When you’re young you did what you needed to do to get through the day.

You paid attention to your mom’s mood when she comes home.

You counted how many beers your dad had and registered the volume of his voice to gauge the danger level.

You put up with comments about your weight, how your siblings got better grades, or how they were killing it in their sport.

And more often than not, all that crap continues into our adulthood.

Sometimes when I’m in social situations and someone says something rude or innapropraite to me, I’ll go into freeze mode or shock.

I’ll get the deer in the headlights look on my face or laugh it off in the moment.

Sometimes we’re not able to say something because of who the person is. Maybe it’s your boss or someone else that has power over you.

Or maybe someone said something hurtful or humiliating to you when you were younger and it pops in your head from time to time now.

It’s not too late to do what you wish you could have done in the moment.

Friendship.

It’s all the things.

Life giving, soul soothing, heartbreaking.

Gets you through life’s most crushing moments.

Sometimes you have to break up and move on which is really fucking hard because it feels like you’re losing a limb, but if you don’t, your soul dies a slow death.

It’s laughing until you cry or pee your pants.

They’re your oxygen, life raft, and glimmers when there’s so much suck.

I met my friend, I’ll call her Natalie because she looks like Natalie from The Chicks, in an Overeaters Anonymous group when I was 16 and she was about 18.

Does life become all rainbows and unicorns when you coach with me?

Nope.

The world will still be a dumpster fire sometimes, people you love will still struggle physically and emotionally, relationships will still be challenging sometimes, and you’ll still have to deal with assholes at work.

But better than the rainbows and unicorns, you’ll have accessable, effective, science-backed, do-anywhere tools to support yourself and your nervous system when life inevitably gets, well, lifey.

Sometimes I’ll get stuck ruminating on something that happened.

Could be something that happened yesterday or 4 decades ago.

I’ll replay the scene or convo with a new outcome, sporting a zinger of a comeback that my brain couldn’t come up with in the moment, thanks freeze mode.

I can lay in bed in the morning, while in the shower, or at a stoplight rehashing and just sittin’ in that good ole dirty diaper of shoulda/coulda/woulda until the cows come home.

And I have, sheesh…