Sarah Oswald 10/5/26 Sarah Oswald 10/5/26

What If the Problem Is the Doorway? | Core Transformation® with Mark Andreas

How the patterns we struggle against can become pathways to deeper states of being, greater choice, and lasting change.

What if the parts of yourself you most want to change aren’t actually the problem?

In this conversation, Sarah Melissa Oswald and personal transformation coach Mark Andreas explore Core Transformation®—a process that approaches our unwanted behaviors, emotional reactions, and internal patterns not as obstacles to overcome, but as doorways into something deeper.

Through personal stories, practical examples, and a fascinating exploration of how change actually happens, Sarah and Mark examine what becomes possible when we stop fighting our patterns and begin listening to what they’re trying to do for us.

About This Episode

Core Transformation® begins with a surprisingly compassionate premise. The parts of us responsible for behaviors or emotional reactions we don’t like are often trying, in their own way, to accomplish something positive. Rather than trying to eliminate those parts, the process follows their intentions inward toward what Mark calls a “core state”—experiences such as peace, love, presence, or simply being.

Sarah and Mark explore how this differs from simply understanding why we do what we do, and why insight alone doesn’t always lead to transformation.

Along the way, Mark shares personal stories of using the process in his own marriage, the origins of Core Transformation® in the work of his mother, Connirae Andreas, and the emerging research examining its effectiveness.

Their conversation also moves beyond any single modality, finding fascinating points of connection between Core Transformation®, Gestalt, Relational Life Therapy, couples work, and the larger question of what helps human beings actually integrate change.

Perhaps the most intriguing possibility they explore is this: the thing we experience as the problem may also contain the pathway toward what we’re actually seeking.

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Key Topics Discussed

How Core Transformation® works with unwanted behaviors and emotional patterns
Why the parts of ourselves we struggle with may have positive intentions
The difference between insight and integration
What “core states” are and why they matter
Using inner work to change how we show up in relationships
Mark’s experience using Core Transformation® during conflict in his own marriage
Why transformation doesn’t always require retelling the entire story of what happened
The relationship between Core Transformation®, Gestalt, RLT, and other approaches to change
The origins of Core Transformation® in Connirae Andreas’s work
Research examining the effectiveness of Core Transformation
Why doing less internally can sometimes create more freedom and choice

Questions for Reflection

What part of yourself have you been trying to get rid of, control, or overcome?
What might change if you approached that part with curiosity and asked what it was ultimately trying to create for you?
Where in your life do you understand a pattern intellectually but still find yourself repeating it?
What would integration look like—not simply knowing something differently, but actually experiencing yourself differently?

Why This Conversation Matters

One of the ideas at the center of my work is that our most difficult patterns are rarely random. They developed within a larger relational system, often as intelligent attempts to protect us, maintain connection, or get an important need met.

That doesn’t mean every behavior is healthy or that we shouldn’t take responsibility for how we affect other people. But lasting change rarely comes from declaring war on ourselves.

That’s one reason Mark’s work resonates so deeply with me.

Core Transformation® offers a different way of approaching the parts of ourselves that we wish would simply disappear: not by excusing them, and not by overpowering them, but by becoming curious about what lies underneath them.

Our approaches are different, but throughout this conversation I was struck by how often we arrived at similar territory: the possibility that what looks like the obstacle may actually become the doorway.

If these ideas resonate with you, they’re also woven throughout my relationship coaching practice. I work with individuals and couples to understand the patterns shaping their relationships, build greater capacity for connection and repair, and create change that goes deeper than simply learning what they’re “supposed” to do differently.

Resources for Further Exploration

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If this conversation sparked something in you, I’d love to hear your reflections.

📧 sarah@facetsofconnection.com

🌐 www.leadyourlovelife.com

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This is Facets of Connection, a podcast exploring how we build relationships that actually work in an evolving world. I'm your host, Sarah Melissa Oswald, a relationship coach and founder of Lead Your Love Life. Each episode explores the many dimensions of human connection from romantic partnerships and family systems to leadership community, and the inner relationship we have with ourselves Through thoughtful conversations with fascinating guests and occasional deep dives into the skills that help relationships thrive, we'll explore what it takes to build connections that are rooted in dignity. Respect, repair and resilience because the quality of our relationships shapes the quality of our lives and the future that we're building together.
Today’s guest is someone I’ve known for a long time, and this conversation felt particularly special to me because our work has evolved in interestingly parallel directions.
Mark Andreas is a personal transformation coach and internationally recognized trainer of Core Transformation, the Wholeness Work, NLP, and Metaphors of Movement. But long before Mark was doing this work professionally, he studied Peace and Global Studies and spent two years working with troubled teens in a wilderness therapy program—which, when you hear this conversation, makes a lot of sense. There’s a thread running through Mark’s work around what becomes possible when we stop fighting against people—or against parts of ourselves—and get curious about what’s underneath.
Mark is now one of the primary trainers of Core Transformation, a process originally developed by his mother, Connirae Andreas, and he’s also been leading the research into its effectiveness. Most recently, that included a randomized controlled trial published in Spirituality in Clinical Practice in 2026.
He’s also the author of Sweet Fruit from the Bitter Tree, a collection of stories about creative and compassionate ways out of conflict, and Waltzing with Wolverines, about finding connection and cooperation with troubled teens.
Mark and I both live here in Boulder, and we’ve been friends for many years. What I loved about this conversation is that it really didn’t feel like an interview. It felt like two friends and practitioners getting curious together—about where our work overlaps, where it differs, and this fascinating possibility that the very patterns we work so hard to get rid of may actually be doorways into something deeper.
We talk about Core Transformation, of course, but also relationships, conflict, parts work, integration, what actually creates lasting change, and some really personal examples from both of our lives and work.
So, I’m really happy to introduce you to my friend, Mark Andreas.
And with that, here we go…
Mark, thanks so much for being here with me. Yeah. Really, really happy to be here.
I am too. I've been thinking about having you on this podcast for a long time, actually. . It seems like our work, um, has a fair amount of overlap, but also so much that distinguishes your work from my work that this could be a fruitful conversation for anyone listening- Yeah ... to learn more about how to make transformation in their own lives.
Yeah. Totally, totally. Yeah, I love- I know you have a long history of being involved in this work, but before you tell me anything about that, I was just curious if you would share what you feel is your unique light in this world. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I suppose we all have our uniquenesses, but I don't think of myself as having any particular unique light.
But I do think that, um, I'm in a unique position and, like, a very privileged position to have grown up with the work that I've grown up with in my family, and, and being in a position to bring this work to the world in a, in a big way. Um, and so that's what I've been feeling the most strongly more recently, is just the unique position that I'm in to bring Core Transformation, wholeness work, what my mother has developed, um, t- through the research
And the certification programs, and all the stuff that we'll talk about. To get it out there. , And so that's what's really exciting to me currently, and I would say the other response I have to that question is I've always had a, I don't know if it's a unique light, but it's, I've always had a theme of being interested in conflict resolution since forever.
Through childhood, , my aunt and uncle would jokingly call me the peacemaker or whatever [00:03:00] with me and my cousins, and I studied peace and global studies in college. And then, with this work, it's really, like, inner peace. It's the inner conflict resolution.
Of course, worked with, with, uh, you know, teens for two years in a wilderness therapy program that had lots of very interesting conflict. Um, so I've just always been fascinated by conflict and how we might get along in happier ways with each other, um, and also internally, so. I think that's part of your unique light, as I've
experienced you.
I would-
experienced you. And that's something I really love about what you're doing too, of course, is the, the relationality of what you do and, and the mission of this podcast
It's very much in alignment with u- with all of that. I agree. Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. I love that you're focused on conflict resolution. You remember when I bought a whole case of your books and gave them out to my [00:04:00] friends for a family- I do remember that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm referencing a book of yours that you wrote a while ago called- Yeah
Sweet Fruit From The Bitter Tree, and I know that's not probably what we're gonna talk about here, but I just wanna name, that gave me tools to navigate my own conflict with strangers. Or it gave me- Mm ... more confidence in going out in the world and being able to face whatever comes forward. Awesome.
Awesome. Yeah. I need to reread it now . It's been a little while, but I love those stories. , Just so creative, outside-the-box responses. Well, they were all focused on human-ness, human connection. Yeah. Seeing the humanity underneath someone's struggles. Yeah. Totally. . And it sounds like core transformation also does something similar.
Very much so. It's like the more y- I experience that process for myself and also with clients, it just becomes [00:05:00] obvious that it's like, oh, every single behavior, no matter how it may look on the surface level, it's all, the core of it is, is trying to get something deeply positive and universal.
So It makes it easier when you see somebody who's not having their best day, , to see it that way as opposed to like, "What are you doing to me? Why, why me?" That kind of a thing. Yeah. I think I am tracking what you mean, but I imagine people who , might be listening could be a little confused- Yeah, might need to know-
about what you mean by that ... what is this core transformation thing anyways? Yeah. Right? Yeah, I'm curious about that- Yeah ... as well. And what I think I understand about core transformation is that there's an assumption that patterns are not the problem, but they're the entrance to figuring something else out.
Yeah. . The, the struggles that we experience could actually be part of the solution, or that they have some bigger purpose for us. [00:06:00] Yeah. How I would put it is that- Yeah ... like the patterns,, they might be the problem at the surface level. They, they might be causing real problems for us.
But it's not, um... But it's also the doorway. So the problem that we're experiencing is the doorway to, to these profound states of being. Like oneness, um, wholeness, being,
oneness, um, wholeness, being, presence that,
or just a sense of okayness. Um, nothingness was a core state with a client just this morning that I worked with. Um, that this process it's just a really reliable way to that state of being.
Yeah. How so? I mean, how are the struggles the doorway into a more- Yeah. So, s- so specifically, we, we start with the process. We start with some feeling, some thought, some habit or behavior that's not helpful. And this is like, so I recognize at a conscious level, like, "This is not serving me.
This is not [00:07:00] useful." Um, anxiety, anger, nail biting, smoking. You know, um, maybe I have this inner thought that says, "Oh, God, you screwed up again, you idiot," or something like that. So, so these direct experiences, it is a problem, and yet we can, through the process, we begin, we find the part of us generating that.
So it's not something that I'm consciously deciding to ha- have happen, so we can assume there's some unconscious part of me, some auto- automatic part of me generating this response. And through the process, we get in touch with where we experience that, that part of us that's generating that. So generally, it's like, "Okay, let me just close my eyes and notice, where do I sense this?
I'm not deciding to think I'm an idiot, but I have ... the thought just appeared. Where do I sense this part of me that's generating this thought?" And we welcome the part, thank it for being here, because we know that it has something positive, and [00:08:00] ask the part, "What, what do you want when you s- when you say this to me?
What do you want when you're feeling this anxiety?" And listen for the response back, and we just kind of repeat that process, um, until we get to deeper and deeper outcomes, what, what this part is really wanting for us. And often it surprises people. So initially, we can have certain ideas about what a part might want.
Um, generally, it's around protecting us or somebody else in some way, um, serving us in some way, but it can really surprise people, and even, you know, myself. Having done this thousands of times, um, that if I guide myself through a process, it's not necessarily what I might expect going into it. You can do this on your own?
You can do this on your own, yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I have a great experience [00:09:00] just recently, like a month ago, with-- that I th- I wanted to share with you in particular because of your couples work, where Catherine, my wife Catherine and I were in a-- got in an argument, and I was like, I was really mad, which just doesn't happen that often, but I was like really mad.
And afterwards, I was like, "Oh man, I'm gonna have to do a bunch of CT sessions on this one." And, uh, I had like fifteen minutes before a client call, and so I'm like, well, let me just see what I c... Like, I'll just start. I'll just start something and surely I'm gonna like be working with multiple other things later.
So I just really quickly like did basically that process that I just described. There's a very precise script that we've h- kind of honed over the years of what's, um, what generally tends to be the, the easiest way in to follow the, that down, and then of course also ways of modifying if it, you know, to fit the person.
It's all about meeting what's arising in the person, not about fitting the person to the [00:10:00] process. Um, so I just guided myself through. I had fifteen minutes just kinda quickly through, and I got to a core state. I don't even remember what it was at this point. Something really nice. Some state of being-ness, oneness, love, something like that.
And, and kind of the next f- the next phase then when you get to that core state of being is, okay, so this inner part thought it needed to go through this process to, to do these things first in order to get this state of being. A state of being is just a state of being. You don't have to do anything to get it.
You can just step in and have it. Mm. So that's the, the, the key, and then the, the part gets to step in and have whatever it is, oneness, being-ness, and then discover how that transforms each of the other outcomes that it wanted all the way back through to the initial limitation of like, oh, you're such an idiot or whatever.
And so it, so it's a, a deep transformative [00:11:00] resource. The core state is what makes the process so profound. It's, it's not just, um, you know, a lot of processes, a lot of parts work is about negotiating with parts or having better, creating better dial- inner dialogue, but there's still inner division. There's still negotiation that needs to happen.
There's still kind of needing to manage sort of a bunch of stuff going on on the inside, even if it's done a lot better. And, and so with this process, with the core state of being It just transforms all of that other stuff. And then the next phase of the process is actually a, a way of integrating what was a separate part.
So we can go beyond, um, traditional parts work and actually getting... You know, often people's experience is, is like, "Oh my gosh, there's all these different parts." But it [00:12:00] doesn't have to be that way. Like, ultimately we're whole human beings, um- Yes we are And so it's- One whole human. Exactly. And so it's a way of, of, of meeting our system where it is and, and the fractured nature of every human being.
That's kind of how it normally goes, but, but it provides a pathway to, to more and more integration and wholeness, um, which is one of the, one of the uniquenesses of the process. And the core state is what allows that to be possible. Like, without the core state experience, integrating a part, it's just not gonna be an easy thing to do.
No, it's not easy. Um, but when a part- I've watched people struggle with it for years. Yeah. Yeah. And the- People who have all this insight and know how to do it- Yes ... still struggle- Yeah ... with integration- Yeah ... of those parts. Yeah. Yeah. And- And it sounds like your work just loves those parts and brings them close and asks, "What are you trying to teach me?
What are you, what are you [00:13:00] doing for me?" Yeah. Yeah? Something like that? Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And you know, and that's why a lot of people assume that these parts, we're just stuck with them. Like, they can't integrate. Just gotta learn how to live better- Mm ... um, navigate better. Um, but there is a way to, to actually integrate these, these parts.
Yeah. And that's the core state. Yeah. That's what makes that possible. That's the core state. Yeah. No, or the core state- Integration ... is the resource that allows that integration of the part to be possible, where, um, in many cases, like you say, it's like, "Yeah, how many years have I known that I have this part, and I know why it was formed, and I know that it's not serving in my adult life context, but it's still something I have to manage."
And, you know, maybe I can manage it better with the insight or with tools or, you know, that awareness. That can help hugely. Mm-hmm. But there's still something to manage, as opposed to, you know, a lot of my clients, when we kind [00:14:00] of do feedback in the next session, it's like, "Oh, yeah, remind me, what did we work on again?"
And, and it's like, "Oh, yeah, we did this and this and this." And it's like, "Oh. Oh. Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about that, but that hasn't been a problem for me." Wow. Um, and yeah. And now this isn't to say that every session is this way, but it is a very common- Hmm ... it's a very common thing. And of course, some problems, issues that people come with are gonna involve many more than, than one or two parts, too.
So sometimes it's about just staying with it and working with integrating a lot of different parts and making that incremental progress to more, more wholeness, so. Hmm. Like it can keep going deeper and deeper. Yeah. Well, it's like... Or layers, you know? It's like, um, there can be... Sometimes somebody shows up, and it's like, "Okay, there's one part of me that's mad, that's getting mad about [00:15:00] whatever."
We do a session. There's one I have on, on YouTube that a client who volunteered to just post the whole session on YouTube, where with anger, often it is just one part, and you can do the process, and it's like, okay, he had like decades of anger issues, uh, are just gone, just totally resolved. He doesn't have to think about it anymore.
Um, you can see the whole session on, on YouTube, start to finish. Can you share that link so I can put it in the show notes? Yeah. I'll share that link. Okay. I would love to watch it. Um, so- I got this little flavor of the work when I participated in your research. Yeah. You got to experience two sessions, right?
Two sessions only. Yeah.
yeah.
But your, what you're describing of people not really remembering what they worked on because it shifted, and they no longer needed to worry about it- Yeah ... that was my experience, too, as I think back to what I was working on in those sessions. Hmm. I don't really remember, but I remember- Yeah
the way I felt. [00:16:00] Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Do you wanna share more, anything more about your own experience? You don't have to, but yeah. Um- Maybe you don't remember. I don't know, I don't know what's most important to share or what could be valuable, but- Yeah, yeah ... what I remember walking away with was the sense that like, "Oh, I already have everything I need."
Yeah. Totally. All these parts that are struggling in whatever way they were struggling- Yeah ... are here to help me. Yeah. And they have good intentions. Yeah. And that- Like, there's goodness under every single aspect. Yeah. Yeah, totally. It's the... What I, what I loved about it was how loving it, this model is.
Yeah. Yeah. It's a very gentle way of working, yeah. Not just gentle in the session, but loving of all those parts that I thought, "Man, that thing that I do is really frustrating me." Yeah. And I could turn to it and think, "Why are you here? [00:17:00] Just get out of here." Yeah.
Yeah. But
through Core Transformation, it makes the assumption that that part of me has something that it's trying to give me, something good.
Yeah. Yeah. And underneath all of that, whatever those steps are, it seems that the assumption is that human beings are good. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, and one of the things along those lines that, that also makes it so powerful is that it's, it's just what you said. A lot of times, um, like I'm thinking even just the, the person that I worked with earlier today, um, initially was saying like, "You know, it's, it's common for me to have be- it's difficult for me to get in touch with my experience, and it's, you know, common to have sort of like resistance to, to noticing what's happening and getting in touch with my emotions, and so I just want you to know this [00:18:00] upfront, like it might be, might be challenging.
That's kinda normal for me." And we began with the process, and, you know, started with a part, and then one of these resistances came up, and a lot of ways of working don't d- don't have a, a, a way of dealing with that. Like what happens when resistance comes up or, or the client says, "Oh man, I'm j- I've just got a block now, and suddenly I'm, I lost it.
I'm, I'm out of touch with that," or, "Oh, I just dissociated," or whatever it might be. With this way of working, it's so easy because we just notice that, and that's exactly what's supposed to happen. So okay, so there's some part of you that's just generated this experience of disconnection or whatever it is, and so we notice that part, worked with that, and it w- you know, he, he went so deep into the experience, and it was super easy.
I g- I was surprised actually how, how easy it was. It was like we would just guide through the core state and back, and then we'd come back to the first part, [00:19:00] back through, and like super deep, really connected with his experience, really profound, uh, session. And this process allows ... It's, it's just, it's part of the process to, um, to welcome those, what you might otherwise call a resistance or a challenge or something else is now happening, arising in my experience.
That's all part of it, and we just welcome that part to join in to the process as well. To join in. Yeah. I can make up what I think that means. Like, in my, in my head I'm assuming that you, "Oh, there's resistance. Come on in, resistance. Tell me why you're here. What's your intention for me?" Yeah, exactly. And so then we just do the whole process of that part, guide it through the whole thing.
Rather than trying to, "Okay, let's manage it and then get back to where we were," it's like, no, this is where we're meant to be. So we just guide the whole ... And, and whether or not we get back to, like, where we started, that doesn't matter because this [00:20:00] is the layer. There's this general principle of, like, any time it becomes challenging, it just means we're not working with the part that's asking to be worked with in that moment.
So if we just- Oh ... go with that- It's like there's a little kid in there being, "Me, me, me. Please." Yeah. No, it's like, "Oh, cool." Like, "Focus on me." "Great." And we're like, "Oh, no. This shouldn't be happening." "Get out of here." Yeah. But it's like, no, this is exactly what should be happening. Exactly. So yeah. You know, it sounds similar to the work that I've been taught to do, which is looking at relational patterns between people, and how maybe, maybe when I am triggered or upset about something, I just shut down, right?
Maybe I completely wall off and disappear. And they're ... What I help people discover is that they have spent their whole lives doing that because it's protected them. It has kept them safe. Yeah. But- Or at least it did- But ... at some time, or Yes ... or attempted to. It did at [00:21:00] some time- Yeah. Yeah ... keep them safe, and now in their relationship it's actually causing trouble.
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. But there, we also then say to that part, "Hey, here's what you've cost me. You're no longer in charge." But what I love about core transformation is that it's not demoting that part. It's actually saying, "Come closer." Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Let me love on you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and when the, that part accesses its core state of being, now it becomes a powerful resource that's
And we have a, a, a part of the process, the third phase, the integration is about evolving, growing up to present. So that young part gets to have an experience of not being frozen in time at that younger developmental age of only having the [00:22:00] limited resources that we had as a three-year-old or whatever it might be when that pattern was formed.
Is it can evolve and have access to our whole being, and also share that core state then with our whole being so that we ... It becomes a power- not just a, um, like not just that we're being nicer to the part, but that that part actually becomes a deep resource for us in those moments that's, that's more powerful than, than what our adult selves would think up to do in that, in that situation.
Hm. Can you give a little more clarity to that? I am imagining someone who has no idea what you're talking about- Yeah ... trying to wrap their heads around this. Uh-huh. So how- Yeah ... how does that work in practice, not just in theory? But do, are you open to sharing a little bit- Yeah ... about what it looks like in session?
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And [00:23:00] again, I think, like the, um- You know, it's a lot to summarize. This,
a
session would likely be 90 minutes. It's a, it's a deep kind of process that often doesn't fit within an hour. So to summarize it briefly, just keep that in mind for everyone listening. Yeah, that's fair. Um- And it moves slowly, doesn't it?
It can move slowly. It can move more quickly. Yeah. But it often is, uh,
you,
you might say slowly. Um... My experience of it, Mark, was almost like hypnosis. Yeah. It's often a altered experience for people going in. Mm-hmm. It felt like an altered state. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, uh, the So what, what I'm gonna share as part of the resources is a micro book on the first two phases of the process, so that will have all [00:24:00] of the, all of the details, and then, like, how to find a starting place, and how to guide yourself through the process.
Oh, cool. So that's really gonna be the, um, the best answer to this question
Perfect
for people. Perfect. So it's something that- Yeah ... people can use at home for, on themselves. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a mic- a mini book for practitioners. It's for the individual- No, it's for your own know nothing of this process, total intro, um, how you can guide yourself through the beginning part of the process.
Amazing. Yeah. That's such a great resource. Um, so- I can't wait to check it out myself ... so it has a, like a word-for-word script that you can ask yourself the questions, um, write down your answers, and, and guide, guide for kind of how to
find a
starting place and that kind of thing. Hmm. Um, so that's the first two phases of the process.
That's identifying the part, generating the, the unwanted response that we're having that we wanna shift, um, the questions to ask to discover the deeper [00:25:00] l- layers, the deeper outcomes that that part wants, all the way down to the core state, which is some state of being that just is. The, the definition of a core state is that we get
Nothing needs to happen to, to experience it. It's just at a beingness level. So oneness, wholeness, okayness, presence. Um, and then from that core state, discovering, okay, if I just, if the part just steps in and has this already, which it can do, it doesn't have to wait for any of that other stuff- Yeah ... it can just have this to begin with, now how does this transform each of those other outcomes all the way back through to the initial problematic response?
So tho- that's the first two phases, which will be in the micro book. Then the, the th- the third phase is the one where we find out what was the age of this part, and, um, giving it a, a way of, of, if it wants to ... This is always a invitation only. Like, we're not gonna force a part to do anything it doesn't want to.
But generally, [00:26:00] they always want to once they understand the, the purpose of the evolving and growing up phase. Um, so that's phase three, and that's where the part can, can then integrate with us as a whole, and we get that integration, uh, where we don't need to be managing parts inside anymore. Even if they're, like, more resourceful parts, we don't need to have that inner separation any longer.
The way I'm hearing it is almost like you're identifying more of what that part looks like, where it came from, how old it is It's, it's really as simple as just asking inwardly, "How old are you?" And going with the response that comes. Mm-hmm.
So,
like, when I do it for myself, I just get a, like, a number pops up, and I don't even have any...
Sometimes people have a insight of, like, some memory when, when something, when that part was formed, but, but you don't need that. You don't need that insight or that, um, [00:27:00] conscious level understanding of where it arose. We just kind of work with the experience in the present moment and trust whatever answer the arises, and we go with that, and then there's a process for inviting it experientially to do the growing up thing.
Um, so it's a very experiential process. And it sounds- Yeah ... like it's really rooted in a lot of trust. Yeah. Yeah. Mm. Trusting. Well, and you gain that trust through doing, through doing the process. Like, initially people tend to go, you know, like, if another part arises or they feel resistance or, like, another negative feeling comes in during the process, initially people's res- response tends to be something like, "Oh, no.
Gosh, another thing coming up. Oh." But it, but you do this process enough, and you start to get excited when that happens. Like, when I'm working with somebody and they tell me that, like, they just got disconnected from the experience, I go, [00:28:00] like, that's the moment in the session where I go, like, "Oh, okay, great.
Now, like, something juicy is happening here." Um- Now more of you is actually in the room. Yeah. And this is exactly what we wanna access that's likely what you've been just trying to, like, shove aside and a, and kind of get through some program without paying attention to it. Um, so yeah. It's a, it's, that's a really nice thing.
I love the way you say, like, "Oh, get excited when those parts show up," because it means- Yeah ... something juicy is in the room. Yeah. I think of that, um, I use something similar when I talk about conflict with couples. Yeah. Like, I've done conflict enough now to know that something better is on the other side.
Yeah. And so I get excited when conflict arrives. Totally. 'Cause that's what- Because I know we're going somewhere ... that's what we're here for, right? Yeah. Totally. Mm. Totally. Yeah. I'm just looking at- Yeah ... some of the, the questions that I had written [00:29:00] down about this. Yeah. While you do, I'll just, I realized I never finished my own personal story.
Oh, okay. So I'll close the loop on that, which is that, so I did my quick 15-minute thing, and I was sure, I'm like, "Okay, I'm gonna have to do at least two other sessions on some different parts here or something." But- I felt amazing and I went into my client session. Then after my client session, I was going
You know, the one where I was guiding somebody else on their, on their issue, not, not my own. Um, and I was going, "Wow, I don't think it ... I don't ... There's nothing more to do here." Like, it was just done, and it was ... There was no conscious mind ins- I mean, it was ... I basically was just left with a sense of like, well, I love her and she loves me, and that was just so obvious that there was, like, nothing to talk about anymore.
It was like [00:30:00] I, I was assuming, I was like, "I'm gonna have to really tell her about this and this and this, that I need to, like," you know, "that it's really important to communicate." And sometimes there are important things to communicate, but in this case it was just, "No, actually that was all my stuff, and now I don't need to, um, go into a big process with her because it's just done."
Huh. Yeah. So you went from extreme anger to, "It's all my stuff. It's o- it's over. I'm good. I found my core state, and I'm ready to move on." Like, "I've got what I need now," and that's, and there's nothing that even needs to be said. How did you take that back to Catherine? I'm just curious. As you said that, I had this thought of, "But you're depriving her of actually being with you through that transformation."
How did you share it with her? Oh, yeah. How does it bring you closer to her- Well, so she ... The both of us- Rather than- Yeah. Both of us do core transformation with- Oh, really? ... with [00:31:00] oursel- with our stuff, and sometimes that involves the other person, uh, not surprisingly. Um, so you know, she also very much has gotten huge benefit from the process.
Um, and so I just told her, I was like, "I did a CT," and I was like, "Sure, I was gonna have to do at least two more, but I'm good." Like, um, and, and I realized, like, yeah, it was just kinda my, my thing apparently. Um- Hmm ... and so, yeah. There was just sort of, it was like I actually I have, I've got what I need and, um
And yeah, I don't remember super clearly any further details about our, um ... But I'm guessing that I was, you know, checking in if she needed anything more too or, you know, um, or- You're not just saying, "Hey, I'm good now. Let's go." Yeah, I'm good. We're[00:32:00]
Um, so yeah. That was a, that was ... You know, so I've been doing this since, you know, for a long time, about 17 years, and still surprises me sometimes, uh, in my own experience and Yeah. And, and, and, and other times, you know, it's not that it's, that that's how it should go, it's just that's an interesting example of how it can go.
Other times it's like, "Oh, now I have real clarity of, like, what's important to communicate to my partner about, uh, something." And, you know, so I'm really clear about what's important to me, what my needs are, and be able to do that from an, from a really resourceful place as opposed to, like, a triggered kind of begrudging place or something like that.
So you made contact with the core state underneath that anger. And then what about that actually allowed you to [00:33:00] transform your relationship with that protective strategy?
So
I'll share some Like, why, why
is this important? Why is not, why is insight alone not enough? How can that- Yeah ... not create the transformation that Core- Yeah ... Transformation is capable of? Yeah, totally. Well, so I'll share some, some metaphors for that in a moment. But I think, like, probably every listener can relate to being consciously aware of something being a problem, and yet it's still a problem, right?
You know, occasionally we can have insight about something and, and, and it might shift, or maybe it shifts without insight. You know, we evolve and, and grow and, and that sort of thing. But a lot of the time we have, we know at a conscious level, okay, like blowing up at, when my boss says XYZ or, you know, feeling [00:34:00] anxious about how my partner's gonna respond or, like, whatever it might be, it's not serving me.
I know that consciously. I even have done therapy, and I know where it came from, and I understand that it's trying to, it's this protective strategy from when I was young and growing up in the environment I w- grew up in and, and all of that. But does it change that response? No. It's like I'm still, I might be able to manage it better, like I might somet- I
might
be able to, like, hold it back sometimes or, you know, in the moments.
But it's, it takes work and effort and energy to do that, and willpower, and when our willpower is depleted, then, like, out it comes, and it doesn't look so good. That's right. Um- Who can remember their communication skills in the heat of an argument? Right. Yeah. You know? Totally. And so, um, yeah, so, so with, with, with a lot of processes, uh, um, transformation processes, it's [00:35:00] kind of like if we have a broken arm, um, it's kind of like putting a cast on the arm, which is, or our protective strategies are often that way.
It's like, okay, that's actually a really good thing to do if you have a broken arm, is to put a cast on it. Like immobilize it, no more further damage will happen, and give it some, like, some protection to be able to heal. But at a certain point, it's, the healing has gone as far as it can with the cast on there.
And for, for the f- for the further healing to happen, the cast needs to come off. And a lot of processes are kind of like, well, let's try to decorate the cast or let's paint it or s- get all our friends to sign the cast or whatever. But it's like, but I still have a cast on, and it's rigid, and it's now that's restricting my motion, and it's actually preventing full, the full healing capacity.
So with Core Transformation, it's like finding those casts, those protective strategies, and [00:36:00] allowing them to come off, um, rather than trying to add something else on to make it better. Make it or make it look better or kind of, um, make it not quite as awkward as it's been. Um, so I really like that metaphor.
Like another client put it, he said, he said, "You know, a lot of things I've done, uh, personal growth wise have felt kind of like if there's a bug in the operating system, kind of like creating a workaround, like adding some programming to like- Hmm ... circumvent the, like the bug in the program. Whereas this feels like just getting back to the source code or like, you know, just getting back, you know, just removing the bug.
Rather than a workaround, removing it, getting back to the, the, the source, and that's really what this process is all about. Hmm. So yeah, I don't know if there's a follow-up on that How do you convince, how do you convince that [00:37:00] part to take the cast off? So the beauty of it is that you don't ... Yeah, so the, you don't have to do any convincing because the whole
And that's why, um, you know, ha- having the problem, having the part be the doorway to, to the core state, you're, you're, you're n- um, there's no convincing needed because you're just asking the part, "What do you want?" the whole time, and eventually it says oneness or peace or being and, and then you, you present this, this, you know, you have the part find out in its own experience.
So th- this state of being, you know, this core state of being, the wonderful thing about this is that you don't need to do anything to have it. Uh, you thought you needed to do these other steps first. That is not a very good way of, of going about it. Like, you probably didn't get to experience peace or oneness or whatever it is very often going about it in that way.
Um, and so th- this is the good [00:38:00] news. You can just step in. It's so much easier than you thought. You can just step in and have it. And so then we invite the part to do that in experience and, and so the part doesn't need any convincing. It's happens through the experience, and then it discovers how everything else just becomes so much easier through that experience.
. So you're, you're actually not helping people create the core state, but clearing stuff out of the way so that they can experience it. Exactly, yeah, which is really key.
And do you find that each part has a different core state that it can get to, or is there typically one core state for each individual that they- Um- ... that has their home base? So it might, it, it's things a ... S- so it can be different and it can be the same. I've worked with some people where it's like, you know, I remember one person where it's like, yeah, it was one, one
every time it was, like, the same phrase, but it's something, it can be, and it can also be different. So, but it's these things like [00:39:00] love, a, like, just a beingness level kind of love that just is, or oneness, okayness, presence, peace, nothingness. You know, people have different words for it, but the basic thing is that it's a state of being that's possible to experience regardless of what's happening or doesn't happen, um, which, and it's what you sh- shared, which is it's not something that we create.
It just is. So it's, it's indestructible. It's just, it is what it is. We can lose tra- lose touch with this, but it's always been there and it always will be, and now the, the part through the, through its own process is Remembering that I can just step in and have it, basically. Um It's always there with us.
Yeah, it's always there, and it's always, always will be there, and so it's nothing to, to create. It's just [00:40:00] like you said, it's like Just remembering almost. Um Oh, I love that. Yeah Remembering who I really am- Yeah ... underneath all these protective strategies that I've- Yeah ... dealt with throughout- Yeah ... most of my life.
And for a lot of people, it's like, um, the f- their, their first experience of, of a core state through the process can be something that, that they feel like they've never experienced before. Like, my mom's first experience, she developed the, the process, the core transformation process, and, um, part of what inspired her to develop it was this experience that she had.
Uh, it was her first experience of a core state. This was before she had developed the process, but it, it led her, and it was a totally different experience that, that, um, that she arrived there. Um, but having that experience m- made her [00:41:00] realize that this was even possible. And her experience was, um, it was with, uh, Milton Erickson, who's a, a famous hypnotherapist, um, that she went to see in, in the, like, one of the la- maybe the last year of his life or something.
And so he had his own wizardry and, and, um, he would do ... He was a master of hypno- hypnotherapy and hypnosis and communication, and so she has no idea how he orchestrated this, this experience for her. Um, but it was,
f-
her experience was, like, in that moment, she s- she suddenly had this profound sense of, "Everything's gonna be okay."
Like, um, "I don't know why or how, but, like, it's all okay." And up unt- and it felt to her like she had been, her whole life she had been living with, like, in a costume or, like, with masks or something, and, like, all of that had just come away, [00:42:00] and it was just Everything was, everything just totally okay. This deep, profound sense of, of okayness, just h- just how things are.
And that experience lasted for f- her for, for a couple weeks, but then it faded. And she then let, you know, kind of was ... went into her, her, uh, pursuit of, "Okay, is there some way that I could find that again reliably?" 'Cause I don't know what Milton Erickson did. Um, and her, her take on it is that whatever he did, he orchestrated it from, from the outside, and so it didn't last.
It was a deeply profound experience, but it came from what- whatever he was doing from the outside. And so core transformation is a process where it comes from the inside. Like, it's a reliable way of, [00:43:00] um ... You know, when I'm guiding somebody, I don't have to be some magician and manipulate things so that somebody has this
You know, like you said, it's not something that we need to create. You just follow this very simple process and it's there. Like, it's there and it just comes out That's so wild to me. I've had, I have a lot of thoughts as you're talking about your mother here Yeah. Um, one thought that showed up was I can imagine my clients saying to me Everything feels okay now, right?
I've hit, I've hit that place where I don't have to do anything. Everything's gonna be okay. Yeah. And then, okay, maybe it's me. My other part inside- Probably not ... would say, "Oh, no, you can't rest. There's still much to do." Yeah, yeah. Don't think you're gonna be okay. There is a lot- Totally ... to do to maintain this state.
And I hear you saying- Yeah ... [00:44:00] actually it's actually about doing less. Yeah. Yeah, totally. And that's a really common concern that comes up. Mm. It's definitely not just you. Probably, probably every human being. Um- Hmm and so then in that moment, the, the beauty is you can, again, just like welcome that concern and like, okay, well, just check, check.
Like close your eyes and notice. Like, so ask this part, when you have this oneness as a way of being, is it a problem? Is it a problem with the things that you need to do, or does it actually support and enrich, make it that much easier to do the things that you- That's it ... want to do? It makes it easier to do the things that we have to do.
Yeah. So, so either the person say- notices that in their own experience. So again, I don't need to convince of anything. And they're like, "Oh, yeah, it makes, it supports all of this stuff." Sometimes I joke, like I've, I've guided a lot of people through this process, and I've never had [00:45:00] somebody just like turn into a couch potato 'cause they're just in oneness, and they're like, "Nah, I'm not gonna do anything now."
Never? Um, never had it happen. Okay. Never been, never been a, a cl- a concern. Um, but of course, it supports, there's more that, more capacity that we have. There's more that we can do because it takes less energy and, and there's more alignment with what we really wanna be doing, and not doing what we don't wanna do, and that sort of stuff.
But of course, the other possibility is that a part goes, "Okay, I'm not convinced. I'm not convinced," and then you just welcome that part and guide that part through. And then pretty soon you're all in oneness, so. Pretty soon you're just not here. It sounds too good to be true, Mark. It does, yeah. Doesn't it?
- And so that's why we're so excited to have research that shows hard data- Yes ... um, on the, the effectiveness with clients. And so we have, um, [00:46:00] uh, there are, uh, three published research studies. So a pilot study, um, and then two RCT, randomly controlled trials, that, that we have published in peer review journals.
And, um, the first of those studies was one, one person, one, uh, practitioner independent of us did this as his, uh, doctoral research, and he guided everybody through the process. Uh, a single session of core transformation And one of the things that was the most striking, even to us where we see this kind of transformation happening, um, all the time with our clients, is that in, of the group that he worked with, um, it was around 150 people, something like that.
So it was a pretty sizable group. Um, and of those people, there was a subset that w- um, according [00:47:00] to the ... So they, for the research, they filled out surveys before and after, and, um, basic well-beingness surveys, and one of those surveys was the GHQ, uh,
uh, GHQ
GHQ12 questionnaire, which, um, if you get, if you get a certain measurement, um, it indicates you would likely be, um, diagnosable with a mental health- Hmm
disorder. Um, and so there was, of the, of the, there was a subsection of the population that, um, qualified for that according to their initial, uh, uh, the GHQ12 when they initially did the survey. After their single session, 61% of them no longer fell into that category of qualifying for a mental, uh, likely qualifying for a, a diagnosis.
Yeah, mental health diagnosis. Wow. After a single session of core transformation. A single session. Yeah. So that was something that even to, e- even was, um, uh, yeah, something that we [00:48:00] were quite amazed by. Then in our, in the, the most recent study that was published this year in 2026, this was a study that, um, Dinesh, who's, who authored that first study, teamed up with, with me and another author, and what we did was we tracked, we used similar measurements, but we were tracking all of our, um, our coaches in our coach certification training.
They have to guide a certain number of volunteer clients through the process as part of the, um, a part of their training. And so we did research before and after with all of their clients, their volunteer clients. So these are people who have not experienced core transformation before. Um, and they sh- they showed, they did two 90-minute sessions with, with these clients, and the results
So the study shows the results of, of this whole cohort. So a lot of times when research happens, [00:49:00] they choose the best, most experienced practitioner in a method. Um, and, and so it can show some impressive results, and then they go and try to replicate the results, and then it, it doesn't, it doesn't work out so well.
So this is really exciting because these, um- The, the coaches in training, the, they're, they were still in their training, they're not even certified yet, um, showed similar results as that initial study, so,
a-
after just two 90-minute sessions. So, um, so this shows that it can be taught reliably, it can be replicated.
It's the process. It's not one amazing therapist or coach. Right. Um, that this is, is, can be replicated. And the other thing that's really exciting is that we did a meta-analysis with other, um, other really like, you know, kind of like the gold standard in therapy, [00:50:00] CBT, mindfulness, um, some other approaches.
And what, what our coaches in training were able to... The effect sizes that, that the research showed with, uh, with, with these clients after two sessions was in the same range as these other methods got after 13 to 23 sessions. So- Wow. That's outrageous ... yeah, yeah. What it says to me is j- I, I'm hearing a couple things.
So even someone who's not fully certified in this model can produce similar results. So even someone who might be doing it poorly can still have
transformation
And I think it, I think from the way you've described this model and my own experience of it, it seems a little less dangerous than other models.
Yeah. Okay? Yeah. Certain models practiced poorly could create some serious [00:51:00] damage. Yeah. But Core Transformation-
Yeah, I agree with that ... practiced mediocre, maybe poorly, doesn't sound like it can do damage. If anything- Yeah, yeah ... it's just a new possibility. I agree. I agree. It's a really safe way of working because it's so gentle. It's acknowledging, welcoming, and yeah. So I would totally agree with that, and that's one of our reasons for creating the coach certification program is that this is...
I mean, this was our take before doing, before the research, but now we have the research to also, uh, show that this is something that can be taught relatively quickly. I mean, some of the people in the program, uh, they had taken our, uh, six half-day foundation training. Mm-hmm. And then our six half-day advanced training and the coach certification.
That was their whole training in Core Transformation. So it doesn't take a [00:52:00] lot of training to, to get somebody to that, that capacity. Wow, the implications for this are huge. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Like, the potential impact on- Yeah ... humanity could be huge. Yeah. Yeah, so that's why we're, that's, this is our mission is to get this out to more coaches, therapists, and we have people in our programs who, you know, who are just starting fresh, and we also have, like, seasoned therapists and coaches already seeing clients that come into our program and are just, like, thrilled by the kind of impact that this has, um, with their clients, that they're able to see when they bring this into their work.
So if anyone's listening here who is a practitioner already of other modalities- Yeah ... um, I just have a couple of questions for them or- Yeah
for you
to answer. Anything- Yeah ... you may be thinking. Do I need to be a therapist in order to get certified in Core Transformation, or can I be a coach? [00:53:00] You can be a coach.
So it's a coaching program, so you don't need to be a therapist. Coaching. Yeah. Got it. And then can it pair with other modalities, or is it best done just in pure form? So I would say in, in, so it's best done in pure form within a session, but it can absolutely be paired in the sense that, like, you know, it's not the only thing that I do with clients.
Um, I have other modalities that I use, but when I'm doing Core Transformation, I do Core Transformation. So it's not gonna benefit from- trying to hybridize it with something, that's just gonna probably water down both methods and- Mm ... and make least each one less effective. But it's something that, um, you know, that's, that's my, it's, it's my go-to method in my coaching practice, but I also use other methodologies too that I find really helpful.
So it's something you can absolutely bring into your tool set, uh, of what you're already doing with clients, and, [00:54:00] um, just recommended that when you're doing it, you do it. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. Um- Yeah, that makes sense ... yeah. So you can weave it
in, just- Yeah. So like, oh, great- Weave it ... let's do a core transformation session with this, and then maybe the next time you do a couples, you do some communication strategies of NVC or w- you know, or whatever your other things are.
Yeah. Sure. Yeah. You know I, I work with couples, right? Mostly. Yeah. And then my work also focuses on ways that protective strategies show up in their relationships and how those protective strategies are causing- Yeah ... difficulty for them. Totally. Totally. So I'm, I'm really curious about core transformation inside partnerships, if you're up for chatting about that.
Yeah. Totally. Um- And I also wanna say, you know, I lo- just that I, I know you're, one of your deep trainings is in the RLT, Terry Real's, uh, Relational Life Therapy, and just wanna say that I [00:55:00] love his stuff. And if I was seeing more couples, I would absolutely get the whole training, uh, that, that he does in the relational piece because, um, yeah, when you're dealing with another human being, communication is an important part of it.
And, um, in my own coaching, I generally work one-on-one with people, but if there's a relational element, often there's a combination of doing the inner work, so that we have access to our own, um, core states in, in, in the relationship, but then also, you know, sometimes it's really helpful to have some- skills development and communic- in, in upping our communication skills.
And, and just some, you know, it's one thing to be in a state of oneness, and sometimes that allows natural communication ability to become freed up and and now things just kind of work easily. But often there's a [00:56:00] lot to be, there's a lot of benefit to be had by learning like, "Oh, well, here's a communication strategy you might try out that might just make things go a lot smoother between you and your partner, and be really helpful for you both, and really clarifying."
So, um, just wanted to also acknowledge that important piece of it. Um, and like, like, um, John and Julie Gottman talk about, you can have all the great communication strategies in the world, and like you mentioned earlier, but if you're triggered, if you're in that young place, it's like, it's not gonna help.
Um, even if you say it, even if you say all the right things and you follow the NVC format or whatever format you're, you're following, um, if you're reactive in that moment, it's just not gonna go over well, so. That's right. And while RLT does teach a lot of tools, it actually begins with couples doing deep inner work in front of [00:57:00] one another.
Mm. Got it. And what I notice is that it actually produces more compassion and understanding between them when they see their partner connecting with that inner child or bumping up against the realities of their childhood upbringing. Yeah. And it sounds like- Yeah ... I'd be very curious to, to see how a partnership could transform if core transformation was done in a session with the other partner watching.
Mm, yeah. It's exciting. Totally. . I have done that once. I had- You have? I don't e- it was so long ago, I don't even remember the details, but I do remember that one time, uh, a couple was, um, wanting to do that, and they found it valuable to, for, for exactly the reasons that you're sharing of, of, um, yeah, just having that, that further empathy for, for the other's experience.
And, um- Not just empathy for the other's- Um- ... [00:58:00] experience, but I find that something magical happens when I'm able to recognize the positive intention underneath my partner's behavior. Yeah, totally. Totally. Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally. So I think it has a lot of potential. I think there's also areas where, um, you know, sometimes it's gonna be easier, especially if it's an interpersonal thing, and it depends on the couple, for sure.
You know, for some it might be perfect, like, yeah. Like, uh, my wife Catherine was just telling me about somebody, uh, she saw on social media who was like, "Yeah, you know, my husband does this thing every once in a while. It's really helpful. He sits down and he's like, he's like, 'Do you want me to be your best friend right now?
Bitch to me about your husband.'" Um, so some couples are able to do that kind of a thing, and for others, for other times, there's gonna be a understandable, like, concern about, like- Can I even [00:59:00] reveal some of this?
Mm-hmm.
And so in th- in those cases then, of course, um, working individually with core transformation is gonna be the best fit because then they can have the full freedom to just, like, say it however it comes out, whatever their experience from that part is, and not have to have that concern of like, "Oh, gosh, how's my partner gonna take it?"
For sure. Um- Yeah, it's not for every couple. Yeah, yeah. It, sometimes it's
not
safe enough in a partnership- Yeah ... to suggest doing this. Yeah, yeah. Totally. But I, but in- But it's a fun idea. Totally, yeah. And I think it has great potential- Mm-hmm ... in, um, as an option. Um, and, and for Catherine- Or even if it is in private without the partner in the room, I imagine that- Oh, yeah
understanding one's own strategies for protection can- Yeah ... actually change how that person handles conflict in their partnership. Yeah. Yeah, totally. - And it's not too far off from the work I'm doing either. Yeah. [01:00:00] Totally. Like, my wife, Catherine, her, her favorite part of it is the different insights that arise as you're getting those deeper and deeper outcomes or higher and higher outcomes, depending on which metaphor you, you do.
Um- Yeah ... that, um, she finds those, those... Like, you don't need to have the insight, but often those insights naturally arise as you're going through the process, and she finds that her favorite part of the process. And, and it's something where. i'll guide her through the process, um, and she finds that really valuable.
I've offered for her to guide me through, but usually thus far with our young kids, she's been like, "I have other, other ways of spending my time. You do
it yourself."
She's like, "You got it, Mark." "This isn't for you."
"You got it, Mark." "For years."
"You're a pro. You just, you, you got you." But I'm totally open to it. I'm like, "Anytime, you know, you wanna guide me through, I'm, I'm game.
Just let me know." Um, and that's something that we've [01:01:00] found really, um, when I've guided her through with the things that she fully opts into and, and wants to, wants to do, um, we've found that deeply connecting for our relationship, and- Oh, I believe it. Yeah. And it's an easier process to do that because, you know, it's, with a lot of standard therapy, there's kind of like the, the therapy is more, the therapist is more the authority of kind of- Here's where we might go with this or kind of advice from the outside often, depending on what model you're in.
With core transformation, it's ju- you're just following a process. So it's a lot easier to guide a partner through even because it's not like I'm saying anything about how... We're... Like, I'm just asking some nice questions and seeing what comes out and, like, ackno- you know, being thankful for whatever responses come, and, you know, it's all coming from within the person.
So [01:02:00] it's less likely to bring up, you know, annoyances of, like, "Well, you're trying to impose something on me here," or something like that. "That's your idea, but not my idea." But it's 'cause it's all- Hmm ... it's all coming from within through the process, so. I'm thinking about Gestalts. Yeah. Because in Gestalts, I have been taught that we don't need as much story as we think to w- be able to help- Yeah
someone. Yeah. And I imagine that is true in core transformation as well, yeah? Totally. Totally. Like, I mean, I access people's core state through their body, their somatic awareness- Yeah ... like, without story sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. But it sounds like you're doing something similar without s- Absolutely ... there's no need for the narrative.
Yeah. What's happening right here and now. Yeah, totally. Totally. Not that narrative is not important. Sometimes it absolutely is. Yeah. Often, like, I'll have, I mean, often if somebody's, especially if they've [01:03:00] been to a number of different therapists or coaches, often they're kind of trained to, like, or f- or just f- feel like, "Well, I gotta tell you the whole life history so that you can help me."
Um, so sometimes I'll, I'll let people know, "You know, I'm happy to hear anything you want me to know about your history, but we don't actually need any of it to, to do the work." Yeah. "All we need is what's happening right now that you don't like, and we'll just enter into the process from there." So some people are relieved, and they're like, "Oh, okay.
Great. Let's, yeah, let's just go, go with it. I'm feeling anxious, and I don't want to anymore." And then we can just go in through the experience. And other people really need to tell their story. Totally. Yeah. So, um- Mm. Mm-hmm ... and so then it's like, "Okay, great. I'll listen. I'll hear it, and, uh, just wanna make sure you're not doing it out of a-" Yeah
obligation. Obligation. 'Cause some people don't wanna tell the story. They're like, "I've told this so many times." [01:04:00] Yeah. "I don't wanna tell it again." What a relief. Yeah. I can get help without having to rehash my whole story? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Totally. I'm in. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Mark, we could talk for hours about this.
We could just, we could just keep going all day. We could. Yeah. And I'm aware that we've been chatting for almost an hour now. Yeah. And that there's still huge sections of our plan that we haven't touched upon. Which is totally fine. And that's okay. Yeah. But, um- I think we've covered what a lot of the core important things, even if it wasn't according to a plan.
It wa- yeah, it never is according to a plan. Which is how the whole Core Transformation process works anyways. Right. Same with my work. You have a plan. It does not matter. Yeah. It's here. And I just enjoy hanging out with you and brainstorming about this stuff. Yeah, likewise. Likewise. So I know you have a training coming up- Yeah
[01:05:00] for practitioners to learn this model. Is that right? Yeah, yeah. So it's actually for individuals and practitioners. Oh. So the, the Core Transformation Foundation training, this actually makes it so much richer, whether you're an individual or a practitioner, to have a mix because, um, everyone brings a different flavor into, to the training, um, and to, to have a range of just life experiences coming in.
So the Core Transformation Foundation training, we teach it twice a year, um, once in October and once in the spring. So the next one's, uh, coming up in October. It's six half days, and the focus of the workshop is personal transformation, which is also, as you I'm sure would agree, the best way to learn something if you're gonna be a practitioner, if you wanna go on to- Yeah
through the whole coach certification, is the, the primary focus is personal transformation. So it's a really [01:06:00] wonderful, uh, experience that way, where you get to bring your biggest issue w- at the end, at the final, the final part of the training and, and work it through with Core Transformation. There's lots of assistant support and trainer support.
So I teach it with my aunt, Tamara Andreas, um, who's co-author of the book. She's my mom's sister, um, obviously, my aunt. Um, and so yes, it's just a wonderful way of getting your own personal benefits and transformation, and it's also the first step if you're interested in potentially becoming a practitioner in Core Transformation.
So this s- six half-day inner work program is- Yeah ... just the first stage of becoming certified to do this work? Right. Yeah. Okay. So it's the first, it's the f- it's the first prerequisite if you wanna do the certification program later. Um, so [01:07:00] there's the, the foundation, which this one is, then the advanced training, and then there's the coach certification if, say, I
I attended,
would I gain enough insight to be able to start dabbling with this with my clients?
Oh, yeah. Totally. Yeah? Totally. Yeah, for a long time, it's all we had. Okay. That's what people learned, and then they went and they worked, brought it in with their, their clients. So absolutely, especially if you're already... It depends on your other training, you know, what you might feel comfortable with. But we teach the full method in the foundation training, so you get the whole thing.
Hmm. Then in the advanced training, we teach alternate formats, how to work with challenges that arise, and, and common roadblocks to, to moving forward with the process. Um, and then the coach certification is just getting really good at it and lots of practical, um, practice with outside clients who don't know the process, feedback from peers, mentors, from Tamara and I.
So [01:08:00] all of the trainings happen over Zoom. So they're live, and, uh, we do all of the breakouts in smaller breakout rooms over Zoom. So you can attend from anywhere. Um, and it works really well. It works really well with the breakouts and with the assistants coming in and supporting. And, um, yeah, it'd be wonderful to have some more people join us.
I'm, I'm f- fascinated. I would love to, to join. Awesome. For this one, you can just go to coretransformation.org. That's where everything Core Transformation lives specifically.
I'll put that link in. You know, you've mentioned your family a number of times, and I know you've grown up in a world where this stuff was talked about in your household.
Yeah. You've grown up with the people who created NLP. Or at least some of it, yeah. At least some of it. Okay. Not all of it. Yeah. Okay, fine. Not the [01:09:00] founders, but, - developers , and my parents, Steve and Connirae Andreas, they certainly developed a lot of, um, a lot within the field of NLP.
Yeah. So with that in your family of origin, growing up around this work, I'm just curious what you see in our current time with the approaches that are gaining traction. Where do you see coaching or therapy, personal development heading? Like, what are your hopes- Hmm ... for this next generation of practitioners?
What do they need to understand? What's unfolding? Yeah. What's your personal insight on all of that? Well, I think, um, I think one of the things that NLP did really well, which stands for neuro-linguistic programming, kind of a funny, funny name it ended up with. Another t- another conversation, but, um, one of the thing that they did really well and that i- it was a foundation for this work [01:10:00] that, that we're doing now with the Core Transformation and Wholeness Work is another, um, model de- developed by my mo- my mom, Connirae.
Um, what NLP did really well , was creating reliable processes to to get somewhere, and that's something that before then was largely absent from most therapy,
You know, if you, if you take your car into the mechanic to fix something, there's like a process for doing that that works really well, and it's really reliable. Like yeah, it'll be-- We'll come out of the shop and it'll be fixed. , And NLP , was bringing that into therapy, to coaching, is modeling excellence, modeling how people change and how people successfully transform and, and putting that into replicatable processes.
Thing, you know, things that can be researched, that can be, um, taught and replicated [01:11:00] easily, um, rather than just kind of relying on the wizardry of like some incredible person with all this combination of insight. But how do you transfer that to somebody else to do what Erickson did? You know, the kind of magic that he would pull off with people.
Um, and so with, with the core transformation, the wholeness work, it has that precision that, that there's that process element of, yeah, we don't have to go into the whole story and hope that somewhere along the way something will happen, that there's a really reliable process to, to get to that, that place that we all wanna be, that , core place.
And, um, and the core state, that's something that goes beyond NLP, traditional NLP can, can be really powerful, really effective. But Really my mom's, um, inspiration in developing Core Transformation was because NLP kind of didn't work for her. Hmm. She was like the, [01:12:00] the tough case.
Like,
she, uh,
even one of her therapists was like, "This works with everybody else that I do it with, but it's not working with you, so I don't know. I don't know what to do here." Her biggest stuff, it was not budging with the ch- classical NLP stuff.
And so she, she's like, "Okay, I need something more. I need something that works at a deeper level." And with this, this core state experience, the thing that's unique about Core Transformation and wh- and the wholeness work as well is that it, it's a relaxing of the effort, like what we were talking about, like removing the cast.
You know, even these really effective NLP processes, it's still like adding something, adding ... Often, often it's kind of like, well, we're gonna run a pr- a new program, or we're gonna add a new program. And so there can even be this subtle efforting that, that is required to maintain it, to maintain my positive state.
I know how to access my positive state now, but I still have to do something a [01:13:00] little bit to ... It's easier than just willpower, total willpower. Mm. But there's still this doing kind of thing, as opposed to like just actually letting all of that go. Now f- and for some people, that's really appropriate. It's like, yeah, being able to have something that I can reliably do and it gets better results, that's great.
You know, it's ... and can be super helpful. Um, but the nice
the,
you know, where this goes a le- level deeper is actually relaxing the doing and letting go of the ... and just allowing things to happen from a different place. Um, and so that's where ... That's ... So this is a very long-winded answer to your question of, um- That's okay things going is in this direction of we don't need to add more stuff on for people to do, and that, uh, we- Doesn't have to be a struggle
doesn't have to be a struggle, yeah. Mm. I love that that has [01:14:00] been your family's mission. Not just the lack of struggle part, but to create something formulaic that anybody can access, that you don't have to be this brilliant therapist who's done thousands of hours of training, but that you can take this script and support someone in major transformation.
Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like, well, from the way I hear it,
it
sounds like both your parents had that as their mission in life. Yeah. Totally. Mm-hmm. I mean, my da- the, my dad's version was, like, I, I like recipes. Like, he came from a chemistry background. He's like, he, he, his goal was always to create such a complete recipe that a total idiot could follow it and get the result.
I know. I need those kinds of recipes for my cooking. You know, that you don't need any training, any background. Uh-huh. You just, you know, I know how to read, so I'll just read through the recipe and I end up with the cake that I was hoping for. And he wanted to do that for personal change. [01:15:00] Mm-hmm. Personal transformation.
Yeah. So- He sounds like human, um, like he was a real servant of the human experience, trying to help- Yeah ... people know themselves better. Yeah. Be free from whatever weighed them down. Yeah. That's so beautiful. Yeah. Totally, totally. His name is Andreas also. Yeah, he took my mom's last name. Oh, okay. Yeah. When you said your aunt- Yeah
is your mom's sister, I got a little confused. Yes, people usually do. He took your mom's maiden name. Yeah, sometimes people are like, "So," like, you know, they're like, "Does, does, does your dad have, like, multiple wives?" Or like, "What's going on here?" They're like, "Just how do I bring up the question?" So. They were ahead of their time.
I love it. Yeah. Yeah, he, uh, he didn't really like his first name, so he went by his last name. Stevens was, so he went by Steve. So Steve Stevens was a bit redundant, so he was happy to take my mom's [01:16:00] last name. Fair. He had the right idea. So he became an Andreas. So he became an Andreas, yeah. Hmm. Well, is there anything more that you would wanna leave our listeners with? Any, um- Way that you wanna tell people how they can contact you? I know you shared your website already.
I'll throw that into the show notes along with that- Yeah ... micro book, and anything else you wanna send my way. Yeah. Yeah. What I would say is, come to the training. That's really the easiest entryway in,
but you also have that micro book that you can check out on your own, explore guiding yourself through. And if you find that you can't really guide yourself through, that's okay. That's part of the normal range of experience. So, um, for some people, it's just gonna be, um, being guided by somebody else where you get to experience it, so.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I don't know if I would- Yeah ... be someone who would have great success guiding myself. Yeah. Yeah. A l- a lot of
I'll-
Then they can reach out to you or another [01:17:00] Core Transformation practitioner. Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course, there's always the personal co- coaching option as well. So my website's markandreas.com.
You can contact me that way. And, um, and also once you're guided through, you know, a lot of my clients, once I guide them through a number of times and they have that experience, then it's something that they're able to guide themselves through. And then other people are like, "Never interested in guiding myself."
That's cool too. It takes a lot of discipline. You know, it does take ... It is, you know, of course easier having somebody else guide you because you're not having to track both sides of it, so. Mark, you're so well-spoken about all of this. And- I've been talking about it for a while. Yeah, I know. I know. But you have a lot to share.
Oh, thank you. And so much wisdom. Oh. Thank you- Thanks so much for- ... for imparting it Thanks so much for- And then like- ... hosting the space and asking such great questions, and yeah, um, and doing what you do and [01:18:00] helping share this with everything else, all the other awesome work that you're doing. I am glad to do that, and I'm glad to spread your message to the world.
Like- And looking forward to- ... this needs to be known ... further collaboration of core transformation and couples work. 'Cause I think there's a lot of- Yeah ... really cool potential there, so. We should talk. We'll, we'll talk, yeah. Yeah. I'm fascinated by it too. Yeah. Neat. Okay. Awesome. Thanks so much for doing this with me.
Thank you. Yeah.
Thank you for spending this time with me on facets of connection. This podcast is part of my broader work through Lead Your Love Life and the Radiant Connection Lab, where I guide couples who feel distant, stuck in old patterns or disconnected from their spark to rebuild, closeness, communicate with care, and to fall in love all over again.
If you'd like to explore that work further, you can learn more at Lead Your Love life.com. I'd also love to [01:19:00] hear what this episode sparked for you. You can send me an email or a voice memo to sarah@facetsofconnection.com. I read every single message, and sometimes a listener story might become part of a future episode.
If you enjoyed today's episode of Facets of Connection, be sure to follow or share this show so that more people can find it right here or on YouTube or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Until next time. Remember this, the quality of your life is shaped by the quality of your relationships. See you soon.

Sarah Oswald 7/25/26 Sarah Oswald 7/25/26

The Invisible Systems Shaping Human Connection with Alexander Goldman

How technology, predictability, and the courage of “not hiding” shape human connection.

Why does genuine connection feel harder than ever, even though we’re more connected than at any point in history? In this conversation, Sarah Melissa Oswald and Alexander Goldman explore the invisible systems that influence our relationships, our sense of belonging, and our ability to stay connected in the modern world.

About This Episode

In this episode of Facets of Connection, Sarah sits down with writer and systems thinker Alexander Goldman to explore the often-invisible forces shaping our relationships. Together, they examine how technology, culture, and modern life quietly influence the ways we connect, avoid discomfort, and seek belonging.

Rather than blaming technology itself, Alexander invites us to become more aware of the systems we’re participating in—and to reclaim our capacity for authentic human connection.

One of the most powerful moments of the conversation comes when Alexander offers a simple but profound reframe: instead of striving to be more vulnerable, what if our work is simply to practice not hiding?

Whether you’re navigating friendships, romantic relationships, family life, or your own relationship with technology, this conversation offers a hopeful and deeply practical perspective on what it means to stay human in an increasingly digital world.

Listen or Watch

Key Topics Discussed

Why connection has become more difficult in modern life
How technology changes the way we relate to one another
The hidden influence of systems on our relationships
Why predictability often feels safer than genuine connection
Rethinking vulnerability as the practice of not hiding
Building friendships as adults
AI, social media, and the future of human connection
Small practices that help us reconnect with ourselves and others

Questions for Reflection

Where in your own life have you chosen predictability over genuine connection?

What might become possible if, instead of trying to be more vulnerable, you simply practiced not hiding?

Why This Conversation Matters

This conversation explores one of the central ideas behind my work: relationships aren’t problems to solve—they’re living systems to understand. Whether we’re talking about marriages, families, organizations, or communities, many of our greatest challenges emerge not from individual people, but from the invisible patterns we’re participating in. Throughout this conversation, Alexander Goldman helps illuminate those hidden dynamics and offers a richer way of understanding human connection.

If these ideas resonate with you, you’ll find them woven throughout my relationship coaching practice. I work with individuals and couples to better understand the patterns shaping their relationships so they can move beyond recurring cycles and create more connected, resilient partnerships.

Resources for Further Exploration

Substack

The Interface of Us (Alexander’s Substack)

Books

The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It — Will Storr

The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt

Social Health: The Art and Science of Connection — Kasley Killam

The Art of Gathering — Priya Parker

Connect

If this conversation sparked something in you, I’d love to hear your reflections.

📧 sarah@facetsofconnection.com

🌐 www.leadyourlovelife.com

Follow Facets of Connection wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript of Episode 23 of Facets of Connection featuring Alexander Goldman discussing social health, loneliness, technology, vulnerability, game theory, AI, belonging, and the future of human connection.
This is Facets of Connection, a podcast exploring how we build relationships that actually work in an evolving world. I’m your host, Sarah Melissa Oswald, relationship coach and founder of Lead Your Love Life.
Each episode explores the many dimensions of human connection—from romantic partnerships and family systems to leadership, community, and the inner relationship we have with ourselves. Through thoughtful conversations with fascinating guests and occasional deep dives into the skills that help relationships thrive, we’ll explore what it takes to build connections rooted in dignity, respect, repair, and resilience. Because the quality of our relationships shapes the quality of our lives—and the future we’re building together.
Today I’m joined by Alexander Goldman, a writer, researcher, and systems thinker whose work sits at the intersection of social health, technology, behavioral science, and, of course, human connection. Through his writing at The Interface of Us, Alexander explores how the invisible systems around us—from our digital environments to our cultural norms—shape the way we relate to ourselves and one another.
In the conversation that follows, we explore why genuine connection can feel so elusive in our modern world, how our brains have adapted to environments they were never designed for, and why the answer isn’t simply to use less technology, but to become more intentional about the systems we’re participating in.
One of my favorite moments in this conversation is when Alexander offers a reframe of vulnerability. Rather than asking us to be more vulnerable, he invites us to simply practice not hiding. I find this distinction both practical and deeply hopeful. Whether you’ve been thinking about your own relationships, the impact of technology on your life, or simply what it means to belong in today’s world, I think you’re going to find this conversation both challenging and encouraging.
And so, with that, here we go.
Conversation
Sarah: Welcome Alexander! You found this podcast and said, “This aligns with my work.” I’ve also read on your Substack that your personal mission is to bring more people back to a place of high social health. I’m curious if you could say more about that—and why this podcast felt like such a good fit for what you’re passionate about these days.
Alexander: It’s been a little while since I listened to your episodes, but I remember really resonating with them. I felt like you held both the ground-level, lived psychological experience of people navigating connection and the higher-level systems that shape those experiences. That really resonated with me.
My background is in game design and game theory, so I tend to think about social systems and human connection from a 10,000-foot perspective. What are the games we have to play to get by? What are the systems we interact with? How do those systems change the way we interact with each other?
I’m actually a fairly touchy-feely person, but when I first discovered this field, it literally kept me up at night when I realized how many people were feeling disconnected and lonely. I thought, If this resonates with me this deeply, then it’s something I should devote much more of my life to.
Sarah: Why do you think that is? Why this, of all things?
Alexander: A few reasons. First, it’s an invisible problem—even to the people experiencing it.
Now that I’ve learned more about evolutionary psychology, I can explain why. If you were lonely and separated from your tribe while wandering through the jungle, becoming overwhelmed by your loneliness would actually make it harder to reconnect with your tribe. So when we’re in distress, we’re often less aware of both the distress itself and the impact it has on our bodies.
Before I understood that, though, it was simply knowing how many people were out there craving connection, belonging, friendships, relationships—feeling completely alone in that journey, believing something was wrong with them because they didn’t have what they longed for. I found that heartbreaking.
Sarah: This may be too personal, but was that something you struggled with yourself? Were you looking for a personal answer, or has your interest always been more at the systems level?
Alexander: I think it’s important for people to understand why this became such a personal calling. I’ve moved many times throughout my life. I’m a very extroverted person, so in adulthood I’ve generally found it easier to make connections.
But it’s still hard. I’ve had to push against my own instincts and our natural desire not to ruffle feathers. There were definitely periods—especially my first couple of years in college—when I didn’t have the skills I have now. I certainly experienced a great deal of disconnection.
Sarah: I think almost everyone can relate to that, even if it looks different from person to person. Even as someone who’s studied this for years, there are still days when I have to tell myself, I need to get up and go see people. Sometimes that feels like work, even though I know that’s where I get my energy. It can still be challenging to know where to begin finding meaningful connection.
Alexander: It’s so true. The science behind all of this is really mind-blowing.
We have our evolved mammalian brain sitting on top of our older brainstem—the lizard brain. That older part of the brain says, Avoid risk at all costs. Social risk feels deeply existential. Meanwhile, our evolved primate brain is saying, I desperately need connection.
So we have these two forces wrestling inside us. If you’re not aware of that, you might think something is wrong with you because you’re getting ready to go to a party and, at the last minute, think, I don’t really want to go. But there’s nothing more human than that tension.
Sarah: I completely agree. You mentioned your background in game design, and when we first talked you told me about the dating app you were building. I’m curious if you’d share more about that journey—and how studying game design eventually led you to realize you didn’t want to spend your life distracting people. That’s quite a career shift.
Alexander: It is. I’ve made a number of career shifts, so this was just one stop on a very zigzag path.
I’ve always loved art and creativity, and I genuinely thought I wanted to spend my life making games because they allowed creativity to reach people at scale. There are a lot of redeeming qualities to games, so I don’t want to sound dismissive or holier-than-thou.
But while I was in graduate school for game design, I realized many people derive their sense of meaning, accomplishment, identity, and self-worth from the games they play. You accomplish things in games that give you a sense of purpose and joy. Eventually I realized many people were getting almost all of their identity through games. That felt dystopian to me once I recognized how rich reality actually is—and how many opportunities there are for messy human connection.
Sarah: Moving from gaming into real life—and embracing being a messy human—takes courage.
Alexander: I love messiness. I’m visiting family right now, so the room I’m staying in isn’t especially messy, but I think messiness itself is beautiful.
I remember one of my first relationships. The woman I was dating had a scar—not a significant one—but I remember suddenly realizing, This person has lived an entire life. She’s just a person. I’m just a person. We’re these messy little primates wearing clothes and stumbling through life together.
That realization was incredibly freeing. I no longer felt like I had to become this perfect person or present some flawless image of myself. We’re just little people. There’s so much liberation in that.
Sarah: I love that. I think many people experience the opposite—they see the mess as something to escape.
But human beings are far more complex than the predictability of a video game, or really any virtual environment. When we spoke before, you said predictability feels safer to the nervous system than genuine human contact because people are unpredictable. They’re messy. They’re complex.
Alexander: Exactly. Our brains are essentially prediction machines. They’re constantly trying to forecast outcomes. Human beings are one of the greatest sources of unpredictability.
If you’re in a relationship, you don’t know whether your partner will leave you, break a foot, or surprise you in some other way. Part of the brain constantly seeks predictability and control. I compare it to trying to breathe through a straw while underwater.
You’re meeting some fundamental needs for safety and control, but you’re also cutting yourself off from the fully lived reality that you actually want. To truly live, you have to come up for air. You can never be fully happy if you’re only interacting with AI, only playing games, or never seeing people in person. We need unpredictability.
Sarah: Do you think our use of technology is one of the drivers behind today’s epidemic of loneliness, isolation, and disconnection?
Alexander: Fundamentally, yes. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the founding stories behind social media companies and consumer technology.
One fascinating example is Tinder. The engineers who created it originally described wanting a way to connect with women because they were too afraid to approach them in person. Instead of building something that helped people become more confident in real life, they built a system that prioritized control and predictability. That philosophy became embedded in the product.
The result is that today, 45% of men between 18 and 25 have never asked a woman out in person. The tools we use subtly teach us how to see the world.
Another example is Instagram. The founder’s girlfriend didn’t want to post photos on Facebook because she disliked how she looked, so they built photo filters. That became Instagram’s original value proposition.
The unintended consequence is a platform that has contributed to enormous pressure on young women to carefully control their image. When technology feeds our underlying fears instead of our healthier instincts, we create tools that promise to make us feel better while actually making us feel worse. They’re ultimately counterproductive.
Sarah: Our real selves begin to feel worse while our online selves become more beautiful.
So I’m hearing you say that technology has fundamentally changed our relationship with uncertainty, discomfort, and intimacy. Do you think we’re losing our capacity to tolerate the awkwardness that’s necessary for genuine connection?
Alexander: That’s a great question. I think there are two parts: our own individual tolerance for discomfort and the social norms we’ve collectively created.
For example, because our phones offer constant distraction, you might see someone wearing an interesting hat and think, I’d love to ask where they got it. But then another thought appears: I’m not supposed to do that. Everyone stays in their own bubble.
Those social expectations reinforce the idea that discomfort should be avoided. At the same time, everything we do reshapes our brain. What fires together wires together. The less we practice discomfort, the scarier discomfort becomes.
So many people know they want more serendipity in their lives, but pursuing it feels intimidating. Especially for older generations, it can be difficult to appreciate just how frightening those social risks feel for younger people.
Sarah: I’m right in the middle of that generational divide. I’m almost forty-three, so I’m one of the last generations that remembers life before smartphones.
I’ve been bringing people together in community for about fifteen years, and I’ve noticed a real shift. People seem much less willing to walk into a room full of strangers and share vulnerable parts of themselves.
I’ve been asking myself how we make that feel safe again, because I believe belonging is essential—not just for healing, but for facing the challenges ahead. How do we help people show up? Ten years ago it wasn’t nearly this difficult.
Alexander: I think part of it is that people don’t realize we should actually fall in love with discomfort. Discomfort is gooey and weird.
But if you interact with people only online, you really become an isolated individual. When we’re that disconnected, our nervous system changes. Threat perception increases. The level of trust we have in strangers goes down. We begin to feel completely alone in the world, and therefore we trust others less.
So the work is about cultivating the conditions that help people feel safe enough to trust—and helping them question the narratives they’ve inherited about themselves and everyone else. There’s a lot to it. It ain’t easy, sister.
Sarah: I’ve just been wondering what it is that people would want out of that, and my sense is that a sense of belonging is essential to our well-being. But if we don’t recognize discomfort as something that’s maybe good for us, how would we ever get there?
Alexander: I think it’s interesting, too, because so much of the underlying technology was premised on the idea that discomfort is fundamentally bad—that the more you control your life, the better you are.
Even though that messaging isn’t right there out in the open, it’s implicit between the lines. If you see ads for social media or Uber Eats or anything like that, it’s about: How do you control your life the most? How do you access information?
Whereas being part of a group is different. There’s something amazing that happens when you’re part of a group and you can look around and say, I trust these people enough. I don’t need to show up in any particular way. I can just be me. I don’t have to curate myself or control myself.
And fundamentally, if you don’t have that, your cortisol goes up. Elevated cortisol is toxic to your prefrontal cortex. There are incredibly real health issues here. So it’s not just a lifestyle thing. It’s fundamentally a health thing, too.
Sarah: I agree with you. That’s why the Surgeon General of the United States named it an epidemic.
Alexander: Right.
Sarah: It impacts our health on all levels.
What I really like about you, Alexander, is that you’re a systems thinker, like me. But I’m very much in the day-to-day, on the ground with people, figuring out what’s happening here and now, and you’re more zoomed out than I am these days. You’ve got this bird’s-eye view of the system playing out before us that we’re all trapped inside.
You said to me earlier that the systems are characters in this play we’re in, and these systems have more lines than we do as human beings. Can you speak to that? Do you remember saying that to me?
Alexander: I do. Yeah.
My background is in game design and game theory. One of the interesting things in game theory is to imagine you have a group of people and a set of rules. How do people behave in that environment, where there are specific things they’re trying to accomplish and specific ways to accomplish them?
Sometimes the rules of the game are so repressive that they define people’s behavior and interactions much more than individuals do.
For instance, I think about young girls on social media. Our brains are hardwired to seek status, connection, approval, and all of these things. There might always have been some high school cafeteria jockeying, but in general, you had your group of friends, you reinforced those bonds regularly, and that’s where you got your sense of connection.
With social media, there’s pressure to provide content, curate your image, cultivate an identity, and be constantly online, because otherwise you lose access and the opportunity to position yourself as higher status. So there are all these girls who essentially feel like they have to play this game.
I recently read a statistic that 44% of teenagers wish social media had never been invented.
Sarah: Yeah, me too.
Alexander: It’s staggering, because a lot of the ones who use social media the most are the ones who wish it had never been invented. If nobody had access to social media, they wouldn’t have to keep putting in this work.
Sarah: They feel trapped by it.
Alexander: Exactly. They feel trapped by it. It’s essentially a game they’re forced to play. And if you vanish from it—
Sarah: Game of their lives.
Alexander: Yeah, exactly. If they vanish from it, they lose their social status. They lose their positioning.
When I moved to Austin, I was talking to a friend, and he said that if you want to date, you have to have a really developed Instagram profile so that if you meet women, you can share your profile and they can see who you are before they decide whether they want to go out with you.
I was like, “I’m not doing that.” But I could easily have felt like I had to because those were the rules of the game.
Sarah: I suppose you could. You could feel that way.
Alexander: Yeah. Many people probably do. And if I did do that—I’m in a relationship now—but it probably would’ve been much easier to find one, because that’s where my credentials would’ve been, basically.
Sarah: Mm-hmm.
As you were telling me this story about high schoolers in the cafeteria, I imagined myself in high school and pictured my group of friends around me. That group gave me a sense of safety moment by moment. Without that, if all interactions are on social media, you don’t have that same sense of safety with your people. You’re on your own out there.
Alexander: I think that’s fascinating. We think it’s so obvious that we each have our own profile on social media. That seems intuitive, right? But that also has a built-in philosophy that it’s just us, and the world is its own thing.
When I was growing up and I would get together with a group of friends, I wouldn’t be thinking, What’s the story of my life that I want to tell in this encounter? I wouldn’t be thinking about how I was going to post it to social media. It was just me belonging with friends, playing games, going out, or going to a party. You’re not hyper-fixated on your own identity.
That’s another thing social media does: it reinforces the parts of our brain that fixate on ourselves. We become much more anxious about our own identity, our own interests, and our own safety. And if you’re only focused on your own safety, you can’t help other people feel safe. That’s what we really need.
The more we focus on other people’s safety, the safer we feel. If you’re only focused on yourself, you’re never going to feel safe. Nobody’s ever going to feel safe.
Sarah: Okay. Great. I mean, I’m with you. It’s a very sad picture that you’re painting, and I see it.
So here’s the question then: How do we become more conscious participants rather than passive recipients of social media—whether it’s on social media or just out in the world?
Alexander: I compare it to sugar. We all know sugar is okay for you in limited quantities, but nobody says, “My entire diet is sugar.” Whereas a lot of young women spend five and a half hours a day on social media.
The first thing is that we know our desire for sugar is biological. We need some kind of self-concept where we recognize that our desire for stimulation, novelty, and social media is also biological, and we should stop thinking about that as us.
If you compulsively pick up your phone—which we all do many times a day—you shouldn’t think, “Oh, I picked up my phone for a reason. Let me scroll on Instagram because I must have picked it up for a reason.” No. We can simply be aware that some parts of our brain go on autopilot sometimes.
Then it’s about taking little opportunities every day to reflect on our values and how to live them out, and making small decisions every day. Find out how much time you spend on your phone and see if you can cut it down by five or ten minutes a day, or a week, or anything. Just start exerting control and agency over your own life.
Sarah: So are you saying that we shouldn’t identify with that automatic part of our brain that reaches for the phone—or even knows how to find Instagram with my finger? My finger knows how to do that without my brain saying, “Oh, you should check Instagram,” right?
Alexander: Totally.
Sarah: My finger knows it. So are you saying we shouldn’t identify with that part of our brain? That’s not us?
Alexander: What’s fascinating is the part of our brain that feels loneliness. There’s a lot going on in the brain when you feel lonely, but it’s much more akin to a sensation like hunger or thirst than it is to an emotion, because there are physiological things happening in your body. It’s not just an emotion.
Sarah: It’s a cue.
Alexander: It’s a cue, yeah. If we feel hungry, we don’t think, “There’s something about my essence that’s hungry. My inner self is hungry.” No. It’s just a body thing. The same is true when you feel compelled to pick up your phone. It’s just an impulse.
Sarah: So from that framework, loneliness and the cues of it in our body are an impulse for finding our people.
Alexander: Yeah. When you feel lonely, your brain perceives it as unsafeness.
Sarah: That’s right. You fundamentally cannot feel lonely and safe at the same time. You cannot be outside the tribe and still be safe.
Alexander: Correct. Those are old parts of our brain that you referenced earlier.
Sarah: Yeah. Just part of our biology. People have that biological response to loneliness: “I feel that lonely thing. Let me go on Instagram and see some people I know.” How is that not serving me? How is that not the way I need to get this itch scratched?
Alexander: In so many different ways. First of all—
Sarah: I know. I’m just asking you what you have to say about it. We might have different answers.
Alexander: Yeah. What’s really interesting is that our brain responds to different kinds of social media content in different ways. The easiest way to divide it up is between active social media use and passive social media use.
If you’re commenting on friends’ photos and sharing something because you genuinely want your friends to know what’s going on—not because you’re trying to be seen in a particular way—that doesn’t have as great a negative impact on our mental health and feelings of connection. In limited quantities, it’s okay.
But the best metaphor is this: imagine you went to a mailbox, put a photo of yourself in it, wrote a description, and then someone else came, took out that photo, and wrote a response. Now compare that with spending time in person with friends. Which one is a social experience?
Obviously, the mailbox thing is weird. That’s about control, disconnection, curation, and isolation.
But passive social media consumption—where you’re viewing the content of people you don’t know—is really bad for your brain in different ways. Any time your brain experiences that novelty, any time your brain releases dopamine, it also releases cortisol. Cortisol takes longer to hit your system because it works through the endocrine system rather than directly within the brain. So it can take twenty minutes to hit your system.
You’re scrolling, experiencing that novelty, and if someone likes or comments on your photo, you get some oxytocin. But fundamentally, it’s just bad for your brain. You get this buildup of cortisol, whereas when you spend time in person with people, your cortisol levels go down.
So you could just look at it as different hormones and chemicals in your body. If we measured those things, the difference between being on social media and actually spending time with people would be night and day.
Sarah: So that would be one of your recommendations—to become an active participant in our system rather than a passive recipient?
Alexander: Yeah. It’s weird, even the language: followers, things like that. I don’t know how we normalized the idea that being a follower in life makes sense, or sitting in the stands watching other people live their lives makes sense.
There’s that Roosevelt quote, The Man in the Arena. I’m pretty sure that’s Roosevelt. I’m grossly paraphrasing here, but who are the people in the crowd to critique the people in the arena who are actually competing and living their lives?
Sarah: It’s okay.
Alexander: Live your life. That’s the simplest way to put it. Seek out risk and uncertainty. Live a messy life. Obviously, don’t be attached to outcomes if you’re interacting with someone.
And I think this is the beautiful part: our brains are addicted to structure. We crave structure and predictability. It makes so much sense that what we need to counter our world, where there’s way too much structure, is to live in a world with less structure.
But our brains are like, “I’m not super comfortable with that.”
Sarah: Right. Who in their right mind would seek that out?
Alexander: Right. But that’s what it used to mean to be cool, right? Being cool used to mean going to parties, and now it means separating yourself. To me, it’s obvious. Be cool. Hang out with people. Do people things.
Sarah: Did the definition of cool really change? I didn’t know. I’m still doing the old version of cool.
I know you’ve been focused so much on the bigger picture—the systems at play—and right now you’re speaking to the very human element of how to make your life more connected. But what’s the bigger system that brought you to this conversation? Why the heck did you find yourself here, Alexander?
You were making video games, and even your creation of a dating app seemed like it could have been enough to pursue the questions you were holding. But what was it inside you that said, “I need to understand this better. I need to look at it from a bigger perspective and write articles about it and do interviews”? What are you up to?
I know what I’m up to. I love working with humans. They’re in my office every day. I’m making a tangible difference in their real lives. That lights me up. I am on the planet for that reason. I am on the planet to help people know more about themselves through meaningful connection with others.
But I realize I’m making assumptions about you. I don’t know enough about you to understand how you got here.
Alexander: No, I think it’s a great question. It’s really not that different for me in the sense that I’ve always found people interesting.
I think when you work at the systems level or you’re trying to understand things, it can feel very disconnected. But I have these end goals. My end goal is to help everyone feel more connection and live a more satisfying life—to have more life in your life.
I hope to accomplish that by cultivating conversations and sharing research. I have a podcast where I talk to experts to learn more. Eventually, I want to do another startup in this space that attempts to leverage everything I’ve learned to build alternative paths to status and connection, particularly for young people.
Honestly, when I learned about the loneliness epidemic, I thought, “This is such a freaking dumb problem.” We all want more connection. It’s not like there’s a limited amount of food where some people are always going to be hungry. Theoretically, everyone can have the connection they want.
Frankly, dumb problems tend to be really complicated—problems that don’t need to exist, but are still incredibly complicated. That’s the way my brain thinks. I like thinking about the systems and the people.
And honestly, I had never really understood what people meant when they talked about having a driving sense of purpose that pushed them in a particular direction. In the past, when people said that, I was always kind of like, “Okay, it matters to you, but what does this mean—purpose?”
Then when I stumbled across this work, I was like, “No. I would devote my life to this.” And I want to devote my life to this.
I’ve been a camp counselor. I love working with kids. What really got me was learning how miserable the generation I used to work with as a camp counselor has become—statistically far unhappier than previous generations at that age. I was like, “Screw that. I have a set of skills. I want to contribute.”
I also think I bring a unique perspective. I like thinking about game theory and behavioral economics, and I think there are perspectives missing from the human connection space. There’s a lot of sociology and psychology, which are incredibly important and valid. But if we don’t nail the branding and understand how to transition this into action, then I think it becomes a bit like the language around climate change.
When climate change became a major issue, it resonated with a lot of people and drove action. But for others, the language felt threatening or didactic or disconnected from their day-to-day life, and that created a rift.
I think we have an opportunity to nail this, and I hope to be part of that. Sorry, I feel like I went on for a while.
Sarah: That’s great. It tells me a few things about you. For one, I think we have a lot more in common than I initially realized. Two, I want to be part of building whatever the heck you’re up to. And I love that you’re thinking about this from a business lens.
How do we nail the branding for this new world order of connection that we need in order to survive as a human species? We’ve got to get the branding right, or else we’re going to lose this whole new generation of people.
Alexander: It makes so much sense, right? There’s a push to transition from talking about loneliness to talking about social health. That makes a ton of sense.
Our brains are hardwired to fear loneliness and to fear being seen as lonely. So talking about the loneliness epidemic can actually be counterproductive in some ways, because increasing awareness can lead people to crystallize a view where they think, “I don’t want to talk about that.”
If you’re already in the know and you’re like, “Yeah, let’s talk about the loneliness epidemic,” then you know what we’re talking about. But other people are deathly afraid of being seen as not having enough social connection in their lives.
So it is fundamentally a branding problem. How do you reframe it so that pursuing connection and taking social risks are seen as high status and desirable instead of signs of weakness or neediness?
Sarah: I love that.
Alexander: Confidence has always been sexy and interesting. Somewhere along the way, we lost the message.
When you uncouple things that should be intertwined in the human experience—confidence, status, risk-taking, extroversion, all of these things—social order starts to fray.
Sarah: I was thinking again about that teenager in the cafeteria. It would be death to sit alone at a cafeteria table by yourself eating lunch. You don’t admit that you don’t have friends. That’s shooting yourself in the foot. There’s a real stigma around being lonely.
Alexander: Yeah. And we need more spaces where we actually live in the same world together.
There’s more to unpack there, but just being in the same place and realizing how much we have in common matters. I just wrote a piece—subtle plug for my Substack—about how I’ve learned so much more in my life by realizing what I have in common with other people than by focusing on what sets me apart.
You can’t understand yourself only by seeing what makes you different from other people. When you realize that we all just want to feel like we belong in the cafeteria of life, that changes things.
A lot of people eat every meal alone. I think it’s something like half of all Americans in a given week—maybe half of all adults. It’s a staggering number.
And if you can afford not to be seen, then you don’t risk being seen as lonely. So that’s something else we need to address.
I firmly believe we should be talking about not hiding and how easy it is to hide in our lives.
Sarah: Yeah. I was going to bring that up next, actually. It feels like it segues really nicely into that.
Sarah: You’ve spoken about the difference between the word vulnerability and not hiding. You don’t like the word vulnerability.
Alexander: Yeah. I think I like the idea behind it, but fundamentally, a vulnerability is a weakness, right? It is, definitionally, a weakness. And the framing of being vulnerable is, “Okay, let me be weak with you.”
We’re hardwired not to want to seem weak. We don’t want to be weak; we want to be strong. So there’s a part of our brain that hears the concept of being vulnerable and says, “Oh, God, no. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be seen as weak.”
And this is where the game theory comes in—the social rules and reprogramming those rules—because the framing I like is not hiding.
We all experience emotions, and emotions fundamentally connect our inner values and our lived experience and tell us how to act. If you’re angry about something, that anger is driving you toward action.
For me, it’s just not hiding. Showing up, letting yourself be seen. You don’t have to cry at a movie if you’re a manly man, right? It just means that if you see a puppy abandoned on the side of the road and you feel sad, that sadness isn’t weakness. That sadness is strength because it’s driving you toward action—to take that puppy, bring it to the pound, figure out whose puppy it is.
If you let yourself get bowled over by emotions, that can be a form of weakness. But just showing up and being in touch with yourself—that’s essential to being an effective person.
Sarah: That’s right. That’s a form of strength—to be in touch with oneself. That takes a lot of courage and strength, to know what’s happening inside oneself.
Alexander: Yeah. As opposed to fear in your inner world.
Sarah: Yeah, for sure. It’s much easier to stay in fear, maybe. But how might we rethink strength in a culture that often equates emotional openness with weakness? How do we redefine that?
Alexander: I think it’s little things, really. The whole manosphere thing is fascinating because it goes back to that idea that when people are stressed, they need to understand the world more. They need more rules and structure and predictability. There need to be strict explanations for things: Whose fault is it? All of these things.
That’s what social media does to us. It makes us feel like we need more structure. So part of it is helping people, one-on-one, feel like they can step back from that world.
I also think there’s a lot of reprogramming we have to do. There’s so much that has to happen in education—teaching people these skills at a younger age and framing them as fundamental literacy. You need to understand your inner world because that drives you to live the life that makes sense.
And I do think there’s a lot of messaging we need to do. Public service announcements are really interesting because, in many ways, they can drive action.
I’ve been studying marketing and advertising recently, and what’s fascinating is that the most effective advertising uses indirect messaging rather than direct messaging. If you see an ad for a cruise ship, the ad doesn’t say, “You’re sad and miserable. You need a cruise.” It says, “You’ve worked hard. You deserve a cruise.”
I think we need to employ a lot more indirect messaging to reframe masculinity in the right ways and help people feel confident and comfortable in that world. Hollywood can help with that, but I think it’s everywhere. I’m an older brother, so modeling that for my younger brother matters. If I were a parent, modeling that for my kids would matter. All of that is important.
Sarah: What would be the indirect marketing message you would give to our population?
Alexander: I think I would craft a message where the only conclusion you could draw is that hiding your emotions is a sign of weakness. Maybe there’s a character who’s kind of laughable because they seem to need to control their world too much. I’m just riffing right now.
Sarah: That’s okay.
Alexander: But I’ve actually thought about a campaign where you see someone reaching out and making friends. Having friends has always been high status, but the process of making friends has lost its acceptability.
So maybe you show celebrities meeting other celebrities and just talking to them, saying, “Hey, you wanna hang out sometime?” Taking those risks, talking about things they have in common. They’re not gushing about their emotions. They’re just saying, “I really like this. I like that. Why don’t we do this sometime?”
I remember reading qualitative interviews with young men about loneliness, and one quote stood out to me. I’m paraphrasing, but essentially he was saying, “What? Am I supposed to just talk to a dude and be like, ‘Hey, you wanna hang out?’”
And, like, duh. That’s how you make friends. So we need to normalize that by showing that these things are high status.
Sarah: Wow. It’s just not even known anymore how to do it. My status is average. People used to just ask if they wanted to hang out.
Alexander: Yeah.
Sarah: Whew. Status is average.
You know what I’ve been doing?
Alexander: What?
Sarah: I’ve just been going out of my way to tell new friends, “Hey, I really like you. I want to be your friend.” More often than not, the person says, “Wow, thanks. It’s very rare that people actually say that, and it makes me want to be your friend too.”
Alexander: Yeah. “Thanks for naming it.”
And that’s also a demonstration of strength, right? You’re confident enough in your life, your status, or whatever you want to call it to say, “I’m not afraid of being seen a certain way.”
I love giving dudes compliments because a lot of dudes never get compliments. I’ll be at a coffee shop and say, “Dude, that’s a cool shirt,” and often guys are like, “Wow, thank you.”
I like giving anyone compliments. If you’re a guy, giving a woman a compliment can sometimes be complicated because she might wonder, “Is this the opening for flirting?” And I’m a huge fan of flirting, but if I’m just trying to give someone a compliment, I often prefer giving compliments to guys when I have no ulterior motive.
Sarah: Feels a little safer.
Alexander: Yeah. For me, it’s not even that I’m worried about safety so much as I want the person to know that I’m giving the compliment because I genuinely think what they’re doing or wearing is cool.
I love complimenting guys’ beards and mustaches. “Dude, badass beard.” It’s awesome because everyone loves getting compliments.
Sarah: That’s such a simple way to influence the culture of this. Just making a simple comment to a stranger: “I like your sunglasses.” Seeing one another.
Alexander: Right. And living in that same world.
Because that’s the other thing. This might be a bit indirect, but I read this interesting article that was basically asking: We know in physics there are tons of dimensions, right? We’re not limited to three dimensions. So why did life evolve in three dimensions?
At two dimensions, there’s not enough complexity. Everything would be flat and the world would be too simple. But at four dimensions, there’s so much more space that you might never see anyone. If I existed here, you might exist somewhere else in the future at a different point in time, and it would be too hard to connect.
That’s kind of the world we live in right now. There are way too many different spaces. So just showing up, giving someone a compliment, and existing in the same space—our nervous system responds to that. We’re like, “Oh my God, yeah. We’re here.”
Sarah: The collective spaces.
Alexander: Yeah. Physical spaces where people can gather.
Sarah: Physical spaces. That’s important to the future of humanity.
And you also said earlier that social media has this assumption that we should all have our own personal accounts. That got me thinking: What would a collective account look like? How could collective accounts interact with one another? Would they?
Alexander: Right. It’s interesting.
Imagine, for example, that you’re with a group of friends doing a potluck. Everyone brings something, so you know the end result of this system comes from the actions of individuals. But once all the food is on the table, you don’t necessarily know who brought what.
The point is the end result and the sum of the parts. It’s not about the individual contributions.
I used to be in Cub Scouts when I was young. You wouldn’t go to a Cub Scouts potluck and have everyone put their names on the food: “Look at what I did.” You do something for the public good.
Maybe a digital representation of that is harder, although there are versions of it where you can contribute without leaving your name. But in person, I think that’s easier.
And it’s beautiful, too. Doing something and not needing to be seen for doing it is a great gift.
Sarah: True. Do you think AI is going to change that for us? We don’t know what the future looks like right now. We know it’s going to be a very different world from the one I grew up in.
Sarah: I don’t know how old you are.
Alexander: I’m 37.
Sarah: Pretty close. I’m also pretty stoked on some of the AI stuff. I use it a lot. I think there’s a lot of power in it, and there’s a lot of potential for humanity to see itself through the lens of AI. What are your biggest excitements around it, and what concerns you the most?
Alexander: My biggest excitement is that I do think there’s an opportunity to use AI to build tools that help transition people back into connection, or away from disconnection.
For instance, there are a lot of tools you can use on your phone to limit access to apps. There’s a whole host of reasons why they don’t work—I’ve tried them.
Sarah: Yeah. Didn’t work.
Alexander: But if you know what your priorities are and what your values are, you could use an AI tool so that when you try to open Instagram or something like that, it pops up and says, “Hey, remind me what your values and priorities are.”
A lot of our agentive, higher self, you could say, isn’t really active all the time. So I think there are ways to engage that sense of self and remind us of our priorities when we interact with technology.
I also think AI has the opportunity to help people build and practice skills.
I’m definitely worried about the whole AI boyfriend and girlfriend thing, and the idea of having your whole social life through AI.
Sarah: Yeah. It’s wild, isn’t it?
Alexander: It is. At the same time, I take some solace from the fact that the whole reason Meta rebranded as Meta was because they thought the whole world would be in VR and that would become our reality.
Maybe they were just ahead of the game, but there was a lot of pushback. Nobody really wanted that because it’s kind of a loser way to live your life in VR. And I do hope we consciously share the reality that living your life with only virtual friends is kind of a loserly way to live as well.
So I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion, but I do think it’s an uphill climb.
Sarah: Hmm. Well, I’ve built an AI tool to help people with connection.
Alexander: Right. Exactly.
Sarah: I built a tool based on the models I’ve studied. I don’t know if I told you about this, so stop me if I did.
Alexander: You did.
Sarah: I did.
My clients use it between sessions, and it helps them find contact with self so that, in a stressful moment, they don’t bring a less mature version of themselves to their partner. They can take it to this AI tool and use it to understand what’s coming up for them, get into their bodies, see the bigger pattern, and then deliver a message back to their loved one that’s more aligned and true—and more likely to bring them closer rather than push them away.
Alexander: That’s beautiful. It’s a perfect example.
AI conversational models can help us interact with our own messiness and our lived reality. If you’re a therapist and you see someone for one hour a week, you can’t just learn and grow one hour a week. So I think there are a lot of ways to amplify our capacity to engage with things.
The problem with programming and digital experiences historically is that they’re rules-based, which means you can’t bring your messiness into them and interact with your messiness there. AI tools have more variability. So there’s certainly a lot of power there.
I also think we’re still learning best practices, and it’s up to pioneers like you to figure it out, play with it, get feedback from users, and figure out how to expand our capacity to improve the world through it.
Sarah: Yeah, because it does have the ability to meet us as messy humans in a way that technology never has before. So there’s something possible here. I don’t know exactly what, or where that will lead us.
And I also understand the detriment of having AI here. There are a lot of downsides, but it’s here. It’s not going anywhere. So as a business owner, I’ve embraced it because it’s smart for me to do so personally.
But what responsibilities do we have as we design the next generation of human systems? That’s a big question. What responsibilities?
Alexander: I fundamentally believe that every builder also has to be a philosopher. Everyone is. And if you don’t think that you are, then you’re just a bad philosopher.
You wind up building a Tinder or another dating app that reinforces the very fears you were trying to assuage by building it.
So I think the first fundamental responsibility is that you have to study and really ground your idea—and what you build—in science and in an understanding of how things work.
I think the whole story of modern humanity is that our capacity and the power of our tools constantly outstrip our intelligence and wisdom. We can build really damaging things.
There are people building AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends. That’s a perfect example of someone having way more capacity than wisdom. They’re just bad philosophers.
The second part is to actually play out the thing you’re making, which means doing research with users. I’m professionally a user researcher. That’s what I spend all day doing and thinking about.
You have to actually figure out how what you’re building is going to impact people, try to anticipate the negative outcomes, and design around them.
It can be expensive because you can make a lot of money doing dumb things. But invariably, I don’t think those systems are fundamentally sustainable.
For instance, there are lawsuits right now where Meta and Google have lost cases over social media being addictive—things like infinite scroll, personalized recommendations, and algorithms.
I do think, in the end, that’s going to hit the market caps of these companies and they’re going to take a step back. I think the long-term business prospects of doing things the right way are better.
Sarah: Always. That’s not really where we are as a culture right now, though.
Alexander: No.
At one point I worked as a professional futurist at a think tank, trying to understand how emerging technology would impact us. We need far more of that. We need louder voices, stronger voices, and experts who can help establish a culture around new technologies as they emerge.
For instance, early AI models were particularly sycophantic, and many still are, because people like being complimented. But it’s not good for us, and that should have been front and center much earlier—putting pressure on these AI companies to make the models less sycophantic.
They are less sycophantic now, but they’re still very complimentary.
Sarah: They sure are. I have to remind mine to be truthful with me.
Alexander: That’s a great point, Sarah.
Sarah: I do remind it, because sometimes it will make stuff up, and I’m like, “Wait. That’s not fully true. Do not give me answers that are just made up to make me feel good.”
Alexander: Right.
We’ve spoken about some immediate action steps for people. I’d like to talk about what you can do if you’re a parent—or different kinds of users, or people, as humans might call them.
I think, in particular, if you’re a parent, it’s never been harder to be a parent. It’s so easy to give your kid a device, and I really do think that in the future we’ll have people whose brains developed without spending too much time on devices and people whose brains are underdeveloped.
Most people think social media is about novelty. I actually think it’s more about a feeling of control and predictability. That goes back to what we were talking about earlier: just because your brain likes something doesn’t mean you have to identify with it.
I liken scrolling on social media to compulsively checking security cameras outside your house. You think, “Uh-oh, something might be going on,” so you scroll through the cameras. You feel safer after dismissing the potential risk, but the net result is that you feel more at risk because you’ve reinforced the belief that you need to keep monitoring these threats.
A great example is the movement toward phone-free spaces on campuses, thanks in part to The Anxious Generation.
That’s great, but those kinds of things have to be premised on values that are connected to status. If the message is, “We young people can’t control ourselves, therefore we need phone-free spaces,” that’s never going to take hold because nobody wants to feel like they can’t control their behavior.
Sarah: So it has to be linked to status.
Alexander: Everything has to be linked to status, because people want to feel good about themselves. Behavior change is always linked to that.
Alexander: I compare it to smoking. In the early ’50s, more than half of all Americans smoked. What changed—and why it dropped to, I think, around 13 or 14%—was two things. One was the research on the health impacts, but that alone didn’t drive the change. Smoking used to be seen as classy, and then it became seen as trashy. When behaviors shift their social weight, patterns change and then behaviors change.
Sarah: Hmm.
Alexander: So if kids start seeing that spending time away from your phone is the high-status thing to do, versus being on your phone as a compulsive need to suck on a digital pacifier, that’s where we actually start seeing movements.
Sarah: That’s good. Yeah. That is so good. I like that. Help them see how lame and trashy it is.
Alexander: I mean, you should be embarrassed if you’re looking at your phone too much. It goes back to this idea that people think they’re connecting with others by scrolling through social media, but obviously that’s not the case.
Think about this: we were talking about how loneliness is stigmatized. What if it were stigmatized to be on your phone too much because it shows the world that you are lonely? Don’t be out in the world holding your phone and looking at Instagram while you’re in public. That’s really embarrassing.
And this is where things go back again to game theory, because how do you put these messages out there? So many people consume information through social media. Are influencers going to tell people not to spend time on social media? No.
That’s the real challenge. You boil it down, you know the right thing to do, the right messages, the right kinds of social engineering we need, and then it becomes a challenge of how to actually make it happen.
I fundamentally think what we’re talking about now is a movement. It’s a social movement. It’s a whole reframing of values. It’s an alternative way of living, an alternative path to status, an alternative way to feel important. That’s really what we need.
Nobody should scoff at people or publicly ridicule them for being on their phone, because that’s kind of a douchey move. But at the same time, you can imagine businesses putting up signs that say, “Don’t suck on your digital pacifier.” That’s a bit hyperbolic, but you know what I mean.
Sarah: I think so.
On the flip side of that, I’m thinking about how to make belonging to a group of people—connecting honestly with one another and with themselves—something that has high status. How do I make that something people can be proud of and brag about?
Alexander: Yeah. I think that’s also a cultural engineering issue, and I think we have some really silly values and philosophies in America.
I’m very pro-American and very pro-90% of what this country does, but the whole idea of going it alone and rugged individualism is interesting. First of all, the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” originally meant doing something impossible on your own, because you can’t actually pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Sarah: That’s right.
Alexander: And we are fundamentally social creatures. So I think about someone who believes they need to go it alone as someone who may actually be too afraid of being human to tolerate the uncertainty and messiness of connecting with others.
Trying to go it alone is actually a sign of weakness. It’s not a sign of strength, because you’re happier and you can accomplish more when you’re in a state of connection.
Those are the messages we need. Again, the path to status—the way people should want to be seen—is as someone who feels a sense of belonging, who goes to the same events again and again.
We also need education around that, because a lot of people fundamentally don’t understand that making friends requires persistent effort. Things like Meetup are interesting because there’s a lot of value there, but a lot of those apps are trying to solve for serendipity: a chance encounter.
I don’t know if you’ve read The Art of Gathering.
Sarah: I’m familiar with it, absolutely.
Alexander: It’s pretty incredible.
Sarah: Amazing.
Alexander: One of the ideas there is that you need closed containers as well. You need to invest in a community. People need to understand that it takes time and repeated encounters to build a real friendship.
So sign up for classes. Improv classes. Become more active in your religious group. I think improv classes are honestly some of the best, although they can be a little silly, so they may not be the right fit for every kind of connection.
But any class, any club, anything that requires membership is much better than a one-off event.
We like to think we can show up once, evaluate a group, and decide whether it’s worth investing in. But you can’t really do that. There’s research suggesting you need to spend around 90 hours with someone to become a true friend—which might be a little high—but the point is that you have to invest.
You can’t just show up and say, “Can we be friends?” It’s trust, effort, and all of these beautiful, messy things.
Sarah: So a membership model where the same people come back month after month and have the chance to deepen in relationship with one another—that’s going to be more successful than a one-off event?
Alexander: Yes. One hundred percent.
At the same time, I think status has been missing from some of those equations. Often people assume that if they go to an event where anyone can show up, they’re just going to meet lonely people. So there can actually be some friction there—a kind of repulsion.
We need to create groups where there’s some level of exclusivity and people feel like it’s worth investing in. Exclusivity doesn’t have to be financial. It can be shared identity, shared belonging, and the sense that you can’t just show up and instantly become a member.
And the funny thing is, I guess this is how cults start, right? Everyone wants to belong to something. You’re like, “Oh, you do this, you can get to the next level.” I’m not recommending cults, obviously.
But we do need to feel like we want to belong to something—and that the thing we want to belong to is actually worth belonging to.
Sarah: I’m thinking about the couples group that I host, and there are bars people have to meet in order to be accepted. They can’t be in the middle of a major trauma in their partnership. They can’t be in the middle of an affair. They have to be at a certain relational level to be accepted into the group.
That way, everyone who comes knows there’s a certain standard here. Not just status, but that the people who are here are focused on similar things and we’re all going to grow to the next level together.
Alexander: Right. And I’m sure there’s also a shared understanding in the group that this doesn’t happen right away. The more you invest and the more time you spend in the group, the more you get out of it, the more you feel seen, and the deeper the perspectives you receive from other couples.
So that itself creates something—maybe not exactly a ritual—but a shared understanding of what this thing is. Versus something like Meetup, where anyone can show up and therefore it’s harder to believe in the structure of the container.
For a long time, especially in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st, I think we increasingly developed this idea in America that we didn’t need structure in our lives, that structure was inherently restrictive, that fewer rules were better, and that the more individual we became, the happier we would be.
But the more we learn about human nature, the more we realize that structure can actually be liberating. Showing up as a member of a group where you have responsibility—that responsibility is liberating.
If you have no responsibility, you can feel no belonging.
Sarah: That’s right. So there’s liberty in having belonging and responsibility and structure.
Alexander: Yeah. If there’s no loss or no cost to you not showing up, then there’s no real belonging that comes from it.
I think that’s part of what makes family such a beautiful thing. You’re in it for the long run. In a parent-child relationship, as a child you feel safety and security knowing that your parents will always be there for you.
We’re hardwired to value those kinds of investments.
Sarah: Exactly.
Alexander: And we need that in our lives as well. It’s not just ephemeral connection. It’s the stability that comes from shared investment, and that takes time to build.
Sarah: Yeah. I love your perspective on all of this, Alexander.
Sarah: How can our listeners stay in touch with you or learn more about what you’re up to?
Alexander: Totally. I have a Substack, interfaceofus.substack.com.
Sarah: I’ll put that in the show notes.
Alexander: Awesome. I write about the intersection of all of these things—game theory, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics—and I try to make it accessible, fun, and interesting. I also have a podcast that you can access through the same Substack.
Sarah: Is there anything else you’d want to leave our listeners with? Anything else you hope people understand about systems—or the systems at play that are keeping us apart?
Alexander: If you’re interested in books on the subject, The Status Game is one I’ve been reading recently. It’s a great book for understanding the importance of status. The Anxious Generation is amazing.
I’m trying to think of my favorite books to plug. There’s also Social Health—I forget the exact title, but I know the author, which I feel really guilty about. I think it’s called Social Health: The Art and Science of Connection. It’s an amazing book as well.
Sarah: You forget the author of that one?
Alexander: Yeah.
Sarah: I’ll see if I can find it and put it in the show notes.
Alexander: Cool. And The Art of Gathering is amazing.
Sarah: Yes. I’m a big fan of Priya Parker.
Alexander: Oh, so good.
I recently did some research on the role of the loneliness epidemic in politics. Did you know that lonely people are seven times more likely to volunteer for political causes and six times less likely to volunteer for non-political causes? They’re also far more likely to vote at the extremes.
So many problems we face as a society are fundamentally driven by the loneliness epidemic in ways we wouldn’t even think about. If we can solve this, it’s a foundational problem. We can fix a lot of things through it.
Sarah: At its core, it’s also part of why we’re so divided. So extreme.
Alexander: Oh, yeah.
Sarah: Because we’re not actually talking to each other and seeing, “Oh, we actually do have more in common than we have differences.”
Alexander: Everyone has the opportunity to be a leader. Don’t be a follower—be a leader. Drive change in the world around you, with your friends and even with strangers you meet.
Take risks. Be messy. Live your life. Be alive.
Sarah: Be alive.
Alexander: Yeah. Honestly, reach for aliveness.
Sarah: I like that. Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
Alexander: Me too. It’s been awesome.

Sarah Oswald 7/8/26 Sarah Oswald 7/8/26

The Revolution Is Relationship: Finding belonging, ritual, and hope in difficult times

What does it mean to stay openhearted in a world that often feels overwhelming?

In this episode of Facets of Connection, Sarah sits down with longtime friend and colleague Karta Elise Allred to explore belonging, grief, community, and the practices that help us remain deeply connected—to ourselves, to one another, and to the living world around us.

Together, they reflect on what we’ve lost in our increasingly isolated culture, why our bodies need spaces to process collective grief, and how small acts of gathering, ritual, and kindness can become profound forms of leadership.

Whether you’re feeling hopeful, heartbroken, or simply longing for deeper connection, this conversation is an invitation to remember that we were never meant to navigate life alone.

In This Episode

Why belonging is a fundamental human need
The hidden costs of loneliness and hyper-individualism
Processing grief through movement and community
The role of ritual in cultivating connection
Creating spaces where people can be fully witnessed
How kindness becomes an act of leadership

Reflection

Where in your life are you longing for deeper belonging—and what is one invitation you could extend this week to create it?

Available July 8, 2026:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

Resources & Mentions

People

Karta Elise Allred: LinkedIn, Instagram
Josh Schrei

Organizations & Programs

Podcast

The Emerald Podcast (hosted by Josh Schrei)

Connect

If this conversation sparked something in you, I’d love to hear from you.

📧 sarah@facetsofconnection.com

🌐 www.leadyourlovelife.com

Follow Facets of Connection wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sarah Oswald 3/15/26 Sarah Oswald 3/15/26

Season 2 Kick-Off with our host, Sarah Melissa Oswald of Lead Your Love Life

In this episode of Facets of Connection, Sarah Melissa Oswald explores why healthy relationships don’t simply happen—they are consciously led. Drawing from Relational Life Therapy, Gestalt Therapy and living-systems thinking, she explains the skills couples need in order to move beyond reactive patterns and build partnerships that grow stronger over time.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why most couples were never taught the skills of relational leadership

• The three phases couples move through as relationships develop and grow

• How reactive conflict patterns can be interrupted

• Why relationships behave like living systems

Facets of Connection explores the many dimensions of human connection—from romantic partnerships to leadership, community, and the inner relationship we have with ourselves.

Available March 15, 2026:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

If you’d like to explore Sarah’s work helping couples build thriving partnerships, visit leadyourlovelife.com

You can also share reflections from this episode by sending a voice memo or email to sarah@facetsofconnection.com.

Follow Facets of Connection wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sarah Oswald 11/21/25 Sarah Oswald 11/21/25

Peace Begins at Home with Cynda Collins Arsenault, founder of Secure World Foundation, Our Secure Future and Women Powering Change

This conversation with Cynda Collins Arsenault explores the connections between personal experience, community, and global change. Cynda reflects on how her journey—rooted in her role as a mother and community-builder—has shaped her decades-long work in peace, inclusion, and female leadership. The discussion moves through themes of respectful relationships, the transformative power of grief, and the importance of inclusive communities.

Cynda shares stories about creating networks of support for her daughter with disabilities, building organizations that foster peace on earth and in outer space, and highlighting the essential leadership strengths that women bring to collective action.

Throughout the conversation, she encourages listeners to find meaning by engaging authentically with their own communities, caring for themselves, and supporting causes that resonate with their passions, all while embracing both the joys and vulnerabilities that come with connection.

Available November 21, 2025

Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

Show Notes:

Secure World Foundation

Our Secure Future

Erin JC Arsenault

Women Powering Change

Lead Your Love Life

Radiant Connection Lab

Sarah Oswald 10/31/25 Sarah Oswald 10/31/25

Shaping High Performance Cultures for Real Connection with Brett Goldstein, host of Grow to Gold

In this conversation, Brett Goldstein reveals a refreshingly honest and relatable approach to both work and life—he and Sarah move fluidly between stories of vulnerability, reflections on personal growth, and practical wisdom cultivated from real mistakes and successes.

Their dialogue uncovers how Brett’s leadership style is grounded in emotional openness and “human connection,” exploring how trust and authenticity ripple out from daily professional choices to transform family life, friendships, and even self-understanding.

With humor, a bit of grit, and plenty of actionable insights, their exchange highlights that success isn’t measured in numbers, but in the quality of our relationships and our willingness to show up, learn together, and embrace imperfection along the way.

Available October 31, 2025
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

Show notes:

Grow2Gold Podcast

Sarah Oswald 10/17/25 Sarah Oswald 10/17/25

Why Research Matters for Relational Healing with Dr. Jae Sevelius of The Rebel Lab

Dr. Jae Sevelius joins host Sarah Melissa Oswald for a deeply insightful conversation about the future of relational healing. As the Senior Research Strategist at Relational Life Foundation, Jae is leading groundbreaking research to establish Relational Life Therapy (RLT) as an evidence-based, widely accessible modality. Together they discuss why research matters for the future of RLT, how it can shape graduate training programs, and what makes this model so transformative for therapists and clients alike.

Jae also shares how their decades of work at Columbia University and with LGBTQ+ and trans communities have shaped their understanding of relationships as both a source of trauma and a pathway to healing—and how this understanding connects to their exploration of psychedelic-assisted therapy. This episode shines a light on the critical role of research, community, and compassion in building a more relational world.

Available October 17, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

“Relational Life Therapy gives clinicians permission to bring their full selves into the room, to speak the truth with love—and that’s why it works.”

-Dr. Jae Sevelius

Show Notes

Connect with Dr.Jae Sevelius

Sarah Oswald 10/3/25 Sarah Oswald 10/3/25

When Love Becomes Culture: Translating RLT into Community Peace with Chiddie Anyasodo of Chotayah

In this powerful episode, host Sarah Melissa Oswald sits down with therapist and peace facilitator Chiddie Anyasodo to explore her remarkable journey from oil and gas engineer to relational healer. Drawing on her background in engineering systems and her training in Relational Life Therapy (RLT), Chiddie has pioneered a groundbreaking approach to conflict resolution, transforming age-old community tensions in Nigeria through the creation of the “Five Masquerades” metaphor.

Chiddie shares how she helped a village locked in a 19-year conflict find common ground, peace, and even laughter by translating complex relational dynamics into cultural stories that resonated deeply with her community. From navigating patriarchal structures to disarming resistance and shame, Chiddie demonstrates how relational skills can heal not just couples, but entire communities.

This conversation is both inspiring and practical, a glimpse into how systemic change begins with relational courage, creativity, and compassion.

Available October 3, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

"If we can translate relational wisdom into the metaphors of each culture, we really can build world peace. Village by village, relationship by relationship."

-Chiddie Anyasodo

Show Notes

Chiddie's Website: https://chotayah.com/
Chiddie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chidiebereanya/
Bringing Peace Home, through RLT practitioner, Chiddie Anyasodo (blog)
Scholarship application for RLT

Sarah Oswald 9/19/25 Sarah Oswald 9/19/25

Building Resilience in the Next Generation: Supporting Teens & Preventing Suicide with Iuri Melo, founder of School Pulse

In this episode of Facets of Connection, host Sarah Melissa Oswald sits down with Iuri Melo to explore the urgent youth mental health crisis and the power of proactive solutions.

Iuri is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with 20 years of experience and the proud father of five. He’s the co-founder of SchoolPulse, a nationwide student support service that delivers positivity, optimism, and growth mindset tools to students, parents, and faculty via text and email. After several teen suicides in his community, Iuri co-created SchoolPulse in 2017 to proactively support student well-being. He’s also the author of Mind Over Grey Matter and the teen best-seller Know Thy Selfie, and the developer of “Adventure Based Therapy.” With over 300 schools in 25+ states, Iuri’s mission to “bless the human family” is inspiring students every day through kindness, psychology, and powerful weekly videos.

Together, Sarah and Iuri dive into:

Why positive relationships are the #1 protective factor for student well-being.
How proactive, daily check-ins can prevent crises before they escalate.
The role of positive psychology and growth mindset in helping teens thrive.
How schools, parents, and communities can build stronger systems of support.

This heartfelt conversation is filled with optimism, practical strategies, and a shared commitment to ending the epidemic of loneliness by fostering connection at home, in schools, and across communities.

Available September 19, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

“Positive relationships are the number one factor in short and long-term happiness."

-Iuri Melo

Show Notes

Sarah Oswald 9/5/25 Sarah Oswald 9/5/25

Shaping Our Built Environment for Personal Transformation with Kathi Burns of Organized and Energized

In this conversation, Sarah sits down with Kathi Burns, a best-selling author, board certified professional organizer, personal stylist & nationally recognized for her simple organizing & style solutions. She has also been featured on Good Morning America as a successful woman owned business. Sarah and Kathi explore how our relationship with our built and digital environments impacts our well-being, productivity, and connections with others. Kathi Burns is .Kathi shares her mission of helping people embrace change with less fear, whether through decluttering a kitchen counter, streamlining business systems, or reframing how we approach “piles” in our lives. Together, they discuss how organization reduces overwhelm, strengthens relationships, and creates space for joy, creativity, and resilience. This episode offers practical wisdom and inspiring insights for anyone seeking more ease in their life and relationships.

Available September 5, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

“When we clear away the clutter, whether it’s on our counters, in our calendars, or in our minds, we create space for joy, connection, and what truly matters.”

-Kathi Burns

Show Notes

Sarah Oswald 8/22/25 Sarah Oswald 8/22/25

Intimacy Though Community: Rethinking Connection Beyond the Nuclear Family with Beverly Joy Ehrlich

In this heartfelt and thought-provoking conversation, RLT-certified coach Beverly Joy Ehrlich sits down with Sarah Melissa Oswald, Director of Relational Life Foundation, to explore what it means to foster intimacy through community. Their conversation illuminates the limitations of the nuclear family model and invites us to reimagine relationships as living systems—ever-evolving, interdependent, and rich with possibility. From Sarah’s personal journey of cultivating multifaceted relationships to practical insights on building meaningful connections, this episode is a powerful reminder that intimacy doesn’t begin and end with our romantic partners.

Discover how community, diversity, and inclusive connection can create a more sustainable foundation for belonging and relational resilience—especially in a time of increasing speed, loneliness, and disconnection.

Available August 19, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

"It’s not a sign of weakness that we depend on our communities. It’s actually a sign of strength."

-Beverly Joy Ehrlich

Show Notes

Sarah Melissa Oswald’s private practice, Lead Your Love Life
Beverly Joy Ehrlich’ private practice
Carol Giligan
Thomas Hübl
Priya Parker
MatrixWorks: Living Systems in Groups
Jessica Fern – Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy

Sarah Oswald 8/8/25 Sarah Oswald 8/8/25

Navigating Neurodiverse Relationships with Caron Starobin, LCSW-C

In this rich conversation, therapist, educator, and RLT mentor Caron Starobin, LCSW-C, joins us to explore the unique complexities—and deep potential—of neurodiverse relationships. Drawing on decades of experience, Caron shares how Relational Life Therapy (RLT) offers an empowering framework for supporting couples where one or both partners are neurodivergent. We discuss the intersections of trauma and neurodivergence, how ableism can show up in relationships, and the importance of breaking down communication to build true connection.

Caron opens up about her path into this work, shaped by her own family history and a deep passion for helping people feel seen, heard, and less alone. Whether you're a practitioner, a partner in a neurodiverse relationship, or simply curious about how different brains relate in love, this episode offers insight, compassion, and real-world tools to bring more empathy and satisfaction into your relationships.

To dive deeper into Caron’s work or to explore her upcoming Relationship Bootcamp, visit www.starobincounseling.com.

Available August 8, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

"Relationships are complex. And when neurodivergence is part of the equation, we have to bring even more curiosity, compassion, and understanding."

-Caron Starobin

Show Notes

Connect with Caron Starobin
No Ordinary Love Community Conversation
RLT Feedback Wheel
Save Your Seat in Caron’s Relationship Bootcamp (October 10-11, Ashton Maryland)
RLT Certification

Research that indicates Hans Asperger colluded with the Nazi’s:
Article from Tidsskriftet
Article from The Guardian

Sarah Oswald 7/25/25 Sarah Oswald 7/25/25

Building Stronger Families Through Connection with Susan Caso, author of The Teen-Parent Connection

In this heartfelt episode of Facets of Connection, we sit down with therapist, author, and mother, Susan Caso, MA, LPC, to explore how respectful, connected relationships between parents and teens can help shift the trajectory of our current youth mental health crisis. Drawing from over two decades of experience and her book The Parent-Teen Connection, Susan offers actionable tools for building emotional closeness, fostering trust, and transforming conflict into meaningful repair.

Susan and Sarah dive into key concepts like belonging at home, the difference between the “parent role” and the “mom/dad role,” how to model emotional regulation, and why perfection isn’t the goal—connection is. This conversation is a must-listen for anyone raising, working with, or simply caring about the next generation.

Whether you're parenting a toddler or a teen, this episode offers rich insight and thoughtful guidance for navigating the relational work of raising whole humans.

Available July 25, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

"Connection and learning how to be in a relationship starts at home."

-Susan Caso, MA, LPC

Show Notes

Susan Caso’s book: The Parent Teen Connection
Ed Tronick: Rupture and Repair
Janet Lansbury: Respectful Parenting
Infinite Campus
Gestalt Therapy
SusanCaso.com

Sarah Oswald 7/11/25 Sarah Oswald 7/11/25

From Stigma to Safety: Access, Equity and Representation in BIPOC Communities with Stacee & Ya'Ron Brown of Relational Growth & Wellness Foundation

In this inspiring episode, we sit down with Stacee and Ya’Ron Brown, licensed professional counselors, married couple, and co-founders of the Relational Growth and Wellness Foundation. They share their mission to bring healing, transformation, and liberation to BIPOC and Pan-African communities through accessible mental health care, relational education, and cultural representation. Drawing from their lived experience and 17 years of marriage, Stacee and Ya’Ron speak candidly about using Relational Life Therapy (RLT) to break cycles of generational trauma and support thriving relationships in their community.

We explore their nonprofit’s work to train future leaders, expand access to therapy, and their exciting partnership with Relational Life Foundation to bring these vital tools to underserved communities—at home and abroad. This is a conversation about radical love, representation, and generational healing—one relationship at a time.

Available July 11, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
iHeartRadio

"We are not here to treat people's symptoms. We are here to transform the legacies of our culture."

- Stacee Brown

Show Notes

RGWF Foundation
RLF Newsletter Signup

Sarah Oswald 6/27/25 Sarah Oswald 6/27/25

Mini Matters of the Heart: From Dehumanization to Aliveness with our host, Sarah Melissa Oswald of Lead Your Love Life

Join our host, Sarah Melissa Oswald, as she takes us inside Colorado prisons, where she witnessed the transformative power of the Realness Project. Through heartfelt conversations with incarcerated men, she explores what it means to connect, to lead, and to heal—even in the most dehumanizing environments. This episode is a moving reflection on resilience, relational leadership, and the belief that all humans are good at their core. It’s a powerful reminder that once you’ve heard someone’s full story, love becomes inevitable.

Available June 27, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

“ All humans are good at their core. Everyone has the potential for growth and transformation, if given the opportunity.”

- Sarah Melissa Oswald

Show Notes

Episode 04: Breaking Generational Cycles of Incarceration with Laurie Lazar
Realness Project

Sarah Oswald 6/13/25 Sarah Oswald 6/13/25

Connection Compass: The Center of Health with Cathy Hill, PhD, emeritus Director of Training at Relational Life Institute

In this short podcast segment, we explore the evolution of RLT’s Relationship Grid. You'll learn how healthy self-esteem balances equally warm regard for self and others, and how having both protective and containing boundaries is essential for respectful relational dynamics. We also unpack the pitfalls of externally driven self-esteem, and the power of practicing relational health every day. Whether you're a therapist or simply curious about improving your relationships, this conversation offers deep insight and practical wisdom.
Learn more about Cathy at www.cathyhill.ca

Available Now:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

"Healthy self-esteem is the belief that you have inherent worth just because you're a human being—and so does everybody else."
- Cathy Hill, PhD, teaching Terry Real's RLT

Show Notes

Connection Compass Course

RLT Relationship Grid

Use code Facets for 10% off the full "Connection Compass" recording

Sarah Oswald 5/30/25 Sarah Oswald 5/30/25

Beyond the Bottom Line: The Business of Being Human with Matt McCall of Forge Capital

In this episode of Facets of Connection, we explore the intersection of purpose, relationships, and entrepreneurship with venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and philosophy enthusiast Matt McCall. We dive into the power of storytelling, the challenges of balancing personal and professional relationships, and how entrepreneurship serves as a microcosm for self-growth. Matt also reflects on life’s transitions, human-centric leadership, and the impact of anxiety and depression on young adults today. Whether you're an entrepreneur or simply seeking a more meaningful life, this conversation offers insights and practical takeaways for navigating relationships, purpose, and resilience. Tune in for an inspiring discussion on integrating personal values with professional success.

Learn more about Matt at https://polsky.uchicago.edu/people/matthew-mccall/ / https://somethingventured.com/

Available Now:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

"The most important relationship you can have is your relationship to yourself."
- Matt McCall

Show Notes

Something Ventured
Anaïs Nin - book Risk
Abraham Maslow - book Motivation and Personality (1954 )
The Hedonic Treadmill
Andrew Huberman
Jonah Hill documentary
TV Show- Shrinking
Phil Stutz
Dr. John Gottman
Matt McCall “S Curve” blog reference
Joseph Campbell
Rhythmia Costa Rica Retreat
"Zone of Genius" is a concept from Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap
Victim triangle /Creator triangle
Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame
Daniel Pink Drive Innovation
VIA strength test

Sarah Oswald 5/16/25 Sarah Oswald 5/16/25

Your Voice Matters: Turning Passion into Purpose Through Story with Tracy McCartney of Red Canary Magazine

In this powerful episode of Facets of Connection, Sarah sits down with Tracy McCartney— mother, writer, connector, and founder/publisher of Red Canary Magazine — for a heart-opening conversation about how storytelling fuels social and environmental justice. From typewriting poems as a toddler to creating an award-winning magazine amplifying marginalized voices, Tracy shares her inspiring journey of transforming grief, rage, and love for the Earth into real-world action. They dive deep into how independent journalism can heal communities, why true connection is at the heart of activism, and why caring for the planet and caring for each other are inseparable.

If you've ever wondered how your unique gifts can ripple out to make real change (even when the world feels overwhelming), this conversation is a must-listen.

Connect with Red Canary on:
Instagram
Facebook
LinkedIn
YouTube
Vimeo

Available May 16, 2025:
Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple Music
Youtube
Substack
iHeartRadio

“It's the relationship between individuals, and the collective, that's
really going to make a difference”
- Tracy McCartney

Show Notes

The Guardian
PBS
Joanna Macy Poetry of Rilke
“To Live and Die in LA’s Diesel Death Zones” by Nick Schou (Skow)
“Rise of the American Favela” by Sam Slovick
“Fighting for the True Country” by Steven Gute
Sign up for the “Note From The Nest” Newsletter on the Red Canary Magazine website

Sarah Oswald 5/2/25 Sarah Oswald 5/2/25

Sustainable Hope with Toufic Hakim, Executive Director of the Foundation for Self Leadership

In this heartfelt episode, Sarah is joined by Toufic Hakim—scientist by training, spiritualist by choice, and Executive Director of the Foundation for Self Leadership. Together, they explore what it means to cultivate sustainable hope in uncertain times by tending to our inner worlds, our relationships, and our communities.

Toufic offers wisdom on how self-awareness, compassion, and connection can help us meet the world with clarity and heart. This conversation is a balm for the nervous system—and a deep invitation into presence, purpose, and possibility. The Foundation for Self Leadership is dedicated to fostering emotional, relational and societal healing and wellbeing. Its advocacy and research programs revolve around the IFS paradigm as a leading model among others.

Learn more about The Foundation for Self Leadership
Find Foundation IFS on Facebook & Youtube
Read their magazine Parts and Self

Available May 2, 2025:
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“We are never truly alone—even in solitude, we are in relationship with our stories, our sensations, and the communities that shaped us.”
- Toufic Hakim

Show Notes

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Black Swan

Atlas of Emotions & Atlas of the Heart

Inside Out

3 Spheres Diagram

Book: "You are the one you've been waiting for" by Richard Schwartz

Sarah Oswald 4/18/25 Sarah Oswald 4/18/25

Relational Reckoning: Should I Stay or Should I Go? with Terry Real, founder of RLT

In this episode, new board president and founder of Relational Life Therapy (RLT), Terry Real, joins senior RLT practitioner and faculty member Anna Sterk, LMFT for a powerful conversation about one of the toughest relationship questions: Should I stay or should I go?

Together, they unpack the concept of relational reckoning—weighing whether what we’re getting is enough to make grieving what we’re not getting worth it. They challenge the myth of unconditional adult love and explore the fine line between acceptance and self-abandonment. From resentment to “normal marital hatred,” this episode is full of clarity, compassion, and truth-telling. Whether you’re questioning a relationship or seeking deeper connection, this conversation offers a path forward.

Learn more about Terry Real
Learn more about Anna Sterk

April 18, 2025:
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"There's something sacred about doing the work to become your best self, regardless of whether the relationship survives. That work is never wasted."

- Terry Real

How the patterns we struggle against can become pathways to deeper states of being, greater choice, and lasting change.

About This Episode

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Core Transformation®

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How technology, predictability, and the courage of “not hiding” shape human connection.

About This Episode

Listen or Watch

Key Topics Discussed

Questions for Reflection

Why This Conversation Matters

Resources for Further Exploration

Substack

Books

Connect

Read the Full Episode Transcript

In This Episode

Reflection

Available July 8, 2026: Spotify Amazon MusicApple MusicYoutubeSubstack​iHeartRadio

Resources & Mentions

People

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Relational Leadership Coach & Celebrant

Available July 8, 2026:
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