On a small dairy farm, you do not reinvent the morning. You run the same tracks you did the day before, the milker pump roars to life at five. The cows get milked and then fed. The sequence does not change.

On a dairy farm, inactivity is never invisible. If the cows do not get fed, you know it by morning. Nothing stays hidden for long.

The harder kind of inactivity is the quiet kind. The kind that looks fine from the outside.

When my brother Joel died, there was no time to stop and fully grieve. Even that night, the farm kept moving. The work kept coming, so I moved with it, partly with intensity and a lot of avoiding.

I didn't ask the questions sitting right underneath the surface. Not because I was too busy, but rather because I did not want to know the answers. I knew the questions, and they were easier unanswered.

I left certain doors closed for years. I moved on, called it resilient strength. It was neither. It was avoidance with a good story attached.

That is the most dangerous form of inactivity. Not laziness. The deliberate choice to leave the hard question alone because answering it costs something.

The Things We Hide — Moment

Inactivity does not look like what most people think it does.

It does not look like sitting still. It looks like staying busy enough that you never have to sit with the one question that actually matters.

In The Things We Hide, I write about inactivity as a wall rather than laziness; a sophisticated strategy for avoiding the reality of what lies on the other side of your actions.

You fill the calendar, stay productive, and keep moving. Underneath it all, the thing you are not looking at just keeps growing.

My podcast guest Jason VanRuler described it in the starkest terms. Some people just opt out. They decide the prospect of looking in the mirror is too costly. So they reach for comfort instead. They rebuild the same patterns because familiar pain is safer than unfamiliar change.

The belief underneath that inactivity is quiet but devastating: if I do not look at it, it cannot touch me.

This is the belief cycle. Beliefs drive thoughts. Thoughts drive actions. Actions drive results. When the belief is built on avoidance, every result just confirms the pattern. You stay stuck; you call it staying safe.

The door I kept closed was not dramatic. It was the question of what I was actually carrying and whether I had ever really dealt with it. Leaving it closed felt like moving forward. It was not; it was just deferring the cost.

The only way out is through, not around, not over. You have to open the door and ask the question. 

It is uncomfortable. It will cost you. And it is the only thing that actually changes anything.

Ultimately, you will come out the other side.  My friend Joseph Mast shared this revelation with me years ago:  “You have to go through it to see it, you can’t see it while you're in it.”

PRE ORDERS NOW AVAILABLE - RELEASE DATE JUNE 9

Podcast

Jason VanRuler is a licensed psychotherapist who has spent his career at the intersection of trauma, attachment, and human connection. He is the author of Discovering Your Communication Type, a book forged from thousands of hours sitting with couples and individuals at their most fractured moments. His PATHS framework gives leaders and families a practical language for why connection breaks down and what it takes to rebuild it.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Jason.

1. Your Pattern Is Yours Until You Own It — Jason was in an apartment in Minneapolis, car about to be repossessed, dropped out of school, when he caught himself in the mirror. He looked at the person staring back and thought: This person was supposed to do something else. What changed was not his circumstances; it was ownership. He stopped selling himself the story that someone else was responsible and asked, "If this is my thing, maybe I can change it." That is the pivot point every pattern requires. Not a dramatic event. Just the moment you stop believing the lie. “I just believed for so long that it was somebody else’s thing, not mine. And so I just had this moment where I was like, man, that’s a really hard lie to sell anymore because it sure looks like my thing.”

2. Knowing How You Communicate Changes Everything You Build — Jason watched couples go through the same empathy scripts in session, and one in four did not respond at all. That question drove him to build the PATHS framework: Peacemaker, Advocate, Thinker, Harbor, Spark. Each type communicates for a different reason. None is better than the others; all misfire when you reach for the wrong tool at the wrong moment. Self-awareness is not a soft skill. It is what determines whether your words land or whether they miss. “The maturity is knowing who we are, how we naturally show up, and then understanding if the situation or environment needs that.”

3. The Messy Middle Is What People Are Missing — Most people tell the clean story. A hard thing happened; here is where I landed; here is the lesson. What they skip is the ten years in the middle. Jason said the people who cannot figure out how to do the work are not lazy. They just have no model for what the middle actually looks like. The leaders worth following are the ones willing to say they are in the middle of it right now and here is what they are doing. Not polished, not resolved, just honest. “The people who show you the middle part are the people worth following.”

Just a couple of weeks away - June 9

Jason’s work is about what happens when you stop blaming the pattern and start owning it. That is exactly where my book begins.

The Things We Hide is about the beliefs underneath the behavior. The walls we build. The cycles we run on. And what it costs us when we never stop to examine them.

It comes out June 9. If you want to go deeper on everything Jason and I talked about, this is where to start.

Individual copies and bulk bundles are available now at thethingswehidebook.com.

If you are ordering for a team or organization, bundles start at five copies and go up from there. Every bulk order comes with resources to make this a shared experience, not just a book on a shelf.

DAYS UNTIL RELEASE

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.