Not long after I came home from the hospital, there was a morning that I was lying in bed watching something on TV. Justin was in the loft just outside the bedroom, playing Minecraft on the desktop computer that is out there. I heard him get audibly frustrated with something that wasn’t going right. I started to get out of bed, almost on instinct, to go and help fix what was wrong.

Barb was calm, but firm. “What exactly,” she asked, “do you think you are doing? Get back in bed and rest.”

While my self-care instincts have never been good, I like to think that my heart was in the right place. I just wanted to help. If you are anything like me, your default setting when someone you care about is hurting, angry, or overwhelmed is to try to fix it.

I am a fixer by nature and training. My brain immediately goes into tactical mode when people are in trouble. What is the plan? What are the actionable steps? How do we mitigate the damage, minimize the pain, and pull this situation back into some semblance of order? It comes from a good place—a deep desire to protect the people I love from suffering—but if I am being completely honest with myself, it also comes from a place of self-preservation. Watching someone you love navigate a massive, untamed emotion is uncomfortable. It makes us feel helpless. And so, we reach for tools to make the bad feelings go away as quickly as possible.

We offer silver linings. We give unsolicited advice. We say things like, “Well, at least...” or “Have you tried...” or “Look on the bright side.” We attempt to tidy up their emotional living room while they are still in the middle of the storm.

We do this because our culture conditions us to believe that action is the only true virtue. If you aren’t solving the problem, you aren’t helping. If you are just sitting there, you are wasting time. We treat emotional discomfort like a leaky faucet or a broken appliance—something to be repaired instantly so everyone can get back to normal.

Not actively helping means you are ‘doing nothing.’

But over the last few years, through military service, raising kids, dealing with my own physical and mental health struggles, and navigating the messy reality of human relationships, I’ve come to realize something critical: most of the big stuff in life cannot be fixed. It can only be felt.

And when someone is in the thick of feeling something massive—grief, panic, deep disappointment, or explosive rage—the best thing we can do for them isn’t fixing it. It’s holding space.

Holding space is one of those phrases that sounds a little woo-woo on the surface, but in practice, it is rugged, gritty work.

Holding space means intentionally choosing to sit next to someone in their discomfort without trying to change how they feel. It means dropping your agenda, putting away your toolkit, and refusing the urge to tidy up their pain. It means saying, through your presence and your quiet focus: I see you. I see how hard this is. I am not afraid of how big this feeling is, and I am not going anywhere.

It sounds simple. It is hard as shit.

When my kids are overwhelmed and losing their minds over something that seems small to me, my immediate impulse is to explain to them why it’s not a big deal. When a friend is going through a devastating heartbreak or a career crisis, my brain wants to chart a six-step recovery roadmap. Doing nothing feels like failure. It feels like standing by while someone drowns.

But here’s the paradox: when we rush in to fix someone’s pain, we often inadvertently send them a few very harmful messages:

1. Your feelings are too much for me to handle.

2. You aren’t capable of sitting with this yourself.

3. My comfort with your emotion is more important than your need to feel it.

When we try to rush people through their grief, anxiety, or anger, we aren’t actually helping them heal. We are asking them to suppress their emotions so that we can feel less uncomfortable.

To hold space for someone is to offer them a rare and sacred gift: permission to be human.

In a world that demands constant productivity and immediate resolution, sitting quietly with someone’s unresolved agony looks like doing nothing. From the outside, it looks passive.

In reality, holding space requires an immense amount of strength, emotional stamina, and discipline. It requires you to build a bigger container within yourself—one that can hold your own anxiety about their pain while making room for them to be completely unraveled.

Think about the times in your own life when you were in the darkest valley. When the news was terrible, when the marriage was falling apart, when the grief was so heavy you could physically feel it in your chest. Did you want someone to pop in with a quick cliché or a five-point plan? Or did you just want someone who wasn’t afraid to sit in the dark with you for an hour?

The people (family, friends from church, the guys from SaW) who saved me in my hardest moments weren’t the ones who had all the answers. They were the ones who sat with me, listened to me vent, or sat with me in total silence without trying to fix it. They didn’t try to pull me out of the hole; they jumped down into the hole with me and said, “Yeah. It’s dark down here. But I’m not going anywhere.”

Holding space isn’t passive. It is a deliberate, kinetic act of solidarity. It is the embodiment of courage.

We live in a world that is chaotic, loud, and increasingly fragile. People are carrying heavy burdens—health issues, financial strain, family crises, and existential fear about the future. And just a cursory glance at the news will remind you that people are right to worry, right to be scared, and right to wonder what awaits in the dark corners of the future.

We can’t fix almost all of it. We can’t take away the world’s pain, and we often can’t even lessen the pain of the person sitting across the dinner table from us.

The truth is we don’t have to fix it to make a difference.

In our house we have a saying. When one of the kids comes to us with a problem, we ask them if they want to be HUGGED, HEARD, or HELPED. Sometimes we just want to know that someone is physically there with us. Sometimes, we just need to vent and share our feelings with a non-judgmental ear. And sometimes (and in doing this I have found that it is very much the minority) we want / need actual help solving the problem.

The next time someone you love comes to you with a big, messy, uncomfortable emotion, I encourage you to pause before you offer a solution. Resist the urge to fix, advise, or lessen the blow. Ask if they want to be hugged, heard, or helped.

Take a breath. Put away the toolkit. Just be there. Let them make their own sandwich, let them cry, let them be furious. Let the storm roll through, and serve as the anchor that holds steady while it does.

It might feel like you aren’t doing anything. But in a world that constantly tells us to hide our pain, giving someone a safe place to feel everything might just be the most important thing you ever do.

Be well, y’all. Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.

And no matter what, keep pounding the rock.

Now comes the fun part. Figuring out what to make of the last couple of months.

Around here we have taken to calling it - only half jokingly - the summer of biblical plagues. Everything that has happe…

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So there I was. In the ICU. Again. I had a hose in my nose, a drainage tube in my side, and IVs in both arms. The biggest issue is that I had evidence of an upper GI b…

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It has been said that every story starts with Once Upon a Time. Before Once Upon a Time starts, however, it is helpful to understand the context in which a story takes…

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On June 25th, I went into surgery at the VA. It was a “routine” laparoscopy to remove a perforated and angry appendix. During surgery - while I was under general an…

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I was in crisis. I was drowning in unaddressed and unresolved trauma. I could only see and feel my hurt. I was self-centered and thought my pain was all that…

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Last night Justin, kind of out of nowhere, started talking.

Justin: I have been scared about something. Is it okay if we talk about it?

Barbara

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Earlier this week, Justin’s usual bus driver was unexpectedly absent. That happens sometimes. Sometimes you get sick or someone close to you gets sick. We all miss days of work from ti…

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Five years ago Thursday, on April 24th, 2020, I launched the Combat Snuggles newsletter on Substack with a post explaining its unique name. That first post sparked well over 400 more over the next fi…

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I took the above picture 9 years ago tomorrow. I walked out of the house into a lovely spring day and saw this flower blooming in our yard. The flower was beautiful, and Barbara loves purple. I took …

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Today is Ash Wednesday, traditionally a day of fasting and prayer for some Christians to mark the beginning of Lent – the 40-day period leading up to Easter.

In some churches, the palm fronds from the…

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Barbara and I go to our local grocery store – Wegmans - almost every day. Wegmans is a fancy place (if you haven’t been, it is kind of like Disneyland for food), but we don’t shop there because it is fancy. We shop there because it is less than a half mile from our house. It has become part of our routine to get Justin on the bus and then head to the store to do the day’s shopping (we find that shopping as we go for meals reduces food waste).

Last week was Valentine’s Day. Because of our daily store visit routine, we were there on the day itself, and the day after as well. On Valentine’s Day, there were bright displays of flowers, a station where strawberries were being dipped in chocolate, and all manner of cards, decorations, and goodies in varying shades of pink. There were cards, balloons, and bottles of rose. It was beautiful and festive and looked like love (at least the store-bought version). There was light and hope and sweetness – both literal and metaphorical.

The next day all evidence of Valentine’s Day was gone. The flowers were back in their place, the strawberries sold or in storage, and the cards nowhere in sight. There were a few decorated cookies and some bottles of rose. On an endcap near the back of the store there were some remnants of Valentine’s Day, marked down for quick and final sale. All that had been bright and alive and full of color the day before had faded, pushed out to make way for the green of St. Patrick’s Day.

It occurred to me seeing all this that love is easy, or at least easy-ish, when everything is pink and fresh and bright. But what happens when love falters? How do you respond when things fall apart?

Valentine’s Day is great. Real love survives the day after.

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Love, exciting and new

Come aboard, we're expecting you

Love, life's sweetest reward

Let it flow, it floats back to you

Love Boat soon will be making another run

The Love Boat promises something for everyone

Set a course for adventure

Your mind on a new romance

and Love won't hurt anymore

It's an open smile on a friendly shore

Yes love...

I was raised by television.

You may think that I am exaggerating for dramatic effect, but I mean it quite literally. While my mom did many parental things (she paid rent, made sure we had clothes and food in the house most of the time, ensured we went to school, and had Christmas presents) she left the emotional work of child rearing to Big Bird and Fred Rogers and Captain Kangaroo. It was TV that taught me lessons about life, about people, and about the way the world worked. And this education would continue throughout my childhood and into early adulthood.

I don’t think my mom was the only parent in the 70s and 80s who outsourced much of their parenting to television. Most of the people in my generation had parents who loved their kids, but at a distance. I think the predominant parenting style in the 70s and early 80s was benign neglect.

TV taught me a lot about life. And it also taught me a lot about love.

One of my favorite shows was The Love Boat. Every

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Sunday is Barbara and I’s 30th wedding anniver…

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The word heresy comes from the Ancient Greek word haeresis which literally translates as “something that was chosen.” A choice. The word haeresis carried no negative connotation for the Greeks. An haeresis was the result of someone using their reason to decide between competing options. Haeresis was the result of deliberation. Making an informed choice was considered a sign of wisdom.

The meaning of the word began to change with the nascent ascendancy of the Catholic Church in the first millennium. To the church and its leaders, people thoughtfully considering their options and making an independent choice - a heresy - was not just bad, it was dangerous. The very last thing that church authorities wanted was to be surrounded by people with the temerity to think for themselves.

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Actor, comedian and podcaster John Hodgman (formerly of The Daily Show) writes a short self-help column each week for NY Times Magazine. A couple of weeks ago the …

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