For years, I believed love meant meeting people where they were.
So I did… Became really adept at it.
I listened beneath the words, noticed what wasn’t being said, sensed when someone was hurting long before they told me. I learned to ask thoughtful questions, to stay curious instead of reactive, to hold space for another person’s experience.
People felt safe with me.
And yet, I began to disappear.
At first, I was unaware of this. I’d leave lunch with a friend or hang up the phone after a long conversation with someone I loved and feel an ache I couldn’t quite explain.
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I knew what they were worried about.
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what they hoped for.
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the stories behind their stories.
But somehow they knew very little about mine.
I’d get in my car thinking, How did we spend an hour together and somehow never get to me?
Initially I blamed them, wondering Why don’t they ask? Why aren’t they curious? Why don’t they hold space for me the way I hold space for them?
The resentment was real. But resentment has a way of becoming an honest teacher when we’re willing to listen. Of course I was.
These incidences just taught me that I had become so skilled at entering other people’s worlds that I’d forgotten to invite them into mine.
No one had assigned me that role.
I had.
Looking back now, I can see the genius in it.
The little girl who learned to pay exquisite attention to the unsafe emotional climate around her grew into a woman who could sit with another human being in profound ways.
That capacity has shaped my entire life.
It made me a teacher, a coach, someone people trust with their stories, and most recently a death doula.
I wouldn’t trade that gift for anything. But gifts have shadows.
Mine was believing my role was to understand everyone else while remaining largely unknowable myself. I thought that was kindness.
Looking back, the quiet questions running beneath almost every interaction were fraught.
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Will this upset them?
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Will they think I’m selfish?
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Is this really worth bringing up?
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Maybe this isn’t the right time.
I thought I was protecting the relationship. Instead, I was protecting myself from the discomfort of honesty.
That’s when I began to understand the difference between niceness and kindness. No one ever taught me that love also asks us to invite people to meet us where we are.
Niceness was asking me to manage someone else for my comfort.
Kindness was asking me to tell the truth in service of something larger.
At times that truth is gentle. At others it’s uncomfortable. And sometimes it sounds like, “I’d love to tell you what’s been happening for me.”
That’s why I return again and again to what in my book Unbreakable Us I call the “Sacred Third.”
Every relationship is more than you and more than me.
There is what is living between us which we are creating with every conversation. Every silence. Every truth we tell… and every truth we avoid.
When I abandon myself to care only for you, the Sacred Third suffers. When I bulldoze over you to care only for myself, it suffers then, too.
Niceness protects comfort. Harshness protects certainty. And the Sacred Third asks a different question: What would help this relationship flourish?
I’ve come to believe that this is where tenderness and directness meet.
For years, I thought they were opposites. If I was tender, I couldn’t be direct. And if I was direct, I couldn’t be tender. But neither turned out to be true.
Tenderness without directness leaves us unseen. Directness without tenderness leaves us disconnected.
Love asks something more courageous: asking us to remain connected to ourselves while staying connected to one another.
The old pattern no longer runs the show, but every now and then I notice its familiar invitation.
And noticing gives me a choice to stay curious, to reveal a little more of myself, or to simply say, “I’d love to tell you what’s been happening for me.”
I’ve discovered that intimacy isn’t built by waiting for someone to ask the perfect question but by having the courage to let ourselves be known.
These days, the question I carry isn’t, “Will they ask about me?” It’s, “Am I allowing myself to be known?”
That question continues to change the way I relate – not always with full mastery – rather with the recognition that every relationship is a love lab, an invitation to practice.
Today, one of the greatest privileges of my life is sitting with people as they untangle their own relationships. And perhaps because of my own story, I’ve noticed that people who long to be deeply known are often the ones who have become the most skilled at knowing everyone else.
The gift was never the problem. The imbalance was.
Intimacy isn’t created because one person knows how to listen well. It grows when both people are willing to know and be known. To listen. To reveal. To care. To ask. To answer.
Those are the relationships I want to create.
Not just with my nearest and dearest. But with the people I coach.
These are the kinds of conversations we’ll be exploring inside the Unbreakable Us Masterclass this fall. Know that I don’t have it all figured out but believe love asks us to keep becoming people who are both tender and direct.
So I’ll leave you with the question I’ve been carrying:
Where has one of your greatest gifts also cast a shadow?
You don’t have to rush to answer it.
Some questions are meant to be lived before they’re understood.
Ready to Explore What Is Possible?
If this reflection brought something into focus for you—perhaps a familiar reaction, a recurring relationship pattern, or a place where you long to show up differently—I invite you to schedule a one-to-one Discovery Call with me.
This is a space for us to look beneath what is happening on the surface and explore what may be shaping your experience of connection, conflict, trust, and love. Together, we will identify what may be asking for your attention and consider what a more grounded, resilient path forward could look like.
You do not need to have it all figured out before we speak. You only need to be willing to become curious about what is possible.