Let’s break down some of the biggest myths!

Myth 1: “Get it out. Scream into a pillow. Book a rage room.”

Where it came from: the hydraulic model of emotion, which is a fancy way of saying “steam engine.” A century of Freud-adjacent thinking that emotions build pressure and need venting or the boiler blows.

Your emotions are not a boiler. You are not a 1920s locomotive.

In that review, activities designed to increase your arousal (hitting a bag, smashing plates, screaming) had an effect on anger of essentially zero. Not small. Zero.

And an earlier study found that people who hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who angered them came out more aggressive afterward, not less.

Because you aren’t discharging the anger. You’re rehearsing it, with your whole body, while their face plays on a loop behind your eyes.

That’s not release, dude. That’s practice.

Myth 2: “Go for a run. Burn it off.”

Man, I hated learning this one.

In the same review, jogging didn’t just fail to reduce anger. It increased it, by a meaningful margin. “Solo repetitive cardio,” as they called it, was one of the worst performers in the entire dataset.

Where it came from: conflating stress with anger. Exercise genuinely helps stress, mood, sleep, and about a hundred other things, so everyone assumed anger came along for the ride.

It doesn’t.

The honest caveat, because I’m not about to tell you to skip the gym: group sports, PE-style classes, and structured aerobics classes all did reduce anger in the same review.

So this isn’t “exercise bad.”

The difference, I’d argue, is what your mind is free to do while you move.

Forty-five solo minutes on a treadmill is forty-five uninterrupted minutes of courtroom.

A class you have to follow, with people in it, isn’t.

I think this is why CrossFit was so helpful in my own healing journey, honestly.

So, move your body. Just don’t call it processing.

Myth 3: “Anger is a stage you will pass through.”

Where it came from: the five stages of grief, which came out of Kübler-Ross’s 1969 work with dying patients.

Not the bereaved. And definitely not women recovering from a discard.

It escaped the lab and became gospel anyway.

When researchers actually tracked bereaved people over two years, anger didn’t show up early and leave. It peaked around the five-month mark.

And the feeling that dominated the entire window, start to finish, wasn’t anger at all.

It was yearning. Just missing him.

Which means if anger shows up at month five, when you were sure you were past this, you are not regressing.

You’re on time.

Myth 4: “If you’d really healed, you wouldn’t still be angry.”

Where it came from: wellness culture, which figured out early that serenity photographs better than fury.

Forgiveness work is legitimate, and structured forgiveness interventions have real evidence behind them. But that evidence is for forgiveness arriving after the injury has been named, felt, and accounted for.

Doing it before that isn’t forgiveness. It’s marking the case closed while the anger quietly files an appeal.

You can’t skip a step you never took.

Ok, Cody, I get it. What CAN I do about it??

So, glad you asked, imaginary reader in my mind.

Five Things That Actually Work

Five tools based on neuroscience you can start using today, here we go!!

Tool 1: Turn the heat down BEFORE you decide anything

The thing that actually worked in that 154-study review was the opposite of venting; it was the activities that bring your physiological arousal down instead of up that helped the most.

Think breathing, relaxation, yoga, and meditation.

All of these worked much better, and it was consistent across ages, genders, and cultures, in the lab AND out in real life.

Extended exhales are the fastest version.

In a Stanford trial, five minutes a day of exhale-emphasized breathing beat meditation on mood and lowered physiological arousal over a month.

You’re probably thinking, “Cody. Breathing. That’s the big neuroscience reveal. Really???”

I get it, stick with me.

You are not breathing in order to become calm and gracious about what he did. Nobody is asking you to be nice here.

You’re lowering arousal so the anger becomes readable. High activation turns anger into a broadcast. Lower activation turns it into information.

Same anger. Different resolution.

And the most important detail from that review is that arousal-lowering activities that included a thinking component worked substantially better than ones that were purely physical.

The body piece alone was about half as effective.

Which is precisely why the next four tools exist :)

Tool 2: Say the ugly version, in the third person

First: put it into words. Uncensored. Not the version you’d read aloud in therapy. The petty one. The immature one. The unhinged one.

Putting a feeling into language reliably brings the intensity of that feeling down, and there’s brain imaging showing it directly: label the emotion, and amygdala activity drops.

But sanitized journaling regulates nothing. “I felt hurt by his choices” does not count, ladies. If it wouldn’t mortify you to have it read aloud at a family dinner, go again.

Second, and this is the upgrade: write about yourself in the third person. Use your own name.

Not “I’m so angry that he.” Try “Sarah is furious that he.”

Ethan Kross and Jason Moser’s labs tested this with both EEG and fMRI.

Third-person self-talk reduced emotional reactivity, and here’s the kicker: it did it without requiring extra mental effort. Unlike almost every other regulation strategy, it’s basically free.

The pronoun does something a pep talk can’t. It moves you from inside the experience to witnessing it, instantly. And a witness can see a pattern that a participant is far too flooded to see.

Ten minutes, on paper, your name at the front of every sentence.

Tool 3: Say it out loud, to nobody

Same principle, different channel. Don’t skip it because it sounds silly.

In the car. On a walk. In your empty kitchen.

“That wasn’t okay. I hated that. I’m angry about what he did.”

You have thought that sentence roughly nine thousand times. You have almost certainly never heard it in your own voice.

Thinking a thing and hearing yourself say it land in completely different places in your body. One is a thought passing through. The other is testimony, with a witness in the room.

And the witness is you. Which is the closest thing to a verdict this situation is ever going to hand you.

Tool 4: Give it a defendant it can actually reach

Anger doesn’t complete without a finding. So you’re going to hold the hearing yourself.

Write him the letter. All of it. Every accusation, every question, every unfair thing you’d never say to his face. Date it.

And do not send it.

One caveat that keeps this from being a Pinterest ritual: the research on expressive writing suggests the benefit doesn’t come from raw venting by itself. It comes when the writing moves toward making sense of what happened.

So the letter has two halves. The first is what they did. The second is what it cost you, and what you now know you will never accept again.

I burned mine around the six-month mark. Watched the pages curl up and go black.

Felt completely ridiculous doing it.

BUT, I’ve got to admit, it for sure did something that six months of just writing about it hadn’t.

It felt more complete.

Tool 5: Turn it into a boundary, or it turns into resentment

This is the big one. If you take one thing out of this whole blog, take this.

Anger exists to change a condition. If it never changes a condition, it doesn’t evaporate. It converts.

And resentment doesn’t stay quiet. It leaks out sideways. As snapping. As withdrawal. As the nine-paragraph text at 1am you regret before you’ve finished hitting send.

So let the anger show you what it was protecting, and then say that thing out loud to the next person who tests it.

“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“I need more consistency than this.”
“I’m not having this conversation right now.”

Anger that becomes a boundary is finished.

What’s Under the Anger?

Everything above works on the anger. None of it touches what’s underneath the anger.

Here’s what I mean.

By month five I understood my situation perfectly. I could have delivered a lecture on it, with slides.

AND the youngest, most wounded part of me, the one that got discarded and froze in that moment, did not care even slightly.

Understanding is not the same thing as being witnessed and processed.

In IFS terms, anger is almost always a protector. It’s standing in front of something younger and rawer, doing a real job.

And the clean righteous fury and the “I’m being the bigger person” calm are usually the same system arguing with itself about how to make sure that younger part never feels that again.

The breakthrough for me came in a session where I could finally step into the memory of the breakup with enough of my grounded Self online to put something like a shield around the version of me still stuck inside it.

My body relaxed for the first time in half a year. I can still feel it when I write about it.

Oh, and to be clear, this happened in a room, with Kaitlyn, my IFS trauma therapist, after months of work.

Before we could go anywhere near that younger part, we spent multiple sessions with a protector we ended up calling my Barrier, which was genuinely terrified that if it stepped aside, the pain would come out and never go back in the bottle.

Do not go digging for those young parts by yourself. Not with a journal, not with a podcast, not with a chatbot at 2am.

Noticing a protector and unblending from it is something you can absolutely practice on your own.

Direct work with the wounded parts underneath, which IFS calls Exiles, is work to do with a trained professional who can help you stay resourced while you’re in there.

The five tools above are yours. This one needs a room and a witness.

This is why inside my She Rises community I have other IFS practitioners like myself and Kaitlyn in there to help out!

The Anger Was Never the Problem

Everything you’ve been told about your anger since this happened has been about reducing it.

Get it out, run it off, breathe it away, forgive him, move on.

But your anger was never the malfunction, and you’re not an angry woman.

You’re a woman whose anger never got to finish.

Let it.

You got this.

And as always, until next time… Live Heroically 🧠

Ready to Go Beyond Reading?

Reading helps you understand yourself. Transformation comes from applying it.

If you’re ready to move beyond consuming content and start creating lasting change, join me inside my She Rises Community.

Inside, I will help you go from heartbreak to secure love in 63 days.

You’ll Have Access To:

A neuroscience-based breakup recovery system
Weekly live coaching with me
Accountability to help you actually implement what you’re learning
A community of women healing and growing together

If you’re ready to become emotionally available, develop secure attachment, and attract healthy potential partners, this is for you!

Join Community

Supporting Research

Kjærvik, S. L., & Bushman, B. J. (2024). A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage? Clinical Psychology Review, 109, 102414.
Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724–731.
Lee, A. H., & DiGiuseppe, R. (2018). Anger and aggression treatments: A review of meta-analyses. Current Opinion in Psychology, 19, 65–74.
Balban, M. Y., Neri, E., Kogon, M. M., Weed, L., Nouriani, B., Jo, B., Holl, G., Zeitzer, J. M., Spiegel, D., & Huberman, A. D. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1), 100895.
Carver, C. S., & Harmon-Jones, E. (2009). Anger is an approach-related affect: Evidence and implications. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 183–204.
Harmon-Jones, E. (2004). On the relationship of anterior brain activity and anger: Examining the role of attitude toward anger. Cognition and Emotion, 18(3), 337–361.
Shimbo, D., Cohen, M. T., McGoldrick, M., Ensari, I., Diaz, K. M., Fu, J., Duran, A. T., Zhao, S., Suls, J. M., Burg, M. M., & Chaplin, W. F. (2024). Translational research of the acute effects of negative emotions on vascular endothelial health: Findings from a randomized controlled study. Journal of the American Heart Association, 13(9), e032698.
Chida, Y., & Steptoe, A. (2009). The association of anger and hostility with future coronary heart disease: A meta-analytic review of prospective evidence. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 53(11), 936–946.
Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1997). Hiding feelings: The acute effects of inhibiting negative and positive emotion. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103.
Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39(3), 281–291.
Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M. J., Tom, S. M., Pfeifer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.
Torre, J. B., & Lieberman, M. D. (2018). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling as implicit emotion regulation. Emotion Review, 10(2), 116–124.
Moser, J. S., Dougherty, A., Mattson, W. I., Katz, B., Moran, T. P., Guevarra, D., Shablack, H., Ayduk, O., Jonides, J., Berman, M. G., & Kross, E. (2017). Third-person self-talk facilitates emotion regulation without engaging cognitive control: Converging evidence from ERP and fMRI. Scientific Reports, 7, 4519.
Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: How you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324.
Pennebaker, J. W., Mayne, T. J., & Francis, M. E. (1997). Linguistic predictors of adaptive bereavement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(4), 863–871.
Frattaroli, J. (2006). Experimental disclosure and its moderators: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(6), 823–865.
Maciejewski, P. K., Zhang, B., Block, S. D., & Prigerson, H. G. (2007). An empirical examination of the stage theory of grief. JAMA, 297(7), 716–723.
Wade, N. G., Hoyt, W. T., Kidwell, J. E. M., & Worthington, E. L., Jr. (2014). Efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions to promote forgiveness: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 82(1), 154–170.
Denson, T. F., Pedersen, W. C., Friese, M., Hahm, A., & Roberts, L. (2011). Understanding impulsive aggression: Angry rumination and reduced self-control capacity are mechanisms underlying the provocation-aggression relationship. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(6), 850–862.
Schwartz, R. C., & Sweezy, M. (2020). Internal Family Systems Therapy (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Which myth did you fall for? Would love to hear below!

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You Understand Him Too Well. (That's the Problem.) 🧠

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Do You Just Miss the Sex? (No.) 🧠

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How to Be More Approachable to Men 🧠

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Emotional Intelligence ≠ Secure Attachment 🧠

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You Were Taught to Be Useful, Not Lovable 🧠

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Secure Love WILL Trigger You 🧠

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Disagreement Isn’t the Threat. (Avoiding It Is.) 🧠

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Why Knowing Your Attachment Style Hasn’t Changed Anything 🧠

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Your Brain on a Breakup 🧠

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"Trusting Your Gut" Is Ruining Your Love Life. 🧠

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The 3 Dating Types Post Heartbreak 🧠

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The Mind, Brain, Body Digest

7 Types of Situationships, Ranked by Recovery Time 🧠

TL;DR Summary:

Let’s Talk About the Ones That “Didn’t Count”

First, How I’m Ranking These

#7: The Talking Stage That Never Graduated

Why It Sticks

What She Calls It in Session

#6: The Friend You Started Sleeping With…

Why It Sticks

#5: The Label Ban

Why It Sticks

What She Calls It in Session

#4: The On-Again, Off-Again

Why It Sticks

#3: The Wrong Timing One

Why This One Won’t Close

#2: The One That Ended Right Before It Got Real

Why This One Won’t Close

What She Calls It in Session

#1: The Emotional Affair

Alright, So Why Are You Still In This

Reason 1: Unfinished Heartbreak

Reason 2: You Were Sold on What COULD Be, Not What IS

Reason 3: Some PART of You Picked the Ambiguity

What To Actually Do About It

Step 1: Deliver the Verdict Yourself (for unfinished heartbreak)

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Step 2: Capacity Column, Potential Column (for what COULD be)

Step 3: Find the PART That Keeps Picking the Exit (for choosing the ambiguity)

One Last Thing

Ready to Complete Heartbreak in 63 Days?

Supporting Research

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“How Do I Say It So He'll Finally Hear Me?" (You Already Did.) 🧠

TL;DR Summary:

The Message I’ve Read Four Hundred Times

Your Experiments Are Broken

Layer One: The Bad Experiment

Layer Two: You’re Not Missing the Data. You’re Disqualifying It.

Layer Three: It Worked Once

Layer Four: You’d Rather Be a Project

Me Too…

Layer Five: You Already Thought You Were the Problem

The Evidence Protocol

Step 1: Listen

Step 2: Discern

Step 3: Accept

Step 4: Act

Step 5: Go Get the Part That Set the Number

You Got Your Answer a Long Time Ago

Ready to Complete Heartbreak in 63 Days?

Supporting Research

Leave a Comment

5 Questions I'd Ask on a First Date (If I Were a Woman) 🧠

TL;DR Summary:

Lemme Tell You About the Worst Version of Me

You’re Not Catching a Liar.

1. “What did you actually like about being in a relationship?”

The Follow-Up

What You’re Watching For Bottomline

2. “What do you do when you’re stressed?”

The Follow-Up

What You’re Watching For Bottomline

3. “Who’s your oldest friend? And what happened with the ones you lost?”

The Follow-Up

What You’re Watching For Bottomline

4. “Has anyone ever changed your mind about something that mattered?”

The Follow-Up

5. “What was your part in why your last relationship ended?”

The Follow-Up

The Questions Were Never the Hard Part

How to Use These Without Sounding Like HR

1. Spread them out.

2. Ask like a person.

3. Then shut up.

4. Write down what he actually said within 24 hours.

5. Answer all five yourself.