Most people believe something like this:

Once I feel safe, I’ll be able to change.

It sounds healthy.

It sounds trauma-informed.

It sounds responsible.

It is also the exact belief that keeps people stuck.

Because safety is not a prerequisite for change.

It is an after-effect.

The Sentence Everyone Knows How to Say Now:

“I already know why I’m like this.”

It lands with confidence.
It sounds regulated.
It signals education, therapy, reflection, growth.

And in practice, it often functions as a full stop.

No further inquiry.
No behavioral risk.
No relational movement.

Just a well-furnished explanation you can sit on indefinitely.

If you were monkey branched, you may still be asking the wrong questions.

You may be asking:

• Why did they do this?

• Was it something I missed?

• Was the other person already there the whole time?

Those questions are understandable.
They are also downstream.

The more important question—the one your nervous system has been asking long before your mind caught up—is this:

Why did this hurt in a way that feels disorganizing, destabilizing, and hard to explain?

The answer is simpler—and more sobering—than most advice columns will tell you.

Let’s start by stripping away the cute metaphor.

Monkey branching sounds playful. Gym class. Momentum.

A harmless swing from one bar to the next.

That language is doing a lot of moral laundering.

What we’re actually talking about is relationship replacement while maintaining emotional cover—cultivating a new attachment before ending the current one in order to avoid the psychological and ethical free fall of being alone.

This is not modern.
This is not new.
This is avoidance with better branding.

I was trained by a woman who took the divine seriously—and sentimentality not at all.

My first mentor, Elizabeth Petroff, was my Comparative Literature professor at UMass in 1972.

She taught me how to speak with my personal angel.

She also taught me the history and use of tarot cards—not as fortune-telling, not as belief, but as a symbolic technology designed to discipline attention.

This is not an essay about belief in the divine.
It is an essay about how serious traditions train attention without sentimentality.

This matters, so let me be precise.

Petroff was uninterested in spiritual vibes.

She cared about method. And she had no patience for practices that made people feel elevated but less accountable.

Tarot, in her hands, was not prophecy.

It was a historical grammar—a way of teaching the psyche to recognize pattern, tension, and choice under constraint.

A structured interface between narrative intelligence and intuition.

Less mysticism-as-spectacle. More mysticism-as-tool.

By the time you reach this page, insight is not your problem.

You already understand yourself reasonably well.

You can describe your patterns, name your injuries, and explain—often accurately—why you respond the way you do.

You may even understand your partner better than they understand themselves.

This is not nothing.
It matters.
It just isn’t enough anymore.

This is what remains after insight has done all the work it can do.

Most of my gentle readers arrive here looking for answers.

That makes sense. When a relationship feels strained, confusing, or quietly heavy, answers can feel like oxygen.

But answers presume the problem has already been correctly named.

In modern relationships, it usually hasn’t.

What most couples and families believe they are struggling with—communication, intimacy, conflict, desire, trust, parenting differences—is often downstream of something quieter and more durable:

how attention is managed inside a shared system, over time that does not replenish.

Nothing is actively wrong.

Your life works.
Your relationships function.
There is no obvious danger to name.

And yet—your nervous system will not stand down.

You are not anxious.
You are not fragile.
You are not failing at regulation.

You are responding to a culture that requires continuous interpretation.

Modern life rarely threatens us outright.
It keeps us perceptually online.

Every room.
Every relationship.
Every silence.

Safety is no longer about danger.
It’s about whether your nervous system is ever allowed to stop watching.

That condition has a name.

Neuro-perceptive safety.

Modern relationship culture has made a quiet discovery:

it wants intimacy,
but not the vulnerability of wanting it.

Once, emotional investment signaled seriousness.
Now it is more often treated as a design flaw.

Care too openly and you risk being called anxious.
Ask for clarity and you’re “moving too fast.”
Expect consistency and you’re advised—gently, therapeutically—to focus on yourself.

None of this is happening because people no longer want connection.

It is happening because nonchalance has been upgraded into a virtue.

Being unbothered now reads as emotional intelligence.
Low investment passes for regulation.
Detachment is framed as self-respect.

There is a quiet pressure in modern relationships to explain yourself immediately.

Not just your decisions—but your feelings about your decisions.
Not eventually. Now.

A pause gets interpreted as distance.
“I don’t know yet” sounds evasive.
Privacy reads as withholding.

Opacity, we’re told, is a relational failure.

But this assumption—that emotional transparency is always virtuous, always necessary, always loving—is not only wrong.
It is destabilizing.

There is a fantasy most of us quietly carry that other people are doing life on purpose.

That they selected their temperament, their childhood, their nervous system, their coping style.

That somewhere, at the beginning, there was a menu.

There wasn’t.

We didn’t choose the bus.
We didn’t choose the route.
We didn’t choose who sat next to us, or who taught us how to sit at all.

We just boarded—crying, confused, half-asleep—and have been squirming in our seats ever since, waiting for the ride to end.

This is not pessimism.
This is realism with its sleeves rolled up.

A group of Buddhist monks is walking across the United States toward Washington, D.C., to promote peace. They started in Texas in late October.

They are now moving through the Southeast. Two of them were injured when a truck struck their escort vehicle. They kept walking.

This detail matters. Not because it’s dramatic—but because it clarifies intent.

If this were a stunt, it would have ended at the hospital. If it were branding, it would have paused for optics. Instead, the walk continued.

That’s the point.