We can do all the heavy lifting in therapy, but sometimes life just throws too much at us at once. Between the holidays, chaotic work schedules, and general exhaustion, Rachel and Mike recently hit a wall, slipping off the tracks into a tough two-week period of disconnection.

When catching up on the setback, Rachel shares a powerful analogy: normally, if she jumps off the dock, she needs Mike to stay on the dock and pull her back up—but this time, they were both so depleted that Mike jumped off the other side, leaving them both swimming with nobody to pull them to safety. For Rachel, this brought up a painful, ancient narrative. Instead of just seeing two stressed partners, her nervous system told her she was defective. In this session, we reframe what it means to be guarded. For so long, Rachel viewed her emotional wall as a massive block of ice she needed to hack down. Today, we explore why the only real way to remove an ice wall is to slowly warm up the environment until it dissolves on its own.

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