The blue light of my phone is currently reflecting off a shard of ceramic that used to be the handle of my favorite mug. It was a heavy, speckled piece I bought for $29 at a craft fair three years ago, and I just watched it shatter across the linoleum because I was trying to hold my phone, a stack of mail, and a lukewarm cup of Earl Grey at the same time. The handle is lying there like a severed ear, a tiny monument to my own clumsy multitasking. But the real reason it’s on the floor is the email I just read. It arrived at 8:09 PM, a timestamp that feels like a punch to the solar plexus. It’s from my ex, and it is a masterpiece of modern, HR-approved psychological warfare.

I’m sitting here on the kitchen floor, 19 minutes after the mug broke, and I’m thinking about Julia D.-S. She’s a typeface designer I know, someone who spends her days obsessing over the negative space between an ‘f’ and an ‘i’. She understands that the way a message is shaped is often more important than the message itself. Julia once told me that if you increase the tracking on a sentence enough, it becomes aesthetically pleasing but completely unreadable. That is exactly what this email feels like. It is a perfectly spaced, beautifully kerned set of instructions on why my feelings are actually just a ‘projection of my own unhealed trauma.’

Julia D.-S. recently went through a separation that lasted 29 months from start to finish. She told me that the hardest part wasn’t the division of the $1499 worth of mid-century furniture or the arguments over who kept the vintage letterpress. It was the emails. Her ex-partner had spent a significant amount of time in ‘wellness retreats’ and had emerged with a vocabulary that functioned like a suit of armor. Every time Julia tried to express a basic human frustration-like the fact that he’d forgotten to sign the 109 papers for the kid’s insurance-he would respond with a paragraph about ‘honoring his capacity’ and ‘maintaining a boundary against her chaotic energy.’

This is the great irony of our current moment. We have more tools for communication than ever before. We have apps, we have therapists, we have 499 different books on how to have a ‘conscious uncoupling.’ But by adopting this pseudo-clinical language, we have actually made it impossible to resolve anything. You can’t negotiate with a ‘boundary.’ You can’t argue with someone’s ‘truth.’ These words, which were meant to help us understand our internal worlds, are now being used as shields to avoid any kind of external accountability.

It makes me miss the days of open screaming. At least when someone was shouting, you knew where they stood. There was a raw, jagged honesty to a door being slammed or a ‘You’re being a jerk!’ being hurled across a parking lot. Now, we get three paragraphs of ‘I am noticing that your requests are activating my fight-or-flight response, and I need to prioritize my self-regulation by not responding to you for 79 hours.’ It’s the same abandonment, the same refusal to engage, but it’s wrapped in the plastic of self-care. It’s a ‘no’ that pretends to be a ‘Namaste.’

This is where the real damage happens in family transitions. When parents start speaking to each other like they are competing in a clinical trial for the most enlightened human on earth, the children are the ones who get lost in the white noise. Kids don’t need ‘co-parenting dyads with established emotional containers.’ They need two people who can figure out how to get the soccer cleats from one house to the other without turning it into a dissertation on ‘relational triangulation.’

I suspect we do this because we are terrified of the mess. Divorce is messy. Separation is a 39-car pileup of the heart. If we can describe it in the language of a textbook, maybe we can pretend it isn’t happening to us. Maybe we can pretend that we aren’t the ones on the floor with a broken mug and a 109-word email that makes us feel like we’re losing our minds. We want the clinical distance because the alternative is to admit that we are hurting, that we are failing, and that we are deeply, embarrassingly human.

But that distance is a trap. In the process of protecting ourselves with these $239 words, we lose the ability to actually move forward. We get stuck in a loop of diagnostic standoff. Julia D.-S. found that her mediation only started to work when she and her ex finally stopped using the ‘scripts’ they’d picked up from Instagram infographics. They had to get back to the basic, ugly, monosyllabic truths. ‘I am sad.’ ‘I am overwhelmed.’ ‘I need you to help me.’

Finding that path isn’t easy, especially when the legal system is often designed to encourage the very defensiveness we’re trying to escape. This is why many are turning toward more human-centric models. For instance, finding a way through the noise often requires the guidance of people who see the humans behind the jargon, which is the cornerstone of the work done at

Collaborative Practice San Diego.

They understand that a divorce isn’t a clinical experiment; it’s a life change that requires actual conversation, not just the exchange of weaponized vocabulary.

I think back to the mug. If I try to glue this handle back on, I’m going to use a clear, industrial-strength epoxy. It’s going to leave a visible seam. You’ll be able to see exactly where the break happened. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay. A mug with a seam is a mug that has a history. It’s a mug that has been used and dropped and cared for enough to be mended.

Our communication should be more like that. We should be okay with the seams. We should be okay with the fact that sometimes we’re going to be ‘unregulated’ or ‘unskillful’ or whatever the buzzword of the week is. But instead of hiding behind the language of a therapist’s office, we should have the courage to just be the person who broke the mug. To be the person who is late for pick-up and is actually just sorry, not ‘negotiating a capacity constraint.’

Instead, I think I’m just going to tell him that the mug broke. I’m going to tell him that I’m tired and that the Tuesday schedule is hard for me too. It’s a risk, of course. When you drop the jargon, you drop your shield. You’re standing there without your ‘HR-approved’ armor, and that’s a terrifying place to be. But the 89 people I’ve interviewed about their own transitions all say the same thing: the healing only started when the ‘speak’ stopped.

We are living in an era of 159 different ways to avoid saying what we actually mean. We have optimized our conflict for the courtroom and the comment section, but we’ve forgotten how to optimize it for the kitchen table. Julia D.-S. eventually finished her typeface, by the way. She called it ‘Residue.’ It’s a font where the letters don’t quite line up, where there’s a little bit of bleed at the edges, a little bit of ink that didn’t stay where it was supposed to. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever made.

Maybe that’s what we need in our family transitions. Less ‘alignment’ and more ‘bleed.’ Less ‘containment’ and more ‘spilling over.’ We need to stop acting like our lives are a set of clinical symptoms to be managed and start acting like they are a set of relationships to be navigated.

I’m going to go get the broom now. There are probably 1009 tiny pieces of ceramic hidden under the stove, and if I don’t find them, I’ll be stepping on them for the next 19 weeks. It’s a mess, but it’s my mess. And as I sweep, I’ll be drafting a reply that doesn’t contain a single word of therapy jargon. Just the truth, as jagged and uneven as the handle in my hand. I suspect that, in the long run, it will be much harder to ignore than a perfectly kerned wall of ‘boundaries.’

In the end, we don’t need more experts on our trauma; we need more people who are willing to be messy together. We need to realize that ‘holding space’ is just a fancy way of saying ‘staying in the room when things get uncomfortable.’ So, let’s stay in the room. Let’s break a few more mugs and admit that we don’t have the vocabulary to fix everything. Maybe that’s the only ‘truth’ that actually matters.