Truth Lasagna: Your recipe for navigating loaded questions when you're between jobs, relationships, or chapters

You're in the middle of something — a career pivot, a business transition, a relationship shift — and someone asks a perfectly innocent question like "How's life?" or "How's work going?" Your throat clenches. You either say too much or nothing at all, and walk away feeling like you lied either way.

This solo episode introduces one of Julie's most-used client frameworks: Truth Lasagna. Rooted in her grandmother's wisdom — you can't tell everything you know — Truth Lasagna is a practical, body-based way to navigate the messy middle without oversharing, shutting down, or betraying yourself in the process. The framework is simple: your truth has layers, like lasagna. Your deepest, rawest, most unprocessed truth belongs to very few people. The middle layer is real and honest, but considered. The outer layer is brief, diplomatic, and true — it's just not everything. Choosing the right layer for the right person isn't hiding. It's discernment.

Julie unpacks why high-achieving, empathetic women are especially prone to the all-or-nothing truth trap, how the fawn response quietly masquerades as dishonesty, and why ethically nondisclosing or withholding isn't the same as hiding parts of yourself or lying. You'll also learn about Truth Buckets — how to pre-sort who gets which layer of your truth, so you can stay connected to people without flooding the room or going silent.

If you've ever avoided a networking event, a coffee date, or a family dinner because you didn't have a clean answer to a loaded question — or you've ever overexplained until you regretted it — or you've walked away from a conversation quietly wondering if you could have shared something better — this episode is for you.

06:09 — Truth Lasagna: The Framework Your Grandmother Already Knew 

08:41 — The Wobbly Middle: Why Identity and Belonging Make This So Hard 

10:55 — The Fawn Response and What It's Actually Trying to Do 

18:23 — Oversharing Isn't Honesty — It's a Stress Response in Disguise 

30:15 — The Three Layers: Who Actually Gets Your Deepest Truth 

36:51 — Truth Buckets: Pre-Sorting People So You're Not Frozen in the Moment

 42:38 — How to Practice This When It Feels Messy and Imperfect

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Transcript

Julie Granger (00:58)

Hey there, I'm really glad you're here in the Sink and Swim podcast. Before we get into today's episode, a little housekeeping. I wanna help you get oriented just so you know where you are, how the space works, and how to take care of yourself while you're listening. So first, a gentle invitation. As you listen or watch, see if you can listen not only with your ears or watch with your eyes.

but also by noticing what's going on inside your body. And that may change throughout the whole episode. And as you notice permission to know you don't need to fix anything, you don't need to analyze it, but just notice it. Some parts of you might feel seen. Some might feel exposed. Some parts might feel resistance or concern.

about what we're saying. Other parts might feel relief, encouragement, or they might want to reach through and help us or hug me if it's just me talking.

So notice how you feel as you settle in, whether you're listening in a quiet place or out on a walk or driving or in the middle of something.

and also how you feel when you're done.

That noticing is really sacred work.

And after you listen to the episode and notice, if you find yourself feeling the tug to stay connected to me or to the podcast or to any of my guests, please make sure to check the show notes and also make sure to subscribe to the podcast wherever you're listening right now. Now is a great time to go hit that subscribe button. And I'm not asking that for numbers, but because it lets the episodes find you,

without you having to remember or keep track. And if you like having something you can read or revisit or sit with more slowly, you can also subscribe to my newsletter and that's in the show notes as well.

You can also find clips and highlights on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Substack, and Facebook. All different platforms, different doorways to the same house. So choose whatever feels easiest for you. At any point today, later, or months from now, if something in you starts whispering, you know, I feel this nudge inside.

My life or my work looks really good on paper. Everything I've built should feel good, but that's not how I feel. And sometimes that can be a sign that it's time for deeper support and reorientation. And that's where working with me in a soul story mapping session comes in. It's a private one-on-one session, not a discovery call, not a sales conversation. It's an actual coaching space.

to map what's true for you right now and get clear on what wants to shift. Even if you don't do anything with it, we're just gonna map it out. All of the links to all of those things live in the show notes, so you don't have to hold any of this in your head, but I'm saying it now to orient you in case you're listening and something comes up and you wanna know where to go next. Okay, let's drop into today's episode now.

Julie Granger (03:54)

Hello, welcome to this episode of the Sink and Swim podcast where I will be talking about a concept today called truth lasagna, which is a concept I have talked about with clients for years. And it's based off of a concept my grandmother taught years and years ago. And that concept is you can't tell everything you know.

And this concept comes up multiple times a week with my clients. And a recent conversation reminded me it's just time to say it out loud here on the podcast. I call it Truth Lasagna. And there's like a sub topic called Truth Buckets. And the premise is that there are layers of truth.

to what seem like very benign questions people might ask you about your life, about your work, about your relationships, about your health, anything really. And those questions can land in your system, in your body, like a really loaded question where you're like, God, how much time do you have? How much of the truth do you actually want to know?

not everyone has a right to your deepest layers. Not everyone can handle your deepest layers of truth. Sometimes it's just not appropriate to go there and you need to be able to discern that. And that is why it makes it super awkward when someone might ask you a seemingly benign question like, hey, what do you do for work? And your throat clenches up and you're like, God, I don't know how to answer this question. Because

It's awkward, it's complicated, you don't know how to explain it. It's hard to wrap words around something that's kind of intangible and mystical and magical and, and or in process. And you feel like you either need to over explain or say nothing, or just water it down for this person. And then you walk away being like, I felt really inauthentic and that felt really gross. And I don't ever want to have to do that again. What I hear from a lot of my clients who are women who are very empathetic and

want to do good in the world and value telling the truth and being authentic is they feel like if they don't share the full truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, that they're lying somehow, that they're withholding information and not being authentic. And I feel that way sometimes. And I feel like I've reduced myself down or watered myself down or I'm hiding parts of myself and

when I stumbled upon the concept of truth lasagna for myself, it really changed everything to seeing truth in layers and seeing there's this opportunity for stewardship and discernment. And it doesn't mean you're withholding yourself. It means you're reading the room, which if you're empathetic, you're very good at doing and discerning which layer of truth is the appropriate one given the context, the person and

sort of the social goal at hand. And the reason I'm here to talk about it is this is something that comes up so often. if you... I think that we as a culture can feel really ashamed to talk about it out loud. And so here I am doing that, putting words around things that sometimes feel weird to talk about out loud.

because we just have certain social constructs we've all agreed to that actually make it harder and make it awkward and they don't have to be true. You don't have to subscribe to them. You can kind of take a different approach and it's not gonna change the entire social dynamic.

this shows up so many places in life and it could be in your personal life. It could be in things about your close relationships, your family, money, your political views, religion, all the things that can quickly turn into awkward conversation. It could be when people ask about your work, your job, your business.

your vacations. mean, when people ask questions, they typically don't realize they're asking a loaded question and it's not the question that's to blame, right? It's what it means to you and how it lands in your body, which could on one day land feeling really loaded and on another day not feel that way at all. So it's so subjective and contextual. And what I hear, at least in my clients, where the entry point for them

coming to me is often something is changing about the way they do their work. Maybe they're leaving a job but haven't left yet. Maybe they're launching something but it's not live yet. Maybe they're applying for jobs and haven't told anyone. Maybe they're closing a business or exiting a professional relationship or a business partnership. Maybe it's someone.

I work with people in service professions who have a new skill they've acquired, but they don't feel competent or well practiced at it yet. So they have something like imposter syndrome. Maybe it's, I mean, I've done this so many times in the iterations of my work, building something new and it's not quite ready to be shown to the world yet. And it's like so alive inside your body, but you're not ready to talk about it. But you also don't want to like only talk about your old way of doing things.

maybe, I mean, the place this happens so often is you're just among colleagues or among new people you're meeting, whether you're networking or at a conference or at a course or just talking to friends when you're out at a brewery and people ask what you do or they ask how work is going and you freeze because you're like, I don't know.

to explain or how to explain this or it lands as a just really loaded question or a triggering question. Maybe on the front end, you avoid going to a social event or a coffee date or a networking event or a course or showing up among your professional colleagues because you don't have a clean answer to how work is going or what you're doing or what you're working on. And because it's not clean and complete and feeling

like something that you're really certain and confident about, you stop yourself on the front end from going, which is real, it makes sense, right? The common thread among all of this is you're in the wobbly middle. You're not fully closed from the old thing and you're not fully open and present in the new thing. And whether it's about your work or a new...

romantic relationship you're in or a friendship or a parent who is going through a health issue or you just are moving to a new town and nobody knows yet. The middle, being in that middle and not quite in the old thing and not landed in the new thing is a deeply uncomfortable space.

for any human being.

That's normal for it to feel uncomfortable. And you're not doing anything wrong if it feels uncomfortable or you feel like you don't want to talk about it or you don't want to face the questions that people are going to inevitably ask you. I think about all the time, my husband and I have both been through a lot of career pivots over the last couple of years. Mine inside my own business, his being

laid off from a company that eliminated his job, going through some side jobs, going through some volunteer work, kind of figuring out what's next. And we would go to social events with neighbors and friends and all kind of just normal human peer relationship things and walk away and be like, my God, we're so relieved that nobody brought up work because we're both in a messy middle in our work.

And we were just so grateful to be in friendship interaction. Shout out to my friends, by the way, who just didn't like jump straight to work because we didn't have clean answers to questions we knew would come up and we didn't want to have to bumble our way through and, and, or tell too much of the truth and then make it awkward. You know, it's just, ⁓ so hard. And the truth of why this feels so unbearable is

we are wired for identity and identity in this case being like the way you see yourself in relationship to your environment, to the world internally and externally. And then we're also wired for belonging, which is how we see ourselves in relationship to other people. And when one or both of those things are in flux, you're

nervous system is going to read the flux itself as a threat. This is not a metaphor. This is an actual thing that happens. Your system is going to say I'm not firm on my identity and I'm not firm on how people recognize that identity. I'm not firm on feeling like I belong both with myself and with other people. And so it makes sense that you might want to

over explain yourself that you might feel like you don't quite know how deep to go because it's still completely in process for you. You might want to avoid it altogether because it's still deeply in process for you. Or you might also be trying to rush an outcome. I can't tell you how many times in the iterations of my career

I've signed up to go to a women's networking event or something where there's going to be people where inevitably talking about my work is going to come up and I'm not ready to talk about it. And I'm sitting there writing out, what's my like elevator pitch going to be? What's my one-liner today? You know, what do I feel comfortable talking about based on who I'm talking to, the audience, the room? And that can feel a lot like shape-shifting. Like you're like, I'm trying to make myself fit.

But what it actually is, is you want to belong. You want to be firm in your identity. It's actually you being a good steward to your nervous system and not sitting at home in a dark hole avoiding people, which we're not supposed to do. And so it's not a character flaw if things feel weird and unbearable in the middle. You want, or rather your nervous system wants to have an answer to the question or to...

Fill in the blank here of I'm the person who blank or who is blank or who does blank. And right now in the messy middle, you can't fill in that blank cleanly in a way that sort of applies across all circumstances and situations in a way that people will understand in a way that they get.

In a way, they're not going to push back and question you. There's so many things that your system is trying to plan for. And this is normal. It's also genuinely disorienting.

Imposter syndrome lives here even if it's not related to skill sets or expertise because it might be that you are perfectly skilled and adept at let's just say a job you're stepping into but you don't feel like you belong yet in the group or the environment where you're stepping in and we all know how that feels you're the new kid on the block you're perfectly skilled

but that's like half the equation. That's the identity piece, but the belonging piece, not quite yet. Right? I don't remember which one of my new jobs, I think it was my very first PT job, there was an acronym that got tossed around called the FNG, fucking new guy. And you could be literally the Taylor Swift of the music industry.

taking a new position, working with a new recording studio, and you're still the FNG, your system that is wired for belonging is still going to hold back a little bit unless you're like a sociopath who literally doesn't try and read the room in honor that people are getting to know you. And so, I mean, we hope that's how it goes, but we can overdo it where we don't feel we belong and or the environment we're stepping into doesn't give us the safety to belong.

And so we hide ourselves, right? So that was an aside that imposter syndrome lives in this messy middle space, even when it's not about your competency. So competency is part of your identity and really your relationship to yourself. But belonging is the other piece that we are wired for. And you could be perfectly competent, but if you don't feel like you belong, then you're also going to get like...

throat clenching, want to avoid it, want to crawl under a hole and or over explain yourself and tell too much of the truth when you're in these And none of this means you're in the wrong place. It just means you're in the middle. And there are things in your life where you are kind of in a complete state where things are good, where things are stable. So hopefully your whole life isn't uprooted all at once, but sometimes it does happen that way. Your relationships fall apart, your marriage falls apart,

or maybe not your marriage, but your friendships, or maybe something's going on with your family and your job is changing and your health is changing. That's also very common, especially for people in my age group going through sort of the 40s. It can feel like literally the wheels have all fallen off in all directions. And especially for people, women, millennial women, Gen X women, baby boomer women.

I like to think maybe we're shifting this and how we raise girls in younger generations, but I don't know.

One of the things I see for women, especially empathetic, compassionate women who are helpers, who were raised to be a good girl and then grew up to become the good provider, the good coach, one expression of the nervous system that I see extremely often is the fawning response.

So when your throat clenches and you freeze and you have nothing to say, that's very obviously the freeze response. When you over explain and you like go blue in the face trying to get someone to understand what it is you do or what's going on in your life, that's kind of a fight response. You're fighting someone even when they aren't fighting you or maybe they are, they might be pushing back, they might be asking questions.

And they might be asking innocent questions, but you feel like you're being questioned because you feel insecure about it, right? Those are kind of obvious responses. The flight response is when you just don't even go, right? Or like you avoid things altogether. The phoning response is a little bit more subtle. It can look like over explaining. So it can look a little bit like the fight response. It can look like...

giving people more than they ask for. It can look like almost like asking permission, making sure everyone feels okay, trying too hard to read the room and make yourself fit with whatever story you're going to tell. But it can also look like nothing and feel a lot like lying. So this is the part that I see with a lot of my clients who they're like,

All right, I'm going to be closing down my business and I'm going to have to send my clients other places. And it could be they're closing it down for maternity leave or it could be they've got to go on sick leave or they've got to go take care of a parent who's in the hospital. It could be they're closing their business completely just in this example. But they don't want to get into the nitty gritty personal truth of the whole thing.

And so, and yet they know the whole truth and nothing but the truth and they feel like they're lying if they don't give the whole truth. And so this is really, really common. It could be that you are, ⁓ I'm thinking about when I was, this doesn't always happen when you're closing something down. It could also be when you're starting something new.

Let's say you're starting a new job and

The reason you got into the job is because you're excited about the new job genuinely. But there is a lot of baggage on why you got into the job, why you left the old thing. And when someone asks you about what you do for work, maybe you can't even answer the question because you haven't announced that you're leaving the job or starting the new job. Or maybe you can answer the question of you're starting a new job.

And then people ask you what made you get into that work. And it can feel like you're lying, especially if your system is primed for a fawning response, when you don't give them the whole backstory. And then you can feel really disappointed in yourself, especially if you are someone who values telling the truth and being honest and authentic, when you didn't tell the whole truth.

but you can also not want to overshare and over explain. It's just a really complex place to be. And what's really interesting about the fawning response is what's so beautiful about the fawning response, and it shows up so often in social interactions, is because it's actually here to serve social belonging. It's like the...

All nervous system responses show up, but this one in particular shows up in relational contexts because it's designed to help maintain belonging and connection with people or retain it or establish it in the first place. It's all about feeling seen, heard, understood, held and safe to connect.

Along the way, okay, and the fawning response has always been wired into your system. It's not something that you were conditioned to. Just like your fight response has always been a part of you, you were born with it. The fawn response is less studied, but it's always been a part of you. And what gets conditioned is that as you put that fawning response into practice, whether you know it or not,

part of it is managing someone else's comfort. So if you're very empathetic and you're very compassionate and you were also taught somewhere along the way the value of telling the truth and being honest and being authentic, your fawning response will one, get turned against you and tell you you're being a bad person for not telling the truth because remember you're trying to be the good person, right? And then it will also be turned against you in response to your relationship to the other person because

you were taught that telling the truth or giving them the whole story is honest and honesty is what drives connection. And so there's this whole part about being dishonest when actually you're not, but your nervous system is telling you that you are. Okay. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do to try and maintain connection and be a good person. But

It just means when it shows up in these types of interactions that your system doesn't feel safe enough to be in the wobbly middle out loud. It doesn't mean you're lying, but your brain is going to go, I must be lying because I can't figure out how to tell the right truth or I feel like I'm not telling the truth. But the fact that the fawning response is there, it doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong. And I think the fawning response gets a really bad rap out in the world.

Like you hear it, you probably say it, you're being such a people pleaser or you're just shrinking or you're so worried about what other people think. You're supposed to be worried about what people think. We're wired for that. We're wired to want to connect to people. We're wired to want to belong. You cannot take that out of your brain. People pleasing is not a choice. Falling is not a choice. Trying to be the good person is not a choice. It's not this conscious thing that you're deciding to do, even though the self-help world will tell you that.

actually an intelligent response of your nervous system to try and help you connect and belong. And so when you start to feel this ickiness in the weird middle, it's your fawning response kicking in and it's literally your system saying, I'm not safe to be fully authentic. Right now my truth is messy. It's murky. It's not in any clear state of being. And I'm afraid that people aren't going to handle that well. And the truth is there's probably evidence to support

that people don't handle that well. People push back, they question, and it's usually because it's messy and murky and in the middle. Talking is hard today.

And so here's what I'd like to offer. Your system's going to do its thing. Your nervous system is, this is going to feel awkward. You're going to feel like you don't know what you're supposed to say or how to say it so that you don't overshare, undershare, so that you can genuinely maintain connection with this person. That's normal. There is no avoiding that. And the sooner we can just get comfortable with the fact and be honest with ourselves about the fact that that is just going to happen.

the smoother this is going to be. I'm not going to say that it's going to be any less awkward, but it makes the weight of the awkwardness feel less loaded.

The truth about you that I love if you're in this place and you felt these things is you probably genuinely value honesty and authenticity. This is a good thing. You're not like some greasy lying person, right? The truth is also being... Okay. And being honest, being authentic, and being transparent.

is not the same as revealing literally every detail.

Not everyone signed up for every detail. Per my grandmother, you can't tell everything you know. Some things, especially if they are still deeply an emotional process for you, are allowed to be held sacred. That doesn't mean they are a secret. It means that you're honoring with reverence that you're still metabolizing it in your own system. And unless this is your therapist,

or a very close friend who has consented to holding you in this space and they know what they're signing up for, it may not actually be good stewardship of a social interaction or relationship to just dump it all on them.

I'm not saying you need to hide yourself, but the truth is that oversharing or giving more than the situation has asked for is not honesty. It's a dysregulated stress response that is wearing honesty's clothing in a way. And if you're still processing it and you're not regulated about it,

it's going to be really hard to feel like you are intentionally sharing authentically in a way that honors where you're at in the process. And that's why having someone walk with you through the middle is really important. And that's not to say that you keep everything from your friends and your colleagues completely. It just means that there are layers. It's like it's a spectrum. It's not an all or none.

It means that you get to be intentional and discerning about, if I open that doorway too wide, I don't think I'm going to be able to stop. And it might actually mess with how my emotions are processing and it might mess with theirs.

Oversharing is often a reaction. It's unconscious. It's not something that you even agreed to do. And it's something sometimes we've learned unconsciously to, I love this phrase, Brene Brown uses it, hot wire connection. So we've shared a lot. We kind of stunned someone's system. They don't even realize their system is being stunned. These are also empathetic people. They lean in and now they're like, well, you've opened that door. I guess we're here, right? And so learning the difference between oversharing

revealing too many layers of the truth and being vulnerable and actually giving what the container of the relationship can hold, even if that is deep layers of truth, and reading it and having someone who can hold it and contain it with you is incredibly regulating. If you've walked away from something and you're like, ugh, replaying it in your head or it just...

you kind of regret it, it might have been too much, right? And that's not to say that your truth is too much or you are too much. But this isn't something that we've usually been taught. We've been taught, tell everything or tell nothing. And it's really challenging to figure out this middle, which is why Truth Lasagna is here, which we're going to get to.

And it's not just women, but people whose systems tend to lean on that ingrained fawn response for so many cultural and conditioned reasons. We have been taught that full disclosure equals integrity. And or it's the only way to get love or to feel included or to belong. Remember belonging, right? And we've through centuries of the lives of women been pressured.

to tell everything, or again, this is the only way you're going to be loved. We've also learned to tell nothing and hide ourselves and shrink ourselves and silence ourselves. And that can definitely feel like lying, but sometimes that's a good form of non-disclosure, especially if it protects you. But today we're talking about the...

the wiring that says, if I don't tell you everything, I'm lying. And you are someone who I fear.

or I fear this relationship will be threatened if I don't reveal the full truth.

And this does so much damage to people unconsciously. It's not a choice for this program to be playing. Withholding or non-disclosure is a way of being a steward of your own system and of someone else's. Even if it feels like you're hiding something, you don't have to tell everything you know. This is not a moral failure.

Sometimes this is actually very wise and kind. The little white lie, right? That is a withholding lie that actually protects a relationship. I think about this a lot with parenting, right? Where parents may tell the whole story to a child who can't process it on it or something might actually create more of a problem, even though there might be more to a story than you're revealing to a child. And so...

The actual true thing in the middle is I'm still figuring it out to say to yourself, which is true for all of us, for all the things in life.

That's the state of it, right? Is you're still figuring it out, you're still grappling with it, things are still processing, things are metabolizing.

So.

Especially in healthcare, but not everyone I work with is in the healthcare field. We were also taught that full disclosure is an ethical obligation. That we're here to educate and to tell the full truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to our patients so they can make informed consent. We don't always do that, but that's what we were taught to do. The good provider doesn't withhold. The good patient won't hide anything from you. You want your patients to tell you everything.

Right?

Someone who is an accomplished, smart, poised, polished person who wants to be respected by other people doesn't make people uncomfortable by being unclear or ambiguous or awkward. So your empathetic side is looking out for how other people might feel. You want to be polished and clear. That's fair. These are your values. But they can get muddied up.

when you're in that messy middle and you're not quite in any one role, identity or relationship yet.

So we can then get into the one of two things, share nothing or over share everything. Sharing nothing is sometimes right. This is what I love about this one is you don't have to answer any question. You can always pivot. You can always set a boundary. You can always say no.

The problem with this is if it becomes your default, it cuts you off from the support and community and the feel good oxytocin that comes from social interactions that you need. Oversharing floods the other person's system, potentially, creates connection that isn't real, creates information they can't hold responsibly. You regret it later, is unkind to your system.

So the all or none is usually not the answer. The answer is truth lasagna layers. So I picture lasagna, right? The layers of those pasta sheets with lots of gooey stuff in between. It's delicious. Your deepest layer of lasagna, let's just picture that there's three to four layers of the lasagna. That deepest layer of truth is the whole truth, the full truth and nothing but it.

with the emotion, with the unprocessed shit, with the, this is just who I am in my nakedness. Like not cleaned up, not polished. Here's the truthiest, truthiest truth. This layer in general belongs to very few people. And you know that. These are for the people who have earned it, who can hold you in it, who aren't going to judge you.

who have the capacity for it. And those things can change depending on the subject, depending on the part of you. You know, some people can hold one deep part of you and can't hold the other. Some days they can hold you and some days they can't. This is a constantly moving thing. It's not an always.

So it just depends on the situation. Some people are really good at holding you in your work stuff and terrible at holding you when it comes to talking about your kids.

So you and only you know who that deepest layer is most safe being disclosed to.

very few people. For most people, me included, most of the clients I work with, this is going to be one

to maybe five maximum people. And where we can get really confused on this deepest layer is if you were brought up to believe that you always tell the full truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to family members.

Sometimes family members excruciatingly cannot hold you in your deepest layers because when you reveal your deepest layers, it reflects theirs and they may not be ready to approach that. Yes, there's so many reasons, but this is where people get themselves in trouble. It's just you can have that autopilot running that says deepest truth belongs to family. Even if I don't normally, you know, talk about

my most personal things with my family. When they ask, I have to tell them. And this is, you know, especially if it's like your parents or a sibling or like as a kid, you were taught to tell the full truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, right? It can bring that up.

And so what I love to do with clients is whatever we're dealing with, whether it's relationships, work, health, is really sit down and identify the unfiltered layer, the deepest, deepest layer where nothing's held back. Truly, who gets to know, who gets to be in on that in a way where your system is like, yeah, okay, I'm on board.

Not, I'm not sure. If your system's not sure, they get to move to the next layer. It's just an automatic move them to the next layer. And sometimes there's two middle layers and sometimes there's one. Let's just keep it simple and say there's one middle layer. There's only three layers to this lasagna. The middle layer is the real truthful version, but it's not raw. It's not unprocessed. It's not something you even hesitate a little bit.

because you might regret sharing it later.

And so this is where you might say, let's just say that you're in between jobs or in between work related things. I'm starting a new job. I'm so excited about it. It's going to really fit me. get to really take on projects that fit my personality. And I'm leaving a job that really didn't fit me. It was a toxic work environment, didn't pay well.

and I decided that I deserved better and I found this new job." So you give the highlights of the story, but not the deeper details. Okay? So this is the middle layer. People on this layer can hold the... Like some versions of the truth, some layers of the truth, and sometimes you find that that...

builds intimacy and trust and relatability and whatever that relationship is. And now let's contrast that with the outer layer. The outer layer of truth, so the top layer of that lasagna where it's got the melty cheese on top and it's looking delicious, is diplomatic. It's positive, it's appealing, it's true, it's brief. This is less is more. Less is more. Okay?

This is for people who, for whatever reason, it's not going to work to tell them the things that are in process. So on the outer layer, nothing that is not certain to you is shared, okay? Because it might affect your relationship. And let me give you an example. So I have a client who was simultaneously

leaving a business partnership and leaving her business and needed to tell her clients who were currently in that business. And she had a nondisclosure and a non-compete and all these kind of things. So legally, she technically couldn't disclose a lot of truth to people. And she also, from a stewardship perspective of her own

clients, you know, didn't want to give the full truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth because like, she wanted them to feel like they could trust that they were going to get the medical care they needed, whether it was from her or from one of her colleagues, whether in that practice or somewhere else. And so while so much of her loved these clients and wanted to tell them more of the truth,

and wanted to bring them into the story in that fiduciary relationship she's in where it's, we call it a power differential, where she's actually responsible ethically for a client's experience and it's supposed to be about the client. It's not about her, even though she has now developed intimate relationships with these people and they might even know her outside of work. So that can be really murky. And so these types of

interactions, when in doubt, give them the most superficial layer and let them find out the details on their own. You know, unless it's like it is a personal relationship that also happens to be a client and you know they're going to find out from someone else and you want them to hear the truth from you, right? Those are all ethical murky decisions that need to be made. Obviously talk to your lawyer about that too if this has a legal implication. But the difference between

Each layer is so important and I can't underscore the encouragement that when in doubt, if something in you says, I'm really not sure about this, move a layer outward on what you share. This is not deception, it's discernment. And I really can't underscore, especially if you're empathetic, especially if you're the type of person who reads the room and wants to take care of the other person, that this is stewardship.

for them, for their system.

And then there's a second tool which helps you do some pre-sorting for your nervous system. And I call that truth buckets. So the layer of the lasagna is what you say, the version of the story you're telling, the depth of truth that's revealed. The bucket is who you say that layered to.

their level of intimacy and trust, their need to know of the depth of the layers and whether your relationship can hold that depth.

So there's lots of ways to approach this. You actually need both. You need to pre-sort people given the context of what the situation is. And then you also pre-sort your layers of truth. Now this might sound like a ridiculously rigid exercise. And so some people...

I work with take this quite literally. They actually write out the layers of truth so their system can kind of go, have something in my back pocket to reach for when I'm in an interaction with someone. And I also, especially if I already know who that interaction is going to be with, I've pre-sorted them into a bucket so I know, so I'm not frozen in the moment, so I don't overshare, so I don't flood their system.

so you can show up just a little more confident.

The other time it's really helpful is you have just kind of pre-written, maybe not word for word in your head, your layers of truth. And then you meet someone out in the wild, maybe unexpectedly, and you know, I'm reaching for that most superficial layer of truth. When in doubt, always start more superficial. Always. That doesn't mean you're being shallow. It doesn't mean it's small talk. I mean, technically it is, but

It means that you're being socially discerning and you're going to see, can this relationship hold the next layer? Is there more to tell? Is there space for that? Am I going to like dominate this person's time?

So reading your own layers internally I think of the layers as horizontal ways you sort your own truth internally and the buckets as vertical ways you sort people. And you're not always going to get it right, but...

It's just a really kind exercise where especially if you're feeling yourself freeze up or you feel like you can't trust yourself going into something to build a little bit of trust with yourself and build some resource. It's like your safety raft that's hanging by the pool that you may not need to grab. You may actually be just fine trusting yourself in the moment, but it gives you something to reach for that you've prepared for just a little bit.

so it can feel a little smoother for you while you're in the messy middle.

And I just want to say a word for those of you who bristle at the idea of small talk. I know I just mentioned that. If the idea of starting with a surface level answer makes you feel like you're shrinking or hiding, I want you to stay with me. When someone asks you at a party, how's work? They are not necessarily consenting to the full drawn out truth in the whole story. For a lot of people, that question is the equivalent of how's the weather where you live? They're not looking for your whole

traumatic story about how you survived a hurricane a couple years ago and it started raining this weekend and it triggered all of your feelings about that and you sat in your house, covered up with your dog, crying and you don't know what you're going to do with yourself the next time it rains. I have full respect if you have had a traumatic experience or something's been really hard for you and I'm not saying don't share that with people. What I'm saying is not everyone's signed up for that.

They may actually be great at holding the space for that, but that may not be what they were expecting when they're like, how's the weather? And they were just expecting you to say, ⁓ it's kind of hot here. It might rain this weekend. Don't know what I'm going to do with that. And then you guys go about your merry way on whatever it was you were going to talk about in the first place. going deep, which I know you love to do if you hate small talk, I do too, but going deep without consent or mutual agreement to go deep isn't

you avoiding radical honesty. It's you actually crossing a boundary someone didn't ask you to cross. Starting with a one-liner, starting with that superficial truth, that surface truth, the brief and diplomatic version is actually how you read the room. It's not withholding yourself. It's taking it one step at a time for your system and for theirs. It's only small talk if it stays there forever.

If you go from, how's the weather? It's warm. Yeah, it might rain this weekend. I don't know I'm to do about that. Yeah, me neither. you know, what are you doing for Christmas? Well, I don't know. I'm not really sure. We'll probably go see family. Yeah, me neither. Okay. You know, what are you doing for New Year's? That is all surface level. And I'm with you. If that's the whole conversation, that sucks. But if it starts there and then you go a little deeper and you go a little deeper, that's the entry point. You're leaving the door open. You're not closing it.

and you're giving the person a chance to show you whether they want to lean in a little bit more or whether we're going to pivot and go somewhere else. And they are allowed to do that. Okay. So again, this is not a brain exercise. You can make it one all you want. You can start there. You can finish there. can just like think of your lasagna layers, like right amount in your head. You can visualize them. You can listen to how your body feels.

and use that as your layers of lasagna if you're like really in tune with your body, which I recommend.

But it doesn't have to be this convoluted, complicated exercise unless that would really help you. I have had clients who've written this out. They've made spreadsheets. They've drawn out elaborate, creative ways of picturing these kind of things. And it brings a sense of safety and assurance to their systems in a time where their systems are craving identity and belonging. And instead of fighting themselves on that and shaming themselves for feeling so weird,

It teaches the system, hey, I've got you, I'm here for you. This is awkward, you're right. This is murky, it is messy. It doesn't feel like we know who we are or where we belong.

Either way, it's a way to build trust with yourself. It's a way to build assurance that you're okay. It's also a way to keep connection with people instead of self-isolating to protect yourself, which is a completely fine thing to do, but hopefully not something you do forever. And it's a way to get yourself out into the world. And by the way,

Practice. Practice talking about the things that feel awkward for you. Because what I don't want this to be about is having to have a clean, polished, perfect answer either. One of the most helpful things you can do, especially for people who are in that middle layer or the most intimate layer, the third deep layer, is actually say when they ask a question or they check on you or ask how work is or ask how that thing went with...

your family or whatever the sort of weird, murky, messy thing is that you're having trouble talking about, is actually just illuminate the vulnerable truth and say, actually, this is really hard for me to talk about. Or actually, this is really hard for me to wrap words around. Are you willing to bear with me as I stumble through it? I don't always recommend that for the most superficial layer unless you've given the diplomatic answer and someone asks a deeper question and shows an indication that they want to.

get more of the story. And then you feel your system start to get nervous and you're like, ooh, maybe I'll try the middle layer of truth with them, right? You just get that intuitive inclination that maybe the door is open and it's safe here and you want to dip your toe in the water and try it and they seem to be able to hold the truth with you. You are allowed to say, hey, this is really hard for me to talk about or I feel like I might word vomit.

Are you cool hanging with me as I stumble through this? One of my favorite things to do is just say that. I think about examples of coffee dates where I've met up with colleagues and I'm working through a new business idea or I'm launching a program that's not quite fully baked yet. And I just think about a woman I met with about two years ago when I was in a real liminal space, a real messy middle.

between two eras of my business. And to be honest with you, I wasn't 100 % clear who I was, what I was doing, who I was helping, what it was going to look like, what I was calling it. It was a mess. And she asked me, and I was like, is it OK if I just kind of work it out out loud as we talk? And she did such a beautiful job of holding the space and letting me word vomit. And then I actually asked her, said, it would actually be really useful for me.

if you would reflect back what you heard. And she did, and she nailed it. And the sense of validation and affirmation I got from that, I'd say this was like a middle layer of truth type of person. Like we started superficial and we got a little bit more gooey with it, was so helpful. And it gave me a sense of affirming the identity that I was stepping into and feeling like I belonged and felt was safe.

with this person. And so what I don't want you to hear from this is you have to have it all figured out before you go talk to someone. It is absolutely okay, depending on your read on the relationship, to illuminate that you're in process and say, hey, can you hold this? People are allowed to say no. They're allowed to try and then reflect that they couldn't hold it. Sometimes they ask questions that feel like pushback.

And that tells you they couldn't hold that truth. And so the other thing I want to highlight is, and the reason this isn't such a rigid exercise to do upfront and sometimes just more of a concept to hold loosely in your body or in your mind, the truth lasagna and the truth buckets is you might spend a lot of time preparing and getting it all written out and getting it all figured out. And then you try it and you misfired or they misfired and it backfires in some way.

and didn't feel good. And so there's no guarantees with this. It could be that you sorted someone into a layer, shared accordingly, and it went sideways, or you got interrupted, or you just didn't land with them. And that's not a failure on your part, and it's not a failure on their part. I think about how sometimes I'll be going on a walk with a friend or a neighbor, and they'll ask how work is, and they...

literally like know nothing about my work. They're in a completely different industry, but they're being so kind and just, you know, we're being friends and we're talking about how work's going. And I'll explain something that's in process and forget. I'll totally just forget that they have no idea what it's like to be an entrepreneur. And I'll only figure that out when they start asking questions that seem a little

I don't know what the word is, but frantic or anxious. And they're trying so hard to understand. But what has happened is I've shared something that to me just feels like a normal part of my work of being an entrepreneur. And this person who has never been an entrepreneur in her life, that scares the shit out of her to imagine doing that. And me sharing that pulls that up in her and she starts asking a lot of questions.

And what it ends up doing is it first of all pulls away from the original thing I was sharing. And then I start explaining to her something. And I start to feel like, my god, I'm not being understood. And this isn't landing. And that sucks. And so this is information. If anything goes sideways when you're trying to do this, it's not proof you did something wrong. It could mean just their capacity to hold you didn't match what you estimated. And you just adjust. And you don't make it personal. It doesn't mean your friendship failed. It didn't mean that.

You shouldn't gone on the walk. It just meant that we're all humans on a human journey and it's messy. And sometimes it's going to misfire. And our deep desire to be understood and held and seen and therefore belong can get challenged when we least expect it. And we get to try again, assuming it's not like.

a big rupture that happened. And even if it is a big rupture, you can try again either with that person or with someone else. But it doesn't have to be personal.

you can adjust the layer of truth.

You can try again. You can ask them if they want to learn more. There's all types of ways to navigate this a little more gracefully, but one of the best ways preemptively is to give yourself grace for being in the middle, for being imperfect, for not having it all figured out. And when and if it feels okay to do that, illuminating that in your very human interactions with other people.

At worst, it might throw them off a little bit. At best, it illuminates to them that it's okay for them to be in their own messy middle.

and that you're a safe space for that. Because when you honor your mess, they see, ooh, maybe this person can hold me in my mess too. And that can be such a beautiful thing in any relationship.

In summary.

Accidentally, and it's usually accidentally, flooding someone with your unsettled truth without their consent is not honesty. It's not transparency. It's not necessarily being ethical. It might actually be landing as a burden to them. And they may not register it as that. But when it feels not great to you on the back end or even during,

or you feel like you all of a sudden become like a flood of information coming out of your mouth, that is often a place where maybe this was a deeper layer of truth than this particular relational container on this particular day could hold.

Not every layer of our wobbles and mess are the responsibility of every other human to hold. Choosing the right layer of truth and the right bucket of truth, like person, protects both of you and honors the relationship. And it keeps you from saying things you can't take back before you're

My hope is that when you take it one bite at a time, even when it's a close relationship, start superficially, move a little deeper, take breaths, stay grounded in your body, stay grounded in reading the room. And this is all assuming the other person does it with you. If they don't, then hopefully you don't keep trying to tell the truth deeper and deeper and deeper, right? My hope is that...

the more you practice the discernment. And again, hopefully it's more of an intuitive felt thing and not such a cognitive process, because that can be a lot to hold in your brain. But the more you practice even just little bits of this, the more you feel permission to exist in the world as your messy middle self, as the unprocessed version of you.

know very deeply and feel very safe with the fact that you're not withholding, that you're not lying, that you're honoring the depths and breadth of your truth in a way that lets your system know that your sacred parts are safe with you, that you're not going to reveal them before they're ready to be revealed, and that you're not out of some type of obligation.

that you may not even realize you're holding, revealing them to people before those people are ready for them and able or capable of holding them.

The unsettled feeling that comes with this underneath all of it is not a sign that you're on the wrong track.

It's a sign you're in the middle, which is good. It means you're growing. The middle is supposed to feel like this. And this is why so many people don't move from a relationship, from a job, from a literal house to the next one, from, you know, they leave a friend group and forge new bonds and connections. It's why so many people keep doing the same thing year after year with their family when they hate it.

Breaking the belonging, shifting the identity, being in those middle spaces is really hard and really brave. And you're not meant to navigate it alone. The part of you that is so worried about how this is going to land with other people is such a wise part because you are wired to regulate in groups of people.

Co-regulation is how you settle into feeling unsettled in the middle. We are supposed to hold each other across the threshold of life. We're not supposed to do them alone. And again, the fact your system is very worried about what people are going to think is all the evidence you need to prove that. It doesn't mean you're thinking small. It doesn't mean you're being a people pleaser. It means...

And this is the intelligent part of the phone response. You very much care about being held across messy middle thresholds and that your system is saying, don't do this alone.

So I invite you when you're in those messy middles, even though it might feel excruciatingly hard, find someone to support you, whether they're on that deepest layer and you've identified them, whether it's a coach, a helping professional, a therapist, someone in the clergy.

Find someone who's gonna walk with you through it. Because the worst feeling is that no one's gonna be able to see you, understand you, and hold you, and you can't tell your truth.

It's supposed to be processed out loud with other people. I'm not saying don't process it out loud with other people. I'm saying be discerning of who you let in on those deepest layers. I love to be that person for people. And it's so beautiful when someone

gives themselves permission to be held because when you do that, it also strengthens your capacity to hold others and puts you on that deepest layer list for other people. And there's not much more of a greater honor than that in our lives.

So thank you for listening. May you go forth in whatever version of Truth Lasagna and Truth Bucket seem to land with your system. I invite you to take even one little piece of this and try it on in the next kind of awkward, strained, ugh, social interaction you might be anticipating coming up. Pause a minute before you go.

Remind yourself that this is normal that I feel this way. It's okay that I genuinely care what people are going to think. It's my system saying I need people. And it's also okay to be discerning about which people you let in on which layers of the truth. You can tell everything you know, but sometimes it's not in your best interest or theirs. Thank you for listening in to our Truth Lasagna episode.

As always, make sure to hit the subscribe button wherever you're tuning in. Reach out with any questions. Hit up the show notes to subscribe to my notes from a fart walk newsletters. I'd love to invite you to book a session with me if there's something in the messy middle-end process that you'd love support around. Otherwise, go forth. Have some lasagna. I'll talk to you guys soon.