The Story She Helped Me See

I was in a coaching session with Katherine Woodward Thomas, a beloved mentor, NY Times bestselling author & psychotherapist, when she asked me a question I wasn't prepared for. She wanted to know when I had first decided I wasn't enough.

I sat with that for a long moment. And then I followed it back, past the marriages, past the choices that hadn't served me, past the stories I'd been telling myself about why things had gone the way they had. All the way back to a moment in childhood when a small version of me drew a conclusion about her worth and quietly built her life around it. I hadn't known I was doing it. That's the thing about the stories we absorb early in life. They don't feel like stories. They feel like the truth.

On April 27, 2026, we lost Katherine. She passed from complications of ovarian cancer, and those of us who knew her work, or were fortunate enough to sit across from her, are still finding words for what that means.

I came to Calling in "The One"the way most people do: curious, hopeful, and fairly certain I understood what it was about. Seven weeks, a partner at the end, or so I thought. I was wrong, in the best possible way. This was a call to know and love myself.

What Katherine built during her 69 years was one of the most honest invitations to self-examination I have ever encountered. The entire premise rests on the belief that the life you are living, and the love you keep finding or losing, is shaped by beliefs you have been carrying since long before you had the language to name them. Whose voice first told you that you were too much, or not enough? Where did you learn to reach for what you didn't really want because some part of you had decided it was all you deserved? Calling in "The One" asks you to find out.

Conscious Uncoupling, her other landmark body of work, rests on the same ground. Rather than moving through an ending in bitterness or self-blame, it asks what is this experience trying to show me about myself, and what do I want to do differently from here? It is a way of finishing something well, of leaving a relationship without leaving yourself in pieces along with it.

I became a certified facilitator ofC alling in "The One" because I had lived it from the inside. And what I found there changed how I show up with every person I work with, the woman navigating a divorce after thirty years of marriage, the one who is finally ready to stop settling, the one who thinks love passed her by at 60 and isn't sure it's worth hoping for anymore.

Because what I see in nearly every person I sit with is the same thing Katherine helped me find in myself. A story, formed long ago, running quietly underneath everything. Sometimes it's subtle, more of a settled feeling than a conscious thought, a belief about what they deserved, what they were capable of, what the rest of their life could realistically look like. And once you can see it, you can choose something different. You can write something true.

Katherine's gift was teaching us to look at that clearly. I noticed the change in her presence over the last couple of years as she strived to show up to move her work forward. It was rarely spoken about openly in the community, but those of us who knew her felt it. She was fighting something. And she kept showing up anyway, kept teaching, kept asking the questions that matter, right until the end.

Katherine, thank you for the question you asked me that day. I have been following that thread ever since, and so have the women whose lives you touched through mine.