with Jordan Leaño
What you need is not up for debate.
"To be wounded by your own understanding of love.
To bleed willingly and joyfully."
You've done the work.
Something is still running underneath it.
You've had this conversation more than once. Different words, same outcome, because you're arguing with the story, not the need underneath it.
You know the narrative by heart. You've traced it back. And something underneath still keeps producing the same result. That something isn't a thought you can reframe your way out of. It's an identity you've been carrying without questioning.
Someone treated you like your needs didn't matter. And somewhere in you, that got filed away as fact. Their behavior became evidence. You believed the verdict.
Not almost chosen. Not conditionally wanted. You want a relationship where naming your needs isn't a risk to the connection. It's what the connection is built on.
You've tried to think your way there. Reframe your way there. But real freedom isn't something you generate. It's what's left once the story you've been carrying about yourself stops running the show.
Not because of a technique. Because once you can actually see the story for what it is, instead of what it convinced you was true, something in you already knows the difference.
What happened was real. The pain was real. What wasn't necessarily true was the story you built about yourself in response to it, the one that's been running your relationships and your needs ever since.
Someone didn't want you the way you needed to be wanted. That part is real. But underneath it is an older story, one that existed before this relationship, that says only someone fundamentally unworthy of that ends up here. The relationship didn't create that story. It just seemed to confirm it.
You've done therapy, coaching, retreats. You've examined the story from every angle, and you're more self-aware than ever. But awareness of a story isn't the same as actually questioning whether it's true. Until that happens, it keeps writing the same outcome into new rooms with new people.
Strip masculinity of faith and compassion, and what's left tends to harden into control instead of leadership. That's not strength. It's fear wearing strength's clothing. It shows up in how we love, how we ask, how we withhold.
Faith and compassion aren't the soft version of having needs. They're what lets a need be stated once, plainly, without needing to dominate the room to be heard. When that's actually present, the people around you feel the difference immediately.
I found out my former partner had been with someone else. What surfaced in me wasn't just grief about the relationship. It was an old identity snapping back into place: I am trash. That identity didn't start with her. It had been running long before she did what she did.
Underneath the grief was something rawer. Real anger, wanting to hurt them both the way I'd been hurt, wanting them to feel exactly what I felt. When I actually looked at that anger instead of pushing it down, I saw why it was there. It only made sense next to an identity I'd been carrying long before either of them: I am trash.
When I got honest about what her behavior actually meant, and what it didn't mean about me, something in me let go. Not a reframe. Not a new story. Just the truth that had been sitting underneath that identity the whole time.
That's the work I do with people now.
I used to fall into the trap of putting people in my past because they were "wrong," because somehow I was "better" than them and needed to move on from them. But that wasn't the full story. I shared my heart, I gave it my best, and in the end the relationship didn't last.
Attempting to resurrect a relationship that ended is playing God, or at the very least signals to my past self that their efforts weren't important. Every ounce of time, energy, and effort I put into that relationship was important, and allowing the depth of loss to truly hit my heart is the gift they left me, to unlock a deeper level of love.
It's painful. It leaves me vulnerable. It reveals my shame, where I felt insufficient, and ultimately shows me all the places I have yet to love myself. A great gift hidden in great pain.
Delete the messages, the photos, the contact. Burn anything symbolic they left you. Block them so they don't have access to you. Not because there is anything wrong with them, but because the way you honor them is by holding them as your precious, important past.
Men and women. Both arrive having done significant work on themselves. Both arrive knowing the story. Both arrive still feeling something underneath that the work hasn't touched. The wound is different. The story at the root of it is the same kind of thing. And it can be questioned.
This isn't a discovery call. It's a focused conversation to get honest about what you actually need, and what's been getting in the way of saying it. When you can see the story clearly instead of just living inside it, something in you will already know what's true.
I'll be direct, not harsh. Present. This only works if we're both willing to look at what's actually true. If it looks like a fit to go deeper together, I'll show you what that looks like. If not, you'll still leave with something real.
What's true about you has always been true. It's just been buried under a story that was never yours to carry.