Thanks for Sharing

Episode 373: When You Change, Your Relationships Change

Changing your patterns doesn't just change you. It changes the relationships around you.

 

One of the biggest surprises in healing is that being healthier doesn't always feel better, at least not at first. The people around you have learned the old dance just as much as you have. So when you stop over-explaining, caretaking, shutting down, or apologizing for everything, the relationship often wobbles before it finds a new rhythm.

That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong.

It means the choreography is changing.

In this final episode of my four-part series, we explore:
• Why healthy change can create tension
• How family systems respond when you break old rules
• Why other people's reactions don't have to determine your growth
• How to stay grounded in your second response, even when others aren't sure what to do with the new you

One of the biggest lessons I've had to learn is this:

Being needed isn't the same as being loved.

Changing that belief didn't just change me; it changed the expectations inside some of my relationships. Growth doesn't happen in isolation. It happens one relationship at a time.

 Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube.

 Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

 

#Healing #Relationships #Attachment #TraumaRecovery #NervousSystem #Differentiation #FamilySystems #PersonalGrowth #MentalHealth #Therapy #CouplesTherapy #Boundaries #EmotionalHealth #ThanksForSharingPodcast 

Episode 372: Now What? Developing the Second Response:

You can understand your pattern completely. You can know exactly where it came from, what it's protecting you from, why it shows up the way it does. And still, in the moment, you do the thing anyway.

That's because understanding a pattern and interrupting it are two different skills. And interrupting it and actually replacing it — building something to put in its place — that's a third skill entirely. That's what this episode is about.

The second response isn't a version of you that shows up once you've healed enough. It's a direction. Something small and specific and chosen, built from a value you actually hold, practiced in moments that don't matter so that it's available when they do.

This week: what do you keep losing when the pattern wins? That answer is usually pointing straight at what you're building toward. 

 

Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

Episode 371: The Gap Between Reaction and Response

Understanding your patterns is one thing. Interrupting them in real time is something else entirely. In this episode, we talk about the tiny space between the trigger and the reaction — and how to find it, use it, and slowly make it bigger.

 

 Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

 

Episode 370: Why knowing isn't enough

Why can you understand your behaviors and still repeat them: You can explain exactly why you do it. And then you do it again.

 

That's not a character flaw. It's the difference between insight and integration, and they are not the same thing.

In this episode, I'm talking about why understanding your patterns doesn't automatically change them, what's actually happening in your nervous system when insight isn't enough, and the real mechanisms that create lasting change — including corrective experience, practicing in activated states, and why repair might be the most underestimated part of healing.

If you've ever thought "I know this stuff, so why do I keep doing it?" — this one's for you.

 [link in bio]

 Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

 

Episode 369: If I Can't Be Loved, I'll Be Needed

I said that in a men's group a few years ago — and the room went silent.

Everyone immediately understood what it meant to organize your life around being needed. What surprised me was what came next: when I introduced the idea of being chosen — freely, without obligation — some of the men weren't just skeptical. They weren't sure relationships like that actually existed.

They had seen duty. Obligation. Dependence. But they weren't sure they'd ever witnessed two fully functioning adults who simply wanted each other.

This episode is about the difference between being needed and being loved — and what it costs us when we confuse the two.

New episode is live. Link in bio.

 Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

#attachmenttheory #codependency #relationships #emotionalhealth #mentalhealth #therapy #beingneeded #beingloved #securelove #selfworth

Episode 368: All Behavior Makes Sense

"All behavior makes sense. And if it doesn't make sense yet — we keep asking questions until it does."

This is one of the phrases I say most in my work, and in this episode I'm unpacking where it actually came from. Not grad school. Life.

I'm sharing two stories that changed how I see people — one from a cassette tape in my car, and one from a borrowed office and a father who asked me point-blank what he smelled like. Both of them taught me the same thing: behavior doesn't live in a vacuum. It lives inside a context. And once you understand the context, almost everything makes sense.

This one is for therapists, parents, and anyone who has ever written someone off before they understood them — including themselves.

New episode is live. Link in bio. 

#podcast #therapist #mentalhealth #curiosity #allbehaviormakessense #therapy #selfawareness #attachmenttheory #nervoussystem #healing

 

 

 Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

 

 

 

Episode 367: Beliefs, Values, and the road back to yourself: What if some of the beliefs running your life were never actually chosen by you?

In this episode, we explore the difference between values and beliefs — and why that distinction matters so deeply in healing, recovery, relationships, and identity.

We talk about:
• Survival beliefs formed in childhood
• The gap between who you want to be and what feels possible
• Compliance-based identities
• Emotional reality being deprioritized in families and systems
• Why coping patterns often hide deeper values
• The voices from the past that still shape how we live and love
• And how healing is often the process of finding your way back to yourself

This episode is for anyone who has ever wondered:
“Is this actually who I am… or just who I had to become?”

 Listen now on Thanks for Sharing.

 

Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

 

#healing #traumahealing #attachment #betrayaltrauma #therapy #mentalhealth #selfawareness #relationships #innerchildhealing #recovery #emotionalhealth #psychology #healingjourney #codependency #jackiepack

Episode 366: Friendship, Authenticity and the People Who Stay: Why is friendship — truly lasting, genuinely honest friendship — so hard to find and harder to keep?

In this episode, we explore the quiet loneliness of being surrounded by people who don't really know you, the fear underneath the masks we wear, and what it ttakes to build the kind of friendship that survives time, change, and all the complicated business of being human. Plus: the girls' weekend nobody talks honestly about, a friendship that didn't just fade but detonated, and a personal reckoning with what it means to be a therapist trying to have friends who aren't. No listicles. Just an honest conversation about one of the most important and most complicated things in a life.

 Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

Episode 365: The Boundary Hangover: Why You Feel Worse After Setting Limits (And What's Actually Happening)

You did the hard thing. You said it.

And then you felt worse.

That guilt, that dread, that urge to immediately walk it back — that's not a sign you did something wrong.

It's your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do. Just not for the life you're trying to build.

In today's episode, I'm breaking down the 7 reasons the aftermath of a boundary feels like a crisis:  the grief, the identity disruption, the fear of abandonment, the cognitive dissonance, and what's actually happening in your body when a familiar dynamic gets disrupted.

Because nobody told us the relief doesn't come right away. And that silence has led many people to give up on themselves too soon.

New episode is out now. Link in bio. 

 

Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links

 

Episode 364: When Everything You Believed Stops Making Sense

There’s a moment most people don’t talk about.

When what you believed… stops holding.

Not because you’re broken.
Not because you’ve failed.
But because you can finally see.

Disillusionment isn’t the end of something.
It’s the beginning of seeing clearly.

And the people who have the courage to stay in that space—
not rush to fix it, numb it, or replace it—

are often the ones who understand the world the most deeply.

This episode is about:
• What it means to wake up to reality
• Why disillusionment can feel destabilizing
• And how people who go through it can actually help build something more honest and solid

If you’ve been questioning things lately… this one is for you.

 

Have a question or something you’d like me to talk about in a future episode?

You can call the show and leave a voicemail or send me an email — I love hearing from you, and your feedback helps shape these conversations. 

https://thanksforsharingpodcast.my.canva.site/thanks-for-sharing-links