Data Collectors,

Welcome to Stop 1 of the ROR series.

This stop introduces the foundational framework of the entire Rewiring Out of Resentment™ series. In this stop, we begin exploring resentment not simply as an emotion, attitude, or personality flaw, but as an adaptive infection pattern that spreads through nervous systems, relational environments, family systems, and social conditioning.

We are learning how resentment forms, what environments allow it to grow, how it spreads, and why so many people unknowingly live inside emotional contagion cycles without realizing it.

Let’s zoom into environments that can be breeding grounds for resentment. The most common areas I have seen are with those who tend to be over-functioners, people pleasers, those who struggle with emotional invisibility, and mothers with no life, hobbies, or unachieved goals outside of their role as mother and wife.

Over time, when we stay suppressing, over-functioning, etc., we get pulled out of our window of tolerance. When we are pulled out of our window of tolerance and stay out of it for long periods of time, we start to develop resentment. The infection has begun, but we must be careful. Once we have the infection, it is really easy to get hit harder because the system is weaker and more susceptible to the craving for bonding.

Those with a high resentment level tend to want to bond via shared gossip, dislike for others, or the need to complain about their partner with blind-loyalty friends or friends who are also stuck in similar patterns. Don’t get me wrong, co-regulation is necessary, and us ladies need to process a lot in order to regulate. But check your regulation session. Is it mostly you repeating the same upset? If so, you may be co-ruminating in a self-destructive way instead of a helpful way.

Why might it be self-destructive? Well, who do you typically co-ruminate with, and do you ever challenge the blind spots? Do you end with reflection on what is in your control? If not, we are in a self-destructive loop.

Chronic self-abandonment is the biggest behavior leading to resentment.

If we think of resentment as a bacteria that thrives and spreads like mold, we would explore which environments the resentment infection spreads and grows in the fastest. Here are some examples where, if the following behaviors exist in environments, I can guarantee you someone in there is struggling with resentment:

• Avoidance

• Emotional dishonesty

• Chronic survival mode

• Hypervigilance

• Emotional rigidity

• Suppressed grief

• Unresolved attachment wounds

• Repetitive relational gridlock

How do you suspect the infection spreads?

Through tone.
Through energy.
Through interpretation.
Through emotional leakage.
Through defensiveness.
Through withdrawal.
Through criticism.
Through passive aggression.
Through silence.
Through projection.
Through chronic emotional exhaustion.

Eventually, the entire relational field becomes emotionally contaminated.

Emotional Leakage

People often believe resentment only exists in words.But resentment leaks long before it speaks. It leaks through:

• body language

• sarcasm

• sighs

• irritability

• shutdown

• avoidance

• emotional numbness

• hypercriticism

• scorekeeping

• contempt

• chronic nervous system tension

Children absorb it.
Partners absorb it.
Coworkers absorb it.
Families absorb it.

Research consistently demonstrates that human beings are constantly reading one another’s emotional states through nonverbal communication. According to Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory (2011), the nervous system is continuously scanning the environment for cues of safety or danger through facial expressions, tone of voice, body posture, and relational energy. In other words, even when nothing is being verbally said, the body is still communicating. This is why unresolved resentment eventually creates emotional climates where:

• play disappears

• curiosity disappears

• softness disappears

• repair feels exhausting

And once all of this disappears, the connection begins feeling unsafe. John Gottman’s research on relationships found that contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and withdrawal are among the strongest predictors of relational distress and disconnection (Gottman & Silver, 1999). Long before a relationship falls apart, the emotional climate often shifts first. Louis Cozolino (2014) reminds us that we are social creatures whose nervous systems are constantly influencing one another. We regulate together, dysregulate together, and often absorb emotional states without realizing it. In other words, resentment becomes atmospheric.

Emotional Cost & Nervous System Currency

One of the core ROR concepts is understanding energy as currency I call it “energy expense.” Everything costs something emotionally:

Conflict costs energy.

Suppression costs energy.

Masking costs energy.

Overexplaining costs energy.

Avoidance costs energy.

Hypervigilance costs energy.

Many people are emotionally bankrupt without realizing it, and when nervous systems become depleted, resentment becomes easier to access than joy.

Why do you think that is? Well, my theory is because resentment requires less vulnerability. Joy requires openness. Play requires flexibility. Connection requires risk. Resentment often feels emotionally safer because it protects the nervous system from disappointment, grief, vulnerability, and uncertainty.

But let’s do a quick cost-benefit analysis.

In psychology, a cost-benefit analysis is simply the process of examining what a behavior, thought pattern, belief, or coping strategy gives us versus what it costs us. Most behaviors persist because there is some benefit, even if that benefit is unconscious.

So, what is the benefit of resentment?

Anyone?...

What I have seen in my clinical practice, as well as within myself, is that one of the biggest benefits is stagnation. We get to stay in the comfy, cozy zone where development does not occur.

We get to avoid uncertainty.

We get to avoid vulnerability.

We get to avoid accountability.

We get to avoid looking at our own role in the dance.

We get to constantly complain about the things we are suffering with. Sometimes that, in itself, comes with a secondary gain, which could be seen as a benefit. Maybe we receive validation. Maybe we receive sympathy. Maybe we receive attention. Maybe we receive a sense of belonging through shared frustration. Maybe we get to stay connected to a familiar identity. The cost of this, though, is stagnation. Over time, resentment builds and begins infiltrating perception.

Perception is the root of my work.

The longer resentment remains unchecked, the more likely we are to interpret neutral situations through a contaminated lens. We stop seeing what is happening and start seeing what we expect to happen, now why on earth would some of us want what we expect? Yup good ol’ confirmation bias.

We begin collecting evidence for our pain. We begin filtering out evidence that challenges the story and before we know it, resentment is no longer something we experience.It becomes the lens through which we experience everything day to day. For those of you who are new to my corner of the internet, I would encourage you to start with my first YouTube video on perception. I will link that below.

Because if resentment is the infection, perception is often where we first begin seeing the side effects of the resentment build up.

Research on chronic stress and trauma suggests that prolonged activation of the nervous system narrows our capacity for flexibility, curiosity, connection, and play (van der Kolk, 2014). When the body is exhausted, survival becomes the priority. The nervous system begins choosing predictability over possibility, protection over openness, and certainty over vulnerability. Certainty is what we all want in this world today, but think about it. Much of what we are certain about is linked to suffering. That is a key indicator that you are in protector part frequency. Stephen Porges (2011) explains that the nervous system is constantly evaluating whether the environment is safe enough to engage socially. When the body perceives threat, it stops caring about joy. It stops caring about fun. It stops caring about connection. The nervous system is trying to survive. Think about it. If you were being chased by a bear, you wouldn’t be worried about date night, pickleball, painting, gardening, or trying a new hobby. You would be worried about staying alive. The problem is that many of us are carrying around nervous systems that act like the bear is still there. So when somebody says, “Why don’t you just go have fun?” or “Why don’t you try something new?” the body says, “Absolutely not.” this has nothing to do with not wanting joy or connection. But because your nervous system has spent so much time surviving that it has forgotten how to play.

This is one of the reasons resentment becomes such a powerful trap. Resentment is familiar. The disappointment is familiar. The frustration is familiar. The criticism is familiar. The story is familiar. The body knows exactly what to do there because it has practiced it thousands of times. Joy, on the other hand, asks us to loosen our grip. It asks us to become curious. It asks us to be present. It asks us to risk disappointment again. And for many people, that feels far more dangerous than staying angry.

This is why I believe resentment can become a baseline for functioning. The nervous system will often choose familiar suffering over unfamiliar peace. Many of us have never actually learned how to live on the lake. We learned how to survive in the storm waves because we were born there. So when the water finally becomes calm, we don’t relax— we freak out because wtf is down there!!!😅. We start looking around wondering what is wrong. We start anticipating the next wave. in doing all of this we do not realize we create our own waves. That is why this work is not simply about reducing resentment. It is about teaching the nervous system that safety, play, joy, curiosity, and connection are not threats. They are skills that many of us never had the opportunity to develop.

Bruce Perry’s work similarly highlights that stressed and dysregulated nervous systems lose access to higher-order functioning. When survival states dominate, our ability to reflect, empathize, and problem-solve, connection becomes significantly reduced (Perry & Winfrey, 2021). Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) further argues that the brain is constantly managing a “body budget.” Every decision, emotional response, stressor, conflict, and interaction either deposits into or withdraws from that budget. When the account runs low, the brain becomes more reactive, less flexible, and increasingly focused on conserving resources.

This is why resentment can become so seductive.

Resentment gives us a story.

Resentment gives us certainty.

Resentment gives us someone to blame.

Resentment allows us to externalize discomfort instead of tolerating the vulnerability required for curiosity.

Joy asks us to soften.

Joy asks us to stay present.

Joy asks us to risk disappointment.

Joy asks us to remain open even when certainty would feel safer.

For many nervous systems, especially those accustomed to survival, softening feels far more dangerous than staying armored. This is one of the central hypotheses of the Rewiring Out of Resentment™ project:

The Glove Up Concept

In future stops, we’ll expand deeper into the concept of “gloving up.” That will be for those who watched the orientation for ROR. it will be a Crayon to add the crayon box. 🖍️

Read the article here to understand what I mean when I say crayons.

For now, let’s think of gloves as emotional protective equipment.

Not emotional walls.
Not avoidance.
Not detachment.

Skills.

1. Pause.

2. Observation.

3. Discernment.

4. Regulation.

5. Compartmentalization.

6. Non-reactivity.

7. Boundary awareness.

8. Emotional responsibility.

But most importantly, the acceptance that multiple things can be true. Not just what you feel, think, and believe. Many of us enter emotionally charged situations completely unprotected, absorbing everyone else’s emotions, projections, expectations, and nervous system activation without realizing it. Then we wonder why we leave interactions emotionally contaminated. The goal here is not emotional numbness. No no we feel on this corner of the internet. The goal is learning how to stay present without emotionally raw-dogging every environment we enter.

Research on emotional regulation and family systems repeatedly points to the importance of differentiation, which is our ability to remain connected to others without becoming emotionally fused with them (Bowen, 1978). In simple terms, differentiation allows us to stay in the room without becoming the room. It allows us to witness someone’s distress without automatically making it ours. It allows us to stay grounded in our values, observations, and reality while remaining open to the reality of another person.

That is what the gloves are.

Not disconnection.
Not superiority.
Not avoidance.

Protection through skill.

THE FIELD OBSERVATION

One of the most important things to understand:

It is usually cumulative.

• Micro-moments.

• Repeated disappointments.

• Unspoken truths.

• Chronic emotional suppression.

• Invisible labor.

• Perceived inequity.

• Inherited modeling.

• Emotional exhaustion.

Eventually, the nervous system adapts to expecting disappointment. This expectation becomes perceptual. Meaning: the brain starts scanning for confirmation. This is where resentment narrows interpretation and reduces relational flexibility.

The nervous system stops asking:

“What else could this mean?”

And starts assuming:

“See? Here we go again.”

Cognitive psychology has demonstrated that human beings naturally search for evidence that supports preexisting beliefs while overlooking information that challenges them (Beck, 1976; Kahneman, 2011). Once resentment takes hold, the brain becomes increasingly efficient at gathering evidence that confirms the resentment story. John Gottman refers to a similar phenomenon as Negative Sentiment Override. In this state, even neutral or positive interactions become filtered through a negative lens because the emotional climate of the relationship has become contaminated (Gottman & Silver, 1999). This right here is why it is so difficult to rewire out of resentment. Many of us are anticipating the very pattern from our partner. We scoff at the idea of them doing anything to improve or change. We dismiss attempts before they have the opportunity to become real.

Many of my couples sessions result in individuals not necessarily wanting repair. They want me to validate them in front of their partner so they can feel justified in whatever it is they are doing at home.

That’s the issue.

If I had a dollar for every time I asked, “How badly do you want to confirm that as true?”

You see, when we are stuck in resentment for long periods of time, this is where Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work comes in. Over time, that mood becomes a temperament. That temperament becomes a personality. That personality becomes a predictable way of interacting with the world. The brain and body become habitually wired into expecting the very thing they do not want. Neuroscience research on neuroplasticity supports the idea that repeatedly activated neural pathways become increasingly efficient over time (Doidge, 2007). The more we rehearse disappointment, suspicion, criticism, and resentment, the easier those pathways become to access. This is where those frequent flyer miles come in, because many of us frequently fly the neural pathway of resentment. Robbing us of the blessing to repair.

So when your partner does something to shift out of the pattern, many people immediately question it as if it is suspicious.

They look for the catch.

They wait for the other shoe to drop.

They anticipate failure.

That suspicion often leads the other partner to feel rejected in their efforts to change, causing them to internalize beliefs about whether change is even worth attempting. Especially when the person they are trying to reconnect with has already decided they don’t believe it and now both people are trapped. One person is trying to prove they can change. The other person is trying to prove they can’t.

That is resentment’s favorite playground.

THIS WEEK’S FIELDWORK

Your Assignment

This week is not about fixing anything. This week is about observation.

Your assignment is to begin noticing:

• where resentment leaks,

• what environments intensify it,

• what interactions drain your energy,

• and how often your nervous system anticipates conflict before it even happens.

You are also encouraged to begin implementing the joy experiment introduced during orientation:

• movement,

• novelty,

• walks,

• play,

• sensory regulation,

• intentional pauses,

• recreational activities,

• or moments of emotional compartmentalization.

Not because you “feel like it.” Let’s be real: if we all waited to get things done because we felt like it, nothing would ever get done. This experiment is testing whether regulated joy can interrupt emotional gridlock patterns long enough for deeper repair work to eventually occur. My husband and I have been implementing this practice as well, as we have found ourselves caught in a season of resentment with each other. If I can be honest, too, between you all and me, much of our resentment comes from inherited scripts. It also does not help the dynamic that my MIL lives with us. She, in Indian mom fashion, brought all her expectations into our home. Part of what my husband has to learn is building the culture that WE make, regardless of how his mother feels about it. And men, I say this with love. Many of you are okay with upsetting your wife instead of upsetting your family, and it shows.

Let me ask you something, especially for those who are living in their own homes. What’s the worst that can happen if you disappoint your mother? What’s the worst that can happen when you prioritize the family you created instead of the script your mother fused into you?

One thing I have noticed about Indian families (and the same rings true for multiple cultural dynamics) is that internalized patriarchy often lives in women. I have to learn how to not allow my MIL’s pollution and expectations to create nervous system movement in my home and within me. That’s where real exposure therapy comes in. It’s easy for me to shrink because “she’s an elder,” but the roles change when elders move into YOUR home. This is something many elder generations do not want to hear.

It’s why “it’s the culture” or “it’s the religion” is the common statement many use to sort of dead the conversation about their accountability. I don’t buy it, though. It has nothing to do with culture or religion if it is not applied consistently across all members of the family. When incongruences are present, we are often looking at family systems dynamics, scapegoat dynamics, and the inability to admit that those dynamics exist. All of this leads us, as individuals, to chase the approval of our parents.

This is where regression shows up. If you have not healed those wounds, you will end up always chasing the approval of a parent who will never give that approval to you. That’s what happens with the narcissistic need to be needed. Priority becomes their needs, especially when those needs are based on severely outdated scripts. Men will end up enabling the disrespect their mother shows toward their wife without even realizing it. Simply because they are in the regressed frequency. Ladies, we forget the men we love also had to survive their upbringing. This is where grace and compassion is necessary. The internet will not teach this though because it benefits from chaos, dysfunction and emotional cut offs.

That’s why this work is not about blame. It’s about understanding what happens to the nervous system and the mind when we are around our family of origin and all that was sedimented from childhood gets brought back to the surface. Family systems research has long observed that adults often regress into earlier roles, emotional patterns, and attachment behaviors when interacting with their family of origin (Bowen, 1978). In other words, highly capable adults can suddenly find themselves thinking, feeling, and behaving like much younger versions of themselves when old family dynamics are activated. Trust me this rings true even for me.

Through the joy experiment, my husband and I realized that physical activity through recreational sports brings us joy. I am competitive. 🤭 So whooping his A** in a recreational activity feels very satisfying as a regulation tool. 🤣

UNTIL NEXT TIME...

Your assignment is simple. Continue the joy experiment.

Collect data.

Observe your nervous system.

Notice where resentment shows up.
Notice where resistance shows up.
Notice where you want to turn around.
Notice where you want to quit.
Notice where you want to prove the hypothesis wrong.

Most importantly, notice what happens when you choose to participate anyway.

When we do this work we must understand.. Savannah!! Are you listening 🤭 The goal is not perfection.

The goal is observation.

The goal is collecting evidence.

The goal is becoming curious about your own patterns rather than automatically believing them. As the Safari continues, there will be additional stops, side quests, field observations, and a few surprise tools along the way. If you see the 🖍️ emoji, pay attention. It means we’re adding a new skill to the crayon box. For now, keep your hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. If something stings, activates, irritates, or challenges you, don’t panic.

Collect the data.

The Safari has officially begun.

See you all out there!

And again.

From the bottom of my heart. Thank you for being here, thank you for being heart open to the work. Because connection is what humanity needs, not division.

As always come as you are where you are. 🫶🏽

Remember knowledge is power ignorance is a choice.

References

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Beck, A. T. (1976). Cognitive therapy and the emotional disorders. International Universities Press.

Boszormenyi-Nagy, I., & Spark, G. M. (1973). Invisible loyalties: Reciprocity in intergenerational family therapy. Harper & Row.

Bowen, M. (1978). Family therapy in clinical practice. Jason Aronson.

Cozolino, L. (2014). The neuroscience of human relationships: Attachment and the developing social brain (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Doidge, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. Viking.

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work. Crown Publishers.

Hochschild, A. R. (1989). The second shift: Working parents and the revolution at home. Viking.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lerner, H. G. (1985). The dance of anger: A woman’s guide to changing the patterns of intimate relationships. Harper & Row.

Perry, B. D., & Winfrey, O. (2021). What happened to you?: Conversations on trauma, resilience, and healing. Flatiron Books.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Satir, V. (1983). Conjoint family therapy (3rd ed.). Science and Behavior Books.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

Welwood, J. (2000). Toward a psychology of awakening: Buddhism, psychotherapy, and the path of personal and spiritual transformation. Shambhala Publications.

Extended Reading

For those who wish to go deeper down the rabbit hole, I highly recommend the following:

📚 The Body Keeps the Score — Bessel van der Kolk
Trauma, nervous system activation, and how the body stores unresolved emotional experiences.

📚 The Polyvagal Theory — Stephen Porges
Understanding safety, connection, threat detection, and the nervous system’s role in relationships.

📚 The Dance of Anger — Harriet Lerner
A foundational exploration of resentment, boundaries, self-abandonment, and overfunctioning.

📚 Family Therapy in Clinical Practice — Murray Bowen
The gold standard for understanding family systems, emotional fusion, differentiation, and inherited relational patterns.

📚 Invisible Loyalties — Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy & Geraldine Spark
An exploration of intergenerational burdens, relational debts, destructive entitlement, and inherited family obligations.

📚 The Neuroscience of Human Relationships — Louis Cozolino
How relationships shape the brain, regulate the nervous system, and influence emotional functioning.

📚 What Happened to You? — Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey
A practical and accessible introduction to trauma-informed understanding and nervous system development.

📚 Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
How cognitive biases, assumptions, and mental shortcuts shape perception and decision-making.

📚 How Emotions Are Made — Lisa Feldman Barrett
A powerful challenge to traditional views of emotion that helps explain why perception is so central to human experience.

🏕️ WELCOME TO THE ROR MAP™

Before you dive in please understand this essay is hands on. It serves as the map through our ROR experience. It is full of Assessment and reflection questions along with the Mission briefing video you will see below. I encourage you all to come back and reassess your scores to see for adjustments and growth.

🧭 Mission Briefing:

🎯 Primary Objective

To investigate whether intentional joy, novelty exposure, movement, and structured compartmentalization can reduce emotional gridlock, interrupt resentment loops, and restore relational flexibility within the nervous system and interpersonal field.

🔬 Proposed Intervention

Repeated exposure to regulated joy, movement, novelty, and intentional emotional shelving may create alternative neural pathways capable of “backdooring” the nervous system out of chronic emotional gridlock and into increased flexibility, safety, and relational resilience.

🧠 Operational Theory

When the nervous system becomes trapped in repetitive conflict cycles, learning itself can become weaponized. In high-arousal states, insight alone is often insufficient for transformation. This project explores whether play, sensory regulation, and embodied participation can soften defensive patterning enough for meaningful rewiring to occur.

🛰️ Research Environment

Participants will observe emotional responses, relational behaviors, cognitive distortions, and nervous system activation patterns across a multi-month experiential field study known as: Rewiring Out of Resentment (ROR)

📂 Participant Role

Each participant acts as both:

• observer,

• and specimen.

The goal is not perfection. No No, we do not do perfection on this corner of the internet.

⚠️ Field Conditions (What to expect)

Participants may encounter:

• discomfort,

• resistance,

• avoidance impulses,

• emotional fatigue,

• cognitive dissonance,

• and heightened defensive responses.

These responses are not considered failure.
They are considered: active field data.

🎒 Recommended Safari Equipment

• Curiosity

• Water (for when that resentment gets spicy and you want to activate into mob mentality behavior🤣)

• Comfortable shoes (For the runners when discomfort hits)

• Reflection journal

• Emotional honesty

• Willingness to stay in the vehicle during activation 😂

  • Willingness to share with the community. (sharing your story through our Advice Column Okay? Now What?, DMs, or the comment section.

  • This adds opportunity to explore actual lived scenarios from those within our shared corner of the internet.

  • You can access previous entries Here.

🚫 Contraband Items (Do not Bring onto the safari)

Please leave behind:

• emotional scorekeeping,

• surveillance of your partner, other, or self.

• doom scrolling during joy activity or intervention implementation.

• “should” language,

• avoidance behaviors or anxiety loops

• substances used to bypass discomfort,

• and the belief that healing should always feel pleasant.

🧪 Select Your Research Environment

❤️ RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT 01

Romantic / Partnership Dynamic

Objective:

To observe how resentment develops within attachment bonds, emotional labor dynamics, conflict cycles, intimacy ruptures, unmet expectations, and nervous system reactivity between romantic partners.

Field Questions:

• What repetitive conflict loop appears most often?

• What behaviors trigger emotional shutdown or activation?

• What emotional need feels unseen or chronically neglected?

• What resentment story do you replay most often?

• What role do you believe you occupy in the relationship?

• What role do you believe your partner occupies?

• What would “repair” realistically require from both parties?

Nervous System Observation:

• Does your body brace around this person?

• Do you anticipate disappointment before interaction?

• Is emotional closeness associated with safety or exhaustion?

• Does joy feel accessible or threatening?

🌿 RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT 02

Family / Friendship / Workplace Dynamic

Objective:

To examine resentment patterns within non-romantic relational systems, including family roles, workplace expectations, social hierarchies, caretaking dynamics, unresolved emotional inheritance, and boundary fatigue.

Field Questions:

• Where do you feel over-relied upon or emotionally depleted?

• What role are you unconsciously performing?

• What emotional burden feels chronically unacknowledged?

• What expectations feel unfair, unequal, or invisible?

• What relational dynamic feels impossible to escape?

System Mapping:

• Is this resentment inherited, modeled, or reinforced culturally?

• Are you operating from guilt, obligation, fear, or resentment?

• Are boundaries present, inconsistent, or absent?

• What behaviors reinforce the loop?

🔥 RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT 03

Individual / Internal Resentment Dynamic

Objective:

To investigate resentment directed toward the self, the past, missed opportunities, identity wounds, grief, shame, perfectionism, burnout, or unresolved emotional narratives.

Field Questions:

• What part of yourself feels abandoned or neglected?

• What internal narrative do you replay most often?

• What are you exhausted from carrying?

• What version of yourself are you grieving?

• What unmet need keeps resurfacing emotionally?

• What emotion feels hardest to release?

Internal System Observation:

• Does rest create guilt?

• Does joy feel earned or unsafe?

• Does stillness increase anxiety?

• Does your nervous system default toward self-criticism?

🧪 ROR BASELINE ASSESSMENT

Participant Intake + Field Readings

Below is the assessment section. This section will provide you with an overall score. Pay attention to Section 4 as the calculation requirements are different. At the end tally up your total to get an idea of where you baseline is before beginning the activity.

🧭 SECTION 1 — EMOTIONAL CLIMATE READINGS

(Relational Atmosphere Assessment)

Rate each statement from:
1 = very low
10 = extremely high

🔢 Emotional Climate Total:

___ / 40

📍 EMOTIONAL CLIMATE INTERPRETATION

0–10

Minimal emotional gridlock detected.

11–20

Mild relational strain present.

21–30

Moderate emotional fatigue and disconnection detected.

31–40

High emotional gridlock likely impacting nervous system regulation and relational flexibility.

🏃 SECTION 2 — ESCAPE & AVOIDANCE PATTERNS

(Withdrawal + Fantasy Readings)

🔢 Escape/Avoidance Total:

___ / 30

📍 ESCAPE PATTERN INTERPRETATION

0–10

Low withdrawal patterning detected.

11–20

Moderate emotional avoidance present.

21–30

High emotional disengagement and survival-based distancing detected.

⚡ SECTION 3 — NERVOUS SYSTEM ACTIVATION

(Physiological Reactivity Readings)

🔢 Nervous System Total:

___ / 30

📍 NERVOUS SYSTEM INTERPRETATION

0–10

Relatively regulated nervous system state.

11–20

Moderate activation patterns detected.

21–30

High-arousal nervous system state likely contributing to resentment looping and emotional rigidity.

🧠 SECTION 4 — WILLINGNESS & PARTICIPATION

(Experimental Readiness Assessment)

🧪 Resistance Conversion Formula

10 - your resistance score = adjusted participation score

🧪 Example Calculation

Original Scores

• Willingness to Participate = 8

• Hopefulness About Change = 8

• Resistance Toward Process = 5

⚙️ Resistance Conversion Formula

Because resistance measures protective activation rather than openness, we reverse the score:

Formula:

10 - Resistance Score (5) = Adjusted Resistance Score (5)

So:

10 - 5 = 5

example score: ✅ Adjusted Resistance Score = 5 then I take my Willingness score and hopefulness score (8+8+5=21) look below the image for the total Participation score. Then review the interpretation in the section below. A score of 21 falls under High willingness.

🔢 Participation Capacity Total:

21 / 30

📍 PARTICIPATION INTERPRETATION

0–10

Low readiness for emotional experimentation.

11–20

Moderate openness with protective hesitation.

21–30

High willingness for participation, experimentation, and nervous system flexibility.

🛰️ OVERALL FIELD CONDITIONS (scores from section 1-3 only!)

This score measures the current level of:

• emotional gridlock,

• resentment looping,

• nervous system strain,

• and relational fatigue present within the system.

• Add together the totals from:

  • SECTION 1 — Emotional Climate

  • SECTION 2 — Fantasy / Escape / Avoidance

  • SECTION 3 — Nervous System State

  ⚠️ DO NOT include: Section 4

🌿 0–35

Low emotional gridlock currently detected.

🌤️ 36–65

Moderate resentment looping and nervous system strain present.

🌧️ 66–95

High emotional gridlock and relational fatigue detected.

⛈️ 96–130

🔬 What Higher Scores Mean

Higher scores may indicate:

• increased emotional activation,

• chronic resentment looping,

• relational exhaustion,

• nervous system rigidity,

• and decreased access to play, flexibility, or co-regulation.

Lower scores may indicate:

• greater emotional flexibility,

• increased nervous system safety,

• and improved access to connection and regulation.

⚠️ ROR FIELD DISCLAIMER

This assessment is not diagnostic. It is not pass or fail.

It is designed to:

• increase awareness,

• observe relational patterns,

• identify nervous system strain,

• and track emotional flexibility over time.

The goal is observation. Collect data and retake the assessment every 30 days.

Open Reflection

• What is the very first memory, hurt, or dynamic that comes to mind when you think about resentment?

• What do you fear would happen if resentment softened?

• What feels hardest about choosing joy right now?

• What activity immediately triggered resistance in you and why?

• What narratives showed up when thinking about trying this protocol?

• Does part of you believe joy with your partner is unsafe, temporary, embarrassing, pointless, or undeserved?

• What emotional “evidence” has your nervous system been rehearsing most?

• What would it feel like to stop monitoring the relationship for a moment and simply experience it?

• Have you become more practiced at protection than connection?

Below is a list of activities to help you get started.

Free or Low Cost Activities

• Neighborhood walks

• Hiking trails

• Basketball at a local park

• Pickleball courts

• Board games

• Card games

• YouTube dance classes

• Stretching together

• Sunset drives

• Picnics

• Farmers markets

• Window shopping

• Community events

• Library events

• Public concerts

• Bike rides

• Watching the stars

• Cooking together

• Watching a comedy special

• Nature trails

• Beach or lake walks

• Home paint nights

• Video games

• Trivia nights

Paid Activities

• Arcades

• Bowling

• Escape rooms

• Comedy shows

• Concerts

• Recreational sports leagues

• Mini golf

• Pottery classes

• Painting classes

• Dance lessons

• Axe throwing

• Sporting events

• Museums

• Botanical gardens

• Kayaking

• Paddle boarding

• Yoga classes

• Couples massages

• Cooking classes

Important Reminder

The goal of the activity is NOT to force deep conversations.

The goal is:

• shared attention

• movement

• nervous system interruption

• novelty

• presence

• laughter

• reconnection through experience

Awkwardness is okay.

Silence is okay.

Resistance is expected.

You are not failing because discomfort shows up.

You are rewiring.

And rewiring requires repetition.

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🗺️ROR MAP Glossary

(This map is your central navigation hub for the Rewiring Out of Resentment™ journey.)

Each numbered stop represents a major essay, lesson, experiment, or nervous system checkpoint along the main road of the series.

Along the way, you’ll also encounter:

• 🧪 Side Quests — deeper explorations into culture, conditioning, attachment, resentment origins, family systems, and perception

• 🖍️ Tool Drops — practical nervous system tools, breathwork exercises, regulation strategies, and “crayons” for your toolbox

• 📍 Checkpoints — reflection prompts, experiments, and participation updates

• 🎒 Field Notes — community observations, collected data, and shared experiences from fellow travelers

🧭 The Safari Exists Across Multiple Terrains

The main Rewiring Out of Resentment™ safari lives inside the:

• 📚 Substack essays

• 🎥 Longform YouTube videos

This is where the deeper theories, reflections, tools, side quests, and nervous system experiments are fully explored.

📱 Shortform Content (IG + TikTok)

The shortform content is designed to:

• make you think,

• react,

• feel,

• question,

• and reflect.

These clips are intentional nervous system interruptions meant to expand perception and pull you deeper into the essays and longform discussions.

🎙️ Podcast / Audio Reflections

The podcast space is more casual and conversational.

Episodes may pull from:

• community experiences,

• case-study style reflections,

• relational dynamics,

• cultural observations,

• and personal transparency.

Think: campfire reflections after the safari. Yaay cozy and fun  🤗

🗾The Map Begins here.

(Due to limited space this may end up being a link if we reach character capacity 🫣)

1. Orientation: (You’re in it 😉)

2. ROR //Stop 1: Next

3. TBA

4. TBA

5. TBA

Wheeew,

You’ve officially been initiated into the experiment.👏🏽

The joy activity can begin at any time. You do not need to wait for the next stop to start collecting data. Your participation is the research. Every walk, pause, playful moment, nervous system interruption, or act of intentional compartmentalization becomes part of the field study. I am engaging in the same activity and so is my husband 🤭

Throughout the next couple months of this journey, you’ll notice “side quests” and “side missions” appear across essays, podcasts, short-form videos, and discussions. These are intentional. Resentment does not only live in romantic relationships. It lives in family systems, workplaces, gender roles, cultural conditioning, grief, identity, expectations, power dynamics, inherited narratives, and survival adaptations. This journey is designed to stretch our capacity for nuance while examining how resentment spreads across multiple relational fields.

Relationships are the hook.

NEXT STOP:

🦠 ROR //STOP 1 — The Infection Model

Next week, we begin exploring resentment through the lens of an infection model.

We will examine:

• how resentment forms,

• the emotional environments that allow it to spread,

• the nervous system conditions that sustain it,

• and how emotional “leakage” impacts the people around us.

This stop will also introduce several foundational ROR concepts, including:

• emotional gridlock,

• energy expenditure,

• emotional contamination,

• protective adaptations,

• and the beginning stages of “gloving up” before entering emotionally charged environments.

With this work the goal is always observation.
We are learning how to identify the conditions that keep resentment alive.

Questions, reflections, reactions, and observations can be shared in the comments, DMs, podcast submissions, or community spaces throughout the week. Many of those discussions will shape future side quests, podcast conversations, and upcoming stops along the trail.

The safari has officially begun.

You have been release into the wild 🤪

I will see y’all out there!

—Come as you are, where you are.

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How many of you are navigating or have navigated a relationship where resentment built up over time so much so that — the gap got too big to repair?

The more I work with couples within all frequencies of conflict levels, the more I realize just how much this work is all rooted in the same emotional frequencies. Remember those Tron highways I have mentioned? Yeah, well— many of us are frequent flyers on the chaos highway. So much so that in our relationships, the amount of dismissiveness, defensiveness, contempt, disrespect, and stonewalling makes many feel like roommates. So close but feeling so far away. This has become normalized as well.

What I also seem to have noticed is, us pesky little humans are so unique in the way in which we avoid the shadow within. The result of this avoidance impacts the filtration system of our minds, which has been stuck in the resentment loop for so long it has disoriented the filtration system. What this means is, what you are taking in from the environment has been contaminated. Contaminated narratives must be named, but how can they be named if we as individuals do not know they are contaminated to begin with?

Couples can maintain the dance of anger, conflict, and disconnect long enough because the level of frustration towards each other is high but not high enough for them to leave…. just yet.

What does that tell you?

I believe many do not leave despite tensions being high for a long time because we really don’t want to walk away from the marriage. So, we must get very clear on the why…

Do you not want to walk away because you are scared? Or do you not want to walk away because you have hope?

What happens if you know that nothing will change with your partner, yet you still stay?

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Now, reflect on the last time you and your partner or whoever this other person is for you. It can even be a family member or even a friend. You can apply this to whoever the role is but for the sake of this discussion let’s focus romantic relationships. Now, for couples in high conflict or high level of disconnect, have you tried going out to a date? Doing something fun?

Or do you argue on the way there?

Or while you are there?

Or even the night fore you get there?

Reflect on the last time you both laughed together.

I am convinced this is the nervous systems anticipatory system live at work. Since the duo has been in the cyclical dynamic for so long the resentment spreads fast like mold. Infecting the connection creating further disconnection between the couple. How can you get any skills used, any listening & understanding to occur when couples just want to rehash their version of the marital tension. Sometimes it feels absolutely impossible to imagine joy, laughter, fun— in seasons or cycles of disconnect and resentment.

BUT…

What if you interrupted the whole thing with — fun?

Sounds weird right? But not just “plan a date” fun by going to eat at yet another restaurant. I mean something intentional where you may even have to interact with other people. It can be a concert, comedy show, sporting event, bbq, community event, recreational activity. Anything that can get you and your partner out of the house, in a new environment, engaging in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the marriage and the problems or discussions of having them.

Just fun.

Ladies, you still with me?

I know this seems difficult. Especially because this falls inline with one of the natural abilities I believe men have access to the most.

The ability to compartmentalize, and ladies, this is a skill we could really develop.

To start this plan we mutually think of “for how long?”

Now, the ideal goal would be to plan for 3 consecutive days, for an initiation jumpstart period, before implementing the weekly goal. The 3 day consecutive practice assists the nervous system’s anticipatory threat system for the change in behavior of the couple. Otherwise the amygdala, which doesn’t have eyes, will grow suspicious of the changed behavior because it has grown use to the storms of chaos. So when one person or both people in the couple decide to activate this activity of joy by picking something to do and doing it, the amygdala — IT WILL— send you thoughts or beliefs to get you to doubt joy being something you can experience or even achieve together.

That’s the lie.

It is very important that when this doubt shows up, you are ready and on the lookout. It’s not going to occur just in you, it will occur in your partner. Since many couples are attuned to the stress responses of each other. You will pick it up from your partner especially for those who are highly attuned to their partners stress responses. You will be able to feel the distortion narratives are impacting them the same way they can feel that shift radiating off of you. Key behaviors to look for when this arises are: nitpicking, managing, complaining, hovering, getting an attitude, contempt, finding something to argue about as a means to stall or abort the mission. These are resistance systems. The nervous system uses these to pull the couple back into their conflict gridlock dance.

This is how we stay stuck in the dance.

It takes one to be willing to step out…

When you are ready and prepared for what will and might happen for you during this activity, you will be equipped to handle the doubt that comes before the somatic memory activates within the body. Once the bodies somatic interpretation turns on it brings on that activated sensation making it a lot more difficult to push against that level of discomfort and continue the work without caving into a fight.

This work is all about building the resiliency to discomfort. Let’s work smarter—not harder, and make that resistance as small as we can.

If you cannot get this done in 3 consecutive days, then try it on the days you can. But it starts with a plan!

One thing I tell myself daily is.

Decide before the week starts what the activity will be and what days and times the couple (you and your partner) will do it.

Then commit to showing up.

The key here is to give the couples joint brain and nervous system a shiny new silver toy to look at. This can even be board games, pool games if you are lucky to have a pool at home, or even video games. You can even call people and make it a social gathering. Yes, it means actually getting involved and doing something intentionally. All of this guides you out of the mind and into the present through activity. When it’s outside of itself, it cannot loop in the self-destruction of distortions, meaning-making, or catastrophizing.

Something I am really learning about myself within my own marriage is just how much my nervous system resists repair because it either:

1. Doesn’t trust it or

2. Doesn’t think the change will last.

Such a positive mindset to hold right? That’s a side effect of the resentment infection especially when it’s chronic.

What I see often what I hand the system a strategy:

“already tried it, and it just made it xyz____”

“S/he won’t____ I know him/her”

“It won’t last more than 2 weeks, after S/he goes right back…”

“It’s not going to matter anyways…”

Fortune tellers yeah?

These are also distortions. You won’t be able to see any change in your future when you are digging up images of the past. Your emotional frequency has built up resentment in it. The only way to truly let go of resentment in order to do this activity is to literally put it down. If you don’t know how to do that metaphorically speaking, then write all that you resent about your partner on paper and literally hold it in your hand.

Go on...

Write it out, pen to paper.

Hold that paper in your hand.

Fold it up.

Date it.

Now, before each activity, you pick this folded up paper, or keep it flat, hold it, and state the following out loud or make up your own variation.

Then put it down.

Get a nice little spot for it if you really want to make this practice your own. Or simply leave it in a file, folder, whatever it is but have that physical piece of paper.

This can serve as an anchoring practice for your mind to have something to physically do. Pick up the resentments (on paper— put down the resentments, put down the paper) For those of you like me, who might struggle with abstract forms of letting go. You can even go as far to getting a small journal for this and each time, write it down before the activity as a ritualistic release of the resentment before proceeding with the joy activity. This is very intentional work.

Honestly, If we as humans really look at ourselves and our relationship. Can we be honest with ourselves? We aren’t really trying at all. We are sampling.

Sampling strategies to see which gives us the immediate feedback loop we need instead of building a new system that involves consistency.

Sampling intellect and where to regurgitate it.

Sampling “skills” just to say they didn’t work.

Sampling anything we can to support our stagnation.

We can’t stand when our partners are on “their best behavior” for 2 weeks and then it goes right back to how it was.

But did anyone rehearse a different option? Did you commute to the interaction rehearsing in your mind the best possible outcome, or just the same outcome you are used to because you “know them and this is just how it is?”I know many think this mind-work stuff is cliché, but just look at how addicted our society has gotten to technology just within the last six years. (Counting since the 2020 isolation times, which is a key data point.) That’s how profound of an impact the digital world has on us, yet we take that power and its level to impact connection for granted.

Think about all the information running through our minds daily. We don’t even have to leave our homes to be told how our lives should be and our relationships should look. Instead, we take a daily psychological beating from the cozy comfort of our own couches and beds—completely willingly.

At this point, we basically volunteer as tribute.

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Now, Lets talk steps.

In order to rewire to reconnection we ALL must learn to build your resistance to discomfort. You have to be willing to see how much discomfort shows up for the relationship without caving to resist the discomfort. What I mean by this is. Some times in this work it means taking the first step out of the loop and just diverting the attention to an olive branch, apology, invitation, a meal. Something that says

Resentment is such a tricky emotion that it is hard to bypass it regardless and still be loving, kind, affectionate, do the “wife” or “husband” duties.

If your thoughts come up with “but…why should I…??”

That’s a die off symptoms of exiting the loop. When we exit the loop of resentment we start to have die off symptoms.

This is egoic pollution. This is the fog clouding up the lens to the filtration system. We have to push through and do it anyways, the same way you smize through your teeth at someone in your workplace. You do it anyways. The way you still give your kids, some of them very disrespectful to you, that unconditional love anyways. So the muscle is there. The choice to use it with your partner is your own.

This is going to be an open tab discussion (series) where we first unpack this slowly and intentionally. I will share my insights and even transparencies of navigating some of these complexities myself. At the end of each essay, there will be reflective questions for you to explore further. I am hoping for this to be a guided experience so we can all share what each other is going through and how you navigate the discomfort of resisting joy for a greater cause—repair in the marriage.

Ready?

Directions

Your goal is to schedule and complete a chosen activity ideally three days in a row for an initiation jumpstart period, which helps prepare your nervous system’s anticipatory threat system for the change in behavior. If consecutive days are not possible, schedule the activity on the days you can, but decide on the specific activity, days, and times before the week begins. Choose a physical activity or bodily movement such as walking, hiking, bike riding, or playing sports—to get your body moving and your brain outside of itself. To shift your brain’s focus further, you can invite friends, visit a recreation center, or join a local group. Once the plan is set, you must commit completely to showing up.

The Rules

1. Commit to showing up and achieving the completion of the activity. If you signed your kid up for a season of sports and on the second practice they wanted to quit, would you allow that? We finish what we start. The key here is to get the emotional field cleared from the resentment fog so you can see the emotional climate from a clean state rather than a tainted one.

2. Go in with an open mind and a willingness to work on what is happening within you, not your partner. This is an exposure therapy portal to your own inability to face fun or joy without the mind turning it negative.

3. Practice active redirection. When your mind wants to loop you back into resentment narratives, you must consciously redirect yourself back to the present moment/ activity.

4. Journal your data and thoughts. Use your journal as a tool to hold your version of the data so it is accurate to the moment and not exaggerated by a future heightened state.

5. Work on sitting in silence if you have nothing to say to each other, instead of bringing up past conflicts just to fill up the space.

6. Track your actual data so it does not get lost. Score your mood on a scale of 1 to 10 (the higher the better) both before and after the activity. Reflect on your experience and save this information so you have real data to compare later, rather than relying on memories enhanced by confirmation bias.

7. Create a code work such as “TIME OUT” if a door was opened and the hallway is heading for conflict. Continue on to the activity.

8. If you are faith based, spiritual based. These are fantastic opportunities to call in the word, your higher power, or set an intention. Great ways to redirect the mind.

Here is Round 1 of Reflection Prompts.

1. What emotional payoff might you secretly be receiving from staying emotionally guarded?

2. What is holding on to resentment protecting you from? Does resentment protect you from vulnerability, disappointment, grief, rejection, surrender, softness, or accountability?

3. Can you remember a time when you weren’t ‘monitoring’ your partner? What else could you be doing with that time?

4. What “evidence” has your nervous system been collecting to confirm your resentment story? Now ask yourself: What evidence has it been filtering out?

5. If joy, play, novelty, affection, movement, laughter, or physical closeness returned to the relationship tomorrow… would your nervous system trust it?

   Or would part of you immediately prepare for its disappearance?

   Why?

6. Have you become more emotionally committed to being understood… than to creating connection?

The key with this mission of adding joy back into the relational field of the couple is to get the field cleared from the resentment fog. That way the couple can see the emotional climate clearly from a clean state rather than a tainted one 🫶🏽.

Good Ol’ discomfort.

How many of us know what that feels like? It’a what we all collectively avoid the most. In our relationships, families, even in the workplace.

In the essay I wrote we discussed the commute calibration. How on our commute to situations we mentally rehearse the scene before even entering the field. You can find that essay below.

These days specially lately, I see our dopamine nation and the nervous systems within it. You see, even with myself right now I am full of discomfort. I want to give up, not do anything, just sleep and do nothing. Anyone else feel that way?

This past month has been a lot for many of us. The discomfort that lives in what is rough to deal with.

We are living in a collective state of preemptive embodiment and since it’s the base line for functioning for many of us. It’s almost normalized at this point. It’s a nervous system loop where we carry the storm into the room before we’ve even turned the knob and walked in. We could be rehearsing it in bed the night before, on the way to work, predicting what the outcome will be so we can “stay ready.” Whether it’s a political argument on the timeline, a walk down the hallway to speak to your teen, or a partner longing for connection, we are witnessing a massive, multi-generational failure to metabolize discomfort. This then creates a leakage and you see this avoidance of discomfort show up in many environments.

When we don’t have the skills to process our own guilt or shame, we displace it. We outsource it to our children, our partners, and our algorithms. This is the skipped highway exit of emotional development, and it’s why we keep reliving the same chaos. I am convinced, that many have experienced arrested development in a lot of areas. Due to the messaging and modeling growing up as well as the internalized beliefs we refuse to let go of. Let’s zoom out— When I reflect on arrested development I think of what Dr. Amen stated “ parents unconsciously rob their child of self-esteem to build their own.” lately this has been very true. Not out of malice but out of the desire to not “feel bad.” When you avoid feeling bad at the cost of your parenting, the cost of your professionalism, and your own self-respect. We end up creating a new version of the same issue many of us grew up in or even survived.

How Our Systems Get Hijacked

To really get why we’re feeling so full of discomfort, we have to look at how our biology is actually being hijacked by the world we live in. It’s not just “in our heads”—it’s a physiological response to a few key things happening in our bodies and our histories. We are physically exhausted from “staying ready” which is the hypervigilence that gives us a false sense of safety. What I call “carrying the storm into the room” this is what neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) calls Predictive Interoception Coding. Our brains aren’t just living in the present; they are constantly guessing what’s next based on every past stressor we’ve ever faced. When we live in that loop of predicting the worst to protect ourselves, we rack up a high Allostatic Load. This is the literal wear and tear on our brains and bodies from chronic stress. We aren’t just “tired” or “exhausted” our systems are physically depleted from trying to solve problems that haven’t even happened yet(McEwen, 2005).

Our “dopamine nation” has lowered our tolerance for the hard stuff. We’ve become so used to outsourcing our feelings to algorithms and quick fixes that we are losing our affect tolerance, which is our actual ability to sit with a hard emotion. As Dr. Anna Lembke (2021) explains in her research on the pleasure-pain balance, when we over-indulge in high-dopamine distractions to avoid feeling bad, our brain counter-regulates by tipping us further toward the “pain” side. This lowers our affect tolerance, making everyday stressors feel unbearable.

The “leakage” is a family legacy. That “leakage” I mentioned where we displace our shame onto our kids or partners—is a core part of Family Systems Theory. When we haven’t reached a high level of Differentiation of Self, we can’t regulate our own internal anxiety. So, we engage in a Family Projection Process: we take our unmetabolized discomfort and unconsciously hand it over to the people we love. (nitpicking, complaining, hovering, trying to “help”, etc) This creates a multigenerational loop where the next generation inherits a nervous system that is already primed for a storm they didn’t even start.

Let’s go on a journey through examples of how we displace the discomfort and how that becomes a cycle.

🛺💨

The Parent Glitch: Discomfort as Tradition

A boundary is not a threat, but to a parent without emotional endurance and a severe level of enmeshment, the narcissistic need to be needed, or simply the inability to curate their own life outside of the kids. Boundaries feel like an existential rejection. They haven’t finished the “highway” of their own development, so when they hit a boundary, they glitch.

Ever felt the heat of those guilt trips, weaponized incompetence, or forms of learned helplessness before? Yup, these are strategies — often unconscious— that gives us the exit to displace the hot potato of discomfort. All while avoiding the vulnerability necessary to ask for what we need.

Could you imagine what it would feel like for you to be on the receiving end of vulnerability like this?

When we understand much of this behavior isn’t malicious and realize it is just a lack of skills—those pesky crayons some of us never got—we can see the cycle more clearly. They reach for the only crayons they have to color that life experience with: passive-aggression, silent treatments, and coercive manipulation disguised as “family loyalty.” This is nervous system activation hiding under the umbrella of tradition, culture, and even faith. When a parent cannot bridge the repair because their ego refuses the shame of acknowledgment, they dodge accountability and hand the emotional burden to their child instead.

This process, often described as a failure of interactive repair, forces the child to adopt compensatory strategies to maintain the attachment bond (Schore, 2012). That’s why many of us become people pleasers, or develop dismissive and avoidant attachment styles. This child grows up as an adult who eventually refuses to hold the weight any longer. In family work, this is where emotional cutoff occurs. According to Bowen (1978), emotional cutoff is a common way individuals manage unresolved emotional attachments to their family of origin by physically or emotionally distancing themselves. For many family systems that live off the fear of “what will people think,” this is the last thing the system needs because it draws external attention to the internal dysfunction.

Again, many of us are stuck in egocentric loops where we think everyone is watching and judging us, when it’s really just us hyper-analyzing ourselves. This heightened self-consciousness is often a byproduct of hypervigilance, a state where the nervous system is constantly scanning for social threats to maintain safety (Porges, 2011). The family system is often built on the individual holding what many other family members refuse to hold; that is how the discomfort gets displaced. It’s easier to pass it like a hot potato using covert means that can look like love, care, or inquiry to the naked eye. For those of us attuned to these dynamics, we see it for what it is: control. We would rather pass the heat of discomfort elsewhere than sit and process through it.

Emotional Displacement and the Software of Shame

Unresolved trauma, sibling wounds, and cultural pressures don’t disappear they get displaced. Parents who never dealt with their own abandonment will project those pieces onto their adult kids. Now— get this… For those parents who are so worried about becoming like their parents. Be careful now, you may end up creating a new version of the same problem like I said before simply because you are more concerned with being liked, seen as good, and you don’t want to feel the discomfort of being “mean, assertive, or “like my parents”, etc.

When I say this I say this with love mommas…

TOUGH. LOVE. SAVES. LIVES!!!

It is a bit selfish to prioritize your own discomfort over the need to parent your children. You don’t want to feel bad, so you don’t demand the respect from your children by implementing consequences, following through with what you say and being consistent. Being a yes parent only conditions the child that everyone outside of you will say yes and that there are never natural consequences to their actions. That is not setting your kid, teen, etc up for success. It’s setting you up for comfort.

See what Dr. Amen means when he says that this is where parents rob their children of self-esteem to build their own?

Many moms who overfunction only do so out of their activated survival self (ASS)—a set of behaviors learned as a child that they never unlearned. Now, many moms overdo it out of their own need to soothe feelings of guilt or shame. We often don’t want to feel the discomfort of our own unresolved behaviors or past decisions. You may simply be learning how to be yourself outside of being a mother, wife, father, or husband, but every time you feel guilt for going to the gym, going out, or going on vacation—doing something where you aren’t just prioritizing the kids—you feel bad. That discomfort is an intensity many couples do not want to face, so where do you think it gets displaced? You guessed it: the partner.

When we zoom in on conditioning, we have to look at the internalized patriarchy within the very women we try to measure up to. This internalized patriarchy is also what raised many of our husbands. In clinical terms, this is often linked to gendered socialization and the internal locus of control; while women are often socialized toward communal overfunctioning, men are often conditioned toward agency and compartmentalization (Helgeson, 1994). Many men have the mechanism to prioritize themselves and compartmentalize effectively. Consequently, women who overfunction often meet men they deem as underfunctioning. Boys are mothered in ways girls are not. If you scan your upbringing, you may see that many mothers do not feel they have the same safety to raise their sons with the same emotional expectations, often due to the influence of their own mothers or mother-in-law’s who overshadow their parenting with their sons. In my work with men and couples, the data shows that many men have no problem prioritizing their needs—not necessarily in a selfish way, but through a capacity for compartmentalization. This is a skill many women could learn to adopt, but instead, many activate an external locus of control. Due to the fear that if they actually did compartmentalize they will be “judged".”

This is where women may start demanding, expecting, or even engaging in covert forms of coerciveness to get their needs met. They want their husband to father or husband exactly the way they seem fit. In psychology, an external locus of control is a major clue that nervous system activation is present (Rotter, 1966). Control is the biggest illusion of safety. Women were conditioned to overfunction, especially for men—to cook, clean, and do it all. Many men were never required to provide reciprocity in emotional availability because their mothers were in a state of survival. For those mothers, doing was what dissociated them from their shadows, grief, and trauma.

This overfunctioning provided a loophole for men to simply wait for the woman to lead. Think about how often women meet for brunch or talk in group chats about how unhappy they are and how their husbands don’t do xyz. Yet, when I ask what they want, many just say “effort.” If you cannot pinpoint what effort looks like concretely, you are setting a boobytrap. According to research on adult attachment and communication, vague expectations often lead to a demand-withdraw pattern, leaving the partner in a state of executive freeze because they feel like no matter what they do, they will fail (Gottman, 1994). Ladies, think about your mothers. How often did you feel that nothing you did was good enough? Is it possible you have created that same hurdle for your partner and your children?

See how focusing on what our partners, coworkers, bosses, kids, or family are NOT doing frees us from the necessity of actually facing the discomfort of doing it, learning it, asking for it, or initiating it—whatever that “it” is. Pointing outward frees us from looking within at what we choose to neglect in ourselves.

Let’s do a quick example for “funzies,” and this is a very common one. Let’s say you had goals, dreams, and aspirations for your career, but kids, marriage, and life diverted you off that path. Years later, you never actually started. Where do you think the buildup of that grief goes? It is often channeled into an undercurrent directed at your partner. It’s easier now to get on them for every little thing, giving a nervous system that is addicted to being “bothered” something to feast on—all so you don’t actually have to face the ache of a choice. We have the free will to change our lives in a snap, and that fact alone is daunting. That thought puts the power back in our hands, and that power is the “hot potato” of discomfort we would rather displace.

This dynamic is often described in clinical literature as emotional reactivity within a system. When we cannot manage our own internal distress or “unfinished business,” we engage in what is known as a functional shift, focusing on the perceived inadequacies of others to regulate our own sense of self (Kerr & Bowen, 1988).

One of my favorite challenges is one I often have to use on myself, too. When I want to hyper-focus on my husband and the enmeshed dynamic he has with his mother—feeling the frustration and emotional intensity that comes with a MIL who weaponizes religion, softness, and “doing” to mask manipulation—it’s easy for me to be righteous in my psychological knowledge. But look at the very boundaries we ladies demand our husbands have with their mothers. Look at the relationship with your own parents. Do you talk? Can you communicate boundaries or tell them no? Can you let them know when they are overstepping, or do you ask to get out of things through avoidance and people-pleasing? If the answer is no, you are being a hypocrite, my dear.

I had to look deep into this mirror myself. Our situation is a bit unique since my MIL moved in with us over two years ago, making boundaries very necessary. But when we are caught in our own web of codependency or enmeshment, the inability to say no comes with the very discomfort we do not want to face. We displace it by focusing on what our partner is failing to do as a way to manage our anxiety through an external locus of control.

From a neuroscience perspective, this is a matter of Hebbian plasticity—the principle that “cells that fire together, wire together.” When we consistently fire and wire the neural pathways that focus on lack and external blame, we effectively prune away our ability to perceive agency or gratitude (Hebb, 1949). This displacement cycle becomes a physiological habit; we are conditioning our brains to scan for deficits instead of blessings, reinforcing a state of survival rather than one of growth.

Biology vs. Betrayal

The “half-assed hug” debate is something I notice in many systems, but it also serves as a metaphor for whatever action you want to replace “hugging” with. Let’s look at the emotional authenticity of hugs within families and how a system navigates when someone says no to physical touch. As always, put your gloves on here—it’s time to bring nuance into this discussion. In some families, due to culture, religious beliefs, messaging, and modeling, the idea of affection is seen as a sign of respect.

However, we also live in a society that is conditioning entitlement, and we have to name this. We often think that just because of what we feel, we are entitled to be rude or disrespectful. In reality, agency and body-protective measures have nothing to do with a lack of respect. Respect is becoming a dying art, so let’s just name that.

This is a biological reality. When the nervous system is activated, our perceptual range narrows, and we often interpret neutral cues as hostile. We cannot force a connection when the body is organized for conflict. This state of “neuroception”—the internal process of scanning for safety or threat—dictates whether we are even capable of social engagement (Porges, 2011). With that being said, we also have to acknowledge that many generations before us were conditioned to “grin and bear it,” forcing children to engage with family members who were behaving inappropriately.

The family might even know about the behavior and still force the child to engage because they don’t want to “look bad, feel bad, or make a scene.” What parents do not realize when they engage in this level of dismissive avoidance is the wound they unconsciously create. By protecting yourself from scrutiny, you create a breach of trust between you and the child. Over time, research shows that this lack of “attunement” and “rupture without repair” leads to insecure attachment patterns (Siegel & Hartzell, 2003). This child grows into an adult who may eventually stop engaging with you entirely due to what you refuse to acknowledge.

This is the discomforting consequence of dismissive avoidance in parenting. We are so focused on immediate relief in the now that we don’t think about the long-term future. When our selfish need for comfort overshadows the needs of those we love, we enter the territory of narcissism—a topic I know everyone loves to talk about. In clinical terms, this is often a form of “narcissistic parentification,” where the child is expected to regulate the parent’s ego and social standing at the expense of their own bodily autonomy (Miller, 1981).

The Rupture of Growth

One of the hardest truths to swallow is that development is not a duet; it’s a relay. Just because you have evolved doesn’t mean your partner, parents, or coworkers automatically will. When we deem ourselves morally righteous in what we have learned and demand that the environment meet us there, we slip into a form of narcissism. Demanding that the world change to accommodate our new awareness is not an act of embodiment; it is a retreat into an external locus of control. Where the illusion of safety lives. An internal locus of control, by contrast, is enforced through boundaries: saying no to your kids and providing consequences without trying to soften the sting by picking up their favorite food just because you can’t sit with their anger. In romantic relationships, an internal locus of control means finally doing something for yourself without scanning the environment—the kids, the partner, the “moods”—to find a loophole that lets you out of choosing yourself. Avoiding that choice only leaves you in resentment because you are still trying to outrun discomfort.

For overfunctioning mothers, I truly ask: how altruistic is your care for others if you do not prioritize self-care? Research into family dynamics suggests that chronic overfunctioning is often a compensatory mechanism for high systemic anxiety (Kerr & Bowen, 1988). People-pleasing is actually a form of manipulation because it creates gridlock, triangulation, and unintentional mess due to not being honest with ourselves. It’s the adult equivalent of saying, “Let me ask my mom... sorry, she said no,” when you never actually asked, but you’re also an adult. We throw others into the line of fire to avoid a perceived backlash that we inevitably face anyway. We are so uncomfortable with the truth that we don’t see the ways the mind takes the long way through avoidance and the externalization of blame.

Ladies, zoom in on yourselves for a moment. Do you do for your daughter what you do for your sons? Do you offer your husband the same grace you offer your children? Some of you tolerate disrespect and a lack of responsibility from your children—giving them miles of leash—yet hold your husband to a standard you don’t even hold for yourself. This is the classic discomfort displacement cycle. We tolerate disrespect in one area and toss that “hot potato” of frustration onto our partners because it is easier than facing the aspects of ourselves that feel powerless. Many couples hit what clinical researcher John Gottman (1994) calls “gridlock,” often because they assume their growth should be synchronous. But forcing a partner to behave beyond their current level of emotional development is its own form of control. Real development may require you to walk away from what creates discomfort, or—and this is a big “or”—it may require you to finally face the heat. Instead of running to avoidance, emotional cutoff, or ending a relationship, we can choose to face the urge to overfunction, scan, and overanalyze.

In my work with couples and families, I see how emotional cutoffs have become avoidance loops. It has become easier to avoid than to face the discomfort of being around another human who is messy and unregulated. This is the cycle many relationships are weathering right now, and it continues until someone makes the active choice to step out of the loop. It’s that easy, but it requires a conscious, daily decision to stay in the chair when things get hot.

The “Emotional Stew” and the Narrative Prison

When we can’t sit in our own emotional stew where the muck of shadow, shame, and embarrassment live. We grasp for narratives that make us the righteous victim so we don’t have to face our own agency. The nervous system is a pesky thing; it will have us grasping for God, the kids, or even therapists to validate a version of the story where we are the only one “drowning,” while failing to see that our partner is also self-medicating and imploding.This “righteous narcissism” prevents us from seeing the relational field as it is. True agency is realizing that you don’t need a narrative to justify leaving a dead marriage; the fact that it isn’t working is enough to start inquiring and assessing.Is it me? Is it the patterns of avoiding discomfort that have gotten us here? It takes two to maintain a cyclical dynamic in a relationship. Many cycles occur because, deep down, we benefit from them; they free us from a discomfort hiding somewhere else. This same displacement cycle is happening at the macro level. The internet has become a nervous system exposure lab where people project their parental wounds onto truth-tellers because they are too lazy to do the work of reclaiming their own power.

They bypass and deflect. They attack the mirror instead of looking in it. They demand comfort instead of self-reflection.

In a nation of dopamine addicts, we all get itchy for love-bombing, political movements, and ideologies because they provide relief from discomfort while simultaneously creating an “end of conversation” dismissiveness. In return, the amygdala which has no eyes—categorizes this chaos as home because it is so familiar. We are comfortable in the chaos because it’s what we were born into. Remember the waves I’ve talked about? Many of us were born in the chaos waves of life. We get so used to riding those waves that when we finally get to the calm of the lake, we’re bored.

This tendency to outsource our emotional state to others is often a byproduct of what researchers call emotional contagion, where our nervous systems unconsciously mimic the distress of those around us instead of maintaining an internal baseline (Hatfield et al., 1993). When we seek righteous victimhood, we are often operating from a state of defensive attribution, a cognitive bias where we attribute our failures to external factors to protect our self-esteem from the stew of shame (Shaver, 1970). Furthermore, the “boredom” we feel in the calm of the lake is a physiological reality for those raised in high-stress environments. Clinical studies on the repetition compulsion suggest that the brain may subconsciously seek out familiar chaotic patterns because the neurochemical spike of conflict feels more like vitality than the unfamiliar stillness of safety (Levy, 1998). Commute Calibration serves as a form of top-down regulation, where we use the prefrontal cortex to provide the mental rehearsal necessary to inhibit the amygdala’s reflexive survival responses (Schore, 2012).

Much of this work requires an awareness of that discomfort. It requires Commute Calibration—the art of the practice.This involves practicing calm through mental rehearsal so that when we arrive, we can embody safety. You stop waiting for the other person to change and you become the baseline for yourself, which is true freedom. You stop letting the past write the emotional code. You don’t just manage your emotions; you lead with them.

That was the goal all along right?

Till next time data collector.

Key Points for Integration

• Predictive Processing: The nervous system doesn’t just react to the present; it creates a “mental rehearsal” of the future based on past trauma. This leads to a high allostatic load, where the body stays in a state of “functional freeze” or hypervigilance.

• The Dopamine-Discomfort Loop: Constant engagement with high-reward stimuli (social media, “outsourcing” feelings) lowers our affect tolerance. This makes ordinary life feel physically painful, causing us to avoid necessary developmental growth.

• Family Projection Process: When we cannot regulate our own shame or anxiety, we unconsciously “leak” it onto our partners or children. This is a primary driver of multigenerational trauma.

• External vs. Internal Locus of Control: Real healing requires moving from an external focus (blaming others, demanding they change) to an internal focus (holding boundaries, choosing yourself, and sitting in the “heat” of the moment).

• The Chaos-Homeostasis Connection: For those raised in high-stress systems, the “lake” (safety) feels boring. We may subconsciously sabotage peace because our nervous systems are wired to perceive chaos as “vitality.”

Extended Reading List

For the Neurobiology Enthusiast

• “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel van der Kolk: A foundational text on how trauma is physically stored in the body and nervous system.

• “Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett: A shorter, accessible look at how the brain “predicts” your reality rather than just reacting to it.

For the Family Systems Seeker

• “Extraordinary Relationships” by Roberta Gilbert: An excellent introduction to Bowen Family Systems Theory, focusing specifically on differentiation and triangles.

• “The Drama of the Gifted Child” by Alice Miller: A deep dive into how children adapt to their parents’ unmet emotional needs, often leading to the “overfunctioning” discussed in the essay.

For the “Dopamine Nation” Context

• “Dopamine Nation” by Dr. Anna Lembke: Crucial for understanding why we are collectively losing the ability to tolerate boredom or emotional pain.

• “The Joy of Missing Out” by Tanya Dalton: A practical look at re-centering your life around your own values rather than the “external scan” of productivity and social pressure.

For the Boundary & Self-Work Journey

• “Parenting from the Inside Out” by Daniel J. Siegel and Mary Hartzell: Focuses on how our own childhood histories affect our parenting and how to break the cycle through self-understanding.

• “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” by John Gottman: Offers data-driven insights into the “gridlock” and communication patterns that happen when couples stop growing together.

Reflective Question

As you move from reading to practicing, which area of your life currently feels like the “hottest potato” the place where you are most tempted to focus on others’ failures rather than your own capacity for choice?

References

Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bowen, M. (1978). Family Therapy in Clinical Practice. Jason Aronson.

Gottman, J. M. (1994). What Predicts Divorce? The Relationship Between Marital Processes and Marital Outcomes. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1993). Emotional contagion. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2(3), 96–100.

Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. Wiley.

Helgeson, V. S. (1994). Relation of agency and communion to well-being: Evidence and explanations. Psychological Bulletin, 116(3), 412–428.

Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. W. W. Norton & Company.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence. Dutton.

Levy, M. S. (1998). A conceptualization of the repetition compulsion. Psychiatry, 61(1), 45–53.

McEwen, B. S. (2005). Stressed or stressed out: What is the difference? Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, 30(5), 315–318.

Miller, A. (1981). The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. Basic Books.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Rotter, J. B. (1966). Generalized expectancies for internal versus external control of reinforcement. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 80(1), 1–28.

Schore, A. N. (2012). The Science of the Art of Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

Shaver, K. G. (1970). Defensive attribution: Effects of severity and relevance on the responsibility assigned for an accident. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 14(2), 101–113.

Siegel, D. J., & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive. TarcherPerigee.

Data Collectors,

Have you ever stopped to think about the every day ways we don’t see how we place ourselves in the line of fire? Every time we resist the nuance to humanity. The messiness, the free will of individuality and in doing so we miss ourselves.

We miss the moments that can bond us, unite us, imprint us with more core memories. But, as long as we stay distracted by the VECNA energy, the ANTs (automatic negative thoughts) of our minds it will continue to infiltrate our perception. That’s why having access to very superficial forms of dopamine, such as validation by someone else vibrating at the same frequency as you in the comment section, or a video with millions of views that discusses the same trauma wound, man/woman bashing, and that made us feel seen. This is the sickness, we don’t realize how dangerous having something in own hands where instead of sitting with the very thoughts we are in an endless loops of processing—everything. Is that not like the bell Pavlov used to condition the dogs? Over time that consistent behavior of allowing what’s in our minds to essentially choke hold ourselves. Many of us are talking to ourselves in our own heads more than we are with other people. We sit with the same mental images of a story. Your version. Nuance to a nervous system that vulnerable will see anything that is different as a dismissal of their version. The more I observe human behavior, the more I see how drowning in our suffering story serves no one— not even ourselves. We keep ourselves in a prison needing everyone to validate our version of the pain not seeing the selfishness behind how that robs others of their version—now another loops begins.

Yet, many don’t see it.

You can’t when you are in it. That’s the point of Napoleons Hills Book “Outwitting The Devil.” When you are drifting you are lost to the path of getting back in alignment with yourself.

Many of us know what we need to do. It’s the doing of it that gets really hard. So we start listing all the disorders, chronic issues, and systemic injustices to fill the gap of the doing not realizing that listing them all keeps the wounds fresh in your mind and just becomes yet (insert DJ Khaled voice) another loop of justifications for our behavior or lack of.

We get in our own way and we know it.

Remember, we all individually make up the people. If the world is a mess—well, it’s made up of—the people. The systems that have caused harm we the people are also apart of.

Think about it…

It’s your legal counsel and their team, the micro aggressions that live between the jury and the judge or even the judge and the lawyer working your case. The professor and the student. The veteran employee and the new hire with fresh knowledge and a highly supported approach. We are afraid of being “left behind”or “replaced” so anyone that feels like a threat to us is then automatically projected onto as if they are. Despite the amygdala forgetting we are at work (it doesn’t have eyes so it is counting on us and our differentiation to guide it to truth), we do not see the repercussions of our beef with people at work and how it impacts our work performance and how that performance can impact customer, client, patient, students, etc.

Let’s play with an example here ok. I want us to look at how we—the people—actually build the "broken systems" we complain about. It doesn’t always look like a big, formal policy that causes harm; usually, it’s just unaddressed human leakage that no one feels safe to name or even address.

Characters: Violet the customer, client, patient, what ever floats your boat.

Staff member: A

Staff member: B

Notice how you know nothing about A & B, not their roles, job description, backgrounds, gender, age, none of it—because it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about those identities and labels it’s about the relational space and what happens within it when emotional energy arises.

Let’s pretend this case with violet really triggers some thing inside staff member A, and Staff member B is taking that emotional leakage from A, personal and as a result their beef essentially causes Violet to lose out on intentional effort and the outcome she needed for the services these staff members are suppose to provide her. Ever had work stress that caused insomnia, anxiety, xyz? Ever look at how your work performance gets neglected? In Violet’s case she loses out, due to a dynamic that has nothing to do with Violet at all. So forms get bypassed, deadlines get missed, because the staff are in a stress response due to each other. Their unhealed, unaddressed dynamics costs violet her custody situation, or her health situation, or xyz. This is how we the people make up the very systems we complain about or deem as “not good.” Look at the reenactments that show up in the workplaces. Look how personal bias, workplace conflicts, spill into the work itself often causing death in some environments.

It has nothing to do with what our nervous system is perceiving. Yet our perception dictates how we move through the world. We take it out on the call line workers, the custodians that keep our environments clean, the truck drivers we cut off on the highway because we are impatient but forget they are the ones that deliver our goods.

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How many of you thought immediately after reading that “well the truck drivers…"?”

See, as if whatever we say within the rebuttal justifies. We have become a society of graspers. Grasping for what we can to justify harm done to us or others in our “tribe.”

We do it even in the smallest ways. Especially under stress, especially towards our loved ones. Let’s look close in the micro.

Maybe we are in a streak of not getting good sleep, maybe our back is hurting, we are on our menstrual cycle, we are stretched thin because of outside demands, kids, finances, xyz. Whatever it is. We each get pulled emotionally into emotional states that leave us feeling moody, irritable, apathetic, angry, etc. The safety to speak is about having the safety to be in moods other than moods that are deemed “socially polite” that customer service effort gets to come off like a bra after a long day. 🤭

That type of relief but with emotions, we get to come as we are where we are. We can have RBF without our partner thinking we are mad at them. We don’t have to walk on eggshells with our emotional hygiene especially on dirty days. We all have dirty days.

That’s the point isn’t it? We must be accountable of those dirty days and own them, name them, give grace to ourselves, our partners, our family for being in an emotionally dirty day..

When I work with couples. We always have compassion for the children when they cry, are moody, have tantrums, even when they hit. We can excuse it because “they are tired, hungry, sick, etc. However, when are partner is cranky, snappy, or in mood we deem that as unacceptable. We don’t come with the same grace. Remember the child in us didn’t just vanish, it got taller, and hidden under the stress of adulthood. That child comes out effortlessly when we give ourselves moments of joy. But that’s a different topic. Can you see how we have the ability to give the patience, yet choose not to because “well he’s an adult, she is grown, I shouldn’t have to.”

Who said?

Humanity is messy, moody, and irritating at times— scratch that— most of the time.

We all have an emotional battery that starts to die and the emotional frequency shifts. We forget that shift is felt externally. Often times discharged on the kids or our partner. People around us. We can see this at scale in the macro, especially online.

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I have been making it a point to get back on track with my spiritual routine. Prayer, meditation, gratitude. Most important— physical movement and mobility. I think maybe as I almost enter my 35th level of life in exactly 2 months today actually (July 3rd baby) 🥳

The importance of body movement though is something I can’t take for granted. It’s very easy to as well.

Anyways, my point. I don’t know about any of y’all but these last few months have draaaagggggeeeeeed my ass. 😮‍💨 Tested me in ways that were severely uncomfortable. I also feel a shift on social media. More people are waking up to the upside down reversal. We can clearly see how many are prioritizing follow count over professional ethics, accountability, sequential structure, but please honeybees. Zoom out farther than that.

The cognitive conditioning to our neural pathways. We are already a sick and mentally unwell society. We are plugged in like VECNA’s tentacle things — to the screens. We drink and drink what the algorithm tells us as well as the news outlets. We believe anything we see even if we didn’t see it with our own eyes, and even if we know that Ai exists.

Differentiation is not just a necessary skill it may just end up becoming a survival skill necessary for navigating the new world that is trying to develop. Cognitve shortcuts straight to labeling, diagnosing, and bypassing— to justify ourselves or at least distract attention from the truth. Our inability to allow others outside of ourselves their truths because we aren’t secure in our own. We can label ourselves experts just because we decided to and we have the “followers” to justify it.

Can’t we see though. The farther we get away from community. The farther we stay othering everyone around us to protect ourselves from — ourselves. The more we get in our own way. Think about it, in reality when true crisis occurs, natural disasters, etc, I have seen people jump into help, rescue, xyz. Regardless of the very things we use to divide. Doesn’t that show you how it’s all ego noise? Over time the work gets more clear. The ability to differentiate, hold nuance and still stay rooted in yourself. Exposing self to differences allows you the ability to get closer to your own values. You get to disagree and still—be.

Wild concept am I right?

Don’t worry, I am in practice with you all too!

This month we explore concepts that we can actually try. Start putting into practice strategies to really work on pause. If we don’t know where to begin then let’s just start with the art of doing and saying nothing at all.

Something I know I too can work on🤭

Till next time data collectors.

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I had to sit with The Why…

This is for me.

It’s my guardrails; it’s what holds me accountable.

I realize I show up for others as fuel for myself. Call it survival blueprint? It’s why some of us panic—we never like to be late.. (shiiii my nervous system turns on if it is late to be early🤣) I have an academic schema—which is essentially a mental blueprint we use to organize our lives (Piaget, 1952). I live on that structure. Rigid. Panicky. Hyper-vigilant of time and routine. That kept me balanced and aligned. It was my baseline for functioning. I felt backed and structured by the guardrails of academic due dates and syllabi. A recipe that seemed to keep me grounded. After graduation.

Not only did I lose that structure. I Costco Styled life: graduated grad school, got married, moved across the country. Left my beloved California.

The framework fell apart. Savannah drifted, fumbling in a panic of symptoms that were masked by college—learning that I was willing to give my best to other people’s business but wouldn’t show up for myself in my own.

The public eye puts pressure on you. A kind of pressure that—for me at least— makes you want to sh*t yourself sometimes, but it’s enough to make you get your shit together. Not in a performance way, I wouldn’t really know how to do that, to be honest. Because sometimes I really don’t know how to stfu... lmfao (just ask my brother or my husband🤣). I talk a lot. That’s just me. I talk even more when I recognize patterns of control that others avoid.

I was a “why” kid.

I still am.

This time, it comes with pathology labels designed to make you think something is wrong with you. Whatever is “wrong,” I’m learning that sometimes we just inhabit these archetypes—the universal patterns and roles, like the “Scholar” or “Teacher,” that exist in our collective human experience (Jung, 1959). For me, it was the “Scholar.” Education was my ticket out of the dysfunctional system I was in. Survival...

You know about that pendulum swing, right?

Sometimes we can swing too far in the other direction. Over learning just to stay “safe".” Are we really safe? Or did you just create a new version of a psychological prison? Even I have to step back from the work for a while at times. There is way more than just academics, but we use over-analyzing as a form of protection.

I had an academic schema—a mental blueprint or “script” used to organize and make sense of the world (Piaget, 1952). I lived on that structure. Rigid. Panicky. Hyper-vigilant of time and routine. That kept me balanced and aligned; it was my baseline for functioning. I felt backed and structured by the guardrails of academic due dates and syllabi.

Once that disappeared... Hey, Sav?! Where did she go?

The framework fell apart. I was fumbling in a panic of symptoms that were masked by college. But that “Scholar” archetype is also the portal to the “beyond the beyond” type of conversations with people.

You know …Depth…

Do we remember what that is anymore?

That internal need for depth in this current society can leave us feeling unreached in a way that seems “too much.”

We all are, aren’t we?

According to my analysis from the data I have collected over the course of my life and in my professional settings: Why?

Why is it that when it’s for us—our own business—we sabotage, procrastinate, and freeze? I have failed at so many things; why is this what makes me freeze? The fact is, I made it this far in the ability to capture people’s attention, which is the currency right now. Plus, I come in peace—even though some squirm like a stray dog on the freeway that I am trying to save.

Sometimes it makes me break because I go all in.

I burn out.

I over-function because I still have to unlearn blueprints. I still have to learn to pause. I still have to speak up and not swallow. This last year, my body has been screaming at me in jaw tension. For me, that means throat tightness because of biting my tongue. 🤭Really, Sav? This is biting your tongue? I giggle.

I can only be me. And being human is the best ride because my best client relationships are when we are all just one: beings being seen, being heard, being acknowledged. So many of us need it, but we have gaslighted and “sweet-lemoned” ourselves into believing that we didn’t—because we are “strong,” “independent,” la-la-la noise.

Pavlovian-style conditioning is born out of realizing that the emotional heart of life is what Tony Robbins calls that “pull” factor. You can push, but you need something to pull you. This is my pull. I’m not the girl that is sensitive; I’m the girl that feels everything people aren’t speaking. What the collective feels, what my clients’ grief feels, or the joy they feel. Sometimes it brings me to tears because I am so proud of the people I work with. Life is hard. The clients I have gone through/ are going through shiiiiiiit. They made a choice to work with me, they committed, and the relationships were built. The challenges were faced. Goals were achieved. Just like that not only are people telling me I changed their life.

They changed mine…

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The Evolution of the “Disordered” Realm

I always question to myself… Are humans really experiencing “disorders” or do we have habitual ways of living that have influenced our personality? Those personalities come with traits. Over time, these traits become patterned, labeled, and sequenced, and suddenly, we have “personality disorders.” In my lens, it becomes “disordered” when you have drifted too far for too long. Years and years and years. Trauma can do that. Being raised by parents who are drifters can do that.

Seeing it from this angle helps depathologize the stigma of labels and lets us see it as a game of life: cause and effect. Yes, genetics plays a role. Epigenetic’s (environment plays a huge factor… I mean look around. We can all agree sh*t got weird after 2020)

Think of it this way. Genes are the Christmas tree, the environment decides if it lights up or not.

The ego makes you resistant to this because it becomes about your feelings. Feeling insulted rather than guided. Society creates more resistance, too, because the noise distracts us and drifts us even further away from our higher self. Every time I teach this I have this mental image.

Real talk: Some of you… *cough* people pleasers— you try to save them and they pull you into drifting too. Then, we enter the “disordered” realm. But that doesn’t mean you are stuck there. Think pufferfish—you are puffed up and out there, drifting through life.

ADHD? It’s an island, and you can get shipwrecked there for decades if you don’t create systems and change your lifestyle. What that means is learn the skills to build you a boat/raft— Something—because the palm trees DGAF if you have ADHD. It’s not just a special club where we get to call ourselves “neurospicy” and do nothing about that neurospiciness except tell everyone. 🙄 Fatigued… This work helps me stay there. In aligned structure— or at least I am getting there. It helps me learn and continue to expand my love for learning with others. It breaks me out of comfort zones as I expand my business and my comfort with being seen. It’s the ultimate exposure therapy for me. Throughout this journey, it has revealed a lot of what I need in order to regain the structure academia once gave me.

Across all ages, this is not just about ego and external noise. I feel within the last year, I have elevated so much in awakening to see beyond that noise of distraction—the kind driving people to Polarity Town, bypassing what does not validate them and their feelings. I see straight into the heart of people and I can finally accept and not feel embarrassed to say that, that’s my art. I don’t know, I guess it’s cheesy or something. I am all for cheesy—depending on the cheese. 🤣(I cracked myself up with that one, as my husband looks at me while I am writing this on my laptop, wondering what I’m laughing at 12:44 AM.)

Myself…Always myself.

See…

The Terminal Crisis: The Death of the “Why”

I had to sit with the “Why.” I realized that being a “Why” kid wasn’t just a childhood phase; it was my primary defense against the drift. When we lose our “Why,” we lose our access to inquiry, and when we stop inquiring, we lose access to ourselves for good. That is the real crisis we are facing. Being the why kids created friction for many that were conditioned to never ask why. Just listen as they were told. What’s happening now is we see this at scale. Now Mental health professionals are being asked to cosign the drift by providing diabgositc labels and “skills” that many will refuse to use anyways. Many humans go to therapy not to get help but to gather research necessary to maintain their role as victim. Sometimes that leaves them with blaming therapy for not being effective. We as humans find a why for our suffering more than we care to find a “why” for the reason we choose it over living.

We’ve become a society that is complacent in its own curiosity, settling for the safety of a label because the “Why” requires too much of us, too much effort and maturity. When you stop asking why your nervous system is red-lining. When you stop exploring why you are giving 150% to a system that only asks for 50%, you open the door to be spoon-fed what to think and how to live in fear. We’ve been conditioned to think that the “Why” is a disorder—a symptom of “neurospiciness” that needs to be managed rather than a portal to the “beyond the beyond.” But I am realizing that the “Why” is the only thing that keeps the framework from falling apart.

I heard in a video recently. Animals only sit or do nothing if they are dead or dying.

Sit with that.

You will find those who avoid the message beneath that are those who will find other reasons to argue why animals do nothing rather than to look at their own behavior of stagnation making them ill.

We started playing roles before we discovered who we were, and now we are shipwrecked on islands of our own making, clinging to our “disordered” labels like life rafts that aren’t actually floating. My “Scholar” archetype was my ticket out of the dysfunction, but if I stop inquiring, that same scholar becomes a prisoner of over-analysis and intellectualization. We have to stop using our trauma as the endpoint of the conversation and start using it as the doorway. The level of development this will take—for me, for you, for us—is massive. It requires us to stop biting our tongues and start speaking the truth about the patterns of control we’ve been avoiding. It means choosing the uncertainty of freedom over the coherence of that familiar pain. We were kids begging for the truth, and now, as adults, we whine about the weight of it. But the “Why” is the pull.

It’s the only thing that can lead us away from the labels that harm and imprison us and back to the agency and discipline that can save us.

What do you think?

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Data Collectors

WHY THIS LEDGER EXISTS

This Ledger exists to document what happens when survival becomes an identity humans cling to for survival. During our April safari, we examined the traits most people judge in themselves—avoidance, anxious attachment, people pleasing, hyper-independence, overthinking, emotional shutdown and traced them back to the environments that trained them. The narcissistic need to be needed.

This narcissistic need is what many of us grew up under.We were raised under the women— specifically elders or our mothers who had to disassociate into “doing” to survive. What we are examining is how this style of parenting requires the children of a mother stuck in this survival loop, those children must have something for that mother to do. See how the pattern gets conditioned? It’s not about blaming people it’s about watching how the system gets established. What we also are realizing along this journey is how this current society is obsessed with finding and identifying the villains. Now the problem with getting stuck here is the conditioning of bypassing the inquiring necessary to understand the systems that required adaptation in the first place. The systems that help us understand why we are the way we are. I called them our inherited scrolls, these scrolls house the rules for life, how structured, or unstructured, how rigid we are. The rules to life we think are ours but are really inherited. We then go through our life with these rules despite the gridlock and distress it may cause to us.

Many people spend years attacking behaviors that once protected them, without realizing those behaviors were intelligent responses to immaturity, neglect, inconsistency, narcissistic dynamics, or chronic emotional unsafety. What we call dysfunction in adulthood is often developmental conditioned responses that have saved us from the discomfort of ourselves or rescued our care givers from their own discomfort. We enter relationships believing we are afraid of losing other people, when often we are afraid of losing the strategies that once helped us survive other people. People pleasing, avoiding, doing, working— all as a means to “busy” ourselves away from alignment of self and in the land of drifting. Society fears boundaries because compliance once preserved connection, as you can see with society today— it comes at the cost of abandoning yourself. We fear rest because productivity gave us a sense of worth, now we live out these scripts as adults, forcing them onto our partners and our children. We fear directness because silence once prevented retaliation, but now we are realizing our silence still creates gridlock. So when these adaptations begin to crack under adult pressure, the collapse rarely appears clean.

It emerges as rumination.

As burnout.

As resentment.

As chronic attraction to unavailable people.

As “matching energy.”

April’s work requires us to ask a deeper question: Which parts of you are truly you, and which parts were built for weather that has already passed? What I mean by this is, many of us are waiting for storms we already survived simply because we are so afraid of having to experience that storm again into our current reality. SO much so that we never learn to surrender to the joy or freedom we claim to want.

Let’s get into it.

Primary Artifact: Survival Adaptation • False Self • Attachment Distortion • People Pleasing • Hyper-Independence • Avoidance • Rumination • Nervous System Reactivity • Regression • Differentiation • Identity Reconstruction

This Months Video:

The Bars We Help Build: How Adaptation Becomes Self-Imprisonment

One of the more difficult truths in psychological growth is recognizing that not all suffering is externally maintained. In other words not all suffering is due to external forces. While many wounds originate in real developmental injuries—neglect, enmeshment, emotional inconsistency, narcissistic parenting, gendered double standards, parentification, chronic criticism etc. The continuation of suffering in adulthood is often sustained through internalized structures we unconsciously preserve. Schemas we develop to chase outdated archetypes that we inherited. These structures become the “bars” of a prison originally built for protection. The problem here is— if we all feel the need to lead through life with our protector part driving. Why is nobody asking the question. What are we scared of?

Due to this lack of inquiry we seek repeated validation of our pain stories because pain confirms the narrative we already know, while responsibility requires entering the unknown. The very room we all would rather avoid. Validation has an important therapeutic role when trauma has been minimized or denied, but has it been denied? Our society is so fatigued of everyone’s trauma stories because we realize its being used to end the conversation. when validation becomes the endpoint rather than the doorway, it can keep identity organized around injury rather than agency. Many individuals remain loyal to their pain because pain feels coherent, whereas freedom demands uncertainty, grief, and new behavior. The question becomes not merely who harmed us, but how much of our present confinement is now maintained by adaptations we continue to rehearse because learning to change how we respond without holding on to the managerial need to control what others will say about it.

The Narcissistic Need to Be Needed

One of the more overlooked expressions of narcissism we explored this month is not just overt arrogance, domination, or grandiosity, but the compulsive need to remain psychologically necessary to others. This dynamic often hides behind caregiving, sacrifice, over-functioning, martyrdom, emotional over-involvement, chronic rescuing, or the presentation of being the one who “holds everything together.” On the surface, it can appear loving, devoted, maternal, generous, or selfless. Yet clinically, the organizing principle is often less about the child’s development and more about the caregiver’s need for identity stabilization, emotional relevance, control, and insulation from inner emptiness or underdeveloped selfhood (Kohut, 1971; Miller, 1981). In this structure, helping becomes a form of self-regulation. The child is cared for but is also unconsciously used to soothe the unresolved needs of the parent. It ends up looking like managing their anxiety, giving the parent another person to discharge emotional buildup onto, or using the child as a distraction from themselves.

We explored how this pattern frequently has intergenerational roots, meaning inherited scripts passed down across generations. Many women in prior generations lived within social systems that restricted autonomy, economic mobility, psychological self-definition, and access to identities outside of marriage or motherhood. For many, being needed by family became one of the few available avenues for significance, belonging, power, or emotional centrality (Chodorow, 1978; hooks, 2000). Now, we can’t spend our time piddling in the hippocampus archives, our past can only help us understand why we are doing and behaving the way we do. What we choose to do with that understanding is up to us as adults. You can see why Dr. Amen states many parents unconsciously sometimes consciously rob their children of self-esteem to build their own. Can you see what they are trying to build? Much of this is unconscious behavior; it doesn’t always mean it is happening out of malice. This is how survival blueprints take over. When we zoom into that historical context, indispensability was not merely pathology—it was adaptation. If a woman could not freely build identity through vocation, creativity, authorship, sexuality, or self-directed purpose, she often built identity through relational necessity.

The problem emerges when a survival adaptation required by one generation becomes unconsciously imposed on the next. We see this at the macro level today. What once helped someone endure structural limitation can later become a constricting emotional inheritance for the generations that follow. Today, we are seeing many adults who are people-pleasers rather than initiators. We fight for the victim role because it frees us from having to take action and make a choice for our own life. When identity becomes fused with being needed, a child’s independence may be experienced by the parent as loss rather than success. Developmentally healthy milestones—such as privacy, self-trust, disagreement, relocation, romantic attachment, emotional boundaries, or differing values—can register as abandonment, disrespect, betrayal, or ingratitude (Bowen, 1978).Again, this is rarely conscious. Most caregivers do not think, I need you dependent. Rather, the nervous system experiences differentiation as destabilization. As a result, autonomy may be subtly punished through guilt induction, emotional withdrawal, criticism disguised as concern, chronic unsolicited advice, crises that pull the child back into orbit, or over-helping that quietly interferes with competence (Minuchin, 1974).

KEY TERMS

1. Differentiation of Self — Bowen (1978)

The capacity to remain emotionally connected to others without losing one’s identity, values, or independent thinking. A differentiated person can tolerate disagreement, guilt, and relational tension without collapsing into compliance or reactive cutoff. It is one of the central markers of adult psychological maturity. Low differentiation often presents as people pleasing, emotional fusion, chronic reactivity, or needing external approval to feel stable.

2. Allostatic Load — McEwen (1993)

The cumulative physiological and psychological burden created by chronic stress exposure over time. This includes hypervigilance, emotional suppression, family chaos, over-functioning, relational instability, and unresolved trauma states. High allostatic load often appears as burnout, irritability, executive dysfunction, sleep disruption, anxiety, and diminished resilience. Many individuals misinterpret overload as personal weakness rather than accumulated stress debt.

3. Emotional Fusion — Bowen (1978)

A relational state in which one person’s emotions, needs, or moods automatically dictate another person’s internal state and behavior. Boundaries become blurred, individuality feels dangerous, and disagreement is experienced as abandonment or threat. Fusion is common in enmeshed family systems where loyalty is prioritized over autonomy. Adults raised in fusion often struggle to know where they end and others begin.

4. Enmeshment — Minuchin (1974)

A family dynamic characterized by diffuse boundaries, over-involvement, and impaired individuation. Privacy, autonomy, and separateness are often interpreted as rejection or betrayal. Children in enmeshed systems may become responsible for parental emotions, identity, or stability. Later in life they often confuse closeness with over-access and love with self-erasure.

5. Learned Helplessness — Seligman (1975)

A psychological condition in which repeated experiences of powerlessness condition the person to stop attempting change, even when options later become available. It often develops in controlling, inconsistent, or over-functioning environments where autonomy was punished or unnecessary. In adulthood it may appear as passivity, dependence, indecision, avoidance, or chronic under-functioning. What looks like laziness is often trained non-agency.

6. Overfunctioning / Underfunctioning Reciprocity — Bowen (1978)

A systemic pattern where one person becomes excessively responsible, competent, organized, or controlling while another becomes passive, dependent, avoidant, or less capable. The stronger one pole becomes, the weaker the other often becomes. Families and couples frequently mistake this for personality difference when it is actually a mutually reinforcing relational dynamic. Resentment builds on both sides.

7. Pathological Accommodation — McWilliams (2011)

A defensive adaptation in which an individual chronically adjusts themselves to dysfunctional environments at the expense of authenticity. The person becomes highly attuned to others’ moods, expectations, and reactions while disconnecting from their own preferences or needs. Often developed in childhood, it can later look like people pleasing, emotional invisibility, and identity confusion.

8. Experiential Avoidance — Hayes et al. (1999)

The attempt to escape, suppress, numb, or outrun uncomfortable internal experiences such as grief, fear, shame, loneliness, or uncertainty. It can appear through productivity, substances, overthinking, caretaking, scrolling, perfectionism, or chronic busyness. Relief is usually temporary while the avoided material intensifies over time. Many modern coping habits are socially rewarded forms of avoidance.

9. Neuroception — Porges (2011)

The nervous system’s unconscious process of detecting safety, danger, or threat without conscious reasoning. Before thought occurs, the body is already scanning tone, posture, facial expression, pace, and environmental cues. Individuals raised in volatile homes often develop hyperactive neuroception, perceiving danger rapidly even in neutral situations. This helps explain why some adults react before they can explain why.

10. Window of Tolerance — Siegel (1999)

The optimal zone of nervous system arousal in which a person can think clearly, regulate emotion, and remain connected. Outside this window, individuals may shift into hyperarousal (panic, rage, urgency) or hypoarousal (shutdown, numbness, collapse). Trauma and chronic stress narrow this window. Many relationship conflicts are nervous system events disguised as moral disagreements.

11. False Self — Winnicott (1965)

A personality structure built around adaptation, compliance, and meeting external expectations rather than authentic expression. It often forms when the environment rewards performance but cannot tolerate the child’s real feelings or spontaneity. The individual may appear highly functional while internally feeling empty, unseen, or uncertain who they actually are. Healing involves recovering the hidden true self beneath performance.

12. Narcissistic Need to Be Needed — Integrated Clinical Concept

A relational pattern in which a person derives identity, worth, or emotional regulation from remaining indispensable to others. Helping becomes tied to control, dependency maintenance, or resistance to others’ autonomy. Often expressed through martyrdom, over-helping, crisis management, or guilt when others become independent. It can appear caring on the surface while obstructing differentiation underneath.

13. Relational Debt — Integrated Concept

The accumulation of unspoken truth, unmet needs, swallowed resentment, and emotional suppression within a relationship. This debt is eventually “paid” through passive-aggression, emotional withdrawal, disproportionate reactions, burnout, affairs, or sudden cutoff. What appears sudden is often the delayed consequence of prolonged silence.

14. Pro-Social Avoidance — Integrated Concept

A form of avoidance disguised as kindness, empathy, or being easygoing. The person focuses on others’ needs, moods, or problems to avoid confronting their own vulnerability, grief, conflict, or desire. Because it appears generous, it often goes unchallenged for years. Internally, however, it preserves fear through self-abandonment.

15. Regression — Freud (1917); Modern Trauma Adaptation Models

A stress response in which an adult temporarily reverts to earlier developmental coping strategies when overwhelmed. This may look like clinginess, shutdown, rage, helplessness, controlling behavior, or emotional immaturity. Regression is often mistaken for character revelation when it is more accurately a nervous system return to previously rehearsed survival states.

REFLECTION PROMPT

Take a moment to pause and notice what parts of your life still require you to be needed in order to feel valuable. May of us were conditioned to give 150% so much that as an adult, a mother, and father, a xyz. We continue to give that in every environment. Where did we learn the environment must meet you in your need to overfucntion rather than learning so surrender what is required?

Now shift the lens inward. In your closest relationships, where are you still waiting for someone else to heal and develop the skills that were never taught to you? Where are you blaming others for collisions created by old survival adaptations neither of you consciously chose? Remember the inherited scroll? What conversations, boundaries, or acts of self-leadership would become necessary if you stopped organizing life around old family roles?

As you sit with this gently ask yourself:

Where am I still surviving through patterns that no longer protect me... and calling it love? Calling it “breaking the cycle?”

📚WEEKLY LEDGER REFERENCE ARCHIVE

Bowen (1978) — Family Therapy in Clinical Practice

Bowlby (1988) — A Secure Base

Porges (2011) — The Polyvagal Theory

Siegel (1999) — The Developing Mind

McWilliams (2011) — Psychoanalytic Diagnosis

Winnicott (1965) — The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment

Minuchin (1974) — Families and Family Therapy

Kohut (1971) — The Analysis of the Self

Miller (1981) — The Drama of the Gifted Child

Wachtel (1997) — Psychoanalysis, Behavior Therapy, and the Relational World

Yalom (1980) — Existential Psychotherapy

Frankl (1946) — Man’s Search for Meaning

Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson (1999) — Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Beck (1979) — Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders

Kabat-Zinn (1990) — Full Catastrophe Living

van der Kolk (2014) — The Body Keeps the Score

Levine (1997) — Waking the Tiger / Somatic Experiencing

McEwen (1993) — Allostatic Load Theory

Seligman (1975) — Learned Helplessness Theory

Adler (1927) — Individual Psychology / Compensation Theory

Lerner (1985) — The Dance of Anger

Johnson (2008) — Hold Me Tight

Gilligan (1982) — In a Different Voice

Jack (1991) — Silencing the Self Theory

Main & Solomon (1986) — Disorganized Attachment

Rotter (1954) — Locus of Control Theory

Dweck (2006) — Mindset

Karpman (1968) — Drama Triangle

Tajfel (1970) — Social Identity Theory

Janis (1972) — Groupthink

Pavlov (1927) — Conditioned Emotional Response

Linehan (1993) — Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder / Opposite Action

Maté (1999) — Scattered Minds

Lembke (2021) — Dopamine Nation

Illich (1975) — Medical Nemesis / Iatrogenesis

Foucault (1963) — The Birth of the Clinic / Medicalization & Medical Gaze

Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson (1993) — Emotional Contagion

Cloud & Townsend (1992) — Boundaries

Perel (2006) — Circular Causality / Relational Systems

Kernberg (1984) — Aggression and Personality Organization

Walker (2013) — CPTSD & Fawn Response

Brown (2012) — Daring Greatly / Vulnerability Research

Church (2013) — EFT Clinical Trials / Emotional Freedom Techniques

Chodorow (1978) — The Reproduction of Mothering

hooks (2000) — All About Love / Patriarchal Socialization

Nathanson (1992) — Shame and Pride / Compass of Shame

Kahneman & Tversky (1979) — Prospect Theory / Loss Aversion

Hawkins (2002) — Power vs. Force / Map of Consciousness

Napoleon Hill (1938) — Outwitting the Devil

Data Collectors,

What Are You Actually Bringing In With You?

You ever notice how your body starts reacting before anything even happens? You’re not even inside of the hard conversation yet. You’re not at the workplace. You haven’t even pulled into the driveway, but your stomach is already tight. Your breath is shallow. Your mind is running simulations—mind movies. Your nervous system is on edge, and nothing has technically gone wrong. That’s preemptive embodiment. It’s your body rehearsing what it expects. Key word here: because if we are expecting something, we anticipate it.

When we engage in this loop, our mind starts directing the movie and your nervous system is already acting it out. It looks like carrying a storm you haven’t even walked into yet. Maybe you hate your job, and on the drive to work the entire way, your mind automatically loops and loops into negative expectations of how the day is going to be because “the bitches” are in the office and we hate them. So then the mind locks in… on their face, their snarky little XYZ behavior that triggers us. Or maybe it’s the holidays and we are on our way to the families’. The mind loops into anticipation: “Oh boy, Mom is going to ___ and it’s going to get bad.” Here is another example: you are in conflict with your partner, you have to tell them something and express something, and you are already saying, “He/she will react, we will get in a fight, it’s going to get worse, omg we are going to divorce…” See the script? What this is describing here is the nervous system engaging in predictive threat modeling. The brain, specifically the amygdala and insula, begins scanning for danger based on memory, not present-moment data. This is how trauma works: the body prepares before the event because, historically, it had to.

From a neuroscience perspective, this is the sympathetic nervous system activating; and when that happens in advance, heart rate increases, digestion slows, and breath shortens, despite the absence of an immediate threat even being present. The body is not responding to reality; it is responding to expectation (this is when the unconscious contract comes online). For ADHD and trauma-impacted nervous systems, this process is intensified because transitions lack natural pauses, which are necessary to snap the brain back into alignment before moving on to the next task. The commute becomes a bridge where unprocessed activation carries forward unchecked.

How We Reinforce the Very Dynamics We Fear

Every thought you think produces a chemical. Every emotion you embody sends a signal; this is not just inside of you, but into the relational field you’re about to enter. And when we rehearse conflict in our heads, we don’t just “process” something; we generate frequency.

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We ignite the energy loop before it even happens. So by the time we walk through the door, we’re already vibrating with defense, fear, dread, or urgency. We scan for disrespect. We expect invalidation, and the people we encounter feel it, even if they don’t know what they’re feeling. That tension you rehearsed becomes the tone you lead with. That panic you marinated in becomes the climate of the room. It’s not that you’re wrong in what you are feeling— it’s that you walked in with proof before the evidence even formed. Can you see the pattern? You became the prophecy and the producer. You were right, but at what cost?

📓 Field Notes

From a neuroscience angle, this process reflects anticipatory threat activation driven by the brain’s predictive coding system. The nervous system is not organized to wait for events to occur; it is organized to forecast based on prior experience. The amygdala (remember Amy doesn’t have eyes) and hippocampus collaborate to scan for familiar threat patterns, while the prefrontal cortex constructs narratives to justify the body’s activation after the fact. This is why physiological response precedes conscious interpretation. Each rehearsed thought recruits a biochemical cascade, primarily cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine—placing the nervous system into a sympathetic dominant state. Over time, repeated rehearsal strengthens these pathways through neural plasticity. This isn’t just overthinking; it is state conditioning Pavlovian style. The body learns to associate specific people, places, or transitions with danger, even in the absence of present-moment threat.

Clinically, this phenomenon is referred to as state-dependent perception. When the nervous system is activated, perceptual range narrows. Neutral cues are interpreted as hostile. Ambiguity is filled with threat-based meaning. Micro-expressions, tone shifts, or silence are filtered through expectation rather than observation. The individual does not enter the room searching for conflict; the body has already organized itself as if conflict is underway. This is where interpersonal dynamics become self-reinforcing. Human nervous systems are inherently relational and attune automatically through limbic resonance and mirror neuron activation. Others may not consciously identify the source of tension, yet their bodies register it.

Posture tightens. Vocal prosody shifts. The relational field organizes itself around the most dysregulated signal present in the room. What is often described as “frequency” in experiential language is well documented in clinical literature as emotional contagion and autonomic entrainment.

The result is a closed feedback loop: anticipation generates arousal, arousal shapes behavior, behavior alters the relational field, and the altered field confirms the original expectation. The nervous system then records the outcome as evidence, reinforcing the belief that vigilance was necessary. This is how trauma reenactment occurs without conscious intent, and why insight alone rarely interrupts these patterns. This mechanism is further amplified in individuals with trauma histories, attachment injury, and ADHD. For ADHD nervous systems in particular, transitions often lack natural pauses, allowing sympathetic activation to carry forward uninterrupted. The day becomes a continuous physiological sentence without punctuation—no breath, no reset, no recalibration.

What is frequently experienced as intuition is more accurately understood as memory acting as foresight.

The cost is not the absence of accuracy about potential harm, but the loss of nervous system flexibility. Entering relational spaces already armored reduces the capacity for novelty, repair, and genuine connection. Accuracy without regulation becomes another form of self-protection—one that quietly reproduces the very dynamics it seeks to avoid.

Why Not Use That Same Energy in the Opposite Direction?

From a neurobiological standpoint, mental rehearsal activates many of the same neural networks involved in lived experience. Visualization recruits the prefrontal cortex, limbic system, and autonomic pathways simultaneously, meaning imagined states can shift physiological tone in real time. When attention is intentionally directed toward calm, warmth, or receptivity, parasympathetic pathways—particularly vagal regulation—are more likely to engage. This is not a denial of threat, but a reallocation of anticipatory energy. Rather than allowing predictive threat modeling to default toward chaos, the nervous system is offered an alternative template. Over time, repeated rehearsal of regulated states increases nervous system flexibility and expands the window of tolerance. The body learns that anticipation does not have to equal bracing.

In this sense, the commute functions as a transitional container—a liminal space or portal, if you will—where nervous system state can be recalibrated before contact occurs. What is framed experientially as blessing the space is clinically understood as shifting autonomic set point prior to interpersonal engagement. In other words, you basically are mental rehearsing your play before you get into the room. Instead of what you already know may or may not happen, why not exercise new neural pathways and focus on what COULD happen—what you would like to happen? See what happens. Why not? If there is resistance to this practice, ask yourself why. Who resists something that could help them?

What Is Commute Calibration?

Commute Calibration™ is the name I give to a frequency practice I teach clients—it’s a form of nervous system and energetic leadership. It’s the recognition that the emotional atmosphere you walk into is usually co-authored by the energy you bring. And the energy you bring usually starts on the way there. Most people rehearse fear. Most people rehearse defensiveness. Most people replay all the old loops of judgment, rejection, disappointment, and chaos and then wonder why they keep reliving the same dynamics.

Commute Calibration interrupts that rehearsal and replaces it with energetic choice. You practice compassion before contact. You embody peace before confrontation. You picture the person you’re about to see as not perfect, but as receptive. Safe. Understand, they might not be, but that is not the point; it doesn’t matter if they are safe, because you are.

Let’s take a stretch break here real quick... This work is not easy.

As someone who has their own level of CPTSD, anxiety, and hypervigilance skills that make me a skilled pattern recognizer, I also have to check when I am actually feeding the stallion of my mind instead of settling with it—especially in my marriage. Safe, healthy relationships: the ones where there are no phones being hidden, codes, and secrets. Where cheating is not something you anticipate. Relationships where the conflict usually stems from attachment wounds rather than behaviors that align with infidelity and mind games. Mature adult relationships involve facing the ASS in each of us, but most importantly, the ass within ourselves.

I have had my fair share of assery moments in my marriage. The shame or embarrassment my brain can loop in... relationships are a perfect place to face the muck of the shadow. I feel my Commute Calibration even if that commute is just walking down the hall to talk to my husband. If you are in a current season of gridlock, that commute means everything. For many of us—myself included—the hallway is filled with panic child energy, catastrophe, and mental rehearsing of what’s in the hippocampus archives and projecting it onto the conversation I am about to walk into.

Let’s say you are about to talk to your boss. That whole morning—the day you wake up, your drive there, and the walk to the office—what is your mind rehearsing? How is that helping your bodily frequency, or hurting it?

Why is it so difficult for us to rehearse the ideal outcome?

Mental Rehearsal: What the Nervous System Is Actually Practicing

At a clinical level, Commute Calibration™ is a practice of intentional mental rehearsal. The brain is always rehearsing something. The question is not whether rehearsal is happening, but what is being rehearsed and who is leading it.

Neuroscience has consistently shown that mental rehearsal activates the same neural circuits involved in real-time interaction. The prefrontal cortex, limbic system, and autonomic nervous system respond to imagined scenarios as if they are already occurring. This is why rehearsed conflict tightens the chest, shortens the breath, and sharpens tone long before contact is made, just like the image above demonstrates. The body does not wait for reality to confirm the threat; it prepares based on prediction. Most people unknowingly rehearse defense, vigilance, and disappointment during transitions. These rehearsals strengthen old attachment templates and trauma loops, training the nervous system to arrive already braced. Commute Calibration™ interrupts this default rehearsal and replaces it with a deliberate one.

• Calm is practiced before it is required.

• Receptivity is embodied before it is tested.

• Safety is generated internally rather than negotiated externally.

In this sense, Commute Calibration™ is not wishful thinking. It is directing the rehearsal toward regulation instead of reenactment. The nervous system is given a different script to embody, one that does not deny risk, but refuses to let fear lead the entrance. Over time, this changes what the body expects, how it prepares, and what it brings into the room.

This Isn’t Bypassing. It’s Energy Leadership.

From a trauma-informed perspective, this distinction matters. Bypassing avoids pain by dissociation or denial; while regulation metabolizes pain without allowing it to dictate behavior. What is described here aligns with self-led nervous system regulation. The goal is not to invalidate harm, but to prevent the body from reliving it prematurely or indiscriminately. Hypervigilance is a learned survival adaptation rooted in chronic threat exposure. So when left unexamined, it becomes a default leadership structure in relationships, where anticipation replaces presence. Which is why leading our nervous system does not erase memory; it interrupts automatic reenactment loops. This is how individuals move from trauma-driven reaction to intentional autonomic choice.

Clinically, this process expands the window of tolerance. Instead of entering relational spaces in a collapsed or combative state, the body is given a regulated baseline from which discernment becomes possible. Leadership here is not about control over others, but about refusing to outsource internal safety to external conditions.

This is why readiness is internal. The nervous system does not require consensus to regulate; it requires permission to stop rehearsing threat as identity.

Now, lets expand on window of tolerance for a moment.

The Window of Tolerance: Why Regulation Must Precede Contact

The concept of the Window of Tolerance, originally articulated by Daniel Siegel and expanded within trauma research, describes the optimal zone of nervous system arousal an individual can remain present, flexible, and responsive. Within this window, the nervous system is regulated enough to process information, tolerate emotion, and engage relationally without collapsing or becoming aggressive. When an individual enters a relational space already rehearsing threat, the nervous system is often pushed outside this window before interaction even begins. Anticipatory mental rehearsal activates either hyperarousal (sympathetic dominance: anxiety, irritability, defensiveness) or hypoarousal (dorsal vagal shutdown: numbness, dissociation, withdrawal). In either state, perception becomes distorted and the capacity for repair, curiosity, or mutual regulation significantly decreases.

What is often mislabeled as “being sensitive” or “overreactive” is, clinically, a nervous system operating outside its window. In these states, the body prioritizes survival over connection this comes with side effects and those look like: Your boundaries being experienced as threats, any feedback being experienced as attack, and ambiguity feels as if it is filled with danger. Practices such as Commute Calibration™ function by widening the Window of Tolerance before contact occurs— thus building our capacity. By engaging parasympathetic pathways through breath, imagery, and intentional rehearsal, the nervous system is brought closer to baseline regulation. This increases the likelihood that emotional input can be metabolized without triggering collapse, aggression, or reenactment.

Crucially, regulation does not require the absence of discomfort. The window is not a comfort zone; it is a capacity zone. Individuals within their window can feel anger without becoming violent, sadness without collapsing, and fear without surrendering agency. This is why leading the nervous system before entering charged environments is not avoidance— it is preparation.

Pause…

See how this is self-lead preparation instead of doom rehearsing? Where were we before in our commute to the difficult interaction was preparing for the worst. Which created emotional distress in us.

From this lens, we can see that energy leadership is clinically synonymous with state management. It is the decision to arrive within one’s window rather than demanding that others regulate first. Over time, repeated access to regulated states strengthens autonomic flexibility, making it easier to remain present even when stressors arise. This is how cycles break, not by eliminating threat, but by expanding the body’s ability to stay oriented to the present while discomfort passes through.

The Science Backs This Up

Research in psychophysiology and interpersonal neurobiology consistently demonstrates that nervous system states are not contained within individuals, but are co-regulated and transmitted relationally (Porges, 2011; Siegel, 1999, 2012). Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory describes how cues of safety and threat are communicated through facial expression, vocal prosody, posture, and breath rhythm, allowing nervous systems to synchronize automatically during interaction (Porges, 2011). This process occurs below conscious awareness and precedes verbal exchange. Studies on autonomic entrainment show that individuals in close proximity often unconsciously align heart rate variability (HRV), breathing patterns, and muscular tension, particularly in emotionally charged or attachment-relevant relationships (Thayer & Lane, 2000; Thayer et al., 2012). Higher HRV, a marker of parasympathetic regulation and vagal tone, has been associated with improved emotional flexibility, social engagement, and resilience under stress (Grossman & Taylor, 2007). Conversely, dysregulated states—marked by low HRV and elevated sympathetic arousal, spread rapidly within relational systems (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994).

Mirror neuron research further supports this mechanism. Neural circuits involved in action, emotion, and intention activate not only when a person experiences a state directly, but when observing it in others (Decety & Jackson, 2004). This provides a neurological basis for why calm presence can de-escalate a room and why agitation can infect it. The nervous system is not merely responding to words; it is responding to embodied cues in real time (Siegel, 2012). Mental rehearsal research, widely utilized in sports psychology, exposure therapy, and performance neuroscience, demonstrates that repeatedly imagining regulated emotional states produces measurable physiological changes (Jeannerod, 1994; Guillot & Collet, 2008). Controlled studies show reductions in cortisol output, improved vagal tone, and increased stress tolerance when individuals practice compassion-based imagery, gratitude rehearsal, or calm-focused visualization (Lehrer & Gevirtz, 2014; Grossman & Taylor, 2007). These outcomes reflect biological conditioning, not symbolic intention. The body learns from what it repeatedly rehearses.

Trauma-informed frameworks reinforce that dysregulation travels faster than cognition. The limbic system processes safety and threat milliseconds before the prefrontal cortex engages in conscious interpretation, which explains why relational dynamics often shift without explicit confrontation (van der Kolk, 2014; Siegel, 2012). Bodies respond to bodies before language enters the equation. Regulation, therefore, becomes a primary form of communication. Whether described as frequency, coherence, or autonomic signaling, the mechanism remains consistent across disciplines. Regulation is communicable. Grounded presence alters relational fields by changing the nervous system signals available for others to attune to (Porges, 2011; Hatfield et al., 1994). If trauma can be transmitted through proximity and repeated interaction, so can stability, self-leadership, and calm.

From a clinical standpoint, this reframes leadership as state transmission rather than control. The most regulated nervous system in the room often sets the tone and its done not through dominance, but through coherence (Siegel, 1999; Thayer et al., 2012).

What You Radiate Is What You Regulate

When you enter a room already rehearsing trauma, you limit the possibility of connection. When you enter as a tuning fork—when you embody the frequency you want to experience—you reshape the room. You stop waiting for someone else to change. You stop scanning for the threat. You stop letting the past write the emotional code. You become the baseline. Your energy becomes the gravitational pull. Your nervous system sets the pace. You don’t just manage your emotions; you lead with them. That’s Commute Calibration. That’s what it means to walk into a space as a safe person because you chose it for yourself.

Try This the Next Time You Drive Into a Hard Space

No pressure.

No perfection.

Just your intention.

Breathe.

Shake your hands.

Exhale through your mouth like you’re sighing the tension out of your body. Not forcing it. Just letting the pressure drain. Let your shoulders drop. Let your jaw soften. Put on music that doesn’t collapse your chest or spike your nervous system, something that keeps you open instead of braced. This isn’t about distraction. It’s about not walking in already clenched. Now picture yourself in the situation you’re anticipating. The meeting. The job interview. The hard conversation. The family dinner. See yourself there. Not perfect. Not performing. Just present. Visualize how you want to feel in that space—steady, clear, grounded, warm, firm, whatever matters most to you. Notice how your body is holding itself in that version of you. Your posture. Your breath. Your tone.

Then let the scene play out in your mind. Not the worst-case version—this new one. The regulated one. The version where you’re with yourself instead of scanning for threat. Yes! that’s it! You’re rehearsing presence, not control. You’re practicing arriving. You’re choosing what your body practices before you walk in.

And then, quietly, to yourself, say: May I feel peace today.
May I feel grounded.
May I feel supported.
May I be open to joy.

And then say:

I bring calm.
I bring grace.
I am rooted and regulated.
I am safe to lead with love.

(add your own flavor to it)

It might feel weird the first time. It might feel silly. That’s okay. The body doesn’t need you to believe it yet. It just needs you to practice.

Frequency Is Contagious. You Choose What You Spread.

You can be the toxin. Or the tuning fork.

You can be the storm. Or the anchor.

You can rehearse trauma. Or you can rehearse transformation.

You don’t need anyone’s permission to shift. You don’t need their approval to soften. You just need a moment. A breath. A choice. And the car ride is a damn good place to begin, because bodies teach bodies. Nervous systems read nervous systems. Long before words land, before intentions are explained, before outcomes unfold, something quieter is already happening. The body is broadcasting. Others are attuning. Regulation spreads. So does dysregulation. This is not about being positive. It’s about being present. It’s about deciding that the past doesn’t get to write the emotional code of the room before you even arrive. It’s about choosing to practice the state you want to live from, instead of rehearsing the wound you’ve already survived.

You don’t change the world by forcing it to calm down.
You change it by arriving regulated enough to stay yourself.

That’s Commute Calibration.

Stay tuned for a video here I can demonstrate what this looks like visually.

Until next time data collectors

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References & Extended Reading List

Decety, J., & Jackson, P. L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3(2), 71–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534582304267187

Dispenza, J. (2014). You are the placebo: Making your mind matter. Hay House.

Grossman, P., & Taylor, E. W. (2007). Toward understanding respiratory sinus arrhythmia: Relations to cardiac vagal tone, evolution, and biobehavioral functions. Biological Psychology, 74(2), 263–285. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2005.11.014

Guillot, A., & Collet, C. (2008). Construction of the motor imagery integrative model in sport: A review and theoretical investigation of motor imagery use. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 1(1), 31–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/17509840701823139

Hatfield, E., Cacioppo, J. T., & Rapson, R. L. (1994). Emotional contagion. Cambridge University Press.

Jeannerod, M. (1994). The representing brain: Neural correlates of motor intention and imagery. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17(2), 187–245. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X00034026

Lehrer, P. M., & Gevirtz, R. (2014). Heart rate variability biofeedback: How and why does it work? Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 756. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00756

Maté, G. (2019). In the realm of hungry ghosts: Close encounters with addiction. North Atlantic Books.

Nathanson, D. L. (1992). Shame and pride: Affect, sex, and the birth of the self. W. W. Norton & Company.

Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the body: A sensorimotor approach to psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.

Schore, A. N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. W. W. Norton & Company.

Siegel, D. J. (1999). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are. Guilford Press.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The pocket guide to interpersonal neurobiology. W. W. Norton & Company.

Thayer, J. F., & Lane, R. D. (2000). A model of neurovisceral integration in emotion regulation and dysregulation. Journal of Affective Disorders, 61(3), 201–216. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0165-0327(00)00338-4

Thayer, J. F., Åhs, F., Fredrikson, M., Sollers, J. J., & Wager, T. D. (2012). A meta-analysis of heart rate variability and neuroimaging studies: Implications for heart rate variability as a marker of stress and health. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 36(2), 747–756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.11.009

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.

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Data Collectors!

I wanted to take a second to talk about what’s actually happening behind the scenes. I’m building out a lot of moving parts right now, and because you all support me here on Substack, I want to make sure you’re getting the “Sanctuary” treatment across everything I’m doing. For my providers, students, and coaches: I’ve officially opened up The Safety to Practice community. This is for the clinicians, the people in their hours, and honestly, I’m opening it to coaches too (even though we know coaching isn’t therapy, the work still matters).

I have the Community Forum for $49 one time payment, but for you all, it’s $10 off and for the Group Consultations, which are normally $65 monthly, I want you to have a real discount. If you’re a Sanctuary member, I’m bringing that down to $40 a month.

Here’s the thing: If you join a group consultation, I’m giving you lifetime access to the forum for free!! Even if you only show up for one month of group, you keep the forum. The forum is there for those of you who don’t want to do the live virtual meet-ups but still want a place to land.

For everyone else (The NSP Academy): If you aren’t a provider, don’t think I’ve forgotten about you. I am knee-deep in building the Nervous System Playground (NSP) Academy. This is taking me more time than I anticipated because I want it to be right— low key perfectionism avoidance 😩. My vision for the Academy is a literal playground for human behavior. I want to provide self-paced learning for people who maybe don’t have access to traditional therapy, or maybe you just prefer not to do therapy. This is about self-development and giving you the tools to navigate your own nervous system at your own speed.

Once the Academy is fully live, you’ll be getting a 20% discount as a thank you for being here with me while I build this.

The Communities & How We’re Meeting

I want to be transparent with you all: I’m building these spaces because they are exactly what I have needed. I’ve wanted a safe place to practice as a clinician—to process, learn from others, and just support each other in this helping field. And honestly, I’ve needed a community like the one we’re starting with Milligram Mondays, too. Sometimes I struggle to get things done just like anyone else, and I wanted a space where we can regulate life and navigate these complexities together.

Here is the breakdown of how and when we are moving:

1. Chasing Milligrams (Free Community for Everyone) This is open to everyone, and we are kicking things off with Milligram Mondays. These are “Action Hours” focused on getting us out of that “Executive Freeze” we all hit sometimes.

• The Science: We’re using the power of Body Doubling. There is real neuroscience behind having another person “witness” your work. It lowers the cortisol and friction that keeps us stuck, helping us stay regulated while we actually get things done.

• The Schedule: We meet the first Monday of every month.

• The Kickoff: Our very first “Meet & Greet” is Monday, April 20th at 4:00 p.m. MST. We’ll do some icebreakers and maybe finish with breathwork or journaling just to feel out the flow.

• The First Official Action Hour: This takes place on Monday, May 4th.

2. The Safety to Practice / Provider Circle (Group Consultation) This is for the clinicians, students, and coaches. This is where we dive into the clinical mentorship and “Provider” side of things.

• The Schedule: We meet bi-weekly on Thursdays at 12:00 p.m. MST. We’re starting with two 1-hour meetups, but we can discuss as a group if we’d rather switch to one longer session.

• The Replays: Don’t worry if you’re seeing clients or life gets in the way. There will always be replay access for the consultation sessions and meetups.

I am so glad to finally be moving with all of this. It’s been a long time coming, and I really hope to see you there—whether we’re processing clinical cases or just holding space for each other to get through the “to-do” list.

Not apart of the Sanctuary?

If you aren’t a Sanctuary member yet but you want to get in on these perks, you can join us by clicking the link below.

Becoming a paid subscriber here doesn’t just give you the current discounts for the Safety to Practice community and the Group Consultations—it’s also your locked-in access for the future. As I roll out the NSP Academy and other digital products or specialized workshops, Sanctuary members will always be the first to know and the first to receive exclusive pricing.

Join the Sanctuary & Unlock Your Perks

1:1 Slots are Opening Up!

I am so excited to share that I’m opening up new slots for 1:1 work, but things are going to look a little different moving forward. I’m shifting my practice toward a more brief, solution-focused approach. I want our time together to be intentional and high-impact so you can actually get moving on what matters to you.

Here is how that looks:

• Clinical Sessions: These now have a max capacity of 12 sessions. We get in, we do the work, and we get you regulated and ready to navigate life on your own terms. While you roam the streets of the wild 😝

• Consulting Sessions: You can grab these as a single intensive session (if you just need to troubleshoot one specific thing) or as a 6-session package for deeper strategy. I will eventually open up a 12 session package.

I’ve put all the details, pricing, and how to book into the links below. Take a look and see which one feels like the right fit for where you are.

Again, I am so full of gratitude for your support, encouragement, engagement.🥰 All of it! Thank you for being patient while I get the NSP Academy ready. I’ll be sending out the specific discount links for the clinical side down below! ⬇️

I hope to see some of you all in our upcoming Milligram Monday register below.

Sign Up & Join the free community Here!

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I was not planning on writing this, but after the day I had, I thought why not. There is something that came up from the depths of the sediment…You know—the suppressed s*hit some of us feel is not necessary to dig into. I mean, come on—I do this for work. I already know what is down there, what it means, yada yada... Then I realized in that moment how much I minimize my own aches. How the loss of a friend having to grieve impermanence in a way that my mind just could not grasp. Object permanence. What do you mean she was here and now she is gone… Just like that—gone. I was in denial… calling her, texting her. Then…

Just stuck…

A week prior to this incident—I could feel something. Remember the cricket I mentioned in a previous article? Yeah... I could feel the essence of that cricket. I could feel something was off in the field, like something was about to happen, but I just did not know what. I was in my people-pleaser era at the time, to some degree. Now, don’t get it twisted—I still had no problem telling random people no or speaking up for myself. But with the people I loved and cared for? I was not pushy. I didn’t want to crowd her or make her feel hover-policed, so I gave her some space. We normally talked at least once a week, and even though I could feel her drifting, I stayed quiet. Around that time, she had already moved away to the East Bay and like all humans, she adapted to her environment. It’s just a part of development, but her new environment was loud. The teens there partied in ways that my sheltered nervous system was coded to recognize as pure danger.

So, my BFF and I were shifting. She was in a place where she desperately needed to belong to her new surroundings, and I didn’t live there—I would just travel in to visit. We were being pulled in different directions by the classic adolescent trap: the fight between staying true to yourself and the desperate need to fit in.

Can you remember what you did to belong during that time?

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There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being the one who sees what is happening while being surrounded by people who refuse to look— yet claim they “see.” Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about family systems, roles, and how certain individuals become the emotional containers for everyone else’s avoidance. Once you see the pattern, you can never unsee it. I watch these dynamics with a sense of awe. It’s never from a place of judgment, but from a profound observation of the human condition. We all need that sense of awe to truly understand the world.

In my clinical work, I see it repeatedly: the one who notices, the one who names the tension, the one who feels everything first. Often, it is the eldest daughter carrying not only her own pain but the unprocessed grief, fear, and resentment of the generations before her. She becomes labeled as “too much” simply because she refuses to pretend things are fine when they aren’t. What we don’t discuss enough is how often awareness is punished. Naming the truth is frequently met with projection. When you name a pattern, it is interpreted as an attack, an act of harm, or a sign of moral superiority.

Kind of like growing up with our parents.

Let’s pause for a second…

Let’s sit in this presence for a moment and truly reflect…

What if naming the truth really meant: “I see you because I am you?”

The more I work in family systems the more I realize, many of us fall into the role of holding something for others. At least holding that narrative. When you grow up in a system where survival requires emotional suppression, awareness becomes a threat to the blueprint, It isn’t that your observations are inaccurate. You see, that’s the destructive mental trap designed to make you doubt yourself. It’s that your clarity disrupts the illusion of peace. Many families selectively bury their heads in the sand; they are oblivious to their own patterns, yet they are the first to look up and judge when YOU disrupt the status quo. When the child or adult kid breaks the status quo that draws attention to their parenting.

When you break that illusion, you instantly are seen as “difficult.” In my practice with high-conflict or avoidant families, I’ve watched this play out:

• The moment you name a pattern, you are “intense.”

• When you stop absorbing everyone else’s emotions, you are “cold” or “abrasive.”

• When you stop performing happiness, you are “angry.”

The irony is that those criticizing you for being “too much” are often the ones who never learned how to sit with their own discomfort. It pisses me off to see people adopt the language of healing, using words like “boundaries,” “regulation,” or “perspective” without embodying any of it. It becomes a costume— a performance to appear “evolved” while avoiding real accountability internally, and the body knows. It’s like a Scooby-Doo mask; I find myself wanting to snatch it off to reveal the avoidance underneath. I find I need to remind myself at times that some people will convince themselves the mask is the only thing they can survive in.

There is no point in losing yourself trying to convince someone to live.

Real work means acknowledging your own baggage. It is easy to “explain” things using absolute, accusatory language, while positioning yourself as the mature one. Respectful dialogue is often a comedy when it comes from those who have mastered covert power plays. There are undercurrents of energy—invisible highways—that most people cannot see because they are “playing therapy” while living in a distorted reality. We see this when calmness is used as a shield while the language spoken suggests high nervous system activation. In these dynamics, withdrawal is mistaken for maturity, and anyone who questions it is labeled the problem.

This is a setup.

That is the ache.

Many of us were forced to grow up early. We learned to read rooms, manage tension, and keep the peace before we could learn what “peace” even meant. That hyper-awareness made us responsible for things that weren’t ours to carry. When someone tells me I “need to let things go” or that I “think too much,” what I really hear is: “I’m uncomfortable with your clarity.” Clarity asks for ownership, and not everyone wants to pay the cost of acknowledging what they’ve avoided. What hurts most is the expectation that people should shrink themselves to protect others from their own reflection. What does reflection actually mean? Why does the concept of seeing ourselves reflected back to us become so hard to not just accept, but at least hold.

Examine it.

Some refuse too, because to them the pain of discomfort is too much, or because the ego has swallowed them whole.

I am learning to stop trying to be understood by those who benefit from misunderstanding me. I am learning to slow down my “needy ADHD brain” that sees every pattern. But most importantly, I am recognizing that accountability is often treated as a one-way street. Some people will only walk down accountability lane if you hold their hand and walk it with them.

Many of us are out here fighting the world. Myself included. This last week, traveling back to Mexico during a crisis to get my dog emergency veterinarian care. Exploring a city I only ever heard stories about from locals of El Paso. Seeing how people live there. How you are treated because the car you drive and how that mentality spills into the States because— well— group think.

I think about how a woman in the line crossing the bridge entering back into El Paso literally called the Mexican police on us because we merged into the line like other people did— MANY other people. She almost crashed her car trying to prevent us from merging. Now, were we in the wrong? Probably, we are driving in another country and didn’t know what we are doing. Thats not the issue. The issue was the level of hatred in this women. The anger and rage— for what? Enough rage to call the police all of that just so she could feel like she had some control over something. There are women and men alike that have similar frequencies of this nature. Bitter, angry, no control in their own life. These people are working at schools with your kids, working as therapists, they are the lawyer, the judge granting your custody case.

We sit on our high horses from our special kid club groups of marginalization. Screaming about injustice and systemic oppression. Yet, don’t zoom into the narcissism within us all. We don’t bother to examine how we treat each other. We cuss people out on the highway. We take over the highway. We use our cars as weapons for control, and treat people a certain way beucase the way they dress, the car they drive, the side of town they live in. We judge people for being poor or for being rich. If they made a life for themselves we judge them while claiming they aren’t humble people. We make meaning out of anything that reveals whatever we feel we lack in ourselves. We disassociate into activism because it distracts us from the emptiness inside ourselves and the narcissism we use to mask that emptiness. We search for people who validate us because algorithms have conditioned that as baseline. So when we are in reality and the therapist doesn’t take our side or validate us, our kids don’t do what we say, live how we want them to live, we can’t stand our neighbor for getting a new car or remodeling their house—again. “Why does so and so always travel.” This is our life.

All we do is complain.

Why do you think that is?

We don’t ever complain about what we are doing we just complain about what others are doing.

I was once sitting outside having lunch with my brother years ago. A guy in a car pulled up to traffic that was stopped honking and yelling at people to move. He was in his egocentric loop not realizing traffic was stopped so someone in a wheel chair could cross. Did I holler at the guy and say “Hey! it’s sunny outside while gesturing for him to relax!!!” — yeah.. I did🤭 It worked though. He apologized, he got snapped out of his ego loop and back into the present reality where he could visually see the person crossing the road. Now, for me I understand ego-centric loops and how we all— myself included— get stuck in them. But, it’s the grief of how many perform altruism, perform kindness, but day to day behave hateful to people for whatever reason they created in their mind while stuck in the upside down of their ego-centric loop.

This performance is the ultimate systemic bypass. We track the patterns of the world so we don’t have to track the patterns of our own hearts. We want the world to change its “Family System” while we refuse to regulate our own internal system. What we are seeing in these moments—the rage in the car line, the weaponizing of a police call, the judgment of a neighbor’s success—is displacement. When we lack internal agency, we seek external dominance by doing things such as calling the police on others for literally mundane reasons, screaming racist and abuse at people who held a boundary up to you. Americans think we are losing our rights.

What this is Psychoeducationally, this is a failure of Self-Led Regulation. Many can choose to lead themselves to stagnation while blaming systemic forces for their lack of discipline. While simultaneously bypassing harm to people simply because “they were rich” “ they were white” or “they were racist.”

That worries me.

Scares me even.

We have replaced actual human connection with ‘validation loops’ provided by algorithms, which leaves us starving for real intimacy. So when we go looking for real intimacy, many of us don’t know what that is or even looks like— so, we turn to Ai and social media to have someone else tell us if this person is a red flag or not. We go to therapy hoping they will side or validate us against our family or partner. When that hunger isn’t met, it turns into communal narcissism where ‘the other’ becomes a canvas for our own unexamined shadows. We aren’t fighting for justice in those moments; we are discharging the discomfort of our own emptiness, just look online.

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A lot of us are angry because the messaging and modeling that we received growing up was just anger. It wasn’t just anger, it was a lot of emotions that just make you feel “not enough,” and then we end up transmuting that and inheriting it, and then polluting the world. Being on Easter holiday weekend, seeing that level of hatred in a person purely for just what we did... it triggered me to want to be ugly back to her, like, “Oh hell no.” My husband was able to kind of let it go, but for me, it wasn’t about the woman in the line. It was a metaphor for what that woman represents as a collective, and it was creating this level of grief in me that really— hurt.

How are we sitting out here still pointing the finger at the right versus the left, versus the blue versus the red, versus the “you’re an idiot,” “you’re a racist,” “phobic” as we defend ‘our side’ and we’re having tantrums and we’re out here protesting, but look at how you treat each other on a day-to-day basis. Where do we think all of this built-up energy is coming from? Something is stirring it up in us and we’re not reflective at all. It’s the incongruence of the fakeness of it all. It’s Easter weekend and you’re out here hella hatred—she hissed with her teeth, almost about to wreck her own car so she could have control. This woman could be in your family, she could be an in-law, she could be a co-worker.

Now, I want us to really zoom out.

This is how I bring this back to families, because a lot of us are being raised by women who are burnt out, drained, and exhausted. They’re surviving. They’re in marriages they are not happy in (their choice, yes villains exist but it’s still a choice that was made and we all must accept that fact.) Instead of metabolizing that and processing it, it gets displaced on their partners, kids and some of these kids are adult-adults. Some of these adult-adults don’t even want to deal with the parent anymore because all they do is discharge their energy because they don’t know how to metabolize it themselves with healthy habits, healthy skills, healthy diet, healthy sleeping patterns, or healthy mental and spiritual health. Essentially learning to be an individual outside of being a role. Many don’t want to do that. You don’t want to have the discipline; you just want to go to work. You want to come home, you want to b*tch and complain, and then you want to complain about how your kids aren’t treating the world how you raised them—which was basically to circle you and validate everything you think and feel because you didn’t know how to learn how to do it for yourself. This is what so many are going through right now. whether you are the mother in the story or the adult kids in the story.

The transitions in life are what we humans are struggling with adapting to. So we drift.

When there’s somebody in the family who is the scapegoat, who pulls out, who emotionally cuts off, who is tired and isn’t going to deal with it anymore—that’s where narcissistic injuries start showing up. This isn’t about blaming women—that’s your victim schema. It’s easy to say out loud that all I do is side with men rather than actually sit with the message thats being said. I get annoyed because I have to walk this path too. The woman in the crossing line is a metaphor for what we deal with in our mothers-in-law, and our fathers-in-law, and our partners, and our family systems or even at work. It's the shadow aspect of us, the rugrat aspect of us, the child. Everybody talks about communication, and then when you actually do try to communicate:

“Hey, what’s been going on? I noticed that you’ve shifted, did I do something?”

What do you get in response?

…“Oh, everything’s fine,” and then they run to chismé brunch where they gossip and generate more meaning making stories to blind loyalty friends. It’s a pattern I see in my office, in my own life, with peers. So often.

We want communication but are not honest when faced with it.

This is the world that we live in. This is why I always say we cannot care what people are going to say or even think about us. Let them talk. Let them... because if somebody is going to believe information like that from a secondary person... I learned that real quick how fast people gossip, because gossip is the best way to avoid the chaos in your own life.

It is.

It truly is.

The perfect distraction from our own shadows.

The more we gossip, judge, and condemn people for their shadow. We drift further and further away from reaching and facing our own.

The Cost of Clarity

This is the Cost of Clarity.

When you decide to stop being the ‘stabilizer’ for a dysfunctional family blueprint, you become the villain in their narrative. The woman in the line at the border wasn’t fighting a Tesla; she was discharging a lifetime of unmanaged powerlessness onto a stranger because it’s easier than looking at the burnout in her own kitchen. Psychoeducationally, we are looking at Intergenerational Displacement. Working in El Paso, this experiences has granted me the opportunity to see this play out live in so many capacities. When a system—whether it’s a family or a community—refuses to metabolize its own grief and anger, it requires a target. If you aren’t willing to be that target anymore, if you refuse to ‘hold their hand’ down accountability lane, the system will experience a narcissistic injury. They will use gossip, and labels or even guilt and manipulation to regain the control they lack internally.

This displacement doesn't stay behind closed doors; it migrates. When we haven't reconciled the powerlessness in our own living rooms, we take it to the streets, often under the banner of a 'cause.' Activism, in its unexamined state, becomes the ultimate dissociative shield. This is why activist movements frustrate me. As much as I understand the heart behind them. They are riddled with people infected by egoic constructs and noise using that movement specifically as a shield to disguise narcissistic traits, entitlement, and unfazed unhealed wounds. I find them to be psychologically dangerous while in a society being conditioned to process data into polarity. What I mean by this is many of these groups members—trauma bond together due to having the same ache. Yet no skills are being used, many struggle with mental illness, mood or personality disorders, and are walking on eggshells among their own group members. Reenacting the very blueprints they fled creating these small groups that are systems too. We just recreate what we know in new decorative ways. Think about it, we go into relationships as an escape from the childhood wounds, only to find they show up in the relationship. It’s the same concept with friendships, and these activist spaces.

Until we stop using activism and roles as a dissociative shield and start looking at how we hold the ‘hand’ of our own accountability, the system doesn’t change. It just shifts characters. The goal isn’t to be ‘right’ in the line back to El Paso; the goal is to realize that the person you are screaming at is the mirror you are most afraid to look into. Clarity costs you the comfort of the groupthink, but it buys you your soul back.

Sitting across from difference is my life version of exposure therapy, because difference gets me closer to my own truth.

So…

Let them talk.

You have work to do.

They don’t warn you about the guilt trips in modern veterinary medicine.

This past Saturday took a turn when our dog was diagnosed with a severe Ehrlichia blood infection. He went from normal behavior—playing— to sever fever in a matter of hours. Panic was my instant baseline. He was in a severe state, and we were terrified. But as we walked into the clinic looking for a lifeline, I didn’t feel supported. I felt handled.

Gaslighting and guilt trips are built into the culture here. So when they show up at your primary care appointment, dentist, or Emergency vet visit— there is a level of “oh, hell no…” that stirs up inside me. Walking into an American vet clinic too often feels exactly like taking your car to a mechanic when you don’t know anything about engines. It becomes a barrage of high-pressure sales tactics disguised as medical necessity. Weaponizing the heightened emotional state that you are in.“Let’s just run this $1,000 test and see what happens,” they say, as if regular people just have thousands of dollars lying around to “just see.”

Our system pushes you into high-stakes decisions fueled by panic and emotional leverage, rather than giving you an actual, informed choice. It preys on the fear that if you don’t spend every dime you have, you are failing as a pet parent. Had I allowed that guilt to convince me I wasn’t doing enough, I would have spent thousands of dollars in the ER just to put my dog through invasive trauma that likely would have killed him.

Instead, I said “f*ck it.” I decided to look across the border into Juárez, Mexico. Knowing how I feel about having to rely on others. This was an emergency, I was going there regardless, I was ready to raw dog the whole experience with Google Translate in hand.

The Anatomy of Surrender

In Mexico, the philosophy was different. They didn’t immediately push aggressive, wallet-draining interventions just to run up a bill. They gave his body time and space to do what it was naturally designed to do, supporting him without suffocating him.

Key word here is—with space.

Now, to get him that care, I had to break the habit of… well—being me. Rumination and what I like to call emotional self-harm were not going to heal him; they were only going to hurt him and me in the process. While I have a tendency to be a hyper-independent person who has no problem asking questions and challenging opinions. I am also someone who keeps to themselves, stays private, and handles their own shit. My husband and I were both the eldest children, the ones who will “just figure it out.” Asking for help does not come naturally to us. We always give to others, but forget to give to ourselves. Much of the time, that giving is just—grace.

Yet, here I was: accepting help from a friend who crossed with me and served as my translator. I had to drop my pride at the border. I had to blindly trust strangers to translate for me and guide us through the chaos. For the hyper-independent, true surrender feels like jumping off a cliff. My default setting in a crisis is to prepare for absolute catastrophe, but this ordeal forced me to practice a brutal kind of patience. I had to learn to stay open to the best possible outcome, holding space for healing rather than immediately assuming the worst.

My history with pets in crisis is basically sudden death. I have never gone through something where a pet is fighting to stay alive. The level of confusion my body is experiencing had my mind glitching, trying to play movies of healing and health while fighting the doom of death.

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The Village We Try to Live Without

We talk a lot about self-reliance, but the truth is, you do need a village. By refusing to play the game of a broken, guilt-driven system, something unlocked in me. Stepping into that vulnerability allowed me to let people in. It allowed me to trust the kindness of strangers who had no reason to help us, yet did anyway. I had to be willing to not give a sh*t what the American vet thought about our decision. For me, it’s the lack of integrity. This is a vet my other dog, Archie, sees. Have they called to check on the brother of their other patient? Nope, not once. They never followed through with calling the clinic or sending over documents like they said they would. You know that feeling of being gaslit? That’s how it felt. You don’t receive care once you decide to leave the system. Sound familiar?

This is why self-advocating is so important. You can’t worry about how others will feel about a choice that is for you while you swallow your own ache. We can’t self-abandon to feed someone else’s ego, either. I don’t care what profession it is.

To the strangers in Mexico who helped us breathe life back into our dog: thank you. I will forever recommend this veterinary practice to anyone. You didn’t just help heal him; you helped heal a part of me that thought I had to carry the world alone.

To anyone currently sitting in a sterile waiting room feeling pressured by a system that makes you feel like a bad person for not bankrolling their experiments on your dog...

Trust your gut.

You know your animal better than a corporate billing protocol ever will.

The one thing about language barriers:

Love is universal.

I highly recommend Unidad Medical Veterinaria in Juárez, Mexico. They have staff that speaks some English, but over all they are extremely caring. The owner Javier gave us a tour of the hospital. He is a very passionate man and you can tell he loves what he does. He was through in his breakdown of what was happening inside our Charlie’s body. The staff educate you, show you pictures and help you understand what they are doing. Instead of giving you a service list of fee after fee after fee. They take the time to get to the root of the problem. Very grateful we were guided to this Vet hospital.

Hello!

Thank you so much for providing this space, and I hope you're taking care of your mind and spirit this week. I'm dealing with a tough situation with my separated partner (whose pronouns are they/them). We have been legally married for seven years, and they are still caring for my disabled mother while I attend graduate school in another state. This separation is meant to help us figure out what we want to do next (e.g., if we want to attend marriage counseling or are prepared for a more formal, legal separation), but I honestly don’t know what to do. We’ve had some communication challenges since the start of our marriage. We both value our friendships, but we have distinctly different styles of caring for our friends, and I’ve occasionally felt insecure about how they care for certain friends, especially those with whom they’ve had romantic feelings in the past. We have had conversations about it whenever it comes up, but last year, while I was visiting home during winter break, I found out about a recent connection of theirs, initially from a dream they shared with me about this person (and I’ve heard little about this person during our calls). I didn’t see them much during my month-long visit; instead, they spent quite some time at the person’s home and missed dinners at our home. When I finally raised questions, they were defensive, dismissed my feelings over the person’s feelings, and said to our close circle and me that I was being controlling and abusive in the ways I “dictated” who and how they make friends. It wasn’t until two months later, in early February, that they admitted they had feelings for this person and had been going over to the person’s place for morning coffees, evening dinners, and massages while reading to each other nearly every day, all of which felt like a lot of emotional investment. They’ve continued to tell me and others that they felt hurt by my questions, as my questions felt explosive and interrogating to them, and they felt abandoned when I asked to separate. I also found out that, as they were telling our families, they take care of my mom out of love and would feel insulted to be compensated, they’ve withdrawn more than $17K from my personal and our shared savings accounts over a 10-month period. I will be visiting home again in two weeks to celebrate my mom’s birthday, and I really hope I can develop a set of questions and reminders to help me approach this dynamic. Thank you for reading!

The Cost of the Unspoken: Navigating the “Double Bind”

Dear Writer,

Thank you for writing in and sharing your situation with our Safari members.

Reading your letter, I see a deeply layered entanglement. You are in a tough spot: you are away pursuing your goals while your partner is performing the heavy labor of caring for your mother. This creates a privileged vs. labor dynamic that often breeds a “debt” mindset, making it feel impossible for you to hold them accountable without feeling like the “bad guy.”

But let’s zoom out and look at the hard truths here. The core of this conflict isn’t just “the other person”—it’s the avoidance that came before them.

1. The Trap of Implied Assumptions

When we don’t explicitly define the rules of engagement for friendships—especially those with past romantic ties, we fall into a trap of implied assumptions. You likely assumed “friendship” meant one thing; they assumed it meant morning coffees and massages. Because there was avoidance early on, you are now navigating in the dark.

In Buddhist philosophy, we talk about the “Second Arrow.” The first arrow is the event (your partner has a close friend). The second arrow is the one you shoot into yourself: the meaning-making. “They didn’t tell me about this on our calls,” or “They prioritize them over me.” This meaning-making is what’s causing your body to stay in a state of high activation.

2. Emotional Investment vs. Accountability

What you described, the daily dinners, the reading together, the massages—is a significant emotional investment. It looks like a relationship because, functionally, it is one. Your intrusion knows it. I challenge you here. What is the somatic experience you are carrying when you bring up your questions? Is it possible that somatic experience created undercurrents your partner feels and labels “interrogation?”

When you ask questions and they label it as “interrogating” or “controlling,” that is often a defense mechanism. You are finally showing up as a self lead individual holding them accountable, and they don’t know how to adjust to a version of you that is no longer avoiding the truth.

3. The Financial Contradiction

The $17,000 withdrawal is a massive alarm that contradicts the “martyr” narrative. They told your family they take care of your mom “out of love” and would be “insulted” by pay, yet they’ve accessed a significant amount of your shared and personal security. This is an external locus of control—using the labor of caregiving to shield themselves from financial transparency and any accountability of the emotional relationship with this friend.

Your “Homecoming” Strategy (The Mission)

I want you to try and shift from an external focus (what they are doing) to an internal one (what you need).

The Somatic Check-In

Before you speak, check in with your body:

• Locate the sensation: When you feel the urge to “interrogate,” where is that in your body? (Chest tightness? Heat in your face?)

• Find the origin: What is your earliest memory of feeling that specific sensation?

• Projection check: Is it possible you are projecting a past memory of abandonment onto this situation to make sense of the current “fog”?

Questions to Move Toward Clarity

Instead of questioning, try focusing on Needs and Non-Negotiables:

I will attach the worksheet I give my clients here.

• On Boundaries: We never explicitly defined what ‘friendship’ looks like with past romantic interests. My non-negotiable for emotional safety is transparency. How can we bridge the gap between your need for autonomy and my need for honesty?

• On Finances: “I value the care you give my mother, but I am confused by the $17k in withdrawals. Can we look at the accounts together so I can understand the financial reality of our household?” This is where you may have to speak up or limit access to the bank account.

• On the Separation: “Are we both willing to stop the avoidance and look at the actual impact of our actions, rather than just our intentions?”

A Final Reminder

Before you engage in these tough conversations, remember that seeking clarity is an act of self-respect, it’s not control. It may feel that way for others who have never experienced you in your self-respect frequency. You are allowed to take up space in your own marriage, even when you aren’t the one physically present every day.

Trust the data your body is giving you. If a situation feels “off,” it’s because your boundaries are being signaled. Ground yourself in what you know to be true for you before you step into the “fog” of someone else’s defensiveness. You aren’t “interrogating” you are simply coming home to yourself.🫶🏽

Readers…Now, it’s your turn.

Unfortunately relationships don’t come with a manual, but they do come with unspoken contracts and sometimes, those contracts need to be ripped up and rewritten.

Does this story resonate with you? Have you ever felt like the “villain” for simply asking for transparency? Or have you found yourself in a “double bind” where your partners or even your parent or family members labor made it feel impossible to speak your truth?

The Safari wants to hear from you.

Remember we are all humans on a human experience.

Submit your letter to "Okay, Now What?" here

Till next time Data Collectors

Data Collectors,

WHY THIS LEDGER EXISTS

This Ledger exists to document what happens when truth is withheld. During our safari this month we learned what occurs in systems when the voice disappears. This month’s Safari was not focused on villains but the patterns that give oxygen to the villain. We enter relationships with the fear of losing ourselves or being too much. What if we shifted focus and looked at how we lose ourselves because we were never taught how to be seen. So when that suppression reaches its threshold, it does not come out clean. It comes out as blame.
As reactivity.
As “matching energy.”
As burnout.

What looks like chaos… is often accumulated silence over a long period of time.

Let’s get into it.

Primary Artifact: Silence • Agency • Matching Energy • Nervous System Reactivity • Co-Creation

This Months Video:

Safari Theme:
Voice • Self-Abandonment • Emotional Reactivity • The Illusion of Power • Nervous System Drift • Unconscious Contracts • Agency vs Victimhood

This month we explored how silence, over-functioning, and “matching energy” are not signs of emotional intelligence—but adaptive survival strategies that keep people stuck in cycles of self-abandonment, relational resentment, and nervous system dysregulation. At the core: reclaiming agency requires disrupting the patterns we’ve been calling “protection.”

THE DEBT OF SILENCE — PEACE AS A COVER STORY

We’ve been conditioned to believe silence is maturity, that “keeping the peace” is emotional intelligence. What we are learning clinically is that silence is not neutral—it is a storage system. Unspoken truth does not dissolve; it accumulates, and eventually it converts into relational debt. That debt gets paid through passive aggression, emotional withdrawal, sudden explosions, and distorted narratives. The individual believes they are reacting to the present, but they are actually discharging a backlog. Gilligan (1982) and Jack (1991) both identify this pattern as silencing the self a relational strategy where individuals suppress their needs to maintain connection. The paradox is that the very thing used to “protect” the relationship is the exact mechanism that destabilizes it.

PRO-SOCIAL AVOIDANCE — HIDING IN EMPATHY

This month revealed a more socially acceptable defense:

“I just want them to feel heard first” or “I’ll let them go.”

On the surface, this reads as empathy, what many of us know through the undercurrents— its for control. Fearfully avoidant patterns (Main & Solomon, 1986) show that individuals use pro-social behavior as a way to avoid exposure. By letting the other person lead, you control how much of yourself is revealed, you delay vulnerability, and you maintain psychological distance. This pattern does not stop at home; it shows up in therapy spaces, work environments, friendships groups etc.. Yalom’s Social Microcosm (2002) explains that whatever happens in the external world will replicate in the therapy room. So when clients say, “The therapist isn’t helping,” the question is not always about skill—it is often, “What are you not saying here too?”

THE OVER-FUNCTIONING LOOP: CONTROL DISGUISED AS CARE

To truly understand why you over-function today, you have to explore your family. Look at your mothers, your grandmothers, and the women before you where love, cooking, and cleaning came at the direct cost of your own autonomy. We learned early on in those kitchens that our own emotional climate was not important around these individuals. We watched them carry the weight of the world and erase themselves just to keep the peace. Then condition us to do the same. Fast forward to the future. Now you are in work environments and relationships that mirror that exact same blueprint, showing us where it needs to be uninstalled by us in our behaviors. We have to learn not to regress to the panicked child, the suppressed child, or the avoidant child when tension rises.

Remember that your amygdala does not have eyes; it simply feels the undercurrents of the system and assumes you are still that small child who needs to shrink to survive. It is up to us to train the stallion in our minds and in our nervous systems to settle down. Over-functioning looks like responsibility, but it is actually anxiety regulation. Bowen (1978) describes this as a system imbalance: the more one person over-functions, the more another under-functions. This creates dependency, resentment, and exhaustion. The over-functioner believes, “If I don’t do this, everything falls apart,” but what is actually happening is that their control is preventing the system from adapting. Porges (2011) would frame this as a fawn response—a survival strategy where the individual monitors others instead of expressing themselves. The energy is there, but it is misdirected, keeping the system stuck rather than allowing it to evolve. You are not your grandmother’s survival strategy. Stop holding up a broken system and let it fall so you can finally breathe. Silence does not remove expectations. It hides it in the fine print of the contract you did not sign. This creates what Sager (1976) identified as unconscious contracts: you decide how someone should behave without ever telling them. Then when they don’t meet that expectation, you feel hurt, betrayed, or disrespected, even though they never agreed to the terms. Cloud & Townsend (1992) make this explicit: silence is not kindness; it is a form of dishonesty. Passive-aggressiveness is not random behavior—it is the interest you pay on unspoken truth. The relationship begins to fracture not because of conflict, but because of concealed expectations that were never brought into the open.

CO-CREATION — THE PART PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO SEE

This is where the deepest resistance shows up, because co-creation feels like blame. Over on this corner of the Internet though— it is access to agency. You can believe that or not, but it is the portal. We see this play out constantly when people demand labels like “neurospicy” or lean solely on genetics. It takes the responsibility off of them to implement systems, build habits, and remain consistent. It is being used as a green light to drift, and then complain when they get the side effects of that drifting. It is exactly why people reject hard information—even scientific, epigenetic facts about how we can literally rewire our own brains. People simply do not want to hold that responsibility.

We saw this heavily in the Jillian Michaels debate. Activist movements and spaces often hold narcissistic behavior patterning—individuals victimizing themselves, using double-bind role reversals, and trauma dumping, all while grandiosity themselves to “sweet lemon” or “sour grape” their way out of the accountability needed to get the very grace we all are demanding from others. Co-creation means you participated in maintaining the dynamic—not intentionally, not maliciously, but through silence, tolerance, avoidance, and delayed boundaries. Yes, That’s on you. Perel (2006) and Rotter (1966) both point to the same principle: if you are only a victim of the system, you have zero leverage to change it. The moment you see your role, you regain choice. Without that awareness, you remain stuck in a loop where change feels impossible because responsibility has been outsourced entirely to the other person. Stop using your biology or your past as a prison cell, and start using your awareness as the key.

NARCISSISTIC INJURY & THE PATHOLOGY DEFENSE

When reality does not match expectation, the ego reacts. Kohut (1971) describes this as narcissistic injury. We see this play out in the most basic, concrete ways at home: see what happens when you stop performing for your family. The moment you stop cooking or cleaning the exact way they want you to, or the moment you actually set a hard boundary, notice the shift. Instead of them examining what was not communicated, their response becomes labeling, moral superiority, or blame. They will use deflection tactics to completely avoid accountability and make everything about themselves, effectively sucking up the entire emotional climate in the room.

McWilliams (2011) explains this as a defense mechanism: pathologizing others protects the self from discomfort. It is easier to diagnose someone else than to disclose your own truth. This creates a toxic dynamic where clinical language is weaponized outward rather than used inward for reflection and growth. I want you to reflect on where you learned this behavior from. Who in your childhood used these exact same deflections? Because that is exactly how it is showing up in your adult relationships today. Stop using psychological terms as weapons of avoidance and start using them as mirrors for your own evolution.

MATCHING ENERGY — THE ILLUSION OF POWER

This was one of the most dominant patterns this month. Social media reframes reactivity as empowerment—telling you “they’re cold, be colder” or “they’re loud, be louder",” to “Let a MFer know.” People love to call this “standing on business,” but that is not what standing on business actually is. Standing on business means owning your own alignment and refusing to allow the external world to pull you into its storm. Now, this is not easy!! especially for those of us navigating in-law, toxic work environments, constant gridlock cycles in relationships, etc. It’s not easy, but that is the point. These are portals into the training arena.

Matching energy is actually a trap designed to keep you a drifter. Clinically, matching energy is emotional contagion (Hatfield, 1993), and when done intentionally, it is pure self-abandonment. Hawkins (2002) frames this through frequency: anything below Courage (200) operates in Force. When you match anger, silence, or chaos, you end up matching the lower vibrations of people—which is exactly how they pull you into the “Upside Down” with Vecna. Napoleon Hill (1938) calls this drifting, allowing external forces to dictate your internal state. True power is standing firm and refusing to let people and their dysfunction pull you into the game, the script, the performance, or the over-functioning. Stop letting them set the temperature of the room while you just react to it.

So let the b*tches at work do what they do. See how your brain is worried about them instead of worried about the little one in you that need your attention?

KEY TERMS

1. Silencing the Self — Gilligan (1982); Jack (1991)
A relational survival strategy where an individual suppresses their thoughts, needs, or emotions to maintain connection. While it may preserve short-term harmony, it leads to internal disconnection, resentment accumulation, and eventual relational rupture.

2. Relational Debt (The Debt of Silence) — (Integrated Concept)
The accumulation of unspoken truth within a relationship. This “debt” is eventually discharged through indirect behaviors such as passive-aggression, emotional withdrawal, or disproportionate reactions that appear disconnected from the present moment.

3. Pro-Social Avoidance — Main & Solomon (1986)
A form of avoidance masked as empathy or consideration. The individual prioritizes the other person’s voice or needs as a way to delay or avoid their own vulnerability, maintaining control over emotional exposure.

4. Social Microcosm — Yalom (2002)
The concept that interpersonal patterns present in everyday life will inevitably emerge within the therapy relationship. Silence, avoidance, or control in external relationships will replicate in session dynamics.

5. Overfunctioning / Underfunctioning Reciprocity — Bowen (1978)
A systemic imbalance where one individual over-functions (takes on excessive responsibility) while another under-functions. This dynamic stabilizes anxiety in the short term but creates dependency, resentment, and stagnation over time.

6. Fawn Response — Porges (2011); Walker (2013)
A trauma-based survival strategy where individuals prioritize appeasement, emotional monitoring, or self-abandonment to maintain perceived safety in relationships, often at the cost of self-expression.

7. Unconscious Contracts — Sager (1976)
Unspoken expectations within relationships that one partner assumes the other should meet. When these expectations are not communicated, they become sources of resentment and perceived betrayal.

8. Passive-Aggression as Deferred Expression — Cloud & Townsend (1992)
Indirect expression of unmet needs or suppressed emotions. Rather than communicating directly, individuals express frustration through tone, withdrawal, or subtle hostility—often as a consequence of prolonged silence.

9. Co-Creation (Relational Responsibility) — Perel (2006); Rotter (1966)
The understanding that relational dynamics are mutually maintained. Recognizing one’s role in a system increases agency and the ability to change patterns, as opposed to remaining in a purely externalized victim position.

10. Locus of Control — Rotter (1966)
A psychological framework describing whether an individual perceives control as internal (self-influenced) or external (controlled by others or circumstances). Shifting toward an internal locus increases accountability and behavioral flexibility.

11. Narcissistic Injury — Kohut (1971)
An ego-level response triggered when reality does not align with internal expectations or identity. This often results in defensiveness, blame, or emotional reactivity rather than self-reflection.

12. Pathologizing as Defense — McWilliams (2011)
The use of psychological labels to explain or diminish others as a way to protect oneself from discomfort, vulnerability, or accountability. This maintains self-image while avoiding internal examination.

13. Emotional Contagion — Hatfield (1993)
The automatic or intentional mirroring of another person’s emotional state. When unregulated, it leads to shared dysregulation rather than differentiation or grounded response.

14. Matching Energy (Reactivity Loop) — (Integrated Concept)
A behavioral pattern where individuals mirror the emotional tone of others under the belief that it represents empowerment. Clinically, it reflects reactivity and loss of self-regulation rather than agency.

15. Map of Consciousness — Hawkins (2002)
A framework that categorizes emotional states into levels of consciousness. States below Courage (200) are associated with “Force” (reactivity, contraction), while higher states reflect regulation, clarity, and agency.

16. Drifting — Napoleon Hill (1938)
A state in which an individual allows external circumstances or people to dictate their internal state, resulting in loss of self-direction and reduced intentionality.

17. Malignant Reflection — Kernberg (1984)
A pattern where individuals derive satisfaction from matching or exceeding another person’s negative behavior. This reflects a shift from defense into active participation in dysfunction.

18. False Power — Hawkins (2002)
The temporary sense of control or dominance gained from reactive states such as anger or pride. While it feels empowering, it ultimately depletes psychological and physiological resources.

19. High-Guard State — Porges (2011)
A chronic physiological state of tension and hypervigilance where the body remains prepared for threat. This includes muscular bracing, shallow breathing, and heightened sensory scanning.

20. Stored Trauma (Somatic Memory) — van der Kolk (2014)
The concept that traumatic experiences are held within the body, not just the mind. Physical patterns of tension or reactivity may persist even when cognitive awareness has shifted.

21. Somatic Discharge — Levine (1997)
The process of releasing stored survival energy through physical movement or body-based interventions. Healing requires completion of physiological stress responses, not just cognitive insight.

22. Allostatic Load — McEwen (1998)
The cumulative physiological impact of chronic stress. Prolonged activation of the stress response leads to wear and tear on the body, affecting emotional regulation, cognition, and physical health.

23. Selective Activism (Nervous System Hierarchy) — (Integrated Concept)
The tendency to express agency in low-risk environments (e.g., online or public spaces) while avoiding high-risk interpersonal situations that require direct vulnerability and boundary-setting.

24. Nervous System Hierarchy — Porges (2011)
The prioritization of safety responses within the nervous system, where individuals may feel more capable in abstract or distant contexts but shut down in direct relational engagement.

25. Agency vs Reactivity — (Integrated Concept)
Agency refers to the ability to choose one’s response independent of external stimuli, while reactivity reflects automatic, stimulus-driven behavior rooted in survival patterns.

📚 WEEKLY LEDGER REFERENCE ARCHIVE

Gilligan (1982) — In a Different Voice
Jack (1991) — Silencing the Self Theory
Main & Solomon (1986) — Disorganized Attachment
Yalom (2002) — Social Microcosm
Bowen (1978) — Family Systems Theory
Porges (2011) — Polyvagal Theory
Sager (1976) — Marriage Contracts
Cloud & Townsend (1992) — Boundaries
Perel (2006) — Circular Causality
Rotter (1966) — Locus of Control
Kohut (1971) — Narcissistic Injury
McWilliams (2011) — Psychoanalytic Diagnosis
Hawkins (2002) — Map of Consciousness
Napoleon Hill (1938) — Outwitting the Devil
Hatfield (1993) — Emotional Contagion
Kernberg (1984) — Aggression & Personality Organization
Van der Kolk (2014) — The Body Keeps the Score
Levine (1997) — Somatic Experiencing
McEwen (1998) — Allostatic Load
Walker (2013) — CPTSD & Fawning

REFLECTION PROMPT

Take a moment to pause and notice your internal response as you move through this work. Where in your life are you staying silent and calling it peace, and what is that silence actually costing you over time? As you reflect, see if you can identify a specific moment where you felt the urge to speak but chose not to. What did your body do in that moment, and what story did your mind create to justify staying quiet?

Now shift the lens. If nothing about the other person changed, what would your next move need to be in order to stay aligned with yourself? This is not about confrontation for the sake of conflict, but about recognizing where your voice has been outsourced, and how to get it back.

As you sit with this, gently ask yourself:

Where am I abandoning my voice… and calling it safety?

Closing This Months Safari — WHERE WE GO NEXT?

This month’s safari journey brought up a lot deep in the sediments of our suppressed wounds.

If you’ve been following along this month, you’ve probably felt the shift. This wasn’t just about behaviors or calling out dynamics. We slowed things down enough to see what’s underneath it all—the silence, the over-functioning, the reactivity, the subtle ways we abandon ourselves and then try to make sense of the fallout. And if you were really paying attention, you probably noticed this wasn’t just about “them.” It rarely is. This month wasn’t about finding villains. It was about noticing where your nervous system learned to survive them and how those strategies are still running your relationships, your voice, and your sense of agency today. What we uncovered are patterns, not personalities. Patterns don’t come from nowhere. They come from something deeper.

As we move into April, we’re taking that next step. We’re going into schemas and archetypes—the internal blueprints and roles that quietly organize how you show up in your life. The peacekeeper. The over-functioner. The one who waits. The one who disappears. The one who holds everything together until they can’t anymore. The structured responses that have been shaped over time through our own doing, and they don’t just live in our minds either—they play out in your relationships of all kinds.

So instead of staying in theory, we’re bringing this into real life. The “Okay… Now What?” advice column is open.

If you’re navigating something right now, whether it’s a relationship dynamic, a family tension, a pattern you can’t seem to break, you can write in. Over on this corner of the internet what you’re experiencing is shared. These patterns repeat across people and systems. Your situation is not isolated. It’s data. We are not alone.

Each week, I’ll be selecting one submission and walking through it. Not just surface-level advice, but a full breakdown—what’s happening in the nervous system, which schemas are activated, what archetypes are in play, and what self-leadership actually looks like inside that situation. Real scenarios. Real dynamics. No hiding behind abstract language.

At the same time, we’re going to slow the pace of the Safari a bit. Integration matters way more than speed. You don’t need to pile on more information if your system hasn’t had actual time to process what you’re already seeing. This space is a nervous system gym, not a content treadmill. Slowing down is part of the work.

Behind the scenes, I’m continuing to build the Nervous System Playground—the asynchronous space where all of this will live in a more structured, experiential way. I’m making something you can return to, move through at your own pace, and actually practice instead of just consume. That’s the long-term vision here—less noise, more embodiment. For those of you craving connection beyond just reading and watching, I want to remind you about the free Chasing Milligrams community. That space exists so we’re not doing this work alone. We aren’t performing there. We aren’t competing or trying to get it “right.” We are just showing up as we are, with enough regulation and reflection to actually learn from each other.

So as we close out this month, don’t just rush past it. Notice what stayed with you. Notice what irritated you. What made you pause, what made you want to argue, and what felt uncomfortably true. That’s your entry point.

That’s exactly where your work is.

The Safari doesn’t end here. It just gets closer to you.

Till next time data collectors.

xoxo

Enjoy.

As I type from my own nervous system activation, I decide to write to shed a little of what I am carrying and explain how this might not be the letter you think it is.

You see, being married into a Punjabi family is one thing, but being around cultures that have gaslighting built into them is a completely different experience. I knew the moment I met my husband; I sat on my bed saying, “Something feels too good to be true.” My husband is a great man, a gift from the universe. Fast forward eight years later: the mother wound enters our home, and the “people pleaser” I had retired came back for an encore.

I am no stranger to narcissistic abuse. I believe I fell into psychology because I was a “why” kid. My whole life, I was manipulated to believe that I was the manipulator. I was the “crazy” one. “It’s all in your head,” they said. Eventually, I realized: no—I was the childhood reflection of the life my mother could have chosen but didn’t. I was the glimpse into a life she could have had, if only she had found the courage to walk away from those who mistreated her.

Now, I am not here to smear anyone, but I damn sure won’t be silent. Working in El Paso has placed me in a pressure cooker of wanting to flip a f*cking table. The amount of avoidance, emotional abuse, and gaslighting that occurs in this city is staggering. Especially in the work place. The amount of fear people have just to speak is palpable; so many walk on eggshells here the workplace, even in their own businesses around their own employees.

I try to sit with this pressure. What is the lesson here? My window of tolerance has been stretched. The same avoidance I see within the dynamics of clients, peers, and even colleagues is now facing me front and center in my own living room.

My mother-in-law.

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As I scroll through social media, I am constantly reminded that these platforms have become a breeding ground for emotional immaturity. Everywhere you look, there are women smearing, blaming, and dissecting men in ways that aren’t just critical they’re malignant.

This is the toxic byproduct of the “blind loyalty” mob. It is exactly why I refuse the “girls’ girl” label: because I know exactly how manipulative women can be.

In my professional world, I work with women struggling with mental health issues and hormonal imbalances. I see firsthand how these struggles are frequently used as a license to be cruel, mean, and detached toward their husbands. Yet, the moment a man mirrors even a fraction of that behavior, these same women collapse. The “hate men club” operates on a blatant double standard that I have zero interest in joining.

As a woman who has no problem saying, "I need my man," I see many women suck their teeth at that. They've been conditioned to think needing a man makes you weak, and that pointing out a woman's toxic behavior makes you a traitor.

Let’s unpack why.

Working with women who are chronically unaccountable and externalize blame is easily one of the most challenging aspects of my career. Especially because I have a mother wound that many women can reawaken with how quickly they split into loving you as long as you validate them.

Women often “drag” their husbands into my office, assuming that because I’ve helped them before, or because I’m a woman I’m automatically an ally for their side. I don’t pick sides. I could care less how many people in my comment section disagree with that. There are always three sides to every story, and I have witnessed a shit-ton of Academy Award-winning performances in the therapeutic space.

When a woman assumes I’ll side with her just because we share the same biology, it highlights that toxic “blind loyalty” expectation. I won’t back down. I will shut a session down, and you will forfeit your fee. Women love to use bullying to force compliance; I’ve seen it professionally and personally. When a woman tries to intimidate me into agreement, it gives me a very clear inkling of what happens behind closed doors at home.

This is exactly why so many men request to work with me. They feel safe knowing I am here to bridge the gap, not to join the mob. Trust me, the amount of professionals that automatically believe a woman’s tears is quite alarming if you ask me.

But it isn’t just about marriages.

Women are frequently the primary victims of other women—in the workplace, in friendships, and within family systems. Many of us have endured the wrath of female emotional volatility. These are the same women who are quick to call you “green” or “unprofessional” because you’re the first person to finally name the diagnosis that therapists before were too afraid to say out loud. Let that sit in.

We have professionals that are too afraid to tell clients important information. I have an issue with that.

I have been bullied by women and I have been hurt by men. Yet, I still refuse to co-sign the “man-hating” mob.

Look at the implications: these women have sons, yet they spearhead a culture of contempt. They watch their daughters find good men and do everything in their power to sabotage it because they feel they had to “settle” or stay in a miserable dynamic themselves. They’ve acquired a debt they never should have had, and now they’re making their children and partners pay it back with interest.

How do women learn to regulate themselves without making it their child’s job or their partner’s burden? That is the accountability my work demands.

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As I zoom out, I see the same pattern everywhere. We can look at the data on Postpartum Depression (PPD) and find ways to twist the science to confirm it’s always the man’s fault—la la la, the refrain goes. But at the end of the day, ladies:

You still chose that man.

Why is that so hard to swallow? Because admitting you chose him means admitting you bypassed your own intuition. You ignored the red flags long before the pregnancy test was positive. You saw the signs, you felt the gut-punch of doubt, and you stayed anyway.

To avoid that soul-crushing embarrassment, women perform psychological backflips to flip the script and keep the focus on the man “harming” them. In psychology, we see this play out through two specific forms of cognitive dissonance:

• Sweet Lemons (Ideation): This is when you convince yourself that the mediocre (or toxic) situation you’re in is actually “sweet.” You tell yourself, “He’s just misunderstood,” or “His potential is so great,” to justify why you stayed when you knew better. You sugarcoat a lemon because you can’t admit you bought a bad fruit.

• Sour Grapes (Devaluation): Once the “Sweet Lemon” act fails, the script flips. Now, everything about him and the commitment you made is “sour.” You devalue the entire relationship to justify your current vitriol, completely bypassing the fact that you were the one who signed the contract.

These aren’t just quirks; they are tools used to roll-reverse your way out of accountability. By making him the ultimate villain, you never have to face the woman in the mirror who let herself down. You make it a “tit-for-tat” war because if you can keep him on the defense, no one is looking at your lack of discernment.

So, when will you be accountable for your choice? It’s easier to externalize blame because it allows you to bypass the shame of your own participation. But until you own the choice, you’ll keep making the same one— just with a different face.

The Traitor Within and the Narcissistic Pivot

We have to talk about the “traitor within.” As Jessica Anne Pressler identifies in her work, many of us—myself included—have had our fair share of abusive partners and cheaters. Why? Because that internal traitor guides us toward people who mirror our own limiting beliefs. When you don’t believe you’re worthy of more, you subconsciously match with a partner who confirms that bias. I remember first hand before I married my husband. I guided myself to emotionally unavailable partner that confirmed the way I felt about myself. Cheated, lied, and was even emotionally and physically abusive.

This is how you end up with an algorithm of unaccountable women mobbing up in the comment sections. They aren’t just “venting”; they are actively sabotaging their own ability to ever find or sustain a relationship with a good man. Women are trauma bonding with other women who also hate men and creating an emotional frequency of emotions that don’t serve them at all. but…. Zoom out, how are women Mobbin’ online against men but still swiping right? You are literally looking for a man in a frequency of anger, rage, resentment, hurt, etc. You meet a man in that emotional frequency AND get pregnant?

Think about that….

How we keep bringing children into this world without understanding this is beyond me. Giving birth and raising children changes a woman fundamentally—biologically, emotionally, and spiritually. But we have to acknowledge that the good men in our lives are watching this transformation from the outside, often with no map for what is occurring within the women they love.

We cannot demand grace while refusing to give it.

This is where the behavior becomes undeniably narcissistic. Many women I work with harbor a deep, simmering resentment because their birth was traumatizing or because they were scared and the man didn’t have to “go through it.” They use that pain as a lifelong justification for emotional volatility.

Let’s be clear: Hormones may create confusion and instability, but your character is what decides whether you allow what is happening inside of you to harm those outside of you. Using your biology as a hall pass to be a tyrant isn’t “feminine empowerment”—it’s a character flaw. A character flaw we must learn to own if we ever wish to ascend out of the basement and into the levels where better quality people live. The catch. You have to do the work to get the higher levels.

The Path to Worthy Love

I don’t speak from a place of judgment; I speak from experience. Before I met my husband, I was in a volatile, abusive relationship. I know the darkness of that “traitor within”. But even in the wreckage, I never gave up on the belief that a good man existed. Finding him wasn’t a stroke of luck—it was work, interpersonal work. Especially as a military spouse, that work started with burning the scripts that didn’t serve me. I had to step into radical accountability. I had to learn the skills and tools to pull us out of the mud in seasons where communication failed and emotions ran high.

This month, we celebrate eight years together. 🥰 The “mud” we’ve waded through was worth every second, because we didn’t use our pain as a weapon—we used it as a catalyst to grow. We learned to pause when conflict starts, and I had to learn that despite fights in the past experiences being weaponized against me, used to control me. Conflict with my husband didn’t mean it was over. It meant that we were both authentically showing up as ourselves and learning to work through those differences with compromise instead of control.

To the women who believe there isn’t a “good man” out there: That is a lie. The truth is, we have to develop into the women that a good man deserves. That is the price of a healthy life, and it’s a price many have become too entitled to pay. You don’t get treated well simply because you are a woman. You get treated well because of your character and how you treat yourself.

Stop looking for a mob to validate your bitterness. Start looking in the mirror to find your accountability. The bridge to a better life is right there, waiting for you to stop performing and start growing.

I say this with love.

Till next time Data collectors.

Come as you are where you are.