One-on-One Intensive
Some patterns are remarkably resistant to good intentions.
You may procrastinate on work that matters to you, overthink every decision, avoid a conversation you know you need to have, or keep putting other people's needs ahead of your own. You understand the pattern. You may have read about it, analyzed it, made promises to yourself, and tried harder. Yet when the familiar situation appears, you find yourself doing the same thing again.
That is usually not because you lack insight, discipline, or willpower. Something in the pattern still makes emotional sense, even if it no longer makes logical sense.
Get Unstuck is a focused, one-to-one coaching program for working with one persistent pattern at a time. Across three sessions, we will look beneath the behavior, identify what is keeping it in place, and create the conditions for a different response to become possible.
The procrastinator knows the work needs to be done. The people-pleaser knows it is acceptable to say no. The perfectionist knows nobody gets everything right. None of that necessarily changes what happens in the moment.
Persistent patterns are often organized around old emotional learning: conclusions formed through experience that continue to shape your reactions long after you have outgrown them intellectually. Perhaps mistakes once brought criticism. Perhaps speaking up created conflict. Perhaps keeping other people happy felt like the price of belonging. Perhaps failure came to mean something painful about who you were.
You may no longer believe those conclusions consciously, while another part of you still reacts as though they are true.
If some part of you expects humiliation when you get something wrong, procrastination can make a strange kind of sense. If disappointing someone feels as though it could cost you their love, people-pleasing can make sense. If making the wrong choice feels dangerous, indecision can make sense.
The behavior is not the whole problem. It is the visible part of an older protective strategy.
Research on memory reconsolidation suggests that an emotional learning can become more open to revision when it is activated alongside an experience that contradicts what it expects. In plain English, an old reaction can begin to change when the part of you that expects danger encounters evidence, in the moment, that the old rule is no longer the whole truth.
This matters because something learned years ago can still feel true even when you consciously know it is not. You can understand, perfectly well, that it is safe to make a mistake or that disappointing someone does not make you unlovable, while your body continues to react as though neither thing is true.
The goal is not to manage the old reaction more efficiently, suppress it, or argue it into submission. It is to help it encounter a reality it does not know how to account for.
For example, an old learning may say, "If I speak honestly, I will be rejected." The new experience is not that everyone approves of you—life remains annoyingly free to contain other people—but that you can speak for yourself, tolerate disapproval, and remain safe and intact.
Or an old learning may say, "I am helpless," while you recognize and feel the choices, strength, and ability to protect yourself that you have now.
This is not about pasting a positive belief over a painful one. It is about helping an outdated protective response update in the presence of a fuller reality.
You do not need to arrive knowing why you do what you do. That is part of the work we will do together.
You can bring a pattern such as:
We will not try to fix your entire life through this process. We will choose one pattern that continues to get in your way and give it our full attention.
We will have a complimentary session to identify the pattern you want to work on and determine whether this approach is right for you. If I am not the right person to help you, I will tell you.
Our first session lasts up to 90 minutes. We will begin with what happens in your life when the pattern appears.
Instead of trying to convince you that your reaction is irrational or telling you what you should do differently, we will look for the emotional logic beneath it: what your mind may believe it is protecting you from.
We may explore questions such as:
The point is not endless analysis. It is to discover the learning that keeps the pattern in place.
The work is experiential, but it is collaborative and paced. We may slow down, notice what is happening in your body, stay with an emotion for a moment, or follow a memory or reaction that arises. This can reveal the conclusions you formed and why the pattern still makes sense to some part of you.
You remain in control throughout. If something becomes overwhelming, we will slow down, change direction, or stop.
We will meet twice more, after you have had time to return to ordinary life and notice how the pattern responds. Each follow-up session lasts up to 60 minutes.
We will look at what has changed, what still carries emotional charge, and whether other memories or learning are connected to the same pattern. If part of the old reaction remains active, we will continue working with it rather than assuming one experience should resolve everything.
Part of the purpose of this process is to help you become more capable of working with these patterns yourself. Throughout our sessions, I will explain what we are doing, help you recognize the emotional learning beneath your reactions, and help you practice meeting those reactions with curiosity rather than judgment or force.
The aim is not for you to become dependent on my guidance. It is for you to become more confident in your own ability to understand what is driving a pattern and respond differently when it appears.
Change is often experienced as a distinct internal shift. Fear, guilt, shame, dread, or urgency that once felt overwhelming may lose intensity or no longer take over in the same way.
You may still remember experiences that helped create the pattern, but they no longer carry the same emotional charge. You know they happened, but your body stops reacting as though they are still happening or about to happen.
You might say no without the familiar surge of guilt, begin a project without dread taking over, make a decision without revisiting it for three days, or speak honestly without your entire body telling you to retreat.
You are not desperately reminding yourself what you are supposed to believe. Something has changed internally, and the old reaction no longer has the authority it once had over you.
I cannot promise that every pattern will disappear completely through this process, and anyone who does is promising something they cannot guarantee. Some patterns involve several layers of emotional learning and may need more time and work.
What I can promise is that we will not spend our time circling the problem. We will look for what is actually keeping the pattern alive and work there.
Get Unstuck is for people who are generally functioning well but have a recurring pattern they have not been able to change through insight, effort, or conventional self-help alone.
You will need to be willing to look beneath the behavior and experience some emotion rather than only discussing the problem intellectually. You do not need to be fearless, perfectly articulate, or already certain about what the pattern means. You only need enough curiosity to look at it honestly.
This is coaching, not psychotherapy, and it is not appropriate for every situation. If you are dealing with a mental health crisis or need treatment for severe depression, PTSD, an eating disorder, substance dependence, or another clinical condition, you should work with an appropriately licensed mental health professional.
I have spent more than 30 years studying happiness, human behavior, personal growth, and what allows people to change. One question has remained at the center of that work: why can we understand something for years and still be unable to change it?
The answer, at least in part, is that understanding is not always where the pattern lives. We can have a sophisticated explanation of our behavior while still being organized by an older emotional conclusion that has never been fully examined or updated.
Get Unstuck grew out of my interest in helping people work at that deeper level: not by treating themselves as broken, weak, or insufficiently disciplined, but by becoming curious about the intelligence inside the pattern and discovering whether it still needs to run the show.
The Investment
$1,100
Your Get Unstuck program includes:
100% Money-Back Guarantee
If you complete the three sessions and aren't satisfied with the work we've done, let me know within 21 days of your final session and I'll refund the full $1,100.
Doug has assisted me in dealing with several long-term problems that have been affecting my life for many years. I was able to release some old behaviors and adopt new patterns allowing me to move forward in areas that were formerly a real challenge for me.
Get Unstuck
One pattern. Up to 3-1/2 hours. $1,100.
Begin with a complimentary session about the pattern you want to change.
Let's Talk About What's Keeping You StuckA Personal Story
One of my first experiences with memory reconsolidation happened in 2012. I was living alone in a house in the forest outside Vancouver, Washington. I loved being out in the woods and was pretty self-sufficient.
Except at night.
Shortly after the end of a 10-year relationship, I began having terrifying bouts of fear, usually sometime between eight and ten in the evening. Nothing was happening, and there was nothing I could identify that I was afraid of. I would suddenly be overwhelmed by a horrible sense of impending doom. I wondered if I was going crazy.
I had been studying memory reconsolidation and had experienced the process while working on other issues with two therapists, including Bruce Ecker, a pioneer in applying memory reconsolidation to create lasting change. So one evening, instead of trying to escape the fear, I decided to sit down and follow the process on my own.
I stopped being afraid and fighting what I was feeling and became curious about it.
As I stayed with the fear, memories began returning that I hadn't thought about in more than 30 years.
When my sister and I were children, our parents would occasionally leave us home alone while they went to a friend's house or a party. A few times a year, our alcoholic uncle would call while they were gone and threaten us.
My sister would answer the phone, begin sobbing and hand it to me. I would then listen as our uncle threatened to come to the house and kill us.
I was probably about seven when this started, and it continued for several years. We knew he lived only a couple of hours away, so the danger felt completely real. We were terrified he could reach us before our parents came home.
We would panic and call our parents. They reassured us that nothing would happen, but I don't remember them coming home to comfort us or help us feel safe. The calls were never discussed afterward.
Eventually my uncle stopped harassing us, and as I got older, I completely forgot about the incidents.
I hadn't consciously connected those childhood experiences with the fear I was having decades later. But my brain had recognized a familiar pattern: I was alone, it was dark, and nobody was there to protect me.
Part of the process can involve speaking directly to the frightened part of you that still carries the old experience. Instead of trying to silence or reason with that part, you respond to it from the perspective of the adult you are now.
I stayed with the feeling and began talking to the part of me that still felt like that terrified seven-year-old boy. I told him that what had happened should never have happened, that of course he had been frightened, and that he wasn't alone anymore. I was the adult now, and I would never allow anyone to do that to him again.
Then I felt the anger arise. In my imagination, I confronted my uncle and told him exactly what I thought of what he had done. I allowed myself to feel the anger of an adult protecting a frightened child, something I had been incapable of doing when I was seven.
My father had died by this time, so I also confronted him in my mind and allowed myself to feel the sadness and anger of not having been protected.
I didn't try to talk myself out of the fear or convince myself that it was irrational. I stayed with the frightened part of me while bringing something into the experience that hadn't been there originally: a capable adult who could protect him.
Then, in a way that felt almost magical, something shifted.
The fear was replaced by a physical sense of being safe, cared for, and no longer alone. I could still remember the phone calls, but the emotional charge attached to them was gone.
I had given that frightened child a new experience, one that directly contradicted what he had learned years before. He was no longer alone and powerless. The danger was over, and someone was finally there to protect him.
That happened 14 years ago, and the fear has never returned. I've traveled the world, lived alone and found myself in many other unfamiliar situations without ever experiencing it again.
That night became one of the most important experiences of my life. Since then, I've used this process to change numerous other patterns that had kept me stuck, succeeding where insight, determination, and willpower hadn't been enough. It fundamentally changed my understanding of what makes lasting personal change possible.