The Third Thing

Somewhere between your late 20s and early 30s, life shook like a snow globe. Maybe you packed up and moved. Maybe you planted roots and doubled down. Astrology has a name for that season, and it turns out your best friend was probably going through it too.

In Part 2 of our astrology episode, Danyelle and Michelle go beyond the Big Six into the placements you share with your whole generation. We get into Chiron, the wounded healer, and why so many millennials are wired to want to be heard (and why we’re all in therapy about it). Then we lay our Saturn returns over our friendship: one of us blew everything up, the other dug in, and it explains a lot about the years we drifted. We close with app recommendations, a friendship date idea, and a two-card Pull for eclipse season.

**Correction: In the episode, Danyelle describes Chrion as a meteor. Chiron is a centaur, a small icy body between Saturn and Uranus. it was discovered in 1977 and called n asteroid, and is now classified as both a minor planet and a comet.

In This Episode

• Chiron in Gemini: the shared core wound for anyone born 1983 to 1988
• Gen X’s Chiron in Taurus and the inherited pressure of security and stability
• Why millennials are so into therapy, self-help, and growth
• Returns 101: your solar return (your birthday) and the infamous Saturn return
• Blow it up or dig in: how your Saturn return shapes your friendships
• Astrology apps we love, and how to get your chart without a birth time
• The Pull: King of Cups reversed and the Eight of Cups for eclipse season

Reflection Questions

• Thinking back to your late 20s and early 30s, did you blow things up or dig in? What about your closest friends?
• Where did your friendships have more space during that season, and what did that distance hold?
• Do you relate to the need to be heard? How does it show up in your friendships?
• Is there something you feel like you “should” know about a friend by now? What would it take to just ask?
• When everything around you feels unsteady, what’s your tether?

Resources Mentioned

• Astrology apps: The Pattern, Time Passages, CHANI, Co-Star, and The Sanctuary
• Therapy, tarot, and astrology readings with Danyelle at tidehealings.com

Try This With Your Friend
Download an astrology app together, pull up both your charts, and turn it into a friendship date. What’s hilarious? What’s surprising? What finally makes sense?

Connect With Us

📸 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
 🌐 Website: TheThirdThingPod.com
🎧 Join our Patreon community for monthly events, deeper conversations, early access, workbooks, and more. 

Support the show

Ever wonder why you and your best friend are perfectly in sync in person, but somehow every text thread turns into a small fire? There might be a cosmic reason.

In Part 1 of our astrology episode, Danyelle (therapist, tarot reader, resident witch) walks Michelle through the natal chart as a tool for friendship. This isn’t a 101, officially. It’s the two of us pulling out our charts, breaking down the Big Six, and getting honest about where our placements make us a dream team and where they make us butt heads. Astrology won’t excuse bad behavior or replace therapy, but it can give you one more piece of the puzzle, and a lot more grace for the people you love.

In This Episode

• What a natal chart is, and why your birth time and place matter
• Our first brushes with astrology
• The four elements as a shortcut: what happens when air meets fire, or water meets earth
• The Big Three (sun, rising, moon), through Danyelle’s Sag/Gemini/Cancer and Michelle’s Aries/Capricorn/Aries
• When your friend’s friends turn out to be a fun house mirror of you
• Venus, Mars, and Mercury (makes up the big six): the planets of love and values, conflict and action, and communication
• Grace as a newer arrival after a quarter century of friendship

Reflection Questions

• Which elements show up most in your chart and in your closest friend’s? How do they work together?
• Is there a friend whose communication style always seems to clash with yours? What would shift if you assumed you were speaking different languages rather than coming at each other?
• Are you resonating more with your sun, moon, or rising right now?
• Where could a little more grace live in your friendships?

Resources Mentioned

• Ghost of a Podcast with Jessica Lanyadoo
• Co-Star, The Pattern, and Time Passages apps

Part 2 drops next week: generational placements, what bubbled up for us, and The Pull.

Connect With Us

📸 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
 🌐 Website: TheThirdThingPod.com
 🎧 Join our Patreon community for monthly events, deeper conversations, early access, workbooks, and more.

Support the show

You got the invite to be in the wedding party, and you said yes before you knew what you were signing up for: the matching robes, the bachelorette weekend, the speech, and a group chat with people you’ve never met who all love the bride as much as you do. Or you didn’t get asked to be maid of honor, and you’re finding a way to smile through it.

Weddings are love days. They are also full of drama. In this episode, Michelle and Danyelle look back on their years as maids of honor, bridesmaids, and guests, and ask why these milestones bring out our insecurities. The answer comes back to the work we’ve done all season: knowing what’s really yours to carry, holding your boundaries, and letting the day be about love instead of ranking your friendship.

In This Episode

• Danyelle’s year of seven weddings, including walking her brother down the aisle
• Being maid of honor at a venue in Moab that was nowhere near ready
• The 26-person joint bachelorette in New Orleans, and the conflict behind the scenes
• Danyelle shares how it felt not to be named maid of honor, nine years later
• Michelle’s first time as maid of honor, and what happens when money and class shape the plans
• Why declining a bridesmaid invite can be honest and kind (but still hard)
• Why you should name a maid of honor or give everyone a clear job
• The Pull: Queen of Cups, on holding all of the emotions without becoming them

Reflection Questions

1. When have you felt ranked by a friend’s wedding, and what story did you tell yourself about it?
2. What do you really have to give as part of a wedding party? Money, time, or energy? Where might you set clear expectations about what your limitations are? 
3. If you’re the one getting married, how can you make sure everyone knows they matter to you, even if they aren’t in the bridal party?
4. What might change if you let go of how the day “should” go?

Connect With Us

📸 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
🌐 Website: TheThirdThingPod.com
🎧 Join our Patreon community for monthly events, deeper conversations, early access, workbooks, and more.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend and leave a rating or review. It helps more people find the show and join the conversation about friendship, growth, and what it means to show up for each other across difference.

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Your friend cancels again. They go quiet for a week. Or you're the one who has to text "I can't make it today" for the third time this month. Mental health is already living in your friendships, whether anyone has named it or not.

This week, Danyelle leads a conversation about what happens when we stop trying to fix each other and start learning to sit with it. We talk about the "pick yourself up by your bootstraps" mindset, why the urge to give advice is often about our own comfort, and how saying "it's not if, it's when" changed the way we show up for each other as friends and co-founders. Michelle also shares about a dear friend who died from an ED, and what it means to love someone through an illness you can't fix.

In This Episode

• Why one in five people living with a mental health condition means it's in every friendship
• Danyelle on living with ADHD and chronic illness, and asking for grace
• How "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and 9-to-5 culture shape what we expect from our bodies
• Why fixing a friend is often about making ourselves feel safe
• When two neurospicy brains don't mix, and how to name it
• Anxious attachment and taking someone's struggle personally
• Grief that holds anger, sadness, and love at once
• Why listening beats advice about 19 times out of 20
• The Pull: Ace of Pentacles

Reflection Questions

• Where might the thing that's annoying you about someone be an invitation to get curious about what's going on for them?
• When you're struggling, what do you need most from your friends: advice, company, or silence?
• Is there something you've been carrying alone that a friend could help you hold?

Resources Mentioned

• Tema Okun, "White Supremacy Culture" characteristics
• adrienne maree brown
• Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts pilot
• If this episode brings something up: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or contact the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline at (866) 662-1235

Connect With Us
Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
Website, workbooks, and episode notes: www.thethirdthingpod.com
Join the community on Patreon: www.patreon.com/TheThirdThingPod

Support the show

Can Men and Women Really Be Friends? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is where it gets interesting. When Harry Met Sally told a whole generation that "sex always gets in the way", and the friends-to-lovers pipeline has been reinforcing that idea ever since. So what happens to the real, full-body love you feel for a friend when the culture says that kind of intimacy only belongs to romance? Flip it between queer and hetero relationships or gender expressions, and suddenly a weekend away with your friend's partner looks very different.

This week Danyelle and Michelle go past the Mars-and-Venus version of this question and look at what's underneath it: where attraction lives in platonic love, why so many men are starved for touch and emotional connection, how race and body size shape who gets read as "safe" or "a threat," and how queerness opened up ways of loving each other that the usual scripts never allowed.

In This Episode

• Why the real question isn't about gender but about how intimate is "too intimate"
• When Harry Met Sally, Seinfeld, and the media that taught us sex ruins friendship
• Where attraction lives in platonic love, and how you can nurture it
• The therapist advice that stuck: not every need has to be met by your partner
• Relationship anarchy and defining relationships as sexual or non-sexual
• Why men are often under-touched and discouraged from naming emotional needs
• Who carries the labor of friendship in heteronormative households
• Queerplatonic love, a queerplatonic ex-wife, and why a bestie and a wife sharing an Airbnb every football season works
• Tarot pull: Ace of Swords reversed, on the fear of trying something new in how we communicate

Reflection Questions

• Where are your boundaries around intimacy rooted in fear, and where could they be more expansive?
• Is there a need you've expected your partner to meet that a friend could help fill?
• Do you let yourself have a crush, a long hug, or held hands with someone you're not partnered with?
• What would it take to tell your partner, "I'm needing a kind of intimacy we don't have"?

Resources Mentioned

• Chanaye Kendall-Jackson, educator on polyamory, ethical non-monogamy and relationship anarchy
• Our Boundaries workbook, available at thethirdthingpod.com

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Every relationship or friend group has had this moment: your favorite person is dating someone you can't stand. Maybe it's just a values mismatch, or maybe it's something heavier from controlling behavior to verbal abuse, or worse. Either way, the question is the same: what's actually your job here, and where's the line between being a good friend and trying to run someone else's relationship?

This week Danyelle and Michelle share the times they got this wrong, one who stayed quiet, one who rallied a full "intervention" campaign, and spoiler alert - neither ended up well. From there, they map out what actually helps: leading with curiosity instead of judgment, naming impact instead of verdicts, and knowing when "I don't love your partner" needs to become a real safety conversation.

In This Episode

• Why "I don't click with your partner" usually isn't yours to fix or fully voice
• The therapist line, "They're the unit now", that uno-reversed Michelle's plan
• Leading with impact on you ("I feel uncomfortable when...") instead of judgment of them
• Why you're allowed to set limits on time together without trying to end the relationship
• The psychology of why we're drawn to familiar, sometimes unhealthy, relationship patterns
• How to name concerning behavior without ultimatums or forcing a choice
• Setting up a code word or safety check-in
• National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233, text START to 88788, or chat at thehotline.org

Reflection Questions

• Is my discomfort about their safety, or about my own values and preferences?
• Am I trying to help my friend, or trying to be right?
• Have I made it safe for my friend to come to me if things get worse?
• Where's a boundary I could set for myself instead of trying to change their relationship?

Resources Mentioned

• Our Boundaries workbook — available at thethirdthingpod.com
• National Domestic Violence Hotline — 1-800-799-7233 / text START to 88788 / thehotline.org

Connect With Us
📸 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
🌐 Website: TheThirdThingPod.com
🎧 Join our Patreon community for monthly events, deeper conversations, early access, workbooks, and more.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend and leave a rating or review. It helps more people find the show and keeps the conversation about friendship, growth, and what it means to show up for each other going.

Support the show

You already know how to show up for a friend: feed them a home cooked meal, celebrate their wins or birthdays, meet their tears with grace. Now flip it around and look at how you treat yourself when no one's watching.

This episode moves from the external work of friendship into the internal: what's actually happening in your nervous system when you people-please, fawn, or go quiet to keep the peace. Danyelle and Michelle break down people-pleasing as a form of self-abandonment, trace it back to IFS "parts" and protector instincts, and get honest about where they still do it from bridesmaid budgets to bracing for a partner walking through the door.

In This Episode

• Why people-pleasing in friendship is often self-abandonment in disguise
• IFS parts work: how protective parts formed to keep you safe, and why they can outlive their usefulness
• Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn: naming fawning as a nervous system response, not a personality trait
• Real stories: avoidance as a people-pleasing pattern, the maid-of-honor budget squeeze, and the "jolt off the couch" reflex
• Choosing a restaurant as a low-stakes place to practice saying what you actually want
• The pause-and-reframe tool for catching yourself mid-pattern
• How secure, "I got you" friendship still leaves room to say what isn't working
• Tarot pull: Knight of Wands — charging forward while staying in communication with yourself

Reflection Questions

• Where in your life does people-pleasing show up as avoidance rather than agreement?
• What's one relationship where you'd benefit from naming a feeling out loud instead of letting it build?
• If your best friend heard your internal dialogue about yourself, would they recognize it as kind?
• Where do you already have a boundary you haven't set yet?

Resources Mentioned

• "No Bad Parts" by Richard C. Schwartz
• TTT workbooks on attachment style, non-violent communication, and boundaries — available at thethirdthingpod.com

Connect With Us
📸 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
🌐 Website: TheThirdThingPod.com
🎧 Join our Patreon community for monthly events, deeper conversations, early access, workbooks, and more.

If this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend and leave a rating or review. It helps more people find the show and keeps the conversation about friendship, growth, and what it means to show up for each other going.

Support the show

Everybody has that friend who remembers the birthdays, plans the trips, sends the text first or the friendship where they're the one always reaching out (which one are you?). Naming that out loud feels uncomfortable no matter which side you're on. But what if the imbalance you're keeping score of isn't actually about being cared for less?

Michelle and Danyelle get into one-sided friendships and offer up a unique framework: over-functioning invites under-functioning, and neither role is good or bad. Rather, they're often trauma responses playing out in real time. Danyelle traces her under-functioning back to staying small and not taking up space; Michelle traces her over-functioning back to her mom's constant giving and a lifelong need to prove she's worthy of love. They connect this to attachment styles from Season 1, talk honestly about a friend who went quiet on Michelle for two months, and dig into capacity...how illness, parenthood, and life stage all shape what each person can actually show up with, and why that's not the same as how much they care. They close on delegation, love languages (and why Michelle can't stand that term), and a Tower-and-Sun pull about what has to fall apart before things get lighter.

In This Episode:

• The framework: over-functioning invites under-functioning, and both are often nervous system responses
• Tracing over/under-functioning back to childhood and family patterns
• Connecting this to attachment styles — anxious and over-functioning, avoidant and under-functioning
• A real-time story: reaching out to a friend six times over two months with no response, and choosing not to take it personally
• Capacity as a spectrum, and why it's not a measure of love
• Chronic illness, capacity, and living in a world that assumes able-bodiedness
• Learning to ask for what you need instead of resenting what isn't given
• Closing tarot pull: The Tower and The Sun

Reflection Questions:

• Are you the over-functioner or the under-functioner in most of your friendships and does that shift depending on who you're with?
• Is there a friendship where you've been keeping score without saying so out loud?
• Where in your life is capacity, not love, the real limiting factor?

Resources Mentioned:

• Lena Dunham's Fame Sick
• The Third Thing workbooks: thethirdthingpod.com

Connect With Us:
📍 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
🌐 Website + workbooks: thethirdthingpod.com
💛 Join the community on Patreon

Support the show

You haven't had to walk into a room and introduce yourself in years, and then suddenly you do, and every old insecurity shows up at once. Making friends as an adult isn't just logistically harder than it was in middle school or college. It's a different game entirely, and most of us are playing it without ever being taught the rules.

In this episode, Michelle and Danyelle break from their usual format to turn the lens outward: why does adult friendship take so much more intention than the friendships we made growing up? They trace the structures that used to make connection automatic, school, dorms, shared schedules, and what happens once those structures disappear. Danyelle tells the full story of her friendship with Bex, from a "let's hang out" that almost got written off as small talk to a bond that's now a business partnership and chosen family. Michelle gets honest about seeing herself as the sidekick instead of the main character, and how that story quietly shaped who she let close. Together, they get into the parts of us that show up to protect us in new rooms, the real fear underneath rejection, and how to actually shift the narrative before you walk in.

In This Episode:

• Why the structures that made childhood friendship easy don't exist in adulthood
• Danyelle's story of meeting Bex and the moment she realized "let's hang out" was real
• The "sidekick vs. main character" narrative and how it shapes who you let in
• Parts work: understanding the protector parts that show up when you enter new rooms
• Reframing the fear of rejection — and giving yourself permission to leave
• Closing tarot pull: the Six of Pentacles, reversed

Reflection Questions:

• What's the story you tell yourself walking into a room full of strangers?
• Where in your life are you still waiting for someone else to reach out first?
• Six of Pentacles, reversed, is about resistance to receiving — where might that show up for you in friendship?

Resources Mentioned:

• The Third Thing workbooks: thethirdthingpod.com

Connect With Us:
📍 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
🌐 Website + workbooks: thethirdthingpod.com
💛 Join the community on Patreon

Support the show

Season Two opens with the episode we've been wanting to make since day one. Queerness has been a thread running under every conversation on this show, and this time Michelle and Danyelle pull it into the center.

Danyelle grew up with two moms who fought on the front lines for marriage equality, and never had a coming out story of her own, queerness was just always an option. Michelle didn't have a close queer relationship until she met Danyelle, and spent longer finding her way there. Together they trace how queerness shaped their friendship, what it means to build a chosen family, and why queerness might be less about who you're attracted to and more about how you move through the world, your relationships, your rules, your sense of what's possible.

In this episode:

• Danyelle's origin story: two moms, a politically active household, and growing up around the fight for marriage equality
• The Kinsey scale and what a peer sex-ed program taught them about the spectrum of sexuality
• Michelle's slower, more shame-shrouded relationship to her own sexuality growing up
• Queerness as culture, not just who you sleep with
• What it looked like to build a blended, chosen family across two moms and a dad living next door
• The 40% statistic: LGBTQ+ homeless youth, and why representation and chosen family matter so much
• A Knight of Cups tarot pull to open the season, using The Crow Tarot deck

Reflection questions:

• Who is in your chosen family, and how did that family get built?
• Where in your life have you felt like you had to create your own roadmap instead of following one that was already laid out for you?

Resources mentioned:
Families We Choose by Kath Weston
It Gets Better Project: itgetsbetter.org

Connect with us:
📍 Instagram: @thethirdthingpod
🌐 Website + workbooks: thethirdthingpod.com
💛 Join the community on Patreon

Support the show