There's a belief that lives inside every spiral, and it sounds like this:
This time is different.
Not just hard. Not just uncomfortable. Different – in a way that makes everything you've survived before feel irrelevant. The past doesn't count. Your history doesn't apply. Whatever resilience you've demonstrated up until now was for a different version of life, a different version of you, a different kind of hard.
I've heard this belief in some form from almost every client I've worked with at a breaking point. And I understand why it feels true. When you're in it — really in it — the spiral has a logic to it. The fear is specific and present, and the evidence for it feels overwhelming. The evidence against it feels distant and theoretical.
That's the nature of a spiral. It's not irrational. It's just radically incomplete.
What a Spiral Actually Is
A spiral isn't a breakdown. It's a story that's gotten too loud.
Usually it starts with something real — a setback, a loss, a moment where something didn't go the way you needed it to. That's legitimate. But somewhere between the event and the present moment, the story around it expanded. It gathered other fears, other doubts, other moments of uncertainty. It began to feel less like one hard thing and more like evidence of something fundamental — about the situation, about the future, about you.
The thought loops. The same fears circle back. Each pass feels more confirmed than the last. And the louder the story gets, the harder it becomes to hear anything else — including the quieter voice that knows you've been here before and got through.
That's the voice we're trying to reach. Not with reassurance, and not with a reframe imposed from the outside. With three questions that interrupt the spiral long enough for the person inside it to find their own footing.
The Three Questions
Question 1: What's the story you're telling yourself?
This is the first move because the spiral is, at its core, a story. Not a lie — a story. Built from real material, but shaped by fear into something more absolute than the facts support.
When I ask this, I'm not challenging the difficulty of the situation. I'm creating a small but critical gap between the experience and the interpretation. Between what happened and what it means. That gap is where agency lives.
Most people, when asked this question directly, can answer it. Not immediately, and not without discomfort — but they can. Because somewhere beneath the noise of the spiral, they already know the difference between what is real and what fear has extrapolated from what is real. The question just gives them permission to name it.
What comes out is often something like: The story I'm telling myself is that this is the end of something. What's actually true is that I don't know that yet. Or: The story is that I've failed. What's true is that one thing didn't work. The gap between those two versions of reality is enormous — and finding that truth it is the beginning of getting out.
Question 2: What do you already know about yourself that this moment is making you forget?
This is the excavation question. And it's the one that connects most directly to the belief that this time is different.
Because here's what's almost always true: you have moved through hard things before. Not just difficult things — genuinely hard things. Things that at the time felt as unsurvivable as whatever you're facing now. And you brought something to that moment — a quality, a capacity, a way of finding your footing — that got you through.
That thing doesn't disappear when a new hard thing arrives. But the spiral convinces you it does. It narrows your field of vision to the present difficulty and crowds out the longer view of who you actually are.
This question widens the frame. It asks you to remember yourself more completely than the spiral is allowing. Not to minimize what's hard now, but to bring the fullness of your own history into the room – because that history is evidence. It's data. And it belongs in the assessment of what you're capable of.
When clients sit with this question, something tends to shift. Not dramatically, not always visibly, but there's a quality of recognition. A remembering. I am someone who has gotten through things. That is already true. I am not starting from zero.
That recognition doesn't solve anything. But it changes the ground you're standing on.
I think of a client who is, in many ways, a masterclass in this. An American who moved to Spain decades ago, built a life there, raised a family, became fluent in the culture as much as the language. Along the way she has reinvented herself more times than most people attempt in a lifetime — from nursing to translation work, from that to pharma, from pharma to something that actually lit her up: founding a nonprofit focused on women experiencing trauma and building frameworks for how they become resilient after it. She had just received her first seed round when we were deep in this work together.
What our work did was go back through her history with her — not as biography, but as evidence. Every time she had stepped into the unknown. Every time she had left something that wasn't right, even when leaving was hard. Every time she had built something from scratch in conditions that would have stopped most people.
She hadn't forgotten those things exactly. But she wasn't using them. The present challenge had narrowed her view to the difficulty directly in front of her, and she had temporarily lost sight of the longer story — the one that showed, clearly and repeatedly, that she was someone who knew how to move through exactly this.
That's what Q2 does. It gives people permission to bring their whole history into the room. And when you do that for someone whose history is as rich as hers, something opens up that no amount of reassurance could achieve. She didn't need to be told she could do it. She needed to remember that she already had — in every version of herself that came before this one.
Question 3: What’s the smallest true thing you can do from here?
Not the biggest move. Not the solution. Not the thing that will fix everything.
The smallest true thing.
This question matters because spirals are partly sustained by overwhelm. The gap between where you are and where you need to be looks enormous, and so nothing feels like enough to bother with. The magnitude of the problem makes the available actions feel pointless by comparison.
Smallest dissolves that. It removes the pressure of having to fix everything and replaces it with a question you can actually answer: What is one true, real, available thing I can do right now?
True matters as much as smallest. This isn't about busy work or distraction — it's about finding a move that is genuinely connected to the situation, that points in the right direction, that you can take with what you actually have right now. Not when you feel better. Not when things are clearer. Now.
The smallest true thing is rarely the thing that resolves the situation. But it breaks the paralysis. And broken paralysis is the beginning of movement, and movement is the beginning of out.
Why They Work Every Time
These three questions work not because they're clever, but because of what they trust.
They trust that the person in the spiral already has what they need. The awareness to distinguish story from fact. The history to prove their own resilience. The capacity to take one honest step forward. None of these things have to be installed, they just have to be uncovered.
That's the essence of pattern work. It isn't about importing solutions from the outside. It's about returning people to themselves. To the longer view of who they are, what they've survived, and what that survival has built in them.
The spiral says: this time is different. Pattern work says: look at your whole story, not just this chapter.
You have moved through hard things before. That is not a platitude — it is a fact. And facts, when you can actually feel them, are more powerful than any fear.
A Note on Timing
These questions don't work when someone isn't ready to be interrupted. There's a moment in a spiral — early on, when the emotion is still raw and the story is still forming — where the most important thing is simply to be present with someone. To let them feel heard before anything else.
But when the spiral has been running long enough that it's becoming a loop — when the person is repeating themselves, circling the same fears, coming back to the same inevitable conclusions — that's when these questions land. Because at that point, some part of them is already tired of the story and ready, however tentatively, to question it.
That readiness is the opening. And these three questions are how we walk through it .
I've Been Here Too
I don't only help people see their patterns. Someone once had to reflect mine back to me.
It was early 2020 and COVID had just begun to turn the world inside out. My husband and I had fled New York City with our one-year-old — there were rumors the National Guard was coming, that the city might lock down entirely, that we were running out of time to leave. In a desperate moment, we packed up, grabbed our dog, and flew to my parents' house in North Idaho.
What followed was one of the hardest periods of my life. My parents' home held my family, my sister's family of three, and all the weight of what we'd each left behind. My husband and I were both working demanding full-time jobs under one roof, trying to care for a baby who wasn't sleeping through the night. I was still nursing. I was on East Coast time living on the West Coast — which meant 7am calls hit at 4am, after I'd already worked until midnight. I was crying most of the time.
Eventually the case wrapped. A family friend came to visit, and I started telling her what the past months had been. She listened. And then she did something I couldn't do for myself — she reflected it back to me. She told me, clearly and kindly, and helped me see that I needed a therapist.
I was so far down I couldn't see it. I couldn't see what I needed, couldn't see a way out, couldn't see the shape of what I was carrying. Without her intervention, I don't know where I would have landed. But because she held up that mirror, I got a therapist. Then a psychotherapist. Then a short-term leave from work to recover.
I want to be clear here: what I needed then was a therapist — and therapy is distinct from coaching in important ways. Therapy heals. Coaching builds. What I do with clients isn't clinical work — it's the work of helping people who are already functioning, already capable, already moving, to see themselves and their patterns more clearly so they can move with more intention. But the belief underneath both is the same: that sometimes you simply cannot see what someone standing beside you can. That's what my friend did for me. And it's what I try to do for the people I work with.
I tell this story because the title of this piece is You've Moved Through Hard Things Before — and that's true for me too. But I didn't find my way back to that truth alone. Someone had to show it to me first.
That's the work. Not just the framework. The human being willing to say: I can see something you can't right now. Let me hold it for you until you can.
Pattern work is at the center of how I coach. The premise is simple: your past is not just context — it's evidence. Evidence of what you're made of, what you've built, and what you're capable of in moments that feel impossible. If you're in a spiral right now — or if you keep returning to the same one — I'd love to help you find the questions that interrupt it.