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Maybe You Don’t Have Commitment Issues
If you want more out of life then what’s really getting in the way?
Why do we have such a hard time making a commitment?
And what’s so wrong with trying to live happily ever after?
Today, my wife Alyson and I explore the deep-seated fears that keep us stuck, the ways we operate from a prey mentality, and Alyson’s embarrassing bathroom experience.
In this interview:
- “Why won’t a man commit?”
- There’s no such thing as a commitment-phobe
- Competing commitments (Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey)
- What keeps us from having alignment with our values?
- When we believe that there are monsters under our bed
Plus:
- The danger of “set it and forget it”
- Identifying our prey mentality
- The shadow to personal growth and self-help
- We’re forgetting how powerful we are
And:
- Why seeking “easy street” is a trap
- Exoneration with Phil Stutz and Barry Michels
- Fragile egos and the “need” to prove our self worth
- Alyson’s body sounds
About Alyson Lanier
Alyson Lanier is a guide, coach, mentor, asskicker, counselor, and teacher. She received her BA, MA, and LPC in psychology, and has extensive training and certification in attachment work and Gestalt therapy, Transpersonal psychology, and Shambhala Buddhism. She has over 50,000 hours of therapeutic experience with individuals, couples, families, children, and adolescents in clinical and private settings. Halfway through her second decade of working in clinical and trauma informed therapeutic settings, Alyson realized psychotherapy alone was incomplete. In order to better serve her clients, Alyson broadened her professional toolbox with trainings and certifications in somatic sex education, energy work and consciousness development, and Ancestral Medicine work, a lineage repair approach to healing personal, family, and cultural burdens.
Adding alternative and spiritual practices to her therapeutic offerings made sense for Alyson because her experience with animist traditions and supernatural encounters began at a very young age, and set the foundation for her life’s study and practice. Her encounters with other-than-human beings, Old World traditions, Shambhala Buddhist practice, and subtle energy work over the years have given her a unique and layered perspective that plants her feet firmly in seemingly antithetical worlds: clinical and transpersonal psychology; Eastern and Western philosophy; clinical diagnosis and energetic and spiritual traditions of healing. Alyson has learned to fully embrace this duality, and to use it to understand the lenses her clients are seeing through, how they’re metabolizing what’s coming through for them, and to lovingly stir shit up to help them level-up.
Alyson delights in supporting her clients as they navigate their growth processes on psychological, physical, energetic, and spiritual levels. Her knowledge of psychology, development, and integral, energetic, and somatic studies give her a centered gravity, and her formative experiences and practices give her a rare wisdom. Her passion and humor spring from a desire to make the sacred profane and the profane sacred. Alyson approaches her transformative work with creative and dynamic interventions, serving her clients and groups as if the world depends on the fulfillment they are seeking, because it most assuredly does.
For over a decade, Alyson has been married to Tripp Lanier (who is also a coach and the host of The New Man Podcast which has been downloaded millions of times by men and women all around the world). Together they have a daughter and live on the coast of North Carolina.
