Here I explore the themes that matter to me and that arise in my work with clients: relationships, psychology, philosophy, aliveness, self-awareness, and the inner life. My writing is inspired by my own 45 years of life experience, accumulated knowledge, and, importantly, from seeing clients over the past 18 years.
Much of this writing also exists as video essays on my YouTube channel, where the same ideas are paired with nature footage and narration in my own voice. You can find the full channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@themetaforest
Recent series:
The Subtle Art of Taking It Personally explores how we interpret and react to other people’s behavior, and what those reactions reveal about our own psychology, wounds, and defenses.
Three Pillars of a Nourishing Relationship examines what makes intimate relationships nourishing versus depleting: hard work together, compatibility, and individual healing.
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The Drama Triangle: A Cocoon of Moral Certainty
It’s in our primal human nature to perceive conflict in terms of an archetypal meta-story with a victim, a villain, and a hero. This can make for an entertaining movie but, usually, seeing the real world in this way limits our growth, connection, and freedom by turning each other into dehumanizing caricatures and escalating conflict. Fast moral certainty comes with a high price tag. Psychologist Stephen Karpman named this pattern “the drama triangle”, and we’re so used to it that it feels normal and even inescapable. It shows up at every level of human relating, from the family to public…
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The Blind Spot That Keeps Conflict Alive
This basic question is, in my experience, central to almost all psychotherapy: “How much of this interpersonal problem is ‘my stuff’ and how much of it is ‘their stuff’ and how much is ‘our stuff’?” The same basic question from another angle: “how much of what I’m experiencing (perceiving, thinking, feeling, saying, doing) is because of the present reality in front of me, and how much of what I’m experiencing is because of my past conditioning?” We’re hardwired for continuous and responsive feedback exchange with each other, and at the same time we’re separate bodies and minds with personality tendencies…
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Circular Causality Blindness In Intimate Relationships
The more enduring and substantive the history between two people, the more personal their behavior toward each other will be. So where better to practice the subtle art of taking it personally than in marriages and intimate relationships? A couple’s mutual awareness of the circular causality between them can make the difference between a status quo stalemate for years and empathy that yields intimacy dividends for decades. Relationship problems can largely be explained by circular causality blindness, which leads to blame and resignation rather than accountability and effort. We tend to underestimate how much our own behavior shapes a partner’s…
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The Myth Of Pure Evil And Circular Causality Blindness
When relationships are going well, we credit good intentions and enjoy the sweetness of harmony. But in conflict, we tell stories of “good vs evil” that erase shared responsibility. Between individuals and groups, there exists a human proclivity to make our side righteous and the other side wicked, because doing so is more comfortable than listening, empathizing, and compromising. Psychologist Roy Baumeister calls this “the myth of pure evil”. It’s the psychology behind polarization, tribalism, and conflict escalation. It allows harmful behavior to insidiously masquerade as virtue under the auspices of fighting evil. The myth of pure evil is not…
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Circle Eye Blind: Semi-Concealed Side Of Strife
Circular causality blindness” is what I call the psychological blind spot that causes us to selectively attribute others’ behavior as a situational cause for our own, while simultaneously discounting how our actions act as a trigger for their behavior. Each partner or party within a system sees their own reactions as justified responses to the behavior of others. Two sides hold mirror-image half-truths, each convinced they’re merely reacting, rather than co-creating a mutually unsatisfying or destructive loop. This video explains how, due to various cognitive biases, we often give up on relationship problems, or make them worse with “solutions” that…
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Significance Shadows And Influence Illusions
Why do we have opposite tendencies to feel invisible and insignificant on one hand, and other times experience the “spotlight effect”, overestimating how much others are paying attention to us? Why do we oscillate between overestimating and underestimating our importance to others, and what do these misjudgements depend on? How can developmental and evolutionary psychology shed light on the disconnect between the perception vs the reality of how much or how little attention is turned our way? I share a few thoughts on these questions in this video.
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Echoes Of Steps Inevitably Intersect
The longer I live, the more I perceive how interconnected I am with the rest of life on the planet. Noticing this can be at once frightening and liberating, depending perhaps on our current appetites for control vs acceptance. What influence can “little old me” possibly have, when it is placed next to that of infinite creation? Are we master and commander of our ship, restrained only by the limits of our imagination and determination? Or are we passengers of fate in a vehicle steered by the hands of God, exempt from any task other than steadfast surrender? What is…
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Taking It Circularly (The Subtle Art Of Taking It Personally 2.1)
A continuation of my essay on relationship dynamics that I’ve called “The subtle art of taking it personally”. In this section I introduce some questions I’ll be exploring, and the concept of “circular causality”, a useful term from the field of marriage and family therapy that, once seen, cannot be unseen (at least in my experience). The next several videos will go into more detail on circular causality (the way we continuously and dynamically impact and influence one another), how and why circular causality is often not perceived from our subjective points of view, and the resulting consequences of that…
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The subtle art of taking it personally (part 1): Who do we think we are?
You may have heard the advice, “don’t take anything personally”. And what’s not to like about the idea that other people’s challenging behavior has nothing to do with us and is all “about them”? But… is it true? If so, would that not also infer that all of our actions are only “about us” and have nothing to do with what other people do in our midst? What does “taking something personally” actually mean? And for that matter, what does “personal” mean? (This may not be as obvious as it sounds). How much of human behavior is about the characteristics…
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Three pillars of a nourishing relationship (part 3): individual healing
In a relationship, it’s easy to attribute the pain of our individual wounds to a partner. They say something hurtful, and we hurt. They leave, and we feel lonely. They smother us, and we feel trapped. It’s just an obvious case of cause and effect, right? What more to it could there be? That’s what we think, at least, until we break up and, months later, are still feeling similar hurt, loneliness, suffocation, or whatever else we were feeling when they were around. Only this time they aren’t around to attribute it to. That can motivate us to look inward…
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Three pillars of a nourishing relationship (part 2): compatibility
I like the idea that anyone can love anyone, regardless of their life conditioning and their genetic attributes. And technically I think that’s true. I believe that at a soul level, we are all the same consciousness, so loving any other being is like loving ourselves. But loving someone isn’t the same as having a relationship with them. Love isn’t transactional, but relationships are, even if those transactions aren’t kept track of (which are the best kind of transactions for intimacy). Love and relationship are related, but not the same. Some kinds of relationships like family, friendship, and intimate partnership…
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Three pillars of a nourishing relationship (part 1): hard work together
What makes a relationship work? It’s a pretty important question. If we knew the answer — really knew it — and believed it in our bones — it might go a long way toward influencing who we select, how we prepare when single, and how we show up in relationships. Most people want a healthy, nourishing romantic and intimate relationship. But I think there’s a lot of warranted confusion around what will get us there, because the answer isn’t simple. When I was younger, I didn’t choose partners or show up in relationships all that consciously, which is fairly typical. …
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Cold water immersion in nature: a therapist’s experience and reflections (Part 3)
This post is the text of a video essay that I made. For most people, I would recommend watching/listening to the video instead of reading the post: The River Eventually I wound up moving, so my access to the lake became a rare occurrence. But there was a river nearby where I went. It took […]
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Cold water immersion in nature: a therapist’s experience and reflections (Part 2)
This post is narrated in this YouTube video: Keeping our cold seat In standard meditation practices, a common instruction is to “keep your seat”. People who say they “can’t meditate” are generally saying that they have a hard time staying with the meditation and not aborting after a few minutes. The urge to stop meditating […]
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Cold water immersion in nature: a therapist’s experience and reflections (Part 1)
This post is narrated in this YouTube video: Taking the plunge I don’t know exactly why I started getting in cold water three years ago. Carl Jung said that “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.” And maybe it’s more accurate to say that the idea of cold water immersion found me, as it was […]
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Cutting the strings that bind us (The Free Oscar Project)
Oscar first introduced himself to me on a beautiful sunny day in the early and snowy winter. I was struck by how close he came to me, and how he seemed small and conspicuously alone. In retrospect, at the time, it felt a bit like looking in a mirror-perfect reflection of a calm lake. A friend later told me that he likely had been abandoned by his flock, since Canadian Geese are usually social animals. I didn’t know if that was true, but the possibility wrenched my heart.
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The courage of investing in a new relationship
This post is the text of a video essay I’ve hosted on YouTube here: Most adults have been hurt in romantic relationships in the past. When we’re young and naïve, we often dive headfirst into a commitment, fueled by the power of romantic love. And then for a variety of reasons, be they some combination […]
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Imago couples therapy
“When we were babies, we didn’t smile sweetly at our mothers to get them to take care of us. We didn’t pinpoint our discomfort by putting it into words. We simply opened our mouths and screamed. And it didn’t take us long to learn that, the louder we screamed, the quicker they came. The success […]
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Psychodynamic therapy
“Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.” Aristotle Psychodynamic therapy and psychoanalytic therapy are sometimes used interchangeably, as there is more overlap than difference between them. One distinction is that psychoanalytic therapy is highly associated with Freud and his contemporaries, whereas psychodynamic therapy may be more associated with “neo-Freudians” who came afterward, […]
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How to journal therapeutically
Therapist’s log Twelve years ago, I found myself starting to journal seriously for the first time. I’d started journaling a few times before but it didn’t stick for long. Perhaps I was too busy soaking in experience as a teenager and twenty-something often does. But at 30 years old, the intersection of a painful breakup, […]