Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D

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Andrea J. Medaris, Psy.D Psychologist, couple therapist, and writer exploring attachment, desire, conflict, and the ways relationships shape who we become.

Author of the forthcoming What You Wish For.

I made a whole carousel about how much I hate condensing my book into little sayings. The irony is not lost on me.The fu...
08/10/2026

I made a whole carousel about how much I hate condensing my book into little sayings. The irony is not lost on me.

The full confession — about the phrase "a book about desire," why it's accurate, and why it makes me want to lie down anyway — is in tomorrow's essay. It's called "Marketing Hurts My Feelings." I meant it.

08/04/2026

Some of the most self-aware people I have ever met are stuck in exactly the dynamic they can describe to you in flawless detail. They have read the books. They know their attachment history, their triggers, the shape of the cycle. And none of it has moved the thing they most want to move. It turns out that understanding a pattern and being free of it are two completely different achievements, and we tend to confuse them. This week, why insight is not the same as intimacy, and what actually changes a nervous system.

Comment/DM/link in bio, I will attempt to send it to you telepathically, you get the idea.

I once worked with a couple, both brilliant, both fluent in the entire language of relationships, who had built a life t...
08/03/2026

I once worked with a couple, both brilliant, both fluent in the entire language of relationships, who had built a life together that ran with perfect efficiency and almost no contact. Two people who could describe their disconnection with real precision and could not, for the life of them, reach across it. What they were missing was never information. It was the experience of being met in the place all the words were pointing to. That is what a nervous system actually revises on, and it is why you can read every book and feel exactly the same on the other side of it. I write about how it starts to shift in this week's essay.

08/02/2026

Home at last, full of information, inspiration, gratitude, and junk food.

08/01/2026

I have 17 pages full of gold in my actual notebook. My brain and my heart are competing for capacity over here. eft_triage_conference

07/30/2026

The advice never to let the sun go down on your anger comes from a good place. I've also come to think the entire self-help and therapy industry is on the pursuer's side. Talk more, feel more, say more, don't leave things to fester, work it out.

But sometimes withdrawers have a point. When there's a threat in the room, the part of your brain that handles logic and planning and choice goes quiet, and what's left is flooding and muscle memory. You can only have the fight you already know how to have. Then add exhaustion, and the gas pedal and the brake are both down at once, and you are in the least relational state a person can occupy.

The pursuer says we have to resolve this so I can rest. The withdrawer says we have to rest so we can resolve this. Both of them are right. Neither of them can do good work at that hour.

And if you're the one who can't put the phone down, it's worth saying why. This fight feels like the last chance to be heard, because it often is.

I'm a pursuer, which is why it took me this long to come around.

Go to sleep. Try again tomorrow.

If you want the essay about this, comment/DM and I'll send it to you. Or the link is in my bio. 😊

It was four a.m. and I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen, six hours into a phone call with someone who had stopped ...
07/28/2026

It was four a.m. and I was sitting on the floor of my kitchen, six hours into a phone call with someone who had stopped being able to listen somewhere around one and kept trying anyway. I was explaining my point again. At the time, unbelievably, I thought he wasn't fighting for us.

The advice never to let the sun go down on your anger comes from a good place. I've also come to think the entire self-help and therapy industry is on the pursuer's side. Talk more, feel more, say more, don't leave things to fester, work it out.

Here's what nobody mentions. When there's a threat in the room, the part of your brain that handles logic and planning and choice goes quiet, and what's left is flooding and muscle memory. You can only have the fight you already know how to have. Then add exhaustion, and the gas pedal and the brake are both down at once, and you are in the least relational state a person can occupy.

The pursuer says we have to resolve this so I can rest. The withdrawer says we have to rest so we can resolve this. Both of them are right. Neither of them can do good work at that hour.

I'm a pursuer, which is why it took me this long to come around.

Go to sleep. Try again tomorrow. And if tomorrow is a thing that never quite arrives at your house, that's the part actually worth fixing, and it's in the essay.

Link in bio, or you can comment/DM and I'll send you there.

You go home to visit your parents, and your mom says something pitched to the person you were at sixteen, and suddenly y...
07/21/2026

You go home to visit your parents, and your mom says something pitched to the person you were at sixteen, and suddenly you ARE sixteen, furious that she can't see who you've become.
We all know that feeling. Here's the uncomfortable part: we do it to our partners every day.
We take a photograph when we meet them. Then we stop updating it. We take pride in knowing them completely, so when new information arrives, we squish it down to fit what we already know. A few years later we look at them and feel very little, because they're the same old person. You know all there is to know.
Or do you?
This week's essay is about this, and all the other ways desire seems to disappear. Comment/DM for the link.

07/16/2026

We’re basically best friends now” gets said like it’s the happy ending. Sometimes it’s the warning.

You’ve got two drives running at once — one for safety, one for exploration — and desire lives in the second.

Too little safety and you can’t explore. Too much, and you won’t. Both cost you the same thing.

The full version — the monkey experiments, the calculus, the whole argument — is this week’s essay. Comment/DM if you want it and I’ll send it over.

We treat the drive to grow as a luxury, something you get to once safety is handled. It isn't. It's a primary drive, as ...
07/14/2026

We treat the drive to grow as a luxury, something you get to once safety is handled. It isn't. It's a primary drive, as old and as non-negotiable as the need for shelter, and it doesn't switch off while you wait. When the check engine light comes on in a long relationship, the usual diagnosis is a safety problem: more date nights, more reassurance, more closeness. Sometimes that's right. But often the starving system is the other one.

The full tour of the machinery is in this week's newsletter. Want it? Comment or DM me and it's yours.

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