services – the life sucks coach

the life sucks coach

helping you make it to tomorrow when you don't want to be here today

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"hope" - artwork by me

How do you keep going when everything fucking sucks?

I won’t sugarcoat it: it’s really fucking hard.

Continuing to stay alive in a world full of so much pain and suffering, whether it’s external circumstances or your own thoughts and feelings that are the source of that suffering — it’s fucking HARD.

So how do you do it?

How do you not conclude that the only way out is out?

How do you find it in you to hold on for just one more day (cue Wilson Phillips or Kristin Wiig, whichever makes you happier), let alone the day after that and the day after that and the day after that … every day for the rest of your life?

The truth is that life IS fucking hard. And it will never not be, to some degree: difficult and painful things will keep happening to you until the day you die. It’s part of being alive.

BUT.

If you have the right tools, skills, knowledge, and support, life — even with all its pain — is survivable, and more than that, it can even be something you find magic in, find wonder in, find moments of unbearable beauty in — instead of just unbearable pain.

So where do you start?

Step One (START HERE): Learn How to Make It Through This Moment

Life is made up of a series of moments all strung together to make one seemingly continuous story. If you want to make it through your whole life, start by learning how to make it through just this one moment.

If you can do this, no matter what you’re going through, you’ll be able to make it, by taking it one moment at a time.

Click the link below to get started** with my training, “How to Make It Through This Moment.”

In it you’ll learn my 5-step BE COOL/DAMN FUN method to help manage mental and emotional overwhelm and get some fucking relief from whatever it is you’re going through.

It’s offered on a pay-what-you-can sliding scale, takes about an hour to complete, and you can put the skills you learn into practice immediately. When you’re overcome by the feeling that “this is too much and I can’t keep going,” this tool will help you do just that: keep going, even when life fucking sucks.

**This and all other trainings are currently being worked on behind the scenes and will be launching soon (as of Spring 2025). Please sign up for my newsletter below to get notified when they launch. 1:1 sessions and resource curation are ALWAYS available to get you through in the meantime (see Step Two and a Half below) 🙂

Step Two: Learn How to Make It Through This Day

Let’s say you just lost your job. You’re mentally and emotionally overwhelmed, you can’t think straight, your mind is spinning: I’m going to be homeless, I won’t be able to feed my dog, I’ll lose my partner, I’ll get sick and not be able to pay for it, no one will ever hire me, I”m not even very good at my job — I’m lucky I even got this one. My parents will be so disappointed. Why do I always fail at everything. I’m a piece of shit. I’ll never get my life together. And so on…

Step one taught you how to stop or at least calm these thoughts and feelings just enough to take a break from them, get some space from them, and recover your mental and emotional capacity (aka the ability to cope).

Step two (that’s this one) teaches you what to do next: figure out what’s in your control and decide how you want to proceed.

Whether your situation is controllable or not, you’ll learn that you always have choices, and know which ones to make to help you make it through just this day (and deal with tomorrow tomorrow).

Because this step is meant to help you NOW, to make it through THIS day, the things you’ll learn in this step can be implemented TODAY, without having to spend a long time learning them before you can use them. You’ll learn the skills that take longer to learn in step 3.

Click the button below** to sign up for my mini course, “How to Make It Through This Day,” and get started.

Step Two and a Half: Get Some Support Along the Way

It’s extremely hard to cope with the pain of being alive. It is much harder if you’re going through it alone.

Survival is much, MUCH easier if you have some kind of support and human connection on your journey — especially connection with someone who also knows what it’s like to struggle.

Even better if they’re someone who is skilled in deep listening and compassionate presence.

And even better still if they happen to be an incredible source of knowledge and further resources — often unconventional aka not boring — to help you get through.

Lucky you: that person is me and I am available to you 🙂

Here are two ways you can work with me directly (you can do both alongside of or in lieu of courses):

You can also get support from me indirectly by subscribing to my publication on Substack, where I share free writings and essays, host a free podcast, and offer a paid subscription to my “secular ministry,” Church of the Small Screen, where I share non-religious sermons and essays using TV as a “sacred text” as a source of guidance and inspiration to help us get through the painful ordeal of being alive.

Step Three: Learn How to Make It Through ANY Day

In step two you learn skills you can put into practice immediately to get through just THIS day — the day you’ve encountered this website and signed up for the course.

But there are other skills that take longer to learn and practice before you can use them.

Skills like self-compassion, distress tolerance, mindfulness, cognitive reframing, and more take time and practice before you get “good” at them — good enough at them for them to help you make it through when everything fucking sucks.

Don’t worry, you can learn these skills in my course, “How to Keep Going.” Sign up at the link below.**

Step Four: Learn How to Make It to Ten Thousand More Tomorrows

Coping is fucking hard, even when you know how to do it and even if you’ve had a long time to get good at it.

If life is only ever pain, you won’t last very long before you give up.

But if life is only coping with pain, you won’t last much longer.

Life can’t be just pain but it can’t just be coping with pain either.

You have to have something more — even and especially when things are hard.

In this final course, “Beyond Today: Sustainable Survival for Ten Thousand More Tomorrows,” you’ll learn how to pay attention to and intentionally cultivate things like beauty, joy, magic, and wonder and see them as not just things that make life better but things that make survival sustainable — that give you the energy and resilience of spirit to keep going when things are at their worst.

You can sign up at the link below.**

One-on-One Support/Deep Listening/Compassionate Presence “Hang Sessions”

Life fucking sucks. And sometimes having someone be there with you in the suckiness is the key to making it through another day.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by life, and connection with a real live human being (who has no agenda other than listening deeply to and supporting you) feels like it would help relieve some of that overwhelm, these “hang sessions” are for you.

These are one-on-one phone calls* where the goal is for you to be heard, supported, and cared about, without the need to reciprocate.

We can chat while going for a nature walk, doing a low-stakes art project, cooking a meal, or anything else that makes you feel good and grounded. We can also just chat, no activity required.

Whether you want someone to talk you through it, to sit with you in your pain, help you problem solve whatever you’re going through, or just figure out how to keep going on your hardest days — I’m here for it all.

Combining my background in chaplaincy/spiritual care, crisis support, non-violent communication, trauma-sensitive care, and more to help you make it to tomorrow by being there with you today.

*Text support also available after initial phone session.

No-Bullshit Meditation Library (Coming Soon)

Sometimes it can be overwhelming to talk to a stranger when you’re in a bad place mentally. I get it, trust me.

Sometimes just the *feeling* of connection, paired with guidance to help you sit with your panic, anxiety, negative thoughts, overwhelming feelings, and whatever else you’re struggling with, can be a better option.

These meditations are like a voice in the darkness reaching out to support you and help you hold on through the tough moments, so you can make it through today — offering connection and support without the need to talk to a total stranger.

If you’re looking for a way to ground yourself, calm yourself, or just stop yourself from spiralling, and don’t want to do it with another person, this is the library for you.

Created through a trauma-sensitive lens, so no one will be telling you to unclench your jaw, dammit, and with everything framed as an invitation rather than an instruction.

I also speak frankly and like a real person, not like a meditation “guru” sitting on a cushion and speaking in a lilting voice —which has never once calmed me in my entire life!

Custom Resource Curation

Sometimes the thing that helps you get through a tough moment or a tough life isn’t connecting with another person or sitting with your feelings — sometimes it’s taking action: to learn about yourself, what you’re going through, and how to get through it.

If you’re looking for resources to help you take action, but don’t know where to start, don’t want to spend time and energy digging through the mountains of stuff out there that might be helpful, or you’re looking for more unconventional sources of guidance and support, custom resource curation is the thing for you.

Basically, you tell me what you’re going through or want help with, and I’ll make you a list of curated resources to help you get through it, tailored to your unique needs and preferences.

Whether you want the more traditional route of self-help books, apps, support groups, websites, and more, or you’re open to finding guidance and self-understanding through movies, TV, music, art, and poetry, I’ve got your back.

After more than a decade and a half of helping myself and others through difficult times, I’ve got a big resource bank to draw from — plus, I’m just really good at researching things and finding solutions (and I love doing it too 🙂 )

THE Course (Coming Spring 2025)

Custom resources are great, but wouldn’t it be even better if you had someone to tell you exactly what things to work on re: mental, emotional, and spiritual health to help you have a life that doesn’t feel like shit so much of the time, where there is less pain and more of the things that make life feel even just a little bit worth living?

When you’re ready to start making changes to your mental, emotional, and spiritual health that will help you not hate being alive as much in the longer-term, and even find moments of joy as a regular occurrence in your life, this course is where you’ll find what you need.

You’ll learn things like self-compassion, how to challenge and reframe negative thoughts, radical acceptance, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and more — things I’ve identified over the years as the most important and impactful tools and skills for people like us — people who are struggling with depression, anxiety, overwhelm, negative thoughts, self-criticism, overthinking, and more — and it’s all taught through a lens that uses music, art, poetry, nature, the sacred, and other unconventional means of learning and internalizing what you’ve learned.

Overall, these modules will help you learn how to achieve the ultimate goal of The Life Sucks Coach: to manage your pain well enough that it doesn’t take up all the room in your life, so you can make space for and intentionally inject into your life the things that make it feel at least a little bit worth living.

If you want your life to have less stress, anxiety, overwhelm, etc. and more joy, beauty, connection, awe, wonder, and even magic, this course is absolutely for you.

The Church of the Small Screen (Patreon) (coming Feb 2025)

I combine my background in chaplaincy/spiritual care with my love of TV to craft secular sermons and essays that speak to the human experience and how we might get through the shittiness of it while holding onto the goodness in it, using TV as a “sacred text” to help guide us, inspire us, and give us strength.

For more information, check out my Patreon page (coming soon!).

Pain& Podcast (Coming Late 2025)

This podcast will feature conversations with people from all walks of life, about the painful experiences that have impacted them, how they got through them, and what good things they held onto when everything was going to shit (the “and” part of “pain&”).

A weekly-ish source of strength and hope from sharing in others’ experiences in this thing called life, which sucks for all of us at one time or another — no one is immune!

My newsletter is the best way to stay in touch. I’ll let you know about new content, including secular sermons, essays, and workshops, share what’s helping me get through the dark times, and send out bonus content when the mood strikes 🙂