Cracked Open: Becoming Intimate With Your SELF — 2026 Year-Long Monthly Challenge 🩷🪩🐣
What if becoming intimate with your SELF was the skill that unlocked everything else?
In 2026, CouplesTherapy.co is launching a year-long, monthly challenge focused on becoming more intimate with your SELF. Month-by-month, we’ll look at our GOO through psychological pieces of defensive mirrored glass and build awareness, choice, and connection.
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Cracked Open
The hero image on our homepage this month—January 2026—and now for the 2026 Challenge section of our site, was designed with the help of our pretentious new friend, AI, as a visual aid to introduce this year’s challenge: Cracked Open: Becoming Intimate with your SELF.
A heart-shaped disco ball with a fragmented, mirrored surface—cracked open and revealing its soft, gooey center.
And that’s like us.
Soft like goo on the inside.
Less so on the outside, with reflective pieces of mirrored glass—each one performing an illusory custom-made defensive technique designed to shield our vulnerable center.
This year at CouplesTherapy.co, our defenders are due for their annual review. And most of them have gone unchecked for a lifetime! Can you imagine? It’s one thing for your boss to give you space—and that’s great—but it’s another altogether when you’ve worked your ass off, full-time, come rain or shine, only to have gone unnoticed.
So the question becomes:
Who’s the boss?
Is it our goo, or mirrored glass?
And that’s what we’ll be exploring throughout 2026.
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Your Invitation
As your guide, I’ll lead you through a year-long, monthly challenge inviting you to reflect on aspects of your SELF—from your gooey center to your mirrored surface. And along the way, you’ll become more Intimate with your SELF.
Yes, I said the “I” word—intimate.
Becoming intimate with yourself is what makes it possible to become Intimate with Another and ultimately, Relational. Not functionally relational, not maturely relational, not mutually relational, not attachment-style relational, not securely relational, simply RELATIONAL. Because as I see it, anything other than that— is not. It simplifies things and that’s our jam at CouplesTherapy.co.
In my experience, very few among us actually know what the “I” word means. But, not to worry—unless you’re a Time Ball, it’s never too late. Truth be told, once upon a time, I needed a crash course myself—and I’m a work in progress.
As a Couples Therapist, I often see intimacy reduced to sex—and that’s not it. Many of us know you can have sex and feel no intimacy at all. If you were under the influence, you might not even remember the encounter. The same can be true in our own lives when unconscious defenders—like mind-and mood-altering substances, patterns, or behaviors—are running the show. They impair our ability to see clearly and choose consciously which way we want to go.
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Explore the 2026 Challenge—and each reflection—as they’re revealed one month at a time.
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The CouplesTherapy.co 2026 Challenge
Like this year’s big, interconnected Times Square Constellation Ball—full of eternally positive energy. With Waterford Crystal panels shining bright through engravings of infinite light, infinite joy, and infinite beginnings—CouplesTherapy.co is inviting you to become your own New Year’s Eve Ball in 2026!
And for the sake of this exploration—rather than our Ball being full of symbolic energy, it’s full of GOO: the soft, vulnerable, authentic part of you. And rather than shining through panels of inscribed Waterford crystal, we’ll be exploring our goo what it seeps through—a myriad of psychological defenses, posing as illusory pieces of reflective mirrored glass
This is a year-long, worthwhile pursuit with the right blend of dopaminergic motivation in the climb topped with indulgent oxytocin and serotonin upon the arrival. By the time we reach the top on December 31, 2026, you’ll know what it means to be Intimate with your SELF—and when your Ball drops on New Year’s Eve, you’ll be primed to rise again in 2027 to explore what it means to be Intimate with Another.
👉 Visit the 2026 Challenge section to begin.
To stay informed as each monthly reflection drops—sign up for The Cherry Press !
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It’s said the process of therapy is to make the unconscious conscious—for the purpose of choice.
Riddled too, is that the gift of therapy is awareness.
And the cost of therapy?
Awareness.
With that, you’re met with January’s Reflection. But, with every choice, as we learned in, Moving the Ball Forward: On Making Decisions, there’s something to gain—and something to lose and its in the process that we grow ourselves up.
So, what’s your decision?
This year, I hope you’ll join us.
You won’t want to miss it and EVERY MONTH COUNTS!
We’re cooking up a clever psychological stack—each year building on its last.
Once more, when the Ball drops on December 31, 2026, we’ll be ready to rise again—in 2027, with our focus on becoming Intimate with Another, and in 2028, on becoming Relational.
Your monthly reflections live in the 2026 Challenge section of our site, accessible through the navigation bar on our homepage.
We’ll meet you there—one month at a time.
With love and excitement for the year to come!
Jessica Hansen, LMFT
Founder, CouplesTherapy.co 🍒