Notes on validation, adolescence, and the work of becoming for everyone

October 7, 2026—I don’t know about you, but end-of-summer-into-fall 2026 has felt extraordinarily difficult. The bad news seems to come from all quarters. It feels like too much to sit with, hold, or witness. There are some days I just want to pull the covers over my head. September was a very strange month for The Shiftless Wanderer as one of my TikTok videos went viral, and it continues to garner over 1000 views a day. In the post I spoke about traumatic invalidation and ho

September 25, 2026—If your experience as an IFS therapist or practitioner has been anything like mine, you completed your Level 1 IFS training, but somehow those beautiful sessions you witnessed in the training demos didn’’t manifest in your therapy office. Unlike the trainings, sometimes sessions can feel extraordinarily messy. We enter unknown territory, encounter clients’ parts and our own parts who befuddle us or refuse to unblend. Sometimes it feels a little bit like wan

August 27th, 2026 - There are several distinct memories I have from 2020, the year everything changed. I had never thought I could do therapy online, but here we were, meeting in people’s bedrooms, bathrooms (yes! bathrooms), cars, and beyond. Because we weren’t meeting behind the closed doors of my office, clients had the opportunity to bring in their partners, kids, pets, and parents. I got an inside look at how things were in their native environments. I met with kids and

June 24, 2026—One of the foundational assumptions of Internal Family Systems (IFS) is that every person contains a multiplicity of parts. We are not a singular, fixed "I." We are made up of many different aspects of ourselves—parts that carry hopes, fears, wounds, desires, beliefs, and strategies for navigating the world. Beneath and beyond these parts is what IFS calls Self: the calm, compassionate, curious, courageous essence that exists within every human being. For many a