Stop Playing Push Me, Pull You.
There's a particular kind of heartbreak that happens in professional relationships—and friendships—that I don't see named often enough.
It happens when someone you respect asks for your help with something significant. Not tactical, transactional help. Not "can you review this deck" help. Not messaging, editing, or feedback on their platform. But mentoring, coaching, or body-doubling help to manage a deep and destabilizing thing that's actually getting in their way. Or this can happen through a major creative project, something that shifts them forward into who they are becoming, in the view of other people.
They name it clearly. They're specific, even if tentative, about what they need. You—because you care, because you're qualified, because you can actually help, because you have this in your wheelhouse—you say yes.
And then. Oh brother. Who is this person? They start running from it.
It doesn't look like running at first. It looks like:
Getting very focused on tactics and execution instead of the deeper work
Chasing shiny objects and new approaches to some other area of their work
Suddenly questioning whether you're actually qualified to help with the thing they asked you to help with
Reframing your professional guidance as overstepping or being too directive or confident for who they’ve freshly decided you are (including rewriting what they should already know about you without cause)
Asking you to prove your credentials or defend your purpose in ways they never asked before
It's avoidance (and ego defense) dressed up as tone-policing, invalidation, deflection, hierarchical issues, and indignance at the idea that they have some work to do beyond demanding others meet them where they are and accommodate them.
I won’t lie, it’s pretty rough to witness, let alone stand on the receiving end of that stuff. But underneath all of that? I can see what one of these is usually protecting. I see the loving, brilliant, vulnerable heart that's so terrified of being broken again that it would rather burn the bridge than risk letting someone close enough to witness the injury. Risking that this person might not finally be the one to “get it,” might not have capacity to hold it.
When someone has been looking so long for help with this problem that “no one” understands, that one additional disappointment feels catastrophic. From the inside, it feels like survival of one more day, one day at a time. The internal resources to map this are not present.
In my twenties, being on the receiving end of this—the tone-policing, the invalidation, diminishment, the snide questioning of my credentials—would send me running for the bathroom to tremble and sob. Now, with decades of experience on both sides of this dynamic, I recognize it for what it is: A whole shit sundae of defensive patterns that feel completely justified when you're the one in them, even as they push away the very help you asked for. The amygdala is at the wheel. Importantly, they are not inclined to treat you poorly at any other time, they have just completely lost control. And they feel remorse, which is key. They don’t self-justify. Sometimes they run for the hills in shame. Sometimes they still bargain, “If you hadn’t said X, then I wouldn’t have went there.”
Holding The Rope Steady
As the coach, or the coach-leaning consultant, it gets into you. Then you start to wonder if you did something wrong. If you pushed too hard, or not enough. If you misunderstood what they were asking for in the first place. If maybe you are unreasonable, rigid, permissive, overstepping. Or if they can’t see you because you’re not holding your end of the rope firmly or visibly. If you’ve been under-serving them or over-coddling them such that they’ve “learned how to treat you,” even if that means they get to tell a story that the investment they made is not resulting in the result they intended.
Pause a beat. A lot of that is blaming and shaming and assigning one-sided responsibility for the outcome. That’s rarely all true.
Trust me, I’ve built myself all the way from “what are boundaries,” through each of these developmental relationships to them:
“Apparently I have to take shit with a smile, all the time (my boundaries, though present, are not tolerated in this container and I have to accept that),” to
“I will not tolerate any shit and if you feel entitled to shit on me, I will show you the door (my boundaries are ultra-rigid),” to
“I have boundaries….but sometimes I choose PPE instead of strict enforcement. There are times when someone has….relational gastroenteritis. This actually means they are on the verge of something profound. Try and protect their dignity in the container…wear comfortable clothes that can be ruined…and don’t forget your face shield and the plexiglas case you keep your tender heart inside when someone’s got to spew and thrash.”
Let’s talk about the one who leaves carnage in his or her wake, and you’re reasonably sure they’d like to stop…and can’t.
This is what I call the relational gastroenteritis problem. It’s not contagious most of the time, but it can be if you don’t practice good hygiene.
I would never ask you to hitch your whole livelihood to this person, as they are, and work with (or for) them full time.
Shit like this will eat you alive.
I want to say something unconventional when it comes to what you should come to expect in terms of respect.
This is incredibly normal for some clients with some coachable issues. It is a temporary, situational, transitional, reactive, emotional and psychological vomit that usually resolves the whole of the tension once they are done emptying their guts.
Clean up, aisle four.
Why It Happens
It’s incredibly indicative that you are dealing with something deeper than a well formed neural pathway that seemingly blocked all their other options. It’s nastier than that. My hunch is that it’s an old, calcified knot of injured tissue at their core. And it has consumed neural tissue in its proximity, and that has effects throughout the body.
You won’t find a small thing inside that client that needs to come out….you have something that has become so intertwined with everything that nothing they have ever tried can relieve it. They are on the verge of giving up something incredibly important because it has become impossible to manage. All their tools have only ever provided “coping,” and that is not indefinitely possible. They reach out to you with a delicate shred of hope.
This is where I take a position that seems like hairsplitting or even deviation but I feel like it’s important. Bear with me.
Some coaches, and probably some regulatory bodies’ code of ethics, would tell me to disengage and send this person to therapy. Period-full-stop. Sometimes that can hurt more than help this kind of client. One-or-the-other can generate a spin where the client’s needs are never met because they haven’t been able to be seen and validated because of the rarity of certain experiences. They may need to be coached long enough to be a seeker of the right kind of therapy, or they may need to run in tandem between therapy (past) and coaching (future) for longer than you think because the excavation needed to heal this is sometimes deep and surly. A lot of encouragement and reinforcement may be required to fill them back up once you excavate this nasty thing.
It’s true: This is not performance coaching. This is not a quick tuning of the performance or skills dial for this client. This is going to be an identity-level, possibly a trauma-forged web of intertwined and layered dreck that’s got them in a place where they cannot be themselves in spite of a level of skill development that you’d think they once possessed. Or still possess. Or might have been so amazingly good at, that it’s purely mortifying to be crawling around without use of those faculties.
They come to me, most often, because of role problems. Or trouble with speaking, presence, power—or feeling that their heads have been put through a blender. Difficulty trusting their perceptions and feedback. I notice that every time I see them, or photos or videos of them, they appear very different. This can be a love of experimentation with appearance…..or on the other hand (and as was for me once), it was the physical evidence that I was in identity fragmentation after a long and injurious wrestle with a person who was psychologically unsafe, and had caused a lot of harm to me personally and professionally.
The Pattern To Watch For
Here’s the energetic signature of this problem: Once they get near you, the person who is confidently parked at the other side of what is terrifying, even unconsciously, things get ugly. That means: the ick, or the wound, or the identity-level challenge story is firing on all cylinders—in reverse. It will take you down with it in order to survive.
Releasing it is terrifying. Living with it is untenable. The client is paralyzed and begins to thrash; your face is tempting as a release zone. Some of them will attack you, some of them will sow discontent, cite outside validation that you really suck, or even crap on you in an Internet forum somewhere. Most of them will be horrified once the process is complete. One of my former clients immortalized one of these lashouts in a book she published, crapping on me in print rather than take some personal responsibility for some challenging times. I think if I asked her today, she would agree that I could not have had the impact that she blamed me for. It just wasn’t structurally possible.
Your ability to hold discernment and feel through what is asking to happen with one of these clients matters a lot.
I also have a personal standard: Have I ever made it incredibly difficult for someone to help me? Oh, gosh yes. Especially when I was not the one who reached for help, or whether someone’s “help” incorporated a degree of projection or assumption as to the cause that simply was not accurate, and I felt unseen and invalidated in that struggle.
Have I ever caused (or….inflicted) a similar level of upset from my own trauma response or unmitigated stress level? Yikes, I am glad that we didn’t all have cameras in our pockets in my first 15 years of adulthood. I have a whole library of events I have to acknowledge in that department. (And I want to go get my little 25-year-old or 33-year-old self and give her the support she needed to not walk into structural, relational or systemic failures in the first place, believing she was obligated to “make it work.”)
These clients are proud, terrified, and desperate. By the time they show up on your calendar, they probably have had other coaches abandon them because it all looks like “behavior,” and “immaturity” and “personality” or “narcissism” or even simply, “an unfortunate choice or pattern that hurts people,” some blithe dismissal that assumes they even have a split second of choice in it. This problem is uglier than that, it’s a knot of scarred and painful injured tissue that may be (metaphorically) pressing on their spinal cord or other major, central aspect of their nervous system. It’s inflamed and its effects have spread far and wide. So triggering it is incredibly easy, and results in something incredibly powerful, overwhelming and unstoppable—more like a seizure. They can’t stop it, no matter how hard they try. The shame is great, the truth or the source of that injury is unspeakable. Some of them are waiting for you to….notice. Save them from it without having to whisper the quiet parts out loud.
Here’s where I tend to walk a very interesting line with credentials that do not include a license to perform therapy or treat disorder.
I personally feel that the somatic work to make this client feel better is still (most often, for my people) in the realm of “wellness,” rather than therapeutic. I personally feel that there are clients who are under-served in therapy, as I was, because they look “strong,” and are disbelieved because there is a narrative out there concerning who “has these problems,” and who “cannot possibly have had that happen.”
Here’s the part I will be bold enough to say out loud. These clients probably went to cognitive or talk therapy, and if they’re gifted or stubbornly high achieving like my crowd, been told they are “fine.” Capable. I tried, for three years, to find out what was wrong with me—and whether there was anything out there to put me back together. These clients are under-served by formulaic approaches. The ones that suggest they just need to (insert cognitive-behavioral tactics here) to hold their shit together better and prevent spills. So they perform through it using everyone else’s toolset….until they can’t. They shatter. They’re regressed by many years from their level of previous development from compounded stress. Because trauma and its cascading effects have shot right through that part of their previous competence.
How do I know, not only am I trauma informed by training, I am trauma informed by decades of lived experience, misdiagnosis, failure-to-diagnose, and having to fucking survive my life’s rich tapestry of situations that don’t even make the therapeutic training manuals because they happen so rarely as to be rendered purely theoretical.
Push or not to push.
Do not ever force this wound open.
Whisper from the side. Offer. Be patient. Do something else. Leave the door unlocked.
As always, wanting (or needing) this healing or transformation and being ready to do it are not the same thing.
When you show up to do the actual work, it stops being theoretical. It stops being "someday I'll deal with this." It becomes real. Present. Unavoidable. Often—that's when the nervous system says: "Absolutely not. Retreat. Make this person the problem, or drive them away, so we don't have to feel what we'd have to feel to deal with this."
It's not malicious. It's not even conscious most of the time.
But it is a choice. Even if it doesn't feel like one.
Here's what I've learned: You cannot want someone's transformation more than they want it themselves.
This particular client is going to act like you are the one who hurt them. They are going to vomit all over your shoes.
When to release them with love
You can be qualified. You can be generous. You can show up with everything you have. You can be patient through the first few rounds of avoidance, gentle when they get defensive, clear and unyielding (but not take the bait) when they question your approach. But at a certain point, continuing to offer help to someone who keeps making you the problem for having the expertise and holding them accountable to what they said they wanted? The audacity of offering it? That's not generosity. That's over-functioning. And it costs you as much or more than it costs them.
It costs you time and energy, yes. But more than that, it costs you the clarity of knowing your worth. Because every time you feel you have to prove your qualifications to someone who already knows you're qualified, you're accepting the premise that your expertise is up for debate. Every time you allow yourself to be dragged back into the woods of “can you see me as I am,” you’re getting dog shit on your shoes.
Trust me, there are clients I am willing to somewhat adapt for while we unearth what needs to be talked about. They get my blue jeans and muck boots sensibility, and even a softer nonthreatening persona instead of full-tilt Kate. Who confronts it with precision and clarity, and names the good bad and ugly so that we can start figuring out what to do with it. These clients can’t hold that. They don’t yet know that I won’t force them to re-experience that trauma. That I have experienced a level of relational traumatic injury as to be able to believe theirs without doubt.
It's not dishonest. It’s titration. It’s meeting someone at a level they are prepared to metabolize until they get clearer and stronger
And then there are those who are just going to have a false start. They can’t bear anyone know about it, yet. They don’t know how they can possibly ask you to hold what they no longer can. Especially if they like you. Especially if they imagine you might have life overlap. They start to look elsewhere for a container they trust to be more of a vault so that it never returns to their daily experience.
Truthfully, I understand that completely. I felt the same way. I wanted to disavow the whole thing, but on the other hand, being witnessed in the claw-back recovery by a couple of coaches and others that I still have some kind of connection to? That’s connective tissue. That’s resistance to falling back down the mineshaft of shit when it forms next to your bed.
Because I understand both sides of this. I understand asking for help with something you're not quite ready to face. I understand the terror that comes up when someone shows up prepared to help you with the thing you've been avoiding. I understand coming up against a need for major growth or healing when you’ve created a whole, outwardly successful life with your workarounds or white knuckles the whole damn way. I understand someone telling you that you’re not as good at something as you think you are—or worse, than you were before something ugly happened to you—and especially if that feedback is unsolicited, or tries to blame you or your failures completely for the outcome. For the harm you suffered because of an unwitnessed and poorly understood form of emotional, mental, psychological or moral injury.
I see things that these clients know I see….and it’s usually when I drop the introductory curiosity and settle in to the unfiltered exchanges without as much formal deference that these clients start elbowing and shutting doors loudly. And I also understand what it's like to be the person who shows up—fully, completely, with everything you have—only to be met with doubt and defensiveness from someone who literally asked you to be there.
Ready or Not?
Both things can be true:
They genuinely want help
They're not ready to receive it
And both these things can also be true:
You care deeply about helping them
You cannot help someone who keeps running from the help they asked for, or hurting you instead of letting you guide them
So what do you do?
You offer clearly, one more time. You say: "You asked for help with X. I have expertise here and I'm willing to walk with you through this. But I need to know if you actually want this, or if the resistance means you're not there yet."
And then you trust their answer. Not their words—their choices.
If they lean in? Beautiful. Do the work together. If they deflect, question, get tactical, or make you prove your value again?
You let them go. With love.
Not because they're bad or wrong. Not because you're giving up on them. But because you cannot do someone else's readiness work for them. Nor can you blow all your fuel circling their airport when they aren’t sure they want the plane to land. Or allow them to circle your airport endlessly, because they run out of fuel, crash, and it’s gonna cost you and your team an emergency cleanup on the runway, if not some bad optics and a season of affiliated distraction.
You deserve relationships—professional and personal—where your expertise is trusted, your guidance is welcomed, and your care is received as it was intended. Not questioned every time you open dialog with someone who has already hired you. That’s what screws with our heads.
The hardest part of being wired for, and effective in doing deep transformation work is learning that clients and people are not all built with the same commitment that you have. And commitment doesn't guarantee you can help everyone who is willing to pay. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is stop trying to lead someone to a result who keeps questioning whether you're qualified to override their own sensibilities.
Not because you doubt yourself. But because you can't carry them and keep integrity to yourself, your work, your other clients, or your truth.
I hope you've finally learned that proving your worth to someone who's using doubt as an avoidance tactic is a game you can't ever win. Assuming you’ve been at this for a minute and you have confidence in the results you get for clients—enough validation to maintain perspective between “I am not for everyone and that’s okay,” and “The ones I am for get something they cannot buy anywhere else on the market,”—you do not, should not, tolerate conditions where you have to fight for basic respect or brace for impact every time you talk to your recurrent clients.
(There is a phase at which this is expected, and grace and patience and what you do not say in the name of discernment and unconditional acceptance can matter more than what you do say. If this goes on unaddressed, however, it can turn into its own corrosion.)
I find it easy to waste my own time with this particular rabbit hole because it evokes some old professional wounds from my 20s and 30s. I can be confidently going about my business (personal and business) and then one day, days after a bumble through this part of my backyard, I get out of bed and don’t make it to the hallway before feel like I’ve taken an involuntary trip down a mine shaft of old shit. I recognize the sensation of falling, followed by the sensation of having put on swim goggles that are lightly coated in….sewage. Everything looks and smells like shit for a minute—until I realize you've just been slimed, and it isn’t even mine. When that happens to you, go get a hot shower, the real day you have ahead is waiting.
You can't want it more than they do. And you don't have to keep trying. My aunt always says about my sister, “You are the strongest swimmer in the family. And she keeps jumping in the water fully clothed and intoxicated assuming rescue ops are obligated to respond. And as soon as you nearly kill yourself hauling her back onto the beach, drenched and coated in seaweed from your own unplanned swim…..she does it again.” So I learned to offer these clients “life jackets,” grab the life ring off the nearest boat and fling it, or grab the “hook” and hold them up until willing help is available that is not me, personally. Because clearly, I ain’t it.
I'm not writing this with anger. I'm writing it with a sort of disbelief and professional grief at the ones who get so close and throw it away.
If this is you, with a client like this, don’t renew that contract. Find someone who is a better fit, for their issue, readiness, or willingness to invest—and make a referral. Maybe there is something about it being you doing this work with them that ended up feeling….icky. That’s not all bad. It’s very often not personal….it’s what they brought, and won’t let you help get it out of the way. You just turn the page, and release them with love.
But here's what I want you to know if you're the one creating the tension. This is what I wanted one person, just one capable person in my life to come through with: I can see you fully, even though that’s the worst thing imaginable until you meet me. I see that you're not trying to hurt anyone. I see that this isn't malice—it's desperation. I see the brilliant, capable person you were before this injury, and I see the person you're trying to become.
The pattern is not reflective of who you are, or who you’ve become, no matter who told you that you are “damaged.” (That was the line used on me to justify a devastating professional abandonment.) It's what's protecting you from feeling what you are afraid you have to feel to heal. You're worth the work it will take to get there, and you undeniably deserve relief from this pain. It’s easier than you might think to be free. You’ve just been using the wrong tools for this assignment.