Tangled, Not Broken
Not everything gets untangled by pulling harder.
I love to untangle necklaces.
A knot never comes apart the way you’d expect. Pull too hard, and it tightens. The only way through is to sit with it — find where the tension actually lives, not what manifests on the surface. Every knot has a place it started. Find that place, and the rest of it loosens on its own. That’s the part I’ve always loved — not untying things, but understanding how they got tied.
Where did it tighten first? Which strand is carrying tension? What happens if I stop pulling and simply pay attention?
Sometimes the knot loosens almost immediately. Sometimes it takes an hour. The time doesn’t matter, because the necklace was never ruined. It was tangled.
I feel this way with people, too. There isn’t judgement or fixing, there is only curiosity. Watching for where the tension actually lives, not what manifests on the surface. I try my best to be an observer of the systems- I get curious. Who goes quiet? Who tries to smooth things over before anyone else can say what they actually feel? Who jumps in first? What happened before this? What have they been carrying? What story made this response necessary?
People don’t become tangled overnight. And they don’t untangle because someone pulls harder. The harder we pull, the tighter the knot becomes.
Noticing asks something different. Slow down. Separate one strand from another. See which story belongs to childhood. Which belongs to grief. Which belongs to perfectionism. Which belongs to the impossible expectations we’ve quietly inherited.
One by one, they begin to loosen. Not because someone fixed us. Because we finally understood what we were looking at.
People sometimes imagine therapy as advice. I don’t experience it like that. It feels much more like sitting beside someone while we patiently untangle something they’ve been carrying for years.
Not rushing. Not judging. Not assuming. Just noticing.
Sometimes the knot isn’t even where they thought it was.
My favorite thing about untangling is that nothing new has to be added. Every link was already there. Every piece already belonged. The work isn’t becoming something different. It’s helping everything find its place again.
I don’t think healing is the process of becoming someone new. I think it’s the quiet work of untangling what has always been there.
This is the kind of space I want to help build.
Because people aren’t broken; sometimes they just get tangled.
— Leah
If this resonated, I’m building a space called SOLA around exactly this way of working. Subscribe for more.