This morning I received a voice note from a man who wants to hold space for the woman he loves. His voice cracked halfway through. He said: I want her to feel safe with me. I just do not know how.
Last week a man left a comment on one of my reels: so what are we actually supposed to do?
The same week, a woman wrote to me after her Relationship Audit: I have told him a hundred times what I need. He does not hear me.
I lay in bed thinking about all three of them, because the answer to what they are each asking lives inside the worst week of my life.
I promised you the lived experience. Not theory. Not something I read in a textbook and repackaged. The tools I teach, the cards I created, the structure I offer couples and individuals every week, all of it grew out of moments where I was the one on the floor. This is one of those moments.
My sister died on a Friday
I was with her. At her home. The house she had designed and had built for them, every room exactly the way she wanted it. I stayed with her body. I massaged her legs one last time. I washed her. I brushed her hair. I put some makeup on her face because she would have wanted that, to be seen one last time looking like herself. I dressed her. The woman who had been my best friend, my rock, the person who pulled me out of a moat when I was eighteen months old and never stopped pulling me out of things, and I was buttoning her shirt and smoothing her collar and knowing this was the last time anyone would do this for her. We spent one last night with her there, gone in spirit, needing to say our goodbyes even though she could not hear them.
When the hearse came on Saturday, I stood outside and watched it pull away. My brother-in-law took the children in the other direction, to the farm, to somewhere that was not this house with its absence in every room. They drove off. The hearse drove off. I was standing alone in front of the house my sister and he had built.
I sat in my car for forty-five minutes.
I could not move. I could barely breathe. I just sat there with the key in the ignition and my hands in my lap, staring at her front door. Two hours to my parents' house in Belgium. Could I face it? Could I face going back inside first, into the room where she died, the room where I had just dressed her body? Could I sit with the despair of losing the person who knew me better than anyone on this earth?
I did not go back inside. I drove.
By the evening I was at my parents' house. My father, who had already begun disappearing into dementia, sat in his chair and stared at the television. My mother moved between rooms doing things that did not need doing. Folding things that were already folded. Wiping surfaces that were already clean. Her face was a mask of something I recognised because I had seen it in my own mirror an hour earlier. The look of a body that is still functioning while the person inside it has left.
The television stayed on through it all. Through every silence. Nobody turned it off. My father watched it without seeing it. My mother sat beside him and held his hand and I do not think either of them knew they were doing it. They had lost their daughter. There is no language for that. There is no protocol. They grieved the way their generation knew how, which was to keep the house quiet and the screen on and to not say her name in the present tense because the present tense might crack the whole thing open.
I lasted two days.
I do not say that with judgment. Their grief needed the hum of someone else's story. The structure of a schedule that someone else had set. Mine needed to move. Mine needed to get out of that house where the sorrow sat in the walls like damp.
I went to Amsterdam. To my sister's flat near the hospital. The one that still smelled like her perfume on the pillows. I was meant to write her eulogy. I had days. I sat at her kitchen table and I could not write a single sentence.
I cleaned things that were already clean. I opened my laptop, closed it, opened it again. I talked to my children and made arrangements for them to come to Holland for the funeral. I went out for coffee I did not need. I met an acquaintance I did not know all that well but needed a shoulder to cry on and be physically held. He was there, steady, not knowing what to do, but willing. I cried until my eyes swelled shut and I could not see the keyboard. I punched her pillows. I tried everything my body knows how to do with impossible feelings and none of it unlocked a single usable word.
I was lonely in a way that sat on my chest. Not sadness. Something heavier. The weight of being the only person in the room with all of this inside me and no way to get it out.
What grief taught me
Grief has been my biggest teacher. I mean that with my whole body.
Here is what it taught me first: people do not know how to be with you when you are grieving. It's not that they do not love you. They do. Not because they are not trying. They are. Yet grief asks for something almost nobody has practised. The ability to stay with someone's pain without trying to move it somewhere more comfortable.
My friends called. They said call me anytime. They meant it. But when I called and what came out of me was not neat sadness but something raw and repetitive and ugly, something that did not get better week by week, I could hear them searching for the right thing to say. I could feel them wanting to fix it. Wanting me to feel better so they could feel better. Wanting the conversation to have an ending.
The thing I needed most was the thing almost nobody could give me.
Stay. Do not fix it. Do not match it with your own story. Do not rush me to the lesson. Just stay.
I had to teach the people around me how to do that. I was drowning, and I was also giving swimming lessons.
Some people could learn. Most could not.
After the funeral I pulled back from my sister's children. My nephew and niece. I told myself it was kindness. I look like her. I sound like her. Every time my name lit up their phone I thought: is this a comfort or a wound? I did not know. I still do not know. Grief is full of decisions you make from inside the fog that you carry long after it lifts.
The call on the walk
On one of those walks through Amsterdam I called my coach.
I want to tell you exactly what happened next because it is the reason my Tell Me intimacy and communication cards exist.
I need you to understand something first. I was already well versed in this method. I had been using it with clients for years. It is a structured practice, rooted in the dyad, where one person speaks and the other receives with only three responses: thank you, clarify that, summarise that. One prompt. Three responses. No fixing. No advice. No interpretation.
Days before my sister died, I had been with her and used it myself. The prompt I gave her was: tell me what you need me to know about dying.
She answered. I received. I said thank you. I said tell me more.
Days later she was gone. I was the one who could not speak. I was the one who needed someone to hold the structure for me. The method I had given to hundreds of people, the method I had used with my own dying sister, was now the thing I needed someone to turn back on me.
My coach said: imagine I am your sister. Tell me what you have withheld from me.
The first things that came were the obvious ones. The ones that fit on a sympathy card. I miss you. I cannot believe you are gone.
She said: thank you. What else?
I kept walking. The rhythm of my feet on the pavement was doing something I did not understand then. Left foot, right foot. Left hemisphere, right hemisphere. The same alternation therapists use in EMDR to help the brain process what it cannot process sitting still. My body knew what it needed before my mind caught up.
Thank you. What else?
Then something cracked open.
Anger. At her.
Do you know what it is to feel rage at someone who suffered? Who was in pain for months? Who died while you held her hand? The shame of that anger was almost worse than the grief itself. What kind of person feels fury at their dying sister?
My coach did not flinch. She did not reassure me. She did not say that is normal, it is okay, everyone feels that. She said: thank you. What else?
So I kept going.
The anger was not about her dying. It was about what her dying stole from us.
We were meant to watch our children get married together. We were meant to go on ski holidays and bitch about our wrinkles and dance on tables in Beirut like we did in our twenties. We were meant to grow old and ridiculous together. Every single future I had assumed was ours.
I was sobbing on a street in Amsterdam and the words coming out of me were not about death. They were about life. About all the life that would never happen now.
Thank you. What else?
Layer after layer after layer. Each one only reachable because the one before it had been spoken aloud to someone who did not try to do anything with it except receive it.
We had agreed on a time limit. Fifteen minutes. This matters more than it sounds. When your body knows there is a container, it will let you go all the way to the floor. It will not let you fall apart if it does not trust that someone will help you come back.
When it was done, my coach brought me back. Gently. Clearly. I am not your sister. That was then. This is now. You are here. I am here.
I call it clearing the pipes. Everything that was clogged and stuck and backed up for days finally moved through me and out.
I kept walking. I opened the voice recorder on my phone and spoke my sister's eulogy in one take. Every word. No stops. No edits. It poured out of me like it had been written the whole time and just needed the obstruction cleared.
I went back to her flat. I typed it up. For the first time since she died, I slept.
Structure is the thing
What my coach did for me on that call was not complicated. That is the thing I need you to hear.
She did not grieve with me. She did not cry with me. She did not tell me about her own losses or try to relate or offer wisdom. She asked. She received. She said thank you. She asked again. She held the same structure I had held for my sister days before. So I could fall apart inside it.
Structure is the thing that makes safety possible.
I know that sounds counterintuitive. We think safety comes from warmth, from softness, from letting everything flow. It does not. It comes from knowing the walls are there. From knowing there is a time limit, and a way back, and someone who will not try to do anything with your pain except hold it.
That is what I have spent years building. My Tell Me cards came out of this. Out of six hundred couples and even more individuals sitting across from each other learning what my coach taught me on that street in Amsterdam. The dyad. Two people. A structure. One prompt. Three responses.
Tell me what is happening for you right now.
Thank you.
Clarify that.
Summarise that.
When I put those cards in someone's hands for the first time, they almost always say: that is it? Then they use them. Something shifts. Because the structure takes the pressure off. You do not need to know the right thing to say. You do not need to be wise or therapeutic or even particularly articulate. You need one prompt, three responses, and the willingness to stay in your body while another person empties theirs.
I have watched men who walked in with their arms crossed and their jaws tight say things to their partners they have never said to anyone. I have watched women who were convinced he will never hear me go still with shock when he does. Not because he suddenly became a different person. Because the structure gave him somewhere to put his attention that was not fix this.
The gap between them was never about love. It was always about tools.
To the men who show up
I want to say something to the men who show up in my audits. Because I am not sure anyone has said it to you.
You are doing something remarkable.
You book the session. You are willing to hear things that are difficult. Some of you are shaking. Some of you are furious. Some of you are holding back tears because you were taught that tears mean you are weak and you are only beginning to learn that they do not.
You are not the men the internet argues about. You are the men who quietly, privately, show up. Who send voice notes at seven in the morning saying how do I hold her. Who leave comments saying I want to do better but nobody will tell me how.
I see you. I work with you every single week. You are so much closer than you think.
What is missing is not your love. Your love is enormous. What is missing is the structure to channel it. You were taught that when something is wrong, you fix it. She is upset, make it better. She is crying, stop the crying. Every instinct you have is aimed at resolution. What she is asking for is not resolution. She is asking to be received. Those are different things.
The Tell Me cards exist because of you. I kept watching beautiful men with huge hearts try to love their partners with the only tools they had, and it kept landing wrong, and nobody was giving them the frame that would let it land right.
To the man who sent me the voice note
You asked what you do to have her feel safe.
Here it is.
Stay close to her. Close enough that she can feel your body near hers. No need to touch her. No need to hold her. Just close enough that her nervous system can feel yours.
Your body stays soft. Jaw unclenched. Hands open. Breath slow. She is reading every signal you are sending whether she knows it or not. If your body says I am bracing for impact, hers will brace too. If your body says I can hold this, hers will begin to let go.
Say: tell me what is happening for you right now.
Then stop. The silence is where she finds her own words. If you fill it, she will find your words instead, and they will not fit, and both of you will feel the miss.
When she speaks, you say: thank you. Clarify that. Summarise that.
You do not fix. You do not relate. You do not tell her about the time you felt something similar. You receive.
When she is done: thank you.
That is it. That is the whole thing.
You are not reading her mind. You are giving her somewhere to put what is inside her. That is what she has been asking for. That is what she has always been asking for. Not for you to understand her pain, but to stay in your body while she moves through hers.
Your presence is not a risk. It is the safest thing you have.
The fact that your voice cracked on that voice note this morning, the fact that you are afraid of getting it wrong, means you are already paying the kind of attention she needs. Now take that attention out of your head and put it in your body. Stay close. Stay.
Her birthday
My sister's birthday is April 6th. She would have turned sixty this year.
Every year I feel it coming before I see it on the calendar. A tightening behind my sternum. A restlessness in my legs. The pull to walk.
I wrote something not long after she died that I want to share with you because it is still true.
What if we allow ourselves to fully feel our core wounds? What if our core wounds are a blessing? What if they guide us and allow us a superpower? What if we could talk to our core wound? What if we could feel it deeply in our body and acknowledge it?
My core wound is the absence of presence when growing up. Over the years I have worked on this, yet there is always a new layer. The layer I found after my sister died is that because I did not have enough presence when I was young, I spent my life seeking out situations where my full presence was needed to see all of the other person.
Being present with my sister during her illness. Seeing all of her. Accepting and loving all of her as she passed. How blessed we are to have these core wounds. They give us drive. They make us more human. They give us a way to connect that is ours alone.
This is what has me feel so passionate about what I do. To be so fully present with another that shifts and change are inevitable.
Still following the breadcrumbs.
Juliette