Make memories. Get outside. See everyone. Go somewhere. Be present. Slow down, but also don’t waste it. Look good in the photos. Feel good about looking good in the photos. Have the best summer of your life, ideally by the end of June.

Your nervous system, once again, would like a word.

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying to perform a season, and summer is the loudest offender.

No other time of year comes pre-loaded with this much cultural pressure—the nostalgia, the FOMO, the ambient sense that everyone else is living their most golden, sun-drenched, effortlessly joyful life while you’re just...trying to stay hydrated and answer your emails and stop Googling whether your weird fatigue is dehydration or a personality flaw.

The “best summer ever” mythology starts early. It’s built into every end-of-school countdown, every travel influencer, every Instagram grid that looks like a highlights reel of a life you haven’t quite figured out how to live yet, and honestly, neither has she, but her color-grading is exceptional.

But here’s what nobody mentions: the pressure to maximize a season is the fastest way to stop actually experiencing it.

You can’t be present and perform simultaneously. You have to pick one.

Real summer self-care is the quiet, slightly countercultural act of choosing presence over performance; letting this season be what it actually is, not what you’ve been told it should look like.

So here is my Summer Self-Care Edit. Less highlight reel and more real life.

1. Let Summer Be Ordinary Sometimes

Not every day needs to be an event.

Some of the best summer moments are the ones nobody photographs—the slow morning with nowhere to be, the conversation that goes longer than planned, the evening walk where nothing happened except the light was nice and you noticed it.

Ordinary is not a consolation prize. Sometimes it’s the whole point. (This is something I have to tell myself approximately four times per week, so.)

2. Protect Your Rest Like It’s a Reservation

Summer schedules have a way of filling themselves. Every weekend suddenly has somewhere to be, someone to see, something not to miss.

Rest doesn’t get added to the calendar unless you add it; so add it. And add it with the same energy that you’d protect a non-refundable flight with.

The cost of skipping it is real. You just don’t always feel the bill until you’re crying in the Target parking lot in late August and you’re not totally sure why.

3. Give Your Body Grace in the Season That Asks the Most of It

Summer is the season that makes the most demands on how we feel about our bodies—and the least forgiving about them. The swimsuits. The shorts. The photos. The relentless, unasked-for commentary.

This is not an invitation to fix your body before you let yourself enjoy the season. It’s an invitation to enjoy the season in the body you have right now.

Wear the swimsuit. Eat the thing. Go to the thing. Don’t let a number or a reflection determine how much summer you’re allowed to have. (For the record: you’re allowed to have all of it.)

4. Redefine What “Not Wasting It” Means

The fear of wasting summer runs deep. It’s practically encoded in childhood, right next to the theme song for whatever show you watched on Saturday mornings.

But rest is not waste. Saying no is not waste. A quiet weekend at home is not waste. Reading an entire book by a fan because it’s too hot to go anywhere is not waste.

You know what actually wastes summer? Spending it so anxious about missing out that you couldn’t feel the parts you were actually in. Don’t do that.

5. Let Yourself Want Simple Things

Summer has a way of making everything feel like it should be bigger, better, more.

But sometimes what you actually want is a porch and a cold drink and nobody asking you anything for an hour. Sometimes you want to swim. Sometimes you want a nap. Sometimes you want to watch a movie in the dark in the middle of the afternoon, like a person who has fully opted out and is not sorry about it.

Simple wants are not small wants. They’re often the most honest ones. The porch and the cold drink? That’s a life.

6. Move for the Feeling, Not the Outcome

Summer movement has a different energy than the rest of the year, and it’s worth leaning into.

The early morning walk before the heat arrives. The swim that’s actually just floating. The spontaneous something that doesn’t count as a workout but definitely counts as alive.

Let your body move because it wants to, not because it owes you something. Your body does not owe you anything. It’s been out here doing its best.

7. Stay in the Moment Long Enough to Actually Have It

Put the phone down for a minute.

Not as a digital wellness prescription—I’m not your therapist right now (well, I am, but I’m off the clock)—just as a small act of generosity toward yourself. You genuinely cannot take a memory home if you were busy documenting it instead of being inside it.

The best summer moments don’t need a caption. They need your full attention. Give them that.

What Your Enneagram Type Needs This Summer

Because the pressure to have the “best summer ever” doesn’t land the same way for all nine of us—and your type has something specific to say about where you’re most likely to get in your own way.

Type 1 — The Improver Summer will tempt you to optimize your leisure. Better sleep schedule. More intentional mornings. A reading list with actual goals. (A reading list with goals, you guys.) Your invitation this season: let fun be inefficient. Do something with no measurable outcome. Let a day go sideways without calling it a failure. Rest that you haven’t earned is still rest you deserve. Write that down somewhere you’ll actually see it.

Type 2 — The Helper You will coordinate the trip, remember everyone’s food preferences, and make sure the whole thing comes together beautifully, and then quietly wonder why you feel depleted by vacation. Honey. This summer, build something into the season that’s yours alone. A morning. A day. A trip nobody needed you to plan. You are allowed to have summer for yourself. (And I say this with love: nobody is going to give it to you. You have to take it.)

Type 3 — The Achiever The “best summer ever” pressure was basically written for you, and it will absolutely run you if you let it. Your self-care this season is radical ordinariness. A weekend with no agenda. A day that doesn’t produce anything. Let summer be something you live rather than something you accomplish. This will feel wrong. Do it anyway.

Type 4 — The Romantic You’re already attuned to the bittersweetness of it all—the way the long days feel both endless and fleeting, the nostalgia that shows up before the season has even finished, the small grief of a good thing passing. (Deeply relatable. Hi, it's me.) Your invitation is to stay in the present tense. Let this summer be its own thing, not a comparison to every summer before it or a trailer for when it’s over.

Type 5 — The Investigator Summer is loud and social and full of unstructured time, which is either a dream or a genuine personal threat depending on how yours is set up. Your self-care this season is scheduling solitude on purpose, so it doesn’t have to be seized defensively like you’re rationing emergency reserves. Protect your recharge time before you’re depleted. And then, from that full place, actually let someone in. Just a little. You can do it.

Type 6 — The Loyalist You may spend the whole summer half-present because some part of your nervous system is already scanning for fall—the schedule, the unknown, the thing that might go wrong before you’ve even bought school supplies. Your self-care is practicing landing in the day you’re actually in. Summer is asking you to trust it a little. Let it be good without waiting for the catch. (There might not be a catch. I know. Wild.)

Type 7 — The Enthusiast You planned the best summer ever—possibly in January, over a color-coded spreadsheet. The trips, the concerts, the experiences, the spontaneous adventures that you somehow also pre-planned. (There’s a version of you that has already mentally had a spritz in Positano and it’s February.) And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you’ll feel a flicker of emptiness you can’t quite name. That’s not a sign to add more. It’s a sign to go deeper. Let one thing fully land before you’re already onto the next. The season is enough. You’re enough. (Yes, even without the next thing.)

Type 8 — The Challenger You want summer on your own terms, and you will absolutely fight for the right to have it that way. That energy is good, and I respect it. Your invitation is to channel it toward receiving, not just controlling. Let someone else plan the thing. Let yourself be taken care of for once. Let summer surprise you. You don’t always have to be the one holding it all together, and sometimes the people around you would really love the chance to try.

Type 9 — The Peacemaker You’ll accommodate everyone else’s summer and call it easy-going. And you’ll be good at it. And you’ll get to September and quietly realize you never once asked for what you wanted. Your self-care this season is wanting things out loud, before the window closes. What do you want summer to include? What would make it feel like yours? Don’t wait until the leaves turn to figure that out. Ask now. Then ask again.

The best summer ever isn’t the one with the most stamps in the passport or the fullest camera roll or the body you finally felt good in.

It’s the one where you were actually there—present, honest about what you needed, generous with yourself about what you couldn’t do or be or have yet.

Some of it will be golden. Some of it will be humid and hard and ordinary and fine.

All of it counts.

Have a real summer, not a performed one. That’s the only version worth having.

With Love & Gratitude,

Katie

Not the mugs-and-candles kind of feelings (though I do own the candle, and yes, it’s prickly pear, and yes, I find that personally offensive). I mean the bone-deep, career-altering, God-is-laughing-at-me-right-now kind of feelings. The kind that come from twenty years of sitting with a tool that didn’t just help me understand myself, it helped me accept myself. And that, friends, is a very different thing.

So consider this my love letter: not to the trend, the aesthetic, or the Twitter thread assigning Enneagram types to Vanderpump Rules cast members (okay, I love those a little), but to the system itself and to what it actually does, if you let it.

I didn’t discover the Enneagram. The Enneagram discovered me.

I was twenty-five, adrift in a Nashville I hadn’t figured out yet, interviewing for a job I didn’t want, slicking on lip gloss like it was armor. My boss—a striking woman named Alayna with two-toned curls and a personality the size of a city block—talked about the Enneagram the way other people talk about the weather. Constantly, casually, like it was just obvious that this was how the world worked.

I thought it was a cult. Or at the very least, a bored-rich-people thing. I tolerated it until I got tired of being the only one in the room who didn’t speak the language. So I went home, poured a very generous glass of boxed pinot noir, and Googled “E-n-n-e-a-g-r-a-m.” I bought Richard Rohr’s The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective—reasoning that if I was joining a cult, it may as well be a Christian one—and waited for it to arrive.

When I opened it, something inside me went very quiet.

“A little voice piped up. She was a shy one. But I heard her—a dominant type Four, the Romantic. For the first time, she felt like she belonged.”

That’s the moment I mean when I say it undid me. Not the quiz or the mug, but the moment a framework made sense of something I’d been carrying alone my whole life—the feeling that I was intrinsically, essentially, differently broken. That everyone else got a simpler life. That I was meant to struggle and long and search and never quite arrive.

Turns out, that’s just being a Four. And Fours are not broken. We’re just wired for depth, sometimes to our absolute detriment.

Here’s what the Enneagram gave me that no other system had: a why.

Not just “you are this type”, but here is the wound underneath the pattern. Here is the story you’ve been telling yourself since childhood, the one that feels so true it hasn’t occurred to you to question it. Here is the fear driving the behavior you hate most in yourself. And here—gently, honestly—is the invitation to something different.

It’s not therapy or a religion. It’s definitely not a one-time quiz you can screenshot for your bio. It’s a map. And like any good map, it doesn’t tell you where to go; it just shows you where you’ve been and makes the terrain a little more navigable.

For me, that terrain included undiagnosed depression, a long chapter with an eating disorder, a complicated and sometimes aching relationship with God, and the very specific suffering of a Four who has spent most of her life half-convinced she is too much and not enough simultaneously. The Enneagram didn’t fix any of that, but it named it. And naming it with curiosity instead of shame changed everything.

I’m a Jesus girl, make no mistake. But over years of tangled undoing, I’ve come to think of myself as something like a Buddhist-informed Christian, which I realize sounds like a fun dinner party answer and also probably requires some explanation.

The Buddhist principle of non-attachment has quietly rearranged my life. Not detachment—that cold, checked-out thing—non-attachment. The practice of holding things, outcomes, identities, the stories we grip, with an open hand instead of a white-knuckled fist.

The Enneagram brought me here because what it asks you to do, at its core, is exactly that: stop trying to escape your patterns and start getting curious about them. Stop running from your type’s suffering and sit with it long enough to understand it. As Enneagram teacher Russ Hudson puts it, the work is an invitation to “sit with the ouchie”, not to coddle it. Just to stay in the room with it long enough to see what it’s actually telling you.

From that place, something I’d never experienced before became possible: self-compassion. Not the bath-salts version, but the real version. The one where you look at your own worst patterns and feel something closer to tenderness than contempt.

“There was nothing wrong with me to escape or hide away. Understanding the patterns helped me accept them, and in them, I began to see the God-image I’d been created in.”

Twenty years in, the Enneagram still keeps me humble. That’s not nothing.

I’ve watched it crack people open gently and held space while they put themselves back together more honestly. I’ve seen it save marriages—not by assigning blame, but by replacing “What is wrong with you?” with “What are you afraid of?” I’ve watched people weep with the relief of finally understanding themselves.

And still, after all of that, it keeps doing it to me. A new layer. A new ouchie. A new invitation toward the version of myself I keep growing into.

That’s the thing nobody tells you: the work isn’t a destination, it’s a direction. And the Enneagram is not the vehicle, it’s the compass. One that, on the days when I’ve lost the thread of myself entirely, points me back.

Happy International Enneagram Day, friends. Whatever your type, whatever your wound, whatever layer you’re currently working on or trying desperately not to see, you’re in good company. The whole messy, gorgeous, imperfect lot of us are in this together.

Here’s to getting truer. Not better. Truer.

And in honor of International Enneagram Day, I’m hard launching the KG Enneagram Typing Cards—and they’re not just for therapists.

I’ve spent years using an experiential typing process in my practice and coaching programs; conversations, stories, and prompts that help people discover their type from the inside out, not a 140-question quiz that harvests your email and sends you straight to Crazy Brian’s Healing Emporium.

These cards bring that process to your dinner table, your living room, your next road trip with your teenagers who have stopped voluntarily speaking to you.

Because here’s what I believe with my whole heart: the ultimate expression of love is to understand another person, and these cards are designed to help you do exactly that with the people who matter most to you.

A gentle note for the parents in the room: please, I’m begging you, skip the online test for your kids. Their little identities are still very much cooking, but starting conversations? Asking good questions? Watching them light up when they feel truly understood? That’s the whole point. These cards give you a beautiful, low-stakes way in.

They’re for families, couples, friend groups, teams, therapists, and coaches, yes, but honestly? They’re just for humans who want to go a little deeper with the humans they love. Which, if you’ve read this far, I’m guessing is you.

They’re already live on the website, but we’re making it official this Saturday because there’s no better day for it.

With love and gratitude and understanding,

Katie

It had been a big week: three dress-up days, an end-of-year graduation program that included—I kid you not—a drum solo, and big emotions getting off the bus because a couple of second graders had decided that liking “Golden” by K-Pop Demon Hunters was apparently only for girls. Bedtimes had crept later by ten, then twenty minutes, because summer was right around the corner and something in the air made the whole world feel looser.

I went over to sit with him as the tears started to stream. I asked him to tell me about his sad feelings, fully aware it could be any number of things. What he said next stopped me cold.

“Mama, kindergarten is going away forever. I’m gonna miss Miss Fishpaw so bad.”

The slow tears turned into a heaving wail.

Every ounce of me wanted to hold my baby, absorb that pain, and reframe the hell out of why everything was going to be fine. The enneagram four therapist in me was practically vibrating—shove paper and markers in front of him, have him draw all the hard stuff, make the pain beautiful, by God! And the exhausted mama in me just wanted to fix it fast so we could eat something before 9 pm.

Instead, I held him close and let the tears keep coming.

· · ·

Here’s what I’ve learned—as a therapist, as a mother, and as someone who has fumbled through her share of endings: we are profoundly bad at goodbyes. Not because we’re weak or broken, but because we’ve been quietly taught that moving on is the goal. That the next thing is the point. That grief over something good ending is somehow ungrateful, indulgent, and a little much.

But Tucker, at six years old, knew something most of us spend decades unlearning: an ending deserves to be felt all the way through.

We rush the goodbye so we can get to the hello. We skip the grief because the next chapter looks bright. We minimize our losses—jobs, relationships, chapters of life, phases of our kids’ childhoods—and wonder why we feel vaguely unmoored when the new thing arrives.

It’s because we never properly buried the last one. You cannot build a good next chapter on an unacknowledged ending.

· · ·

After ten minutes and some protein (blood sugar is real, people), Tucker slowly came back to himself. I asked him to tell me everything he was going to miss about kindergarten. The floodgates opened. He took me on a colorful, scattered, completely magical tour down memory lane—the carpet at circle time, the way Miss Fishpaw said his name, the Tuesday snack rotation, the friend who could burp the alphabet.

I said, “Let’s toast to a really special year.”

I poured Tucker some Sprite in a fancy glass and myself a pale glass of rosé. We raised them to all of it: the wonderful parts, the terrible parts, the memorable, and the utterly forgettable. We took a slow sip together. I ditched the dinner I’d been making, threw in a frozen pizza, and pulled out Guess Who?. What we actually needed wasn’t a sit-down meal; it was to be fully present in the moment we were in—the tender, grief-dusted threshold between what was and what’s next.

· · ·

Here’s what I want you to take away—whether you’re closing out a school year, leaving a job, ending a relationship, watching a child step into a new phase, or simply feeling the weight of a season you didn’t know you’d miss until it was almost over:

The ending deserves a toast. Not a sprint to the next thing. Not a pep talk about silver linings. A real, intentional acknowledgment of what was the good, the hard, the boring Tuesday afternoons you’d give anything to have back.

Grief isn’t the enemy of growth. It’s the ceremony that makes growth sacred.

When we honor an ending well, when we let ourselves feel the loss, speak the memories aloud, raise a glass to the year that sprinted by—we don’t get stuck, we get free. We walk into the next chapter with our whole selves, not just the parts that survived the rush.

Miss Fishpaw deserved that toast, so did kindergarten. So does whatever chapter you’re quietly closing right now.

Pour something fancy. Say the names of the things you’ll miss. Let the tears come if they need to. And when you’re ready—truly ready—frozen pizza and Guess Who? will be right there waiting.

The road to the next chapter begins with a proper goodbye.

With love and gratitude,

Katie

My son Tucker and his best friend Jet were walking away from the field together, heading toward the garden playground. They were still in their cleats, still carrying the particular quiet that little boys carry after a hard game, and somewhere in those few steps, without a word or any fanfare at all, Tucker reached over and took Jet’s hand.

Just held it.

Two little guys walking through their disappointment, hand in hand, because that’s what you do when your person needs steadying.

I nearly missed it entirely.

I was ten feet behind them, sunburned and frazzled, hollering at our new puppy Ace, who had chosen that exact moment to lose his mind. I had snack wrappers escaping from every pocket. I was wiping sweat out of my eyes with the back of my arm. I was doing that frantic phone-pat where you check the same three spots over and over because surely it has to be somewhere. I was a full production; a whole situation.

In the midst of my “mom trying to keep it together” hustle, I almost missed one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.

I almost let it flicker past and dissolve into the noise of all my doing and managing and gathering and rushing.

But I caught it. I stopped. I let it land.

That moment is now in me in a way that a lot of moments aren’t. I can close my eyes and see their small hands. I can feel exactly what it did to my chest.

That’s the thing about beauty. It is everywhere, and we are almost always too “somewhere else” to catch it.

Why Beauty Is Not a Luxury Item

Let me just say this plainly: beauty is not for people with extra time. It is not an Enneagram Four thing, a creative thing, a sensitive thing. It is not a reward you get after the to-do list is done.

Beauty is a need. A biological one. A soul one. And right now—in this particular historical moment, with its noise and its doom-scroll and its relentless urgency—it might be the most quietly revolutionary practice available to us.

One of my favorites, philosopher and poet John O’Donohue, wrote that we should each be “the artist of our days”, not the manager of our days. Or the optimizer of our days–the artist. He believed that how we shape our attention shapes our life; that beauty is not something that happens to the lucky few but something we actively, intentionally call in.

I think about this constantly. Most of us have never been taught to do this. We have been taught to be productive and efficient, to hustle toward the next thing. We have not been taught to pause, to look, to let the moment of the sunset or the perfectly designed chair or the child laughing three tables over actually register as something real and worth receiving.

And that gap, between the beauty that’s there and the beauty we actually take in, is costing us something.

Your Brain Has a Problem (And Beauty Is the Fix)

Here’s where we get a little nerdy, and I want you to stay with me, because this actually matters.

Human brains are wired for negativity. This is not a character flaw; it’s evolutionary survival code. Our ancestors who noticed the rustle in the bushes (danger!) stayed alive longer than the ones who were busy admiring the sunset. So evolution handed us a negativity bias: we register threats faster, remember bad experiences more vividly, and return to worry more readily than to wonder.

The bad news: this ancient wiring runs in the background of your modern life, making you subtly more anxious, more reactive, and less able to rest than you probably want to be.

The good news: your brain is not fixed. It is plastic. Meaning it can be rewired.

Neuroscientist Rick Hanson has spent decades studying what he calls “taking in the good”, and his research shows something both simple and staggering.

When you notice a positive experience, a beautiful moment, a genuine feeling of warmth or awe or delight, and you stay with it, you begin to create new neural pathways. You literally change the structure of your brain.

But here’s the part most people miss: the pause is non-negotiable.

Hanson’s research points to something like 11–20 seconds of deliberate dwelling—three slow breaths, at minimum—for a positive experience to move from a fleeting moment into actual long-term memory. Without the pause, it passes through you and leaves almost no trace. With the pause, you are building new wiring. You are making the brain just a little bit more inclined toward beauty the next time.

This is not self-help fluff. This is neuroscience. It means that noticing beauty and staying with it is one of the most concrete, practical, evidence-based things you can do for your mental health and your quality of life.

The sunset is not just pretty. It is medicine, but only if you stop and let it be.

Three Breaths. That’s All.

I want to make this as simple as possible, because I know you are busy, and I know your brain is going to try to rush past this and get back to the list.

When something beautiful catches you, and it will, because beauty is genuinely everywhere, you have a choice. You can let it flicker past, or you can stop and take three breaths. Three slow, full breaths, while you stay with what’s in front of you.

The light through the leaves.

The way your dog looks at you when you’ve been gone all day.

A piece of music that does something strange and lovely to your chest.

The design of a building that someone cared enough to make right.

The face of someone you love, really looked at.

Three breaths. Let it in. This is the practice.

You are not being indulgent. You are not wasting time. You are doing the neurological work of becoming someone who is more easily moved by goodness, and less easily hijacked by fear.

What Mary Oliver Knew

The poet Mary Oliver gave us a simple instruction that I return to again and again. In her poem “Sometimes,” she wrote about what it is to be a human being paying attention. And she distilled her entire practice and life’s work into three imperatives:

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.

Notice, let it move you, and then do something with it—share it, write it, speak it, live it differently because of it. Beauty doesn’t just want to be witnessed; it wants to travel. It wants to pass through you and out into the world in some changed form.

This is why I exist, I think. Or at least part of why.

I genuinely believe one of my callings, one of the reasons I’m here, building what I build, living the way I live, is to help people see what they’re already standing inside of. Because beauty is not scarce. It is everywhere. It is the stunning floral arrangement you walked past without looking up. The quality of light at 6 pm that turns the ordinary street into something cinematic. The woman at the table next to you with her coffee and her quiet contentment. The particular way someone you love says your name.

The beauty is there. It has always been there.

We just keep accidentally choosing not to see it.

This Is Not About Being Positive

I want to be clear about something, because I know what some of you are thinking.

This is not toxic positivity. This is not “just focus on the good things.” This is not pretending the hard things aren’t hard, or the broken things aren’t broken.

Beauty lives alongside grief. It actually intensifies it, sometimes. Have you ever been moved to tears by something gorgeous in the middle of a hard season? That’s not a contradiction. That’s what it is to be fully alive.

The ancient philosophical tradition of the true, the good, and the beautiful—verum, bonum, pulchrum—held these three as the transcendentals: the things that point us toward what is most real, most worth living for. Not as escapism. As orientation.

Beauty tells us something is right with the world, even when much is wrong with it. It reminds us that we are here, that we are alive, that there is something to be grateful for being inside of.

This is what we need right now, the radical act of remaining open. Open to being surprised by goodness, open to being stopped by loveliness, open to the kind of presence that reminds you what you’re actually here for.

The Invitation

So here is what I want to leave you with. A practice. A dare, really.

For the next week, make one commitment: catch three beautiful things per day. Not grand ones. Not Instagram-worthy ones necessarily. Just real ones. Ones that actually catch you first before you have a chance to decide whether they count.

And when they do: three breaths. Stay. Let it in.

Then, if you’re feeling brave: tell someone. Send a voice note. Write it in your Notes app. Post it. Whisper it to yourself. Tell about it, the way Mary Oliver told us to.

Because here’s what I know: the more you practice seeing beauty, the more beauty you will see. Not because the world has changed. Because you have. Because you’ve spent enough deliberate seconds with enough gorgeous ordinary moments that your brain has started to actually look for them, to expect them, to find them faster, to live more of your life in the kind of quiet open-eyed astonishment that is the closest thing I know to peace.

You were made for this.

You were made to stop on a soccer field with snacks falling out of your pockets and a puppy unraveling behind you, and see the two small hands and let them wreck you in the best possible way.

You were made to be astonished.

Pay attention.

With Love and Gratitude,

Katie

What’s one beautiful thing you’ve almost walked past lately? I’d genuinely love to know; tell me in the comments.

Patriarchal? Absolutely. Enticing? At the time, yes.

Womanhood seemed like a never-ending pageant, and the type Four in me was always getting gussied up for a moment to shine. But at the end of high school, I was not engaged to my high-school sweetheart and the divine art of Jell-O salad construction hadn’t come to me in a cranberry-flavored fever dream. To make things worse, my closet contained a lower than average amount of gingham. Where was all the love? It seemed that everyone could find it except me, and I was seething.

At thirty-three years old, after a third date gone south with a (fifth?) rogue, tatted-up worship pastor on a love bomb roll, I gave up. Dating emotionally unavailable men had basically become a second career. Turns out, a remarkable amount of men who date therapists just want therapy. Y’all, it’s hard out there for a shrink.

Without my knowledge or consent, my frustration morphed into bitterness. Every time I got a wedding invite or baby announcement, I wanted to light it (just a little bit) on fire. Not yours, I swear.

* * *

And then after lots of trying, crying, a miscarriage, and nearly making peace with the possibility that having kids wasn’t in my hand of cards, that maybe my true self was always meant to be a career woman, polished and purposeful and perfectly fine on her own, thank you very much, I got pregnant. My lifelong dream was a reality. I was happy and healthy, selecting neutral paints for the nursery and trying to decide if my pregnancy style would be kaftans or body-con dresses.

And there was Daniel. Daniel, who had shown up in my life like a plot twist I didn’t see coming, a man who eats character for lunch every day, who loved me well and showed up fully, even when fully looked different than either of us planned. Because then Covid hit, and the hormones hit, and Daniel, bless him, left his big glamorous job—the one that had come with all the perks, including a wife who got to dress up six solid years in a row. It was a good run. We were fine, more than fine, but the life we’d known quietly changed shape. The nursery got painted anyway. The baby came anyway, and somewhere in the beautiful, brutal fog of all that anyway, I disappeared.

Not all at once. That’s the thing no one tells you. It’s not a dramatic exit. It’s a slow, quiet evacuation. A cup of coffee gone cold on the counter. A sentence you started and never finished. A version of yourself you kept meaning to get back to after the feeding, after the nap, after the season, after this.

And then Tuck turned a year and a half old. And I got the call. Breast cancer.

I want to pause here, because I need you to feel the full weight of that sequence. The longing. The loss. The miscarriage. The pandemic. The baby finally, finally here. And then—a diagnosis that made every survival switch I had ever owned flip on at once and stay there.

There is a particular kind of disappearing that happens when your body becomes the emergency. When the woman who was already running on fumes suddenly has to marshal every resource she has just to stay alive—for herself, yes, but if she’s honest, mostly for that little boy with the wide eyes who needs his mama to make it. You stop asking who am I because the only question that matters is will I be here.

I didn’t lose myself to motherhood. I lost myself trying to survive long enough to stay in it. And somewhere in the fighting, I forgot that the woman worth saving was also worth knowing.

Here’s what I know as a therapist, and what I had to learn the hard way as a mother: when human beings confront trauma, we default to our survival selves. Fight, flee, freeze, whatever gets you from one moment to the next. In the short term, those switches save you. Left on long-term? They cost you. And the particular cruelty of my story, of so many mothers’ stories, is that the trauma was real, the survival was necessary, and still. The bill comes due. One day the crisis passes and you look up and you don’t know the woman in the mirror. Not because she left, but because you never had the chance to meet her.

* * *

But here’s where it gets interesting. Here’s where I want to sit with you for a minute.

When I finally started doing the work of finding myself again, not my best self, mind you, but my favorite self, I made a discovery that stopped me cold. I wasn’t just looking for who I had been before the diagnosis, before the baby, before Covid, before the years of longing and loss. I was finding parts of myself that had never been allowed to exist in the first place.

Parts that were shushed in a church pew in Mobile. Parts that got gussied up for a pageant they never won. Parts that felt too much, wanted too much, grieved too loudly. Parts of a little girl who also needed mothering and never quite got enough of it in the right ways.

And before y’all come for me—I had, and still have, the most angelic, loving human being of a mother. To know her is to simply want to be near her. Always. So this isn’t about her. This is about something trickier, and honestly more universal than we like to admit: we can have fabulous mamas and still experience real or perceived holes in our childhood experience. Turns out we are a terribly needy little species, and no parent can fill every corner of a child’s heart. That’s not a flaw in our mothers, that’s just the human condition.

And I realized: the work wasn’t just reclamation. It was origination. I wasn’t finding my way back. I was finding my way forward, to a version of myself that had been waiting, patiently and without complaint, in the unloved corners.

The most tender thing I have ever done is learn to mother myself. To speak to the parts of me that went missing, or were never seen, with the same grace I pour into my child every single day.

Good moms don’t miss themselves. Good moms don’t grieve. Good moms don’t need anything. Good moms certainly don’t sit with a breast cancer diagnosis and think, in the quietest, most secret part of themselves, maybe now someone will finally take care of me.

That’s the lie, and it is exhausting to carry.

What if this Mother’s Day, instead of performing okayness, instead of smiling through brunch and posting the photo and being grateful enough, happy enough, present enough, you gave yourself the one thing you might have needed longest?

Not a spa day. Not a hall pass. Not a thank you.

Gentleness. Toward yourself. Rooted in the truth that loving your people well and needing to be loved yourself are not opposing forces. They are the same river.

* * *

I made it through. Tuck has his mama. Daniel still eats character for lunch. And I am, for the first time in a long time, maybe for the first time ever, learning what it feels like to be my own favorite person to come home to.

You are not lost. You are in process. And the woman you are becoming, the one who survived things she never should have had to survive, the one piecing herself back together, the one learning that her favorite self was never her best-behaved self, she is worth the whole journey home.

I’m here for her. I’m here for you.

Happy Mother’s Day, to every version of you that made it this far.

With love and gratitude,

Katie

Usually, the answer is this: the quiz is measuring the wrong thing.

Most Enneagram quizzes are built around behavior. What do you tend to do? How do you usually respond? And behavior is useful data, but it’s downstream of something more fundamental. Something the quiz can’t quite reach.

That something is focus of attention.

Here’s what I mean:

Imagine your mind is a whiteboard. All day long, things get written on it: thoughts, questions, worries, desires, observations. You don’t sit down in the morning and decide what goes up there. It just happens. And by the end of the day, the whiteboard is full.

Your Enneagram type is what fills that space.

Not what you decided to think about. Not the tasks you completed or the roles you played. The stuff that shows up on its own; the mental channel your brain defaults to when it has a spare moment, when things get hard, when you’re just driving home in silence.

That’s the signal.

The Pairs People Mix Up Most, and What Their Whiteboards Actually Say

Type 3 and Type 7 are a good starting example, but they’re far from the only pair that trips people up. Here’s what focus of attention looks like across the most commonly confused combinations.

3 and 7: Same energy, different engine

Both are high-energy, future-oriented, and always in motion. But a 3’s whiteboard is covered in performance and perception: am I succeeding, am I being seen well, is my output landing?

A 7’s whiteboard is covered in possibility and anticipation: what’s next, what could this become, what am I missing by staying here?

The 3 is chasing achievement. The 7 is chasing fullness. They can look identical at a dinner party and be having completely different internal experiences.

1 and 6: Both worried, different object

These two are often confused because both tend toward anxiety, conscientiousness, and a strong internal critic. But the objects of concern are different.

A 1’s whiteboard fills up with questions about correctness: is this right, did I do that well enough, what’s the proper way to handle this? The internal standard is everything.

A 6’s whiteboard fills up with questions about safety and loyalty: can I trust this, what could go wrong, who’s actually in my corner?

The 1 is worried about integrity. The 6 is worried about security. One is scanning for errors. The other is scanning for threats.

2 and 9: Both accommodating, different motivation

On the surface, Twos and Nines can seem almost interchangeable—warm, other-focused, conflict-averse, and attuned to the people around them. But the whiteboard tells a different story.

A 2’s whiteboard fills up with relational attunement: what does this person need, am I valued here, how can I make myself indispensable? There’s an active, effortful quality to it.

A 9’s whiteboard fills up with the desire for peace and the avoidance of disruption: is everyone okay, can we just stay comfortable, what would happen if I said what I actually think?

The 2 is working hard to connect. The 9 is working hard to keep things undisturbed. One leans in. The other quietly disappears.

4 and 6: Both intense, different focus

Fours and Sixes don’t get compared as often, but they share an emotional intensity and a tendency toward introspection that can make them hard to tell apart, especially in women, who are often typed as 4 when they’re actually 6, or vice versa.

A 4’s whiteboard is filled with identity and meaning: who am I really, what is missing in me, why do I feel so different from everyone else? The gaze is inward and personal.

A 6’s whiteboard is filled with doubt and contingency: what if this goes wrong, who can I really trust, am I prepared enough? The gaze is outward and anticipatory.

One is trying to find themselves. The other is trying to find solid ground.

5 and 9: Both withdrawn, different reason

These two share a low-profile, non-demanding quality that can make them look nearly identical, especially in professional or group settings where neither tends to take up a lot of space. But the withdrawal comes from completely different places.

A 5’s whiteboard fills up with observation, analysis, and resource management: do I have enough energy for this, what do I actually know about this, I need to think before I speak. There’s a sense of careful conservation.

A 9’s whiteboard fills up with harmony and inertia: this doesn’t really concern me, I don’t want to make it worse, I’ll just go along.

The 5 withdraws to think. The 9 withdraws to avoid friction. One is protecting their mind. The other is protecting the peace.

8 and 3: Both dominant, different driver

Eights and Threes can both project power, confidence, and a take-charge presence that makes them easy to confuse, especially in leadership contexts. But look at the whiteboard and the difference is stark.

An 8’s fills up with control and justice: who has power here, is anyone being taken advantage of, am I being challenged or respected? The orientation is toward strength and protection.

A 3’s fills up with image and achievement: how am I performing, am I being seen as successful, what does this win mean for how I’m perceived?

The 8 wants to be uncontrollable. The 3 wants to be admirable. One leads from power. The other leads from image.

Why This Matters

The Enneagram is not a personality sorting hat. It’s a map of the human interior, specifically, a map of the ways we each get caught: the repetitive loops, the questions we can’t stop asking, the things we reach for when we’re scared or tired or just on autopilot.

Which means the most important question isn’t what do I do? It’s what does my mind keep coming back to?

You don’t have to excavate your childhood to find this. You just have to watch.

Watch what you think about in the shower. What your mind does when a conversation goes quiet. What you’re really asking yourself when you’re technically thinking about something else.

Your whiteboard is already full of information. You’ve just been looking at your behavior instead of reading it.

So if you’re still unsure of your type, put the quiz down for a minute. Give yourself a few days of honest observation. Not judgment, just noticing.

What keeps showing up?

That’s your type. And your whiteboard won’t lie.

With love and gratitude,

Katie

If you want a guided way to do this, I created a deck of Enneagram Typing Cards.

They’re not a quiz. There are no right answers and no scores to calculate. Instead, each card walks you through the internal landscape of a type—the focus of attention, the core fears, the questions that live underneath the behavior—so you can sit with each one and notice what actually resonates.

It’s the difference between being handed a result and finding your way to one yourself.

If you’ve been circling your type for a while, that distinction matters. Recognition is different from identification, and the cards are designed to get you to recognition.

You can find them here.

Here’s the thing about perfectionism that no one tells you at the beginning:

She’s a really good driver.

Smooth lane changes, never misses an exit, gets you where you’re going on time with a smile and a color-coded itinerary in the cupholder.

That’s the problem.

When something works, you keep using it. You don’t question it. You just keep handing her the keys.

For most of my life, I thought I was just a high achiever: driven, thorough, someone who cared.

I didn’t realize I had quietly organized my entire life around the feeling of: if I could just get it right… maybe I could finally feel enough.

I wasn’t living. I was managing my worth.

There’s a difference. It took me a long time to see it.

Perfectionism isn’t excellence. It’s fear dressed in excellence’s clothes.

And she is well-dressed, let me tell you. The blazer fits. The Louboutins say, “I’ve arrived.” You could absolutely be fooled. Most people are.

What most people don’t see is what’s underneath: a woman white-knuckling her way through a life that looks great on the outside and feels like a performance on the inside.

Your Mind Has a Whiteboard.

I’ve been teaching the Enneagram for years now, and the question I hear most from high-capacity women isn’t “what’s my type?”

It’s: why am I so tired?

The answer, almost always, lives in the same place.

The Enneagram isn’t a label. It’s a map of attention. It shows you what your mind has written in bold, and what never makes it up there at all.

Perfectionism lives in what your attention refuses to release.

And every single one of the nine types has a version of it.

Nine Types. One Root Fear.

The One over-corrects and finds the flaw in everything, especially herself.

The Two gives until she’s empty and then quietly wonders why no one gives back.

The Three becomes what works and loses track of who she is without it.

The Four tracks what’s missing and makes it mean something about who she is.

The Five prepares endlessly, waiting to feel ready.

The Six anticipates everything that could go wrong and calls it responsibility.

The Seven reframes pain into possibility before it has a chance to land.

The Eight carries everything alone and calls it strength.

The Nine keeps the peace and slowly disappears inside of it.

Different strategies. Same root.

I am only safe when I perform.

Perfectionism Was Doing Her Job.

This isn’t a flaw. It’s not something broken in you.

It’s a strategy you learned (brilliantly) to help you belong.

The perfectionist in you was doing her job.

She just doesn’t get to drive anymore.

You Don’t Need a New Personality.

You don’t need to become someone else. You need a new relationship with the one you’ve been.

You’ve mastered what Will Guidara calls “unreasonable hospitality.” You graciously extend it to your work, your people, your clients, your kids, your inbox.

Just not, typically, to yourself.

Here’s something I keep coming back to: the word authentic comes from the Greek authentikos meaning “original, genuine.” But trace it back further, and you find the root authentes: one who acts on their own authority.

The author of their own life.

We spend so much time performing for an invisible audience, managing perception, curating the version of ourselves that’s easiest to love, that we forget we were always meant to be the author of this story. Not the character. Not the narrator who hedges and qualifies. The author. The one who decides.

Perfectionism hands that pen to fear.

Authenticity takes it back.

So Here’s the Invitation

Not a full life overhaul. Not a new routine. Not a better planner.

Just one place this week where you tell the truth instead of performing it. One moment where you let something be enough.

Notice the strategy. Name the pattern. Then do the most radical thing a recovering perfectionist can do:

Author one new choice.

Not a perfect one. Not an optimized one. A true one.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

You are not the strategy you learned. You are the one who gets to decide what comes next. You always were.

With love,

Katie

Bloom. Glow up. Finally become the version of yourself you were apparently putting on hold all winter.

Except…you just spent three months being told to rest. And now the world wants you to burst into color on command?

Your nervous system would like a moment to adjust, actually. Please and thank you.

There’s something quietly miraculous about spring. Not the Instagram version, the real one.

The way flowers don’t just decide to bloom. They’ve been doing underground work for months. Roots deepening, energy gathering, and waiting for exactly the right conditions.

They don’t bloom because it’s time. They bloom because they’re ready.

And readiness looks different for everyone.

Spring self-care isn’t about performance. It’s not about overhauling your routine, your wardrobe, your wellness stack, or your entire personality because the calendar said April. It’s about emerging in your own way, at your own pace, and tending to what’s genuinely beginning to open in you, not what you think should be blooming by now.

So here is my Spring Self-Care Edit—a gentler invitation to step into the season, one honest exhale at a time.

1. Let the Thaw Be Gradual

You don’t have to be fully in bloom on the first warm day.

Spring is a process, not an event. There will be cold snaps (Nashville freeze, anyone?). There will be days when you feel more February than May. That’s not regression. That’s just how seasons actually work. They arrive unevenly, in fits and starts, until one morning the air just smells different and something in you loosens.

Give yourself the same grace the garden gets. You’re still emerging.

2. Open the Windows Before You Overhaul Your Life

The smallest acts of renewal matter most.

Let the fresh air in. Change the sheets. Move your body outside even once. Eat something green. These aren’t productivity hacks; they’re sensory invitations for your nervous system to register that something has shifted.

Big transformations are made of tiny recalibrations. Start there.

3. Let What Died in Winter Stay Dead

Not everything is meant to come back.

Some habits, relationships, thought patterns, and versions of yourself—they didn’t make it through the winter for a reason. Spring is not a mandatory revival. It’s a discernment practice.

What are you actually called back to? And what are you only returning to out of habit, or guilt, or fear of the space it would leave?

You’re allowed to let some things stay in the ground.

4. Tend the Things That Are Trying to Grow

Something in you is reaching toward the light right now.

It might be a creative project. A relationship. A boundary you’ve been meaning to draw. A desire you’ve been quietly starving. A version of yourself you haven’t quite let yourself become yet.

Spring self-care means giving that thing a little water; a little room. Not forcing it into full bloom, but not ignoring it either.

Notice what’s reaching. And reach back.

5. Move Like You’re Waking Up

Spring movement is different from winter movement. It has momentum.

Longer walks. Dancing in the kitchen. Getting back on the mat. Not because you owe your body transformation, but because your body has been winter-still and it remembers what it feels like to move for joy.

Let it remember.

6. Nourish for What’s Ahead

Winter nourishment was about warmth and grounding. Spring nourishment is about lightness and vitality, and the transition between them is its own kind of care.

Bright things. Fresh things. Color on a plate. Hydration that doesn’t feel like a chore. Food that makes you feel like you’re running with the season, not behind it.

7. Let Spring Be Emotional Too

Seasons don’t just change outside. They change inside.

Spring can surface unexpected feelings: restlessness, longing, hope that feels risky, grief for time that passed, excitement that feels almost embarrassing to admit. That’s not dysfunction. That’s aliveness.

Let yourself be moved by the season. That’s the point.

What Your Enneagram Type Needs This Spring

Because we don’t all emerge from winter the same way, and your type has something very specific to tell you about what renewal actually looks like for you.

Type 1 — The Improver

Spring for you can quickly become a to-do list in disguise.

Fix the house. Fix the routine. Fix yourself.

This season, your invitation is to let growth be organic, not optimized. One imperfect bloom is still a bloom. Put down the red pen. Let something be good enough in its becoming.

Type 2 — The Helper

You’ve spent winter giving warmth to everyone around you. Spring is your permission slip to turn some of that toward yourself.

What do you want to do with the longer days? What is asking to bloom in your own life, not in service of someone else’s? Water yourself first this season.

Type 3 — The Achiever

The urge to perform “spring”, to show up already transformed, already glowing, already running the 5K is real for you. But renewal isn’t a metric.

This season, try letting something grow without an audience. Do something that doesn’t make it to the highlight reel. Let your becoming be private for a little while.

Type 4 — The Romantic

Spring stirs something deep in you: longing, beauty, the bittersweet ache of things returning. You feel this season hard.

Your invitation is to let those feelings move through you without building a home in them. You don’t have to romanticize the melancholy. Let yourself bloom, too, not just feel the beauty of everyone else doing it.

Type 5 — The Investigator

Winter probably suited you fine, honestly. Spring asks you to come out a little. To let yourself be seen in your re-emergence, not just observed.

Your self-care this season might be less about input and more about presence: being in your body, in the warm air, in actual conversation, without immediately retreating to analyze it.

Type 6 — The Loyalist

Your nervous system is scanning for what could go wrong, even as the flowers open. That’s not a character flaw. It’s your whole operating system.

This spring, your self-care is learning to tolerate hope. To let good things be good without bracing for the catch. The sunshine is allowed to just be sunshine.

Type 7 — The Enthusiast

Spring is basically your Super Bowl. You want all of it; all the plans, all the experiences, all the new beginnings at once.

Your invitation this season is to go deep with one thing, not wide with everything. Real renewal isn’t always more. Sometimes it’s letting one good thing fully arrive before you’re already moving on to the next.

Type 8 — The Challenger

You’ve been holding things together all winter, yourself and probably a few other people too. Spring asks you to put some of that down.

Your self-care this season is softness. Not weakness, but the kind of strength that knows when to let things be tender. Let yourself be moved. Let spring be gentle with you.

Type 9 — The Peacemaker

You may have merged so quietly into winter that you’re not sure what you want spring to be. This is your season to practice preference. Not what’s easiest or what everyone else needs.

What do you want to wake up to? What is asking to grow in you specifically?

Spring is calling you by name. Answer.

Spring self-care isn’t about becoming a better version of yourself by May.

It’s about honoring the underground work you’ve already done and trusting that the roots held, that something real was happening even when nothing looked alive.

The flowers didn’t fail in winter. They were preparing.

And so were you.

Now bloom however you bloom, at whatever pace you bloom, and in whatever colors are actually yours.

With Love & Gratitude,

Katie

It was, genuinely, one of the best days I’ve had in a long time.

There is something about being in a room full of therapists — my people — that feels equal parts electric and grounding. The curiosity. The willingness to go there. The particular kind of humor that only develops when your job is to sit with human suffering for a living.

I always leave spaces like that with more energy than I came in with.

But what stayed with me this time wasn’t just what happened on stage.

It was what happened the night before.

A brief story I will be telling forever.

The night before the workshop, I ran into Dan Siegel.

Now, if you know me, you know I have been deeply, enthusiastically geeking out over his work on personality and wholeness. We’d actually met at this same conference the year before, which meant a baseline level of fan energy was already present and accounted for.

So I walked up to him, opened my mouth, and in one breath said:

“I’m teaching an Enneagram workshop tomorrow—”

And in the very next breath, with no pause, no transition, no apparent self-awareness:

“Please don’t come.”

Just. Out there.

He was gracious. He did not come (bless him). And the story made its way into the room the next morning and honestly, it might have been the most important moment of the whole day.

Because the room exhaled.

We laughed. A lot.

And something softened that made everything that came after land better.

Here’s what I think that moment was actually about.

We spend a lot of time in this field trying to be the most competent person in the room.

And competence matters, don’t get me wrong. You should know your stuff. You should keep learning. You should be able to hold the complexity.

But there is something that matters just as much, maybe more:

Staying human while you do it.

The best therapists I know aren’t the ones who have mastered the most models. They’re the ones who have stayed in honest, ongoing relationship with themselves, with their work, and with people who make them better.

Not just proximity. Not just colleagues you nod at in a hallway.

But relationships that challenge your thinking, expand your lens, and gently (or not so gently) call you out of autopilot.

Because here’s what I see over and over:

You can be deeply trained.

You can know the Enneagram. You can understand IFS. You can hold the theory beautifully.

And still hit moments in the room where you think—okay, but what do I actually do with this right now?

That gap doesn’t close through more information.

It closes through refinement in relationship.

Through talking cases. Through hearing how someone else would listen for it. Through being reminded (sometimes uncomfortably) of what your own patterns of attention are causing you to miss.

This work asks a lot of you. It asks you to stay present in the face of complexity, track multiple layers at once, and notice your own internal reactions while staying attuned to someone else’s.

Doing that day after day, client after client, without spaces where you get to be resourced?

It quietly wears you down.

Which is why what I’ll remember most about DC isn’t the content I taught.

It’s the conversations in between. The laughter. The oh, you see it that way too? moments. The sense of being among people who actually get it.

That’s the work behind the work.

If you’re using the Enneagram clinically, or wanting to, here’s what I’d offer:

Don’t just deepen your knowledge. Deepen your connections.

Seek out mentors, honest circles, fellow enthusiasts who will push back on you.

Let yourself be shaped by the people who challenge you, not just the ideas that inspire you.

And when you run into someone you deeply admire the night before a big moment, maybe just let yourself be a little human about it.

It tends to work out better than you think.

With love and gratitude,

Katie

Once we uncover the truth about our patterns—especially those hidden deep in our Enneagram type—it’s tempting to sit back and enjoy the wisdom. But wisdom without action is just information. Eventually, we have to shift from “knowing” to “being.”

By this stage in the journey, most of us find our groove. We’ve learned to live and move to the distinct tune of our type’s patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. We’re “doing the dance” within the context of our relationships, careers, marriages, and parenting. We know the steps.

But the music doesn’t always play the same tune forever.

When we encounter moments where our steps don’t sync, and the rhythm stops, the invitation becomes clear: It’s time to “do the work.”

If you’re anything like me, this usually starts with strong coffee and a “come to Jesus” talk—usually with myself, but sometimes with the people I love most.

The Story of the Mysterious Musician

Sometime in the early aughts, I was really feeling my false self. I was determined to make a career as an outstanding, celebrated Christian musician. Think cool, mysterious, and aloof… no bejeweled jeans allowed. I told myself I didn’t need anyone but Jesus (and autotune). Least of all, my higher self.

But a year or two into my Enneagram studies, the music stopped. I realized the music business honestly wasn’t what I wanted; I didn’t honestly love performing; and “honestly” wasn’t a word I used enough in conversation with myself. I came to find that there was no “audience of one.” I was auditioning on the stage of the world’s acceptance and love. And it felt intoxicating…until it didn’t.

We are all born honest. We are naked, crying out for what we need, dancing like nobody’s watching. But none of us stay that way.

How do we get back?

For me, the first step was having an honest conversation with myself, my loved ones, and my steadfast manager. I let the whole world down, but for once, I didn’t let myself down. I stepped out of the spotlight and into the truth.

The Anatomy of an Honest Conversation

How do we have those conversations with ourselves and others?

We stop doing the dance and asking for permission to be who we were meant to be.

Here’s what I mean:

1. The Trap of the False Self
   The “doing the dance” phase feels safe. It’s familiar. But it is often built on a false self that is trying to earn worth through performance. “Doing the work” means identifying when the dance is actually a prison.

2. Permission is a Myth
   We often wait for permission to change our lives—permission from our parents, our partners, society, or even our “inner critic.” The honest conversation requires realizing that you don’t need anyone’s permission to reclaim your truth. You just need to speak it.

3. Apologies can be Armor
   We often over-apologize because we fear rocking the boat. However, a life of service and leadership doesn’t require constant self-flagellation. You can speak your truth with love, not with an apology for existing.

4. The Medium Matters
   Not everyone is a talker. Some of us need to process through writing. This chapter explores alternative approaches that may be better for the “write-y” readers among us. Whether you write a letter you never send or draft a script, the goal is the same: getting it out of your head and into the light.

The Honest Conversation Starter Kit

Knowing is approximately thirty-three percent of the battle. The rest is action. To help you move from insight to transformation, here is a reflective exercise designed to help you name the patterns you’ve been stuck in and identify one honest conversation you’ve been avoiding.

Step 1: Name the Pattern
Be specific. Don’t just say “I’m a perfectionist.” Look at the behavior in real-time.

• What is the specific thought loop running in my head right now?

• What am I doing to try to manage the anxiety or fear underneath?

• Example: “I am checking my work five times before sending an email because I’m terrified of looking incompetent.”

Step 2: Identify the Unspoken Conversation
We often avoid conversations because the truth about what we need feels too big or too scary.

• What is the one thing I have been avoiding saying to myself, my partner, my boss, or my team?

• What would happen if I actually said it?

• Example: “I need to tell my boss I’m overwhelmed and that I need to take a day off, or I’m going to crash.”

Step 3: The First Step
Knowledge is power, but action is freedom. You don’t have to solve the whole problem today; you just have to take the first step.

• What is one small, brave action I can take this week to move from “knowing” to “doing”?

• Example: “I will draft the email to my boss and leave it in my drafts folder without sending it.”

If knowing is about thirty-five percent of the battle, the other sixty-five percent is the honest conversation.

Stop asking for permission. Stop apologizing for your needs. Stop dancing…well you know…in the stuck kind of way.

The world is waiting for your truth. Let’s get after it.

With love and gratitude,

Katie

I was twenty-two when I finally went to intensive therapy—which felt, at the time, both embarrassingly late and wildly urgent. After years of undiagnosed depression, disordered eating, and a few hospital visits, getting through the day felt like a grind.

I could smile. I could laugh. I could perform a version of myself that looked fine on the outside.

But inside, I felt…off.
Different.

Vacant.
Like I was waiting for the real me (the right me) to arrive.

I assumed the longing, the exhaustion, the overwhelm, the anxiety, the anorexia were just growing pains. I told myself that once I reached adulthood, I would finally become who I wanted to be: lovable, irresistible, kind, a little witty, maybe a touch mysterious (preferably the French kind).

I thought if I just worked hard enough, I could become someone worth being—worth loving.

The Day Everything Shifted

My youngest brother was born on my fifteenth birthday.

My mother spent the afternoon laboring in red lipstick and pearls (as one does).
I spent the afternoon wandering the hospital halls until I found a scale near the nurse’s station.

No one was looking. So I stepped on.

I was a perfectly normal weight for my height and build.

But normal and perfect felt like sworn enemies, especially to my Enneagram Four heart.

*(I didn’t know that at the time, and I sometimes wonder how much of that quiet agony I might have been spared if I had. Alas. I’ve learned to trust God’s timing.)

Meanwhile, my mother brought home a beautiful (screaming) baby boy. I brought home anorexia nervosa—which, in its own way, screamed just as loudly.

What I Was Really Trying to Control

For a long time, I believed my eating disorder was about my body.

But it wasn’t.

It was about trying to manage the unbearable feelings underneath:

• the fear of not being enough

• The desperate need to be seen

• the ache of feeling different

• the longing to belong

• the pressure to become someone worthy of love

Control gave me relief. Rules gave me structure.
Shrinking gave me a sense of safety.

Until, slowly, it didn’t.

The Unraveling, and the Beginning of Compassion

After years of ongoing recovery, I began to learn how to care for my body. We were getting along better, but the depression rudely hung on. One strange gift of being hospitalized in 2007 (other than the mashed potatoes) was that it gave me a lot of time to think about how I had gotten there.

I tried blaming everyone—from my parents to spiritual teachers I wished had shown up sooner to explain my inner world. (Richard Rohr, why’d you take so damn long?)

But eventually, the blame gave way to something much more honest:

I had been trying to survive.
To protect myself.
To be loved and seen…mostly by me.

When I began learning the Enneagram, something inside me softened.

As I read, a quiet little voice inside me started to speak up. She was shy, but she was clear. A dominant Type Four—the Romantic. For the first time, I felt a strange, steady sense of recognition.

“Oh. There are others who feel like this too.”

I wasn’t broken. I wasn’t wrong for feeling deeply, for longing, for searching.

The Enneagram didn’t excuse my behaviors.
But it helped me understand them.

And in that understanding, something new emerged:

The very beginning of self-compassion.

What the Enneagram Can Offer in Recovery

Eating disorders don’t develop in a vacuum. They are adaptive strategies (often brilliant ones) for managing pain, fear, and unmet needs.

The Enneagram helps us gently uncover:

• what we were trying to secure (love, safety, belonging, significance)

• what we were trying to avoid (rejection, shame, loss, chaos)

• the emotional patterns that shaped our relationship with our bodies

For some of us, it’s perfectionism.
For others, it’s self-sacrifice.
It’s control. It’s numbing. It’s identity.

When we can see the deeper story, we can begin to meet those needs in ways that don’t require us to harm ourselves in the process.

Creating A Life We Don’t Need to Escape From

Recovery, for me, was not just about food. It was about creating a life that felt safe enough to live in.

A life where my body wasn’t an enemy, where my emotions weren’t something to outrun, and where my worth wasn’t negotiated through numbers or rules.

The Enneagram was one of many tools that helped me build that kind of life—one where I could move from surviving to actually living.

It took time, support, honesty.
And yes, it took grit.

But it also took something softer:

The willingness to believe I was worthy of care.

If This Is Part of Your Story Too

If you are quietly struggling right now—or loudly struggling, or somewhere in between—I want you to hear this:

You are not broken.
You are not shallow.
You are not weak.

You are a human being who learned a way to cope with something that felt overwhelming.

And you deserve support as you learn a different way.

There is life on the other side of this.

A life where:

• food is just food

• your body is a home, not a project

• your energy is freed up for relationships, creativity, purpose, and joy

• your identity is rooted in something far deeper than appearance or performance

I have seen that life. I have lived that life.
And I have had the privilege of walking with many women as they find their way there too.

What Awareness Means

Eating Disorder Awareness Week is not just about information. It’s about compassion.

It’s about understanding that behind every behavior is a story that made sense at the time. And it’s about remembering that those stories can change.

If you’re ready—gently, slowly, in your own time—you can begin to write a new one.

One where you are not at war with yourself. One where you are on your own side.

—

With deep compassion for every version of you that has tried to keep you safe,

Katie

That’s how behavior patterns work.

Something novel, something new, starts out with promise. We like it. There’s a payoff, a positive connection, a dopamine hit. So we do it again.

Over time, those behaviors become ingrained. A pattern forms, along with millions of neural pathways that reinforce it. Eventually, we become so locked into this way of being that it’s difficult to steer in a different direction. Often, an addiction is born.

In our overstimulated, overworked, under-loved world, it’s completely normal to self-soothe, and very easy to lean too hard on those routines. Trust me, I’ve been there.

In my experience, the Enneagram can be immensely helpful in identifying, understanding, and ultimately interrupting these patterns, shifting us toward more conscious, practiced living.

How I Learned to Interrupt the Pattern

One great thing about being hospitalized with clinical depression back in 2007 (other than the mashed potatoes) was that it gave me loads of time to think about how I had gotten there. I tried blaming everyone—from my parents to Richard Rohr (why didn’t you show up sooner?). But blaming Richard Rohr is never the answer. Ultimately, I needed to create a safe environment and make my world a place where I could live instead of just survive. The Enneagram is one of many tools that helped me do that.

It helped me see who I was at my core, how my patterns were protective mechanisms that didn’t serve me anymore, and that I could take ownership of my own healing. The Enneagram helped me feel understood and seen (hello, type 4!)

Loops for Each Enneagram Type

Each type has a familiar loop, a patterned way of coping that once helped, but eventually keeps us stuck. Here are the common cycles I see:

Type One — The Perfection Loop
Notice what’s wrong → feel tension and responsibility → work harder to fix it → become more critical → lose access to ease and joy → notice what’s wrong again.

Type Two — The Helping Loop
Sense others’ needs → give care and attention → ignore personal needs → feel unseen or unappreciated → give more to restore connection → lose yourself in the process.

Type Three — The Performing Loop
Set a goal → adapt to succeed → achieve and receive affirmation → disconnect from authentic feelings → chase the next achievement → equate worth with doing.

Type Four — The Longing Loop
Notice what’s missing → turn inward to feelings → intensify emotional experience → compare and feel different → withdraw or dramatize → reinforce the sense of lack.

Type Five — The Withdrawing Loop
Perceive demands → conserve energy → retreat into thinking or observing → detach from engagement → feel depleted by interaction → withdraw further.

Type Six — The Doubting Loop
Scan for risk → question self and surroundings → seek certainty → find more ambiguity → increase vigilance → struggle to trust inner guidance.

Type Seven — The Escaping Loop
Feel discomfort → seek stimulation or options → stay busy and future-focused → avoid pain → feel scattered or unsatisfied → seek the next experience.

Type Eight — The Control Loop
Sense vulnerability → assert strength → take charge → resist dependence → escalate intensity → protect against softness.

Type Nine — The Numbing Loop
Feel tension or conflict → disengage from priorities → merge with comfort or others’ agendas → delay action → lose clarity and energy → disengage further.

Together, we can begin to notice these patterns with compassion and practice creating new openings, small, intentional shifts that move us toward presence, choice, and love that honors our naked selves.

Let’s get curious…

The next time you feel the pull of a familiar pattern, try this: pause, notice, breathe.
What are you feeling in your body?
What story is your mind telling?
What would it look like to choose a response that feels new, gentle, and slightly unfamiliar? What are you afraid would happen if this pattern wasn’t running the show?

With love and gratitude,

Katie

What we often label as “overreacting” or “being too sensitive” usually isn’t about the present moment at all. It’s about the past knocking on the door of the now.

Here’s the thing most of us were never taught: trauma doesn’t just happen to us, it happens in us.

Even when we can’t point to a single defining event. Even when our childhood “wasn’t that bad.” Even when we’ve done years of work.

Our bodies remember what our minds learned to survive.

The Nervous System Is the First Storyteller

Long before we had language, logic, or LinkedIn profiles, our nervous systems were busy gathering data:

• Is it safe to need?

• Is it okay to take up space?

• Will I be loved if I’m honest?

• What do I need to do to belong?

Those early conclusions didn’t stay in childhood. They followed us into friendships, marriages, boardrooms, leadership roles, and midlife pivots we never saw coming.

As adults, we may no longer be in danger, but our bodies don’t always know that. So we default to survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Not because we’re broken, but because something in us learned, this is how I stay safe.

As Bessel van der Kolk famously said, “The body keeps the score.”
And sometimes, it keeps it louder than we’d like.

Enter the Enneagram: A Sacred Mirror, Not a Label

This is where the Enneagram becomes far more than a personality system. It’s a map of the adaptive strategies we developed to survive and stay connected.

Each Enneagram type reflects a particular way the nervous system learned to answer the question: How do I get love, safety, and belonging here?

• Type Ones learned that goodness and correctness create safety.

• Type Twos learned that love is earned through being needed.

• Type Threes discovered that performance secures approval.

• Type Fours sensed that being different was the price of being seen.

• Type Fives learned to retreat inward to preserve energy and autonomy.

• Type Sixes realized vigilance and loyalty reduce danger.

• Type Sevens discovered that staying ahead of pain keeps despair at bay.

• Type Eights learned that strength prevents vulnerability from being used against them.

• Type Nines decided that minimizing themselves keeps connection intact.

These aren’t flaws.
They’re trauma-informed adaptations—brilliant, creative, life-saving strategies that worked once.

The trouble comes when we keep using them long after they’re needed.

How This Shows Up in Relationships (and at Work)

This is why the same patterns keep looping, both romantically and professionally.

Why a Type Two overfunctions at home and in leadership roles.
Why a Type Three feels secretly unlovable when they stop achieving.
Why a Type Six struggles to trust their own authority in the room.
Why a Type Nine avoids conflict with a partner and avoids naming their ideas at work.

Our Enneagram type doesn’t clock out when we enter the office. And our trauma doesn’t disappear just because we’ve been promoted.

In corporate workshops, I see this constantly: incredibly capable, intelligent adults being hijacked by unconscious survival strategies. Not because they lack skill, but because an old story is running the meeting.

And in midlife? These patterns often get louder.

Transitions—divorce, career shifts, aging parents, children leaving home, bodily changes—strip away the structures that once held us together. The strategies that worked in our twenties or thirties start to fray. What once felt effective now feels exhausting.

This is often the moment people come to me and say, “I don’t know what’s wrong. I just know I can’t keep doing it this way.”

Integration Isn’t Fixing, It’s Listening

Healing doesn’t start with self-improvement. It starts with self-attunement.

When your body tightens in a conversation, can you pause long enough to ask:
What part of me is trying to protect me right now?

When your Enneagram pattern flares under stress, can you notice it with curiosity instead of shame?

This is where real integration happens, when the wisdom of the body and the clarity of the Enneagram meet.

One without the other is incomplete.

Talk therapy alone can name the pattern. Body-based work helps release it.

The most transformative work I’ve seen (and practiced) combines Internal Family Systems (IFS) with Brainspotting—a brain/body-based trauma modality that reaches far deeper than words. Together, they help us access the places where adaptation began and gently invite those parts back into the present.

From Wound to Wonder

Healing trauma isn’t about erasing the past or transcending your Enneagram type.
It’s about reclaiming choice.

Choice in how you show up in relationships. Choice in how you lead. Choice in how you respond instead of react.

When we stop living exclusively from the wound, we make room for the wonder of who we actually are beneath the strategies, beneath the armor, beneath the story we had to tell to survive.

If you’ve ever found yourself whispering,
“I wonder what happened to me…”
you’re not broken. You’re waking up.

With love & deep gratitude,

Katie

Want more therapy insight? Follow along on Instagram.

New year, new habits.
New planner.
New body.
New you.

Except… your nervous system would actually like a nap.

According to the Gregorian calendar, the one most of us are living by, whether we consented or not, January sits at the very beginning of the year. But energetically? Seasonally? Biologically?

January is not a starting line.
It’s a clearing.
A pause.
The quiet stretch of land before anything blooms again.

February is where beginnings stir.
January is where we rest.

In Wintering, Katherine May reminds us that

“winter is not a failure of productivity—it’s a necessary retreat. A season for conservation. For tending the inner fire.”

And honestly? That feels like permission many of us didn’t know we needed.

So instead of treating winter like something to push through, what if we let it teach us how to be?

Here’s my Winter Self-Care Edit—a gentler guide to staying warm, resourced, and human while the world tells you to optimize your life before your coffee’s even brewed.

1. Embrace the Slower Clock

Winter mornings aren’t meant to be rushed.

Let the light come in when it comes.
Sit with your coffee while it’s still hot.
Stare out a window.
Do one thing at a time.

Productivity will still be there later. I promise.

Think of January as the inhale before February’s exhale.

2. Warmth Is Care

This is not the season for cold plunges unless you genuinely love them (in which case, I respect you… from afar).

Think soups that simmer all afternoon.
Wool socks.
Heating pads.
Baths that feel borderline ceremonial.

Care in winter is about warming what has gone numb—hands, hearts, hope.

3. Move Like You’re Conserving Energy

Winter movement is quieter.
More intentional.

Stretching before bed.
Long walks bundled up like a toddler.
Gentle yoga.
Strength that supports you rather than depletes you.

This is not the season to punish your body into transformation.
It’s the season to listen.

4. Let Rest Be Productive

Rest isn’t something you earn after you’ve done “enough.”

Rest is the work of winter.

Early nights.
Cancelled plans.
Empty weekends.

These aren’t signs you’re falling behind; they’re signs you’re aligned with the season you’re actually in.

Nature isn’t blooming right now.
Neither do you have to.

5. Nourish Deeply (Not Perfectly)

Winter nourishment looks hearty, grounding, and forgiving.

Root vegetables.
Stews.
Bread with real butter.
Food that makes you feel held.

This is not the time for moralizing meals.
It’s the time for eating in a way that helps you feel steady and warm enough to keep going.

6. Shrink the World a Little

Winter is allowed to be small.

Fewer social commitments.
A shorter to-do list.
More time with people who feel safe.

You don’t need to be everywhere.
You need to be somewhere, and preferably somewhere cozy.

7. Tend the Inner Life

Read slowly.
Journal without fixing anything.
Light a candle for no reason other than it makes the room feel kinder.

Winter is for reflection, not reinvention.

Let yourself notice what’s been asking for your attention all year.

8. Honor the Quiet Emotions

Winter can surface things we’ve outrun—
grief, fatigue, longing, tenderness.

You don’t need to rush these feelings toward resolution.

As Wintering reminds us: this is a season to endure, to soften, to trust that life is still happening underground—even when nothing looks alive yet.

Winter self-care isn’t about becoming a better version of yourself before spring arrives.

It’s about staying with yourself through the dark.
Keeping the fire lit.
Trusting that rest is not the opposite of growth, it’s the prerequisite.

February will come.
The thaw will happen.

For now, let yourself be winter.

Preferably wrapped in a blanket, holding something warm, with nowhere urgent to be.

With Love & Gratitude,

Katie

“No prison is more secure than the one you don’t know you’re in.”

— William Shakespeare

Which is, frankly, an incredibly rude thing for Shakespeare to say.

Also devastatingly accurate.

What I think Big Willy was circling is the false self, that adaptive, conditioned little person we build very early on to secure love, attention, and belonging from the people we depend on.

This self is not dishonest.

It is brilliant.

Before we have language or any real sense of who we are, our nervous systems are already writing a survival script.

Smile more.
Be helpful.
Don’t need too much.
Be impressive.
Be agreeable.
Be strong.
Be special.

And because these strategies work, because they keep us connected, protected, included, we keep using them.

Eventually, we build a personality around them.

A character.

And one day, quietly, without noticing, we forget we’re playing a role.

Sometimes the most convincing performance is the one we give ourselves.

The performance we mistake for a personality

Over time, the line between living and performing becomes… fuzzy.

We become very good at being who we think we’re supposed to be.

And very tired.

The Enneagram doesn’t just tell us who we are.

It gently invites us to step out of the spotlight
and back into ourselves.

As a quintessential Four, the character I played in my formative years was called “Special.”

I identified as misunderstood, unreachable, and maybe a little superior.
Basically, a card-carrying member of The Breakfast Club.

My false self, like many, seemed harmless at first.

It was not.

The false self is not who you are.
It’s who you once had to become.

The day my false self learned to scream

My youngest brother, Gates, was born on my fifteenth birthday.

My mother spent the afternoon laboring in red lipstick, pearls, and a chignon, obviously.

I spent the afternoon skulking aimlessly around the hospital.

Until I found a scale by the nurse’s station.

No one was looking, so I stepped on.

I was a perfectly normal weight for my height and build.

“Normal” and “perfect,” however, were my sworn enemies.

My mother brought home a screaming baby boy.

I brought home anorexia nervosa, which, in its own way, screamed just as loudly.

The personality trap

This is what I mean by the personality trap.

Across all nine Enneagram types, I see this again and again:

A moment, sometimes dramatic, sometimes painfully ordinary, when the nervous system learns a story about love, safety, or belonging.

And then builds a personality to protect it.

For Ones, the trap often sounds like:
If I’m good enough, nothing bad will happen.

For Twos:
If I’m needed, I won’t be left.

For Threes:
If I succeed, I’ll finally be loved.

For Fours (hello, old friend):
If I’m special, I’ll belong.

For Fives:
If I stay self-sufficient, I’ll be safe.

For Sixes:
If I stay prepared, nothing will fall apart.

For Sevens:
If I stay positive, I won’t have to feel the pain.

For Eights:
If I stay strong, no one can hurt me.

For Nines:
If I stay easy, I won’t be abandoned.

None of these are character flaws.

They are survival strategies.

They formed around something tender.

Your personality did not form randomly.
It formed around a wound.

Why your patterns make so much sense

I tell my clients this all the time:

Your coping strategies are not evidence that something is wrong with you.
They are evidence that something once mattered very much.

The Enneagram doesn’t shame us for this.

It simply says, very kindly,
Ah. Of course you learned that.

Like Macy — a Type One physician, wife, and mother who carried a quiet conviction that it was her job to fix everything and everyone.

When she finally named the childhood belief underneath it — If I don’t hold it all together, everything will fall apart — she didn’t lose her integrity.

She gained her freedom.

Or Jackie — a Type Seven designer on the brink of divorce, spinning her bright, tasteful little wheels trying to outrun the unbearable pain of disconnection in her marriage.

When she stopped running long enough to grieve, joy finally stopped feeling like a performance.

This is the work.

Not becoming someone new.
Not fixing yourself.

But understanding the story that shaped you
and deciding whether it still deserves the final word.

How to tell if a story is true

Here is a small checklist I’ve come to rely on when I’m trying to discern whether a belief is wisdom…

…or simply a very old fear in a trench coat.

You might try it too.

When a belief shows up, about yourself, about love, about God, about the world, gently ask:

• Is this belief kind?

• Is it grounded in the present, or borrowed from the past?

• Does it expand me, or shrink me?

• Does it invite me toward connection… or toward control?

• And maybe the most important question of all:
  Is this who I truly am — or who I once had to be?

You don’t have to answer quickly.

The true self is patient.

Healing does not begin with changing your personality.
It begins with telling yourself the truth kindly.

A gentle invitation

How do we find the courage to call “Cut!” when we’re giving the performance of a lifetime?

How do we save our dowdy, old true selves from our fabulous false ones?

Slowly.

With curiosity and compassion.
And the growing suspicion that maybe you were never broken in the first place.

The true self has been waiting very patiently for you to come home.

With love & gratitude,

Katie

The moment when learning your type felt like oxygen.
Like finally being seen.
Like freedom.

I remember my own early days with the Enneagram vividly. I was borderline fanatical. I talked about it constantly. I evangelized it to strangers. The Enneagram could do no wrong. It smelled amazing. It never wore socks with Birkenstocks.

I finally knew who I was, and oh, the relief.

But eventually, something quieter (and more uncomfortable) surfaced.

Knowing who I was didn’t explain why I reacted the way I did.
It didn’t soften my sharp edges.
It didn’t magically heal my old patterns.
And it certainly didn’t keep me from repeating the same relational loops.

That’s when I realized something essential:

The true power of the Enneagram isn’t found in “Who am I?”
It’s found in “Why am I like this?”

The Pain Point No One Talks About

This is the place many Enneagram-loving, growth-oriented women find themselves:

• You know your type (or a few you resonate with)

• You understand your patterns intellectually

• You can explain your coping strategies beautifully

…and yet:

• You still feel triggered

• You still feel reactive

• You still feel stuck in familiar pain

If this sounds like you, nothing has gone wrong.

You’ve simply reached the edge of type awareness and the doorway into story work.

The Abandonment Story (We All Have One)

Across all nine Enneagram types, there’s a common thread I see again and again in my work:

A core childhood wound—real or perceived—where something essential felt unsafe, unavailable, or unreliable.

This is often where an abandonment story forms.

Not always abandonment in the literal sense, but a moment where the nervous system learned something like:

• My needs are too much.

• My presence doesn’t matter.

• I’m loved for what I do, not who I am.

• I have to stay strong to be safe.

Over time, that story becomes the bedrock of how we see ourselves, others, and the world.

It quietly answers questions like:

• How do I belong?

• How do I stay safe?

• What do I need to do to be loved?

And then, brilliantly, unconsciously, our Enneagram type develops around protecting us from that wound.

Why Your Patterns Make Sense

I often tell clients this:

Your coping strategies aren’t flaws.
They’re evidence of intelligence.

They formed in response to something tender.

For me, that tenderness traces back to losing my grandmother to breast cancer (my safe place, my nurturer, my sense of belonging) when I was just four years old. Long before I had language for it, my nervous system learned a devastating lesson: the ones you need can disappear.

Decades later, thanks in part to my own breast cancer journey, I realized I was still waiting for her to come back and make it better.

That realization didn’t break me, it freed me.

Because once you understand the story underneath the strategy, you can stop shaming yourself for surviving.

From Type to Transformation

I see this shift in the therapy office all the time.

Like Noelle, a Type Nine trauma therapist who lost her mother to suicide at age four. Without ever consciously deciding it, she carried a belief for decades that her presence didn’t matter. Naturally, she poured herself into helping others heal.

When she finally named that story, not as truth, but as an adaptation, everything changed. She didn’t abandon her type. She reclaimed her agency.

That’s the work.

Not becoming someone new.
Not fixing yourself.
But understanding the story that shaped you and deciding whether it still deserves the final word.

A Gentle Invitation

If you’ve been circling the Enneagram for a while and wondering why it hasn’t gone deep enough yet, this may be your next step:

Move from identifying your type
to exploring your story.

Ask yourself:

• What did I learn about love early on?

• What did I learn about safety?

• What belief have I been living from without questioning it?

You don’t need to rush.
You don’t need to relive everything.
You just need curiosity and compassion.

You are not broken.
Your patterns make sense.
And your story is not finished.

There is more available to you than survival.
And you don’t have to walk back to yourself alone.

It’s time to rewrite the script.

Love & Gratitude,

Katie

P.S. I am hosting a free webinar on January 13th called An Unhurried Start–an Enneagram-informed session to pause, reflect and notice what you’re carrying into the year ahead. I’d love for you to join us.

Not just tired in the I need a nap way, but tired in our nervous systems.

The kind of fatigue that comes from weeks (or months) of anticipating needs, managing logistics, holding emotions, making space, smoothing edges, staying “on,” and showing up again and again.

The holidays ask a lot of us.
And for many women, that asking doesn’t stop once the decorations come down.

There’s a particular strain that comes from constant attunement—reading rooms, tracking expectations, anticipating reactions, carrying emotional weight that often goes unnamed.

Our bodies register this long before our minds do.

Tight shoulders.
Shallow breathing.
A low-grade hum of anxiety.
A sense that rest never quite reaches us.

From a nervous system perspective, this makes sense.

When we’re repeatedly mobilized (planning, hosting, caretaking, performing, producing), our systems stay in a state of activation. Even joyful moments can be taxing when there’s no space to settle afterward.

Over time, the body doesn’t distinguish between “good stress” and “bad stress.”
It just knows it hasn’t been allowed to land.

January Doesn’t Need to Fix You

And then January arrives.

A new year.
A clean slate.
Resolutions. Resets. Fixes.

But here’s the thing I’ve come to believe, both personally and professionally:

The new year is not the time to fix yourself.

After seasons of output, the nervous system doesn’t need a reboot, it needs permission.

Permission to slow.
Permission to soften.
Permission to notice what’s actually present beneath the momentum.

This is why I prefer intentions over resolutions.

Resolutions often come from urgency. From the subtle (or not-so-subtle) belief that something is wrong and needs correcting.

Intentions, on the other hand, invite relationship.

They ask us to listen before we act.
To orient toward how we want to be, not just what we want to do.

Intentions leave room for curiosity.
For gentleness.
For change that unfolds instead of demands.

A Softer Way Into Change

In Enneagram language, this matters deeply.

Each of us has a default way of moving through the world, patterns that once helped us cope, belong, succeed, or stay safe.

Under stress, those patterns tighten.

We grip harder.
We move faster.
We revert to what’s familiar.

The new year doesn’t require us to abandon those patterns through sheer willpower.

It invites us to notice them.

To become curious about what’s driving us.
To gently open to something new, instead of forcing transformation from the outside in.

Renewal rarely comes through pressure.
It comes through presence.

This is slower work.
Quieter work.
And often, braver work.

It asks us to pause long enough to feel what we’re carrying.

To acknowledge what the holidays stirred up—grief, joy, resentment, longing, relief, fatigue—without needing to label it productive or unproductive.

To let the body exhale before the mind makes a plan.

An Invitation

If you’re sensing the need for a softer beginning this year, I want to offer a space for that.

On Tuesday, January 13, I’m hosting a free, 60-minute live Zoom gathering called:

An Unhurried Start
An Enneagram-Informed New Year Gathering

This isn’t about resolutions or reinvention.

It’s a quiet, grounded pause.
A chance to reflect, settle, and orient yourself toward the year ahead with care.

No Enneagram knowledge required.
No pressure to perform or participate beyond what feels supportive.

You’re welcome to come exactly as you are, and to invite anyone who might benefit from a gentle start.

If this feels like the kind of beginning your nervous system has been asking for, I’d love to have you there.

👉 You can learn more and register here: An Unhurried Start

With love and gratitude,
Katie

I learned it in an interior design office where my boss and her identical twin sister talked about it the way most people talk about their favorite Netflix show—loudly, constantly, and with extremely confident opinions.

At the time, I was a deeply insecure, deeply striving twenty-something who had somehow charmed my way into an assistant role I wasn’t qualified for… except for my undying love of good design. I was good at many things (pretending, performing, perfectionism, people-pleasing), but not necessarily the job in front of me.

So when the twins started speaking in what felt like a secret language….

“Well, she’s such a Three.”
“He’s definitely a Nine.”

…I rolled my eyes. Hard.

I assumed this was just another cheesy personality typing system that might tell me I was “organized” (fat chance) or “creative,” as if those labels could explain why my inner world felt like a haunted house most days.

But after a few weeks, I got tired of being the only one who didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. So I did what any self-conscious Xillenial in 2006 would do:

I ordered a book off Amazon.
(Back when Amazon was just… a bookstore. Not a spaceship hobby.)

The book was Richard Rohr’s The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective. When it arrived, I sat on my bed, cracked it open, and within a few pages, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years:

Recognition.

Not the ego kind.
Oh, look at me, I’m special and interesting and unique.

No.

The deeper kind.
The kind that whispers:
Hey… this is you. Not the you you’re performing. The you underneath.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but the Enneagram was introducing me to a subtle, life-altering truth:

It’s not about killing the ego.
It’s about befriending it.
It’s about learning how ego and essence can dance, not compete.

Ego: The Version of You That Learned to Survive

Before I became a therapist, before the letters behind my name or the office with the soft chairs and the plants I pretend not to be killing, I was just a girl trying to make sense of herself.

For me, that meant years of depression, anorexia, changing jobs like Brita filters, and an Olympic-level commitment to standing out.

Look different.
Be different.
Stay different.
Maybe if I were exceptional enough, I’d finally feel at home.

When I read Rohr’s description of the Type Four, the romantic, the meaning-maker, the emotional deep-diver, I felt something inside me unclench.

It didn’t excuse my struggles, but it explained them. It named a truth I’d been circling for years:

My suffering wasn’t a personal failure.
It was a strategy.
A brilliant one.
A protective one.

Ego gets a bad rap, as if it’s the villain blocking our way to enlightenment. But ego is simply the part of us that learned how to protect our tenderness. It built scaffolding around our core fear. It helped us make sense of a world that felt too big and too sharp.

Ego isn’t “less than.”
It’s just not the whole story.

The work isn’t to destroy it, it’s to bring it into consciousness.
To let it become a tool rather than the driver.

Essence: The Version of You That’s Been Waiting (Patiently, I Might Add)

There’s a moment everyone encounters when they start this work. I call it the “WTF Moment.”

As in:

WTF… that’s me.
WTF… how long have I been living like this?
WTF… who am I underneath all these strategies?

In that moment, you’re not discovering something new. You’re remembering something ancient.

Essence isn’t something you find.
It’s something you uncover.

It’s the you that exists without armor, without achievement, without contortion. The quiet, steady self that’s been patiently waiting for enough space to speak.

But here’s the part we don’t say enough:

Essence doesn’t replace ego.
Essence informs ego.
It softens it, redirects it, heals it.

Ego gives us structure.
Essence gives us meaning.

We need both.
We just need to stop confusing which one should be in charge.

Megan, Doritos, and the Art of Becoming Whole

One of the women I write about in the book, Megan, is a beautiful example of ego integrated with essence.

Megan is a Type Six with a twin sister who is the quintessential Seven: charismatic, unpredictable, the life of the party. The kind of sister who lights up every room and has a laugh people recap at brunch.

Megan spent years orbiting her sister’s personality like a little moon desperate for the sun’s warmth.
She checked every decision with her.
Needed constant reassurance.
Never felt steady unless her sister was within arm’s reach.

On top of that, she spiraled into a punishing eating disorder because when you’re untethered from yourself, you grasp for control anywhere you can find it.

But when Megan learned her type (really learned it) something shifted.

She realized she’d outsourced her self-trust so long she barely recognized her own voice. She confused dependence for connection. She starved herself of both food and belonging.

As she grew toward essence, she did things like:

• trusting her internal compass

• eating the damn Dorito

• setting boundaries with the twin she adored

She didn’t abandon her ego; she re-parented it.
She let essence steady the parts of her that were tired of holding it together.

She didn’t become someone new.
She became someone whole.

That’s the work.
That’s the invitation.
That’s the wonderful, terrifying homecoming of the Enneagram.

The Path Back to Yourself

If you’re reading this, maybe you’ve felt that tug, that sense that the life you’ve built, while beautiful, might feel a little too constructed… a little too “together”… or just disconnected.

A little too directed by ego and not quite enough guided by essence.

You don’t need to blow anything up.
You don’t need to fix yourself.

You just need to get curious.

Curious about your patterns, your narratives, your coping strategies, your longings. Curious about the version of you who exists underneath the strategies that once kept you safe.

The Enneagram doesn’t ask you to choose between ego and essence.

It teaches you integration:

Ego finally gets to rest.
Essence gets to lead.
And both parts work together in a way that feels spacious, humane, and real.

You don’t become anything.
You remember everything.

Try This

Here are the journal prompts from the end of this chapter offered to you as a starting place:

• What parts of your personality feel like they were born out of survival?

• Where in your life do you notice yourself performing instead of being?

• How does your ego protect you, and where might that protection be outdated?

• If essence led today, what part of you might finally exhale?

Save them. Sit with them. They’re uncomfortable, but so is every great awakening.

And if you’re craving a community to do this work with, one grounded in honesty, not performance, stick around. There’s more coming soon.

Here’s to the journey back home.
To essence.
To ego (in its rightful place).
To the real you.

With love and gratitude,

Katie

Not your Enneagram type.
Not your bank balance.
Not your jeans size.

It’s something far more elusive:

Enough.

We want to be enough, have enough, know enough, do enough, impress enough. Enough feels reasonable from far away… and yet up close it’s slippery, like trying to grab fog with your bare hands.

So we go hunting.

More certifications.
More green smoothies.
More “high-level containers” with monthly payments the size of a Honda Civic.
More therapy TikToks.
More. More. More.

But here’s the sacred, inconvenient truth I keep bumping into in therapy rooms, women’s circles, leadership groups, and yes, even around well-curated dinner tables:

The way to “enough” isn’t addition. It’s subtraction.

Not becoming more, but becoming less.
Less armored.
Less performative.
Less hustled.

And this is where the Enneagram arrives like a quiet revolution.

It doesn’t ask you to optimize.
It asks you to shed.

Why subtraction feels rebellious

The Enneagram is a peeling-back, not a polishing-up. It removes the unnecessary layers so you can remember the you beneath the persona.

In a culture obsessed with the shimmering promise of “more,” this feels almost criminal. We’re conditioned to curate ourselves:

We filter, edit, and rebrand.
We inject and contour.
We build identities out of aesthetics and aspiration.

So when I say the Enneagram exists to unearth you, not enhance you, people look at me like I’m telling them to throw out their skincare routine. It is intentionally counter-cultural.

Because here’s the radical idea buried at the heart of this tool:

You already have everything you need.
The work is stripping away what is false.

The opposite of home isn’t distance—it’s forgetfulness.

Elie Wiesel wrote that. It rings in my bones.

We don’t lose ourselves because we’re careless.
We lose ourselves because we adapt.

We become the strong one, the capable one, the charming one, the spiritual one, the “doesn’t need anything” one.
We trade authenticity for acceptance.

And after a while, the strategy becomes the persona.
We forget the Self we once knew by heart.

That’s why I always say:

The Enneagram doesn’t tell you who you are.
It shows you where you’ve forgotten yourself.

It doesn’t hand you a label.
It offers you a trailhead.
And if you actually walk it, it becomes a homecoming.

An embarrassing story from my Romantic History Annals (how perfection brok me)

When I was deep in my “trainwreck twenties,” I fell for a man who looked like he was built in a lab to match my curated identity.

He quoted authors I never finished.
He watched documentaries that no human voluntarily chooses.
He used the word “policy” in casual conversation.

Within minutes, my nervous system whispered:
Not interesting enough.
Not cultured enough.
Not whatever-he-just-said enough.

So naturally, I did the thing women are praised for doing:
I masked harder.

Charm? Maxed out.
Talent? On display.
Endurance? Unlimited (apparently)

I curated my way through the entire relationship like I was auditioning for a role I didn’t even want.

And eventually, it cracked.

When the performance collapsed, I was left with a brutal question:

Who was I without the applause?

That crack was the doorway into subtraction—messy, vulnerable, terrifying subtraction.
But it made room for the real me.
Not the impressive one.
The human one.

Motherhood will rip your persona off like a Band-Aid

Parenting exposes your unconscious strategies faster than any therapy modality.

Kids don’t care who you impressed.
They care if you’re actually there.

Becoming a mom at 40 burned away the illusion that perfection = safety.
I couldn’t curate my way into connection.
I couldn’t optimize into attachment.

Some days, the best I could offer was honesty:

“I’m overwhelmed.”
”I’m grieving who I used to be.”
”I’m learning in real time.”

And yet, I feel more myself than ever.

Not because I added anything.
Because motherhood subtracted everything that wasn’t real.

Why the Enneagram matters now

We are drowning in strategies of addition:

More achievement.
More side hustles.
More tasks disguised as healing.

The Enneagram isn’t here to make you more.
It’s here to bring you back to less.

Less striving.
Less shape-shifting.
Less pretending.

It helps us recognize the strategies that kept us safe but now keep us small.
It invites us into the Self that existed before the performance.

It looks us straight in the eyes and says:

“You were never lost.
You simply forgot.”

And remembering, slow, embodied, unclenched remembering, is how we come home.

If this resonates, I’ll keep writing about the places we forget ourselves and the ways we find our way back.

Because subtraction isn’t failure.
It’s freedom.

And sometimes the bravest thing we can do is let go.

Love,
Katie

And then something shifted.

I stopped counting in survival metrics and started counting in moments.

If you’ve ever walked back into life after an earthquake, the kind that rattles everything from your body to your belief system, you know it doesn’t come with a guidebook. No neat re-entry plan. Just you, carrying a basket of experiences you never asked for, wondering where on earth to set them down.

Thanksgiving is here, and the world tells us—sometimes gently, sometimes like a well-meaning marathon coach—that gratitude is the goal. Grateful for the big stuff, the small stuff, the stuff that broke you open.

But gratitude after cancer hits differently.
It isn’t a Hallmark sentiment.
It’s a practice of becoming intimate with your own life.

Here are nine thoughts I’ve gathered along the way, nine because, well… enneagram brain. Call them invitations, reminders, or breadcrumbs for anyone finding their way back to themselves.

1. Simplicity is anything but basic.

Before cancer, I was a maximalist: plans, people, “yeses,” a calendar that needed its own personal assistant. Complexity felt like importance.

Then treatment stripped everything to the studs—sleep, water, prayer, slow walks, quiet conversations. Everything extra fell away.

Simplicity isn’t boring, it’s holy.
It’s intentionality in a cozy sweater.
It’s a “no thank you” without apology.
It’s the Type One in me learning that presence, not perfection, is the point.

2. Fluid is the new balance.

We chase balance like it’s a perfectly stacked tower.
Cancer smiled and tipped the whole thing over.

Balance isn’t static—it’s fluid.
Some days you rest. Some days you fight. Some days, you dance to 90’s R&B in the kitchen just because your body is yours again.

Fluidity is friendship with change.
Pure Type Nine energy.

3. Longevity is more about community than supplements.

I took every capsule the internet ever praised.
What actually saved me?

The women who sat with me in chemo.
The caregivers with soup.
The friends who listened instead of fixing.
The therapists who held space for my grief.

Connection is the real immune support.
Even the Type Five in me had to admit that research is great… but love is better.

4. Our bodies are always talking; we should listen.

Before cancer, I treated my body like an underperforming employee.
Hustle. Push. Don’t complain.

But she whispered before she screamed.
Fatigue, pain, intuition, they weren’t inconveniences. They were warning bells.

Now I ask: “What do you need?”
Water. Rest. A stretch. A mammogram.

Your body isn’t trying to betray you—she’s trying to protect you.

5. Movement is non-negotiable.

Not performance.
Not punishment.
Not a chase back to a former version of myself.

Movement is communion.

Walks. Yoga. Pilates. Dancing while cooking mashed potatoes.
I move because I’m alive.

Type Seven joy, Type Eight vitality, and Type Two care braided together.

6. Protecting your energy is generational wealth.

I don’t hustle like I used to.
I don’t go to every dinner.
I don’t pour into relationships that drain me dry.

Energy is currency and oxygen.
Spend it slowly.
Spend it wisely.

Ask any Type Six: stewardship isn’t fear. It’s wisdom.

7. Life is made of moments, not the “next big thing.”

I spent years sprinting toward the future.
Cancer slammed me into now.

This day.
This dinner.
This laugh.
This sunrise.

Enneagram Fours already know: the sacred is usually simple.

8. Stepping into power looks like unconditional self-respect.

For myself first.

Power that’s forced is brittle.
Power that’s embodied is unshakeable.

I nurture myself with the care I once thought I had to earn.
I respect my body, my boundaries, my breath.

An Enneagram Eight, but healed—still strong, but no longer armored.

9. Gratitude opens us up to greatness.

Not obligatory gratitude.
Not “should” gratitude.

The real kind—
the kind that expands you.

Tiny miracles count:
the velvet feel of baby hair regrowth,
the return of appetite,
a slow morning without fear.

Every breath post-cancer is a hymn.

If this season feels tender, complicated, or heavy—I get it.
Gratitude isn’t pretending things are easy.
It’s seeing clearly… and choosing wonder anyway.

Today, I’m grateful for simplicity, fluidity, community, breath, movement, protection, presence, power, and the audacity of hope.

And for you, for being here, reading this, walking this road with me.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.
May we live—deeply, softly, fiercely, and fully.

Xo,

Katie

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