How to Write Complex Emotion is back!

If you missed the last workshop, I’m teaching it again, this time for The Shipman Agency. I’d so love for you to join us!

I’ll be teaching methods for identifying and expressing the full range of human emotion.

You’ll learn how to drop into your body, explore your own somatic cues, and translate them into language that readers can feel. You’ll also learn how to create emotional atmosphere—not just in your characters, but in the space around them. By the end of this workshop, you’ll walk away with tools to elevate not only your writing, but your ability to communicate the complex, internal world we all share.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my spiritual advisor!

Busy Stern turned 14 years old yesterday! She is my heart and my happiness, and she got everything she asked for—a house upstate, a car, a stable income and better health insurance!! Treats, treats, treats and TREATS.

On Becoming a Person

This newsletter exists as an ongoing inquiry into the questions of self, and how to live when we feel estranged from the person we believe ourselves to be.

What does it mean to have a self? Where does the “I” of me live? These are the questions I spend my time wrestling with, and they form the basis for these weekly dispatches.

There exists a particular form of suffering that, while identified by psychology, remains largely unrecognized in our daily discourse: the quiet torment of living among people whose words bear no reliable relationship to their actions; who say one thing but do another. We have a clinical term for this phenomenon—incongruence—yet we lack a cultural vocabulary adequate to its emotional reality.

The concept belongs to Carl Rogers, a founding figure in humanistic psychology who, in 1950, was trying to understand what made some therapeutic relationships transformative while others fell flat. 

What he discovered, however, was the fundamental mechanics of human trust. 

Rogers observed that effective therapy required three conditions from the therapist: unconditional positive regard, accurate empathic understanding, and—most crucially—congruence.

1. Unconditional positive regard: This means accepting the client as they are, without judgment or the need for them to earn approval through good behavior. It's not about liking everything about the client but about maintaining a fundamental respect for their humanity regardless of their choices. This, Rogers found, creates the safety necessary for genuine self-exploration.

2. Accurate empathic understanding: requires the therapist to grasp the client's emotional world from the inside as if seeing through their eyes while maintaining enough separateness to remain helpful rather than overwhelmed. It means truly comprehending someone else's experience without immediately rushing to fix, advise, or judge it.

3. Congruence: the foundation upon which the others rest. A therapist cannot offer genuine acceptance while hiding behind professional facades, nor can they truly understand a patient's experience while remaining dishonest about their own.

In Rogers' formulation, congruence means that one's inner experience matches one's outer expression. 

The therapist who feels confused should acknowledge confusion rather than perform certainty.

The one who feels moved should allow that emotion to be visible rather than maintaining clinical detachment. 

Rogers realized that the specific alignment between internal reality and external presentation creates the safety necessary for genuine healing.

This, Rogers realized, was not merely a therapeutic technique but a fundamental requirement for meaningful human connection.

Yet most of us, Rogers observed, have learned to do precisely the opposite. We become skilled performers of acceptable versions of ourselves, saying what we imagine others want to hear, often without realizing we have lost touch with what we actually feel or mean.

Consider the friend who tells you how important you are to them yet systematically excludes you from their life. They're not necessarily lying—in the moment of declaration, they may genuinely experience the warmth they describe. But their calendar, choices, and unconscious priorities tell a different story. Either they have confused the experience of feeling affection with the discipline of expressing it consistently, or they aren't being honest with themselves or you.

This is what Rogers meant by incongruence: the gap between our inner experience and outer expression, between who we are and who we imagine we ought to be.

In his broader understanding of the psyche, this misalignment arises from a deeper fracture—between what he called the true self and the ideal self. The true self is our lived, felt experience: messy, shifting, often unpolished.

The ideal self is who we believe we should be—an internalized composite of others’ expectations, social norms, and the conditions we’ve learned to meet in order to be loved. We shape ourselves to please, to belong, to be safe—but often at the cost of becoming strangers to our own lives.

The more distance we place between these two selves, the more anxious and disoriented we feel. To become congruent, in Rogers’ view, is not to become perfect, but to embark on the quiet, difficult project of realignment: to gradually close the space between what we feel and what we show, between what we know and what we let be known.

Our nervous systems are exquisitely calibrated to detect these misalignments. When someone's words consistently diverge from their actions, we experience a visceral sense of unease—not a physical danger, precisely, but a recognition that something fundamental is amiss in the relationship. We don't know where we stand; we aren't sure what to trust. 

The Buddhists recognize the tension here as Shenpa—the feeling of becoming hooked on something hard to shake.

And it's this disconnect that might find us inexplicably anxious around certain people despite their warm words and apparent good intentions. Our ancient circuitry recognizes that unpredictable people have constantly threatened social cohesion. The colleague who praises your work while undermining your projects activates the alarm systems that once warned our ancestors about unreliable allies.

In our sophisticated, modern way, we have learned to override these signals. We tell ourselves we are being overly sensitive and that we should focus on people's stated intentions rather than their revealed patterns. But the body, as Rogers understood, often knows truths that the mind works hard to avoid.

If you've ever talked yourself into something when your body signals to run—you've experienced this. When we talk ourselves into something, we're forcing something unnatural. We do this to avoid feeling the disquiet that arises when we don't want what others do. Instead of sitting with our unease, we seek to solve it quickly. Solving it often means going against our better instincts, and choosing relief over aligning with our true desires.

The cost of living among incongruent people is that we can become incongruent with ourselves in trying to keep the balance, the peace, or our general sanity. It also involves a labor of interpretation, the constant work of decoding the gap between what people say and what they mean, between what they promise and what they deliver. We become amateur psychologists of our relationships, developing elaborate theories to explain why someone who claims to value us rarely seems to act accordingly.

Worse—Rogers writes in his seminal book On Becoming a Person, over time, people realize, “how much of his life is guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is. Often he discovers that he exists in response to the demands of others, that he seems to have no self of his own, that he is only trying ti think, feel, and behave in the way that others believe he ought to think, and feel and behave.”

This cognitive work is more exhausting than we typically acknowledge. It requires maintaining two parallel versions of reality: the one described by their words and the one revealed by their behavior. Rogers noted that this double consciousness gradually erodes our capacity for presence in our lives—we become so focused on managing others' contradictions that we lose touch with our authentic responses.

This insight was radical in its simplicity: most human suffering stems from our collective inability to be ourselves with one another. We have created cultures that reward performance over authenticity, that prize saying the right thing over doing the consistent thing, that celebrates good intentions while ignoring their practical consequences.

Rogers argued that the therapeutic relationship worked precisely because it created conditions where performance became unnecessary. When therapists showed up as genuinely themselves—acknowledging their limitations, expressing their authentic responses, and aligning their behavior with their stated values—clients felt safe enough to do the same.

But why, Rogers wondered, should such conditions exist only in therapy? Why not in friendship, romance, or ordinary encounters that make up a human life?

What would it take to become congruent in our daily lives?

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