We know death is coming. We just don’t like getting close enough to see it. And sometimes, that means pulling away from the very people who need us. This episode reflects on the ideas of death and dying, with a powerful conversation about how we can show up for the dying.

After the death of a dear friend, Steph reflects on the visits people meant to make, the messages that arrived too late, and the loneliness that serious illness can bring. Her friend was deeply loved. He also sometimes wished he saw more of the people he loved—a painful contradiction that gives this conversation its urgency. Steph knows what it means to be on the other side of that absence. After her father died when she was fifteen, and her dealing with her mother's chronic illness, she and her siblings were left struggling while the adults around them didn’t know how to help. The people who withdrew weren’t villains. They were overwhelmed, frightened, and unsure what to do. But the consequences were real.

Jonah challenges the idea that showing up is always the right answer. Having an open afternoon is not the same as having the emotional capacity to sit with someone else’s pain. Together, they distinguish honest boundaries from avoidance, and consistency from the impossible promise of always being available.

And Steph admits something that complicates the whole conversation: sometimes connecting is difficult because saying goodbye hurts so much. Facing that fear won’t make loss easy. It may, however, keep fear from deciding who gets left alone.

The Good Love with Steph & Jonah is hosted by Steph Campbell and her son, Jonah Swotes.

What happens when an old wound enters a conversation before you notice it? In Episode 16 of The Good Love with Steph & Jonah, a discussion of projection and transference becomes personal when Steph recognizes what was happening inside her during an exchange with her son. A meeting earlier that day had left her feeling overlooked. She connects that feeling to childhood exclusion, the fear of becoming invisible as she ages, and the complicated experience of being deeply proud of Jonah while worrying that people would rather listen to him. She also acknowledges that her reading of the meeting may not be what actually happened. Jonah starts with an everyday example of assuming someone else feels the way he would. Later, he describes his own anxiety and desire to keep everyone happy, despite having had a loving childhood. Together, they consider why reassurance sometimes fails to reach a painful feeling and why awareness still takes work. The conversation returns to what Steph hoped to give her son: enough steadiness to recover when life hurts.

Content note: This episode discusses childhood violence and emotional distress, and includes a brief mention of suicide.

Righteousness can make cruelty feel justified. When a belief is used as proof that someone else is beneath you, the harm you cause can be rooted in, thus disguised by "the right thing to do." In Episode 15 of The Good Love with Steph & Jonah, Steph and Jonah examine that turn: how conviction becomes a weapon in families, relationships, and the wider world. Their conversation runs into a difficult contradiction. If someone’s certainty is hurting people, how do you challenge it without becoming just as certain that your own view is beyond question? Steph keeps pressing that tension as they move from public power and religion to the agreements people make with one another. “Going rogue” becomes one way to recognize the pattern: deciding that because your reason feels right, an agreement no longer applies to you. Jonah brings the problem closer to home. The belief that you must never quit, must fix every relationship, or must live by the rules you inherited can hold you hostage long after those rules stop helping. Righteousness can become a weapon against yourself, too, making an alternative seem wrong before you have even considered it. That raises another question: what are we protecting when we refuse to admit there might be something we do not know? The conversation ends with Steph reading a poem she wrote as a child about the world’s unanswered questions. After an hour of testing what it means to be right, that young voice leaves room for discovery. Steph and Jonah keep returning to the need to challenge harm; the ending asks whether we can do that while remaining curious enough to question ourselves.

As a child, Steph was “screaming ouch” at the top of her lungs. It was sometimes referred to as drama. Her son Jonah grew up expecting that people would show up for him. In this episode, Steph and Jonah ask how two generations of the same family learned such different things about trust. Jonah starts with Erik Erikson’s model of childhood development from his psychology class, then brings the question home: what happens when a child’s needs are, ignored, or mistaken for bad behavior? Steph grew up amid her mother’s severe mental illness, learning to pretend she needed nothing, and trying to give other people the care she did not know to ask for herself. She can now clearly name the shame and distrust that became her defaults. Years of therapy have helped her respond to them differently, but old wounds are still painful. Jonah’s childhood offers another side of that family story. With Steph and his father’s care, he learned to know his worth and to assume there might be a reason when someone lets him down. He has had to learn that people will not always show up—and that being able to handle a problem alone does not mean he should have to. Their conversation widens beyond what any one parent can provide. Severe illness, money, work, and community support all shape what care is possible. They also challenge the reflex to dismiss a need because someone else “has it worse.” By the end, even the boy who cried wolf sounds different: instead of asking whether he deserved to be believed, Jonah asks why nobody stopped to find out what made him cry out in the first place. Episode 14 of The Good Love with Steph & Jonah includes discussion of childhood neglect and severe mental illness. The Good Love with Steph & Jonah is hosted by Steph Campbell and her son, Jonah Swotes.

The Lindsay Clancy trial brings Steph and Jonah to a question about the conversation around it: what gets missed when public attention settles on blame? In Episode 13 of The Good Love with Steph & Jonah, they discuss psychosis, the appeal of true-crime spectacle, and the support they believe parents need before a crisis comes to fruition.

Steph speaks from her experience of surviving a mother who was was plagued with severe psychosis. Her memories of fear and of her mother’s remorse lead to a harder question: what happens to the children who live? She describes the lasting cost of that childhood and the difficulty of finding people who understood how to deal with mental illness.

Jonah examines the comments people leave about the case and argues that protecting children includes supporting their parents. Later, he challenges language that can encourage self-diagnosis. Their exchange considers how to make frightening experiences easier to talk about without treating every struggle as a diagnosis. And also how to be pro-active when something is a diagnosis.

They bring it all home discussing the help Steph received through her journey and the life Jonah has been able to build. This is a personal, intense conversation about mental illness and care, rather than a legal analysis of the case. It includes discussion of child deaths and childhood violence.

The Good Love with Steph & Jonah is hosted by Steph Campbell and her son, Jonah Swotes.

Can you break a family cycle while you’re still healing from it? In Episode 12 of The Good Love with Steph & Jonah, Steph brings a question she has spent decades living: why can so much of your life change while the voice inside still seems to be against you? Starting with neural pathways and the effort involved in changing old beliefs, Steph describes the gap between the life she has built and the self-worth she continues to struggle with. She recalls a therapist’s camera metaphor for distorted self-perception, and explains why radical self-acceptance has mattered even when self-love feels out of reach. Then the conversation turns to Jonah. Steph asks what her years of therapy meant for the child she raised. He remembers security, freedom to take risks, and someone in his corner. At her invitation, he also names what stayed with him: anxiety around anger and intensity. Their exchange gives the question of change a specific answer. Steph’s work mattered to Jonah, and it did not prevent every hurt - its not supposed to - thats not the point. As the conversation unveils the beauty of the healing between parent and child, they end with the responsibility to keep seeking support and remain open to what a child experienced.

The Good Love with Steph & Jonah is hosted by Steph Campbell and her son, Jonah Swotes.

Can you help someone without deciding what they should do with the help? In Episode 11 of The Good Love with Steph & Jonah, Steph and Jonah talk about service, community, and the growing habit of looking after only our own. Jonah uses a small confession—he depends on Google reviews but rarely writes them—to show how easily people receive from shared systems without contributing back. From there, the conversation asks what makes service meaningful. Jonah describes contribution as a muscle tied to his own sense of balance. Steph argues that service can be as ordinary as listening without interrupting, and that giving from pity or superiority turns another person into someone beneath the giver rather than someone equal to them. The episode becomes most charged when they discuss giving money to a person experiencing homelessness. Jonah understands the fear that cash could enable harm; Steph challenges the assumption that a gift gives anyone the right to control another adult’s choice. Her stories about handing out cheeseburgers, letting her dying mother smoke, and being treated without shame by a doctor make the argument personal rather than abstract. What emerges is not a tidy definition of good service. It is a more demanding test: whether help recognizes another person’s humanity, whether community can survive without reciprocal participation, whether the giver can release the need to feel righteous about giving, and most importantly, regardless of whether a human being is in the position of giver or receiver, we are all equal as we are all headed to the same destination.

The Good Love with Steph & Jonah is hosted by Steph Campbell and her son, Jonah Swotes.

Who do you become when nothing goes your way? In Episode 10 of The Good Love with Steph & Jonah, Jonah brings in a morning of printer problems, paperwork, and the DMV, while Steph is exhausted in the middle of an unfinished move. Neither is discussing powerlessness from a safe distance; they are already inside it.

The conversation expands from daily aggravation into the systems and people everyone depends on, the comfort of believing that good choices guarantee good outcomes, and the fear that can sit underneath a quick “that’s too bad” response to someone else’s struggle. Jonah describes needing to put his experience in perspective and “emotionally pull the parachute and stop falling.”

Steph offers a less polished kind of reset: sometimes go to sleep, eat, shower, take a bath, or let tomorrow be the next attempt. From there, they move into self-compassion, the HALT check—hungry, angry, lonely, tired—and the surprising role of boundaries in making compassion sustainable.

What the episode ultimately reveals is not a method for taking control back. It is the version of a person that can surface when control disappears—and the small interventions that can keep a bad moment from deciding who that person will be.

The Good Love with Steph & Jonah is hosted by Steph Campbell and her son Jonah Swotes.