I had been watched my entire life by someone. So when I finally found myself alone, truly alone, the idea didn’t feel peaceful at all. It terrified me. At first, I told myself the fear was about practical things. Small, reasonable concerns. I lose my keys. I misplace my phone. What would I do if there was no one there to help me find them? So I solved that. I bought tracker tags for my keys and my phone. Now, when I misplace them, I open an app and they tell me exactly where

For a long time, I believed I had failed to protect my boundaries in my marriage. That I had allowed too much. That I hadn’t spoken up clearly or firmly enough. That I had somehow participated in my own erasure. But that story doesn’t quite hold. Inside the relationship, I didn’t really have boundaries. Not because I didn’t enforce them — but because I had never learned they were allowed to exist. As a child, I had no privacy. None. My phone calls were listened to. My belongi

The first time someone asked me who I was outside of my marriage, I didn’t know how to answer. Not because I didn’t want to. Because the question didn’t make sense yet. By the time my marriage collapsed, I was in my fifties. I had lived an entire life inside that relationship. I had raised children. I had endured things. I had adapted, survived, functioned. The girl I had been before it all felt like a stranger. I was in therapy three times a week then. Not for growth. Not fo

I learned very early in my marriage that if something mattered to me, I couldn’t just say it. Not plainly. Not directly. If I needed something, anything really, I had to figure out how to present it in a way that allowed him to arrive at the conclusion himself. As if the idea had originated in his mind, not mine. At the time, I was vaguely uncomfortable with this. I remember wondering if that made me manipulative. And in a technical sense, yes, it did. I was manipulating outc

There was a long stretch of my marriage where my husband traveled a lot for work. Conferences. Meetings. Professional things that existed in a world I was never part of. And I remember noticing something about myself that I didn’t quite know what to do with at the time. When he was getting ready to leave, I felt… relieved. Not dramatically. Not with fireworks or rebellion. Just a quiet sense of spaciousness opening up in my chest. Like I could breathe more easily for a few da

I've witnessed the remarkable turnaround in every aspect of my own life; relationships, finances, career, self-love, and I now guide clients