Blog for
Chris Lauzon - Therapist, LICSW

Old Mental Muscle once served an important purpose. It helped us navigate difficult family challenges, relationships, environments, expectations, disappointments, life transitions, and fears. It became efficient because it was practiced so often. From both a clinical perspective and a neurological one, these patterns become deeply familiar neural pathways; the brain’s preferred route. The path of least resistance. Imagine this Old Mental Muscle as a massive six-lane highway

The image says what many of us feel but rarely slow down enough to name. We live in an age of constant access, news alerts, social feeds, opinion threads, breaking headlines, hot takes, and outrage cycles. None of it is inherently wrong; we are free: to believe, to speak, to vote, to worship, to dissent, and these freedoms matter.

Let’s talk about the very fine line between “loving someone well” and “loving someone out of fear.” It’s a line that gets crossed more often than we realize, sometimes in the name of care, sometimes in the name of connection, and often without us noticing until tension begins to rise or space becomes scarce. If you’ve ever felt smothered in a relationship, or just as importantly, recognized you might be the one doing the smothering—you’re not alone. And it’s worth unpacking.