What Passive Absorption Is and Why It Changes You

You already know you shouldn't yell. You have read the thing about connection before correction. You could probably teach the workshop.

And then it's 7:40 in the morning, the shoes still aren't on, and you hear your voice climbing anyway.

Why knowing better doesn't make you do better

This is the gap that makes people feel broken. Not ignorance — insight without change. You understand the pattern perfectly and you keep living inside it, which is somehow more maddening than not understanding it at all.

I want to offer you a different explanation for that gap. It isn't willpower and it isn't a character flaw. It's that the way most of us try to change ourselves is the least effective way to change a human being.

First, a confession

People ask me all the time which parenting experts I follow. The honest answer is none of them.

I don't follow Dr. Becky. I don't follow Dr. Shefali. I don't even follow Love and Logic, and I'm an independent Love and Logic facilitator — I teach a handful of their skills to my clients because I think they're genuinely powerful. I used to get the newsletter. I don't anymore.

This isn't a criticism of any of them. It's that if I spend all week talking about parenting with clients and then spend my free time absorbing more parenting content, I become monochromatic. I've had chapters like that. They weren't my best ones.

What I am immersed in is personal growth, and I go all the way in. I've had periods the way Picasso had periods. There was my NPR period, when I drove toddlers around Denver with the radio on and started every third sentence with "I heard on NPR the other day." There was my Eckhart Tolle period. My internal family systems period. Right now I am in a full Ram Dass period and I listen to that podcast religiously — in both senses of the word.

I'm not done with any of them. I just keep adding. And every single one of those immersions changed how I see the world, more thoroughly than any book I ever sat down and studied.

That's the thing I want to name.

Your system braces when it's being coached

Here's what's actually happening when you're in the hot seat.

When I coach you — in a private session, or on a group call when it's your turn — your whole system understands that something is at stake. Because let's be honest about what coaching is. We are working to change the way you interface with the world. That is a direct threat to the self-protective structure you have spent your entire life building. Call it your ego, call it your personality, call it the parts of you that took on their jobs a long time ago for very good reasons.

Your ego knows it needs to brace itself, because someone is coming at it. And that someone is you.

That bracing isn't a failure. It's the system doing exactly what it was built to do. But it means the learning happening in that moment has to fight its way in, and some of it doesn't make it.

So what is passive absorption?

Picture yourself folding laundry.

You've got a podcast on. Some woman is talking about codependency between a parent and a child. Not your codependency, obviously. Just the general idea of it. Hypothetically. In other people.

You're folding towels. Your guard is completely down.

And it gets in — deeper than it would have if someone had sat across from you and said it to your face. Not as an academic fact, and not as a homework assignment you're supposed to go execute. It infiltrates somewhere subconscious, and it's lasting, and it's systemic.

That's passive absorption: learning that arrives sideways, when nothing is being asked of you, so nothing in you has to defend against it. It's the difference between being taught and being steeped.

A coach told me years ago that if you're trying to get good at something or shift how you think about something, you should find one or two sources you genuinely resonate with and then — his words — "brainwash yourself" with their content. Deliberately. Immerse until it colors everything.

He was right, and I watch it work on my clients constantly.

"I hear you in my head"

Most people who work with me work with me for at least six months. And somewhere around month three, it happens almost every time: a client says, I hear your voice in my head.

The kid throws something across the room. The homework fight starts. And there I am, apparently, narrating.

That voice isn't there because our sessions are magic. It's there because they've been receiving it ten different ways at once. They're listening to the podcast. They're reading the emails. They're doing the workbook. They're on the group calls. They're in the Facebook group. And then they come to a session — and because they've already heard me explain codependency a dozen times in the background of their week, we don't spend the session on the concept. We spend it on their Tuesday. On their actual kid.

The absorption did the teaching. The session did the applying.

My friend in Spain runs an English school for kids, and the number one piece of advice she gives parents is this: leave the TV on in English. Leave the radio on. The class does the instruction; the background does the soaking. That's the whole model.

The layer that group work has and private work can't

This is the part I'd sing from the rooftops if I could.

When you're on a group call and someone else is being coached, you are getting the full teaching with none of the bracing. Your guard is down because it isn't your turn.

It never fails. The second or third person I call on opens with "oh my gosh, listening to that was exactly what I needed today," or "that's the same thing that happened to me yesterday." Every single call.

That's structurally impossible in one-on-one work. It's also why I'll say something that sounds contradictory: the group program is the lowest price point of working with me, and in a lot of ways the highest value you can get. There's no six-month package that ends. There's a community. And there's that extra layer of absorption that nothing else replicates.

If one-on-one work feels a little too confronting right now — that's not a reason to wait. That's a reason to start somewhere your guard can stay down.

The part I can't stop thinking about

Here's the spoiler.

The most complete, most powerful passive absorption any human being ever experiences is childhood.

You were immersed in your family's culture, absorbing things nobody sat you down to teach, and you didn't notice a single one of them until you were a middle-aged adult going hang on — where did I get that idea about the world?

And that is exactly what you are building for your children right now. You're constructing a container they are living inside for their entire childhood, absorbing every single thing you're putting out. Not the lessons you deliver. The atmosphere you keep.

You don't have to like that. It's happening either way.

So the question isn't whether passive absorption is shaping your kids, or you. It's whether you're going to leave it on shuffle, or choose what's playing.

If it's happening anyway — why not make it work for you?

Ready to start somewhere? Grab the free workbook, Getting Kids to Listen the First Time — the fundamental principles I teach every client, applied to the most universal parenting fight there is.

Or if you want to talk about what working together would look like, book a free call and let's build you an action plan.

Questions, answered!

What is passive absorption? 

Passive absorption is learning that reaches you indirectly — through podcasts, emails, overheard conversations, or watching someone else be coached — while nothing is being asked of you. Because you aren't the one on the spot, your defenses stay down and the material lands at a deeper, more durable level than direct instruction usually does.

Why doesn't understanding a pattern change it? 

Understanding is delivered to the part of you that already agrees. The pattern lives somewhere older and more protective, and that part braces when it's confronted directly. Change tends to come from repeated, low-pressure exposure rather than from a single insight.

Why does being coached feel uncomfortable? 

Coaching works to change how you interface with the world, which is a genuine threat to the self-protective system you've spent a lifetime building. The discomfort is that system doing its job — not evidence that coaching isn't working.

How can I use passive absorption on purpose? 

Choose one or two sources whose thinking you actually resonate with, and surround yourself with them: podcasts while you drive, their writing in your inbox, their voice in the background of ordinary tasks. Immersion beats intensity.