DEV Community: Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan

Cristiano Ronaldo Waited Nine Years to Propose to Georgina Rodriguez. A Couples Therapist on What "Waiting for the Click" Actual

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:07:44 +0000

Cristiano Ronaldo Waited Nine Years to Propose to Georgina Rodriguez. A Couples Therapist on What "Waiting for the Click" Actually Costs

Cristiano Ronaldo and Georgina Rodriguez are married. After nine years together, five children, and a public engagement last year, they finally had the ceremony. According to a recent Daily Mail report, it was small, private, held in Portugal, with the kids in the room. No cathedral. No stadium. Just them.

But here is what everyone remembers about the road to this moment. Ronaldo said, publicly, that he had been waiting for a certain feeling before he proposed. He was waiting for the click. For nine years, five children, a shared life at the top of a goldfish bowl few humans will ever inhabit, he was waiting for a specific inner signal to arrive and tell him it was safe to say yes out loud.

If you are the partner in your own life who has been waiting to be chosen out loud, that headline lands in the chest like a small stone. Your throat tightens. The old whisper starts up: am I not enough to make you commit? If you are the one holding back, waiting for the feeling, your body is asking a different question: what if I say yes and I am wrong?

I sit with both of these people every week in my office. And the story we tell ourselves about the click, the story that a nine year wait is either romantic patience or quiet cruelty, misses what is actually going on underneath.

The Bridge From the Stadium Lights to Your Living Room

You do not need to be one of the most photographed men on earth for this to be your story. The click, the wait, the partner who is technically all in but not out-loud in, this is not a celebrity dynamic. This is the dynamic. High performing partners in San Francisco boardrooms carry it. So do exhausted parents in three-bed semis in Manchester. So do the couples who walk into my office looking exactly like a very expensive version of Peter and Sarah, which we will get to.

The wait is not about certainty. The wait is about a body trying to survive intimacy while performing invulnerability. That is the story worth staying with.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Click Is a Delay Mechanism, Not a Feeling

I want to be very direct about this. In my experience, when a partner says they are waiting for a click, they are almost never describing an actual feeling that has not arrived. They are describing the shape of a piece of emotional armor.

The click is what we tell ourselves is missing when we cannot metabolize the risk of being all the way in. It gets rebranded as intuition, or discernment, or being responsible about a big decision. All of those framings are respectable. None of them are what is actually happening in the body.

What is actually happening is much older. The closer you get to someone, the more familiar their face, their smell, their voice, their footsteps become. And familiarity, for a physiology that learned early that being fully seen was dangerous, does not read as safety. It reads as exposure. Your primitive brain does not distinguish between the partner you chose and the parent you needed. It just files them together as family. Once someone is family, all the old protective contractions come online.

So the body does what bodies do. It generates a reason to stay one step back from full commitment. It calls that reason the click. It waits.

This is what I mean when I say real love does not run on decree. It runs on proof of work. Nobody gets the certainty in advance. You do not get a guarantee stamped on the underside of the wedding band. You get the daily willingness to be seen in your shyness, your fear, your absolute imperfection, and to have the other person stay in the room anyway. That is the currency. There is no other one.

The Representative Cannot Receive Love

Ronaldo is arguably the most self-disciplined athlete of his generation. That is not a criticism. It is a description of a body that has spent thirty years being rewarded for control, mastery, and the absolute refusal to appear weak. When your entire life has been built on performing at the ceiling of what a human body can do, in front of billions of people, you develop what I call The Representative. Specifically, in his case, a version of it that shows up as the flawless performer.

The problem is that a performance cannot receive love. It cannot be met. It can be admired, cheered, put on a billboard, sold as a fragrance. It cannot be held.

When a high performer enters an intimate bond, they run straight into a wall they did not know existed. The very quality that made them successful in the outside world, that armored, always-competent self, is exactly the quality that has to be laid down for real intimacy to work. And laying it down is terrifying. Because underneath the armor is a small, ordinary human being who is not sure they are enough without the trophies. The body whispers: if I lower the drawbridge, and you find me lacking, I will die of shame in the dark.

So the drawbridge stays up. The relationship gets nine years. The engagement gets postponed. The click gets waited for. Not because he does not love her. Because loving her fully means letting her see the ordinary man behind the world's most famous number seven jersey. And that particular exposure is the one thing his survival response has never had to metabolize.

I've written about this same dynamic under very different celebrity headlines in my piece on Paddy McGuinness, Christine, and Nicola Adams. The details change. The shape does not.

The Relentless Lover and the Reluctant Lover

Now look at the other side of the wait. The partner who is there, has the kids, builds the life, and does not yet have the ring. That partner, in my clinical language, is often what I call the Relentless Lover. The one who keeps reaching. The one whose body will not settle until she gets a clear, out-loud yes.

The partner who is waiting for the click is the Reluctant Lover. Not cold. Not cruel. Just biologically committed to a strategy of self-protection that predates the marriage question by several decades.

When these two dance, and I call this dance the Waltz of Pain, both people end up more alone. The reaching partner reaches harder. The waiting partner retreats further into logic and timeline and readiness. Neither is a villain. Both are scared. The Relentless Lover's deepest fear is I do not matter enough to you to be chosen out loud. The Reluctant Lover's deepest fear is if I fully commit and I get it wrong, I will not survive the shame.

Nine years is a long time to run that pattern. Five children is a lot of shared life to build on top of an unnamed dance. And the small, private ceremony in Portugal, if you read it clinically, is not a fairy tale ending. It is a threshold. It is the moment they either finally build what I call a Sovereign Us, two whole people finding ground together on land they built themselves, or they simply legalize the pattern and hope the paperwork does what the vulnerability could not.

If you want to name your own version of this pattern before you keep dancing it, you can take the free Figs Quiz.

Codependent My Arse

I want to say something plainly to the partner who has been waiting. The mainstream self-help internet will look at a nine-year wait and immediately tell you that needing your partner to commit out loud is codependent. That you should find your worth in yourself. That you should learn to love yourself in a cave until you no longer require anyone else's declaration.

Codependent my arse.

Needing your primary attachment figure to be accessible, responsive, and out-loud engaged with you is not a design flaw. It is a non-negotiable biological necessity from the cradle to the grave. Bowlby did not spend his life proving this so that a wellness influencer could tell you to journal your way out of it seventy years later. Your body is not being needy. Your body is being accurate.

The partner who cannot say the yes out loud is not more evolved than you because they can "hold space" for ambiguity. They are, more often than not, protecting an old wound by outsourcing the discomfort of it to you. You get to carry the not-knowing so they do not have to carry the risk of choosing.

That is not sovereignty. That is a very sophisticated form of avoidance.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Peter, Sarah, and the Boardroom Voice

Let me tell you about a couple who walked into my office looking nothing like Ronaldo and Rodriguez and behaving exactly like them.

Peter had built an eighty-million-dollar company. He spoke in perfect boardroom-ready paragraphs. Sarah was somatic. She lived through her body. They had a young child, seven years together, and Peter could not bring himself to propose.

He sat on my couch, adjusted his posture, and said, "Figs, I love Sarah. I really do. But marriage is a major milestone, and I don't feel that absolute, 100 percent certainty yet. I'm waiting for things to feel totally aligned. I'm waiting for the click."

Peter thought he was being rational and responsible. His limbic system was running a survival program he had installed in childhood and never revisited. He had grown up as a boy who had to swallow his own feelings and perform flawless achievement to earn his father's approval. He had learned very young that needing someone was dangerous. Self-reliance was the price of admission to his own family.

Sarah, meanwhile, was quietly dying of thirst next to him. Not because he was cruel. He was warm, present, a good father. But she could feel that some final door was locked. Her body knew. And the more she reached, the more he retreated into the boardroom voice and the timeline and the readiness assessment.

The work was not to convince Peter to propose. Propose from that armored place and the marriage would be a legal container for the same waltz, with a ring on it. The work was to help him feel, in his body, that the certainty he was waiting for was not a feeling that would arrive. It was a decision that had to be made from inside not-knowing. That is the actual repeated effort a bond runs on. That is what actually clicks.

Peter proposed six months later. Not because he had certainty. Because he could finally tolerate not having it.

What Long Relationships Are Actually Metabolizing

I do not know what has happened between Ronaldo and Rodriguez in the years they were together, and I will not pretend to. What I do know, from sitting with hundreds of long-partnered couples, is that a nine-year runway to a wedding is almost never about waiting for something magical to happen.

It is almost always about metabolizing something real. Sometimes it is the death of a parent that has to happen first. Sometimes it is a betrayal, small or large, that quietly restructured the bond. Sometimes it is a partner who had to earn their own footing, financial or emotional, before they could stand next to the other person without feeling swallowed. Sometimes it is the slow work of two bodies learning that neither of them is going to disappear when the other one is having a hard day.

I write about a version of this in my piece on what actually ends long marriages. The bond is the ledger. The body keeps score of every rupture and every repair. Nine years is a long time to keep that ledger. The wedding is either the moment the ledger gets balanced and put down, or it is a legal event that leaves the ledger open.

The private ceremony in Portugal, with the five kids in the room, could be either. The photos will not tell you which.

Application: Where This Sits in Your Own Life

Read your own version of the story now. Are you the one waiting for the click, or are you the one waiting to be chosen out loud? Do not answer fast. The bodies of most people I work with know the answer before their mouths do.

If you are the one waiting for the click, I want you to consider that the click is not going to arrive. Not because there is something wrong with your relationship, but because certainty is not a feeling that gets delivered. It is a decision made from inside the fear. Every wedding ring in the world was put on by someone who was slightly terrified. The ones who wait for the terror to fully lift wait forever.

If you are the one waiting to be chosen out loud, I want you to stop pretending you do not need it. You need it. That is not weakness. That is your mammalian wiring doing its actual job. The question is not whether you are allowed to want the out-loud yes. The question is whether the person on the other side of you is capable of the real labor required to give it, and whether they are willing to lower the drawbridge that has kept them safe and lonely for as long as they can remember.

Both of these are hard. Both of them can be worked with. Neither of them get solved by waiting.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Ronaldo waited nine years for a feeling. He may have gotten it. He may have simply decided he could stop waiting. From the outside, both look the same. From the inside, they are not.

Stop waiting for the click. Do the behavioral evidence. The ring is not the point. What you build after it is.

Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban, and What "Keeping the Heart Open" Actually Costs After a Long Marriage Ends

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 22:06:42 +0000

Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban, and What "Keeping the Heart Open" Actually Costs After a Long Marriage Ends

The photograph is the point. Nicole Kidman on the cover of British Vogue, poised, luminous, and saying the line the culture wants to hear from a woman who just watched a nineteen year marriage end. She is "keeping the heart open." In a recent Daily Mail piece, she sheds light on the split from Keith Urban and offers the phrase as an act of grace, the kind of statement designed to close the tab on a story the tabloids will not stop chewing.

I am not going to diagnose Nicole Kidman. I have never sat with her. I have no idea what her marriage looked like from the inside. The Goldwater rule holds even when the headlines are loud, and speculation about a public figure's attachment history is not what her cover story deserves, or what you deserve if you found this article by searching her name at midnight.

What I want to write about is the phrase itself. "Keeping the heart open." Because that phrase is either a Vogue-caption platitude that means nothing, or it is one of the hardest pieces of relational work a human being can do after a long bond ends. I have watched people attempt it in my office for sixteen years. Most fail. The ones who succeed do something very specific with their bodies, and it has almost nothing to do with the version of "open heart" the culture is selling.

From the Cover Shoot to the Kitchen Floor

There is a fantasy the culture keeps recycling about long marriages. The fantasy is that if you make it past a certain number of years, some threshold has been crossed, some ground has been earned, and you are safe. Nineteen years is supposed to be past the fragile part.

It is not.

A couple in my office last year had been married twenty-two years. Two kids in college. A house paid off. And in one session the wife said, quietly, "I don't actually know if he sees me. I don't know if he ever did." He looked at her like she had spoken in a foreign language. He genuinely could not compute how a woman he had built an entire life with could sit six feet away and feel unseen.

That is the piece the wedding-anniversary math misses. Duration is not depth. Longevity is not attunement. Your body does not care that you have been married nineteen years. It cares whether, this morning, in the kitchen, your partner turned toward you or turned away. The science of small daily rituals is not decorative. It is the biological ledger your body has been keeping the whole time, and it does not forgive the past because the past was long.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Waltz Nobody Names Until It Is Too Late

Here is the mechanism I see almost every time a long marriage collapses in slow motion. Not the affair, not the dramatic betrayal, not the courtroom scene. The slow one. The one where two people who love each other end up sleeping in the same bed for years while their inner worlds live in separate countries.

I call it the Waltz of Pain. One partner reaches. The other retreats. The reaching partner, who I sometimes call the Relentless Lover, protests for togetherness. They chase. They complain. They organize. They send the text asking why he did not respond to the earlier text. They are terrified of being invisible.

The retreating partner, the Reluctant Lover, hears every protest as an indictment. Not enough. Never enough. Never doing it right. Their protector part goes into the basement of defensive silence, or logic, or the calendar, or the road, or the third whiskey. From the outside it looks like coldness. From the inside it is shame, and the fear that if they let their partner see them tremble, they will be exposed as inadequate.

Two protectors, both trying to avoid vulnerability. Real love hurts from time to time. Real love scares you. Real love asks you to let someone see you when you are not the shiny version. And when neither person can bear that, the marriage does not explode. It just quietly empties out until one day someone realizes they have been performing a marriage they already emotionally left.

This is the piece nobody wants to hear on the day the tabloids report a split. The split is not the beginning of the story. It is the ending of a story that has been happening underneath the family photos for years.

The Representative on the Vogue Cover

There is another piece I want to name, because it lives at the exact intersection of celebrity and the wound almost every high-achieving client of mine carries.

High performers build what I call the Representative. The polished, socially legible, family-approved version of you who can walk into any room, including your own wedding, and buy the safety the truer version could not. It works. That is the trap. The Representative is rewarded. Awards. Applause. Vogue covers. Partners who fall in love with the Representative because the Representative is spectacular.

But your partner cannot bond with the Representative. Your partner can only bond with the small, tender, actual you that you have been keeping in the basement since childhood, when you first learned that your true signal was not welcome in the room.

I know this from the inside. I spent years in Dublin performing a version of myself that would sell. Right accent, right social capital, right jokes at the right dinner. I bastardized my identity because I was frightened of not belonging. When I finally sat on a bench at Esalen after a Soul Motion session, collapsed, tears on my face, and a woman I was drawn to saw me, actually saw me, and loved that man, not despite his collapse but because of it, that was the moment I understood something the Vogue cover cannot teach you.

You cannot be loved for something you are hiding. You can only be admired for it. And admiration is not the food your body was asking for.

When a marriage ends after nineteen years, one of the questions worth sitting with is not "who was at fault." It is "who did they marry, and who was I actually being in there?" If both of you were Representatives, no wonder you starved.

What "Keeping the Heart Open" Actually Means

Now to the phrase itself. Because I think Kidman said something more interesting than the culture is giving her credit for, and I want to defend it against both the "she's coping" reading and the girlboss "self-love first" reading.

"Keeping the heart open" is not the same as staying available for the next romance. It is not a signal to future partners. It is not spiritual bypass.

In my clinical shorthand, keeping the heart open after a rupture is the capacity to remain in your own tender interior while your body is telling you to armor up. Every rupture teaches the survival response a rule. The rule is usually some version of "next time, don't reach that far." Next time, hedge. Next time, keep the exit route visible. Next time, hold something back so this can never hurt this much again.

That is the closed heart. It looks like strength. It is protector parts running the show.

The open heart is the harder work. It is the willingness to feel what happened, all of it, without translating it into a story about how the other person was a monster or you were a fool. It is what I call orphan sovereignty. Sovereign because you are standing on your own ground. Orphan because you are doing it without the bond that was supposed to be there. You do not hand your interior over to bitterness, but you also do not perform peace you have not earned.

The quiet biological work of finishing a bond without pretending it never existed is a specific piece of somatic labor. Your body has been oriented toward another body for nineteen years. That orientation does not update because a lawyer filed paperwork. It updates because you sit, day after day, with the fact that the person you reach for at 6am is not going to be there, and you let the reaching happen without shaming yourself for it and without collapsing into it.

If you want a shorthand for whether you are actually keeping your heart open or just posting about it, ask yourself this. Can I picture my former partner being happy with someone else, and feel my chest stay warm? If yes, you have done the work. If no, keep going. There is no shame in not being there yet. There is only shame in performing that you are.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Two Questions Still Running in the Background

After sixteen years of sitting with couples, I can tell you that underneath every fight I have witnessed there are really only two questions being asked. One partner is asking, in a hundred different ways, some version of "do you actually see me." The other is asking, just as desperately, some version of "am I actually enough for you."

Those questions do not stop when the marriage ends. That is the piece nobody warns you about. Divorce does not answer the questions. It just changes the context in which they keep running.

If your ex has moved on and you feel a spike in your chest, the question is still live. If you find yourself scrolling their new partner's profile at midnight, the question is still live. If you are the one who left and you still feel the need to explain yourself to your family, the question is still live.

Keeping the heart open, in this frame, means letting the questions keep asking without demanding that the world answer them. You cannot force your ex to say you were enough. You cannot force the culture to see you accurately. You can only sit with the questions, hold your own ground, and let the answer come from somewhere inside you that does not need external validation to survive.

If you want to name your own pattern first, you can take the free Figs Quiz. Thirteen questions. Under three minutes. It will tell you which side of the waltz you tend to stand on, which is the first piece of information you need before you can do anything different.

When There Are Kids in the Picture

Kidman and Urban have two daughters. I will not speculate about how the split is landing in their family. What I will say, because I say it every week, is that the parenting does not end when the marriage does. The parenting is the harder part, actually, because you have to keep showing up in a coordinated way with the person your body no longer trusts as your primary attachment figure.

The version of co-parenting counseling I do is not about spreadsheets. It is about dismantling the waltz that survived the divorce completely intact. Because it does survive. Two people who could not find each other while married often cannot find each other across a custody exchange either, and the kids feel every micro-tension in that handoff. The kids are not fooled by the polite tone. Their bodies are reading yours.

If you want your children to keep their hearts open, they need to see at least one adult in the arrangement actually doing it. Not performing it. Doing it. Being kind to the co-parent not because you are supposed to but because you have metabolized enough of the loss that the kindness is real.

What This Means For You Tonight

You are probably not on a Vogue cover. You are probably in bed with your phone, reading this because a headline about a celebrity split touched something you have been carrying quietly for months or years. Maybe your marriage is over. Maybe it is ending. Maybe it is technically fine and you have never felt more alone in it.

The story of a nineteen-year marriage collapsing is not primarily a story about them. It is a mirror. It is asking you a question about the ground under your own feet.

Are you in a marriage where you have been performing a Representative for so long you have forgotten what your actual voice sounds like? Are you the reaching partner, exhausted from a decade of protesting into silence? Are you the retreating partner, hiding in the basement of logic while your spouse cries in the kitchen? Are you already out of the marriage, telling yourself your heart is open when what is actually happening is that you have quietly closed the door on ever being seen again?

None of those positions is a moral failure. Every one of them is a body that learned, somewhere, that being fully yourself was dangerous. The work is not to shame yourself for the position. The work is to notice which one you are in and take the next honest step.

The next honest step is almost never leaving or staying. Those are the questions people obsess over because they feel decisive. The next honest step is usually smaller. It is turning toward your partner tonight, or turning toward yourself tonight, and letting one true thing be said out loud. What you have been hiding. What you have been reaching for. What you have been protecting against.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Keeping the heart open is not a Vogue caption. It is a daily choice to not let the last rupture write the rule for the next reach. Nineteen years, nineteen months, nineteen days. The math does not save you. Only the willingness to stay tender in a body that wants to armor up will. That is your work. Nobody else can do it for you, and nobody can do it to you either.

Mortgage Rates Just Broke a 44-Week Trend. Your Nervous System Already Knew.

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:09:03 +0000

Mortgage Rates Just Broke a 44-Week Trend. Your Nervous System Already Knew.

For the first time in 44 weeks, mortgage rates are running higher than they were a year ago. In a recent RISMedia report, the story arrives in industry dialect. Basis points. Weekly averages. Purchase applications thinning. Refinance activity going cold. Housing economists debating whether this is a blip or a regime shift.

That is boardroom language. That is not the language of the kitchen table.

The couple who came into my office in San Francisco this week did not open with 30-year averages. She opened with the fact that he refreshes Zillow at eleven at night and won't say why. He opened with the fact that she has stopped asking about the pre-approval letter they were supposed to finalize last month. On the drive over, they fought about a $46 charge on the debit card. The fight was so vicious that by the time they sat down, neither of them could remember what the charge had actually been for.

They think they are fighting about money. They are not. They are two flooded bodies in the same room, marinated in more than a decade of unstable ground, and the ground just shifted again.

The Bridge From Basis Points to the Bedroom

A mortgage rate is not just a number. It is a promise about the future. It says: this is what a stable life is going to cost you. And when the number moves against you, your body reads it as a threat to the timeline of your whole life together.

You do not process a rate hike as a policy event. You process it as a survival event. One more piece of evidence that the ground you were told you could stand on is not, in fact, ground.

I want to walk you through what is actually happening under the roof of your house right now. Because a limbic problem does not yield to a spreadsheet, and no housing recovery is going to repair what is happening between you and the person you share a bed with.

Money Is The Architecture Of Time

Here is the frame that changes everything for the couples I work with.

Money is not just an exchange currency. It is the base layer language of a civilization. At its core, money is the architecture of time. It is what lets you project forward, plan in decades, buy a house that is supposed to still be there in thirty years, and believe the version of your life you agreed to build together will still exist next October.

When mortgage rates rise, your body does not register a technical percentage shift. It registers a direct threat to your future safety. And when the future becomes unstable, the timeline of your relationship shrinks. You stop planning in decades. You start reacting in quarters. Then in weeks. Eventually you are reacting in the space between one text message and the next.

I have written about the same physics in Japan's bond yields and what fiat does to long-term love. When the cost of time goes up, everything built on the assumption of cheap time gets exposed. Japanese regional banks got exposed on their balance sheets. Couples get exposed in their bedrooms.

The Not-Good-Enough Financial Mother

The system we are all embedded in, I call the not-good-enough financial mother. Fiat means by decree. Rules shift without your consent, and they have, on repeat, for the whole span of your economic life.

Read that through attachment. A good enough mother is a stable base. Her child ventures out, tries something risky, comes home, and she is still standing there. The fiat mother runs the reverse. She insists the floor is holding while quietly pulling boards out from underneath you. She tells you to grind harder while shrinking what an hour of your work can actually buy. She locks in a rate at one number, then raises the rate on the next one so you cannot move, cannot upgrade, cannot sell without eating a loss. She watches you tap a card at the grocery store, then jacks the rate on the balance you couldn't clear.

Marinate inside that mother long enough and the physiology reorganizes. You end up part of a civilization raised in chronic, low-grade threat. Floor moving. Rules changing. The person at the podium insisting everything is fine while your body keeps its own quiet ledger of what is actually true.

That is why the anticipation of a rate print is not a neutral data event. The survival brain fires first. The rational brain runs behind. That older wiring has no patience for spreadsheets. It just clocks threat and starts scanning the room for who is going to be there when the floor moves.

Two Questions, One Living Room

Attachment theory is the best account we have of what love actually is. From very early in life to very late in life, we are wired to bond the way our lungs are wired for air. Mammalian biology. Not poetry.

Underneath every exchange with your partner, your body is running two questions on a loop. Will you be there when I need you. Do I matter to you.

When the answer reads as no, the biological house catches fire.

Now stack a rising mortgage rate on top of that. Stack the rent renewal that came in $340 heavier than last year. Stack the small drop in your stomach when the escrow statement pings. Your physiology cannot tell the difference between "housing costs are running higher than a year ago" and "I am not safe."

It just clocks threat. And the person next to you on the couch, the one your body is hoping will help you settle, is broadcasting the same threat signal right back. Two flooded bodies. One living room. Then one of you brings up the credit card.

The Fight About The Rate Is Never About The Rate

Couples come into my office convinced they are having a rational conversation about money. They are not.

The thinking brain lags the survival brain. By the time the prefrontal cortex arrives at the meeting, the amygdala has already read your spouse as hostile and dispatched the troops.

So here is the clinical truth. The argument about refinancing has nothing to do with refinancing. The blowup about the HVAC quote has nothing to do with the HVAC quote. The problem is never the problem. It is the way the two of you talk about the problem.

Every recurring money fight in your marriage right now is a protest wearing a disguise. One body trying, in the only dialect it has left, to say something underneath the words. Something like: I don't feel held. I don't feel chosen. I don't feel like the ground is solid and I need you to be ground with me.

It is easier to argue about a rate lock than to admit you are 39 and cannot afford the life your parents had at 34. Easier to fight about a Zillow tab than to say out loud: I am scared we made a mistake. I am scared this is not going to work. I am scared of what happens to us if it doesn't.

The Representative Walks Into The Kitchen

When the financial floor slips, we rarely have the courage to tell our partner we feel small and terrified of failing. Instead, we send in the Representative.

The Representative is the polished, competent version of us. The performer. The one who has answers, or at least a strategy for finding them. When the body feels not enough, the Representative shows up to prove otherwise. She retreats to the Strategy Room of her intellect and builds an airtight legal case against her partner's spending. He opens six tabs and constructs a spreadsheet at 11:47pm. Neither of them is available to be met. Both are performing safety instead of feeling terror.

I sit with these people every Tuesday. Silicon Valley high performers. Successful on paper, physiology in free fall. They got the degrees, they built the portfolios, and they live two mistakes away from what feels like annihilation. When the mortgage rate ticks up another quarter point, the part of them that believes stopping is dangerous, the part that believes relentless labor is their only worth, that part takes the wheel. Sixteen hour days. Seven day weeks. Because resting feels like certain death.

Meanwhile, at home, no one is home. The Representative is running the house. The actual person is somewhere on the floor of the bathroom at 2am, holding their chest.

The Coffee Cup Rupture

I sat last month with a couple I'll call Arthur and Chloe. Big house. Big incomes. Very quiet dining room. They came in over what they called Coffee Gate.

He had made himself a cup of coffee that morning and hadn't made her one.

That was the whole content. That was the whole fight. Forty minutes on my couch, fuming, both of them, over one coffee cup.

I let them go for a while. Then I stopped them and asked Chloe what her body had felt when she walked into the kitchen and saw the one cup on the counter. Her eyes filled inside of six seconds.

The fight was never about the coffee. The fight was her limbic system reading an existential threat to priority. You did not think of me. I do not matter to you. Their mortgage had renewed at a rate neither of them had planned for. He had been working on it silently for two weeks, trying to protect her from the number. She had felt him disappear and did not know why. The coffee cup was the receipt her body issued for a debt she could not name.

You do not solve Coffee Gate with a coffee schedule. You solve it by turning the flashlight of awareness away from your partner's supposed thoughtlessness, away from the Story of Other, and back onto the raw tightness inside your own chest. The Experience of Self. What am I actually feeling. What am I actually scared of. What did I need this morning that I couldn't ask for.

That is where the work is.

"Codependent My Arse!"

Somewhere in the last twenty years, the culture decided that the answer to relational suffering was to isolate, heal alone, self-soothe, love yourself first, and then, once you had achieved some mythical solo enlightenment, you would be qualified for connection.

Codependent my arse.

Needing your primary attachment figure to be reachable and responsive is not a pathology. It is a biological requirement. Cradle to grave. Financial stress does not yield to solitary self-care on a mountain peak. You cannot journal your way out of an unstable monetary system. You cannot breathwork your way through a rate hike.

True sovereignty is the capacity to stay present and vulnerable inside the connection. To let the safe base of the relationship help settle the somatic terror of a shifting world. Sovereign ground is not built alone. It is built between two bodies who have decided, over and over, that they will drop the courtroom and step into the one shared bubble of suffering that neither of them chose but both of them are now inside.

I wrote more about the mechanism of two flooded bodies in When the Fed Holds Rates Because of War. The pattern only sharpens when the number that is moving is your mortgage. This is your house. The physical structure you are supposed to be safe inside. The stakes are not abstract.

What The Body Actually Needs When Rates Rise

Three things. That is what the body is asking for when the floor shifts.

It needs someone to name the floor shifting. Not fix it. Not spreadsheet it. Just say out loud: this is hard. This got harder. I feel scared too. That single sentence, said honestly and slowly, does more for your marriage than any refinance calculator.

It needs proximity. Physical, unhurried proximity. Not the proximity of two people in the same room on two different laptops. The proximity of one hand on the other person's back for ninety seconds while neither of you says anything. Your bodies were built to settle each other. When you stop letting them do that, you both start looking for settling somewhere else. Screens. Alcohol. Work. Anywhere but the person right next to you.

It needs the Representative to sit down. To hand back the flashlight. To let the actual, scared, unfinished person come to the door. That is the hardest of the three, because the Representative got you here. She got the promotion, she closed the deal, she kept the house standing. And now you are being asked to fire her, or at least give her the afternoon off.

I've written more about how this same dynamic runs through Bitcoin's volatility when the price is going the wrong way. The mechanism is identical. The story dressing changes. The physiology is the same.

The Bridge Back To Your House

You are going to open the banking app again tonight. Your partner is going to check the rate on their phone in the bathroom. One of you is going to lie awake running numbers on what happens if the print keeps rising. The other is going to lie awake pretending to sleep.

You have a choice about what happens next.

You can send the Representative into the bedroom. You can rehearse the case you plan to make about the budget in the morning. You can build the spreadsheet at 1am. You can perform competence at the person who most needs to see you, actually you, the scared and unfinished you.

Or you can roll onto your side, put a hand on their shoulder, and say the sentence your body has been trying to say for three months. I'm scared. Are we going to be okay. I need you.

The rate is going to do what the rate is going to do. Kevin Warsh, the Fed, the housing market, the ten-year yield, none of them are voting on what happens between the two of you tonight. That vote is yours.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The mortgage rate is not the enemy. The Representative is. Fire her. Let the actual person come to bed.

Brad Pitt Wants Angelina Jolie's Financial Records: Why the Discovery Fight Is Never About Discovery

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:08:13 +0000

Brad Pitt Wants Angelina Jolie's Financial Records: Why the Discovery Fight Is Never About Discovery

The docket keeps generating docket. According to a recent Daily Mail report, Brad Pitt has asked the court to order Angelina Jolie to turn over financial records from 2017 through 2021, after she reportedly claimed she had put her "career on hold" during the marriage. Jolie apparently produced documents for 2020 and 2021 but not the earlier years. His side wants the full window. Hers, so far, has offered part of it.

The press reads this as leverage. A discovery skirmish inside a decade-long vineyard fight. Analysts will parse what missing years mean for valuation, for spousal claims, for who blinks next. The PR teams will feed the next twenty-four hours whatever spin lands well before dinner.

I read it differently. I have never sat with Brad Pitt. I have never sat with Angelina Jolie. The Goldwater rule applies to movie stars just as much as to industrialists, and I am not in the business of diagnosing people I have not met. What I will do is point at the pattern underneath. I see it in my office every week in much less famous form.

When two intelligent adults, nearly a decade past their separation, are still filing motions about which tax years the other one has to hand over, the fight is not really about the tax years. It is a body still asking a question the courthouse cannot answer.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

From a Discovery Motion to Your Kitchen Table

You do not need a wine estate in Provence for this to apply to your life. The thread running under a celebrity discovery fight runs straight under every contested divorce, every estate war, every business partnership that combusted into six figures of legal fees over what one party now calls "the principle of the thing."

Adversarial law starts from an assumption that cannot hold in a family rupture: that two calm adults are weighing costs and benefits. Nobody in the room is calm. What is actually in the room is two survival brains trying to press a legal instrument into service as a limbic bandage. The instrument was not built for that.

The tax records are the content. The biology is the actual case.

The Story of Other Is the Most Seductive Room in the House

There is a place every activated body runs to when it is in pain. I call it the Story of Other. It is the most seductive real estate on earth.

The world will always hand you evidence to support your wound. Feel unseen, and by Friday you will have fifty examples of not being seen. Feel used, and you will have a hundred. If the story you have been carrying is that your ex is hiding something, your mind will scan every disclosure for the shape of that hiding. And because most disclosures come in incomplete, the story confirms itself. There. You see. I was right.

I have a client who kept a literal notebook. Pages of documented offenses. Dates. Times. Verbatim quotes when he could get them. He came into session ready to litigate his marriage. He was gathering evidence for a case that no jury would ever hear, because the case was not really about her. The notebook was armor. It kept him from having to feel the somatic raw material of being unchosen.

That is what a discovery fight often is. A notebook. An airtight case built so the body will not have to feel what is actually underneath.

Because underneath is much worse. Underneath is: I gave the best years of my career to this. Underneath is: I bought a life on credit with my own belonging. Underneath is: the person I organized my life around does not think I am worth telling the truth to anymore.

None of those sentences can be litigated. So the body reaches for what it can litigate. Which years. Which accounts. Which spreadsheet. Which withheld page.

What Fiat Compromises Look Like in a Marriage

When a partner says they "put their career on hold," a whole clinical world opens up under that phrase.

I write about this in the forthcoming book. Inside a bond, people make a certain kind of transaction where they trade a piece of their own sovereignty for the promise of belonging. They dim a signal that once mattered to them. They shelve a project. They defer the thing that used to give them ground of their own. They tell themselves it is temporary. They tell themselves it is love. Sometimes it is love. And sometimes it is a compromise made on credit, on the assumption that the other person is holding the ledger fairly and will pay them back in presence, in attention, in a future that squares the sacrifice.

A relational deficit accumulates. Quietly. For years. Every reach that got a strategic brain instead of a heart. Every shrink so the room would stay peaceful. Every missed dinner. Every phone call taken during a family holiday. It compounds like anything else on credit.

Then something breaks. When it breaks, the ledger comes due all at once. What outsiders call greed is very often a body trying to issue a receipt for a debt that was never counted while the marriage was still standing.

The world sees "she wants his money." I see a nervous system trying to get the world to confirm, in the only currency this culture takes seriously, that she once existed inside a bond where her sacrifices were real.

I've written about the same mechanism in the context of Brad Pitt's earlier Miraval deposition win, and in a very different key in the Kapur family trust battle at the Indian Supreme Court. Different families. Different currencies. Different jurisdictions. Same body. Same wound.

The Reluctant Lover in the Strategy Room

Under attachment pressure, adults polarize into two shapes. One pursues. One retreats. In the therapy room, they show up as protester and withdrawer. In the courtroom, the two shapes wear different suits.

The withdrawer, the Reluctant Lover, does not vanish under threat. He, or she, retreats into what I call the Strategy Room. That is the place where feelings get translated into positions. Where the raw somatic material of "I am terrified she is going to say I was nothing to her" becomes "let's get her 2017 through 2019 records." The Strategy Room feels safer than the living room. In the Strategy Room, you are competent. You have a plan. You are not the small kid whose belonging is on fire.

The protester, the Relentless Lover, floods the same system from the other side. More motions. More filings. More demands the world confirm she still matters. From the outside it looks like aggression. Clinically, it is a body trying to force the world to say: you were real, you counted, you were not disposable.

The tragedy is that both people are running the same underlying question. Was I safe here. Was I seen here. Did the people I built my life around build me in too. Both people have long since stopped asking the question of each other. They ask it of judges now. Of attorneys. Of the algorithm.

If you want to name your pattern first, you can take the free Figs Quiz.

The Versus Illusion

The adversarial legal system runs on what I call the Versus Illusion. Plaintiff versus defendant. Petitioner versus respondent. Winner. Loser. The whole apparatus assumes one of you must be proved wrong for the other to be proved right.

But inside a collapsed bond, it is not you against them. It is both of you against the dynamic that has been eating the connection since long before the lawyers got involved. That dynamic is the enemy. That dynamic is what turned two people who once organized a life together into two people who cannot exchange five years of tax returns without a judge in the middle.

When the system tells you the only way through is to prove your ex wrong, the system is lying to your nervous system. It is telling a scared body that safety lives on the other side of a verdict. Safety does not live there. There is no verdict big enough. No discovery order complete enough. No settlement number high enough to close a limbic wound. I have watched people win their cases and still not sleep afterward.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Coffee Cup and the Cuisinart

A client of mine, mid-divorce, once launched a coffee machine out of a second-story window. Her husband had drunk from the last cup without asking. That was the crime. From a distance, it looks unhinged. Inside her body, it was a receipt she had been trying to issue for years. He never remembered her. He never checked. She was invisible in her own kitchen. The coffee machine had become the last object in the house able to hold the accumulated weight of not being seen.

Another couple I worked with had burned eleven months in litigation over a toaster. Four-slice Cuisinart. Forty dollars on eBay, tops. Combined legal fees on the toaster alone had cleared ten grand. Her lawyer thought she was unreasonable. His lawyer thought he was petty. The judge was irritated with both.

I asked her to tell me about the toaster. She cried. He had given it to her their first Christmas together, back when the future still looked like the future. That toaster was the last object still in her possession that once stood for having been loved.

She was not fighting for a toaster. She was fighting for evidence that a version of her had once lived inside somebody's love.

The retirement account is never really about the retirement account. The vineyard is never really about the vineyard. The 2017 through 2019 tax records are never really about the tax records. The body is trying to get the world to confirm something the courthouse does not stock in any currency at all.

Empathy for Me, Empathy for You, Empathy for Us

There is a way through this, but it is not procedural. It is somatic.

I teach what I call Empathy Cubed. Three axes. Empathy for me. Empathy for you. Empathy for us. Most people inside a legal fight are running on axis one only. The wound I carry. The debt I am owed. Axis one is not wrong. It is necessary. If you skip empathy for yourself and try to leap straight to compassion for your ex, you will collapse into performance, then rage, in that order.

But axis one alone will not close the ledger. Axis two, empathy for you, is the harder move. Not agreement. Not absolution. Just the somatic acknowledgment that the moves coming at you from the other side, the withheld pages, the slow-walked discovery, the public statements, are almost always coming from a scared body too. Walls from shame, not malice. Strategies from heartbreak, not entitlement. This does not make them okay. It makes them legible.

Axis three, empathy for us, is where the war actually ends. Both of you got hurt by the same thing. The bond collapsed. The dream you shared did not hold. You are not two separate suffering bubbles glaring across a courtroom. You are one shared suffering bubble that has been filing motions against itself.

I have watched this shift happen in couples who divorce, and in couples who stay. It works either way. It is what real separation looks like when it is not being funneled through a Versus Illusion. It is also what I keep pointing at in the Bevin divorce and in the SK Chairman's near-billion-dollar case. The scale changes. The mechanism does not.

Application: What This Means for You

If you are reading this from inside your own drawn-out legal fight, try one experiment. The next time you feel the pull to draft another motion, forward another email, screenshot another text for your attorney, stop. Hand on chest. Ask your body a different question than the one you have been asking.

Not: how do I win this. Not: how do I prove them wrong. But: what am I actually trying to get the world to confirm right now.

If the answer sounds anything like, that I mattered, that I was not invisible, that I was not disposable, that I did not pour years into someone who now says I was nothing, then no filing on earth will settle it. Only your own turning toward yourself, and sometimes an honest conversation with the other party outside the adversarial frame, has any real chance of closing that ledger.

The Fed will not save you. The judge will not save you. The tax records will not save you. You may have to do this part yourself.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The docket will keep generating docket for as long as two bodies keep asking it to. That is the only thing courts are actually good at. If you want the ledger to close, you have to stop handing it to a judge and start meeting what is underneath it in yourself. Drop the notebook. Feel what the notebook was protecting. That is the work.

Wine for Breakfast and Final Goodbyes: What Phil Collins' Story Reveals About the Nervous System's Search for Synthetic Calm

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:06:30 +0000

Wine for Breakfast and Final Goodbyes: What Phil Collins' Story Reveals About the Nervous System's Search for Synthetic Calm

When a rock legend admits his children were called to his bedside to say final goodbyes after alcohol nearly killed him, and then confesses in the same breath that he "didn't know he had a problem," the internet does what the internet always does. It calls it denial. It calls it delusion. It calls him selfish, or lost, or willfully blind.

In a recent Daily Mail interview, Phil Collins, now 75, described being so close to death that his kids were summoned to say goodbye. He also said he was drinking wine at breakfast and genuinely did not know that qualified as a problem.

I have been a couples therapist for sixteen years. I grew up in Ireland as the son of an alcoholic father and a heartbroken mother. When I read a story like this, I do not see a moral failure. I do not see a scandal. I see a body that ran out of ground and reached for the only regulator it could find. And I see a family shaped for decades by a third party in the house that was not another person, but a bottle.

Let me walk you through what is actually happening underneath a story like this, because if you are reading it and something in you flinched, that flinch is not accidental. Somebody in your life is doing some version of this, or you are.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Bridge From Tabloid to Therapy Room

The Collins story is not really a celebrity story. It is a story about how a human body, when depleted past a certain line, will do anything to feel calm for even fifteen minutes. And it is a story about how a family organizes itself around a bottle without ever consciously agreeing to.

That is a story I sit with every week. Sometimes it is a Silicon Valley founder. Sometimes it is a stay-at-home mother. Sometimes it is the adult child of an alcoholic parent, sitting on my couch decades later, still trying to make sense of a childhood that never quite added up.

Here is what I want to give you. Not a lecture. Not a checklist. A frame that actually explains why smart, loving, high-functioning people drink wine for breakfast and honestly do not think they have a problem.

Synthetic Calm: The Real Reason People Drink at Dawn

The morning drink is not about liking wine. Nobody enjoys wine at 7am. The morning drink is a terrified physiology trying to buy fifteen minutes of parasympathetic quiet before the day's alarms start firing.

Here is what I mean. Your body is built to settle through connection. When attunement, attachment, and solid ground are present in your life, your activation drops inside another human being's presence. You find ground together. Your heart rate follows theirs. Your breath deepens because theirs did.

When that base layer is missing, whether because of childhood attachment wounds, a marriage that has grown silent, or a level of performance pressure that no bond could compete with, the body still needs to settle. And so it reaches for a substitute. Alcohol becomes synthetic calm. It provides the biochemical signature of rest without the relational nutrient the body was actually built for.

This is not a character flaw. It is intelligent, desperate biology. The high-performing executive who takes a nip at breakfast is not a hedonist. He is a man whose body woke up in acute threat and could not find a human being to soften into, so it grabbed the bottle instead. I have written before about what to do when your partner is the one drinking too much, and this is the frame you have to start from. The drinking is a symptom of an autonomic system that has run out of legitimate regulators.

Once you see that, everything about the "denial" starts to make sense too.

Why "I Didn't Know I Had A Problem" Is Not A Lie

Here is the thing about shame. Shame is not just an emotion. In affect theory, shame is a biological interruption of positive affect, the sensation of being suddenly, catastrophically severed from belonging. Two units of present friction can multiply, when they hit stored historical scripts, into four hundred units of internal shame. It floods the body before language can meet it.

Now imagine what it would take for someone to look directly at the full truth of their own devastation. To sit up in a hospital bed, look at children summoned to say goodbye, and actually feel, in the body, the totality of how you got here.

Most human beings cannot do that without a container. Without a therapist. Without a bond. Without something holding them so they do not fall through the floor. If you tried to force that reckoning without the container, the organism would collapse under the shame load.

So the body does something clever. It anesthetizes. "I didn't know I had a problem" is not a lie. It is protective anesthesia. It is the mind protecting a body that could not survive the direct hit of unmediated truth.

This is not me letting anyone off the hook. This is me telling you why lecturing an addict about "denial" never works. You cannot shame someone out of a shame-driven behavior. That is like trying to put out a fire by throwing more fire at it. The denial is the fire retardant that lets the person stay alive long enough to have a chance at ground.

If you are asking why you feel so insecure inside your own life, or why someone you love keeps refusing to see what you see, this is the layer underneath. The body is protecting itself from a shame load it does not yet have the resources to feel.

The Bottle As A Third Party In The House

Here is where the family part comes in, and this is the part I know in my bones.

Adult love, and family bonding, run on two questions the body asks in a loop. Are you there for me. Am I a priority for you. Children ask their parents these questions non-verbally, thousands of times a day, through the tiniest bids. A look. A tug on the sleeve. A story about a bad dream.

When a parent turns toward the child, the child's system settles. When a parent turns toward the bottle instead, the child's limbic system receives a very specific answer. You are not the priority. Something else is.

The bottle becomes a third party in the house. It becomes a competing attachment. And the children, and the sober spouse, spend years unconsciously negotiating with an entity that has no face and no accountability.

I know this because I lived it. I grew up in Ireland where a good sad ballad in a pub could command silence in a room full of raucous drinkers. There was beauty in that culture, and there was also a lot of alcohol doing the emotional labor that human beings could not do for each other. My father was an alcoholic. My mother was heartbroken. I loved them both and I also spent the first two decades of my life trying to figure out why the bottle got what I wanted.

When Phil Collins' children were summoned to say goodbye, that summons was not just the climax of one man's drinking. It was the climax of a family system where a substance had, over years, become the primary occupant of the room. That is not a moral judgment. That is architecture.

If you are the sober partner or the adult child in a system like this, you may recognize the pattern of going quiet, going flat, watching someone whose lights have gone dark. You are not overreacting. You are living inside a system that has been debased by a third party you cannot argue with.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Body Keeps A Ledger, And It Charges Interest

Here is a framing that comes out of my forthcoming book. The body functions as a ledger. Every un-metabolized fear, every suppressed grief, every borrowed moment of chemical calm is a transaction. The ledger does not forget.

Alcohol lets you print synthetic calm on credit. It gives you the felt sense of rest without the underlying deposit of real settling. In the short run, this works. In the long run, the body charges predatory interest rates. Sleep goes. Liver goes. Then the pancreas. Then the moment where your children are summoned to a hospital bed.

This is why willpower alone rarely gets anyone out of severe addiction. You cannot willpower your way out of a debt this large. The body needs the debt to be met by something real. Not another chemical. Not another performance. Actual relational nutrient. Actual ground.

That is why the recovery communities that work do not just remove the substance. They surround the person with a bond dense enough to become the new regulator. The bottle gets replaced by a meeting, by a sponsor, by a room full of people who understand that shame cannot survive being witnessed by someone who does not flinch. If you want to name your own pattern before you do anything else, you can take the free Figs Quiz.

The Compass of Shame And The Direction Called Avoidance

In our clinical framework I use something called the Compass of Shame to describe what people do when shame floods the system. There are four directions people run in. Withdrawal. Attack self. Attack other. And avoidance.

Avoidance is the quadrant where alcohol lives. Scrolling lives there. Overwork lives there. The morning drink lives there. Avoidance says, I cannot feel this right now, so I am going to send my consciousness somewhere else until the wave passes.

The tragedy is that the wave does not pass. The shame does not metabolize. It just gets deposited into the ledger, waiting.

When a person finally lands in a hospital bed with children beside them, what has happened is that the avoidance strategy finally hit its ceiling. The body can no longer outrun what the mind refused to feel. This is the audit. Sometimes people survive it. Sometimes they do not.

The Shift From Story of Other To Experience of Self

If you are the family member watching this happen, there is a very specific trap I want to name. It is the trap of the Story of Other.

The Story of Other sounds like this. Look what his drinking did to us. Look how selfish he is. How could he keep drinking when he had a family. That story is not wrong. It is just not the layer that heals anything.

Underneath the Story of Other is the Experience of Self. And the Experience of Self sounds like this. I am terrified. I am grieving. I have felt unloved by this person for years and I do not know what to do with that ache.

I always tell couples that the flashlight of awareness has to turn from the other person's behavior to your own body. Not to let them off the hook. To finally get to your own truth. Because until you can name what happened to you inside the system, you cannot metabolize it. You will just keep litigating it, in your head, for the next thirty years.

This is the same work I describe when I write about checking your partner's phone after an affair. The behavior is the surface. The wound is a body that was betrayed by a third party in the bond. Alcohol works the same way. There is a betrayal underneath the drinking, and the betrayal has to be witnessed before anything else can move.

What Actually Helps

I am not in the business of stripping people of their coping mechanisms. I am in the business of helping people feel their feelings better, inside a container safe enough to stay in.

That distinction matters. If you rip the bottle away from someone whose physiology has been running on synthetic calm for thirty years, without giving them a container, you are asking their body to meet a shame load it cannot survive. That is why interventions delivered from moral height so often fail.

What helps is the slow, patient construction of ground. Real bond. Real witness. Real settling from a nervous system that does not flinch. Sometimes that is a therapist. Sometimes that is a recovery community. Sometimes it is a spouse who finally stops trying to fix the drinker and starts saying, this is what your drinking has done to me, and I am not leaving, and I am not lying about it either.

That is proof of work. Not willpower. Not performance. The steady, unglamorous laying of a floor solid enough that the person underneath the addiction can finally stand up.

Bringing It Home

If you are reading this and you recognize the pattern, either in yourself or in someone you love, do not use this article to build a better case against them. Use it to soften the case, and get honest about the system you are both inside.

The person drinking is not choosing the bottle over you. Their body found a regulator that worked, in the short run, when nothing else did. The denial is not a lie. It is anesthesia. And the family orbiting the bottle is not weak. It is doing what families do when a third party moves in and refuses to leave.

None of this excuses harm. It just names what has to be named before the harm can stop.

Phil Collins survived his audit. Many do not. If someone in your life is in the middle of theirs, or if you are, the doorway out is not a lecture. It is the slow discovery that there is ground somewhere, and a bond dense enough to make the synthetic calm unnecessary.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The bottle has been holding the room for long enough. Something else has to hold it now. That something else is the work.

Two Minutes on a Prison Phone: What Katie Price's Call to Lee Andrews Tells Us About Attachment Panic Under Pressure

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:04:45 +0000

Two Minutes on a Prison Phone: What Katie Price's Call to Lee Andrews Tells Us About Attachment Panic Under Pressure

The tabloids have their headline. Katie Price got two minutes on the line with her incarcerated husband Lee Andrews, and in those 120 seconds she told him he is "the most hated man in Britain," confronted him about another woman, and asked him about his rough time inside. In a recent Daily Mail piece, she narrates the call herself. He had been out of contact for two weeks. He was thought missing. Then the phone rang, and she had two minutes.

The comment section did what comment sections do. Toxic. Narcissist. Red flag. Walk away. Someone in the replies is calling her cold for confronting him while he sits in a cell. Someone else is calling him worse for putting her in this position at all.

In sixteen years across the couch from real couples in real pain, I do not see a trashy headline here. I see two nervous systems in acute distress, given a stopwatch and told to resolve the unresolvable before the line goes dead.

If you have ever had a fight where you felt so desperate to force an answer out of the person you love that you reached for the sharpest thing on the table, this article is for you. The celebrity is the doorway. The wisdom is what happens inside your own kitchen when the clock is running out on your sense of safety.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Fight Is Never About the Two Minutes

The story looks like it is about a phone call, an alleged other woman, and the court of British public opinion. It is not. Every recurring fight, every dramatic gesture, every weaponized sentence is a protest. It is one person's body saying, in the only language it can find right now, I do not feel safe. I do not feel seen. I do not know if I still matter to you.

Adult romantic love runs on the same biological operating system that bonds an infant to a caregiver. When that bond is severed, by prison walls, by a two-week disappearance, by silence on the other end of a text, the nervous system does not read this as an inconvenience. It reads it as a survival emergency. The amygdala fires. The rational brain runs behind the survival brain. The body reaches for whatever weapon is closest.

Under all the noise, the attachment system is asking two questions and only two questions.

Are you there for me?

Am I enough for you?

When time is scarce and threat is high, human beings do not calmly discuss logistics. They throw emotional flares up into the sky. Two minutes on a prison phone is not enough time to say what needs to be said. So the body compresses. It grabs the biggest, hottest thing it can find, and it throws it, hoping the other person will finally answer the real question underneath.

Why the Village Gets Called In

Telling an incarcerated partner that he is the most hated man in Britain sounds, on paper, like cruelty. In my office, I hear it as something else entirely. It is a client walking in with a folder of screenshots, receipts, texts from friends, and the group chat all agreeing. See? Everyone thinks you are the bad one.

When a person feels profoundly unheard in their own home, they reach for the moral high ground of the crowd. It is a high-cost shield. It signals: I am so terrified of dropping into my own raw grief that I need the entire village standing behind me before I can even speak to you.

I have written about this pattern before, and if you want the sharper version I would send you to the piece on the unfollow as protest. Same wound, different weapon. The unfollow. The public statement. The tabloid interview. The dramatic post at 2 a.m. These are not the actions of someone who has stopped caring. These are the actions of a body in a cell, or a body next to an empty half of the bed, doing the only thing it can still do to be felt on the other side.

Calling on the court of public opinion is what people do when they have given up on being heard privately. And the tragedy is that once the village has been called in, the person on the receiving end retreats further. Because now they are not just failing their partner. They are failing in front of the world.

The Dance That Tightens Under Pressure

I call this dynamic the Waltz of Pain. One partner reaches, presses, escalates, demands an answer. The other partner walls off, shuts down, or is physically incarcerated in a foreign jail with a two-minute phone allowance. The more the pursuer presses ("you betrayed me, you are hated, tell me about her"), the more the withdrawer feels like an irredeemable failure who cannot possibly meet the moment. So he retreats further. Into silence. Into rationalization. Into the flat, defensive voice that makes the pursuer even more frantic.

Round and round it goes, tightening like a noose around both people.

Here is what I need you to hold. Neither person in this dance is the villain. Both are terrified. Both are protesting the same underlying disconnection. They are just answering the same threat with opposite moves.

The pursuer's deepest wound tends to sound like this: You are going to leave me. I will not be chosen. Please, please, tell me I matter. The protest looks like escalation because escalation is what worked as a child when nobody was listening.

The withdrawer's deepest wound sounds different: I am going to disappoint you again. I am not enough. Whatever I do, it will not measure up. The retreat looks like indifference, but indifference is not what is happening in the body. What is happening in the body is collapse under the weight of anticipated shame.

If you want a fuller description of this dance and the two positions inside it, I wrote about it at length in the piece on why couples get stuck in the same argument. But you do not need the theory to recognize it. You know it in your body. You have been on one side of it, probably tonight.

The Two Suffering Bubbles

When a couple arrives in real distress, each person is sitting inside their own private suffering bubble. In a public rupture like this one, one partner's bubble sounds like I am the good one. I have been humiliated. Everyone can see what he did to me. The other partner's bubble sounds like I am in a cell. I am hated by strangers. I keep disappointing the woman I love and I cannot fix it from here.

Both bubbles are real. Both are true from the inside. And as long as the two bubbles stay separate, competing for who has suffered more, no repair is possible. The village keeps voting. The lawyers keep billing. The tabloids keep running the story. And underneath, both people stay alone.

The clinical work is not about deciding who is right. It is about slowly, carefully, guiding both people out of their private bubbles and into a single shared one. A bubble where the sentence changes from look what you did to me to look how much pain we are causing each other because we still mean so much to each other.

That sentence is nearly impossible to reach through a two-minute phone call. But it is the only sentence that matters.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Trap of Diagnosing the Person on the Other End of the Line

The comment sections have already made their diagnosis. Narcissist. Toxic. Red flag. Walk away. I want to name something plainly about that reflex, because it is destroying a lot of ordinary relationships that are not, in fact, doomed.

Most of what the internet calls a red flag is an attachment protest or a shame response. It signals distress, not danger. There is a real difference between patterns of abuse, which require an immediate safety plan and an exit, and patterns of disconnection, which can be repaired if both people can get honest about what is actually happening underneath. If you want the longer version of that distinction, I laid it out in the piece on the red flag trap, and I would encourage you to read it before you diagnose your own partner from a TikTok video.

If you want to name your own pattern in this dance rather than someone else's, you can take the free Figs Quiz.

But hear me on this. Calling the incarcerated partner a monster does not soothe the alarm in the confronting partner's body. Calling the confronting partner a crazy ex does not soothe the shame in the incarcerated partner's chest. Both people stay stuck. The label feels satisfying for about twelve seconds and then the same panic comes back at 2 a.m.

The Keynote Speaker on the Couch

I sometimes describe partners in high conflict as arriving in my office prepared to deliver a keynote address on the other person's defects. Both of them have their slides ready. Both of them have their citations, their timeline of grievances, their forensic case for why the other one is the problem.

And I have to slow them down. Because as long as you are the world's leading expert on your partner's flaws, you are not paying attention to what is happening inside your own body. The moral argument is a can of gasoline thrown on the fire of fear. It feels like proof. It is actually just kindling.

The turn happens when someone finally puts the keynote down and says, in a voice that is much smaller than the one they came in with, I was so scared. I did not know if you were coming back. I did not know how to survive not knowing.

That is the sentence that changes rooms. That is the sentence that, if it landed on the other end of a prison phone, might have made the two minutes worth something.

What This Looks Like in Ordinary Life

You do not need a foreign jail cell for this dynamic to run your life. The prison walls scale down beautifully into ordinary suburban homes. He works late again. She goes quiet for a day. He sends the terse text. She reads it in the parking lot outside the school pickup and her stomach drops. She types back the sharpest thing she can think of because the sharpest thing is the only thing that has ever gotten his attention.

Two minutes on a prison phone is just the extreme version of the compressed, panicked exchange that happens every night in kitchens all over the world when one person has ninety seconds before the kids come back in and the other person is one foot out the emotional door.

The mechanism is identical. Scarce time. High threat. Body reaching for a weapon because the body does not believe there is time for anything softer.

If your bond has quietly drifted into logistics and threats and no real contact, and you want to know what the road back actually looks like, I mapped it out in how to reconnect emotionally. It is not a productivity hack. It is a slow, biological process of teaching two nervous systems that the other one is safe to approach again.

Bringing This Home

You are probably not on a phone with an incarcerated partner. But you may know, in your body, exactly what it feels like to have two minutes and a mouth full of accusations because that is the only shape your love can take when the ground is shaking underneath you.

The work is not to become nicer under pressure. The work is to notice, earlier, that you are throwing flares. To catch the moment before the sharp sentence leaves your mouth and ask, quietly, what am I actually afraid of right now? Nine times out of ten the answer is one of the two ancient questions. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.

If you can get honest about the question underneath, the sentence you actually need to say gets much shorter and much softer. It stops being a case for the prosecution. It becomes a hand reaching across the dark.

Neither Katie Price nor Lee Andrews is my client. I will not diagnose either of them from a tabloid. But I will say this to you, the person reading. If you see yourself on either side of that phone call, in either the escalation or the retreat, you are not broken. You are a mammal with an alarm system doing its job under impossible conditions. Your body is not the problem. The conditions are.

What to Do Next

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The next time you have two minutes and a mouth full of the sharpest sentence you can find, stop. Ask yourself which of the two questions is really asking. Say that one instead. See what comes back.

Ryan Reynolds Calls Blake Lively "Fearless" on Mother's Day: What Public Praise After a Humiliating Settlement Really Signals Ab

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:07:36 +0000

Ryan Reynolds Calls Blake Lively "Fearless" on Mother's Day: What Public Praise After a Humiliating Settlement Really Signals About a Nervous System Under Fire

The internet saw a sweet post. Ryan Reynolds on Instagram, two candid photos of his wife, a soft Mother's Day tribute calling Blake Lively "fearless," dropped in the wake of a legal settlement with Justin Baldoni that most tabloids are calling a humiliation for her side. In a recent Daily Mail piece, the framing is exactly what you would expect: sweet gesture, image repair, a husband riding to the rescue of a wife whose year has been publicly brutal.

That is the surface read. It is also the least interesting one.

I have been a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist for sixteen-plus years, and I have sat with plenty of couples living under external siege. Not celebrity siege, most of the time. Custody wars. Estate battles. A business partner who turned. A family member running a whisper campaign. The specifics vary. The biology does not. When a bond gets targeted from the outside, the two bodies inside that bond do not get to pause the news cycle and process it neatly. They stay in alarm. And the way each partner shows up for the other during that alarm is either the thing that saves the marriage or the thing that quietly starts to end it.

So when a husband stands up in public and calls his wife "fearless" days after a settlement most of the world is reading as a defeat, I do not see a PR move. I see a man doing something specific with his voice and his body, in front of the whole village, and I want to talk about what that gesture actually is at the level of the nervous system. Whether it lands, or whether it is armor pretending to be intimacy, depends on what is happening in the private room after the phone goes down.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

From the Instagram Story to the Kitchen You Know

Almost nobody reading this is a Reynolds. Almost everybody reading this has, at some point, watched their partner get hit by something the world was watching. A firing. A public falling out. An in-law campaign. A neighborhood gossip cycle. The moment your primary person becomes a target, your body has a decision to make. Do you step out in front of them, or do you step back and let them absorb the blow alone?

That decision is not a personality trait. It is a survival response, and it was wired in long before your partner ever met you. This is the layer I want to sit inside.

The Public Press Release Versus the Body

High performers, celebrities, executives, anyone whose life has a public-facing surface, get very good at what I think of as the press release version of the self. The Instagram voice. The interview voice. The wife-is-fearless voice.

The press release is not lying, exactly. It is armor. It tells the world, and it tells the person wearing it, that the blow did not land. That we are fine. That the settlement did not carve anything out of us.

But the body keeps a different set of books. The body is the original ledger. It records every rupture and every repair whether you want it to or not, and no amount of well-crafted caption gets it to close an entry it has not actually settled. Inside the private room after a public humiliation, the sad music is still playing. The chest is still tight. The three a.m. wake-ups are still happening. The question of who saw, who believed what, who is going to bring it up at the next dinner party, it does not turn off because you posted a nice picture.

So when we watch a public tribute like Reynolds's, the honest clinical question is not "how sweet." The honest clinical question is: does this gesture reach the body of the person it is aimed at, or does it live only on the surface where the cameras are?

Both are possible. The same words, said publicly, can be a moment of calming each other for the person receiving them, or they can be another beat of the performance both people have been trapped inside for years.

The Penthouse and the Basement

There is a piece of architecture I use with high-achieving couples that fits this moment exactly. Every couple, but especially couples with big public lives, tends to live in one of two places emotionally.

There is the Penthouse. The Penthouse is high up. It is energetic, in control, managing perception, calling the wife "fearless" on Instagram. In the Penthouse, you are strong. You are the one who handles it. You are the one who steps in front of the linebackers.

And there is the Basement. The Basement is where the actual hurt lives. Small, quiet, retreated, scared. In the Basement, you are the one who was targeted, who was made small in front of the whole world, who is not sure if the people who love you still see you the same way. The Basement is where the shame goes to sit alone.

Most couples in siege live in one of these two rooms and never meet each other in either of them. One partner stays in the Penthouse, performing strength. The other retreats to the Basement and never gets found. The Instagram tribute is a Penthouse gesture. That does not make it fake. It does make it insufficient by itself.

The clinical task in a moment like this is to build a middle apartment. A room where both partners can step out of armor, drop the press release, and meet each other in the actual hurt. The husband who can tell the world his wife is fearless and then, in the private room that night, can sit next to her while she cries and admits she is not, that husband is doing the whole job. The one who can only do the public half is doing what he learned to do a long time ago to keep his own basement at bay.

The Waltz of Pain Under Siege

Underneath every long bond, there is a choreography. I call it the Waltz of Pain, and I have written about it in the context of a working relationship implosion that looks a lot like the ecosystem this Mother's Day post is landing inside of. Two protector strategies, both wired in childhood, colliding under stress.

When external threat hits, the Waltz gets louder. One partner tends to reach, protest, want more contact, more reassurance, more evidence that the bond is intact. The other tends to armor up, go quiet, get productive, handle things. Under siege, these strategies look like coping. They are actually the exact patterns most likely to leave one partner alone inside the crisis while the other partner runs the perimeter.

The reaching partner needs to know they still have you. The armoring partner needs to know they are not letting you down. Both are asking the same primal questions the body always asks: do I still have you, am I still enough for you. Neither has language for it in the middle of a legal firestorm, because the survival brain does not do language well when the amygdala has already sounded the alarm.

If you want a shortcut to seeing which side of this dance you tend to run, you can take the free Figs Quiz. It will not fix anything. It will name the pattern. Naming is where the work starts.

The Versus Illusion, and Why Public Warfare Feels So Seductive

The legal system, and the tabloid system that grows on top of it, is built on what I think of as the Versus Illusion. The architecture demands that one side be right and the other be wrong. There is no other way that building stands.

But the Versus Illusion is a trap for the couple standing inside the storm together. When both partners get pulled into the outward war, when every conversation at the kitchen table becomes strategy, when the shared inner life gets colonized by the case, the actual bond starts to thin out. Two people who are supposed to be a unit end up as co-litigants. That is a very different relationship.

The clinical move, and it is a hard one, is to externalize the storm. The lawsuit is not us. The tabloids are not us. The internet's certainty about who we are is not us. The couple survives by locating a common enemy outside the bond and closing ranks against it, rather than importing the war into the marriage and fighting each other inside it.

A public gesture like a Mother's Day post can be an act of closing ranks. Or it can be another PR move that leaves the bond unaddressed while both people keep bleeding privately. The difference is not visible from the outside. The difference is what happens in the car ride home from the courthouse.

Reassurance That Is Backed, Versus Reassurance That Is Printed

There is a version of public praise that is what I would call printed. It looks like the currency of affection but it is not backed by real emotional processing underneath. You can say "she is fearless" a hundred times. If the couple has not sat down in the private room and let the wife actually be scared, actually admit the humiliation cut her, actually cry about what the last two years have done to her, then the public tribute is a sweet sound with nothing behind it.

The version that is backed looks different. It is preceded by hours the world does not see. Hours where the strong one gets to not be strong. Where the fearless one gets to admit fear. Where both partners let the sad music actually play in the room instead of drowning it out with a caption.

I have written more about the way settlements never actually settle the emotional ledger a court cannot clear. The same principle applies to a beautiful Instagram post. The tribute is not the settlement. The settlement is what happens between two bodies in the room, off camera, when nobody is watching and both of you tell the truth.

Co-Regulation Is a Two-Person Job

Attachment science has been telling us the same thing for decades, and it is worth saying plainly. Adult human beings are not designed to metabolize threat alone. We settle in the context of a bond. We co-regulate. When the world outside is running at you like a line of linebackers, you cannot settle your body on your own. You need your person to step in, put a hand on your chest, and signal that the ground is still under you.

The husband standing up publicly to say "she is fearless" can be that signal. It can also be a distraction from the more important private signal, the one that says "I see you, I see how hard this was, I am not asking you to be fearless right now, you can be exactly as afraid as you actually are, and I am still here."

That second signal is the one that lands in the body. That second signal is the one that closes a ledger the courtroom cannot touch.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Kids Are Watching the Wrong Thing

Reynolds and Lively have four children. On Mother's Day, those children are not going to remember the Instagram post. They are going to remember what the temperature in the house felt like. They are going to remember whether their mother's shoulders were up around her ears or whether they had come down. They are going to remember whether their father was actually present at breakfast or was on his phone managing the story.

Kids do not read captions. They read bodies. And the physiology of a parent under public siege is the loudest thing in a house, whether the parent talks about it or not. Children of high-visibility conflict absorb the tension whether it is named or not. Naming it, in age-appropriate ways, is almost always the thing that lets their bodies settle. Not naming it while everyone performs okay-ness is what teaches a child that the smooth surface of family life is not to be trusted.

If a partnership has been through what this one has been through and the kids never see the parents actually processing it, actually being tender with each other, actually admitting it was hard, then the kids learn that the public press release version of love is the real one. That is a lesson that costs them decades.

The Application

If you are reading this from inside your own version of siege, whatever the scale, the question is not whether you posted the right thing publicly. The question is what happened in the private room afterward.

Did you sit with your partner while they let the mask down. Did you let your own mask down. Did the two of you tell the truth about what the last stretch has taken out of you both, or did you high-five each other on the strength of your public performance and go to bed with your backs to each other.

The public gesture is fine. The public gesture might even be beautiful. But it is not the work. The work is the middle apartment. The room where the Penthouse and the Basement meet, and both people get to be exactly who they are, armor down, sad music playing, and the other one stays in the room.

What to Do Next

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The tribute is not the marriage. The caption is not the thing that actually calms each other. The Penthouse is not the whole house. If you have been performing strength for months while your partner quietly retreats to the basement, the Instagram post you write on Mother's Day will not reach them. Go find them in the room they are actually in. That is the work.

Couple Arrested After Empire State Building Proposal: What a Rooftop Ring Says About Nervous Systems in Freefall

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 22:08:29 +0000

Couple Arrested After Empire State Building Proposal: What a Rooftop Ring Says About Nervous Systems in Freefall

Sometime after midnight, two figures in dark clothing slipped past security at one of the most photographed structures on Earth. At the summit, a ring appeared. Shortly after, so did handcuffs. According to recent reporting, the two were taken into custody after what appears to have been a proposal on the top of the Empire State Building.

The internet knows the drill. Laugh. Roll eyes. Call it clout-chasing. Post the "she said yes to jail" meme.

I want to offer a different reading, because I have spent seventeen years in a therapy room watching couples produce louder and louder gestures to answer questions their ordinary life together has stopped answering. What reads as romance in the headline is often, up close, two bodies scrambling for a floor.

The ring is real. So are the cuffs. What I keep sitting with is this: what does a body have to be feeling to believe that the crown of a skyscraper is a safer place to ask a question than a couch on a Tuesday night.

This piece is not about the couple. I have not met them. I will not diagnose two strangers from a news clip. This is about a pattern that keeps walking into my office, wearing different clothes each time.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

From the Rooftop to the Kitchen Table

You do not have to climb anything to run this pattern. Most people run it in miniature every single week. Book the trip so you never have to have the conversation. Plan the wedding instead of learning the actual partner. Produce the highlight reel instead of eating the meal that is in front of you.

The rooftop is just an unusually literal form of a very ordinary swap. Altitude in place of intimacy. Spectacle standing in for one sentence, spoken quietly, across a small table.

Three threads pull through what is really happening when a couple reaches for a ledge instead of a chair.

Fiat Intimacy: When the Gesture Cannot Cash the Check

There is a concept I have been chewing on for years, and it is the anchor here. I call it Fiat Intimacy.

Fiat money is currency printed by decree. No real energy behind it. No gold in the vault. It looks like value and spends like value, but the only thing propping it up is an institution that keeps printing more.

Relationships have a fiat version. It shows up when we print affection, commitment, and public performance we cannot back up with the daily unglamorous labor of showing up. Anniversary posts staged for the camera. Rings bought on credit. Trips designed for someone else's feed. Grand moves that arrive right when the internal ledger has gone to zero.

The gesture itself is not the enemy. Rings on cliffs are fine. People have always reached for altitude and beauty to mark the moments that mattered. The trouble starts when altitude becomes the whole language a couple has. When the only way you know how to answer "do we still matter to each other" is by strapping yourselves to a spire and hoping the wind speaks for you.

The opposite of fiat, in Bitcoin terms, is proof of work. Real expenditure of energy that cannot be counterfeited. In love, that looks like staying in the room when your partner says something that stings. It looks like turning toward instead of shutting the door. It looks like those thirty uncomfortable minutes of reconnection after a rupture that nobody will ever put on Instagram.

That work does not trend. It builds no reel. It is the only thing that actually holds when the wind gets serious.

When a couple cannot produce that daily behavioral evidence, they reach for proof of stake. They stake status, reputation, an extreme public act, to make the bond feel real. You cannot print your way out of a bond that has cracked, any more than a central bank can print its way out of collapse. The Empire State Building becomes an emotional printing press. Look how real this is. Look how far we went. Please let the roar of the city fill in what the floor of our own home has stopped holding.

The Two Questions Every Body Is Asking

To understand why anyone would risk arrest for a photograph, you have to hear what a body is actually asking under every interaction with a primary partner.

I have written about this in the attachment injury work, and it stays the whole architecture. Every mammal in a bonded relationship is running a background scan with two questions on loop.

Do I have you as a priority.

Do I fully have you.

When the answers come back clean and steady, the body settles. When the answers come back ambiguous or silent, the limbic system reads an existential threat. Your biology does not know the difference between being cut from your tribe on the savanna and feeling alone with your spouse on a Wednesday. To a mammal, separation is death.

When that alarm fires, protest scales. It begins as a sharpness in the voice. Then a fight about the dishwasher. Then an ultimatum. Then, at the far end, a public spectacle designed to wring an unambiguous yes out of a partner, or a crowd, or the sky itself.

If you want to name where you are in that scan before it goes loud, you can take the free Figs Quiz. A starting point, not a diagnosis.

A rooftop proposal is the loudest possible version of a question that can be asked in a whisper. Do you have me. Do I have you. If we make it big enough, will the answer land in the body this time.

The Penthouse and the Basement

There is a picture I draw for high achievers that fits this story with unusual precision.

Picture your emotional life as a building. On the roof sits the Penthouse. Tidy, controlled, strategic. This is the floor where you analyze, plan, and execute. Almost every high performer I have worked with lives up there. Comfortable. Panoramic view. Total sense of control.

Down at the bottom is the Basement. Dark, messy, unfiltered. This is where the raw material lives. The shame. The fear of not being enough. The loneliness. The grief about whatever early conditions turned you into someone who had to become this competent just to feel safe.

High performers can do extraordinary things in the Penthouse. They can describe a mango down to the fibers. They can diagnose their marriage with McKinsey precision. They can name three frameworks, a podcast, and two books that explain exactly what is broken.

What they cannot do from up there is walk downstairs and taste the actual moment with the partner sitting three feet away. Because tasting anything requires the Basement. And the Basement holds every feeling they have organized their life around not feeling.

Now look at the physical shape of a rooftop proposal. It is a climb toward the literal Penthouse of a city. Not a criticism. A description. Ascending to the highest point in New York is a beautiful and physically astonishing way of refusing to walk down into the ordinary rooms where the harder question actually lives.

You describe the mango in the Penthouse. You taste it in the Basement. Every real thing in a bond happens downstairs.

Adrenaline as a Protector Part

The phrase "adrenaline junkie" is lazy. It treats a survival strategy like a personality quirk and misses the whole story.

In my office, I read patterns like this as protector parts. A protector part is a strategy a small body built, usually very young, to stay safe inside conditions that were not safe. Not a flaw. Not a choice. A brilliant, loyal choreography that made sense inside the specific environment you were handed.

For some people, adrenaline is the protector on duty. When you were small, big feelings got you punished, ignored, or shamed. The body found a workaround. Rather than sit with the quiet feelings that come with real intimacy, it learned to reach for sensations so enormous that everything softer got drowned out under them.

A skyscraper delivers exactly that. Wind. Height. Police. Cameras. The pull of gravity. The whole system floods with a signal so massive that the smaller, more terrifying signal underneath it, "I am scared you will stop choosing me," gets buried.

For a defended body, dangling off a New York landmark is often easier than sitting across a small table on an ordinary Tuesday and saying, out loud, "I am terrified you will stop choosing me."

That is not weakness. That is a body that decided, a long time ago, that huge sensations are safer than small ones.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Orphan Sovereignty and the Container the Bond Cannot Hold

Here is the third thread, and it is the one the comment section never touches.

There is a modern myth I call orphan sovereignty. It falls out of the self-help industrial complex. It goes: I am me, you are you, I need nobody, and true sovereignty means standing alone on a mountain top needing no one.

That is not sovereignty. That is a trauma response with an aesthetic. It is what a child does when it learns, early, that no one is coming to hold them, and the small body armors up and declares itself unilaterally independent.

Human biology is herd biology. We do not settle by ourselves. We calm each other. We find ground inside a bond. We become larger together than we ever are alone.

Actual sovereignty is not a ledge. It is two self-responsible adults who have built a shared floor between them, strong enough to hold both bodies at the same time when the weather turns. A container the bond itself provides.

When a couple has not built that container, they will find one somewhere. Without knowing it, they will conscript the outside world into holding what they cannot hold between themselves. Sometimes a crisis. Sometimes a court. In pet custody battles, I have watched couples spend forty thousand dollars asking a judge to hold what their marriage never held. In affair repair, I have watched couples recruit family members, friend circles, and entire text threads to referee the wound.

In this story, the couple appears to have conscripted the city of New York. The Empire State Building. Security. NYPD. The news cycle. The cell and the cuffs finally delivered a firm, unyielding edge that their relationship system could not produce on its own.

I have watched this hundreds of times in the therapy room, in much smaller forms. When a couple cannot hold their own charge, they will subconsciously build a crisis so large that the outside world has to step in and hold it for them. Not a character defect. It is what a body does when it has no floor inside the bond. It reaches for one outside.

Why This Is Not About the Couple

I want to be careful. I do not know these two people. I have not sat with them. I will not diagnose them from a news clip, and I will not use a piece of journalism as a projection screen for my own theories about their private lives.

What I will say is that the pattern lives everywhere. It shows up in couples who have never climbed higher than the stairs to their own bedroom. A rooftop proposal is a very loud version of a very ordinary substitution. You see the same swap in the couple booking a destination wedding to sidestep a conversation they should have had six months ago. You see it in the partner planning a third child because the second one did not close the loneliness. You see it in the affair that surfaces exactly when the bond starts asking the harder questions.

The gesture is always trying to answer a question the daily life has stopped answering. It cannot. No gesture can. Not because the gesture is fake, but because the two questions running underneath, on loop, can only be answered by the quiet work that does not photograph well.

What to Do With This If You Recognize Yourself

If some part of this piece landed somewhere in your chest, you probably already know the shape of your own rooftop. It might be a purchase. A trip. A ring. A move. Another baby. A promotion you keep chasing. A dramatic argument you keep quietly starting because at least in the storm, you feel connected in a way the calm cannot give you.

None of those is a moral failure. Each one is a physiology reaching for something bigger than a whisper to answer a whispered question.

The work is not to stop reaching. The work is to name the quiet question hiding underneath the loud gesture. Then to see if you can ask that question out loud, to the person on the other side of your bed, on an ordinary floor at an ordinary hour, with nobody watching.

That is the Basement. That is where the mango finally gets tasted. That is where the ring on your finger starts to matter more than the ring you keep planning to buy.

The couple came down from the roof in cuffs. Most of us come down from our own rooftops in quieter ways. What matters is what happens after you land.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

You do not need a rooftop to answer the question your bond is really asking. You need a chair, a partner, and the willingness to walk downstairs. The rest is scaffolding.

Jimmy Kimmel Crying Over Adam Carolla Is Not a Bromance Bit. It Is Attachment Biology on a Public Stage.

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:06:18 +0000

Jimmy Kimmel Crying Over Adam Carolla Is Not a Bromance Bit. It Is Attachment Biology on a Public Stage.

At Adam Carolla's Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony this week, Jimmy Kimmel stood at a microphone, cried, and called the guy he has known since 1994 his "life partner." Then he added the line that made every headline: "If that sounds gay to you, it was and it is."

In a recent Variety piece, the tears got treated as the story. The friendship got treated as the punchline. The internet is currently mining the moment for bromance content, gently ribbing the sentimentality, filing it under "unexpectedly touching celebrity moment."

I want to argue something different. I have been a licensed marriage and family therapist for over sixteen years. What Kimmel did at that microphone was not a bit. It was not a performance. It was a body, in front of cameras, doing something men in this culture are trained their entire lives not to do in public. He let his voice crack. He named another man as central to his emotional survival. And he refused, even while joking, to take it back.

That is not a comedy moment. That is attachment biology showing up where the culture usually forbids it. And it is worth slowing down to look at what actually happened, because the same forces at work in Kimmel's throat that afternoon are at work in your marriage, your friendships, and every meaningful bond you carry.

From the Moment to the Thread

The temptation with a story like this is to make it about celebrity, or about men, or about the culture war over male emotion. I am not interested in any of that. I am interested in what happens inside a body when a person allows themselves to be witnessed loving someone out loud, in public, without the usual armor. Because that is the same threshold every couple I work with is standing at, whether they know it or not.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Attachment Does Not Care What Shape the Bond Takes

Here is the biology most people never had explained to them. The bond is not a romantic category. It is not a marriage category. It is a survival category.

John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist who essentially invented the field, spent his career proving that human beings are wired from birth to pair with a good enough other. He was working with children who had been separated from their parents during World War II. Some of them stopped eating. Some of them died. Not from disease. From the absence of a bonded figure. That was Bowlby's radical claim: the need for a primary emotional bond is not a preference. It is as fundamental as food.

And here is the part most articles on attachment leave out. That biological need does not stop at eighteen. It does not stop when you get married. It does not stop when the culture tells you that only your spouse is allowed to be your central figure. From the cradle to the grave, the human body is scanning the environment for a good enough other. It will find that other in a spouse. It will find that other in a sibling. It will find that other, sometimes, in the guy you started making a radio show with in 1994.

Kimmel worked with Carolla on the LA morning show "Kevin and Bean." Then on "The Man Show." Then thirty years of careers built alongside each other. Two physiologies, over three decades, cataloguing each other as safe. That is not a friendship in the Hallmark sense. That is a limbic system that has learned, through thousands of small repetitions, that this specific human calms it down. When one of them stands at a podium and the other is being honored, the body does what bodies do when a primary figure is being celebrated. It floods. The throat closes. The eyes leak.

The joke about it sounding gay is the culture speaking through the moment. The tears are the biology speaking through the culture. The tears win.

The One Question Underneath All Bonds

I write often about how, underneath every meaningful relationship, the body is running two questions in the background. Am I safe with you. Am I real to you. Every argument, every silence, every reach, every withdrawal, traces back to whether the body has a yes or a no on those two questions.

When Kimmel says "life partner" about Carolla, he is publishing his answer. Yes, this guy is safe. Yes, I am real to this guy. Thirty years of proof. It comes out of his mouth in a form the culture does not have a clean category for, so he reaches for the closest word that means what he means, which is "partner," and then he defends the word with a joke because the culture would prefer he did not use it about another man.

But the word is not wrong. The word is exact. Because the biology does not distinguish between the categories the culture wants to enforce. The biology only knows: this person, over decades, showed up. This person did not leave. This person's presence lowered the alarm in my system. That is what a partner is, at the level of the body. Everything else is paperwork.

The anxious-avoidant collision I write about in marriages exists because both partners are running those same two questions and getting different answers than they need. It is the same architecture. Different context. Same biology.

Humor As a Bridge, Not an Exit

Here is where the Kimmel moment gets interesting clinically. Because humor, in the therapy room, does two very different jobs. Sometimes it is a bridge. Sometimes it is an escape hatch. The survival response uses both, and the difference between them is worth understanding if you are trying to figure out your own patterns.

Humor as an escape hatch is what I see when a man in my office starts to feel something real, gets close to naming it, and then makes a joke that lands the emotion back on the ground before it can be witnessed. The joke discharges the intensity. The tenderness gets flushed out through the exhaust pipe of comedy. Nothing has to be received. Nothing has to be metabolized. The moment passes and the wall stays up.

Humor as a bridge is different. It is the joke you make in order to keep the tender thing in the room, not in order to remove it. It lowers the social temperature just enough that the truth underneath can survive being said out loud. It says to the culture in the room: I know what I am about to do is a violation of the codes. I am going to do it anyway. And I am going to leave a small door of comedy open so that we can all breathe while I do it.

Kimmel's line, "If that sounds gay to you, it was and it is," is the second kind. He does not use the joke to retract the tenderness. He uses the joke to protect the tenderness while he leaves it standing in the middle of the room. He is refusing to take the word back. He is refusing to soften "life partner" into something more culturally comfortable. The comedy is holding the space open so the truth can survive.

That is a skill. Most men do not have it. Most of the men who walk into my office use humor to leave the moment, not to stay in it. Learning the difference is one of the highest leverage things a person can do for their close relationships. If you want to name your own pattern with this, you can take the free Figs Quiz and get a starting map.

The Representative Steps Aside

There is a version of Jimmy Kimmel who could have given that speech without crying. That version has done thousands of monologues on television. That version is polished, articulate, controlled. In my work I call that version the Representative. It is the well-rehearsed public self that every high-functioning person sends out into the world to handle things without collapsing. The Representative is not fake. It is competent. It keeps you safe in rooms where being fully yourself would be too costly.

The problem with the Representative is that no real bond is possible while it is running the show. Intimacy happens in the mess, not in the polish. Connection requires the mask to come off long enough for something un-armored to be seen. And that is exactly what happened at the microphone. The Representative stepped aside. What came through instead was a fifty-something-year-old man with a wet face saying that another man had been essential to his life. No spin. No cleanup.

That is what I mean when I write that vulnerability is the currency of connection. You cannot buy your way to closeness with competence. You can only pay in the currency of being seen without the armor on. Every couple I have ever worked with, without exception, is stuck at the exact place where one or both of them cannot let the Representative step aside long enough for the real thing to be witnessed.

I have written more about how the internal bouncer keeps this armor bolted on, and about how those protector parts learned their job early, usually in childhood, in response to real threat. The armor is not stupid. It kept you alive. But it is also the thing standing between you and the bond you actually want.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

What Men Actually Carry

There is a stereotype in our culture that men are emotionally unequipped. That they do not have access to their feelings. That they are somehow developmentally behind their partners on the interior work.

Sixteen years in the room has taught me the opposite. Men have enormous emotional range. They feel things deeply. They can describe those feelings with startling precision when given a container that does not shame them for having them. They can listen. They can empathize. They can love out loud. What they usually cannot do is any of the above in a culture that trained them from age five that any of it makes them less of a man.

So they build a character strategy. Stoicism. Sarcasm. The claim that they do not need anyone. The insistence that emotions are for other people. And underneath every one of those strategies, without exception, is a boy who learned very early that showing what he actually felt was dangerous. That boy is still in there. He is running the software. He is the reason the Representative has to be so competent, because if the Representative slips even for a second, the boy behind it might be seen, and being seen might mean being hurt again.

When Kimmel stood at that microphone and cried about Carolla, the boy came through the Representative for a second. Not in a way that broke him. In a way that let him be more fully himself in public than he probably is most days. That is not a comedy moment. That is a body finding, for a few seconds, that it is safe enough to be itself in front of everyone.

That safety, by the way, is the whole game. It is what every good therapist is working toward with every client. It is what a secure functioning relationship is designed to produce. The capacity to be yourself, un-armored, in the presence of another person, and to have that presence not punish you for it.

Bringing It Back to Your Life

Here is where this stops being about celebrities and starts being about you.

You have people in your life whose presence lowers the alarm in your body. You have people whose voice on the phone changes your breathing. You have people who, if they died tomorrow, would leave a hole in you that no amount of self-help would fill. You know who they are. Your body knows who they are.

The question is whether you have ever told them. Whether you have ever, out loud, said the thing Kimmel said at that microphone. Not the joke about it sounding gay. The tender thing underneath. That this person is central. That this person is essential. That without this person, something in you would collapse.

Most people never say it. They wait for funerals. They wait for eulogies. They wait until the person is beyond hearing it, and then they say it into a microphone at a memorial and everyone weeps and nothing gets metabolized because it is too late. The great gift of what Kimmel did this week is that he said it while Carolla was standing right there. Alive. Available to receive it. Present enough to be changed by hearing it.

That is the invitation. Not to cry at a podium. To go home and tell the person whose presence has held you together that you know they have. To let your Representative step aside long enough to be witnessed doing it. To let the joke, if you need one, be a bridge and not an exit.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The people who hold you together are alive right now. Your voice still works. The microphone is not the point. The saying is.

Suri Cruise Drops Her Father's Name at 20: What Attachment Science Says About a Child Who Stops Waiting

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 14:07:33 +0000

Suri Cruise Drops Her Father's Name at 20: What Attachment Science Says About a Child Who Stops Waiting

The headline moved fast through the tabloid ecosystem this week. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes's daughter Suri, now 20 and a college student, has quietly dropped Cruise as her surname. She is going by Suri Noelle, taking her mother's middle name. According to a recent Daily Mail piece, the change follows years of reported estrangement from her father, going back to Holmes's 2012 exit from the marriage and, by extension, from Scientology.

The internet has already sorted itself into two camps. One camp is cheering: good for her, she set a boundary, she cut off a toxic parent, she reclaimed her identity. The other camp is scolding: how ungrateful, how public, how cruel. Both camps are wrong. Or, more precisely, both are looking at the surface story and missing the body underneath it.

I am not going to diagnose Tom Cruise, and I am not going to canonize Suri. I do not know them. What I do know, after sixteen years of sitting with couples and families in my office, is what happens inside a young body when a parent's presence goes missing for years. Dropping a name is not a triumph. It is not a boundary in the clean, therapized sense the wellness feeds want it to be. It is the loud, structural sound of a protector part stepping fully into the driver's seat because the vulnerable child underneath could not survive another year of waiting.

That is the thread worth pulling. Not the gossip. The biology.

From the moment to the thread

Every human being, from the first breath to the last, is wired to bond with a primary caregiver. That is not sentiment. That is biology. When a child is born, their nervous system organizes itself around the answer to two questions it will keep asking, in different forms, for the rest of their life. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.

When those answers keep coming back as no, or as static, or as silence, the child cannot simply file a complaint and move on. The child has to adapt. And the adaptations we see in a twenty-year-old changing her name in public are the adult echo of adaptations that started when she was very small.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The child cannot make the parent wrong

Here is the piece almost every wellness account gets backwards. When a young child experiences their parent as absent, or inconsistent, or unavailable, they do not sit in the crib and think, my father has failed me. They cannot. The child is one hundred percent dependent on the caregiver for survival. To indict the parent is to indict the ground they are standing on. The young psyche will not allow it.

So the child does something else. The child internalizes the failure as their own shame.

What must be wrong with me, that he does not come. What must be wrong with me, that I do not seem to be a priority. What must be wrong with me, that he chose something else. The question runs underneath everything. It shapes how the child walks into a room. It shapes what they think they deserve. It shapes who they date, decades later, and what they tolerate, and what they cannot bear.

This is not a metaphor. This is what shame is. Shame is the residue of an attachment bid that did not get answered, converted into an identity so the child does not have to face the more unbearable truth, which is that the person they needed most was not there.

You do not have to be a movie star's daughter to know this. I grew up with a lot of longing for a father who would see me, mirror me, appreciate me. Instead I carried the shame that he was not there. I know the shape of this from the inside. The specifics change. The wound is shared.

The two questions, unanswered

In my clinical work I return again and again to those two questions the nervous system is always asking. Are you there for me. Am I enough for you.

For a child whose father has been physically or emotionally absent for years, the answer to the first question has arrived a thousand times as no. Not always dramatically. Not always cruelly. Sometimes just as absence. A phone call that did not come. A birthday that felt corporate. A public appearance that never included her. A schedule that never bent.

Each of those no's is a small attachment alarm going off. When alarms fire without repair, the body has to do something with them. The body cannot walk around in a permanent state of protest, reaching toward a figure who is not reaching back. So it shuts the longing down. It has to. That is not weakness. That is survival.

And here is where the second question turns lethal. Am I enough for you. When a father's absence spans years, the child's body eventually delivers its own answer. Apparently not. Apparently I was not enough to make him stay, or come back, or show up. Apparently there was something more compelling elsewhere.

That verdict does not stay in one room of the psyche. It leaks into everything. Into romantic partners. Into work. Into the very question of whether one's presence in the world matters to anyone.

The Compass of Shame, made public

When the bond ruptures and shame floods the system, the survival response reaches for one of a small set of strategies to keep the shame from drowning it. Clinicians sometimes map these as a compass with four directions. Attack self. Attack other. Withdraw. Avoid.

Dropping a father's surname, publicly, at twenty, is a striking combination of Withdraw and Attack Other. Withdrawal says, if I take myself out of range, the pain cannot find me here. Attack Other says, if I push you away publicly, before you can hurt me again, I control the ending.

I want to be careful here. These are not character verdicts. They are the intelligent, adaptive moves of a body that has run out of other options. When protection calcifies into identity over years, it can look, from the outside, like empowerment. From the inside, it usually feels like something quieter and sadder. Like closing a door because leaving it open cost too much.

This is what I mean when I say estrangement is often self-protection dressed up as wisdom. It is not that the young woman is wrong to protect herself. It is that we should be careful before we call the protection healing. Protecting is not the same as connecting. The two can look similar from far away. They feel very different in the chest.

The dead aunt in the kitchen

There is an image I use often in sessions with parents who want to know why their child seems to be carrying so much when, from the adult perspective, nothing that dramatic happened.

Picture a mother in the kitchen making dinner. Her sister died last year. She is thinking about her sister. She is not really here. Her four-year-old comes in, tugs at her leg, wants to be picked up. The mother, distracted, brushes the child off. Just a moment, honey.

The adult reasons are real and legitimate. Grief is grief. But the four-year-old has no concept of a dead aunt. The four-year-old has no theory of mind for a mother's inner life. The only thing the child knows is that Mom has gone somewhere the child cannot follow, and the child is now standing in devastating relational pain, alone in the kitchen.

Apply that to Suri. It does not matter to a child's limbic system whether a father is absent because of movie schedules, or divorce logistics, or a religion that severed the relationship for its own reasons, or all three at once. The adult reasons may be complicated and true. The body of the child registers only one thing. The primary attachment figure has vanished. And I am now in this devastating relational pain.

The public story will want to litigate whose fault it was. The body does not care about fault. It only knows what it felt, and what it had to do to survive what it felt.

I have written about how children get positioned inside their parents' pain in When Kids Are Caught in the Middle of Divorce. The loyalty binds a young person carries when the adults cannot metabolize their own material can shape decades of the child's inner life.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The Waltz of Pain, frozen in time

In couples work I talk about the Waltz of Pain, the negative cycle where one person's protest triggers the other's withdrawal, which triggers more protest, which triggers deeper withdrawal, until both people are locked in a devastating choreography neither one chose.

Something similar plays out across generations in a family where a parent has been absent for years. The child protests, in whatever way a child can. Then, met with silence, the child eventually withdraws to protect themselves. The withdrawal, from the parent's side, may look like the child does not want them, which reinforces the parent's distance. Now both parties have evidence for their positions. The dance freezes. And a name change, twenty years in, is the visible signature of a cycle that has calcified into permanence.

None of this is unique to celebrities. If you want to name where your own patterns sit in this map, you can take the free Figs Quiz. Understanding the choreography is the first step in refusing to keep dancing it.

No amount of anything makes up for it

There is a thing I have said in sessions with adult children of powerful, distant fathers that lands hard every time. There is no amount of money, no amount of fame, no amount of proximity to power that ever makes up for the ache of a parent who was not there.

The culture wants to believe that a childhood full of resources compensates. That access, and travel, and private schools, and trust funds soften the missing. They do not. The limbic system does not accept payment in kind. It only recognizes presence, or its absence. A five-year-old walking herself upstairs to bed, pulling the covers back, curling into the wall to comfort herself to sleep because the parent is not coming, is having the same organizing experience whether the sheets are from a chain store or hand-embroidered.

This is the differentiation I want people to hold. When a young woman with every material advantage drops her famous father's name, the correct response is not envy, or judgment, or celebration. It is something closer to grief. Grief for the little kid who did all the adapting a body could do, and eventually chose the only remaining move, which was to close the door.

The story of other versus the experience of self

In sessions I make a distinction that I think matters here. There is the story of other, which is the narrative about what the other person did wrong, and why they were bad, and how the system failed. Then there is the experience of self, which is the raw, first-person truth underneath. I feel alone. I feel like I do not matter. I could not keep him. I stopped trying.

The public conversation will stay at the story of other. Was Cruise a bad father. Was Scientology to blame. Was Holmes protecting or alienating. The story of other is what tabloids sell. The story of other is also, always, a defense against the more unbearable material underneath.

For any adult child of an absent parent reading this, the work is not to build a better case against the parent. The work is to move gently, over time, from the story of other back into the experience of self. To feel, finally, the small child who was reaching for someone who did not reach back. To let that grief come up instead of running from it into rage, or defense, or the next name change, or the next relationship where you try to prove you are enough by winning someone who is not really there.

If any of this is your material, I have written more about the fear underneath the vigilance in Relationship Anxiety: Red Flag or Your Own Fear and about what real relational security actually looks like in What Is Secure Functioning in Relationships.

When the news is really about you

Here is why this story is trending, and why you clicked. Almost nobody is here because they care about Tom Cruise. You are here because something in the headline snagged on something in you. A father you stopped calling. A mother whose voice still makes your shoulders climb. A last name that you have thought, sometimes, about changing.

Estrangement is one of the loneliest countries a person can live in. It looks, from the outside, like agency. From the inside, it often feels like the last available exit from a room the body could not stay in any longer. That is real. Sometimes it is necessary. But necessary is not the same as healed. A cut off relationship is a wound with a bandage on it. The wound is still there. The bandage is not the same as skin.

The work, if you want to do it, is not to force yourself back into contact with someone who cannot meet you. The work is to feel the child underneath the protector. To let the shame surface long enough to be seen for what it actually is, which is not proof of your unworthiness but proof of what you did not get. And to build, in the second half of your life, the presence you did not receive in the first.

That is proof of work. Slow, unglamorous, done in small moments with people who can actually stay in the room. Not fiat healing decreed by a name change. Real ground, earned over time.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

A twenty-year-old dropped her father's surname this week. The internet decided it was a story about a celebrity. It is not. It is a story about what a body will finally do after years of asking a question and getting no answer back. If any of that is your story too, the name on your driver's license is not the thing that needs changing. The child inside you is the one still waiting. Go find her.

The Empire State Building Engagement: What "Skywalkers" Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau Reveal About Adrenaline as an Attachment

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:06:32 +0000

The Empire State Building Engagement: What "Skywalkers" Ivan Beerkus and Angela Nikolau Reveal About Adrenaline as an Attachment Strategy

On Wednesday, two figures in black clothing scaled the outside of the Empire State Building. At the top, one of them appears to have proposed. The couple was later identified as Ivan "Vanya" Beerkus and Angela Nikolau, the Russian rooftoppers whose relationship was documented in Netflix's 2024 film "Skywalkers: A Love Story." According to a recent Variety piece, the pair have made a career of dangling off the tallest structures on Earth, and now they have done it above midtown Manhattan with a ring involved.

The internet is calling it the most romantic proposal of the year. A grand gesture. Evidence of a love that laughs in the face of death.

I want to offer a different reading. Not because I have met either of them. I have not. I will not diagnose two people I have never sat with. But I have spent seventeen years in a therapy room with couples who use spectacle as a language, and I want to say something about what a body is often doing when it chooses a 100-story ledge over a kitchen table.

Because here is the quiet truth underneath the awe. For a defended body, hanging off the Empire State Building is often easier than sitting across from your partner on an ordinary Tuesday and saying, "I am terrified you will stop choosing me."

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

From The Moment To The Thread

Grand romantic gestures are not the problem. Rings on mountaintops are not the problem. People have always reached for beauty and altitude to mark the moments that matter.

The problem is when the altitude becomes the whole vocabulary. When your bond can only speak in ledges. When the only way you know how to answer "do we still matter to each other" is to strap yourselves to a spire above a city and hope the wind confirms it.

That is a thread worth pulling. Because plenty of people who will never scale a skyscraper are running the same pattern in miniature. Booking the trip instead of having the conversation. Planning the wedding instead of learning the partner. Producing the highlight reel instead of tasting the mango.

The Penthouse, Taken Literally

I use a metaphor with high-achieving couples that I think applies with unusual precision here.

Imagine your emotional life as a building. At the top is the Penthouse. It is clean, strategic, controlled. This is where you analyze and execute and manage. Almost every high performer I have ever worked with lives up there. It is comfortable. You can see everything. You are in control.

At the bottom is the Basement. It is dark and messy and disorganized. This is where your raw vulnerability lives. Your shame. Your fear of not being enough. Your loneliness. Your grief about whatever conditions shaped you into someone who needed to become this competent.

High achievers are brilliant in the Penthouse. They can describe a mango in exquisite detail. They can analyze their relationship problems with McKinsey precision. They can tell you what is wrong and propose three solutions. What they cannot do is walk down the stairs and taste the actual experience of being with their partner in the present moment. Because tasting it means going to the Basement. And the Basement is where they have kept everything they have spent their lives running from.

Now look at what Beerkus and Nikolau, in the public record of what they do, appear to be doing. They are climbing to the literal Penthouse of the tallest buildings on the planet. This is not a criticism. It is a description. Something in the choice is worth noticing. Scaling to the highest point in New York is a spectacular, moving, physically astonishing way of refusing to come down into the ordinary rooms where the harder question lives.

The Penthouse is where you describe the mango. The Basement is where you taste it. Everything worth having in a bond happens in the Basement.

Adrenaline As A Protector Part

The word "workaholic" is a lazy word, and the word "adrenaline junkie" is worse. Both treat a compulsion as a personality trait. Neither of them is.

In my office, I treat these patterns as protector parts. A protector part is a strategy the body built, usually very early, to keep a small person safe inside conditions that were not safe. It is not a flaw. It is not a conscious choice. It is a brilliant, loyal adaptation that once saved you and is now running your life.

For some people the protector is achievement. Be indispensable and no one can leave you. For others it is caretaking. Be needed and no one can leave you. For others it is adrenaline. Stay in states of controllable, external emergency and you never have to sit still long enough to feel the internal, uncontrollable emergency underneath.

A body that is dangling off a building is a body that is very busy. There is no room in that physiology for the quieter, harder frequency of "will you still love me when I am not spectacular." The physical danger drowns out the attachment danger. And here is the thing I want to be careful with. That is not weakness. That is not cowardice. Protecting is not the same as connecting, but protection got you here. Protection kept a scared kid alive. Protection is not the enemy. It just cannot build a bond by itself.

I have written more about this in a piece on workaholism and the protector parts that run the show. The particulars of the costume change. The mechanism does not.

The Two Questions Underneath Every Ledge

Underneath every bonded relationship, the body is only ever asking two questions. Are you a priority to me. Do I fully have you. Every fight, every silence, every grand gesture is a variation on those two questions.

The mistake most couples make is confusing the content with the system. Couples fight about dishes instead of abandonment. They fight about tone instead of shame. They plan proposals on the Empire State Building instead of asking, on a normal night in a normal apartment, "am I enough for you."

Both are attempts to get an answer. The kitchen fight and the skyscraper climb are, at the level of the survival response, the same behavior. Both are the body reaching for confirmation that the bond is still alive. One just has better lighting.

The problem is that the answer you get on the ledge does not travel home. Adrenaline is not intimacy. The dopamine of survival is not the slow, boring nutrition of being known. You can propose to someone on top of the tallest building in New York and still, three months later, be sitting at breakfast unable to say the thing that actually needs saying.

If you want to name your own version of this pattern before you do anything else, you can take the free Figs Quiz.

Orphan Sovereignty Dressed Up As Romance

There is a particular story the culture loves about couples like this. Two lone wolves. Two renegades. Two people who need no one and found each other. Rugged self-sufficiency plus love equals the ultimate partnership.

I want to push on that.

There is a version of self-reliance I call orphan sovereignty. It is the belief that I am an island, that I do not need anyone, that dependence is weakness. That is not sovereignty. That is self-protection wearing sovereignty as a costume. Real sovereignty is not the refusal of need. It is the capacity to hold your own ground while staying available to be affected by another person.

The couple who scales buildings together looks, from the outside, like the ultimate in mutual sovereignty. Two independent bodies choosing each other in the sky. But sovereignty tested against gravity is not the same test as sovereignty tested against ordinary intimacy. It is easier, for a certain kind of body, to trust your partner with your literal life than to trust them with the softest, most humiliated parts of you. Falling from a building is a clean death. Being seen and found wanting is not.

The goal I work toward with couples is what I call a Sovereign Us. Two people staying present without disappearing into each other and without overpowering each other. A shared emotional system that holds both people with compassion and truth. That is not built on ledges. It is built in the boring, patient labor of returning to each other after a rupture in an ordinary room.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Fiat Love And The Real Labor Of The Bond

I have been writing for a while about what I call Fiat Love. The idea is borrowed from money. Fiat money is money issued by decree, unbacked by anything real. It looks like money. It spends like money. But its value can collapse the moment collective belief in it collapses.

The same dynamic shows up in couples. Love issued by decree looks like love. It has the aesthetics of love. Rings, proposals, documentaries, viral moments, matching outfits, joint Instagram accounts. But it is not backed by the substance underneath. It has not been tested against rupture. It has not been forged in the quiet, unglamorous work of repair. And the moment the collective belief in the spectacle wobbles, the value collapses.

Real love, the kind that actually holds, is Proof of Work. The Work is repair. It is the continuous expenditure of emotional energy that goes into turning back toward a partner after you have hurt them, after they have hurt you, after the small daily failures of two people trying to find ground together inside conditions no one ever prepared you for.

The actual repeated effort is not photogenic. It is not scalable. You cannot compress it into a Netflix cut. It happens in the two minutes after a fight where you take a breath and say, "I am sorry. That was my hurt talking. Come back." It happens in the twenty seconds where you register that your partner has gone quiet and instead of doubling down you soften and ask, "did I lose you just now." It happens in the hundred small returns that no one is filming.

The forthcoming book I have been working on has a lot to say about this. The short version is that any relationship worth being in has to be backed by something real, and the only thing that can back a bond is the accumulated evidence of repair.

The Volatility Is The Point

Bitcoiners like to say that volatility is a feature, not a bug. It tests conviction. It matures the holder. The same is true inside a bond. Emotional volatility is not a sign the relationship is broken. It is your body saying, we matter to each other.

The couple who never fights is often the couple who has stopped reaching. The couple who fights and returns, fights and returns, fights and returns, is the couple whose bond is being tempered.

You do not need to manufacture external volatility to prove your love is real. Life will supply the volatility. A job loss will supply it. A miscarriage will supply it. An illness, an in-law, a betrayal, a middle-of-the-night fear you cannot name. The question is not whether the ground will shake. The ground will shake. The question is whether you have practiced returning to each other on ordinary days so that, when the ground shakes, your hands know how to find each other in the dark.

I have written about this in the context of couples navigating betrayal after an affair, and in the context of couples trying to have the prenup talk without collapsing the bond. Different content. Same underlying architecture. The bond is built or broken not by the size of the rupture but by the depth of the repair.

The Application, For You

You are not going to climb the Empire State Building. Probably. But you are almost certainly running some smaller version of this pattern.

Notice where you reach for spectacle when what is asked of you is presence. Notice where you plan the big trip instead of having the small conversation. Notice where you propose the elaborate solution instead of sitting in the mess with the person you love. Notice where you climb, in your own way, to your own Penthouse, because the Basement feels unsurvivable.

The gesture is not the enemy. Beauty is not the enemy. Grand moments have their place. But if the gesture is a substitute for the conversation, the gesture is a form of avoidance no matter how spectacular it looks from below.

Come down from the ledge. Not the literal one. The one inside you. The one where you have been performing love instead of practicing it. The Basement is not as dangerous as your activation has told you it is. The person you love is standing at the bottom of the stairs, and they have been waiting a long time for you to walk down.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

The ledge will not answer the question your body is actually asking. Only the person across the kitchen from you can. Go find them.

Savannah Guthrie Says "I Cry Every Morning on the Way to Work" While Her Mother Is Missing: A Therapist on Why the Tears Are the

Fiachra Figs O'Sullivan — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 22:06:46 +0000

Savannah Guthrie Says "I Cry Every Morning on the Way to Work" While Her Mother Is Missing: A Therapist on Why the Tears Are the Sanity

There is a specific kind of video that stops your scroll. Not because it is dramatic, but because it is honest. Savannah Guthrie sitting in for Sheinelle Jones on the fourth hour of Today, looking at Jenna Bush Hager, saying the plainest sentence a person can say when the ground has moved. "I can't really even look at you every day without crying."

In a recent Variety piece, Guthrie described what it has been like to keep going to work while her mother, Nancy, is still missing. She cries every morning on the drive in. She cries when a colleague looks at her with too much love. She goes on television anyway.

The internet is doing what the internet does. Some people are calling it brave. Some are calling it too much. Some are quietly wondering how anyone functions at all when a primary attachment figure has vanished from the map.

I am a licensed marriage and family therapist. I have spent seventeen years watching people try to hold themselves together while the deepest bond in the body is threatened. So I want to say something the wellness internet is not going to say, and I want to say it clearly.

The tears are not the breakdown. The tears are the sanity. Savannah crying in the car every morning is not evidence that she is falling apart. It is evidence that she is intact.

The Bridge: Why This Is Not a Story About Coping

Every article you will read this week about Guthrie will use some version of the word cope. How is she coping. How does anyone cope. Tips for coping with ambiguous loss.

I want to move underneath that word, because cope is a fiat concept. It suggests there is a strategy, a technique, a set of behaviors you can bolt on top of a shattered physiology to make you look okay again. That is not what is happening in Guthrie's car. Something older and truer is happening, and it deserves the full clinical picture.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

What Her Body Is Actually Doing on the Drive to 30 Rock

Here is the frame the wellness internet keeps missing. What Guthrie is experiencing is not a psychological event. It is a biological one.

From the cradle to the grave, human beings need emotional bonding. That is not a poster in a therapist's office. That is mammalian physiology. If a human infant is left on the savanna without a good enough other, a dingo eats it. Your entire body is set up, from breath one, to protest the unavailability of your primary attachment figure. It is hardwired into who we are.

For a small child, the primary attachment figure is the mother. For most adults, that role shifts to the spouse. But for many people, the mother remains the deepest layer of the ledger, the original ground. Guthrie's mother has not been consciously downgraded from that role. She has been the emotional home base for fifty years.

And now that home base is missing. Literally missing. Not distracted, not disappointed, not on a business trip. Gone from the map.

Her limbic system is not treating this as an inconvenience. It is treating it as an existential emergency, because that is the only setting the limbic system has when the primary bond disappears. The tears in the car are cortisol and grief and unanswered attachment protest, all firing at once, all firing correctly.

She is not being dramatic. She is a mammal, doing exactly what mammals do when the bond goes quiet.

The Little Kid in the Kitchen

I use a metaphor in session that fits here almost too well.

A little kid is playing on the kitchen floor with her mom. They are connected. The mother is present. The world is safe. Then the phone rings. Mom picks up. She finds out her sister just died. And in that moment, mom is gone. She is still standing in the kitchen. Her body has not moved. But she is gone.

The little kid is now devastated. Not because anything scary happened to the kid. Because mom, the whole world, the entire settling presence, has vanished from the room while remaining physically present.

Guthrie is living the literal, physical version of that scene. Her mother is not in the kitchen. Her mother is not answering the phone. The presence that has been standing in her body for half a century is not there. Every morning she wakes up and re-registers that fact, and every morning her body does the only correct thing it can do, which is protest.

Two Selves in One Body Going on Television

Here is the part that makes this specific case remarkable. Guthrie is not being asked to grieve in private. She is being asked to grieve while anchoring live television.

In my work I say it constantly. It is never one adult in a hard moment. It is two selves inside one adult body, trying to stay safe in the only ways they once knew. There is the Protector part, the professional, the anchor, the one who reads the teleprompter, holds the segment, keeps the show together. And there is the vulnerable part underneath, the daughter whose mother is missing, the little girl who wants someone to tell her the door is going to open again.

Most people, faced with that much internal load, would collapse one of the two selves. They would either take leave from work entirely and disappear into private grief, or they would armor up completely and refuse to feel anything at all until the workday ends. Both are understandable. Both are common.

What Guthrie is doing is harder and rarer. She is letting both selves exist at once. She is letting the vulnerable one ride shotgun in the car every morning, and she is letting the Protector part take the wheel when the light on the camera turns red. She is not asking one to kill the other.

That is not a coping skill. That is Reflexive Participation. The ability to stay present with your own emotional reality long enough for something new to emerge.

The Three Movements

There is a sequence I walk clients through when the body is on fire and they still have to function in the world. Not to fix the fire. To honor it.

First: know you are affected. Most people skip this step. They go straight to meaning making. Straight to narrative. Straight to strategy. Straight to a plan for how to feel less. Sovereignty begins with the simplest truth. I am affected.

Guthrie said this out loud on network television. "I can't really even look at you every day without crying." That is not weakness on camera. That is step one, executed cleanly, in front of millions of people.

Second: describe how you are affected. This is where language becomes medicine. Not fancy language. Not analytical language. Simple, embodied truth. Where the feeling lives. What it does in the body. Guthrie naming the morning drive, naming the impossibility of looking at a friend without breaking, is that.

Third: feel the affect. Let it move. The feeling itself is not the enemy. It is the gateway. Crying in the car is the third movement. It is not a symptom to be managed. It is the thing itself, doing what it is designed to do.

Why the Culture Wants Her to Stop

We live in a culture that will read her tears as a problem to be solved. Someone, somewhere, is already writing a piece about whether she should take a leave of absence. Someone else is writing about how remarkable it is that she keeps going. Both pieces miss the point.

The Compass of Shame has four directions when pain becomes unbearable. Withdraw. Avoid. Attack self. Attack other. Every one of them is available to Guthrie. She could withdraw into private life until her mother is found or not found. She could avoid, and there is no shortage of avoidance available to a person with money and celebrity, everything from constant work to constant travel to substances to just being too busy to feel. She could attack herself, spiral into all the ways she should have called more, visited more, been more present before this happened. She could attack the searchers, the police, her family members, the world.

None of that is what she is doing. She is refusing the compass. She is letting the vulnerable one be an honored guest in her own body while she still shows up to the job.

That refusal is what I mean when I say the tears are the sanity.

If you want to name your own pattern first, before you go deeper into what any of this is asking of you, you can take the free Figs Quiz.

Why the Tears Are the Proof

Here is the part I most want you to hear if you are reading this while carrying your own version of ambiguous loss. A parent slipping into dementia. A sibling who has stopped speaking to you. A partner who is physically present but emotionally gone. A child who moved across the country and rarely calls. A friend who died too young.

Love hurts because love matters. The measurement of how much your mother mattered to you is not the composure you can perform in her absence. It is the exact volume of the pain her absence produces. If you could not be hurt by her being gone, she would not be your mother in any meaningful sense. She would be a name on a birthday card.

Disconnection is not a flaw in love. It is the proof of it.

I have written more about this in Feeling Emotionally Abandoned by Your Partner, because the biology is the same whether the missing figure is a mother, a spouse, or a child. The bonded body is only ever asking one question underneath the fights and the tears and the sleepless nights: is my person there for me. When the answer keeps coming back no, the body does what a body is built to do.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Going Through the River

There is a children's book my kids grew up with. We're Going on a Bear Hunt. Every obstacle, a river, a forest, a snowstorm, meets the same refrain. We can't go over it. We can't go under it. We can't go around it. We have to go through it.

That is the whole clinical picture of what Guthrie is doing on her drive to work. She cannot go over the fact that her mother is missing. She cannot go under it. She cannot go around it with enough productivity or enough performance or enough coffee. She has to go through it. And going through it, in the actual physical body, looks like tears in a car.

This is not something you optimize. This is not something you finish by Tuesday. It is going to take as long as it takes, and the only way out is the whole way through.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

Most people reading this are not on live television and do not have a missing parent making national news. But most people reading this have a version of Guthrie's drive. The commute where the grief comes. The shower where you cry. The five minutes in the parking lot before you go inside and pretend you are okay for the next eight hours.

I want to say two things about that drive.

The first is that the drive is not a problem. It is a sacred space. It is the only place your body has to feel what it needs to feel before you go perform functionality again. Do not try to make it stop. Try to make it welcome.

The second is that going through it does not mean going through it alone. The whole point of a bonded body is that it does not settle by force of will. It settles in the presence of another settled body. That is why Guthrie mentioned Jenna Bush Hager by name. That is why she said she cannot look at her without crying. Because the tears are not just grief. They are also the body finally letting down in the presence of someone safe.

If you are carrying a loss right now and there is no such person in your life, that is the first work. Not fixing the grief. Finding the ground you can land on when the grief comes.

I have written about this in a different frame in the piece on kids affected by parents fighting, because what gets passed down through families is not the fight. It is the body that watched the fight, and the body that learned whether tears in a car are welcome or shameful.

What To Do With Your Own Drive

If you take one thing from this, take this. When the tears come in the car tomorrow morning, do not try to make them stop. Do not put on a podcast to distract yourself. Do not clench your jaw and count the exits.

Notice you are affected. Say out loud, in the car, what you are affected by. Let the feeling move through the body it has been trying to move through all along. Then go to work. Do the segment. Answer the emails. Pick up the kids.

You are not falling apart. You are the exact opposite of falling apart. You are a person whose love is intact enough to still hurt this much, and whose sovereignty is intact enough to keep showing up to your life anyway.

That is not something to fix. That is something to honor.

Read the full piece, and join the waitlist for my book, at empathi.com.

Savannah Guthrie is doing the harder thing on national television. Most of us are doing the harder thing in a parked car, alone, before we walk into a job that will not ask how we are. The tears are not the failure of the system. They are the last honest thing the system knows how to do. Let them come. Then drive.