What does that mean?

When I think about healing for myself I have to really address and face the nervous system baseline of functioning that I have been living in for much of my life. That baseline has been in a chronic state of fear/worry. When you’re in a state of chronic fear, you have to truly be honest with yourself and name, that you have not been in regulation. So the concept of healing is not about finally becoming calm enough that nothing bothers me. Absolutely not that would be madness we’re human, and we will have an emotional response to external stimuli in our environment. The focus point is to really tend to the internal response and the shifts that occur within the body before the response becomes something external other people can see.

There’s so much talk about healing, as if healing involves reaching some evolved place where we never get activated again. Healing also doesn’t mean getting far enough away from the people who hurt us so that we can finally breathe. Think about it, what are you reinforcing your body and mind to internalize through constant repetition of avoidance— whether that is from moving across state lines, suppressing, or simply avoiding any acknowledgment of what needs to be discussed. Some of us believe being in isolation is a form of healing. I see it as isolating ourselves from anything that activates or triggers us. So that closes the window on the amount of exposure training we have to practice regulation strategies. As someone who use to think being single meant I was healing. That became a rude awakening as soon as I got into my marriage and as we face transitions and challenges. We both have blindspots that the marriage revealed needed tending to. Self-awareness is one thing but having and knowing what you’re aware of and facing it head is a very different exposure assignment.

I think healing happens somewhere underneath all of that. Healing happens when the fear beneath our defenses begins to get corrected— more like brought to the surface for deep cleaning. Think about it for a second, every single one of us has defense mechanisms that we have used to protect ourselves from a perceived threat — keyword here — Perception. How do we know something as a perceived threat? Where did we learn that__ is dangerous or equals danger? I asked this because we live in a society today that thinks if someone disagrees with us that disagreement is a form of danger that is a threat to our safety. This is why I challenge so much of our perception in my work. Some of us think a safe love is a threat, and that threat response comes from the perception of feeling suspicious around safety because it feels like betrayal to the baseline for functioning.

So if my baseline for functioning has lived at a 8 (the higher the number 0-10 the more activation, hypervigilenace, and inability to access rest and digest level functioning) being part of relationships even friendships that are in a 3 zone. Those will be less stimulating to the nervous system, causing boredom, and resulting us in unconsciously sabotaging or instigating chaos as a means to feel some sort of familiarity. So going back to our defense mechanisms— those protective strategies. We have to get real clear on the way we were operating as a form of functioning. When the thing organizing the way we see ourselves, other people, love, conflict, safety, abandonment, closeness, control and uncertainty is no longer fear.

That sounds beautiful until you actually have to do it.

Fear does not usually walk into the room introducing itself as fear. Fear comes dressed as discernment. Protection. Intuition. Control. Judgment. Withdrawal. Clinging. Possession. Hyper-independence. Attack and even avoidance. “I’m just being realistic.” “I already know how this ends.” “I need you to understand me.” “I need you to reassure me.” “I need you to change so I can finally feel safe.” It can even show up as psychological language. I know their attachment style. I know what their mother did to them. I know they are avoidant. I know they are a narcissist. I know exactly what this behavior means. Maybe sometimes we do know. I’m not here to deny that at all if you haven’t caught the heart behind my work. A lot of what I say online whether in written or video form is me talking to myself and I’m just allowing witnesses to that conversation. Ya girl has learned a lot about fear and how I believed it served as a means to protect me from future harm.

But:

That sentence has been sitting with me. Heavily.

A Course in Miracles gave me language for something I have been trying to explain psychologically for years. It calls it level confusion. The easiest way I know how to understand it is this:

An example of this is: My body feels anxious, therefore something terrible must be happening.

My partner has not reassured me, therefore I am unsafe.

My body looks different, therefore I am unattractive.

This person withdrew, therefore I am unlovable.

My heart is racing, therefore my marriage is about to end.

They misunderstood me, therefore I am in danger.

Now let’s talk about something real quick. The sensation is real. Don’t think for one second I am minimizing the impact of what that physiological sensation in the body provides us in exacerbated levels of fear and panic. Trust me I’m learning this as well. I am so fed up of living in a nervous system that is constantly firing and wiring in a state of panic even if I logically know there’s nothing to be afraid of. I think that’s one of the hardest parts about this work. Let me give you an example because it happened just now.

The body—meaning my body—didn’t suddenly feel something in my chest and start sending these electric-shock sensations throughout me simply because I heard a dog yelp in the distance that sounded like Charles. It wasn’t just the sound. My ears heard the sound, and then my mind drove it toward a conclusion and started building the story.

My mind basically went, Hey, yo, this is happening.

And my body was like, Oh shit. Do we gotta get ready?

Then the brain goes, Wait, let me get more information.

Here’s where it gets interesting. If my brain had started gathering more information while my body was already activated, what kind of information would I have been looking for? Probably confirmation-bias information. Tainted information. Evidence that matched the story my mind had already started telling me. Because now my body is activated, and I’m no longer necessarily looking through a clear lens at what is actually happening. I’m looking for information from inside the story I’ve already created. Think about it: if I hadn’t had that physical sensation in my body, I could have heard that dog yelp the same way I hear a bunch of dogs out here every day. It would have disappeared into the background with all the other barks echoing around the neighborhood. It would have meant nothing.

So why did my mind automatically go there?

It recognized something that sounded familiar and then created an entire story based on the data it already had: Charles isn’t in the house right now. He’s on a walk. That sounded like him. So it could be him. He could be in danger. Something could be wrong. I might get an emergency call.

Look at how quickly we got there.

One sound.

And within seconds, my brain had damn near produced, directed, and released an entire emergency movie.

I laugh here because doesn’t that sound exhausting? Some of us are living in states like this regularly. Sometimes hourly. Rotating through narratives our minds have created, our bodies have responded to, and then searching the environment for evidence that confirms the very story that activated us in the first place.

The circumstance may also be real. But the meaning is still being supplied somewhere.

The body experiences. The mind interprets.

A nervous system sensation cannot decide that you are being abandoned. Your heart rate cannot announce that your relationship is doomed. Tightness in your chest doesn’t get to determine that someone hates you. Your body can communicate that something is happening, but it can’t independently decide what that something means. Meaning gets filtered through the mind. I think of the mind like a filtration system. Everything passes through it before it reaches our conscious interpretation. But if the filter is already saturated with old fear, old humiliation, old betrayal, abandonment, rejection, unpredictability, criticism or shame, everything entering the system gets colored by what was already trapped inside.

Whats upsetting is we humans then call the filtered water we drink life through reality.

This is why forgiveness has started to mean something entirely different to me.

We always hear, “Forgiveness is for you, not the other person,” and it can sound like one of those empty inspirational quotes people throw at you when they want you to hurry up and stop being angry. But forgiveness really is for us because forgiveness eventually allows perception to change.

Forgiveness does not mean what happened was acceptable.

It does not mean reconciliation.

It does not mean trusting someone again.

It does not mean abandoning boundaries.

It does not mean deciding that something harmful was secretly okay.

It means I no longer want what happened to become the filtration system through which I interpret everything that happens next. If I can’t forgive what happened before, I am not just carrying the memory. I may be carrying the perception it created and that perception can walk directly into my next relationship with me.

I did this in my marriage. My husband did it to me too.

We both entered union carrying realities we had learned somewhere else, and then we unconsciously asked the other person to live inside them. That is what makes relationships such brutal classrooms for development. Truly, it is. The body is a learning device. Relationships of many kinds become a classroom, and conflict serves as tests that are taken in that classroom. Just like fear and intimacy feel like cumulative final exams in relationship classrooms. There are things we can go our entire lives without seeing in ourselves until another person gets close enough to touch them. Which is why proximity has a way of exposing what solitude allows us to never encounter.

You can feel completely healed living alone.

Then somebody you love takes too long to respond.

Somebody misunderstands you.

Somebody pulls away.

Somebody criticizes something you were already ashamed of.

Somebody’s family enters the relationship and suddenly you are negotiating belonging, loyalty, boundaries, identity and culture.

Somebody makes a financial decision that changes your sense of safety.

Now the classroom is open.

And our reactions reveal what we believe, not necessarily what is true.

What we believe.

There is also a form level, and I don’t want to erase it in the name of spirituality or self-reflection.

Was the person self-centered?

Were they controlling?

Did they want everything done their way?

Were promises repeatedly broken?

Did they omit important truths?

Were they emotionally unavailable?

Did they criticize you until you started shrinking?

Did you overfunction?

Did you accommodate things you were uncomfortable with because you were afraid of losing the relationship?

Did you abandon your own boundaries?

Did you keep hoping the person would become someone they had never actually demonstrated the capacity to be?

That data matters.

Collect it.

I am increasingly interested in becoming a data collector instead of immediately becoming a prosecutor. Which today with all this pattern recognition content, it’s starting to become a baseline for functioning to constantly be in as state of recognizing the patterns. Because right now we are being trained to skip observation and move straight into diagnosis.

Narcissist.

Avoidant.

Toxic.

Abusive.

Manipulative.

Gaslighter.

Sometimes those descriptions are accurate and naming abuse can be necessary, clarifying and even lifesaving. I am not interested in minimizing extremes or telling somebody to psychologically analyze themselves while they are in danger. Safety is safety. Now, I also think we have reached a place where the label sometimes becomes the end of the work. Or where we think the work ends. If I can establish that you were the narcissist, then perhaps I no longer have to ask what happened inside me.

Not, “What did I do to cause someone to abuse me?”

That is not the question. I REPEAT , THAT IS NOT THE QUESTION!!

Someone else’s abusive behavior belongs to them.

The question I am wanting to explore is, “What did this relationship teach me about what I tolerate, what I normalize, what I override, what I do when my intuition and my attachment disagree, what I believe love requires from me, and how long I will abandon myself while waiting for somebody else to become safe?”

That is not victim blaming.

That is stewardship, thats the difference.

Self-accountability is not the same thing as accepting responsibility for another adult’s behavior, and if I leave the entire experience believing that the only information available is “they were the problem,” then I may leave with exactly the same filtration system I entered with.

Different person.

Same classroom.

Same fear.

Same lesson.

Same ache.

We all contain narcissistic defenses. We all have moments of selfishness. We all project. We all protect an image. We all have places where shame makes us defensive. That does not mean everyone has Narcissistic Personality Disorder, just like someone withdrawing during conflict does not automatically make them an “avoidant.”

Sometimes the more interesting question is shame.

• What happens when someone cannot metabolize shame?

• What happens when admitting “I hurt you” collapses into “I am a horrible person”?

• What happens when being wrong feels like annihilation?

What happens when someone’s entire identity is attached to being competent, providing, being the strong one, being the responsible one, being the good daughter, being the successful husband, being the person who has everything under control?

You can show someone the pattern perfectly and still terrify them.

Because you may not simply be showing them a behavior.

You may be threatening an identity.

Imagine telling someone whose entire survival system says:

I must control everything or I will die

to simply release control.

You call it freedom, but their body experiences annihilation. Imagine telling someone whose entire sense of worth has been built around providing:

“You don’t have to provide everything to be worthy of love”

That sounds compassionate.

But underneath it may be:

Then who the f*ck am I?

This is one of the hardest things I have had to learn both personally and professionally:

Just because you can see it does not mean somebody has the capacity to see it also.

Insight is not integration.

Information is not capacity. Truth delivered without attunement can become flooding and I have had to sit with my own shame when I reflect on unconsciously flooding other people I cared for due to the patterns I could see that were causing flooding in me.

I have used truth that way before.

I did not mean to overwhelm anyone. I was not intentionally trying to terrorize another person into consciousness. Usually I was trying desperately to create connection.

Do you see it?

Do you see what is happening?

Do you see the pattern?

Do you see how this connects to that?

Do you see why this keeps happening? What I have had to learn and face is if the person on the receiving end can’t metabolize what I am giving them, communication has failed regardless of how accurate the observation might be. That is difficult for me to own because another part of me immediately says, “but nobody cared what was within my capacity!!”

And that may also be true.

There were experiences in my marriage that exceeded my capacity. There were relational and family dynamics I was expected to adapt to long before I had developed the safety or foundation required to hold them. There were things that overwhelmed me. My ego wants to use that as permission: “Then why should I have to care about overwhelming somebody else?”

Because I don’t want the thing that wounded me to become my communication style.

That is where forgiveness becomes a practice rather than a sentimental idea.

I release what happened enough to stop reenacting it.

That does not require me to deny it.

It means what overwhelmed me does not earn the right to turn me into someone who overwhelms others. This is where I want to ring the crisis bell because what I see in society today is a number of hurt people using what hurt them as a justification for why they hurt others.

acknowledging this for me also does not mean dumbing myself down.

Attunement is not shrinking. I am not interested in becoming more digestible by amputating the parts of me that see/feel deeply, but I am interested in learning how to communicate at the level another human being can actually receive.

There is a difference between:

“You’re emotionally avoidant because your mother neglected your emotional world and you are reenacting your entire attachment system with me.”

and:

“When conversations get intense, I notice you disappear from them. Can you help me understand what happens inside you?”

There is a difference between disappearing for three days and saying:

“I am overloaded and I need time to process. Can you give me until tomorrow evening? I will come back to this conversation.”

And then actually returning.

That return matters.

The miracle is not simply that somebody pauses, the miracle is that a new perception allows a new behavior. This is where I think the body becomes fascinating, because the mind can use the body for avoidance.

Attack.

Control.

Withdrawal.

Possession.

Connection.

Comfort.

Communication.

Sexual intimacy.

Violence.

Care.

The body expresses.

But who is teaching the mind?

That question matters to me more and more because we are living in a time when the algorithm has become an external teacher of fear. The algorithm can take your deepest wounds and build you an entire worldview around it.

You feel discarded?

Here are six hundred videos about avoidant partners.

You were hurt by somebody self-centered?

Here are four hundred signs you dated a narcissist.

You’re angry?

Here is an endless stream of content validating why your anger proves you were right.

You are suspicious?

Here is your confirmation.

And now the mind has a teacher.

Fear.

The algorithm does not necessarily care whether you heal because a healed nervous system is probably less profitable than an activated one. The wound keeps scrolling.

And the algorithm keeps feeding it.

I think about Stranger Things when I try to explain this.

Fear is Vecna.

We are living in the Upside Down, but because we have lived there for so long, we start calling it home.

Control feels like safety.

Attack feels like defense.

Judgment feels like discernment.

Withdrawal feels like power.

Possession feels like love.

Hypervigilance feels like intuition.

Clinging feels like loyalty.

Then actual love arrives and terrifies us because love requires us to release some of the defenses keeping the Upside Down intact. What happens when someone actually treats you gently after your entire system has been trained to anticipate abandonment?

You question it.

What happens when someone communicates clearly after years of decoding silence?

You look for the hidden meaning.

What happens when someone doesn’t require you to earn their affection?

You wait for the bill.

What happens when someone gives you freedom after you’ve learned that love comes with control?

Freedom can feel like they don’t care.

A person’s worldview can become so organized around fear that a radically different experience is intolerable. This is what I think it means to be prematurely exposed to a miracle. Not that a magical event suddenly happens and you are ungrateful for it.

The miracle is the new perception, the shift in the way you think, respond, and perceive the world around you. Sometimes the new perception itself is frightening. I think about Pirates of the Caribbean, when the ship has to flip completely upside down to get into Davy Jones’ Locker. The upside down becomes the right side up.

That is what healing can feel like.

The belief that kept you alive suddenly has to die.

The defense you thought was keeping you safe becomes the thing trapping you.

The identity you built around “I don’t need anyone” gets turned upside down.

The belief that love means being chosen gets turned upside down.

The belief that safety means knowing the future gets turned upside down.

The belief that forgiveness means letting someone get away with something gets turned upside down.

The miracle isn’t always getting what you wanted.

Sometimes the miracle is finally becoming able to receive something different by realizing that in order to go right side up. You have to let go of that ways in which you operated from the upside down. often time, before we can even access that new perception, we need support.

A Course in Miracles calls certain external remedies “non-creative agents.” I don’t take that to mean medication or medical care are bad, nor do I believe illness should be reduced to “you were afraid and your mind made you sick.” Bodies are biological. Illness has biological, environmental, genetic and physiological causes. I am interested in the psychological principle underneath the language. Sometimes we need something outside of us to reduce fear enough that deeper work becomes possible.

Medication can be a leg up.

Sleep can be a leg up.

Food can be a leg up.

Movement can be a leg up.

Therapy can be a leg up.

Physical distance can be a leg up.

Structure can be a leg up.

Crisis stabilization can be a leg up.

They may not change the meaning-making machine by themselves, but they can reduce enough pressure that you can finally access the part of yourself capable of doing something with the fear. Medication might quiet panic enough that you can participate in therapy. Physical distance might reduce activation enough that you can actually meditate again, be able to clear your head and make a confident decision.

Sleep might stabilize you enough that everything no longer feels catastrophic.

Prayer may become accessible again.

Forgiveness work may become accessible.

Reflection becomes possible.

You finally have enough space to ask:

What am I actually afraid of?

I think we dramatically underestimate the importance of these practices because they do not always look impressive.

Meditation.

Prayer.

Forgiveness.

Silence.

Breathing.

Walking.

Sitting with yourself without reaching for immediate confirmation.

I have gone through seasons where I could not meditate. I could barely access myself because my entire internal world was occupied by uncertainty and fear. Then I would shame myself because I “should” be able to regulate. Sometimes the first healing intervention is simply reducing the amount of fear in the room.

Not solving your entire life.

Reducing fear enough to see.

That is also why I have become interested in what I call mind power, but not in the manifestation-influencer meaning of the phrase. The mind’s power is that it assigns meaning.

It chooses perception.

It chooses which teacher it will follow.

It can interpret someone else’s discomfort as rejection.

It can interpret disagreement as danger.

It can turn a memory into a prophecy.

It can turn a physiological sensation into a default truth.

And it can also learn another interpretation.

This is why perception matters so much.

That line feels like the center of everything for me right now, and this is because so much of suffering becomes:

• I cannot be okay until they understand.

• I cannot heal until they apologize.

• I cannot move forward until everybody knows my version.

• I cannot feel safe until I know whether this relationship will work.

• I cannot have peace until the outcome arrives.

That gives the external world enormous power. I have spent so much of my life trying to control the perception other people have of me. If I tell somebody I became reactive in a relationship, my mind immediately wants to make sure they understand exactly what my reactivity looked like because their filtration system might take the word reactive and create an image that has nothing to do with me.

Maybe they dated someone who screamed, smashed things and chased them through the house. Now I say “I became reactive,” and their brain paints their experience over my sentence.

We are not the same person.

My mind wants to explain.

Qualify.

Contextualize.

Control.

But something recently came to me:

Yes, people may project their experiences onto my story.

Some people absolutely will, but not everybody has the capacity—or frankly even the interest—to construct the elaborate interpretation I am terrified they are constructing. Sometimes my fear of being misunderstood creates an audience more psychologically sophisticated than the audience that actually exists. So even when someone does misunderstand me, I am learning that misunderstanding is survivable.

I can clarify once.

I do not have to crawl into another person’s mind and redecorate it.

That is healing too.

This is where I think forgiveness eventually leads us.

Not into blindness.

Into clearer sight.

When I am no longer organizing my perception around the wound, I can see things sooner. I can notice incompatibility without needing someone to become the villian in my story. I can notice control without spending three years proving that the person is abusive enough to justify my discomfort.

I can notice emotional unavailability without diagnosing someone.

I can notice that I am shrinking.

I can notice that I am overfunctioning.

I can notice that I keep accommodating.

I can notice that I am clinging to potential.

I can notice that I am trying to force insight.

I can notice that I am waiting for someone to become the person I imagined instead of responding to the person who is actually standing in front of me.

Forgiveness removes some of the distortion.

Then we can make informed decisions based on what we actually see.

That is why the goal is not denying the physical world. If a relationship is harming me, I need to know that. If behavior is controlling, I need to know that. If someone repeatedly lies, I need to know that. If something is abusive in nature, naming it may be important, but naming the form does not complete the healing.

The next question becomes:

What perception in me must be reborn regardless of what happens to the relationship’s form?

That question has been sitting with me because this is the only mind I actually have responsibility for.

• I cannot control what another person says about me.

• I cannot control what version of the story they tell.

• I cannot make someone become self-aware.

• I cannot make someone metabolize shame.

• I cannot force somebody into emotional availability.

• I cannot make somebody choose me.

• I cannot heal someone’s relationship with themselves by loving them harder.

What I can do though—thats the winning focus shift. I can ask what fear has been teaching me. I can decide whether fear continues to be in the role of teacher. In this season of my life, the teacher directing the action has to become love because I have lived too long being taught by fear. And love does not necessarily mean staying, it also doesn’t necessarily mean leaving either.

Love does not automatically mean reconciling.

Love does not automatically mean forgiving and giving someone access to you again.

Love can look like truth.

Boundaries.

Distance.

Repair.

Compassion.

Accountability.

Grief.

A goodbye.

A return.

An apology.

A different conversation.

The action is not what makes it love. The teacher underneath the action does. I still have the part of me that wants to say, “but they did this first.” I still have the part that says, “why should I apologize when nobody apologized to me?” I still have the part that wants the world to understand that the way I became was shaped by what I survived.

That part deserves compassion, but it does not get to drive anymore. The goal isn’t to become the person who wins the case. The goal is to become the person who no longer needs fear to prosecute it. As I type this and reflect, I ask myself: maybe healing is not forgetting what happened. Maybe it is remembering without allowing the memory to become prophecy or ore importantly certainty.

Maybe forgiveness isn’t absolving somebody else.

Maybe it is taking your perception back.

Maybe the miracle is not that the circumstance changes.

Maybe the miracle is that fear is no longer the only interpretation available.

And maybe that is what allows us to finally see clearly enough to choose differently, and maybe we can practice this long enough to explore the fear that lives under our defenses.

Till next time data collectors.

I have decided that September is going to be a month of getting curious about shame.

Not in the let’s all sit around and decide everything we hate about ourselves kind of way. In good ROR fashion. We are still exploring rewiring out of resentment and I don’t know about any of ya’ll but I believe shame plays a role in the cycles, habits, and patterns we find ourself stuck in. I’m interested in shame because the more I study human behavior, sit with people, examine my own reactions, and pay attention to what happens inside relationships, the more I wonder how often shame is present even if lurking in the background of the under currents.

We tend to recognize shame when someone says, I hate myself, or I’m embarrassed. I’m becoming more interested in what happens five seconds later. Getting our Goonies on and exploring the treacherous waters of what shame can activate in behavior. Donald Nathanson’s work describes shame responses that can move toward withdrawal, avoidance, attacking ourselves, or attacking somebody else (Nathanson, 1992). Clinical literature expands on this further: shame-related avoidance can show up through numbing, efforts to undo or escape reality, dissociation, and aggression toward oneself or others (Dearing & Tangney, 2011).

Which has me wondering: How many things we call personality, stubbornness, defensiveness, control, arrogance, avoidance, or “that’s just how they are” are actually strategies somebody learned because shame was an emotion they never learned how to metabolize?

Shame is relational before it becomes personal

Patricia DeYoung’s work conceptualizes chronic shame relationally. Her work brings together attachment, relational psychotherapy, and neurobiology to examine how shame becomes organized within personality through relational experience (DeYoung, 2015, 2021). Janina Fisher approaches trauma from another direction but arrives somewhere complementary: traumatized people can become alienated from parts of themselves, carrying shame, self-loathing, and assumptions of guilt that eventually feel like identity rather than adaptations (Fisher, 2017).

This is where family systems get really fascinating—in a fun exploratory way— to me because none of us came into the world knowing what was “acceptable” inside the family we landed in. So we had to learn it, and well? How do you think we all learned it? Maybe you cried and somebody became irritated, or you told the truth about something happening in the house and suddenly the whole room got cold or silent—possibly even hostile. Experiencing anger? Well it will cost you connection while being helpful earned you warmth, affection, or acknowledgement. Achievement got everybody excited about you, buuuuut questioning an adult quickly got you labeled disrespectful, problematic, or difficult.

I’m not saying every one of these moments automatically creates shame, but I do wonder what happens after years of collecting them and storing them somewhere within the body. Nobody has to sit you down and hand you the family rulebook because your nervous system has been taking notes and listing names the entire time. Storing the data you collect under:

Surviving

This is why I love learning theory because it gives us something interesting to play with. Classical conditioning helps us understand how our brains start connecting things that repeatedly happen together, while operant conditioning gets us looking at what happens after we behave a certain way.

Negative reinforcement is especially interesting because if I do something and an uncomfortable feeling goes away, my brain has a pretty good reason to try that strategy again.

Leave a comment

Let’s play with an example:

🍬 THE CANDY AISLE

Imagine a child asks Mom for candy at the grocery store. Mom says no. The child becomes upset and starts crying, yelling, maybe throwing themselves on the floor. Mom is tired, people are looking, she can feel herself getting overwhelmed, and she just wants the whole thing to stop.

So she gives him the candy.

The tantrum stops almost immediately, and Mom feels relief.

This is where it gets full of blindspots, and remember we all have them. Mom didn’t necessarily give him the candy because she suddenly changed her mind about candy. She gave it to him because giving it to him removed something uncomfortable: the screaming, the embarrassment, the pressure, her own activation. That immediate relief can negatively reinforce her behavior, making giving in more likely the next time she finds herself in the same situation.

Meanwhile, the child is learning something here too and we often overlook the power of witnessing. When I hear no and become uncomfortable, escalating sometimes changes the outcome. The candy itself can positively reinforce the tantrum behavior because something desirable was added after the escalation.

So now we potentially have two people reinforcing a loop together without either one consciously deciding to create it.

Child: “When I make the discomfort bigger, sometimes I get what I want.”
Mom: “When I give in, the discomfort finally stops.”

THIS is the part I want us to carry into our conversation about shame while we explore it this month as part of the rewiring out of resentment series (ROR.)

Consider this:

What happens when the “tantrum” isn’t happening in aisle seven at Albertsons anymore? What happens when we’re adults and the strategy becomes explaining, blaming, withdrawing, controlling, people-pleasing, attacking, or immediately finding somebody else’s behavior to focus on? “Well last week you did___ and I was hurt.”

We are often told that this behavior is malicious, intentional. What if they’re strategies when a nervous system feels under threat?

If so what would it change? Does that change impact you directly?

This excuses nothing, but what happens if we sit with the understanding that so much of what happens around us isn’t actually about us? Sometimes it has far more to do with the nervous system of the person in front of us and their capacity—or lack of capacity—to sit inside their own internal chaos long enough to find their way back to regulation. If explaining, blaming, withdrawing, controlling, or some other strategy makes shame disappear, even temporarily, relief may have just taught the brain to reach for that strategy again and again.

The algorithm might quickly tell us, That’s manipulation. Maybe sometimes it is. My issue with immediately reaching for the most extreme explanation is that we lose all the nuance in between. Do ya’ll know what lives within the in between??

US.

HUMANS.

Think about the grace we would probably want extended to us during a season when we were caught in our own egocentric loops and weren’t showing up like ourselves. Grief, divorce, loss, moves, children, sickness, job loss, stress, family. You name it, we are going through it. We would want someone to understand that there was more happening inside of us than what they could see from the outside. Yet when someone else does something that hurts us, the mind can become incredibly certain: They knew exactly what they were doing. They meant it. They did it on purpose.

Sometimes that may be true, and sometimes we may be watching a person reach for a go-to strategy their nervous system has learned gets those pesky uncomfortable feelings away. The nuanced understanding is, that doesn’t automatically make the behavior okay, nor does it automatically mean they are consciously trying to manipulate us or avoid accountability. Sometimes people are repeating something that worked for them—often times because you conditioned them that it worked. Sigh, that is a hard one to face.

Which leaves me with a much more difficult question to sit with:

Research on experiential avoidance explores a similar loop: escaping an uncomfortable internal experience can bring immediate relief, and that relief can keep reinforcing the escape even when the strategy creates problems for us later.

So let’s put shame inside that loop for a second. Someone tells me something about my behavior that I really don’t want to hear or maybe even admit to myself. I feel that tightening in my body, that little exposure of oh shit, what if they’re right? Maybe I immediately explain myself, remind them of what they did first, minimize what happened, or start collecting evidence for why they’re actually the problem. Somewhere in the middle of doing all of that, I don’t have to sit as closely with the shame anymore.

And there it is: relief.

See the pesky little loop hole it found?

When those well-worn neural pathways find a way to sneak us out of the pressure cooker, even for a moment, the brain gets this tiny sliver of relief that can feel like evidence that whatever we just did must have worked. The problem is that we haven’t actually gotten out of the pressure cooker we’ve just found a little escape valve that releases enough pressure to make staying inside of it tolerable.

*sniff

*sniff

Smells like a trap to me, because the brain remembers that relief and starts reaching for the same escape hatch the next time the pressure builds, giving us just enough of a break to keep us looping through something that never actually resolves what created the pressure in the first place. Sometimes we can live there for years, surviving off these tiny slices of relief without realizing we’ve become incredibly practiced at escaping the feeling while never actually leaving the cycle.

That’s the part I want us to get curious about, I often feel that if we looked at our behavior as a game and that we are stuck on a level because we didn’t gather all the “crayons”— skills needed to beat the big boss at the end. Now we must go back and check the steps, see if we missed some spots. We have the external portion of the assignment down, the hard part is the internal role we play and exploring what we can see in our own behavior. If defending, explaining, blaming, withdrawing, or avoiding gives us relief from shame, what has our brain just learned? How many times do we have to repeat that cycle before we stop experiencing it as a strategy at all and start saying, This is just how I am?

What if “this is how I am” is enough for people?

Now what?

What happens if we are faced with people who are completely content where they are in their life what ever the circumstance. The mind wants to make it feel as if we are not enough but it has nothing to do with us and everything to do with how much the other party had in the tank to meet you where you wanted or needed. That data on another person tells us what we are willing to face in courage, not what we are willing to face trying to get them to change.

Many people out there know exactly the position they put themselves in and still can’t seem to get themselves to move to a forward direction that ultimately benefits themselves, but will cause some grief or even the double whammy— guilt. Attachment grief is a pain many want to avoid at all costs, but relief is one hell of a teacher, It is one hell of a reinforcer of behavior, even maladaptive behavior. Research by Stuewig, Tangney, and colleagues found that shame-proneness was indirectly associated with aggression through externalization of blame; guilt-proneness, in contrast, was negatively related to aggression and externalization (Stuewig et al., 2010). That distinction has been sitting with me because it suggests there may be very different psychological consequences between I did something I don’t like and what I did means something terrible about who I am.

CASE STUDY: “YOU NEVER LISTEN TO ME EITHER.”

Imagine a partner says:

“When you made that joke about me in front of everyone last night, it embarrassed me. I really didn’t like it.”

The person hearing this immediately feels exposed in some way. Maybe there’s a drop in their stomach or heat in their chest, flush feeling in their face. For a split second, the information available is simply: Something I did hurt someone I love.

Now, sitting with that would require tolerating some discomfort. What psychology calls Distress tolerance skills

So instead, the conversation shifts:

“Okay, but you embarrass me all the time. What about what you said to me last week? You never think about how you talk to me.”

Now, look at what just happened.

The focus has moved from my behavior to your behavior. Now I can start collecting evidence against you, defending my character, explaining myself, or getting angry about everything you’ve done. The original discomfort begins to loosen because I’m no longer sitting with I hurt you. Now we’re discussing how you hurt me too.

That relief can become reinforcing, so reinforcing that some couples and families see themselves stuck in the cycle of chronically doing this to each other. Yet, do not consider the silent erosion to the union it causes.

Two possible pathways

Guilt:
“I don’t like that I did that. I can understand why it embarrassed you. I need to repair it.”

The behavior is the problem, which leaves room for me to remain a whole person while taking responsibility for something I did.

Shame + externalization:
“You’re making me out to be a terrible person. What about everything YOU do?”

Now the threat feels larger because it isn’t only my behavior being questioned; my sense of who I am feels under attack. Shifting the blame outward can give me temporary relief from having to sit with that painful self-evaluation. Now I want us to get curious rather than start diagnosing ourselves. The question isn’t “Am I a shameful person because I’ve done this?” That would almost hilariously recreate the exact cycle we’re exploring.

A better question might be:

What happens inside me during those few seconds between someone showing me something about my behavior and my need to show them something about theirs?

In order to access those few seconds, a pause will need to be implemented. There might be a whole lot of information living inside that pause too.

Men: What happens when shame collides with manhood?

I especially want to get more curious about shame in men because I think we sometimes interpret male defenses without examining the emotional rules that preceded them. Research on masculine gender-role strain describes discrepancy stress: distress that can occur when a man experiences himself as falling short of internalized standards of masculinity (Levant, 2011). Other studies have linked masculine discrepancy stress with depression, violence, and other negative outcomes, although obviously this does not mean masculinity or shame inevitably produces aggression (Reidy et al., 2015; Reidy et al., 2018). There is a mob of women reading that last part and disagreeing but then I want to immediately ask, What does that mean for your sons if you have one?

Think about what that might mean inside an ordinary relationship. A woman says, I need you to communicate more. I need you to go to therapy. I need you to be more emotionally available. She may be describing completely legitimate needs. Yet if the man receiving them has organized his worth around competence, strength, providing, emotional control, or never appearing weak, he may hear something underneath her words that she never actually said:

Again, explanation is not exoneration. Understanding why somebody becomes defensive does not require us to tolerate what they do with that defensiveness. I’m interested in what becomes possible when we understand the emotional architecture underneath behavior instead of immediately reducing the person to the behavior.

Women: When care quietly becomes control

Women, I want us in this conversation too.

Brené Brown’s work has helped bring shame, vulnerability, worthiness, and imperfection into ordinary language, particularly around the expectations people internalize about who they believe they’re supposed to be (Brown, 2010/2020). Even the enormous popularity of books such as Rachel Hollis’s Girl, Stop Apologizing tells us something culturally interesting: women clearly recognize the experience of organizing themselves around expectation, approval, apology, and permission. Those books are not equivalent scientifically, but they occupy the same larger cultural conversation about who women learn they are allowed to be. The uncomfortable place I want to explore is what happens when our own shame and anxiety become hidden inside care.

Sometimes I want you to heal quietly becomes I need you to change so I can finally feel okay. Sometimes we can see a man’s family dynamics, avoidance, wounds, or relational patterns before he can see them himself, and being correct about what we see can make us feel entitled to his timeline for discovering it. Boy oh Boy was this a hard lesson I had to face within my own marriage. It doesn’t make sense sometimes for us women when we are told the very behaviors of care and nurturing are causing the very suffocation in our partner. That does not mean we take all the blame, it means we examine the parts our dysregulation plays and how we use care as a loophole to discharge what we refuse to examine. If the behavior is around love, kindness, affection, we can argue that our behavior is supportive. Rather than listen to someone telling us they are not receiving it that way. We always want to get someone else to see their blind spots but let them try to point ours out—defensive.

That is where I have questions.

Can I know something without forcing someone else to know it? Can I identify behavior that doesn’t work for me without orchestrating another adult’s development? Can I recognize another person’s blind spot while remaining curious about my own?

Greenberg’s work on shame and anger is helpful here because he treats them as closely related emotions whose sequence matters; one can sometimes mask or interact with the other, and both can take adaptive and maladaptive forms (Greenberg, 2024). Shame researchers have similarly found that blame and hostility can become pathways connecting shame-proneness with aggression.

Maybe sometimes righteousness feels better than shame.

The generation that “doesn’t believe in therapy”

Then there are our parents and grandparents.

I’m becoming careful about saying the older generations simply “didn’t do the work.” Every generation inherits an emotional vocabulary from the world that raised it. For some families, strength meant silence, privacy meant loyalty, talking about family problems was a form of betrayal. So survival in these systems meant getting up tomorrow and going to work regardless of what happened yesterday. Do that and you are strong, resilient, tough.

Those rules can absolutely preserve dysfunction, but if we zoom in close enough—it can also make historical sense.

That distinction matters.

Living in a system where disclosure once resulted in humiliation, punishment, exclusion, or loss of belonging, silence may have been reinforced long before anybody used words like trauma response. If emotional suppression reliably allowed someone to continue functioning, well we are looking at a form of suppression that had a payoff even if the bill for it arrived decades later, in the generations after. So when we reflect on some of this, instead of beginning with Why won’t this generation talk about anything?, I find myself wanting to ask:

What happened in the world they came from when somebody did?

I don’t know about you but when I ask it that way, I feel a sense of relief and curiosity. The relief for me comes from the reduced pressure that leaves my body feeling as if I must please a generation of people who won’t understand why I perceive it this way and they perceive it that way. That relief you get from the chokehold of pleasing, allows you to be completely ok with what ever discomfort will show up when faced with what ever protest behavior or cognitive dissonance you receive for initiating your first exposure training protocol. Facing discomfort head-on. Especially when we disappoint others by doing what is in our best interest. I don’t mean this in an entitled way. I mean it in a self-sovereign way.

Shame also lives in the audience

There is another reason I can’t explore shame without talking about the internet.

Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed traces the resurgence of public humiliation in digital culture and places it alongside the longer history of public shaming as social punishment (Ronson, 2015). What fascinates me now is how ordinary participation in public shame has become. Someone makes a mistake, a marriage falls apart, an old video surfaces, somebody says something ignorant, and thousands of strangers gather to decide what kind of human being this proves the person has always been.

I wonder what that teaches all of us watching.

We tell people to be vulnerable while maintaining enormous digital archives of their worst moments. We tell them to take accountability and sometimes leave very little psychological pathway back into belonging once they do. We even demand that people grow while occasionally treating evidence that they needed to grow as permanent proof of their character. Yet, here we are—collectively wondering why everyone is terrified of being wrong. Is it that we truly believe we are above being wrong? Or that we are in a society so obsessed with catching you in something to shame you that we are all afraid to mess up. So we don’t move at all.

Subscribe now

Maybe the work is learning to survive seeing ourselves

This is where I’m landing for now, although I expect September to complicate it considerably.

I don’t think the goal is eliminating shame. I’m much more interested in increasing our capacity to remain present when something about ourselves hurts to see. Benau’s work on shame, pride, and relational trauma emphasizes differentiating forms of shame and developing what he calls pro-being pride a capacity to delight in one’s own and others’ unique aliveness rather than organizing the self entirely around maladaptive shame (Benau, 2022). Fisher similarly describes trauma healing as changing our relationship with disowned parts of ourselves, replacing self-alienation and assumptions of guilt with compassionate acceptance (Fisher, 2017).

Maybe that’s part of what allows accountability to become possible.

Maybe shame isn’t the villain we think it is or need it to be? What if shame is actually the portal we have to be willing to walk through to get to the other side of whatever the f*ck so many of us seem to be looping and drifting around in? Like some weird Narnia portal into conscious awareness of self. 😂 Except instead of walking through a wardrobe, we have to walk through the deeply uncomfortable experience of seeing something about ourselves that we would really rather explain away or prove was useful.

There are things we do that we genuinely believe are positive behaviors. I give everything to the people I love. I would do this for you. I always show up. I anticipate what people need. I take care of everybody. Those things may be beautiful qualities, but I think the portal opens when we become willing to ask what else might be hiding inside them. Is there an expectation attached? If I would do this for you, shouldn’t you do this for me? If I sacrifice this much, shouldn’t you recognize it? If this is how I love you, shouldn’t you want to receive it?

Except there is only one of us.

I can be willing to move mountains for someone and still have to accept that another person may not want mountains moved for them—that hurts. I think about how painful it is to pour everything into somebody, do all of these things in the name of loving them, and eventually hear some version of, “I never asked you to do any of that.”

Oooof, because now I have to confront the possibility that something I experienced as love may have also contained an unspoken contract the other person never agreed to. We can give what was never asked for and then punish someone for not receiving it the way we imagined they should.

THAT is the portal I’m talking about. Portal of mirrored truth. Now we get a taste of our own medicine because the sting of shame has us move differently as a means to avoid it. Doesn’t the view from the anger of being stung hit differently? It’s a lot easier to point out the sting in others and still not understand their defensiveness to your comments about it. Because they are already being attacked by shame, they don’t need an added reminder from an external source. Experiencing the feeling of shame in the body feel different for everyone. For me—it makes me feel like I want to through up.

It’s being able to look at something I genuinely like about myself—my generosity, care, loyalty, willingness to help, bubbly personality —and still ask whether there are moments when those same qualities become suffocating for another human. Maybe some of the ways we unconsciously suffocate other people are extensions of the ways we have suffocated ourselves, but adapted to that suffering. If I don’t allow myself to disappoint people, how well do I tolerate someone disappointing me? If I believe love means anticipating everyone else’s needs, what happens when someone loves me without anticipating mine? If I constantly override myself in the name of love, maybe I eventually expect other people to override themselves for me too.

None of this requires us to walk through the portal and beat the hell out of ourselves once we get there. That’s just shame finding another means of discharge as emotional self-harm.

The point is radical acceptance:

That last part let me repeat it. “I can be incredibly self-aware in one area and completely full of shit in another.”

I felt that.

Those realities don’t cancel each other out. Maybe there is some humility in remembering that other people probably see things about us that they haven’t told us yet. Think about how many times you’ve noticed something about someone you love and thought, I’m not saying that because I don’t want to hurt their feelings. Well...why would we assume nobody has ever done the same with us?

There may be people who love us enough to see our blind spots and are still trying to figure out how or whether to tell us. Could it be possible that conscious self-awareness isn’t reaching some magical point where we no longer have blind spots?

What if it’s all in the exploration of becoming a person who can survive discovering one.

As we continue Rewiring Out of Resentment, maybe shame gives us another place to look:

1. What does resentment allow me to keep focusing on in someone else that I may be avoiding in myself?

2. When someone shows me something about my behavior, what happens inside me before I respond?

3. Where have I confused “this is how I love” with “this is how you should love me back”?

4. What have I given, sacrificed, or done without being asked and later resented someone for not appreciating or reciprocating?

5. If I could experience the discomfort of shame without defending, collapsing, or blaming, what might it be trying to show me?

6. What is one blind spot I might be willing to walk through the portal and look at?

Till next time Data Collectors.

References

Benau, K. (2022). Shame, pride, and relational trauma: Concepts and psychotherapy. Routledge.

Brown, B. (2020). The gifts of imperfection: 10th anniversary edition. Random House. (Original work published 2010).

Dearing, R. L., & Tangney, J. P. (Eds.). (2011). Shame in the therapy hour. American Psychological Association.

DeYoung, P. A. (2021). Understanding and treating chronic shame: Healing right brain relational trauma (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Engel, B. (2015). It wasn’t your fault: Freeing yourself from the shame of childhood abuse with the power of self-compassion. New Harbinger Publications.

Fisher, J. (2017). Healing the fragmented selves of trauma survivors: Overcoming internal self-alienation. Routledge.

Greenberg, L. S. (2024). Shame and anger in psychotherapy. American Psychological Association.

Hollis, R. (2019). Girl, stop apologizing: A shame-free plan for embracing and achieving your goals. HarperCollins.

Levant, R. F. (2011). Research in the psychology of men and masculinity using the gender role strain paradigm as a framework. American Psychologist, 66(8), 765–776.

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

Reidy, D. E., et al. (2015). Masculine discrepancy stress, teen dating violence, and sexual violence perpetration among adolescent boys. Journal of Adolescent Health, 56(6), 619–624.

Ronson, J. (2015). So you’ve been publicly shamed. Riverhead Books.

Stuewig, J., Tangney, J. P., Heigel, C., Harty, L., & McCloskey, L. (2010). Shaming, blaming, and maiming: Functional links among the moral emotions, externalization of blame, and aggression. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(1), 91–102.

I saw a family at the lake the other day with their Blackstone.

And listen, this lake is not particularly impressive. 😂 It is certainly not what I’m used to back home in California. There’s dirt everywhere. It’s a little crusty, but there was water. There were trees. There was a fountain and this family found themselves a good spot, brought the grill out, and created a whole little world for themselves.

Noticing that moment made me realize how deeply I have been craving rhythm with pleasure built into it.

Not a vacation or some elaborate itinerary that requires $4,000 and six months of planning. This rhythm also does not include waiting until life finally calms down enough for everybody to be happy and have the time to put in the effort to go.

I mean creating intentional interruptions to ordinary stress.

Maybe Wednesday was f*cking terrible, or your work was chaotic, the kids were overstimulated after school, everybody is tired and somebody still has homework and there are dishes in the sink and emails you haven’t answered.

Okay.

Let’s go get Subway sandwiches and sit by the fountain.

That’s it.

We aren’t solving the logistics of our lives tonight. We’re eating sandwiches outside at the closest lake or park—where ever you can go to decompress and connect with the outdoors. Saturday morning we load up the grill, grab the chairs. Throw the pop-up tent in the car. Bring some books, snacks, water, a football, whatever. Drive thirty minutes to wherever there’s some grass and water. Set everything up and stay there for six hours.

You can read.

You can nap.

You can talk.

You can be on your phone for a little while.

The kids can run around.

Somebody starts cooking.

There is absolutely nothing to accomplish except being there. The thought of this activity is something profoundly regulating about creating spaces in our lives where nothing is being demanded from us.

We spend so much of adulthood responding.

What time is practice? Did you pay the bill? What’s for dinner? Did you call them back? Who’s picking this up? The car needs an oil change. We need groceries. What are we doing about the thing we argued about Tuesday? Somebody needs something. Something needs fixing. Something needs cleaning. We live on Logistics Highway and then wonder why everybody in the car hates each other or can’t get along. When I think about family I think of the beauty in the hustle and bustle. The beauty in the chaos of school mornings, trying to get the kids or yourself into the car and getting the week started. Closing the day together and navigating the extracurricular events or maybe even some home demands. However, despite the beautify of that life moving forward in motion. It also comes with getting stuck on what has to get done so much so that we forget to remain present while living through it.

Relationships need a Play Highway, too. There has to be somewhere we can get off the road of doing and remember that we actually like being alive together. A difficult week can end with, “Tomorrow morning we’re getting breakfast burritos and going to the river.”

That’s the plan.

Nobody needs to earn it first.

The house doesn’t have to be completely clean before we leave. Every problem doesn’t need to be resolved. Nobody has to be in the perfect mood. We don’t have to wait until we’re financially abundant enough to take some enormous vacation. We can bring the breakfast burritos to the river. What I have noticed in society is that sometimes we confuse numbing with recovery time, or decompressing. Going to the bar every Friday might feel like blowing off steam. Scrolling for four hours might feel like rest. Getting high and disappearing into a couch rot session might feel like decompression. Sometimes maybe that’s exactly what we want or may even need in some seasons.

But I’m becoming interested in another question:

What actually restores me?

What brings me back into my body?

What makes time slow down?

What makes me look around and notice where I am?

What makes the people I love feel like people again instead of additional responsibilities?

I don’t know about y’all, but I grew up with productivity being what calculates your worthiness, but more importantly, it is what grants you permission to do nothing. Only when you get your stuff done and the doing nothing must serve a purpose to something else that is contributing to the logistics highway. Why is it that doing nothing simply contribute to your battery recharging or resting your body, your mind. Why can’t that be good enough. It’s a way to agree on blowing and reducing the pressure that gets accumulated throughout the days.

Sometimes recovery looks like packing the cooler, driving twenty minutes away.

Sometimes it’s music playing while somebody stands over a little grill, or it’s your dog lying underneath your chair while you’re reading.

Sometimes it’s everybody sitting around talking about absolutely nothing important, and maybe that’s part of what I’ve been craving when I say I want to live again.

I want a life built around recovery periods.

I want to start adding pleasure into ordinary weeks instead of saved for some imaginary future where everything has finally been “handled.” I want Sunday morning adventures. Walks somewhere beautiful. Dinner outside because the weather feels good. Windows open when it rains, random drives. Apple Hill in the fall. A blanket at the park. A sandwich by the water on a Wednesday when everybody has had enough.

I want to stop treating joy like the dessert we get after finishing life, beucase if we are being honest with ourselves… When are we even finished?

There will always be another bill.

Another deadline.

Another hard conversation.

Another stressful season.

Another thing that needs our attention.

So maybe part of our mission with rewiring out of resentment isn’t creating a life without stress it’s learning how to build a life where stress doesn’t get every room in the house. Stress is a radically accepted part of being human that we include specific rhythms of joy and play or scheduled silence outdoors as a means to manage the stress we have accepted as apart of the life. If we can radically accept stress as part of the every day experience, maybe we can carve a time and space where pleasure has somewhere to live, too. Where the people we love aren’t only the people we solve problems beside, go through conflict, or survive life with.

They’re also the people we sit underneath trees with.

And maybe sometimes healing a tired nervous system really is that ordinary.

A grill.

A tree.

Some water.

Something good to eat.

And nowhere else we need to be.

So as I write this, I ask you, the reader: What is something you will do today to bring a sense of rhythm into your life? The only catch is that the rhythm must have pleasure built into it.

For me, it’s going for evening walks, BUT no podcast or learning videos. Just music, or listening to the sound of the world buzzing around me. It’s deciding I’m going to take my paddle board to the lake. Maybe I’m going to see a movie that evening or meet up for dinner with a friend. Whatever it is, I hope it brings you joy, laughter, and a taste of just how close relief can be when we give ourselves permission to experience it.

I also encourage you during this time to just be. Maybe leave the crime podcasts at home and sit with being in the now. Turn off some of the noise and distractions—the news, the YouTube videos teaching you something, or just the overall constant input that pulls you away from the overarching goal, which is to connect with yourself. When was the last time you sat with just yourself? Had a thought you didn’t need to Google or put into ChatGPT in order to get some sort of response? When was the last time you intentionally sat in silence instead of constantly thinking about what you should be feeding into your mind?

I saw a woman on IG talking about how she was going paddle boarding after work. She gets off at 4 p.m. and basically decided, “I have free will,” so she was going to use it. She was adding fun to her life during the week instead of waiting until the weekend to incorporate it.

This was inspiring for me because I am someone who tends to live with a “school night” mentality. Except now, apparently, it has become a “work night” mentality. It’s this little rule I tell myself about why fun isn’t allowed during the week and somehow belongs only to Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Seeing her say, I have free will, gave me permission to start auditing some of the rules I have given myself as an adult living inside a life I am actively creating.

How effortless is it for us to slip into this default mode where we stop allowing ourselves to play?

Where did we learn to do that?

Where did we learn that being an adult meant we couldn’t make our own rules?

Or that we couldn’t have fun?

When I start my week today, I reflect on the kind of rhythm I’m trying to build into my life now. I also have to be mindful into how my brain tries to define this, because it is not yet another routine I have to perfect or another habit I can eventually turn into a measure of how well I’m doing. I don’t need another bloody checklist. I want rhythm with pleasure built into it. I want there to be things woven into my ordinary days that I genuinely look forward to. Maybe part of becoming an adult is realizing how many rules we inherited without ever agreeing to them. Work first. Fun later. Be productive during the week. Do your chores. Rest when everything is finished. Enjoy yourself once you’ve earned it.

But everything is never finished.

There will always be another email, another load of laundry, another thing I could be learning, fixing, cleaning, planning, or preparing for. I could spend my entire life waiting for the moment when I have finally done enough to deserve an evening that belongs completely to me.

I don’t want to do that anymore.

So maybe this season of my life is less about finding the perfect routine and more about finding my own rhythm. One that has responsibility in it, yes, but also pleasure. Play. Quiet. Movement. Random Tuesday-night plans. Moments where nothing is being optimized and I am not trying to become a better version of myself.

I am simply inside my life.

That sounds like enough reason to enjoy it—don’t you think?

Till next time Data collectors.

Ever notice how many people choose to suffer in silence?

Ever notice how society today bonds over shared gossip and dislike for other people?

What’s the difference between healthy support and gossip searching for validation?

I have been thinking a lot about this. Jessica Anne Pressler made a reel discussing friends that share your vulnerable moments, secrets, or dark times and it really got me thinking.

I myself struggle a lot with trust.

When I think about healthy support I think about discernment. Healthy support protects a person’s dignity while you process whatever you need to process about that person. Without disclosing too much of their personal stuff to another person.

Talking is a great down regulator for some of us. It really is, but when we are hurting, mad, or just upset we may cross lines with how much we disclose about another person while we are upset.

Sometimes something happened in a friendship, marriage, or relationship, and we need another person to help us make sense of it. But there is a difference between processing your experience and turning someone else’s private pain into entertainment as an easy way to collect validation.

When it comes to gossip. That consumes a persons vulnerability. It takes the thing somebody cried to you about, the thing they trusted you to hold, and turns it into something you use to connect with somebody else. I see this A LOT!

I feel so many people don’t know how to connect without having a shared dislike for someone or sharing information about somebody else’s pain.

There is actually research showing that people can feel closer after discovering that they share a negative opinion about another person. Shared negativity can create this quick feeling of, Oh, we see things the same way. You’re on my side (Bosson et al., 2006). That becomes highly addictive.

It may explain why gossip can feel like intimacy, even when it isn’t.

Something I think about is if our connection requires another person to be discussed, exposed, or picked apart, how emotionally safe is that connection?

Many people keep things to themselves not always because they don’t want support, but because they learned they could not trust it when they received it.

Maybe they’ve learned that the people around them don’t know how to handle their pain with care. Maybe they’ve already watched those people talk about everyone else in the room. So they know that eventually, their story will probably become the story being told when they’re not around. There’s something else I’ve noticed, and I want to know if any of y’all have noticed it too.

Have you ever noticed that some people appear way more invested when your life is collapsing? There’s a breakup. A divorce. A job loss. You’re grieving. You’re struggling. You’ve hit rock bottom.

Now they’re constantly checking on you. They want every detail. They want to know what happened, what was said, who did what, and what you’re going to do next.

But when you’re winning? When you get the new job, get accepted into graduate school, move into your own apartment, get married, receive a promotion, or win an award that same level of support becomes a whole lot quieter.

I feel like I’ve been able to emotionally detect that shift my entire life. I could feel the incongruence, even when people told me it was all in my head. This isn’t me complaining about people supporting me when I’m struggling. That’s not what I’m saying. We need people when our lives are falling apart. I’m talking about noticing the difference between the way some people respond to your suffering and the way they respond to your growth.

Research on something called “capitalization” shows that when we share good news with others, their response matters. When someone responds with real interest, excitement, and enthusiasm, it can strengthen both our well-being and the relationship. But passive, dismissive, or destructive responses can have the opposite effect (Gable et al., 2004).

In other words, being able to celebrate someone is also a form of emotional support.

I remember that I started losing friends when I got into graduate school and got my own apartment. My life was starting to move forward, and I wasn’t able to be as available in the same ways anymore.

But when I was dealing with crisis at home, needed somewhere to stay, was going through heartbreak, or had hit rock bottom, people were ALWAYS there.

And because I had sat in rooms and watched some of those same people discuss other people’s private struggles, I couldn’t help wondering what was being said about me after I left the room.

Sometimes we assume the people who rush toward our pain must be the ones who care about us the most. And sometimes they are. But sometimes a person feels more comfortable with us when we need them, when we’re “beneath them”, or when our lives give them something interesting to talk about.

Then when we start growing, the relationship changes because the role we played in their life has changed.

So now I find myself asking different questions.

Not just: Who checks on me when everything falls apart?

But also: Who can stay connected to me when I’m no longer collapsing?

Who can hold my grief without consuming it?

Who can hear about my pain without turning it into social currency?

Who can celebrate my growth without minimizing it, competing with it, or becoming distant?

And who knows the difference between helping me carry my story and making my story theirs to tell?

I don’t think healing means trusting everybody, no way. I think healing also has to include discernment. The ability to pay attention to how people handle other people’s vulnerability before giving them access to yours.

I always feel it as an honor when people share something vulnerable with me. It’s a sign they trust me with something so tender and I don’t want to take that for granted.

I think we need to talk more honestly about the different forms of betrayal that can happen inside relationships. People often act as if cheating is the only way to betray a partner, but betrayal can also look like sharing your partner’s most vulnerable information with your friends.

Their trauma, insecurities, private struggles, sexual experiences, mental health, or something they disclosed in a moment of complete emotional exposure. There’s a difference between seeking support for your own experience and giving people intimate access to a story that was never yours to tell.

When your partner trusts you with the tender parts of themselves, they’re trusting you to protect their dignity, even when you’re frustrated with them. Turning those disclosures into group-chat conversations, jokes, or evidence for why your friends should take your side is a profound breach of emotional safety.

You may never touch another person and still create a relationship in which your partner feels exposed, humiliated, and unsafe with you. Betrayal is not only about where you put your body; sometimes it’s about what you do with the parts of another person they trusted you to hold.

I don’t want my experiences to turn me into someone who is completely closed off because I distrust people, but I also know I have to use discernment more heavily. I’ve been around too many people who used my vulnerability as a weapon against me or as a bridge to connect with somebody else. I think we live in a world where so many people are silently hurting that consuming someone else’s ache can become a distraction from having to sit with our own.

We can disappear into another person’s pain as a way of avoiding what is waiting for us in our own lives. So I’m learning that healing doesn’t mean giving everyone access to me; it means remaining open without abandoning what my experiences have taught me.

I also believe it is a skill when you can be heightened and still filter how much you disclose to your support team.

I was always told don’t speak on what you don’t want repeated to someone else. I believe that is good advice, but I also feel an undercurrent in that. That undercurrent can unconsciously become a protective strategy that may keep us from safe connections. We do need community. They don’t say it takes a village for no reason.

I just think many of us have learned early on in our life that we couldn’t always trust the village.

But, if you have people in your life whom you can fully trust—people who protect what you share, don’t convince you that the incongruence you feel is all in your head, can sit beside you in your grief, and are just as present when you win, please cherish them.

Some of us are fortunate enough to find that safety in friendships or partnerships, and some of us are lucky enough to have it in our parents.

Wherever you find it, don’t take it for granted. Being deeply known without being exposed is one of the rarest forms of love.

Till next time

—Sav

References

Bosson, J. K., Johnson, A. B., Niederhoffer, K., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2006). Interpersonal chemistry through negativity: Bonding by sharing negative attitudes about others. Personal Relationships, 13(2), 135–150.

Gable, S. L., Reis, H. T., Impett, E. A., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The intrapersonal and interpersonal benefits of sharing positive events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(2), 228–245.

One of the harder things I have been learning is that my compassion for other people has often come at the cost of compassion for myself.

I can understand why someone withdraws. I can trace their avoidance back to childhood, fear, shame, emotional neglect, or a nervous system that perceives vulnerability like a crime scene to tiptoe around. I have learned about myself and I can recognize that someone was never taught how to communicate, repair, apologize, or remain present when a relationship asks something difficult of them. Sometimes I can see it so clearly that I start explaining their behavior to myself before I have even admitted how much it hurt me.

Get the app

This is one of the strange liabilities of being highly empathetic. A blessing and a curse is what I always say. You can become so fluent in everyone else’s emotional language that you stop speaking your own. You notice the wound underneath their defensiveness. Or the fear underneath their silence. Maybe you understand that the person who is emotionally neglecting you may have spent their entire life avoiding their own emotional needs. You recognize why your boss controls everything while discharging what they suppress onto every employee. Maybe you have a friend that disappears on your for weeks at a time with no regard or acknowledgement, so when you need support—crickets. You can understand your partner shuts down every time you bring up something real, or why your family keeps asking you to accept behavior they would never tolerate from you. I always refer back to the image of Charlie day connecting the dots:

You can see the line of someone else’s behavior so clearly, yet none of that takes away the grief of how that behavior impacts you. Maybe its in the pursuit of understanding, another that we unconsciously abandon ourselves?

That is the part I have had to stop explaining away.

Understanding why someone hurts me does not obligate me to remain available for the hurting.

I keep coming back to that sentence because I think there has been a part of me that believed understanding someone meant I had to keep giving them access to me. If I could see why they behaved this way, then leaving felt cruel.

Where did I learn that?

Where did I learn setting a boundary felt like punishment that I was handing out onto another being? Not to mention the guilt I may often experience expecting more and how that need felt unfair because I knew they were “doing their best,” even when their best repeatedly required me to accept less than I needed. I confused having compassion for their limitations with making those limitations my permanent living conditions—oooof. That part. I am learning that I can understand someone and still decide that proximity to their patterns costs too much for me. I can have compassion for the childhood that shaped them and still refuse to let that childhood continue shaping my life or causing me to organize myself around theirs. I can recognize that someone’s avoidance is protective for them while also acknowledging that it is painful for me.

Now the hard part, I can believe that they are not intentionally trying to cause harm and still take the harm seriously. Intent can give me context. It cannot be the only thing that matters in the whole equation.

I sometimes think of myself as the Bounty Quicker Picker Upper—the paper towel that is somehow absorbent enough to soak up everyone else’s emotional discomfort. What I mean is that I never want to see another person hurting, grieving, or moving through a season of depression. I have so much empathy for what those feelings can entail that my compassion system goes into overdrive, and I start searching for ways to free them from their discomfort.

Yet, with that being said, I can still understand there can be beauty in discomfort. There can be growth there too. Those of us who tend to be emotional sponges may rush to absorb another person’s pain, believing we are saving them from an ache, when that ache may be necessary for their development—and we are robbing them of that. Read that last part again. As someone who cares. It can be very hard to hear that our form of caring is robbing other people pf developing self-esteem and facing their own mirror for development. Dr. Amen said it best when referring to mothers who unconsciously over mother to the point of “robbing their child’s self-esteem to build their own. Through overcompassion, we may rob both ourselves and the other person of something important: their opportunity to sit with their emotions long enough to metabolize them and grow through them.

That’s development.

Subscribe

There are workplace dynamics where we understand exactly why the environment is dysfunctional. Leadership is overwhelmed. The organization is understaffed. Everyone is operating from urgency energy. The person mistreating us is under pressure from someone above them. We can understand every moving part and still wake up with dread in our bodies and panic in our hearts when we pull up to the parking lot. There are relationships where we understand why someone cannot meet us emotionally. They were taught to suppress their feelings or maybe vulnerability frightens them. Conflict makes them disappear. They need time. They need patience. They need grace. Yada yada… We Know! But— somehow, while we are carefully accounting for everything they need, our own needs go missing from the data.

It happens when I say, “They are going through a lot,” as if I am not also going through the experience of being hurt by them, on top of my own layers of life heaviness. It happens when I make myself easier to neglect because I know they struggle with emotional intimacy. As a result— I keep lowering the bar and I tell myself I am doing this in the name of love. It happens when I become endlessly flexible so no one else has to experience the discomfort of changing, adapting, or witnessing. This last part is something I really need to work on for myself. Being flexible is not always a flex. It becomes self-abandonment.

I think many of us learned that caring means doing. Raise your hand if that’s you?

We do not simply witness another person’s ache, we rush in and attempt to remove it.

We soothe, fix, explain, accommodate, organize, anticipate, and overfunction. We make ourselves useful because usefulness has often been the safest way to secure our place in someone’s life. At least that’s what we may believe to be true. Think about the provider archetype. Imagine a man was conditioned at a young age to provide through monetary means. Imagine that man meets a woman that does not need that level of providing—just wants him. His operating system only know to: pay for this, pay for that, fix this, fix that. Suddenly his partner feels a void in the emotional sector of the relationship. She goes to communicate that to him and is met with defensiveness. He may be feeling not good enough, not appreciated enough. Whole time that is not what she is saying at all. But do they even hear each other? Her emotional need tugs on a level in his own development that is covered in dust and webs, never been touched because it was never required of him in his own family of origin. What does it do to a person when their identify is challenged by something as clear as— emotional availability.

We all learned that we behave X and we get Y.

Somewhere along the way, we may have learned that simply being ourselves was not enough. We needed to provide a specific emotional output (X) in order to receive what we thought was love. Maybe it was acknowledgement, either way that equation over time creates this internalized belief within many of us, myself included. I have even felt it show up as a content creator. With a belief that if I produce more I will be ___. We needed to be understanding, calming, undemanding, insightful, forgiving, available, or easy to love. If we stopped producing, we worried that the relationship might stop too. Abandonment trauma much?

That is difficult to admit because overgiving can look a lot like love from the outside.

Sometimes it even feels like love while we are doing it. Underneath it, though, there may be a quieter bargain: If I take care of what hurts in you, maybe you will not leave me. If I ask for less, maybe I will not overwhelm you. If I understand you well enough, maybe you will eventually understand me. If I keep proving how safe I am, perhaps one day you will become safe for me. That bargain can keep us in painful dynamics much longer than we realize. We are not only waiting for another person to change. We are waiting for all our compassion, patience, and emotional labor to finally produce the relationship we hoped those things would create. This is where projection lives. Where hope resides.

Walking away then feels like abandoning the investment, not only the person. It can look like facing the grief that our understanding could not love someone into becoming available. Think about that last part though. “Not being able to love someone into becoming available.”

That part alone speaks volumes to the trajectory of my life. Loving someone into availability feels like my inner child trying to get redemption for what was never available to her. Then it gets reenacted in my adult life, as loving people into what I needed them to be. In order to feel loved, seen, heard, or even acknowledged. There is an ache in seeing someone clearly and recognizing that you cannot fix what you see—or clean their lens so they could see for themselves. There is an ache in knowing that a person’s behavior comes from pain and deciding that you cannot keep standing close enough to be struck by it.

For people who are used to doing, sitting with that ache can feel unbearable. We want to convert it into action or possibly send one more thoughtful message, offer one more explanation, give one more chance, or find the exact combination of words that will finally unlock the door to their availability. Apparently, we have appointed ourselves emotional locksmiths. I giggle at the visual of myself with the large key ring full of keys to someone else’s emotional availability.

As I sit here and write, I reflect to myself. Maybe part of the practice is learning that I do not have to do anything about another person’s ache. I can care about it. I can honor it. I can sit beside it when doing so is safe and mutual. I do not have to climb inside it and start redecorating. I do not have to turn their healing into my assignment. Their discomfort is not always evidence that I am failing them either. Maybe more people than myself need to hear that.

Sometimes their discomfort is simply what happens when I stop abandoning myself to keep them comfortable. This is where boundaries become an expression of compassion rather than a withdrawal of it. A boundary says, “I see what you are carrying, and I am no longer willing to carry the consequences of it for you.” It says, “I believe your pain is real, and mine is real too.” It says, “I am not punishing you. I am responding to what this dynamic does to me.” There is room for tenderness and distance to exist together. There is also room to love someone and recognize that loving them closely is hurting you.

Choosing myself does not require me to turn someone into a villain. I do not need to erase their humanity in order to protect my own. The algorithm would not be as popular if this was the case for how humans behaved on it. I could easily dive into a rabbit-hole rant about the algorithm’s ability to infiltrate our thinking and condition us to believe that we have to villainize someone in order to cope with the grief and pain their actions have caused.

I do not have to prove that they are a terrible person before I am allowed to leave a job, relationship, friendship, or family dynamic that is depleting me. Sometimes no one is evil, it’s just two histories that meet, and one person’s way of surviving repeatedly injures the other. Sometimes compassion sounds less like “I will stay no matter what” and more like “I understand, and I cannot keep living this way.”

The question I am sitting with now is not only, “Why are they, this, that like this?” I already know how to ask that question. I am very talented at that question.

The newer questions are: What happens inside me when they are like this?

Oooooooo thats a juicy one.

Or

What do I keep sacrificing in order to remain understanding?

I like that question too

What am I afraid will happen if I stop overcompensating?

Do I believe I am still worthy of love when I am not fixing, soothing, or making myself useful?

Can I let another person be disappointed in my boundary without treating their disappointment as proof that the boundary is wrong?

That last question is hard for many of us! Sometimes when we place a boundary we are expecting some sort of instant confirmation that they will respect it. That a receipt will pop out:

“your boundary is confirmed they will accept”

Sometimes they won’t, sometimes there may even be pushback. I am also learning to notice the moment understanding becomes an excuse I am using. What do I mean here when I say this?

What is constant understanding protecting me from? Is there something I don’t want to see? Or be honest with myself about? So I attempt at understanding it away. Maybe what I am seeing requires me to make a choice I am not ready to take action with. Or maybe I am afraid to simple acknowledged that it’s a need weighing heavy on me and it needs to be addressed? Many people do not like change, so avoidance, and suppression are easier. Excusing gives behavior context, but it also acts as an eraser—removing accountability from the other party. Maybe that accountability is something you never see or experience from them. But it’s a lesson that occurs within them. We could be blocking that opportunity for that person simply because we’re overly compassionate.

Understanding allows me to see the whole person. Excusing asks me to disappear from the picture. If my empathy consistently requires me to minimize what happened, silence my needs, override my body, or remain available for repeated harm, then it is no longer compassion. It is self-abandonment and emotional self-harm.

I want a compassion that includes me— don’t you?

I want to be able to say, “I know why you struggle to show up, and I still need people who show up.” I want to say, “I understand why closeness frightens you, and I can’t keep surviving on emotional distance.” I want to say, “I love you, and this version of our relationship is costing me too much.”

That starts with courage

Maybe this is the work: allowing ourselves to understand without automatically volunteering to absorb. Letting empathy inform our choices without overruling our self-respect. Trusting that we can care deeply and still leave. Do you know how many people feel guilty walking away from a toxic work environment? Even if it would drastically improve their health?

Too many.

Compassion is not supposed to require our disappearance. Love is not supposed to be measured by how much of myself I can neglect in order to successfully get the other party to receive it.

Something I always tell myself and the people I work with.

Sometimes, trying to get someone to receive your love can feel like an impossible mission because they can only interpret that love through their own lens. If they feel unworthy, inadequate, or not good enough, no amount of love you give them will necessarily change how they see themselves. It is not always that your love is insufficient. Sometimes, they simply do not yet know how to recognize, trust, or receive it as something that is safe to surrender into.

Understanding someone may soften the way I hold the story. It may help me release resentment and it reminds me that people are complicated, wounded, unfinished, and human.

Yet, so am I

So are you

Maybe, that’s where we have to start.

Till next time

—Sav 🫶🏽

One of the harder things I have been learning is that my compassion for other people has often come at the cost of compassion for myself.

I can understand why someone withdraws. I can trace their avoidance back to childhood, fear, shame, emotional neglect, or a nervous system that perceives vulnerability like a crime scene to tiptoe around. I have learned about myself and I can recognize that someone was never taught how to communicate, repair, apologize, or remain present when a relationship asks something difficult of them. Sometimes I can see it so clearly that I start explaining their behavior to myself before I have even admitted how much it hurt me.

Get the app

This is one of the strange liabilities of being highly empathetic. A blessing and a curse is what I always say. You can become so fluent in everyone else’s emotional language that you stop speaking your own. You notice the wound underneath their defensiveness. Or the fear underneath their silence. Maybe you understand that the person w…

Read more

Many of us may feel lost in the forest of life right now. We might be lost in the hippocampus forest—the archives of our minds. The past, the imprint, the wounds, the scars left on our hearts. We might feel lost in our marriage or in our relationship, in our life choices, our career. We may feel lost in where we’re going, what we’re doing, and what we have done. I find myself in that place too. It’s a liminal hallway that sometimes seems to continue to stretch farther out the more I continue on. When I read the poem “Lost” by David Wagoner and I dive and pick it apart in the way that my brain loves to, I realize how much my sense of self has been rooted in fear and panic. How the imprint in my timeline, the fear of abandonment all have led me—took the wheel and driven me through my life. It’s easy to feel that we have healed when we are single, living alone, or unchallenged by others around us. My marriage has revealed a lot of what is still leading me in panic and fear.

And when you’re in panic and fear, your entire relationship to your surroundings changes. It’s almost like one of those holographic images where you’re in a hallway, but it’s moving so quickly that everything around you is blurry. My attention starts to narrow, my brain starts to search for danger, and I can find it in everything because—well— I am in the unknown. Since my nervous system is a runner and a track star, I become preoccupied with getting somewhere else. Somewhere—Safe. What is safety id danger is all you have known? I think that last part is true for many of us00 reaching for safety as certainty. We’re always trying to get somewhere else. Make this much money. Have this car. Buy this house. Have these children. Have this wedding. Have this. Have that. Thinking that once we have it, we’ve arrived.

But what truly is arrival?

In the poem Lost, it taught me a lot about learning how to be. In a way that has been so difficult for me. Especially in society today, we’re being conditioned to be with the noise, to be with the headlines, to be with the injustices, to be with the grief, the ache of the world. And all of that information within the environment has become an obstacle rather than just what it is— data.

So when I read, “let the forest find you,” I see it as a message. A message to stop frantically trying to escape our present experience long enough so we can actually inhabit it. That leads me to think about my marriage, and the many marriages of my clients, peers, and friends. How do you inhabit something as an anxious when you’re with an avoidant? Because if you think about it both sides of the coin are not inhabiting the relationship—they are running from it. We’re running from it in our own different way. The algorithm loves to shame avoidant partner, damn near condemn them. I have my beef with the algorithm beucase it definitely can infiltrate our minds, how we perceive, and what we deem as “safe.” “Stay away from an avoidant,” “They’re a narcissist run.” Everyone’s a this, a that, or a something else. But what about the people who are doing the pointing? What about the people who are doing the labeling? Who are they? Where are they lost? What are they doing to contribute to what they attract into their life. whether thats a career, friends, a partner, a lifestyle. We all play a role in the life we chose to participate in.

“Victim blamer” has become a phrase for the uncourageous. Those without the courage to step into the shadow of their own behavior.

I reflect on the idea of being lost and how, for me, it feels like being lost is a relationship between ourselves and our demand to know where we’re going. I can be sitting in a forest with somebody, picking you up and plopping you besides me in the trees, and wherever you are in your life, navigating whatever it is, despite us being in the forest in that moment, we’re not actually in the same place cognitively and emotionally anymore. We’re lost within our own interpretations. We might be in the forest. But we’re probably lost in our own mind within that forest, in our own griefs, in our own aches, in our own perceptions of what is or what will be. Despite the lush trees and bushes around us helping guide us back to the now.

For many—myself included. The now is terrifying.

I think about what my work teaches. I think about psychology, biology, neuroscience. All that fun juicy stuff. How our thoughts can literally change our heart rate and our breathing. It can shift our body, digestion, and our hormone balance. What we appraise cognitively impacts the way that we perceive it, which is the filtration our mind uses to cast out our perception of the world—often times projecting that as a default truth for everyone else. And all of that has an influence not only on our automatic responses, but also our neuroendocrine responses within the body. So again, if we’re lost in the forest, if I take you from whatever crisis you’re dealing with at this moment and I plop us in the forest, you’re just going to be another person lost in a forest with all those automatic responses happening in the body.

Subscribe now

I think about self-fulfilling interpersonal patterns. And how my current life right now is literally a self-fulfilling pattern. Being in this marriage, living in this military life, having an in-law in my home, navigating the dynamics of what that feels like. Oftentimes feeling as if I don’t even belong in this life.

Where is, Savannah? Where does she fit?

How has what I expected due to the imprint in my timeline unconsciously influenced what I’m noticing in my current reality because of fear? And how is that impacting the way that my body responds, which impacts how I behave, which, of course, then influences my lived experience?

If we as a society are being conditioned not only by what we’ve already experienced—our childhood adversities, the imprints in our timeline. But also being normalized through conditioning to live in an environment that pushes lack of safety on us every time we pick up our devices. Now we’re perpetually, repeatedly thinking about lack of safety, lack of trust, which only creates our attention becoming sensitized to evidence of unsafety, meaning that’s all we see. So any form of ambiguous information gets interpreted through that expectation lens because we’re being conditioned to normalize it. We go through 20 different emotions while scrolling our phones. Everything is ADHD now, and labeled “genetics.” I can’t help but scream at the fact that the environment gets bypassed. Our habits, and how we choose to live out our daily life cognitively is something we can learn about. Watch a YouTube video about, scroll reels about. yet, what are we actually taking from that education? How are we applying it to our life behaviorally?

When we are mobilized, we behave differently, and people are responding to that behavior, and that response becomes new evidence for the original belief, which is where confirmation bias lives, which is why I talk about undercurrents that many of us, myself included forget that we are emitting out into the world as emotional pollution. The concept of “we are not our thoughts” is such a hard concept sometimes for me to understand as I simultaneously drown in my own feelings of doom, uncertainty, and panic.

If I’m lost in the forest, based off this poem, I could practice separating what comes up inside my mind. One of the thoughts says, “I’m doomed,” and I could ride with it, embody that feeling because of the automatic response—which for me typically looks like a psychological metaphor for jumping off the cliff. Or I can simply say, “My mind is bringing up this thought that says “I’m doomed,” and now I’ve created a very different relationship with that same thought, all because of choice. And yet that choice seems so difficult to make.

When you think about ACT, I immediately think of cognitive defusion. It teaches us to create a little bit of space between ourselves and our thoughts. Instead of “I’m doomed,” it becomes, “I’m noticing that my mind is telling me I’m doomed.” The thought hasn’t disappeared, and we aren’t forcing ourselves to replace it with something positive. We’re simply changing our relationship to it. The thought becomes something happening within our awareness rather than an absolute truth we have to organize our entire body and behavior around. if I apply this concept to what the poem teaches. Then cognitive defusion is essentially learning that just because a thought appears in the forest with you, it doesn’t mean it knows the way out. It won’t provide you with the sense of certainty. The GPS coordinates to get to that certainty. We all learn that the nervous system is drawn to familiarity right. So what is certainty then if now what you are familiar with?

Leave a comment

Being able to observe those thoughts as just a mental event rather than just completely becoming one with it and identifying with it. Getting sucked in by them as if it was VECNA pulling you into the upside down. Which is very hard even for someone like me that teaches this stuff. The Bible even brings speaks on this with Corinthians 10:5. Paul talks about “taking every thought captive.” The Bible also talks about renewal of the mind.

How many of us are actually practicing those things? How many of us actually know what that would look like concretely?

I think the poem is really helping us to ask ourselves: What are we being asked to surrender?

Someone like me, who has an overactive brain and thoughts that zip around creating intense physiological states that impact my perception and how I show up in the “now,” surrendering feels extremely scary. Because what do you mean you want me to stay lost? Especially when you have an imprint of abandonment in your timeline. Being “lost” doesn’t just feel like uncertainty. Being lost can feel just like abandonment. It can feel like nobody is coming, like I have to figure this out, like I need to know where I’m going before something bad happens.

And what happens when you’re constantly living with that fear of abandonment? For me, I become frantic about trying to orient myself. I need to know where I am, where this is going, what this means, what’s going to happen next. But I’m asking the same mind that is terrified by uncertainty to somehow manufacture certainty for me. So it searches. It analyzes. It predicts. It watches. It tries to turn every piece of information into that GPS. And because it cannot actually know the future, the searching never really ends.

Maybe that’s part of what surrender is asking of us. Not to stay lost forever. Not to become passive or pretend that direction doesn’t matter. But to stop demanding that we find our way out of the forest while we’re too frightened to even see the forest clearly. Maybe surrender begins with allowing ourselves to be where we are long enough for the panic to stop deciding what everything means.

To just stop trying to orient yourself.

In our current modern society today, that might literally mean stop scrolling. Stop the noise. Stop the comparisons. Stop the what-ifs. Stop the shoulds and the shouldn’ts.

When I think about this period in my life that I’m in, the things I’m navigating within my own marriage, the fears, the questions, the doubts—will we survive this? Will we get through it? Will we remain together? Will we separate and divorce?—have been drowning me for most of my marriage. I used to tell myself I never wanted to get married because I didn’t want to deal with the pain of having to get through a divorce. I don’t necessarily think that’s a healthy thought process to start a marriage. It was definitely a protective narrative. So now, at 35, I’m faced with looking at what direction I want to take.

As I work with so many couples, I see how so many people, so many women, are gripping. Gripping the relationship to its death. Overanalyzing every nonverbal behavior to its death. While their partners simultaneously avoid the relationship to its death. But are they avoiding the relationship? Or avoiding the intensity of what feels intolerable to face? I ask this for both who fall in the role of avoidant and anxious, because if you ask me. Both roles are avoiding something. They’re avoiding the intensity that comes with facing relational distress, crucial conversations, and relational dynamics that come with all forms of relationships.

We’re all out here on a self-fulfilling prophecy mission of confirming the very things that we constantly cling to and fear are true. And now, with all of this language online and the education and the labels and the ideologies, we’re using all of that to support our own demise.

Isn’t that ironic, what humans do willingly to themselves? Isn’t it confusing too?

Some of us wish and pray for the very things that we see everybody else doing. I think the influencer world has created this notion that there’s a perfect life out there, a perfect person, a perfect marriage, a perfect something. And when we’re constantly looking for “the right one,” “the right job,” “the perfect life,” we have to really ask ourselves:

What is “perfect?” What is “happily ever after," and where did we even see it to even know that it exists?

Because if you think about it, that’s going to be extremely subjective depending on who you’re asking.

I think getting lost in the forest is a metaphor for a deeper form of wisdom. When you think about stillness, and what I’ve internalized stillness to mean for myself, it requires the involvement of distress tolerance skills, but we’re not going to go there. I want to just pull away from all the educational words.

I think it just truly involves tolerating uncertainty without immediately manufacturing certainty to soothe ourselves.

As somebody who constantly needs certainty in order to feel safe, this has been such a hard concept for me to grasp.

When we think about psychology, it may say: becoming aware of the thought without immediately obeying it. From a nervous system lens, it might say: reduce enough mobilization that you can perceive more than a threat. But if we’re coming from a more contemplative state, it might say: become still enough to observe consciousness rather than being swept by every mental event that takes place within the mind.

And then I’m going to reach for Scripture here just for funzies:

“Be still and know that I am God.” — Psalm 46:10

None of this says, “Be still and know your desired outcome.” That’s certainty. None of it says, “Be still and know you’re on the right path.” That’s also certainty.

We are basically taking certainty and we’re placing it somewhere else.

I don’t necessarily know what’s happening next.

I just know I’m in the forest.

I just know I’m lost.

I just know I’m still.

I just know who God is.

I just know I am in the now.

Finding security in that narrative versus the fear-based ones. Pulls us out of the VECNA grip, that often leaves us suffocated.

Stillness does not give us the definitive answer for our future and where we will end up. If our marriage will last. If this job will work out. If this business idea will grow.

But I do think stillness provides us with something very valuable.

Stillness reveals how much of our own suffering was coming from our demand to know the future before we were even willing to inhabit the present.

What do you think?

—Till next time.

Come as you are, where you are.

Data Collectors,

I hope you are all doing well. When I think about writing this essay I too want to model what touching expression highway is like for me. My personal life feels chaotic at the moment. So many bits of uncertainty, the unknown, are we moving? Are we not moving? Whats the military going to do for my husband. What if, What if, What if…

For me, I have learned so much about my nervous systems need for certainty and bloody hell. It’s rough when life just can’t give you that certainty. I want to sit on expression highway with you all today and for me this is very difficult due being a private person and not really feeling the need to share every vulnerable thing that occurs in my life. However, I have been experiencing storms of burn out, marital tension, family dynamics and an overall feeling of justing wanting to crawl into bed and stay there in the fetal position. Not to be dramatic or anything. Being online is very draining, people tend to believe that once you reach a certain number of followers that you automatically have a team of people and make X amount of money. Not me. I chuckle here because a team means I would have to hire people, and hiring people requires trust, and ya girl struggles with that. 🥴 I know I know. This is apart of life I get it, but when it comes to my content and my platform, there is so much noise that it can become so overwhelming to the point where I get tempted to just unplug it all— I won’t— but I do at times need to take a step back.

Once I take a step back the questions start to happen. People DMing me, people in my personal life reaching out to me. Etc etc. I have learned so much about myself through this rewiring out of resentment series. Especially when it comes to receiving care, concern, or even love from others. I have limiting beliefs too, that I have developed from the imprints within my own timeline. Now, I have had to slow down a bit with my content, my written work, my community. All the things. I have a full case load of clients and I am doing all of this alone. Sometimes many of us out there in the wild load our plate to the brim because we feel it’s honorable, productive, whatever the narrative may be. I am realizing the implications of loading my plate while also needing to keep priority on my clients as well. It has been a whirlwind of navigating the demands of being online, the amount of people reaching out to collaborate, and overall learning how to balance while also not losing myself in the process.

When I think about expression highway I have thought so much about my own personal expression within my platform. You see I try to keep it very educational. Not sharing too much about my own personal life and challenges. There is a push to share more but I also don’t want to over share. That’s an art in itself. For me— expression can feel very vulnerable, especially publicly. Now, when it comes to expression in our relationships—whether romantic or platonic or with family. There is a difference between a relationship being unsafe and expression feeling unfamiliar inside your body. I think we keep collapsing those two experiences into one, and then we wonder why so many relationships stay stuck on Logistics Highway, why they stay superficial or even shallow in nature. We talk about schedules, groceries, children, work, money, appointments, gossip of others and everything else that keeps the household moving, relationship intact, or connection feeling stable. The moment we have to say, “This hurt me,” “I miss you,” “I need more affection,” or “I am scared you don’t understand me,” suddenly the whole nervous system starts acting like we are standing in front of a firing squad.

That does not automatically mean the person across from you has created an unsafe environment. Sometimes they have. Some people mock vulnerability, interrupt, dismiss, punish honesty, weaponize what you share, or become so defensive that there is no room left for your experience. We need to be honest about that. But we also need to be honest about the possibility that nobody ever taught you how to stay present through the heat of expression, just like nobody may have taught the other person how to stay present in that same heat while being on the receiving end.

Let me explain.

Expression Highway is not always peaceful. It can be clumsy, awkward, activating, embarrassing, and deeply uncomfortable. Your voice may shake. You may forget what you wanted to say. You may feel the urge to overexplain, shut down, leave the room, get louder, or suddenly make the conversation about something else. That internal distress can become so intense that you conclude, “I cannot talk to you,” when what may also be true is, “I do not yet know how to tolerate what happens inside me when I speak.”

That is where distress tolerance matters.

Distress tolerance is the ability to remain present with emotional heat without immediately escaping it, exploding it, suppressing it, or handing full responsibility for it to another person. It is being able to feel exposed without deciding exposure is danger. It is being able to hear your partner misunderstand you without immediately believing they never cared. It also looks like being able to pause, clarify, breathe, and return instead of treating every imperfect conversation like proof that the relationship is doomed. Even for us with licenses and degrees, those do not exempt us from the distress tolerant skills necessary to help regulate ourselves in the face of activation.

The ability to build distress tolerance skills and have capacity for intense conversations also connects to how we receive love.

Some people deeply crave softness, care, affection, and nurturing, yet they reject it when it arrives, simply because they do not know how to receive it. A man may want to be cared for when he is sick, overwhelmed, or stressed, but his socialization may have taught him that receiving care makes him weak. A woman may want emotional support, but if care has historically come with control, disappointment, inconsistency, or a hidden cost, her body may brace against it before her mind even understands what is happening.

Then we minimize our own ache.

We say we are fine when we are not. We pull away when someone reaches for us. We laugh off what hurts. We become uncomfortable when someone tries to soothe us, hold space for us, or even be willing to just listen. We reject affection, reassurance, help, and tenderness, and then over time the people around us learn to stop offering it. They assume we do not want it. They believe we can handle everything alone. They start responding to the version of us that we have repeatedly presented.

Then the narrative becomes, “Nobody cares about me.”

That story may feel completely true by the time we say it. The affection has decreased. The check-ins have stopped. The person may no longer reach for us the way they used to. But when it comes to healing— it requires us to ask whether that absence was the beginning of the pattern or the outcome of it. For me in this example the narrative could be assuming motive, feelings of others, or potential rejection in anticipation of walking on expression highway. “What will people think of me if I share xyz.” Now, in Sav style I also have to say. Okay…and? But here are some other reflections to consider.

1. Did people truly refuse to care for me, or did I repeatedly make care difficult to give?

2. Did I communicate my needs clearly, or did I expect someone to interpret my withdrawal correctly?

3. Did I say, “Please sit with me,” or did I become cold and hope they would chase me?

4. Did I ask for affection, or did I reject it so many times that my partner learned to protect themselves from the rejection?

These questions are uncomfortable because they move us out of the courtroom and resentment loves a courtroom. It collects evidence, assigns roles, and keeps replaying the same testimony. I am the one who gives. You are the one who withholds. I am the one who tries. You are the one who does not care. Once those roles harden or start to solidify within the nervous system, confirmation bias starts to grow and it will help both people keep proving the story true. You cannot compete with another person’s limiting beliefs forever. If someone believes they are unlovable, ignored, disrespected, or destined to be abandoned, every imperfect moment can become evidence. You may offer reassurance, consistency, affection, repair, and patience, yet one missed bid for connection becomes proof that you never cared. The relationship slowly turns into an endless attempt to disprove a conclusion that existed before the current moment.

That is exhausting.

Leave a comment

At some point, both people have to become responsible for examining the stories they keep bringing into the room. One person cannot spend the entire relationship trying to love the other person out of a belief they are committed to protecting. Reassurance can support healing, but reassurance cannot replace self-examination. Love can create safety, but love cannot force someone to trust safety when their entire identity has been organized around expecting disappointment.

This is part of rewiring out of resentment.

We have to stop automatically treating our feelings as complete evidence, or the default truth. Feelings give us information, but they do not always give us the whole story. “I feel like I cannot talk to you” deserves exploration. What happened when you tried? Were you dismissed? Were you mocked? Were you interrupted? Did the person become threatening or retaliatory? Or did your own body become so activated that you abandoned the conversation before the other person had a real opportunity to meet you? Sometimes the answer is both. Maybe your partner has poor listening skills and you also have poor distress tolerance. Maybe they become defensive and you become accusatory. Maybe you minimize your needs until you explode, and they only hear your needs once they are wrapped in criticism. Maybe both of you keep waiting for the other person to make Expression Highway completely comfortable before either of you agrees to travel it.

That road does not become easier through avoidance. It becomes easier through frequency. We must gain our frequent flyer miles on expression highway in order to build the necessary distress tolerance skills to navigate the heat and discomfort that comes with expression highway and being vulnerable. The more often we practice naming small truths, the less every conversation has to carry six months of resentment. The more often we ask directly for what we need, the less likely we are to rely on testing, withdrawal, mind-reading, or emotional scavenger hunts. The more often we practice sitting with discomfort, the less likely we are to confuse activation with danger. You do not need to wait until you are perfectly regulated to express yourself. We just need enough awareness to recognize what is happening while we are are doing the expressing. So here is an example, You can say, “I am getting overwhelmed, but I want to finish this conversation.” You can say, “I notice I want to shut down.” Or, “I need a pause, and I am willing to return.” You can also say, “I am afraid you will dismiss me, and I am trying to give you the opportunity to hear me.” That is practice.

This is vulnerable, Much of the reasons why we avoid expression highway is because of the fear of how the other party may respond to us. Shame, fear, guilt, rejection. These emotions we have not built tolerance skills for. Rewiring out of resentment requires us to become curious about our own participation without using accountability as another weapon against ourselves. The goal is not to blame yourself for every way you have felt unseen. The goal is to understand the full pattern clearly enough that you stop recreating it. Blame is also a way we get stuck in gridlock. Trying to get accountability from others while not being accountable for what we are unwilling to express—that can be problematic.

Subscribe now

Ask yourself:

1. What happens inside me when someone tries to care for me?

2. What kind of affection do I reject even though I later complain that I am not receiving it?

3. When I say I cannot express myself, what specific behavior am I responding to?

4. Am I asking someone to disprove a belief that I have never seriously questioned?

5. Do I know how to stay on Expression Highway once the conversation becomes emotionally hot?

Resentment grows in the space between what we ache for and what we are willing to risk asking for.

Rewiring begins when we learn to tolerate enough discomfort to tell the truth, receive the response, and remain present in ourselves long enough to discover whether the relationship is actually unsafe or whether intimacy has simply asked us to use muscles we have never developed.

Till next time data collectors

I’ve been sitting with something lately. I think this is one of the greatest struggles of being human. We think we’re responding to what’s happening in front of us, but most of the time we’re responding to what our nervous system believes is happening. Those are two very different things. One is rooted in reality. The other is rooted in prediction. Our brains are constantly trying to answer the question, “Based on everything I’ve experienced before, what does this moment mean?” We don’t just experience life. We interpret it. That interpretation becomes our reality long before we’ve ever stopped to question whether the story we’re telling ourselves is actually—true.

So let me jump in with a personal story. Now, for those who do not understand my work. I am not here for the trauma bonding and getting you to feel seen in your ache while keeping you ruminating in it. My work is about challenging our own perceptions, behaviors, and the way we project them outwardly onto the people closest to us. The personal stories I share are not to villainize, anyone even if they are case studies. So let’s proceed.

Since returning home from my trip visiting family in California. I came home to my lego bonsai broken… Mind you this is not about the lego tree it’s about the principal. Now I ask my husband “why is my lego tree broken?” This man proceeds to tell me he “dusted it and it broke".” Now, this man does not dust anything that is not in his garage. My MIL lives with us and let’s just say, it’s been a rough couple years to say the least. What many of us do not realize, its never about the person themselves, its about the system they quietly bring WITH them. He proceeds to tell me a story that I know is false. My nervous system turns on, which as a result because I am a smiley person causes my face to change. Ugh, I don’t know about any of y’all but those of us who wear our emotions on our face. It can be hard. When I am not smiling— if I am concentrating, in panic mode, or even afraid. My face can have a hardcore RBF. It gets me into trouble. LOL. I digress. I am activated which means the story my mind starts to tell me considering my husband and I have been in a ROR season ourselves is— “You are picking your mother over me, you always pick her side.” All it takes is one feeling in the body, and the mind movies start to flow like an avalanche attack. I have been doing the work internally to really try, but in-laws… More importantly it’s what they do to our partners.

Ever heard of the statement regressed child? When we are around our family or even our parents and there are unhealed, unacknowledged wounds. We tend to regress to the version of ourselves that had to survive around them. For me I over function, for my husband— he disassociate into distractibility and autopilot mode. For others, they may start to engage in learned helplessness, people pleasing, etc. Take a moment and reflect what do you tend to regress into when you are around certain family, OR even specific coworkers. Yes, these same dynamics that we will be speaking on today get reenacted in the work place.

Anyways…

The longer I do this work—both professionally and personally—the more convinced I become that communication doesn’t begin when someone opens their mouth. It begins long before that. Before anyone says a word, our nervous system has already traveled through a series of internal highways that determine how we’re going to perceive what comes next. That’s why I’ve spent so much time developing what I call the Highways of Functioning.

We spend so much time trying to improve communication while completely overlooking the highways that produce communication in the first place. We focus on the argument, the defensiveness, the shutdown, the people-pleasing, the lie, the apology, the withdrawal, but all of those behaviors are simply the destination. They aren’t where the journey began. For me in this moment with my husband, mind you— just like many of the readers and followers of my work, we too are experiencing resentment towards each other— no one is exempt. With military life, not being in our home state of California, deployments, relocations, job stress, and adding in other family on top of a foundation that my husband and I have never really gotten to call our own. These little moments for us can turn into big moments when the foundation has cracks in it.

Within seconds, I could feel my body changing. My chest tightened. My thoughts sped up. My brain immediately started connecting dots that had absolutely nothing to do with a plastic tree. If he’ll lie about something this small, what else does he lie about? Who is he protecting? Why couldn’t he just tell me the truth? Am I being thrown under the bus again?

Let’s pause here beucase we gotta hop in the Delorean for this one. Let’s go back to my childhood where my mother would prioritize relationships over her children. Living in an environment where your own mother was surviving unhealthy relationships. It lead her to saving herself at the expense of her children. Now I do not share this to shame anyone. I share this to help the readers understand this is how our nervous systems get molded. By early childhood development and the attachments with care givers. I learned early on that I could not trust. I learned early on that you can be thrown to the wolves if it meant someone needed to protect themselves from a person they chose to be with. That could be your parent, step-parent, etc. Much of my attachment imprinting was rooted in watching little lies with the adults, get projected or displaced onto the child as a way for one of the adults to seek safety. Does that make sense?

So my amygdala —that doesn’t have eyes— is now taking me and my entire 35 year old body on a time travel date to the past. I felt fire inside. Now, it does not help that there is a lot of manipulation in the family system that my husband also survived. You see, in a society always screaming out that everyone else is the narcissist or manipulator. We forget that we all have survived something in our childhood. So when I am in this moment It was fascinating to watch because I knew enough to realize that I wasn’t reacting to the lego tree anymore. I wasn’t even reacting to the lie. I was reacting to the meaning my nervous system had assigned to the lie, and that meaning was pulling from roads that had been built decades before this conversation ever happened.

I think this is where so many of us get ourselves into trouble. We believe we’re responding to reality when, in reality, we’re responding to the filter we’ve been drinking life through for years. I’ve started thinking about it like a Brita filter. Water doesn’t go straight into your glass. It passes through a filter first, and whatever is inside that filter determines what eventually reaches your cup— and then reaching your stomach because you drink it up. I think our minds work the exact same way. Every interaction we have passes through our own internal filter before it ever becomes our conscious experience. Our childhood passes through that filter. Our attachment wounds pass through that filter. Our family system, our religion, our culture, our betrayals, our fears, our heartbreak, our previous relationships—they all become part of the filtration system we use to make sense of the world.

That’s why two people can experience the exact same event and walk away believing two completely different things happened. Such as siblings living in the same home. One person hears avoidance; another hears abandonment. One person hears hesitation; another hears rejection. One person notices a small lie; another person’s entire attachment history comes flooding back online. The event didn’t change. The filter did. That’s what I find so fascinating about human behavior. We spend so much time arguing over who has the correct interpretation while completely ignoring the fact that neither one of us is drinking straight from the source. We’re all drinking through filters that were built by experiences we didn’t always choose. So when you think about what kids do when they get caught or are in trouble. They end up lying as a means to avoid trouble but all it does it dig their hole deeper. Well, those kids are inside all of us adults. So when we regress, we engage in that same behavior as a means to avoid the discomfort of perceived threat, conflict, etc. Not necessarily as a means to protect someone except ourselves.

That realization has softened me—not because it’s made me excuse behavior that hurts, but because it’s helped me separate understanding from agreement. Reminder, you do not have to agree to acknowledge or reach some sort of clarity. Those two things are not the same. Understanding someone doesn’t remove accountability. It doesn’t erase consequences. It doesn’t suddenly make harmful behavior healthy. What it does do for me at least is interrupt my certainty that everything happening in front of me is happening to me. Sometimes the behavior we’re experiencing has very little to do with us and everything to do with the highways another person’s nervous system has been traveling for decades in order to function and survive. That doesn’t mean we tolerate it, no no no. So for those of you whose pesky little brains think that what I am saying means tolerate abuse. I want us all to turn on our discernment mechanisms. This work does not always apply to those in extreme situations. The issue though is we live in trauma territory and many people think not getting their way is traumatizing.

This work means we stop reducing human beings to the worst thing they did in a moment when their nervous system was trying to survive. In my ASL interpreting we frequently used API- assume positive intent. I means have you ever had to cuss someone out but it wasn’t you that was saying it, you had to be the translator for it? When it comes to API I think we’ve become really bad at that as a society, but think about it. Assuming the positive doesn’t really get someone to buy your course or click follow these days.

The Highways We Travel Before We Ever Speak

One of the greatest mistakes I think we make is believing that behavior appears out of nowhere. We watch someone lie, shut down, explode, become passive-aggressive, people-please, or avoid conflict, and we immediately make the behavior the entire story. We label the person instead of becoming curious about the highway their nervous system traveled before we ever witnessed the destination. Behavior is visible. The highway that produced it usually isn’t. Undercurrents— is what I like to call them. Before we ever arrive on the Communication Highways, our nervous system has already traveled through several internal roads that determine how we’re going to experience the moment. We all have a baseline. We all have a perception. We all have behavior because of that baseline and perception. Then, and only then, do we begin communicating with another human being, but get this. The problem is that most of us think communication starts with our words, when in reality it starts with our nervous system. Many people don’t communicate with their words at all. They communicate through avoidance.

Think about it for a second. Have you ever had one of those days where you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and someone asks you a completely innocent question? On another day, you probably would’ve smiled and answered without giving it a second thought. But today? It feels like criticism. It feels like pressure. It feels like someone asking for one more thing when you don’t have anything left to give. The question didn’t change. Your baseline did due to the environmental situation. The same thing happens with perception. Our brains are prediction machines. They are constantly scanning the environment looking for familiar patterns because familiar patterns have kept us alive. The brain doesn’t ask, “Is this objectively true?” nearly as often as it asks, “Have I felt something like this before?” If the answer is yes, it starts pulling old files before we’ve even had a chance to consciously think. That’s why a small lie doesn’t stay small. It gets attached to every other memory within that hippocampus forrest (archives) that carried a similar emotional weight.

When I noticed my Lego tree had been broken, my brain wasn’t just looking at a broken Lego tree. It was looking for context. It was trying to understand why the explanation didn’t make sense, am I right about the findings? In this case yes, my husband did not dust it himself that makes no sense, why now, and why after I left? it was very clear his mother did, but was my interpretation from the nervous system accurate on why he lied about it? No— at first it wasn’t. As I sat with it, I realized something that honestly made me sad more than it made me angry. I don’t actually think my husband was trying to hurt me. I think he was trying to protect himself. Those are not the same thing. If you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you know I care deeply about making that distinction because intention and impact are two completely different conversations. The impact still matters. The hurt is still real. Accountability still exists. But understanding why someone behaved the way they did often changes how I decide to respond.

Subscribe now

It only took me 15 mins after telling him he doesn’t need to lie about it. The context needed here is that there has been a lot of boundary violations, manipulation, triangulation, and just straight up dysfunctional dynamics interfering within our own marriage due to outside family influences. Many couples go through this when in-laws, family members, etc make their way within the marital union. So for my husband his A.S.S (activated survival self) Must have been not wanting to deal with conflict, making me upset beucase maybe he has caught onto the pattern within me, who knows. His A.S.S is very familiar with my A.S.S and so his nervous system took him down the path he is familiar living in. He had his reason for doing it. Now in many Indian families and other cultures— lies are a big part of how the system functions. Because we center around the elders and pleasing them. When I would do uber and lyft I picked up many people from different backgrounds. Young teens that would hop in the car change their outfits that they had underneath before getting to school, sneaking people in the home, lying about whether or not you ate meat before going to the temple or Gurdwara. This is normal behavior for many families. For me, lying makes me feel out of alignment. Why lie about something so small? I guess this is why I get called abrasive. I tend to name things.

Let me give you another example. Suppose every family system has a plate of meat. That meat represents, trauma, wounds, behaviors, patterns that all go unnoticed, or avoided. So that meat gets placed in the closet. Deep deep down in the closet. Overtime it starts to rot, that rot has a smell. Kids start to smell it and the system (parents) who learned from their parents. We don’t smell anything, maybe because they are nose blind. So now the kids learn to become nose blind to that smell. Now add in a new person not apart of that system. That start naming the smell. Calling it out, trying to look for it. Everyone is telling that person that smell does not exist—now they feel gaslighted because they can clearly smell the rotten meat. Was the system intentionally trying to gaslight that new individual? Or were they simply responding to their reality. That they have become nose blind to? That’s the point.

The more I reflected on it, the more I thought about how many people grow up in family systems where telling the truth isn’t actually safe. This is mostly because honesty disrupts the emotional climate. If telling the truth leads to someone exploding, withdrawing, giving you the silent treatment, shaming you, or making you responsible for their emotional state, your nervous system learns something very quickly: Protect the emotional climate first. That’s where little lies are born. I work with many kids and teens, and let me tell you, even adults—specifically husbands don’t feel like they have the safety to speak in the session due to what may occur after the session.

I don’t think most people wake up in the morning thinking, I’m going to become dishonest today. I think most people are trying to avoid discomfort they’ve learned is dangerous. Somewhere along the way, their nervous system decided that managing another person’s emotions was safer than tolerating another person’s disappointment. That strategy may have protected them as a child. It may have even protected them in an unhealthy workplace. But eventually that same strategy follows them into adulthood, into friendships, into marriage, into parenting, and into leadership. This is why I believe so many of us are arguing about behavior while completely missing the nervous system underneath it. We see someone avoiding conflict and immediately call them weak. We see someone people-pleasing and call them fake. We see someone shutting down and call them emotionally unavailable. We see someone lying and call them manipulative. Sometimes those labels fit— trust me—they do fit. Sometimes they don’t though and thats the part of the online space we don’t always address. But I think we’ve become far too comfortable ending the conversation where curiosity should actually begin.

That’s what I want this work to challenge. Not your boundaries. Not your discernment. Your certainty. Because certainty is comfortable. Curiosity requires courage. And I’ve found that healing ourselves almost always asks more of us than certainty ever will. Trust me y’all I am still learning this too.

Emotional Climate Managers

As I kept sitting with this, I realized the broken Lego tree wasn’t actually what my nervous system was responding to. It was responding to something much older—something I see in families every single day. It was responding to what I call emotional climate management. I don’t think enough people talk about this because it’s so subtle that, when you’re inside of it, you don’t even realize it’s happening. You just know that certain people dictate the emotional atmosphere of an entire room, and everyone else unconsciously begins organizing themselves around that person’s comfort. Just look at some of the workplace dynamics people are tiptoeing in.

I’ve seen it in marriages. I’ve seen it in parent-child relationships. I’ve seen it in church communities. I’ve seen it in military families. I’ve seen it in corporate America. I’ve seen it in court cases where children are terrified to tell the truth because well—loyalty binds. They don’t want to upset mommy or daddy but being truthful in what they see occurring and how they feel about it. So what happens? They try to protect one parent’s feelings from the other. Different environments. Same highway.

Someone in the system cannot tolerate discomfort.

Everyone else begins carrying it for them.

That’s where I think these little lies are born. Maybe telling the truth means someone explodes. Maybe it means someone cries. Maybe it means someone gives you the silent treatment for three days. Maybe it means you’re called disrespectful. Maybe it means you’re shamed. Maybe it means you become the bad guy simply because you disrupted the emotional climate that everyone else has spent years maintaining.

Eventually, your nervous system stops asking, “What’s true?” and starts asking, “What’s going to keep everyone regulated?”

When I think about my husband, I don’t just see the man standing in front of me today. I see the little boy who learned how to survive inside of his family system. I see someone who had to navigate loyalty, obligation, respect, culture, expectations, and emotional consequences long before I ever entered the picture. That doesn’t excuse behavior that hurts our marriage, but it helps me understand that what I’m often witnessing isn’t simply my husband making a conscious decision to choose someone else over me. Sometimes I’m watching a child-sized survival strategy living inside an adult body.

Honestly, I don’t think this is unique to him.

Remember how I mentioned the workplace? Go to any workplace and you’ll find the exact same dynamic. Everyone knows who not to upset. Everyone knows whose mood determines whether the office is going to have a good day or a bad day. People start changing the way they communicate depending on who is in the room. They sugarcoat. They over-explain. They avoid difficult conversations. They gossip in private because they don’t feel safe speaking directly. Then we wonder why trust slowly erodes.

It’s the same highway.

Or think about parenting. A child or teen throws a tantrum, breaks a rule and is immediately given a consequence. Let’s say the father wants to be more stern with reinforcing these consequences while the mom struggles with being the “bad guy”. So despite grounding the child or teen she proceeds to buy them something. Mostly to soothe her own discomfort with the reinforcement of the boundary. This dynamic is what many parents struggle with. The parent immediately caves because they can’t tolerate the discomfort of their child being upset with them. The toy gets bought. The consequence disappears. Peace returns. The emotional climate has been restored, but nothing was actually repaired. The child didn’t learn how to tolerate disappointment. The parent didn’t learn how to tolerate being temporarily disliked by the child. They both learned that whoever experiences the most discomfort gets to control the system, and the parents may even end up divided because of it.

I think that’s one of the greatest family systems lessons I’ve ever learned.

The irony is that the people carrying everyone else’s emotions often believe they’re the peacemakers. They think they’re keeping the family together, or that they are preventing conflict. But underneath that peace is usually fear. It’s not genuine harmony. It’s compliance. Everyone has simply learned which version of themselves they need to become in order to keep the system functioning. I know what that feels like because I grew up in a system like that. My nervous system learned very early to scan the room before I spoke. To read faces. To predict moods. To figure out who needed what before anyone even asked. That hypervigilance served me as a child. It made me incredibly observant. It’s part of what allows me to do the work I do today. But it also means my nervous system can mistake familiarity for truth if I’m not careful, utilizing pause, and deep discernment.

That’s why I’ve become so passionate about cleaning the filter I’m drinking life through. Because if I don’t, I’ll keep confusing old survival strategies for present-day reality. And I don’t want to build my life—or my marriage—on roads my nervous system paved decades ago.

Loyalty Doesn’t Always Mean Love

One of the hardest things I’ve had to accept is that loyalty and love are not the same thing. We talk about loyalty like it’s automatically a virtue, but I’ve come to believe that loyalty, by itself, is morally neutral. You can be loyal to truth, and you can be loyal to dysfunction. You can also be loyal to healing, and to secrecy. You can be loyal to a family system that taught you to abandon yourself in order to belong. Raise your hand if that last one hit you? I know it did for me.

That’s what makes loyalty binds so difficult to recognize as adults.

As adults, loyalty binds become much harder to recognize because they disguise themselves as personality. We call someone conflict avoidant when, in reality, they may have spent thirty years learning that conflict was never emotionally safe. We call someone a people pleaser without asking what happened the first time they disappointed someone they loved. We criticize someone for lying without wondering if honesty once carried consequences their nervous system still remembers. Again, this isn’t about removing accountability. It’s about refusing to reduce human beings to behaviors without understanding the roads that produced them. Todays society is so focused on what we want to see as the villain, but what if we are all a villain to someone out there in the world, even if we weren’t intentionally trying to be?

The more I’ve reflected on this, the more I’ve realized loyalty binds exist far beyond the family. They exist everywhere we build identity. They show up in our politics, our religions, our communities, our workplaces, and even in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Every single one of us is looking through a lens. The question isn’t whether you have one. The question is whether you are aware that you’re looking through it, drinking life through that tainted Brita filter.

For some people, it’s a political lens. Every interaction gets filtered through Republican or Democrat. For someone else, it’s a religious lens. Every disagreement becomes a battle between good and evil. For someone else, it’s a racial lens. As a multiracial woman, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this one because I’ve experienced what it’s like to exist in multiple worlds at once. I’ve had people tell me that if I don’t automatically agree with every perspective coming from one community—the black lens, then somehow I’ve betrayed that community. I’ve been called anti-Black simply because I refuse to see the world exclusively through a Black lens.

Here’s what I want to be very clear about.

I’m not saying my perspective is the correct one.

I’m saying I don’t want any single lens to become the only lens I look through.

The same is true for gender.

The same is true for sexuality.

The same is true for religion.

The same is true for culture.

The same is true for trauma.

The same is true for attachment.

The moment any one lens becomes the only lens through which I can understand another human being, I stop seeing the complexity of the person standing in front of me. I stop being curious. I start becoming certain, and our brains love certainty even if it’s false. Chasing certainty is one of the quickest ways to lose our humanity.

That’s part of what concerns me about the algorithm.

It rewards certainty.

It rewards outrage.

It rewards us for finding people who drink from the same tainted filter we do, while convincing us that everyone drinking from a different filter must be wrong, dangerous, or beyond redemption. We build entire communities around shared pain, shared anger, and shared enemies. We mistake agreement as a form of connection and outrage for wisdom—mob mentality behavior. You know I always say this as I reflect on my small group of friends. Many people today bond over shared gossip and dislike for others. Which is why it is so important to be cautions who you are breaking bread with. Sometimes misery does love company, but many times people need to trauma bond or co-ruminate with someone else to feel seen. Before long, we’re no longer seeing people. We’re seeing categories, pain, and shared dislike for others.

But then something happens that reminds me who we really are.

A natural disaster.

A mass tragedy.

A child goes missing.

Someone collapses in a grocery store.

A family loses everything.

Think about the images we’ve all seen after hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, or after 9/11. In those moments, people weren’t standing in the rubble asking, “Who did you vote for?” They weren’t checking voter registration before pulling someone from a collapsed building. They weren’t asking if the person bleeding beside them was Black, White, queer, straight, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, atheist, Republican, Democrat, or Independent.

They saw another human being.

And they moved toward them.

That’s the irony that keeps me hopeful.

I don’t believe compassion disappeared.

I think it gets buried beneath the filters we’ve spent our entire lives protecting.

Strip away the identities for just a moment, and our humanity has a remarkable way of remembering itself. We know how to help. We know how to comfort. We know how to protect one another. The question is whether we’re willing to remember that before life forces us into another crisis.

Because I don’t want to wait for tragedy to remind me that the person standing across from me is, first and foremost, another human nervous system trying to make sense of the world—just like mine.

Little Lies, Big Worries

When I first sat down to write this, I thought I was writing about a broken Lego tree. Then I thought I was writing about attachment wounds. Then I thought I was writing about loyalty binds. Somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t writing about any of those things. I was writing about worry. More specifically, I was writing about how little lies have a way of creating really big worries. Not because the lie itself is catastrophic, but because the moment uncertainty enters a relationship, our nervous system immediately begins filling in the blanks—madlibs style. We don’t like not knowing. We don’t like incomplete stories. So our brain does what it’s always done—it starts predicting.

The irony is that little lies usually don’t accomplish what we think they will. We tell ourselves we’re protecting someone. We’re trying to avoid conflict. We’re trying to keep the peace. We’re trying to save someone from getting hurt. But if you’ve been reading this far, you already know what happens next. The lie doesn’t eliminate discomfort. It simply transfers it. Instead of having one uncomfortable conversation rooted in reality, we now have a nervous system trying to make sense of uncertainty. And uncertainty is fertile ground for worry.

The moment reality becomes unclear, our brains get to work. What else aren’t they telling me? Why didn’t they just tell me the truth? If they’ll lie about something this small, what happens when something really matters? None of those questions are irrational. They’re the brain trying to close an open loop. Our nervous system is desperately looking for solid ground, and when it can’t find it, it starts building stories out of old memories. That’s where the filter comes back in. We aren’t just responding to today’s moment anymore. We’re responding to every moment that ever felt like this one.

I think that’s why anxiety grows the way it does. It rarely starts with panic. It starts with uncertainty. Uncertainty becomes worry. Worry becomes hypervigilance. Hypervigilance becomes overthinking. Overthinking becomes assumptions. Assumptions become behaviors. Before we know it, we’re checking phones, reading into text messages, replaying conversations, asking for reassurance, withdrawing, people pleasing, shutting down, becoming defensive, interrogating, or pushing someone away before they have the chance to hurt us first. By the time the behavior shows up, we’ve completely forgotten that it all started with one tiny crack in reality that our nervous system couldn’t make sense of.

That’s why I don’t actually think self-sabotage begins with the behavior. I think it begins with the worry. Most people aren’t trying to destroy the relationships they care about. They’re trying to escape the uncertainty they don’t know how to tolerate. If I convince myself you’re going to leave me, maybe I’ll leave first. If I convince myself you’re lying, maybe I’ll start looking for more evidence until I accidentally create the very distance I was afraid of. If I convince myself I’m not safe, I’ll start protecting myself from a threat that may not even exist anymore. Suddenly the behavior makes perfect sense because it was never really about the behavior. It was about the worry underneath it.

That’s why honesty is so much more than a moral principle to me. I think honesty is one of the greatest gifts we can give another person’s nervous system. Honesty doesn’t guarantee they’ll like what they hear. It doesn’t guarantee there won’t be conflict or that they’ll agree with us. But it gives them something a lie never can. It gives them reality. Reality allows me to respond to what actually happened. A lie forces me to respond to everything my nervous system imagines might have happened, and I don’t know about you, but my imagination is almost always far crueler than the truth.

Maybe that’s why this little Lego tree ended up teaching me something so much bigger. Little lies don’t stay little because our nervous systems won’t let them. They become worries. Worries become stories. Stories become behaviors. Behaviors become relationship patterns. And if we’re not careful, we end up blaming ourselves, blaming our partners, blaming our parents, blaming our politics, blaming our culture, blaming everyone around us, when all along we’ve been drinking from a filter that’s been asking one question over and over again:

“Am I safe?”

Maybe that’s the real invitation here.

Not to become someone who never worries.

Not to become someone who never gets activated.

Not even to become someone who always gets it right.

Maybe the invitation is to become someone who notices when their nervous system starts writing a story and has the courage to pause before treating that story as truth. Because sometimes the greatest act of love isn’t avoiding an uncomfortable conversation. Sometimes it’s telling the truth, trusting that the relationship is strong enough to hold it, and refusing to leave the people we love alone with the stories their nervous system will write in the silence.

Little lies create big worries.

And I don’t know about you, but I think this world already has enough worry.

With love

Data Collectors,

I hope you are all doing well. Since being back home, I have been connecting with nature, and my heart is feeling so full. I have also been doing a lot of reflecting alongside my own spiritual study, and there was something in Chapter II, Part II of the A Course in Miracles text that really stuck with me. The question is:

I had to really sit and think about it. In today’s society, especially as a clinician working with couples and families, from what I can see and hear, it could easily feel like many people treasure being “right.” But I wanted to examine this even deeper, at the heart and soul level—and y’all know me: I see things through a trauma (imprint) lens. So let me apply this question to myself, and I hope you will do the same as I provide examples from my own life and nervous system. When I think about the journey we are on with Rewiring Out of Resentment (ROR), I think about relationships, of course—whether that is with family, with my husband, or within relationships outside the home. I sit and ponder the ache I feel when I am caught in shitty tennis matches, going back and forth, and I feel that activation inside.

Am I trying to be right?

That question hurts because, for me, it’s never about being “right.” Okay, Sav—so then what’s all the fuss about? Why do you get so activated inside or upset when XYZ doesn’t do ______? I pause here. I wonder if what I am about to say fits for many of the readers out there. You see, being right is not what I treasure. When I think about resentment and how I get shipwrecked on Resentment Island, it typically occurs because I treasure the need to be heard. So, it’s not that I treasure being right; I treasure being acknowledged. That has been at the forefront of my reflections throughout our ROR series. I think about conflicts with family, my husband, and others. The grief comes from being misunderstood or misperceived.

Now, I know that people are committed to misunderstanding you out here in the streets of the wild, and some are committed to trying to drain your prefrontal cortex energy. But if treasuring being heard is something that has been at the forefront for me, what often follows is a pattern of trying to get people outside of ourselves—with fundamentally different brains and nervous systems—to acknowledge or hear us. We all have different brains, different nervous systems, and different perceptions. So, trying to get another person outside of yourself to hear, perceive, or understand you can become like beating a dead horse. It only drains—you.

Okay, so then what’s all the fuss about, Sav? I ask myself this again. What we treasure has the ability to create disruption within us. But when we treasure peace—no disruption. So, what does that look like exactly? Now, I am no guru, and of course, I do not have all the answers. I simply am doing the work alongside us all.

I recently posted a video talking about the human unconscious addiction to chaos. I mentioned the power of statements—the power of suggestion—and how that alone can pull us back into the chaos Jenga tower, even after we remove ourselves from it. I speak in analogies and metaphors. The Jenga tower is often the system we are all a part of within our families and relationships. I discuss how important silence can be. Remember how I said my goal is to channel my inner Cillian Murphy through non-reaction and intentional response? I tend to overexplain in an attempt to get people to meet me across the bridge to connection. Do you see how draining that can be?

When we think about our role in creating the resentment we struggle with, I have to acknowledge that much of my own drain comes from trying to overexplain things to my husband—trying to get him to “see,” to “understand,” what it is that I am attempting to convey to him. What I am learning is that what we say with our mouths is not nearly as powerful as what we say through our behavior. Literally. Think of WNBA player Sophie Cunningham…

All she did through her behavior was point a finger, and it sent DeWanna Bonner into an activated frenzy. Why do you think something as small as pointing a finger has that much power to activate someone? Don’t even reach for the race-war narrative. That can become a distraction from this work. Think nervous system here. Even in the interview, Sophie stated that she kept doing it simply because she saw how much it annoyed DeWanna. Now, think about your family and the things they do—or maybe even your partner. What do you think DeWanna treasures? What we treasure has power over us. So, if we treasure money, fame, material possessions, etc., those things can begin to control our lives. I will assume that DeWanna may treasure winning, and if she treasures winning, well, even a distraction as small as someone pointing a finger can cause her focus to drift—which is exactly what we saw.

When I work with high-conflict families, what I often hear is, “They just want to be right.” Well, my question is: If that’s the case, why go back and forth with someone who just wants to be right if being right is not something you care about? We can all be petty. I think the petty part of us—the ego mind—is what causes us to engage with people who activate us because the interaction does something to our ego. We feel as though we need to “stand on business,” which is just another way of saying that we become defensive because how dare they disrespect us? Now we feel compelled to prove something. But if we truly did not treasure being right, would we need to engage back?

Whatever DeWanna says is the reason she became so activated by Sophie’s finger-pointing, the story itself is not the most relevant part. Why? Because the story is being processed through her filtration system, and if its dirty or tainted (think Brita filter here) it will drift her. Sophie is a white woman, so the narrative can easily become “racism,” which is a vine we tend to grab onto instead of entering the shadow work everyone talks about. A finger being pointed during a basketball game, by itself, has little to do with racism and everything to do with nervous-system behavior, imprints, and how dirty DeWanna’s filter may be—meaning the lens through which she internalizes and assigns meaning to Sophie’s finger being directed at her. When we drink the dirty water, we avoid the portal within. That is why family and couples work can be so difficult: We feel justified in our hurt because sometimes people really do and say hurtful things. I think about the statement, “No one can make you feel anything.” This was hard for me to grasp, and it used to make me so frustrated. What do you mean no one can make me feel anything? They clearly did or said XYZ! But when we channel our inner Cillian Murphy, we practice remaining unfazed by what occurs outside of us.

Back to my point about acknowledgment. When I look back at the times I was reactive, defensive, or severely pissed off, it didn’t come from a need to be right or agreed with. It came from—grief. A wound had been touched—the wound of being bypassed instead of heard. When we have deep imprints throughout our timeline of being ignored, interrupted, dismissed, etc., and our partner or family does it to us, it can make us feel invisible. So we talk louder, get louder, or become reactive and defensive in an attempt to get acknowledged. But all that does is move us away from the deeper discomfort of feeling ignored. You know, when I was an MFLC (Military and Family Life Counselor), I worked in the school system with military kids. I spent time in high schools, which reminded me of being out in the wild. I would observe their behavior and notice just how often fights broke out over some of the dumbest things. “They were staring at me.” Okay, and? So now you have to get violent?

We have no idea why people look at us. It could be because they like your hair or your outfit, or because they think you are attractive. You could also be dressed in a way that draws attention—this happens even with adults. We dress in ways that attract attention and then go off when people start looking. The point I am trying to make here is this: Is all it takes for you to lose your power and become the one who looks like the clown for someone to stare or point at you? What do you think people are treasuring in moments like that?

I have realized that treasuring acknowledgment can be the first step toward getting a one-way ticket to Resentment Island. Now, I am not saying that acknowledgment isn’t important, because, for me, it is. I also think it is a significant part of human connection. When I am willing to sit in the heat of the Expression Highway, but others are not, they may avoid that heat by exiting onto the Logistics Highway—ignoring what happened, acting as though nothing happened, or engaging in behavior that feels like gaslighting. It hurts. It feels like rejection. Trust me, I am not denying that. Remember, we all have different brains and nervous systems, and we are all holding on to something. We must be careful not to play Mad Libs with other people’s intentions if we are unwilling to check whether what we used to fill in the blank is accurate.

But let’s zoom in closer to ourselves here. I tell myself all the time, I wish I could do that thing Dumbledore does where he pulls out his memories and places them into that well-looking thing. I feel that way about neural pathways. If only I could just pull them out of me, then maybe my body would not respond so quickly to things that truly hold no importance to me.

Share

Have you ever reacted to something so intensely, only to cool down later and feel a little wacko for reacting the way you did? It happens to me a lot. I don’t think most of us are fighting to be right as much as we are fighting to be heard—and being heard does not require being agreed with. This makes it understandable why so many people do everything but acknowledge us or hear us. They may believe that acknowledging our perspective means agreeing with it— Many do. That’s part of why gridlock happens so much. There was a comment on my TikTok from someone telling me that I needed to be more compassionate. She wrote an entire paragraph explaining why my behavior needed to change, overgeneralizing my entire existence based on one clip because it made her feel something. Some women love telling other women what to do, but let a man do it and it’s, “F*ck the patriarchy! “Toxic masculinity—Misogynistic La la la!” Yet here women are, doing the same thing to other women.

Now, I responded by mentioning projection and the problem with assuming who I am outside of one clip. But do you think she acknowledged what she did or even what I said? Absolutely not. She flipped it and made the conversation about how I assumed and projected onto her. Do you see the shitty tennis match that could easily begin there had I continued with a back and forth? Y’all do this at home, too. There is no point in going back and forth with people, especially online. Especially in the comments of social media. That’s asking for a drift session. I don’t need people to get me or understand me simply because they have misperceived me. That misperception has nothing to do with me and everything to do with their filtration system. Think Brita filter here like I said before. If someone has a dirty-ass filter from 1980 and refuses to change it, you make that filter your responsibility when you begin overexplaining, reacting, defending, etc.

Let them.

If people want to assume I am not compassionate simply because I am not online to be liked, but to speak what I believe needs to be spoken, that’s fine. I’m channeling my inner Cillian Murphy.

My husband often misperceives me, too. And you know the algorithm is quick to tell you to find someone new. But again, you aren’t you when you’re hungry—Snickers commercial reference, LOL—but you also aren’t fully yourself when you are activated, tired, stressed, grieving, full of resentment, or carrying unmet needs. The goal is not always to throw out the person. Sometimes the goal is to learn how to bridge the gap with the person you chose and made vows to. That is part of the problem with society today. The enemy is quick to tear families, couples, and friendships apart, and so much of it is rooted in, Well, what would people think of me if they saw this behavior? Who gives a f*ck? It is not their relationship. It is yours. We often forget how snappy, snooty, and ugly we can become simply because we are in a particular emotional state. We are all state-dependent, and our emotional state can temporarily change the very things we treasure. That is important for all of us to understand.

When my husband misperceives me, trying harder to force him to understand me usually makes everything worse on my end because I first need to check my own undercurrent. People have no clue what kind of undercurrent they give off when they feel defensive or misunderstood. We can become condescending, snippy, snooty, sarcastic, rude, or dismissive. We all can. No one is exempt. That is why this is the work. The work is not only identifying how someone else failed to hear me. The work is also becoming aware of what begins leaking out of me while I am fighting to be heard. People online misperceive me all the time based on how I reply to them in the comments—literally, the comments. People will take text written on a screen and create an entire story about who you are based on the meaning produced by their own filtration system. I have a tendency to write very matter-of-factly, not because I am trying to be right, but because I become extremely overstimulated when I am online. I truly do hate social media—to an extent—because that is where the Rugrats and mob mentality members live. So many people discharge on those apps while expecting you to become a vending machine for their needs.

When I am online, my nervous system comes online, too, and I begin to feel a sense of panic and urgency. It has nothing to do with being afraid of anything. I couldn’t care less if I get canceled, especially in today’s climate. It could be an ADHD thing. It could be a Rushing Woman’s Syndrome thing. It could be a variety of things. The fact of the matter is that I try to hop on and hop off. But I do not need to “LOL” and smiley-face my way through every comment just to prove that I am safe for people. That is ridiculous. It coincides with the expectation that we should shrink ourselves to make other people comfortable. At the same time, self-leadership asks me to check my undercurrent—not automatically confess to the undercurrent someone else has assigned to me. Maybe there is some spice underneath my words that I need to acknowledge. Maybe there isn’t. We live in a damn gotcha culture where people are always looking for the next piece of language they can use to redirect the focus back onto you and your behavior. Now someone can say, “See, it’s your undercurrent,” as another way to deflect from the actual point being made. The possibility that my delivery contains an undercurrent does not automatically make the message itself untrue, nor does someone feeling something in response to me prove that their interpretation of my intention is accurate. Read that part again.

This is where I return to the question: What do I treasure here? If I treasure being accurately understood, I can find myself back on the shitty tennis court, writing dissertation after dissertation to prove what I meant. Or I can simply say, “That was not my intention,” check within myself to see whether there is anything useful for me to acknowledge, and leave it there. Self-accountability is not the same as accepting every accusation, interpretation, or projection someone places upon me. I can examine myself without putting someone else in charge of narrating me.

The important distinction here is:

Checking your undercurrent is self-inquiry. Being told what your undercurrent “really” is by someone committed to their interpretation is narration.

This is where I am beginning to understand the teaching in A Course in Miracles differently: What do you treasure, and how much do you treasure it? Because whatever we treasure enough, we can begin organizing our lives around protecting it. If I treasure acknowledgment so deeply that I cannot have peace until someone understands me correctly, then I have handed that person power over my nervous system. My peace now depends upon the cleanliness of their Brita filter. That does not mean I stop valuing acknowledgment. It does not mean I become silent, tolerate mistreatment, or pretend that being misunderstood does not hurt. It means I am learning not to chase acknowledgment at the expense of my own peace. I can express myself, clarify where clarification is useful, and then allow people to do whatever they are going to do with what I said. Their perception belongs to their filtration system. My responsibility is deciding whether I am going to drink the dirty water with them.

So, what do you treasure? And how much power has protecting it been given over your life?

Let me know.

Till next time data collectors.

Come as you are where you are.🫶🏽

Data Collectors,

I’m sitting here going for a walk right now, listening to FKJ Radio, surrounded by so much lush beauty. I mean, this is the City of Trees, and I am so grateful to be from the City of Trees and have the luxury of getting to come back and visit. I’m getting to walk in such beauty. It’s so painful at the same time because I miss home. Military life has taken us away from this beauty. So I’m thinking to myself because I live in the desert now, and the thought that came to my mind was the word “disorder.” As I am walking, I am thinking to myself, Okay, Sav... what does disorder actually mean? Well, first we have to look at the word order for there to even be a disorder. I am going to take us all on a semantics journey.As I contemplate this, we have to use word choices. For me, I internalize this curiosity as if there is disorder, it almost implies something is wrong. And if there is order, then that means right? Meaning there is a correct order? Is that the right order? And now, when I dive deeper, I start to think, Okay, what does “order” mean? To be right? To be wrong? Or to be incorrect? I think of order as sequence. If things are in order, they are in sequence. Okay, so then what sequence? To me, sequence is like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. You don’t go 1, 5, 7, 8, 9. It’s in order.

Okay, so if you go back to order real quick, it can be in order chronologically. It can be in order by height. It can be in order by birthday. The order is dependent on what the context is, meaning what we are looking for that we want to be in order. So with that being said, back to sequence—sequence of what? See how we did all of this digging just from the word disorder? So sequence of what order?

And as I sit here, filling up my cup with my preferred drug of choice, which is nature walks, parts of me want to grieve and be upset. Be frustrated because I’m living here, meaning El Paso, not my home city of Sacramento, or at least back in California. I’m here—in this dry, crusty desert that I have so much resentment toward. This isn’t necessarily where I want to be, but it’s where we are currently living as of now. And as I’m visiting back home, I try to soak up as much of the nature and weather as I can. I could be constantly thinking about the grief of it all, or maybe even a little resentment because my husband’s military career is why we had to leave our home state. I could spiral and loop in my mind with thoughts of whyyyyy.

Going through this beauty in the emotional energetic frequency (think David Hawkins here), the state of pissed off, resentful, bitter, angry—those are low-vibrational emotional states. That low-vibrational state definitely is impacted by my husband, who I am going to use as the external factor in this behavioral equation. For those of you reading, it could be your partner, location, your kids, work, etc. It can be your external family, and when we are vibrating at low-vibrational states because of whatever the external factor is for you, in return it is causing us to operate in such a state that it becomes our baseline for functioning. A constant state of panic. Fear of abandonment. Fear of not being chosen. Fear, fear, fear. And there’s a sprinkle of a weekend here and a trip there, and maybe a month or two here of joy or connection, but a lot of it is dopamine. The sugar I get from the Trolli Sour Gummy Worms or the Nerds Clusters that I know I can’t be eating because if I eat them consistently over time—or binge eat them in one sitting (don’t judge me, I have my months 😫)—that candy f*cks my shit up. 😅

They literally make me so inflamed. You can see it in my face. You can see it in my body. I can feel the brain fog. I can feel the sluggishness. When I’m consuming things through my food that do not bring life to me, this happens. We don’t acknowledge it because it gives us that feel-good comfort.

Now, you can replace the candy with food. You can replace food with sex. You can replace sex with shopping, shopping with alcohol or weed, or even doomscrolling and posting pictures of yourself. The key idea here is: pick your poison—suffer the side effects. The problem with whatever poison you choose is what determines the circuit in the brain with how long that high lasts. So it might last—meaning the duration when you consume it—and then you’re high on it for X amount of seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. What I mean by this is I consume XYZ, and I feel the dopamine high of that for ____ amount of time. I am enjoying the high of said ___ thing. Then, because of that high and the duration of it, we realize that amount of time becomes smaller and smaller. Meaning the amount of time I am high, enjoying that dopamine spike, gets smaller and smaller every time. As a result, if the high is very temporary— meaning it does not last a long time, you end up repeating usage to experience that dopamine high longer.

So I eat Trolli Gummy Worms and feel good, “pleasure” in that moment for, let’s say, I’m fulfilled for that hour. Until the next day, or maybe even later that night, when I am craving more sugar from those sour worms. Maybe it’s weed or a cigarette, and you get relief and pleasure during the duration of smoking it. Maybe you are high for a good 1–3 hours. Then you come down and crave more, so you take another hit. So if you are getting the sequence of what I’m trying to flow here, if I continue to eat these Nerds Gummies, these Trolli Sour Worms, and I’m eating them every day—and sometimes it’s the first thing I eat right when I wake up—I learn I can’t keep them in the house because I will stuff them places. I’m being silly here, but we do the same thing with our poison of choice. People do it with marijuana, alcohol, shopping, scrolling, etc. My point in saying all of this is—over time, I’m consuming it more and more and more, and it’s making me sicker and sicker and sicker. Then, over time, we live in that sickness. A week, a month, a year, two years, three years, four years, five years, 10+ years. That sickness is no longer sickness anymore. It is our baseline for functioning.

Sickness is all we know. So now it’s not even registered by the brain as sickness due to being so accustomed to that baseline. So maybe my skin is breaking out because of all the sugar, the brain fog, the ADHD symptoms, the weight gain, and the inflammation. All of those symptoms are my body trying to alert me—Savannah, the higher self—that something is wrong. But over the course of time, I bypass those signals, and I keep eating the sugar. I notice the changes but do nothing about them because I am getting relief from the dopamine the sugar provides, even if it lasts a short duration. I learn I can and will just consume more. Now, if it’s our baseline for functioning, the modern world says, ding, ding, ding—disorder. Whether that’s depression, anxiety disorder, ADHD, psychiatric disorders, personality disorders, based on the poison you picked.

Let’s understand something here. The poison you pick can very well be influenced by what you observed growing up, by your family or your environment. So maybe you grew up in a family that eats highly processed foods, candies, sodas, etc. This is your baseline for functioning. The thought of eating healthy sounds like death because sugar is a primary in your diet. Remember, I speak in metaphors and analogies. Sugar can be any of those addictive behaviors we listed above. I say all this to help the reader understand. This isn’t about blaming. It is about exploring what influences the choices you make. What influences the highway you choose to drive on. Remember my Highways of Communication? I will link that essay below.

So now fast-forward. Now we’re here in our disordered highway because that’s what the modern world says, but what if we’re not disordered? What if we’re drifted? Think about it—it’s like we were under a spell and it takes somebody outside of you or maybe deep deep work within you to kind of clean that window enough that you can finally see the light of who you used to be— the “higher self.” This isn’t about comparing who you used to be…No, it’s about comparing where your soul used to be and I’m talking about all of us as humans. Many of us may never have connected with ourselves at a soul level and that could simply be due to upbringing and not witnessing that work being modeled. We are all souls on a journey and our souls know the way home, but we’re the ones in the car driving it, because we’ve been given the vessel (our bodies) to drive it. We have been given the free will and agency to pick or oats and ride our lives on it through our choices. We all have free will and agency that we are not exercising enough in a way that does not leave us self abandoned. Because we’re not driving our own cars metaphorically steering our own ship. When we don’t steward our own lives that comes with side effects. So, as a result there is no order. There is no sequence. There is just this feeling of being out of alignment.

And I think because we have developed language for everything, which I think is an amazing trait that us humans have the ability to do. We take things way too far. To the extremes the same way we do with our poisons —remember the poisons? What causes us to disconnect from ourselves, whether it’s sugar, a substance, a food, a behavioral pattern, thought pattern etc. Those behavioral patterns can be having no habits, no structure, you’re not doing what you know at a soul level you should be doing. I don’t like using “should” language, but this type of should feels more like a need. It’s part of the responsibility that comes with being alive. It’s the duty we were given with our place here on Earth. It’s our responsibility to take care of what we have within us.

This vessel—that’s what I’m going to call it. Our bodies. But not just our bodies. Our nervous systems. Our minds. Being mindful, and full of intentional effort with our habits, our body, our mind, and our soul becomes part of the responsibility of taking care of ourselves. I think we’ve gotten so used to broadly naming things that I’m not even sure we know what we’re naming anymore. And if we don’t actually understand what we’re constantly naming, it becomes a form of cognitive laziness. A shortcut that provides nothing concrete for the mind to hold onto.

A perfect example of this is when people say, “We need to work on communication.” Communication this. Communication that.

Okay... but what does that actually mean?

Then we say, “Oh, I feel...” So now we have feelings. And boy, are they complex. You actually have to dive into the pool of those feelings and pull out specific emotions—anger, sadness, frustration, resentment, grief, shame.

We have to get concrete with the specific feeling, meaning we have to name it.

Yet what I’m noticing lately about our nervous systems is that we almost always have the blueprint that explains why we do what we do. Why we communicate the way we communicate. I feel____ because of ____.

Okay? And?

So with communication what exactly do you need to work on with communication? We must learn to get specific. Otherwise, we are holding a blank map with the word communication stamped on it, but with no directions telling us which way to go first.

Example:

“We need to work on communication when we are in an activated state.”

Okay... why?

“...Well, when we communicate, it turns into a fight where we overly criticize one another, speak harshly, interrupt, attack, and deflect...”

The dysfunctional dance.

Perfect. Now we have a path to take. Meaning we have a direction to turn so we can improve the dysfunctional dance by exiting the loop that keeps us stuck and disconnected. Think of Adlerian psychology. I believe everything has a time and a place, but sometimes we get so lost in the past of our trauma that we stop paying attention to the present symptom that trauma is contributing to in the present moment. We keep reaching back into the hippocampus archives, searching for answers, while the present-day consequences continue unfolding right in front of us, thus creating the gridlock we want help navigating through. What I mean here is this: maybe the symptom we’re trying to understand isn’t just about what happened back then. Maybe it’s also about the fact that this is all we’ve ever known. All we’ve ever felt. Maybe reaching for the past has become the only direction we, as a collective, know how to look towards.

I also believe that if we as humans don’t know another baseline to operate from, that could be true for other people as well. Our partner. Our family. Our friends. Our co-workers. They, too, may not know another way to be.

Let’s zoom in closer here.

If I feel____ emotion, that emotion may cause me to behave in a way that maybe everyone in my family behaves, too. So it becomes normalized within my blueprint, but not necessarily normalized within my partner’s, my friends’, or my co-workers’ blueprints. Let’s think about avoidant families here. When emotions enter the chat, the family learns to frequent Logistics Highway as a means of avoiding Expression Highway. Over time, we all inherit that pattern. We become frequent flyers to Logistics Highway. If that is true for me, you, and the cat down the road, then that means this occurs for many of us as humans. So when emotions enter the chat, we head straight to Spicy Island Town. We get loud. We cuss. We slam doors. We shut down.

All of those behaviors don’t actually tell us about the emotions that are at play. They don’t tell us about the vulnerabilities that have been activated. They just activate us right into the logistics autopilot path. For some households, pissed off and okay are the only two emotions that operate within the system. So we never explore deeper to get to the root cause and bridge the gap. We scream. We yell. We fight. We avoid. Meanwhile, the connection suffers. Families and couples start to drift from each other. We can only act like nothing is wrong for so long. Eventually, the pressure cooker fills up, and it needs a release.

Let’s zoom out a little more.

We have to think about what we’re currently navigating in our relationships. What are we navigating in our families? In our marriages? What behavior is happening to us that we are navigating with our partners or with our family?

'“I don’t get enough attention.

They made me feel neglected.

They don’t make me feel good enough.

I always feel left out.”

Okay? How do you know what not feeling “good enough” even feels like enough to even pinpoint that feeling to begin with? What were you experiencing before this person to have the ability to identify not feeling good enough?

Spend some time here because this concept is hard.

We often blame the present person for “making” us feel that way. But no one can make us feel something if we didn’t know that feeling existed to begin with. So if that feeling exists, it means it existed before the person who is currently poking at it. Which is a signal to the body that it’s an old wound that maybe has not gotten a chance to scab over and heal. So we have to understand that the stories our mind tells us when the wound gets touched become a portal. A time-capsule portal that can send us back to the original injury.

Remember, The Body Keeps the Score.

Now, what if the original injury was created by the same person who is currently poking it? For example, your partner created a wound, and now you want that behavior to change. Okay... what are you comparing their current behavior to? What is the reference point? We could be comparing it to the way that person made us feel in the beginning of our relationship. Maybe they used to behave XYZ, and now they don’t. So because they don’t behave the way they used to, now you do not feel “good enough.”

Let’s zoom out even more...

Is it possible that what feels like not good enough isn’t happening simply because they are no longer doing what they used to do or what you need them to do? Is it possible that what they gave you in the beginning created a feeling? And in the beginning, that feeling was good enough. So that feeling became the “poison” you got addicted to. You needed them to continue doing what they were doing to keep you feeling good enough. So the moment they stop...

BAM.

Now you don’t feel good enough.

When we get addicted to a poison, just like the examples before with substances, candy, scrolling, etc., we hyperfocus on the feeling we receive from it.

I eat Trolli’s to feel ____, which equals dopamine.

When we fall in love, we are flooded with oxytocin, serotonin, and dopamine. We get that cocktail from the “poison” of choice—that feeling of the honeymoon stage. If that poison provides us with such a good cocktail of hormones, we have to admit to ourselves that we’re not even living in reality anymore. We’re chasing the cocktail. We’re chasing the feeling the poison gives us. The poison, essentially, is the dopamine. The dopamine we get from falling in love. The dopamine we get in the early dating stage with high sexual chemistry. Just like the dopamine we get from substances, scrolling, shopping, or candy. And that dopamine comes with attachments.

Because I think about substance use, I think a lot about attachment. I think that’s why substance use is such a common thing for people to reach for. It can become rooted in attachment. We attach to other things, too. I have a whole-ass blankey—yes, I call it Blankey and I have had it since I was born 😫. I’m attached to it not being washed because I need it to smell a certain way. It provides me a sense of comfort. Some people get attached to other people. Others get attached to drugs, shopping, or dopamine of any kind, wherever they can get it, and get it fast. Now, my Blankey is an attachment. It comforts me. That’s a pretty mild example, but as humans, we tend to go to extremes.

Think about the word extremes. Think about the word extremist. When you hear those words, where does your mind immediately go?

Mine goes straight to politics because people are so extreme these days in the political arena. But more importantly, it goes there because that word has been primed in me due to the media.. If my mind immediately goes to politics, I’m now highlighting another mechanism of the brain. So let’s go back to disorder. I’m just pulling words from what exists in our modern society today. This isn’t me trying to push an agenda, despite that being a wound that many of us have. Being suspicious of ulterior motives. I’m highlighting perception here. I want to talk about this out loud with people who can handle a conversation like this, because I know many of you are going to assume a meaning behind what I’m trying to do, and there really isn’t anything I’m trying to do other than explore how our minds organize meaning.

There’s disorder everywhere we look. But now I want you to go outside. I want you to observe nature around you, whatever that looks like: stray animals, trees, bugs, birds. And I want you to sit with that energy.

I want you to notice how life goes on for everyone... but humans.

Now, I want you to go somewhere. If you can, go somewhere in nature. If not, go somewhere people naturally gather. Maybe it’s your downtown plaza or whatever your community has. I want you to simply observe the world around you. The buildings. The birds. The bugs. The trees. The wind. Just watch it all. Then I want you to watch the people living within it. Just gaze over them. Notice their mood. Notice their happiness. Watch them talking with other people. Connecting. Relating. Watch them laugh. Or maybe you see a parent going off on their kid, and you find yourself thinking,

“Sister... I feel you. It’s hard.”

Wish her well.

Or maybe you see a mom that’s pissing you off because she’s on her phone, not paying attention, and her child almost jumps off of ______, almost gets hurt, or runs into the street, and she still isn’t paying attention because she’s distracted talking. Now you’re feeling some kind of way.

What is that feeling creating inside of you?

Maybe it’s anger. Maybe you want to walk over there and say, “Hey, lady. You need to pay attention to your kid.” Maybe you feel the urge to tell her how to parent. For me, my immediate response is panic for the child. I want to intervene. That panic becomes the intervention. It’s almost automatic, like a reflex. My nervous system doesn’t really ask permission—it just moves. Now, depending on the situation, that response looks different. If it’s a fight, I’m coming in with “Ay yo!” energy. If it’s something like this, I’m much softer. “Hey, excuse me. Your child almost fell off of this.” Or, “Hey, your little one almost ran into the street.”

I don’t know what’s going on in your life, but I’m going to check in because that’s where my nervous system naturally takes me. Some people don’t care. And that’s something we end up observing, too. We witness people neglecting their own lives in the same way they neglect their children. Sometimes they genuinely don’t seem to care. Sometimes people call someone for help, and then it’s out of their hands.

But then you realize something else.

Even the systems we call often don’t do anything until someone is already dead or missing. This leads me to my next point. If we’re going to call humans “disordered,” then we also have to be willing to acknowledge that many of the systems we’ve built are disordered, too. If we’re going to be labeled as disordered humans, then maybe we also need to start considering disordering some of these systems. We need to question the systems that were built before us.

The tax system is one that I keep thinking about. Are you telling me that in order to own a house—even after you pay it off—you still have to pay property taxes? It sits on land you should own. It’s ridiculous. Where’s the incentive to actually own something? Then, if you rent, you’re constantly chasing because the rent goes up every year. Now you have kids to feed. Now it costs half your paycheck just to get to work because of gas. And we’re all just sitting here watching this shit show of a system feed us and gaslight already “disordered” people.

Share

I’m currently watching this little Filipino family at the park, covered by shade and trees, and it’s beautiful. They’re playing cards, and people are riding bikes around the park area too.

Being back home in California, being with my family fills up my day in a way that I didn’t realize I missed. There are people to talk to. Smiles. Laughter. Stories being shared. Moments being made. Behavior that brings us forward to— the present. But I think we’re losing sight of those moments because we’re on autopilot, drifting in the fog. Remember the fog of the poison I brought up earlier? That poison could be substances. Scrolling. Maybe you’re dying inside. Maybe you feel like shit. Maybe you’re exhausted. Maybe your body is trying to alert you to something through symptoms. Maybe it’s affecting your mental health.

Whatever it is, we’re no longer fully present in these moments.

We’re in our heads. We’re analyzing. We’re overthinking.

“What did they mean?”

“What was that smirk?”

“Why did they say that in front of everybody?”

Especially when we’re around family, we lose the moment of connection because we’ve drifted somewhere else.

Think about it this way.

With the Highways of Communication, Logistics Highway represented by the everyday tasks: the kids, school, appointments, chores, groceries. It was the baseline category that most relationships naturally travel through. But what if there’s also a baseline highway for functioning? A loop that just keeps looping and looping and looping.

The difference is that everyone’s baseline highway is different.

These highways aren’t universal. They’re broad ranges of ways that people function. Mainstream psychology might call them Type A personalities, Type B personalities, personality traits, temperament, or something else entirely. Whatever we call them, I think there are many different baseline ways of functioning. Many “lanes” to operate in within baseline highway.

But there is one common baseline that I see so many of us operating in.

The image above this is what I call the Charlie Day phenomenon. I show this to my clients because I see it in myself, too. We’re always here trying to crack the case in the present moment.

“Am I with the right person?”

“Does he love me?”

“Does she love me?”

“Am I being taken advantage of?”

“Is this the right job for me?”

“Why do they always have to talk shit?”

It’s the pathway of hypervigilance.

If hypervigilance is our baseline, then our Baseline Highway also has a spectrum of lanes. And what I mean by spectrum is this: the Baseline Highway has multiple lanes that we can drive in. Some of us weave through all of them. Some of us chronically stay in one lane. Others chronically stay in another. Think about the people who drive in the left lane. They’re in the fast lane... but they’re driving slow, holding everyone else up. Think about the people who genuinely want to heal. They aren’t just intellectualizing everything. They’re trying to embody what they’re learning. They’re implementing skills. They’re eating healthier, and regulating themselves. They’re doing the work.

Let’s call that the Regulated Lane.

But even when you’re trying to stay in that lane, you inevitably find yourself behind people who don’t belong there. People whose behaviors pull you out of your window of tolerance (out of that regulated lane). People whose nervous systems begin interacting with yours until you slowly find yourself drifting out of your own lane.

Maybe this metaphor isn’t perfect yet, but stay with me.

We all encounter people who activate us. Sometimes we stay in toxic dynamics because of them. Sometimes we stay because of ourselves. Either way, we become caught in an internal loop that creates distress. When we’re around certain people long enough, they can activate us to such a degree that we’re no longer operating from our Regulated Lane.

Do you see what just happened?

You’re no longer in that lane... but you still feel like you are.

Because the amygdala doesn’t have eyes.

It doesn’t realize you’ve drifted outside of the lane you were trying so hard to stay in. Remember, we’re still talking about the Baseline Highway. This highway has multiple lanes across a spectrum. This is where I think our ego can quietly creep in. We become so convinced that we’re still operating from our highest self that we don’t even realize we’ve changed lanes.

I actually think floors work as a really good metaphor here, too.

In The Meantime, Iyanla Vanzant talks about how we all begin in the basement, and over time we work our way up through different floors. Some of us eventually allow people into our lives who are still operating on developmental floors we’ve already outgrown. They’re simply on a different floor. Since they’re operating from a different developmental level, their behavior begins interfering with ours. That interference creates reactivity. And if we repeatedly allow ourselves to lose our cool, over time that reactivity can become our new baseline. That new baseline only hurts us because we slowly begin drifting out of the Regulated Lane.

I can already hear people saying, “Well, what about what they’re doing?”

Exactly.

Now you’re in the Charlie Day cycle.

You’re not wrong. They very well may be contributing to the problem. But look at where it put you. It pulled you out of alignment. That right there tells you everything you need to know. And yet, you still don’t leave that lane. Why? Because you’ve become comfortable there. You’re addicted to it. That is your part. That is your role in the lane drifting that is occurring.

Let’s go all the way back to the beginning when we talked about disorder.

We broke down disorder. Then we explored order. That led us to sequence. Sequence depends on the sequence of what is being placed into order. So, within this psychological and human behavioral framework, I’m talking about the sequence of habits. The sequence of behaviors. The sequence of what we consistently practice. It’s also about how strong our discipline muscle becomes in maintaining the sequence of habits that keeps us in the Regulated Lane as our baseline.

You see what I did there?

Now we have a roadmap.

I have this nervous system baseline chart as shown above. On that chart, 0–5 is regulation, and 0–3 is that beautiful rest-and-digest regulation lane that is the goal for our wellbeing. That’s where we want to be. But here’s what’s fascinating. You can still be in the Regulated Lane and have something grab your attention 3-5 lane. You’re still driving in your lane, but some external behavior happening outside of you has the ability to cause your eyes to drift over into someone else’s lane because you’re thinking, What the hell are they doing now? That can happen in thirty seconds. It can happen in five minutes, or over an entire afternoon. What I’m trying to describe here is an attentional shift. If you’re still regulated, you’re simply aware of the external stimulus. You noticed it. Your nervous system hasn’t necessarily left regulation lane yet.

Now, depending on how long you stay focused on that stimulus determines whether or not you remain in the Regulated Lane.

Does that make sense?

Think about a teacher. A parent. A burnt-out partner. It really doesn’t matter who it is.

Sometimes all it takes is staying focused on that external stimulus for just a little too long...

Snap.

Now you’ve drifted into another lane.

Once you snap, you’re no longer in the Regulation Lane. You’re no longer in the green zone. You’re in the orange or red zone. The red zone represents the extreme end of reactivity. The Activation Lane can house anger, frustration, sadness, grief—anything that keeps you out of the Regulation Lane.

Remember, this is the Highways of Functioning.

The first highway is the Baseline Highway. This is where your nervous system lives. It has multiple lanes, and the lane you’re traveling in determines your baseline for functioning. The Baseline Highway then influences the next highway, which is the Mindset Highway, or what I also think of as the Highway of Perception. This is where your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, interpretations, and perceptions are constantly interacting with one another. Your feelings generate thoughts, and over time those thoughts begin shaping your perception of reality. That Highway of Perception then feeds directly into the Highway of Behavior, which is the part everyone else sees. This is our actions. Our words. Our tone. Our body language. Our habits. Everything observable. Remember, behavior never exists in isolation. What we see with the eye has already been filtered through perception, and perception has already been influenced by baseline. We have to remember that.

So now behavior has multiple lanes because there are many different ways behavior can present itself. There’s regulated behavior, dysregulated behavior, grief behavior, numb behavior, defensive behavior, dissociative behavior, anxious behavior, pleasant behavior and even resentful behavior. There are all different types of behavioral expressions, and each one tells us something about what may be happening further upstream. That means we can’t just look at behavior by itself. We have to consider the baseline lane we frequent and behavior. We have to consider habits because habits become one of the primary lanes within the Highway of Behavior.

One of those lanes aligns with the Regulation Lane of the Baseline Highway. I think of that as the Healthy Habits Lane. These are the daily behaviors that support regulation rather than pull us away from it.

Now, the problem takes us all the way back to where we started... disorder.

Back to sequence.

The order of those habits is different for every single person because we are all unique. The same recipe will not regulate everyone in the same way. We spend so much time watching other people and being influenced by what works for them that we forget to learn the sequence of habits that keeps our own nervous system regulated. That’s where we have to be very careful. Very cautious. Very mindful. Otherwise, we end up trying to mimic the sequence in which other people stack their habits, and when that sequence does not work for us, we develop side effects. Anxiety. Depression. ADHD symptoms. Whatever it is. Not necessarily because the habit itself is wrong, but typically it is due to operating from the poison of comparison. We have to learn what works for us in order to stay balanced within our own nervous system. I think part of the Mindset Highway—the Highway of Perception—is heavily influenced by symbols. Symbols infiltrate our behavior because they first infiltrate our perception. Our brains turn things into symbols as a form of survival. If I can assign meaning to something, I can begin predicting what might happen next. That prediction is a survival process, even though you cannot see it with your eyes because it is happening internally within the mind.

Once I turn something into a symbol, I can create a meaning around it. That meaning can then produce an action or behavior in me. So instead of waiting to find out whether you might become a threat, my mind assigns meaning to you, predicts a behavior from you, and prepares me to protect myself. That is the danger of symbols. They can help us survive, but they can also cause us to respond to an assumed meaning rather than what is actually happening in front of us.

Share The Safety to Speak™

Now that I’ve guided you through this framework, I want you to take a deep breath because we’re about to place something under the magnifying glass. From this point forward, I don’t want you thinking about politics. I don’t want you thinking about religion. I don’t want you thinking about whether you agree or disagree. I want you to think like an observer. Like a researcher. Imagine we’re in a laboratory together studying human behavior. Our job isn’t to decide who’s right. Our job is to notice what happens inside of us while we observe.

The examples I’m about to use are modern-day examples because they contain symbols that many of us already have strong neurological associations with. That means your brain may immediately assign meaning before we’ve even finished collecting the evidence. That’s exactly what I want you to notice. I want you to pay attention to your own nervous system. What emotion shows up first? What assumption does your mind immediately make? Where does your Highway of Perception begin taking you before we’ve even looked at all of the information?

This has nothing to do with how I personally believe or where I stand on any of these topics. That’s not what we’re studying. We’re studying the human mind and perception. We’re studying how quickly the brain creates meaning purely from symbols and how that meaning begins shaping behavior before we’ve even realized we’ve assigned it.

So let’s begin.

Case Study One

A woman is standing in front of a California state monument made of stone in a beautiful natural setting. She is fully covered, with only her face visible, and she is waving a Palestinian flag. As she stands there, you hear people driving past yelling at her. Notice my wording. I said you hear people yelling. We never actually see the people yelling. We simply hear what sounds like a male voice shouting from a passing vehicle. The woman later gets into her car and begins reflecting on what just happened while recording herself on camera for social media. Based on that interaction, she makes the statement that California is “a dangerous place.”

Before we go any further, I don’t want you deciding whether she’s right or wrong. I don’t want you deciding whether the people yelling were justified or not. I want us to stay where we have stayed this entire essay—with observation.

What are the objective facts?

What did we actually witness?

What meanings has your mind already started assigning that we haven’t actually observed? That’s the hook that pulls you and conditions your nervous system into having an automatically response and skipping the key lane. Pause.

Now we’re going to take everything we just laid out and place this scene under the magnifying glass. We’re going to slow it down and examine it piece by piece. I don’t actually want to focus on the symbols themselves. I want to focus on the mechanisms underneath the symbols. This is where I think we miss each other as a human species. We get so caught up arguing about what the symbol means to us that we never stop to ask what our nervous system is actually doing while it’s assigning meaning to that symbol. So let’s start with the woman. Is she actually from Palestine? We don’t know. She’s dressed in what appears to be traditional clothing for her culture or religion, but that doesn’t actually tell us anything. Again, we cannot take what we see at face value. This is discernment training. Observation comes before interpretation. Just because my brain immediately wants to connect dots doesn’t mean those dots belong together.

So she’s standing there waving this flag, and afterward she reports feeling afraid. That immediately makes me curious. Where did she learn what danger feels like? How does she even know what “danger” is? Because if danger had been the only thing she had ever experienced, would she even recognize it as danger? Or would it simply feel normal? She entered California. She waved a flag. She received a response she apparently wasn’t expecting. That’s all we objectively know. Everything else is an unknown variable. What is her history? Unknown. What is her trauma history? Unknown. What experiences shaped her nervous system before this interaction? Unknown. We don’t know what those shoes have walked through before arriving at this moment.

Now I’m going to show you where my curiosity naturally goes, because this is what it looks like to explore instead of conclude. Let’s assume, for the sake of the exercise, that she is from Palestine. Notice what I just did. I made an assumption, and I’m telling you it’s an assumption. If that assumption happened to be true, my first question isn’t political. My first question is psychological. Why did she leave? Was she seeking safety? Opportunity? Family? Education? A different life? I don’t know. I’m not answering the question. I’m simply asking it. That’s a very different thing. I can already feel some of you wanting to answer that question. Notice that. Your Highway of Perception is already activating. I’m asking you to stay with the question a little longer. If she truly left her country to build a life somewhere else, I’m curious about the nervous system that arrived here. What experiences shaped it? What meanings has it already assigned to the world before this interaction even happened? Her waving that flag may represent many different things: pride, grief, home, family, loss. It may simply be the only flag she owns. I don’t know. That’s the point. We don’t know. I mean let’s be real, she may not even know.

Now let’s shift our attention to the person driving by. Imagine it’s the Fourth of July. They have an American flag flying from the back of their truck because they’re proud to be American. They see her waving a Palestinian flag. Instantly, their brain turns that flag into a symbol. That symbol becomes a meaning for them, about her. That meaning produces an emotion as a result that emotion produces a behavior. They yell at her. Notice where the behavior actually began. It didn’t begin with yelling. It began with perceiving. Then she gets into her car and records a video saying she feels scared. Again, my curiosity doesn’t stop with the feeling. Where did she learn to associate a man yelling with being scared? Has she experienced war? Abuse? Oppression? Violence? I don’t know. Those are questions, not conclusions. Remember The Body Keeps the Score. When she hears a man yelling, where does her nervous system go? Where does her perception go? What roads has she already traveled? What have those shoes walked through? What have those shoes fled?

Now let’s pause for a moment.

Now let’s pretend that guy uploaded a TikTok, just like she did, and now I’m watching his video. He’s some white, patriotic American bro (I know... stereotype, but stereotypes exist). He’s angry. He’s cussing. He’s got a Bud Light for the roadie. They’re headed to the beach or somewhere. Who knows. But he feels completely justified. Completely righteous in the anger he’s experiencing because, “How dare they bring XYZ, XYZ, XYZ over here. We’re in America. Go back to your country.” Maybe that’s what he’s saying. Again, he has made a meaning in his mind about her behavior of waving that flag. But where is that anger actually coming from? You really can’t sit here and tell me that a woman you’ve never met, standing in a park, waving a flag from a country she isn’t currently in, is enough by itself to make you that angry. Something else is happening. A symbol has been created, and a meaning has been assigned to that symbol.

The exact same thing happens when someone sees a white person waving an American flag and immediately makes a meaning about them. See how we’ve already left the present moment that I was talking about earlier? We’re not actually responding to what is physically happening in front of us anymore. We’re responding to the story our nervous system has attached to the symbol. We’ve drifted out of the present moment and into a specific lane within the Baseline Highway. Once we’re in that lane, we begin looping. That loop influences the Highway of Perception, and the Highway of Perception begins shaping the story we’re telling ourselves. Eventually, that story produces a behavior. In her case, maybe that behavior is getting on TikTok and sharing how unsafe she felt. In his case, maybe it’s getting on TikTok explaining why he was so angry. Different behaviors. Same mechanism.

Remember, at this point it isn’t even about the flags anymore. It isn’t about what she’s wearing, what she looks like. It isn’t even about that one interaction. We’re looking underneath all of it. We’re looking at the psychological landscape each person brought into that moment long before they ever crossed paths. Her story is different. His story is different. Both stories are valid because both belong to human beings who have lived different lives and developed different nervous systems. Does that automatically make either story accurate? No. And that’s exactly why this work matters, and why nuance is important. The moment we drift out of regulation, we lose access to curiosity and discernment. Once that happens we stop observing, and we start jumping to conclusions— taking a trip to distortion island. That’s the shift. We stop asking questions, and we start defending the meaning we’ve already made.

Now think back to the Highways of Communication. If we can’t access regulation, we can’t access those highways either. Instead, we begin looping. We defend. We criticize. We withdraw. We justify. We overexplain. We intellectualize. We attack. We shut down. Whatever lane our nervous system frequents becomes the lane we continue driving in.

Do you see the connection now?

We cannot communicate effectively because we cannot access regulation. And when we cannot access regulation, we cannot access the parts of ourselves capable of curiosity, discernment, and repair.

So we loop.

Looping is a form of avoidance. We all avoid differently because we all have a different flavor of what we loop in. Some of us loop in substances. Some of us loop in scrolling. Some of us loop in work. Some of us loop in relationships, or in hypervigilance, overthinking. We loop in our poison of choice.

So what is your poison?

How do you eat? What do you smoke? What do you drink? What do you scroll? What do you consistently reach for when your nervous system begins drifting out of regulation? More importantly, how repetitive is that behavior? Because repetition is what creates the baseline. The more consistently you engage in a behavior, the more it becomes the lane your nervous system habitually travels down. And over time, that lane begins influencing how you feel, how you think, how you process information, how you communicate, how you listen, and ultimately how you experience the world around you. Which is why it impacts your perception. We throw words around all the time like effectively. “Communicate effectively.” “Process effectively.” “Listen effectively.”But what does effectively actually mean? It means something different depending on the person because every one of us has a different Highway of Perception. We all assign different meanings to the same words based on the life we’ve lived, the experiences we’ve had, and the baseline we’ve developed into. Words are simply tools that help us translate what is happening inside of us.

Think about the technology we have today. I can speak English, and within seconds technology can translate my words into another language so someone else can understand me. That’s essentially what I’m trying to do throughout this essay. I’m translating information that many of us have carried for years but haven’t known how to organize. We’ve collected all this information. We’ve read the books. We’ve listened to the podcasts. We’ve highlighted the quote or talk about healing until we’re blue in the face. But so much of it stays intellectual. We keep holding it. We keep repeating it. We keep regurgitating it. We don’t embody it.

What does embodiment actually look like for you?

Because it’s going to look different for everybody. That’s the sequence. That’s the order. That’s what I’ve been trying to build throughout this entire essay. Your sequence is not my sequence, is not the next person’s sequence. My sequence is not yours. The goal isn’t to copy someone else’s recipe. The goal is to discover the sequence of habits that keeps your soul in alignment. Being in alignment becomes incredibly important because the longer we stay out of alignment with ourselves, the more we abandon the younger parts of ourselves that were already abandoned during development. Our developmental experiences shape the Baseline Highway. The lane we repeatedly travel within that highway begins influencing the Mindset (perception) Highway—our perceptions, beliefs, interpretations, and stories. Those perceptions then shape the Highway of Behavior, what everyone else can actually see. Over time, those highways become well-traveled roads. They become habits. They become loops, which then become personalities when stuck in them long enough. They become the routes we automatically take without even realizing we’re driving them.

Now, here’s what concerns me.

In today’s world, those chronic loops are increasingly being treated as identities. Mainstream culture often takes the lane you’ve been stuck in and turns it into a prediction about your future with disordered language. As if the loop you’ve been driving somehow determines who you are or what your life will become.

I don’t believe that.

I believe it tells us where you’ve been driving and how that route has caused you to loop. Not where you’re destined to stay.

Poverty. Homelessness. Chronic abuse cycles. Not feeling at home in your own body. Maybe you have what everyone else would call the “perfect life.” You have the money. The beautiful home. The successful career. The family. The vacations. All the things people spend their lives chasing. But internally, you still don’t feel good. Your relationships are suffering, so is your nervous system. It actually doesn’t matter what the circumstance is because everyone is navigating something. Every single one of us. The question isn’t whether you’re struggling. The question becomes where your struggle lives, what lane it keeps pulling you into, and whether you’ve mistaken that lane for who you are because pathology has become identity. Which robs us of the neuroplasticity our brains were designed to do.

Throughout this essay, I’ve used the word poison a lot, but maybe this is where I want to soften that idea. Maybe the goal isn’t to spend our lives trying to find the poison that hurts the least. Maybe the goal is to become so familiar with our own nervous system that we begin choosing what nourishes it instead. What restores it. What keeps it balanced. I don’t actually love the word healing because, for me, it almost signals perfection. Like one day we’ll finally arrive and declare ourselves “healed.” I don’t think that’s what this is. I think this is balance and an embodied form of awareness. I think this is learning how to recognize when we’ve drifted into another lane and having enough self-awareness to gently bring ourselves back.

That’s why we spent so much time talking about the Highways of Communication, and now we’re beginning to build the Highways of Functioning. Communication was never the whole story. Communication is simply what becomes visible, but underneath communication is perception. Underneath perception is nervous system baseline. Underneath baseline are the habits we repeatedly practice until they become the roads our nervous system naturally prefers to travel (our personality.) That’s why we started with the word disorder. We broke it apart. We looked at order. Then we looked at sequence. Because maybe the conversation isn’t actually about disorder at all. Maybe it’s about the sequence we’ve been stacking our habits in, because of outside influences, and we are doing that for years without ever realizing it. As we continue exploring this framework together, we’re going to place modern life under the magnifying glass. That means exploring the symbols being made behind: politics, family systems, marriage, social media, parenting, religion, culture, trauma, and addiction. We’re going to slow everything down so we can understand the mechanisms underneath human behavior. Once we develop the curiosity in mechanisms than conclusions, something shifts. Curiosity begins replacing certainty, which allows us to access critical thinking in order to make proper judgments from a discerned place and not a reactive state. That’s where I think growth actually starts.

It will probably make you uncomfortable. Good. I think discomfort is often the invitation into awareness. We’ve been conditioned to judge before we’ve been taught to observe. The same way we react before we’ve been taught to regulate. We’ve been conditioned to mistake our perception for reality. My work has always been exposure therapy, but check your baggage. This isn’t about trying to persuade you how to think or to even like me or believe what I believe. I’m trying to expand your capacity. The more capacity your nervous system has, the more difference it can tolerate without immediately translating that difference into danger.

The world is nothing but difference. So developing capacity provides you the skills necessary to be bilingual in the language of connection. Your partner will be different from you. Your children will be different from you. Your family will be different from you. Your clients will be different from you. Even the version of yourself ten years from now will be different from who you are today. If we don’t learn how to expand our capacity to tolerate difference, we’ll keep looping. We’ll keep assigning meanings that were never there. We’ll keep normalizing dysfunction simply because we’ve driven that road so many times it feels familiar. And familiar doesn’t always mean healthy or have a meaning at all. Sometimes familiar is just familiar.

Maybe that’s what disordered language has unintentionally done. Maybe we’ve become so focused on naming the outcome that we’ve stopped becoming curious about the sequence that produced that very outcome. We’ve become experts at labeling the destination while remaining strangers to the road that got us there. That’s the work I want to do with you. Once we learn to ask better questions we develop the ability to create better regulated observations which lead to greater awareness. Greater awareness creates different choices, and different choices create different habits. Over time those different habits create a different baseline for functioning in this world. And over time, that changes the direction of the entire highway (trajectory of our life.)

I’m excited to build this framework with you because that’s all these essays really are. They’re me thinking out loud. They’re me sharing the way my brain organizes the world. Some of it will resonate. Some of it won’t. Some of it will evolve because I’m still learning too.

So take what serves you. Leave what doesn’t.

Tell me where your mind went while reading this. Tell me where you noticed yourself making assumptions. Tell me where your Highway of Perception took over. Because if this framework does anything, I hope it helps you become a little less certain, a little more curious, and a little more compassionate toward the highways that both you and everyone else have been driving for far longer than either of us probably realize.

Till next time data collectors

Over the course of this last year. Collecting data not just from my lived experience, but also from my clinical practice, and observing human behavior in systems. One overlap I am seeing especially if you live in America, is the family system of America.

Are y’all ready to get into it?

I challenge you despite being uncomfortable to see if you can access true inquiry and not reactivity. You will know it’s reactive based off if your immediate response is to criticize, or minimize who I am because it’s a nuanced truth that may seem too loud.

None of this work is about me, the lessons embedded deep within this are rooted in helping us understand the mechanisms we are all using within the relationships closest to us.

If the shoe fits is what I always say. Then it’s a portal into something deeper within you. Remember perception is the root of my work. The eyes that read this will all interpret different perceptions. Neither is good, bad, right, wrong. It just is—what we do with that is the real work.

This essay is about the psychological patterns not the context itself. This is going to be hard for society today especially after 2020, because in isolation times we saw what that did to the collective. I am a firm believer that being in captivity causes psychological strain so much so that just like in our relationships we end up stranded in the island of rumination. So if we spend time shipwrecked on that island long enough we will develop side effects. I truly believe what we are seeing today are the side effects of that time spent in rumination. The family of America had so much time to play mad libs due to what the media was feeding us all—or at least those of us who eat up the media. The goal of this essay is not to pursuade the reader anything. But to allow us the ability to pause long enough to expand our minds, see the undercurrents and the neural highways we have been conditioned to take again and again. No matter the context— this pattern has spilled into our families, relationships and workplace dynamics making it harder to rewire out of.

Let’s get into it.

Abstract

This paper proposes a psychological and sociological hypothesis: that the contemporary American sociopolitical landscape functions as a large-scale, dysfunctional family system. We posit that citizens have been conditioned into specific familial roles—the Golden Child, the Scapegoat, and the Enabler—by “parental” institutional bodies (political parties and media) to ensure systemic stability through division. Utilizing frameworks of Bowen Family Systems Theory, Schema Theory, and Neurobiological State-Dependent Perception, we argue that individuals are being “groomed” into collective groupthink, effectively trading personal agency for tribal belonging. This essay examines the “Discomfort Displacement Cycle” at a national scale, where unresolved systemic shame is projected onto marginalized groups to prevent a collective “Family Meeting” that would demand institutional accountability.

I. The Family You’re Already In

The American sociopolitical landscape is not a theater of war even though it feels like it, but let’s zoom in. What we are really seeing is a collective reenactment of familiar wounds in us all. To understand why our discourse feels so visceral, we must move past the idea of policy differences and recognize that we are living within a macro-reenactment of a dysfunctional family system. This is a system where the “Parents” (the Institutional State and Political Parties) maintain power not through any real leadership, but through the clinical application of enmeshment, trauma bonding, and the strategic assignment of roles. The very roles each and everyone of us lived through within our own childhood.

The current state of American discourse is characterized by what I like to call “Noise”—a state of constant distraction, deflection, and gaslighting. This environment mirrors the glitch seen in families where parents refuse to acknowledge harm because their egos cannot process the associated shame or guilt. As a result, the collective is currently experiencing a trauma reenactment, where the “siblings” (demographic, marginalized, and political groups) turn on each other rather than addressing the elephant in the room: an abusive parental system that thrives on trillions in unaccounted-for losses while demanding total compliance. All while utilizing fear to get that compliance.

Is it starting to feel familiar yet?

Buckle up…

Systemic Roles and Archetypes

In any dysfunctional household, roles are assigned to manage the parents’ anxiety and shame or who ever dictates the emotional climate of that environment. In the American Family System, these roles have been scaled to fit entire demographics:

• The Golden Children (The Groomed Minority): Minority groups, Queer, and Trans communities are currently being groomed into the Golden Child role. Now, let’s understand something as we examine this. This isn’t true allyship; it is enmeshment for utility. Key word here, utility. The “Parent” (the Party) uses validation and “love-bombing” strategies such as waving flags, using specific vernacular all to connect to specific communities to try and portray relatability such as wearing a pride flag or bringing hot sauce to the interview with a black individual. Anything to grant a false sense of cultural power to ensure total loyalty. The issue here is the collective is too unconscious to see the covert tactics happening. If any of you have read the book Outwitting The Devil, this is what Napoleon Hill would call drifting. The modern society today is in a massive drift state contributing to unconsciousness. They were designed to look at the “villain” — the opposing side. This is why humans today are always looking for an enemy. See how tribalism can be used for avoidance or as a distraction? The Golden Child feels “heard” but is actually being capitalized upon, used as a moral shield to protect the Parent from accountability. Remember, the parent in this theory is the political party we blindly support without inquiry.

• The Scapegoats (The Designated Villains): Depending on the “Parental” party in power, the Scapegoat in today’s American society is often White “cis” males and White women. Yeah, I said it…. What comes up for you reading that? What happens in the nervous system? What mind movies or stories did your mind just flash for you?

In this system, the Scapegoat is the container for all systemic failure. By pointing at the Scapegoat, the Parent ensures the “Children” never look at the Parent’s own behavioral fraud or incompetence. No matter what side you claim to be on—we can all agree fraud is at the forefront of a lot of this. It’s easy to blame white people in today’s times rather than looking at where we perpetuate our own stagnation.

• The Lost Child (The “Conspiracy Theorist”): These are the individuals who have begun to see the glitch in the algorithm. They notice the elephants in the room—the missing trillions and the institutional inconsistencies. However, because they disrupt the family’s manufactured peace, they are bypassed and labeled as “crazy” or “conspiracy theorists” to neutralize their data. Hmmm… this is feeling very familiar.

• The Golden Goose (The Institutional Government): The entity that produces the “wealth” (or the illusion of it) that everyone fights over, yet no one is allowed to audit— by use of inquiry. Can you see why injury is such an important skill to exercise? It makes sense to me why many don’t or are afraid to.

The Somatic Trap: Trauma Bonding as Policy

We are currently normalizing maladaptive behaviors as a primary means of avoiding direct accountability. The “Noise” we hear daily—the constant cycle of outrage—is a distraction designed to keep the population in a state of Preemptive Embodiment. You feel the tightness in your stomach or the shallow breath before you even read a headline, because your nervous system has been conditioned to expect a storm. We have discussed pavlovian style conditioning. If you are new you can catch that essay below.

This is a Trauma Bond on a national scale. Marginalized groups pick the “Parent” (political party) they believe will save them, not realizing they are being herded into a Narrative Prison. You see this with the mayor in NYC, and we experience this form of coercive control through allyship here in El Paso where they use threats for things so minor such as threatening to take your recycle bin away or similar to what occurs in California where city forces use massive fines to get compliance. In this prison, the ability to inquire—to simply ask “Why” has been surgically removed through social conditioning. We have made the population afraid to ask questions because, in a dysfunctional family, Inquiry is seen as betrayal. Now, majority of the unconscious collective cannot see this because they are too busy being blind loyalty members to narratives and beliefs about the “other” to keep them stuck in the shitty tennis match of constant conflict.

We are witnessing Pop Culture on trial because we are finally seeing our own household dynamics projected onto the screen. You can see that with the OJ documentary and selected celebrities that get “off the hook” for piss poor behavior. Almost like we use celebrities as puppets for the game. Think about what Will Smith did with slapping Chris Rock and was there a consequence for his behavior? no— so what does that teach and model at scale? Celebrities play a role at leading the unconscious to pick a side based on blind loyalty factors they have to that celebrity. We are watching the messy, uncurated collapse of a system that thrived on our division. The algorithm is glitching because the “siblings” (Left, Right, Black, White, Queer, Cis) are starting to realize that the “Parents” don’t actually care about them—they only care about the compliance that keeps the house standing within the dysfunctional system we are all apart of.

It’s easier to be mad at ICE.

It’s easier to be mad at corporations, politicians, billionaires, the President or whatever institution is currently occupying the role of societal villain. In many ways, outrage is the easiest emotional currency available to us. Despite its impacts psychologically to the mind, body, and spirit of humans. It gives us somewhere to displace our discomfort. Somewhere to direct our fear. Somewhere to assign responsibility. The problem is that outrage can also become a very effective distraction from self-examination. If all of my attention is focused on what “they” are doing, I never have to ask what role I might be playing in the very system I claim to oppose. Family therapists have been studying this dynamic for decades. Murray Bowen (1978) observed that anxious family systems often organize themselves around an identified patient—the person everyone agrees is the problem. The family becomes consumed with discussing the rebellious child, the alcoholic parent, the difficult spouse, or the family member who appears to carry all the dysfunction. What often goes unnoticed is that while everyone is busy studying the identified patient, very few people are examining the emotional process of the family itself. The identified patient may be symptomatic of the dysfunction, but they are rarely the entirety of the problem.

I sometimes wonder if America does the same thing.

We spend enormous amounts of time arguing about ICE, corporations, political parties (right vs left), influencers, celebrities, and public figures. These conversations dominate our feeds, our headlines, and our dinner tables. Yet far less attention is given to the everyday ways ordinary citizens contribute to the emotional climate we claim to dislike. The therapist who avoids difficult conversations because they fear losing a client despite their job to be the neutral person, not the person who overly validates. The teacher who remains silent because speaking up feels risky or puts them at risk for exile amongst other teachers or staff. The journalist who knows outrage generates engagement. The Judge who projects their trauma onto custody dynamics making it difficult for the father who is a good man to have access to their child. The influencer who profits from division, so they post what is socially acceptable to get the views. The citizen who shares information without verifying it because it confirms an existing belief. None of these behaviors make national headlines. Yet collectively, they shape culture every single day. The uncomfortable truth is that systems do not operate independently from the people within them. We often speak about governments, institutions, and corporations as though they are separate organisms floating above society, disconnected from ordinary people. They are not. Systems are built, maintained, reinforced, and protected by human beings. They require participation. They require compliance. They require people willing to perform tasks, follow orders, remain silent, look away, or justify behavior that conflicts with their values. The “parents” of society may create the rules, but the rest of us are often carrying them out with our own hands. Just peep into your workplace.

This is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable because accountability is far less satisfying than outrage. Outrage gives us dopamine. Accountability requires humility. Outrage allows us to feel morally superior, while accountability forces us to acknowledge our contradictions. Social psychologists have repeatedly found that people are far better at identifying bias, hypocrisy, and moral failures in others than they are in themselves (Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002). We possess an extraordinary ability to see everyone else’s contribution to the problem while remaining largely blind to our own. From a family systems perspective, this is not particularly surprising. Anxious systems naturally externalize responsibility. They look for someone to blame. Someone to fix. Someone to punish. Someone to remove. The fantasy is that if we can just get rid of the identified patient, the system will finally function. Yet the history of families, organizations, and nations suggests otherwise. Remove one scapegoat and another quickly emerges. Replace one villain and a new one appears. You see, the target changes, but the emotional process remains the same. The mechanism remains.

Sometimes I watch what are described as “peaceful protests,” and I find myself wondering how much of what I’m witnessing is genuine civic engagement and how much resembles a family DARVO session happening on a national scale. Not all protests. Not all movements, but enough to notice the pattern. Denial of personal contribution, aggressive displacement of responsibility, and reversal of accountability. All lead to a collective insistence that the problem exists entirely outside of us. The language changes. The slogans change. The hashtags change. Yet underneath it all, I often see something that looks remarkably familiar to what happens inside distressed families.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable question is not what ICE is doing, what corporations are doing, or what politicians are doing.

Perhaps the more uncomfortable question is this:

What am I doing?

How am I contributing?

Where am I participating in the very thing I claim to oppose?

Because the moment we become unwilling to ask that question, we stop behaving like differentiated adults and start behaving like children demanding that someone else clean up a mess we helped create.

II. The Grooming of the Collective Golden Child

In clinical family systems, the “Golden Child” role is a strategic assignment—a child is not chosen for their inherent needs, but for their utility in regulating the parent’s ego and stabilizing a fragile family unit. How many people can we get to support and vote for us and what do we need to do perfomrativly to get them to “trust” us? When we scale this to the American macro-system, we observe a sophisticated process of Institutional Grooming. Political entities (The Parent) identify marginalized demographics—specifically Minority, Queer, and Trans communities and pull them into a state of Enmeshment. This enmeshment is facilitated through a trade: the Parent offers a false sense of power through symbolic gestures (e.g., rainbow branding, specific cultural pandering, and performative validation, inclusivity etc) in exchange for total tribal loyalty. This dynamic mirrors the love-bombing phase in toxic romances, where the individual is flooded with a sense of being “seen” and “valued” to mask an underlying predatory capitalization on their identity.

This loyalty is not free it comes with trade off that we are seeing many okay with paying. It is purchased at the cost of the group’s critical thinking, informed choice, and cognitive nuance. As members are herded into groupthink roles, they experience a degradation of the neural pathways required for independent evaluation. They become high-functioning sheep within a narrative prison they truly believe they created yet fail to realize where the ability to inquire and to ask “Why?” If you notice the elephant in the room, well that get’s framed as a betrayal of the family unit. This creates a population that is cognitively lazy, accusatory, and manipulative, opting for the safety of the narrative over the effort of true agency. Meaning, if we have been conditioned into fearing inquiry or even asking why. Anyone else that does is automatically “bad, dangerous, unsafe.” Do you see how polarity enters the chat? Can you see how this complicates things when faced with real people in the real world? Especially therapists who are designed to challenge, hold nuance, and leave implicit bias at the door. This creates double binds when we enter into fields where directness, and accountability are part of the work. Pause real quick. What is your perception on directness? That word will look differently in the mind for us all, let’s get clear on that.

Let’s jump into our first case study…

But let’s check in with the nervous system thus far.

How is everyone doing? What are you feeling? What is coming up?

Leave a comment

Case Study 1: O.J. Simpson – The Archetype of the Caged Golden Child

The O.J. Simpson trial was a national family meeting that exposed the mechanics of this archetype. Simpson existed within a self-constructed movie where he was “The Man” which was a role fed by a history of fatherlessness, a drive for hyper-masculinity, and a desperate need for external validation which he got through his celebrity status.

Lets look at the the following data:

• Systemic Enabling: Simpson was the Golden Child of an entire cultural ecosystem: fans, legal architects, and media entities who relied on his status for their own utility.

• The Family Role Projection: During the trial, Blackness and Whiteness were not treated as complex identities but as rigid family roles used to manipulate the national psyche. The legal strategy succeeded by forcing the public to choose a “parental side,” effectively bypassing the facts of the crime.

• The Scapegoat vs. The Protected: To keep the Golden Child “heroic,” the system required a Scapegoat. The focus was redirected away from the human trauma of the victims and onto the systemic failures of the “other parent” (the LAPD).

The Inquiry: The Inquiry: Who needed O.J. to remain a hero?

The communities that were enmeshed with his success could not afford his humanity or his potential for darkness, because doing so would have shattered more than a public image. It would have threatened a symbolic victory. O.J. was not merely a man. He had become a projection screen. A symbol. A vessel carrying collective hopes, grievances, aspirations, and identity needs. To acknowledge his flaws meant risking the collapse of a narrative that many people had emotionally invested in. This is where family systems become incredibly useful. Bowen observed that anxious systems often assign symbolic roles to individuals. The hero. The scapegoat. The golden child. The victim. Once someone occupies one of these positions, the system becomes invested in maintaining the role because the role serves a psychological function for the group. The role itself becomes more important than reality. Zoom out, at a societal level, communities often do the same thing.

The O.J. case exposed something uncomfortable, not simply about race, but about tribalism. The question is not whether racism existed. It did. The question is not whether black Americans have experienced systemic oppression. They have. The question is what happens when legitimate historical pain becomes fused with identity in such a way that accountability begins to feel like betrayal.

Case Study 2: The Family System – How the Golden Child is Created

Before we can recognize these dynamics within governments, institutions, political parties, or social movements, we have to understand how they first develop inside ordinary families. Family systems rarely organize themselves around fairness, just look back in the hippocampus archives of your life.

They organize themselves around anxiety.

When a couple welcomes their first child, they are not simply becoming parents. They are also confronting versions of themselves they have never met before. There is no manual capable of preparing someone for every emotional trigger that parenthood awakens. The first child often receives the most inexperienced version of the parent. They become the family’s first experiment in attachment, discipline, emotional regulation, and repair. As Gabor Maté (2022) notes, siblings are never truly raised by the same parents because parents themselves are continually changing. The mother raising her first child is psychologically, emotionally, financially, relationally, and biologically different from the mother raising her third. This difference does not automatically create dysfunction. What creates dysfunction is the parent’s inability to metabolize guilt. Boy oh Boy is guilt one hell of a weapon, but one hell of an emotion that causes humans to act in ways they may not typically behave as.

Suppose the firstborn begins setting boundaries as an adult. Perhaps they confront years of emotional neglect. Maybe they point out the inconsistencies between how they were disciplined compared to their younger sibling. Maybe they describe feeling unseen, parentified, criticized, or chronically responsible for maintaining the emotional climate of the household. At that moment, the parent faces an uncomfortable psychological crossroads.

One path requires accountability.

The other requires self-protection.

If acknowledging the firstborn’s experience threatens the parent’s identity as a “good mother” or “good father,” the nervous system often chooses protection over repair. Rather than tolerating shame, the family unconsciously reorganizes itself to preserve the parent’s emotional equilibrium. Bowen (1978) described this as the system’s attempt to restore homeostasis. So now the goal within the family is no longer about truth its about maintaining stability. But what is ability in dysfunctional environments? This is where family roles quietly begin to crystallize.

The oldest child, who was once simply asking to be understood, slowly becomes “the difficult one.”

“The dramatic one.”

“The angry one.”

“The ungrateful one.”

Meanwhile, the younger sibling learns something equally important.

Safety comes through alignment. They are observing the parents response to their older sibling and learn what not to do, or what to do in order to get on the parents good side. Som If siding with the parent reduces conflict, preserves closeness, or secures affection, the younger child unconsciously learns to participate in maintaining the family narrative. They don’t have to be manipulative to do this either. In fact, many children genuinely love both siblings. Yet children are exquisitely sensitive to emotional climates. They quickly learn where safety lives.

Sometimes safety lives in silence, lives in agreement, or it lives in helping the parent carry the illusion that nothing is wrong.

This is how enmeshment develops.

Over time, the parent becomes increasingly fused with one child, often confusing emotional dependence with closeness. The relationship begins serving the parent’s unmet attachment needs rather than the child’s developmental needs. The child gradually becomes confidant, emotional regulator, protector, therapist, surrogate partner, or symbolic proof that they were, in fact, a successful parent. What appears to outsiders as extraordinary closeness may actually reflect blurred generational boundaries rather than secure attachment (Minuchin, 1974). Now, what is the cost of this arrangement because it is profound.

The favored child learns that love is contingent upon loyalty.

The scapegoated child learns that truth is dangerous.

The parent learns that avoiding accountability temporarily reduces anxiety.

And the family mistakes this fragile equilibrium for peace. What is the messaging and modeling that is taken from this? Well—avoidance. Perhaps the most tragic consequence is that the siblings themselves often begin participating in the system. The younger sibling may genuinely believe the oldest is selfish, difficult, or overly sensitive because that narrative has become the emotional language of the household. Aligning with the parent protects them from becoming the next target. Family systems have an extraordinary ability to recruit children into preserving dysfunction without anyone consciously intending harm.

Now zoom out.

Replace the mother with a political party.

Replace the favored child with a preferred voting bloc.

Replace the scapegoated sibling with the group blamed for the family’s distress (white people)

Replace the household with a nation.

The mechanics barely change.

The names do.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) described what he called double consciousness which is the experience of seeing oneself through one’s own eyes while simultaneously viewing oneself through the lens of a society shaped by racial prejudice. This was an extraordinarily important contribution because it highlighted the psychological burden carried by black Americans navigating a society that often distorted their humanity. Yet every adaptation has a shadow. When a community has spent generations being misrepresented, stereotyped, or demonized, a powerful protective instinct can emerge. Criticism from within the group begins to feel dangerous. Accountability begins to feel risky. Public acknowledgment of dysfunction can feel like handing ammunition to an already hostile world. Now Zoom Out. We see this today within the black community. I call for a family meeting and many stuck in perception find that to be a threat. Many within the community what members in the same community to get their shit together. Now, Many of us who are apart of the community are fighting stereotypes that in today’s time are being perpetuated by its own members. This is where you get in group rivalry. We don’t need to examine the family system within black culture because we can stay focused on the historical past injustices as a vine to escape the discussion that can lead us to connection. So what happens. We bypass or dismiss certain maladaptive behaviors, rationalize it as an issue with white supremacy as a means to manage the image of black people.

The community cannot afford a bad look and that is where things become complicated. Why? Because what begins as protection can slowly transform into enablement.

All that started in the name of solidarity now becomes silence.

What begins as loyalty can become denial.

The original purpose was survival.

The unintended consequence becomes stagnation. This is what we see today in modern times.

One of the clearest examples of this dynamic occurs inside families where image slowly becomes more important than repair. I see this with religious based families, cultures, and those in the public eye such as influencer families, couples, or individuals on boards of organizations that provide access to the public scrutiny. Imagine a father who struggles with alcohol. Every weekend he becomes verbally abusive, emotionally unavailable, or unpredictable. As the oldest daughter grows older, she begins noticing the pattern and eventually finds the courage to bring it up. She isn’t trying to shame her father, she is simply accessing expression highway to build connection and repair. The daughter in this example simply wants the family to acknowledge that something isn’t working because she can already see the impact it’s having on her younger siblings, who maybe she has become so parentified because of this dynamic that she has become protective of her younger siblings. Instead of her mother responding with curiosity or accountability, the conversation immediately shifts. “We don’t talk about family business.” “Your father works hard.” “Every family has problems, you are ungrateful” “Why are you always looking for something that’s wrong?” In that moment, the problem quietly changes. The father’s behavior is no longer the threat. The daughter’s willingness to name it is.

Over time, the emotional climate of the household begins reorganizing itself around protecting the family’s image rather than repairing the family itself. The younger siblings learn that questioning dad creates conflict, but agreeing with mom restores peace. So what do they do? they don’t consciously choose dishonesty. They choose safety. They begin minimizing the drinking, explaining away the outbursts, and eventually defending the very behavior that has harmed them because participating in the family narrative keeps them emotionally connected to the system. The oldest daughter slowly becomes “negative,” “too sensitive,” or “the difficult one,” while everyone else is rewarded for maintaining the illusion that everything is fine. The family has unknowingly shifted from protecting each other to protecting the story they tell about themselves.

This is what Bowen meant when he described anxious systems reorganizing themselves to maintain homeostasis rather than truth (Bowen, 1978). The family’s goal is no longer about healing. The goal is emotional equilibrium for that unit. The mother’s nervous system has become organized around preventing shame rather than repairing harm. Admitting that her daughter is right would require confronting years of missed opportunities, painful guilt, and perhaps the realization that the marriage she has spent years defending has come at the expense of her children. That level of self-confrontation is incredibly difficult. It is often psychologically easier to dismiss the messenger than to metabolize the message.

This is one of the observations made by Dr. Kamilah Majied, whose work frequently explores how historical trauma, systemic oppression, and collective identity influence psychological functioning. While understanding oppression is necessary, she repeatedly emphasizes that healing cannot occur through perpetual identification with injury alone. Trauma must be acknowledged, but eventually communities must also reclaim agency, responsibility, and authorship of their future. Otherwise the wound becomes the identity and identities are remarkably difficult to question.

Wilhelm Reich’s work on the psychology of oppression pointed toward a similar phenomenon. Systems of domination do not merely operate externally. Over time they become internalized. What does that look like exactly today? Well, People begin organizing themselves around structures that originally harmed them. The oppression survives not only because it exists outside the individual, but because it becomes embedded within the psychological field itself. This is where I believe many modern conversations become stuck. We can always externalize our maladaptive behavior to the “villain” and avoid internal accountability.

Understand this has nothing to do with injustice being imaginary. We as a collective engage in thought terminating cliches just to shut this conversation down. This is a hill I will die on. We have to be bold and brave to initiate these conversations the same way we have to be bold and brave to have them within our own family and relational systems.

So, If this dynamic sounds familiar, it is because we continue to reenact it everywhere at home.

We see it when political candidates are caught lying, engaging in unethical behavior, or contradicting their own stated values, yet supporters rush to defend them because acknowledging the behavior would threaten the larger narrative they have attached themselves to. Research in political psychology has consistently found that individuals evaluate information differently depending on whether it supports or threatens their group identity (Haidt, 2012; Tavris & Aronson, 2007). The facts themselves become secondary. The primary concern becomes protecting the tribe. We see it in celebrity culture. When allegations emerge against a beloved public figure, entire online communities often mobilize to explain away, minimize, rationalize, or attack anyone raising concerns. You see this with Arianna Grande and her weight. Concerned fans are then crucified by die hard supporters who are bypassing the concern and what this is messaging and modeling to her fans. Insert other public figures or celebrities, even influences doing the same thing. The reaction is rarely about the individual event alone. The celebrity has become symbolic. They represent a community’s aspirations, values, identity, or sense of belonging. To question the celebrity feels like questioning the group itself. Social Identity Theory suggests that people frequently experience attacks on the group as attacks on the self (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). So if we question someone and their body image, when then place that inquiry on our own.

We see it within activist movements. A movement may begin with legitimate concerns and meaningful goals, yet over time become resistant to internal criticism. Members who raise concerns about strategy, leadership, or unintended consequences may be labeled traitors, sellouts, or enemies of the cause. Irving Janis (1972) described this phenomenon as groupthink—a process in which preserving group cohesion becomes more important than critically evaluating information. In these moments, belonging becomes more valuable than truth. We see it in religious communities. Clergy misconduct scandals have repeatedly revealed environments where leaders were protected, victims were doubted, and concerns were dismissed because acknowledging wrongdoing threatened the institution’s image. The preservation of the system became more important than confronting reality. Family systems theorists would recognize this immediately. The system becomes organized around protecting itself rather than correcting itself. We see it in families every holiday season. The uncle who drinks too much but is never confronted because “that’s just how he is.” The grandmother who manipulates everyone through guilt but is protected because “she’s the elder.” The sibling whose behavior creates chaos year after year while everyone walks on eggshells to avoid conflict. The family cannot afford to challenge the dysfunction because the challenge itself threatens the stability of the system.

And we see it in conversations about race.

A black person who raises concerns about dysfunction within the black community may be accused of reinforcing stereotypes—being called “anti-black” to shut the conversation down. A white person who raises concerns about dysfunction within their own community may be accused of betrayal. The same pattern appears across cultures, religions, political parties, and social groups. The fear is rarely about the criticism itself. The fear is about what happens if the criticism is perceived by outsiders.

The community cannot afford a bad look.

The problem is that healthy systems are capable of self-correction. Unhealthy systems become preoccupied with self-protection. Edwin Friedman (1999) argued that chronically anxious systems often punish differentiation because differentiated individuals threaten the emotional equilibrium of the group. The person willing to say, “We need to look at ourselves,” frequently receives more resistance than the behavior they are attempting to address. I see this personally with my work online. Women love to come for me— calling me “arrogant” simply because I am secure and do not need their/ the publics approval or agreement. This is why accountability often feels so dangerous, because it introduces complexity, it forces a group to hold nuance—multiple truths simultaneously.

The system may have been harmed. The system may also be harming itself.

Historical injustice is real.

Present-day responsibility is also real.

Oppression exist. Which also means agency exists too.

Mature systems can tolerate both truths, but immature systems insist that only one can survive. That’s the collective sickness and over time this polarity conditions Borderline personality traits. The collective focus remains locked inside what I call the hippocampus archives. The historical record, the nervous system’s catalog of every reason we have ever been hurt.

Those archives matter don’t get me wrong. The archives should be studied, and should never be erased. But archives are designed to inform the present—not replace it. That’s the problem. At some point a community must ask whether it is using history as information or as insulation from accountability. There is a profound difference between understanding how a wound was created and organizing an entire identity around preserving the wound. This is why moments like the one highlighted by comedian and content creator Druski become culturally significant. In one viral exchange, a Black man attempted to attribute his incarceration for murder to white supremacy. Druski’s response was blunt: this had nothing to do with white people. What made the moment powerful was not its humor.

It was the interruption.

For a brief moment, someone refused to allow a legitimate historical framework to be used as a blanket explanation for individual behavior— that distinction matters. When every outcome is attributed exclusively to oppression, personal agency begins to disappear, and when agency disappears, accountability disappears, and when accountability disappears, growth becomes nearly impossible or at least to our perception. Eventually the burden shifts onto the very members of the community who are actively attempting to move forward. They find themselves working harder, behaving better, performing more responsibly, and policing their own behavior to counter stereotypes that are sometimes being reinforced by members of their own group. This creates exhaustion.

Human beings exist inside multiple truths simultaneously. The problem emerges when one truth becomes so dominant that it crowds out every other truth available in the room. At that point, we are no longer pursuing understanding. We are simply just protecting a narrative.

And every family system knows what happens when a narrative becomes more important than reality.

The system stops growing.

III. Case Study 2: Rodney King and the National Nervous System

One of the most uncomfortable realities about human systems is that they rarely collapse because nobody knew. More often, they collapse because everybody knew and very few people were willing to risk what they would lose by speaking up. Now, Family therapists understand this phenomenon well. In dysfunctional families, children quickly learn which truths are safe to acknowledge and which truths threaten the stability of the household. Over time, silence becomes adaptive. The child learns that belonging is often more valuable than honesty. The nervous system begins making calculations: “If I tell the truth, will I lose connection? Will I lose safety? Will I lose access?” Eventually the silence becomes so normalized that people no longer experience it as avoidance. They experience it as loyalty (Bowen, 1978).

This is one of the reasons the Rodney King case became such a profound injury to the national nervous system. The trauma was not limited to the violence itself. The deeper wound emerged from what happened afterward. Millions of people watched the footage. They witnessed the event with their own eyes. Yet when the officers were acquitted, many people experienced something that psychologists would recognize as a form of institutional betrayal—a moment when the institution responsible for protection appeared unwilling to acknowledge reality (Freyd, 2013). For many Black Americans, the message was not simply that harm occurred. The message was that harm could occur publicly, be documented, be witnessed collectively, and still be denied. From a family systems perspective, this resembles the child confronting a parent about abuse only to be told that the abuse never happened. Or a daughter telling their mother of a sexual assault that happened from the mother’s boyfriend, inly for the mother to DARVO her daughter in protecting the boyfriend. The injury is compounded because reality itself becomes destabilized.

Yet what interests me is not only what institutions do. It is what communities do in response. Because once a group experiences repeated betrayal, a new problem emerges. The community becomes organized around survival. Like we discussed earlier in the essay. W.E.B. Du Bois described this through the concept of Double Consciousness —the experience of constantly evaluating oneself through both one’s own perspective and the perspective of a society that may already hold distorted assumptions about you (Du Bois, 1903). This adaptation makes sense. If you know you are being watched, judged, stereotyped, or misrepresented, you become hyperaware of how your community is perceived. You become protective. You become vigilant. You become invested in defending the group. The problem is that every adaptation carries a shadow.

At some point, protection can become enablement. Accountability can begin to feel like that very betrayal I keep mentioning. As a result, internal criticism can start feeling more threatening than the behavior itself. The question quietly shifts from “Is this true?” to “How will this make us look?” The focus is no longer reality. The focus becomes image management. Sounds like communal narcissism. This is where the recent P. Diddy situation becomes psychologically fascinating. For years, there were rumors. Stories. Allegations. Industry whispers. Jokes hidden in plain sight. Enough smoke that many people now claim they suspected there was fire. Yet very few people spoke publicly while the power structure remained intact. Why do you think that is?

Well, systems reward compliance, period.

Just like western medicine— you get care with compliance. Speaking up can cost invitations, contracts, opportunities, relationships, money, status, and proximity to power. Sociologists have repeatedly found that individuals frequently suppress dissent when belonging to a group is perceived as more valuable than confronting wrongdoing (Janis, 1972). Silence becomes the price of admission.

And before we rush to make this exclusively about Hollywood, we should recognize the same dynamic in our own families and communities. How many people remain silent about addiction because they don’t want to embarrass the family? How many people tolerate abusive behavior because challenging it would disrupt the family hierarchy? How many churches protected leaders because confronting misconduct threatened the institution? How many communities protect certain individuals because exposing them would create a “bad look” for the group? The costumes change. The emotional process remains remarkably consistent.

This is where I believe many conversations about race become trapped in a cycle of reenactment. The reality of racism is not the question. The historical record is well documented. The question is what happens when legitimate historical wounds become fused with identity in such a way that they begin functioning as explanations for everything. Like I stated earlier, Wilhelm Reich argued that systems of oppression eventually become embedded not only in institutions but also within the psychological structure of individuals themselves (Reich, 1933/1970). In other words, the oppression survives not only because it exists externally, but because people begin organizing their lives around it internally. Trauma researchers have repeatedly found that healing requires both acknowledgment of the injury and the restoration of agency (van der Kolk, 2014). What concerns me most is how quickly we demand courage from outsiders while excusing silence within our own people. We expect institutions to be accountable. We expect white people to speak up. We expect politicians to challenge corruption. We expect police officers to confront misconduct. Yet we often hesitate to ask the same of ourselves. Just me stating this there will be some who will read and say “so cops don’t need to face the misconduct?” that’s not at all what I said but its what you will internalize. We do the same in our families and relationships.

Subscribe now

Family systems theory would suggest that this is precisely where growth becomes possible. Maturity begins when the focus shifts from what everyone else should be doing to what we ourselves are willing to do. Healthy systems are not built because someone else became accountable first. Healthy systems emerge when individuals become willing to tell the truth even when the truth threatens their position, their status, their paycheck, or their seat at the table (Bowen, 1978; Friedman, 1999).

And perhaps that is the real question underneath all of this.

What are we willing to ignore in exchange for belonging?

Because every family has a secret.

Every institution has a secret.

Every community has a secret.

The only difference is whether the members of the system are willing to tell the truth about it.

Family Systems Case Study:

Imagine a twelve-year-old girl finally finding the courage to tell her mother that her mother’s boyfriend has been sexually abusing her. She has rehearsed this conversation a thousand times to prepare for her courageous step of vocalizing it. Her hands are shaking. Her heart is racing. She already knows there is a chance her mother won’t believe her, but somewhere inside of her is still the hope that the one person biologically wired to protect her will finally make the nightmare stop.

Instead, her mother explodes.

“You’re lying.”

“Why would you make something like that up?”

“You’re just jealous because I finally found someone.”

“You’re trying to ruin my relationship.”

Within seconds, the daughter’s disclosure is no longer about the abuse. The conversation has shifted entirely toward protecting the mother’s relationship. The boyfriend has quietly become the Golden Child of the system, and the mother’s nervous system is no longer organized around protecting her daughter. It has reorganized itself around protecting the attachment she has with her partner. To acknowledge the abuse would require confronting an unbearable reality that she failed to protect her child, invited danger into the home, and perhaps ignored warning signs along the way. Rather than metabolizing that shame, the system unconsciously relocates it. The daughter becomes the problem, and that brave disclosure becomes the threat. Truth itself becomes dangerous, and the daughter learns that silence is better than speaking up.

Family therapists see this more often than people realize. The deepest wound is not always the original abuse. The deepest wound is often what happens after the disclosure. The child learns that reality can be erased if it threatens someone else’s emotional stability. She learns that telling the truth may cost her the very relationship she hoped would save her. She begins questioning her own memory, her own perception, even her own worth. This is the devastating psychological injury that Jennifer Freyd (2013) describes in her work on betrayal trauma. When the individual or institution responsible for protection becomes the one denying, minimizing, or defending the harm, the nervous system experiences a profound rupture. The injury is no longer only the abuse. The injury becomes the collapse of trust in reality itself thus creating a massive imprint that will sediment itself in the timeline, being projected in the adult relationships to come.

Now zoom out.

This is one of the reasons the Rodney King case left such a deep imprint on the national nervous system. The trauma was never confined to the violence captured on camera. Millions of people watched the footage with their own eyes. Then they watched a legal system acquit the officers involved. For many Black Americans, it felt psychologically similar to the child whose mother refuses to believe what she has just witnessed. The message was not simply, “Someone hurt you.” The message was, “What you saw cannot be trusted.” That is what institutional betrayal does. It destabilizes reality. It forces people to choose between believing their own perception or remaining psychologically attached to the authority that has betrayed them. The nervous system cannot comfortably hold both. Something has to give.

This is why family systems are so helpful for understanding society. Whether it is a mother protecting an abusive boyfriend, a church protecting a pastor, a corporation protecting an executive, a police department protecting its own, or a political party protecting one of its leaders, the mechanics remain remarkably consistent. The anxious system does not first ask, What is true? It asks, What will happen to us if this is true? The answer to that question often determines whether truth is welcomed or sacrificed in the name of preserving the system.

III. The Narrative Prison and the Outsourcing of Agency

The Narrative Prison is a psychological architecture and it is built to bypass the intense, exhausting labor required for true agency. As a reminder everything costs energy expense. The cost of agency takes from that expense but also from the cost of belonging. True sovereignty demands internal accountability and continuous self-inquiry, both of which require immense energy from the nervous system. To avoid this discomfort, the collective outsources its autonomy to pre-packaged ideologies. These ideologies function like structural cages: they provide a superficial sense of safety and meaning, but they permanently paralyze critical thinking. By entering the Narrative Prison, the individual trades the responsibility of informed choice for the comforting sedation of a script.

The Narcissism of the Righteous Victim: By adopting a victim narrative, individuals avoid the shadow work of looking at internal failures—such as broken homes or addiction within their own communities and instead project all blame onto external “oppressors”. So what this can look like is when a community or individual internalizes the role of the perpetual victim, they develop an absolute moral immunity. This dynamic is what I call the Narcissism of the Righteous Victim. Researchers Ekin Ok, Karl Aquino, and colleagues clinically identified as Virtuous Victim Signaling. Their research demonstrates a direct, empirical link between frequent victim-and-virtue signaling and "Dark Triad" personality traits—specifically communal narcissism and Machiavellianism. Communal narcissists do not boast about wealth or physical dominance; instead, they claim a "superior prosociality," asserting that they are more caring, moral, and uniquely persecuted than anyone else. By adopting this specialized victim architecture, individuals unlock what the data calls moral immunity. Moral immunity shields the individual from any criticism regarding the manipulative, hostile, or deceptive means they use to achieve their goals. On a macro scale, this operates as a tactical bypass to avoid the grueling shadow work required to look at internal systemic failures. By framing all personal and collective pain as the exclusive fault of an external "oppressor," like I have been saying— the individuals successfully avoid looking at generational rot within their own walls: broken homes, cycles of addiction, or localized community instability. The victim narrative becomes an ego-preserving shield. As long as the "enemy" is outside the house, you never have to clean the rooms inside

Selective Outrage and Principle Fluidity:

A defining feature of psychologically captured systems is not simply selective outrage it is principle fluidity. In a differentiated individual, values remain relatively stable even when circumstances change. A person may wrestle with complexity, revise a position when new evidence emerges, or acknowledge competing ethical concerns, but the underlying principle remains recognizable. By contrast, within highly tribalized systems, principles often become conditional, expanding or contracting depending on whether they protect the emotional needs of the group. What appears on the surface as moral conviction is frequently the nervous system’s attempt to preserve belonging. This is what we see in modern society. In these moments, loyalty supersedes consistency, and protecting the tribe becomes more important than examining whether one’s reasoning remains coherent across contexts (Haidt, 2012; Kahneman, 2011).

One example many people immediately recognize is the dramatic shift in public rhetoric surrounding bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice” is often presented as an absolute ethical principle within discussions of reproductive rights, yet that same principle has, at times, been narrowed or abandoned in conversations surrounding vaccine mandates. Regardless of where one personally stands on either issue, the psychological observation remains the same: when identical ethical language produces opposite conclusions depending on tribal affiliation, it suggests that identity may be exerting greater influence than principle. This does not prove one position is correct and another incorrect— lets pause here for as second. This is the part of nuance and my work that causes uproar. It is not about who is right or who is wrong. That is the trap I am trying to bring to awareness to. It demonstrates how group identity can shape which values are emphasized, minimized, or temporarily suspended in service of maintaining group cohesion (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Janis, 1972).

This same dynamic becomes visible outside of politics. In one episode of Jubilee’s Middle Ground, fitness expert Jillian Michaels participated in a discussion with body positivity activists. The conversation itself is less interesting than the relational dynamics unfolding underneath it— remember I call these under currents. Regardless of where one lands philosophically on weight, beauty standards, or public health, the interaction provides an opportunity to observe nervous systems under perceived threat. Rather than functioning as individuals exchanging ideas, many participants appeared to be operating as representatives of a shared emotional identity. Moments of disagreement were frequently experienced not as intellectual challenges for healthy debate but as interpersonal injuries requiring defense. The conversation repeatedly shifted away from examining claims and toward regulating the emotional equilibrium of the group. In noticed this with activists that were tiptoeing with their perspective even though they were debating Jillian. Apart of the same activist group but weary of upsetting other members of the same group.

From a family systems perspective, this is what happens when unresolved wounds become the organizing force of belonging. Shared suffering undoubtedly creates powerful bonds, and many activist movements begin with legitimate experiences of marginalization, discrimination, or exclusion. The problem emerges when healing becomes secondary to maintaining the cohesion of the wounded identity itself. The group unconsciously develops an investment in keeping the wound psychologically alive because the wound has become the primary organizing principle of the relationship. What originally served as protection gradually transforms into identity.

Neuroscientifically, my favorite part of this work— this pattern is understandable. Repeated discussion of emotionally charged experiences without sufficient regulation can repeatedly reactivate the same defensive neural networks associated with those memories (van der Kolk, 2014; Porges, 2011). Rather than allowing the nervous system opportunities to integrate painful experiences into autobiographical memory, the individual may continually revisit the injury in ways that strengthen its emotional salience. What I mean by this is essentially the scab is picked before it has the opportunity to become a scar. Over time, this pattern of “regulation” through discussion and or vigilance becomes mistaken for healing, and activation becomes mistaken for advocacy. Now, if you are still with me I have to remind the amygdala of the readers. Again, my work is not here as an argument against activism, social justice, or acknowledging genuine oppression. On the contrary, naming harm is often the necessary beginning of recovery. The concern arises when communities unintentionally become organized around the perpetual maintenance of dysregulation rather than the cultivation of resilience, differentiation, and repair. If every disagreement is experienced as retraumatization, genuine dialogue becomes nearly impossible because the nervous system interprets curiosity as danger before the prefrontal cortex has the opportunity to evaluate new information (Siegel, 2020; Porges, 2011).

What I have been observing through my work with clients but through being the observer of collective behavior is that many of these contemporary movements are becoming forms of organizational displacement. The original injury may have been inflicted by parents, institutions, peers, or broader systems of injustice. Yet the emotional intensity generated by those experiences is often redirected toward symbolic representatives of the “other.” The present conversation becomes a stage upon which unresolved relational wounds continue to seek resolution. In psychodynamic language, this resembles displacement and projection; in family systems language, it resembles reenactment. Either way, the nervous system is attempting to solve yesterday’s injury inside today’s interaction.

Just the other day I spoke to a client stating “…your partner is not in a marriage with you, they are in a marriage with their trauma that they are trying to conquer through you…” I see this in many of the couplesI work with and within my own dynamics within my marriage.

The tragedy is that both sides often leave believing they defended themselves, while neither side experiences repair or even connection. The wound remains open, the nervous system remains activated, and the cycle continues. At that point, outrage ceases to function as a pathway toward justice and instead becomes a mechanism through which unresolved pain continually reproduces itself across relationships, communities, and generations. Explaining how we continue to pass down the generational ache rather than confront it.

Cognitive Shortcuts: One of the fastest ways a dysfunctional family maintains homeostasis is through labeling. Instead of engaging with what is being said, the system assigns an identity to the person saying it. "You're selfish." "You're dramatic." "You're the problem." The label becomes a cognitive shortcut that allows the family to avoid the far more difficult task of tolerating ambiguity, examining evidence, or considering whether the uncomfortable observation being made might contain some truth. The role has already been assigned so as a result it means the conversation is over before it has begun. Now, with modern America increasingly functioning this way. Labels such as racist, phobic, bigot, communist, misogynist, or traitorcan certainly describe genuine prejudice or harmful behavior. I immediately think of Carl Jung’s book Man and His Symbols. One of the biggest arguments he makes is that human beings are not nearly as rational as they imagine themselves to be. Much of our behavior originates outside conscious awareness, emerging symbolically through projection, dreams, myths, and the stories we construct about ourselves and others (Jung, 1964). When aspects of ourselves remain psychologically unintegrated, the psyche seeks relief by locating those unwanted qualities somewhere else. The enemy is no longer something we wrestle with internally—it becomes someone standing in front of us. The problem arises when these words cease functioning as descriptions of observable behavior and instead become conversational weapons used to end inquiry before it begins. Which I. experience with my work online as well as many others. Even Brené Brown mentions struggling with this receiving death threats and people burning her book. Rather than inviting curiosity, they foreclose it. Rather than helping us discriminate between harmful and non-harmful behavior, the family members in America’s family collapse complexity into moral certainty. In cognitive psychology, this reflects the mind’s tendency to rely on heuristics—mental shortcuts that reduce uncertainty by simplifying complex social information (Kahneman, 2011). While heuristics allow us to make rapid judgments, they also increase the likelihood of stereotyping, confirmation bias, and premature conclusions.

Within the framework of America as a Family System, these labels function much like family roles. Every “mini-house” whether organized around race, politics, religion, sexuality, or ideology—develops spoken and unspoken rules about which conversations are permissible and which observations threaten the emotional stability of the group. Members quickly learn that asking certain questions may result in exile, public shaming, or accusations of betrayal. Remember belonging is currency and we all have the humanistic need to want to belong. As a result, the nervous system learns that belonging is contingent upon conformity, not differentiation. Where are my overfunctioners at that shrink themselves as a means to keep the boat steady? Over time, people stop evaluating ideas on their own merits and instead scan for whether an idea violates the emotional norms of the tribe or even the family. Bowen (1978) described differentiation as the capacity to maintain one’s thinking while remaining emotionally connected to others. In highly anxious systems, that capacity deteriorates.

This becomes particularly evident when examining discussions occurring within communities themselves. Consider the black community. Like every community, it contains remarkable diversity of thought, experience, values, and behavior. It also contains individuals whose behavior harms others, through violence, exploitation, crime, or interpersonal abuse. Naming these realities should not automatically be interpreted as an attack on Black identity that is hypocritical. Yet within highly polarized environments, criticism directed toward behaviors occurring within one’s own group may quickly be reframed as internalized racism, betrayal, or giving ammunition to outsiders. The consequence is not protection but paralysis—stuckness. Adaptive members of the community are left carrying the reputational consequences of behaviors they neither endorse nor participate in, while maladaptive behavior remains insufficiently challenged because confronting it risks social punishment from within the group itself. The same psychological pattern appears across many identity-based communities. Within some queer and transgender spaces, individuals who raise questions about policy, boundaries, language, or competing rights (such as parents not wanting biological males using bathrooms their daughter are in) may find themselves immediately labeled as phobic, even when the concern being expressed is rooted in legitimate questions about privacy, safety, or competing ethical obligations. Conversely, genuine prejudice can also be dismissed by those outside these communities who refuse to examine their own biases, but let’s be careful. This is nuance, not every person who is trans is a predator, but not every parent wanting to protect their daughter’s safety in the bathroom is phobic. The labels are what create pavlovian conditioning with cognitive laziness. The mechanism is not unique to one side. The mechanism is the point. When labels become substitutes for dialogue, everyone loses the opportunity to refine their thinking.

This is not an argument that prejudice does not exist. Racism exists. Homophobia exists. Transphobia exists. Sexism exists. These realities should neither be minimized nor ignored. Notice how I have to keep repeating that throughout this essay? Why do you think that is?

The concern is what happens when those terms become reflexive explanations rather than carefully considered conclusions. Once the label is assigned, the psychological work of curiosity stops. The individual no longer has to wrestle with competing truths because the label itself performs the cognitive labor. It becomes what I call grasping for the vine. The George of the jungle through the vines of avoiding accountability. When individuals reach for the nearest available explanation (vine) to avoid the discomfort of complexity, we lost sight of repair and connection.

Now if we zoom in to the family. This process resembles what social psychologists describe as motivated reasoning, in which people unconsciously evaluate information in ways that protect preexisting identities and beliefs rather than impartially assessing evidence (Kunda, 1990). The label becomes psychologically rewarding because it restores certainty, reinforces group belonging, and eliminates the anxiety of ambiguity. Unfortunately, it also reduces the capacity for accountability. Once every uncomfortable interaction can be attributed to racism, transphobia, or some other singular explanation, individuals and groups may lose opportunities for genuine self-reflection, interpersonal repair, or behavioral change. Family systems offer a striking parallel. Children raised in chronically reactive households quickly learn that telling the truth may provoke rage, withdrawal, or retaliation. How many of us learned the love stopped or was withheld when we did not do what our parents wanted?

Rather than addressing the underlying issue, family members begin organizing themselves around emotional avoidance. Conversations become performances designed to prevent explosions or adult tantrums rather than opportunities for mutual understanding. This is where the idea of walking on eggshells is introduced. The same process can emerge institutionally. Many people I have worked with including myself navigated workplace dynamics that mimicked the very challenges we faced in our own childhoods. Supervisors become reluctant to provide feedback, triangulate or use cohesive control tactics, educators avoid difficult conversations, clinicians hesitate to ask exploratory questions, and organizations prioritize risk management over honest dialogue because everyone fears triggering the next conflict. What begins as conflict avoidance slowly transforms into collective enablement.

Clinically, this is not emotional maturity it becomes emotional accommodation. The system reorganizes itself around the most reactive nervous systems in the room. Over time, the loudest voices begin determining what everyone else is allowed to think, ask, or acknowledge. The unintended consequence is that differentiation declines while splitting increases making a fast track to borderline traits. People become conditioned to sort the world into allies and enemies, victims and perpetrators, good people and bad people. Yet decades of psychological research consistently demonstrates that healthy cognitive development requires increasing tolerance for ambiguity, complexity, and competing truths rather than reducing them (Kegan, 1994; Siegel, 2020).

IV. Case Studies in Systemic Bypass

One of the defining characteristics of a dysfunctional family is not simply that harm occurs. Harm occurs in every family, depending on what you classify as harm. The defining characteristic is what the family chooses to notice and what/who it quietly steps over. Some conversations become impossible to escape. They dominate headlines, algorithms, dinner tables, and comment sections. Others disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, despite carrying enormous consequences for public trust. It raises an uncomfortable question: Who decides what deserves our outrage?

Take the Somali daycare fraud case in Minnesota, one of the largest pandemic-related fraud investigations in U.S. history. Or the repeated reports documenting billions—and over the decades, trillions in accounting discrepancies within the United States Department of Defense. Or highly publicized disputes over investigations into state leadership and public accountability. Whether one attributes these situations to bureaucracy, incompetence, corruption, or political gridlock is almost secondary to the psychological observation. The public’s attention rarely remains fixed on institutional accountability for very long. Instead, our attention is continually redirected toward the next emotionally charged conflict. It’s almost as if this is by design.

Families do this too.

Children begin arguing in the living room while no one asks why the electricity hasn’t been paid. Parents become consumed with who raised their voice instead of why the family keeps repeating the same destructive pattern. The conflict becomes the distraction. The distraction becomes the tradition. Before long, everyone forgets what the original problem even was.

I sometimes wonder whether we’ve confused stimulation with awareness. Because every week there is another controversy demanding our emotional energy. Another celebrity scandal, another culture war, another viral clip. Yet, another reason to pick a side thus conditioning our brains to polarity and away from nuance. Our nervous systems remain perpetually activated, but activation is not the same thing as attention. If anything, chronic activation narrows our ability to notice the slower, quieter forces shaping our lives.

Perhaps this is one of the greatest costs of living in a society organized around outrage. We become excellent at reacting and increasingly poor at observing.

The Symbol of Wealth

This same process quietly shapes our relationship with money. Spend enough time online and you’ll hear people proclaim, “Fuck the rich.” Then watch what happens after they close the app. Many of those same individuals open YouTube videos about manifestation, abundance, financial freedom, passive income, or becoming wealthy.

There is something deeply human about this contradiction.

Carl Jung believed symbols carry emotional weight far beyond their literal meaning (Jung, 1964). We rarely respond to an object itself. We respond to what the object has come to represent within our own psyche. Wealth is one of those symbols. For some, wealth symbolizes freedom.

For others, it symbolizes greed.

Exploitation.

Narcissism.

Corruption.

Abandonment.

If the unconscious has fused money with moral danger, the psyche finds itself in an impossible position. Consciously, we may long for financial stability, generosity, and freedom. Unconsciously, we may fear becoming the very type of person we have learned to despise. Meaning the very abundance we pray from comes with adjusting to having it and the symbol we applied having it to mean. A classic example of this is someone who grew up low income. Now, surpasses the tax bracket they grew up in. he family may label or even judge them calling them names such as “bougie” “entitled” etc. Anything to avoid the discomfort of the financial growth that was made. The conflict is rarely about money itself. It is about identity. If “wealth” has become psychologically synonymous with selfishness, then pursuing abundance begins to feel like pursuing corruption. The mind quietly sabotages the very future it consciously desires because it refuses to become the symbol it has constructed. That can also be true by having family. Think crabs in the bucket mentality.

Perhaps this is why so many people feel trapped between resentment and aspiration.

They condemn wealth while longing for security.

They resent success while praying for opportunity.

They reject power while asking someone else to rescue them.

Maybe the deeper question isn’t whether wealth is good or bad. Maybe the question is this:

Because whatever answer your nervous system gives may be shaping your life far more than your bank account ever could.

V. Neurobiological Implications: Commute Calibration and Preemptive Embodiment

One of the least discussed features of trauma is that it rarely waits for the event to begin before preparing the body for danger. The nervous system starts the meeting on the commute there. The following information connects to my essay that I will ink below.

Long before the conversation unfolds, many of us have already rehearsed the argument, imagined the rejection, predicted the betrayal, replayed every previous injury, and unknowingly instructed our bodies to prepare for war. I call this Commute Calibration. This is the unconscious process of calibrating our nervous system toward an anticipated outcome before the interaction has even occurred.

Whether we’re driving to a therapy appointment, walking into a family gathering, attending a work presentation, or preparing for a difficult conversation with our partner, the commute often becomes a rehearsal space. The question is rarely What am I driving toward? The more clinically interesting question is: What am I practicing on the way there?

Neuroscience suggests that the brain functions as a prediction engine rather than a passive recorder of reality. Rather than waiting for new information, it continuously generates predictions based on prior experience and updates those predictions as new data becomes available (Barrett, 2017). When previous experiences have taught the nervous system that certain people, environments, or identities are dangerous, the body often begins responding before objective evidence of danger appears. Stephen Porges (2011) describes this as neuroception—the nervous system’s unconscious detection of cues of safety or threat before conscious awareness has the opportunity to evaluate them.

This is where Preemptive Embodiment occurs.

We do not merely anticipate the storm.

We begin living inside it before the clouds arrive. That stay read don’t gotta get ready mentality.

By the time we walk into the room, our physiology has already shifted. Our muscles tighten. Our breathing changes. Our attention narrows. We become exquisitely sensitive to facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, and ambiguity. Remember my shot gun. Many of us are already looking through the shot gun for any perceived threats. So, neutral interactions become easier to interpret as hostility because the nervous system is searching for evidence that confirms the prediction it has already made. State-dependent perception ensures that the body often finds exactly what it is expecting (Siegel, 2020).

This phenomenon extends far beyond intimate relationships. It quietly shapes the way entire communities relate to one another. If someone has repeatedly been told that members of another group are dangerous, oppressive, ignorant, or morally suspect, those expectations begin traveling with them. They enter the interaction already armored projecting what the heard about that person, group, culture etc. Instead of what they learned from their own personal interaction with them. What I call— breaking bread. The armor itself then changes the interaction, thus impacting the development of a relationship.

I experienced this personally after moving from California to southern Alabama. Before I ever met my neighbors, countless people warned me about what I should expect as a multiracial Black woman living in the South. Their warnings were not entirely without historical context. Racism has profoundly shaped American history and continues to affect many people’s lives. But something fascinating happened when I arrived. I realized that my nervous system had been quietly calibrating itself for conflict before any conflict had actually occurred. But more importantly it was not influenced by my personal experience or my own informed discernment. It was influenced by what others filled in my mind.

The people I met were likely calibrating too.

Just as I wondered how they might receive me, they may have been wondering how I would receive them. Each of us entered the interaction carrying predictions the other person had never authored. Had I walked into every room assuming rejection, my body would have communicated that expectation before I ever introduced myself. Thus, generating an undercurrent the others can in fact pick up and feel and unconsciously project back. Hypervigilance has a way of inviting the very distance it fears. Instead, I chose something far more difficult. I chose to show up as myself— Silly goofy Sav. I brought cookies. I smiled. I remained curious. I allowed people to become individuals before allowing my nervous system to categorize them as symbols, used on noise from factors outside of my own heart.

This does not mean discrimination disappears if we think positively. Nor does it deny the reality of prejudice or historical injustice. It simply acknowledges that trauma can quietly shape perception in ways that influence interactions before reality has an opportunity to speak for itself. The distinction matters because a nervous system prepared only for danger may unknowingly close doors to relationships, opportunities, mentorships, and communities capable of expanding its world.

Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in our increasingly tribal culture. Communities understandably form around shared experiences, histories, and identities. Belonging is a fundamental human need— currency if you will. Yet belonging can become psychologically costly when it requires members to remain perpetually vigilant against outsiders or requires you to shrink yourself. The tribe begins reinforcing not only shared values but shared expectations of threat. Over time, members stop relating to individuals and start relating to symbols. Every interaction becomes filtered through inherited predictions rather than present-moment observation.

The irony is that while these communities seek safety, chronic hypervigilance often prevents them from experiencing it. The very strategies developed to protect the nervous system begin narrowing the range of experiences capable of teaching it that safety is still possible.

VI. Conclusion: The Alchemical Revolution

The American family system is currently imploding because it is built on an “illusion of fear” and man-made constructs. Breaking the cycle requires:

1. Reclaiming Agency: Moving away from “outsourcing decisions” to narratives and therapists, and returning to being the “baseline” of one’s own life.

2. Deprogramming: A deep deprogramming of the mind to return to “presence before programming”.

3. Sibling Unity: The “siblings” must stop using the same swords against each other that were used by the system and start communicating their shared data to alchemize a power strong enough to transcend the current indoctrination.

Now, The more I study psychology, neuroscience, sociology, trauma, attachment, polyvagal theory, conditioning, family systems, and human behavior, the more I keep arriving at the same place.

The soul.

I think psychology, neuroscience, all of that is giving us language humanity has desperately needed. We finally understand why our bodies react the way they do. We understand trauma. We understand childhood development. We can even understand why people repeat patterns. We understand why nervous systems become dysregulated. We understand projection, cognitive biases, confirmation bias, state-dependent perception, dopamine, addiction, conditioning, reinforcement, and learned helplessness better than ever before. Yet for all of our understanding becomes a loop we get stuck looping in. I can’t help but notice something unsettling. We have become incredibly educated around the concept of healing while simultaneously becoming more fragmented as a society. We know more words than ever before, but many of us seem no closer to peace.

I think that’s because we’ve become fascinated with understanding the machinery while forgetting to ask who is operating it.

We’ve neglected the soul.

David Hawkins writes that consciousness itself organizes the way we experience reality. Fear is not simply an emotion that visits us from time to time. It becomes a perceptual lens through which we interpret everything around us (Hawkins, 1995). If fear becomes the baseline from which we perceive the world, then every disagreement becomes a threat to us and every unfamiliar person becomes dangerous. If there is a question that deviates from our norm of certainty well that question becomes an attack. Eventually, fear stops being something we feel and quietly becomes who we are. The baseline in which we all function in.

Maybe that’s what has happened to America.

We’ve mistaken fear for wisdom.

We’ve mistaken anxiety for awareness.

We’ve mistaken hypervigilance for discernment.

We’ve mistaken outrage for courage.

We’ve mistaken belonging for truth.

And we’ve mistaken constant stimulation for consciousness.

The American family system is imploding because fear has become its operating system. Every member of the family is terrified of exile. We don’t want to lose our tribe. We don’t want to be labeled. We don’t want to be called racist, anti-Black, phobic, privileged, ignorant, woke, conservative, liberal, communist, fascist, or whatever label happens to dominate the conversation that week. So we outsource our discernment to the collective because belonging feels safer than thinking independently for ourselves. The cost, however, is that every time we abandon our own discernment to maintain acceptance, we surrender another piece of ourselves. Agency is rarely stolen all at once. More often, it is traded away in small exchanges for the promise that we will continue to belong.

When I work with people-pleasers and chronic overfunctioners, this is almost always the wound sitting underneath everything else. They don’t simply fear rejection. They fear being misperceived, because somewhere in childhood they learned that if someone misunderstood them, saw them incorrectly, projected onto them, or became disappointed in them, then connection itself was in danger. So they spend their entire adult lives managing other people’s perceptions instead of managing their own integrity. They over-explain. They overfunction. They over-apologize. They shape-shift. They become emotional contortionists hoping that if they can just explain themselves one more time, someone even if it’s their partner will finally understand. This is where I mentioned earlier.

What if gaining understanding from others was never the assignment?

What if one of the greatest acts of psychological freedom is allowing yourself to be misunderstood by people who are committed to misunderstanding you and facing that urge to explain and choosing not to? Bowen called it differentiation. Hawkins would likely describe it as releasing attachment to the ego’s need for approval. Jung might describe it as individuation, which is the lifelong process of becoming who you actually are instead of who the collective demands you become (Jung, 1964). Scripture echoes the same invitation repeatedly through different language. “Do not fear.” “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” “Perfect love casts out fear.” Different traditions. Different vocabulary. Yet each one seems to point toward the same destination. Stop allowing fear to organize your life.

I don’t think America has a political problem nearly as much as it has a consciousness problem. We have confused information with wisdom, performative behavior with authentic character, and being visible to all as being significant or “good enough.”

We’ve become so consumed with learning the language of healing that we’ve forgotten to actually practice it. Healing isn’t collecting diagnoses or memorizing attachment styles. Healing is a journey in developing the capacity to sit in uncertainty without grasping for the nearest vine. It is remaining open when your nervous system wants to close, shut down, shrink, or react. It is learning to witness your own thoughts without immediately becoming them. It is a skill that no matter what room you are in— when strengthened provides the benefit of connection. Not just to others, but to yourself.

Maybe this is why awe matters so much.

The more I think about it, the more I believe awe is one of the greatest antidotes to fear that exists. Fear collapses our world until all we can see is ourselves. Awe expands it until we remember we are part of something infinitely larger than ourselves. You don’t stand beneath a sky full of stars wondering who voted for whom. You don’t walk through a forest asking whether the trees are left or right. Nature simply exists. It cooperates. It adapts. It creates. It doesn’t outsource its identity because it has never forgotten what it is.

Maybe that’s what we’ve forgotten too.

Maybe before there were political parties, before there were algorithms, before there were identities to perform, before there were movements demanding our allegiance, before there were brands, careers, titles, and diagnoses, there was simply a human being trying to understand what it meant to be alive. Somewhere along the way, we replaced being with performing because we got rewarded with online presence and dopamine from likes. We replaced consciousness with conditioning and replaced our soul with strategy. This is the most heartbreaking part for me as someone that works with humans at such vulnerable level.

What I’m talking about is something much quieter and infinitely more demanding. An alchemical revolution asks us to stop waiting for institutions to become healthy while refusing to become healthy ourselves. It asks us to stop blaming the family system long enough to ask how often we recreate it in our marriages, our friendships, our workplaces, our communities, our churches, and even inside our own minds.

The family system loses its power the moment enough siblings remember they were never supposed to become copies of the parent. That’s the revolution I’m interested in.

Not one that changes who’s in office.

One that changes the level of consciousness from which we meet one another.

Because every great transformation in history began long before it became visible to the eye.

It began the moment someone quietly decided,

“I will no longer allow fear to tell me who I am.”

What will you decide?

References

American Psychological Association. (n.d.). APA dictionary of psychology.

https://dictionary.apa.org/

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.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)

Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books.

Hawkins, D. R. (1995). Power vs. force: The hidden determinants of human behavior. Veritas Publishing.

Hawkins, D. R. (2002). The eye of the I: From which nothing is hidden. Veritas Publishing.

Hawkins, D. R. (2012). Letting go: The pathway of surrender. Hay House.

Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink. Houghton Mifflin.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols. Doubleday.

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

Kegan, R. (1994). In over our heads: The mental demands of modern life. Harvard University Press.

Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17(2), 297–314.

Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.

Le Bon, G. (1895/2001). The crowd: A study of the popular mind. Batoche Books.

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

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

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

Extended Reading

Psychology & Trauma

Bradshaw, J. (1988). Healing the shame that binds you.

Levine, P. A. (2010). In an unspoken voice.

Maté, G. (2022). The myth of normal.

Miller, A. (1979). The drama of the gifted child.

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving.

Wolynn, M. (2016). It didn’t start with you.

Family Systems

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

Kerr, M. E., & Bowen, M. (1988). Family evaluation.

Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy.

Satir, V. (1988). The new peoplemaking.

Carl Jung & Depth Psychology

Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion.

Jung, C. G. (1969). The archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and his symbols.

von Franz, M.-L. (1964). “The Process of Individuation.” In Man and His Symbols.

Consciousness & Spiritual Development

Hawkins, D. R. (1995). Power vs. Force.

Hawkins, D. R. (2002). The Eye of the I.

Hawkins, D. R. (2012). Letting Go.

Ram Dass. (1971). Be Here Now.

Tolle, E. (1999). The Power of Now.

Wilber, K. (2000). Integral Psychology.

Sociology & Culture

Durkheim, É. (1897/1951). Suicide.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish.

Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life.

Lasch, C. (1979). The culture of narcissism.

Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone.

Propaganda, Media & Group Influence

Bernays, E. (1928). Propaganda.

Janis, I. (1972). Victims of groupthink.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media.

Postman, N. (1985). Amusing ourselves to death.

Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism.

Human Behavior & Decision Making

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational.

Cialdini, R. (2021). Influence (New and Expanded ed.).

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow.

Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation.

McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave.

Awe, Meaning & Flourishing

Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man’s search for meaning.

Keltner, D. (2023). Awe: The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life.

Miller, L. (2021). The awakened brain.

Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of meaning.

Biblical & Spiritual Integration

The Holy Bible

The Bhagavad Gita

A Course in Miracles

Data Collectors,

Happy July,

I know I know I have been behind but, I also need to give myself a bit of a break as well. I am not a machine. I have recently been traveling and am currently back home in California. My heart feels full again. I just do not belong in the desert at all😩.

I have been sitting with something lately and I want to share these thoughts with you all. I have had to pull back from the amount of time I consume social media or just media content in general. Now that I am back in my home state I have been taking advantage of the beautiful weather California has been dishing out. Going on my 4-6 mile walks has been such a gift for my soul. Not being on the algorithm really clears out the noise that lives in the mind. I know that is true for some of us. But…

I can’t help but wonder how much of the chaos we keep witnessing outside our homes is displaced energy from the chaos we refuse to address inside them. All the stuff we see online, robberies, killings, toxicity, and people telling you what you need to do. It’s becoming too much noise. When I think about the drama on the roads, the drama in the workplaces, and the drama literally in stores. I keep thinking to myself.

Many of us are drowning in dynamics we know aren’t healthy. We know the conversation that needs to happen. We know the boundary that probably needs to be set and reinforced by our behavior. We know something has to change. But we avoid it because we already “know” how it’s is going to go.

“They’re going to react.”

“They’re going to tell me what I meant instead of listening to what I actually said.”

“They’re going to project their own story onto me.”

“They’re going to make me the bad guy.”

So we say nothing.

What we don’t realize is that avoiding conflict doesn’t eliminate suffering. It simply relocates it. Psychology has long recognized displacement as our tendency to redirect emotions away from the place they belong and toward somewhere that feels safer (American Psychological Association, n.d.). Thats why people are fighting in their cars on the highway, stealing from stores and hard working mom and pop shops, murdering each other, infidelity, family gridlock, and more…. It is getting ridiculous at this point. Now, pair that with what we know about experiential avoidance, that avoiding difficult thoughts and emotions often amplifies distress over time instead of resolving it. We are all becoming pressure cookers and suddenly a lot of our behavior starts making more sense (Hayes et al., 1996).

Does it make sense though?

The pressure cooker energy is building up BUT that energy has to go somewhere.If it isn’t moving toward repair, it usually moves toward projection. We see this everywhere especially online. Why do you think that is?

My theory…

Instead of confronting the partner, the family, the boss at work—we snap at the cashier. Instead of setting the boundary, we pick fights online. Instead of addressing the relationship that continues to wound us, we scream at strangers in traffic. What I am noticing in humans is we found a loop hole for exercising our agency where it actually matters, we rehearse control in places where it costs us very little.

I see it every day.

Everybody has something to say.

Everybody has an opinion.

Everybody is ready to tell someone else what they’re doing wrong.

We’re policing each other’s language, telling people what they should and should not be doing. That their relationships are wrong and to decenter so and so. We’ve become hall monitors of humanity, telling complete strangers how they should think, speak, vote, parent, heal, and exist. Yet many of us walk back into homes where we haven’t exercised our own agency in months—sometimes years. The fire is large there which makes sense why we exert our control outside the home. That’s the part that fascinates me. We call ourselves powerless while exercising power everywhere except the place we’re actually responsible for.

Now let’s pause… Before someone reaches for a vine to “explain” their why.

I’m not saying every conversation is safe to have. Some relationships are emotionally abusive or just physically and emotionally dangerous OR— draining. These dynamics require an exit plan, not another attempt at communication. Discernment matters with this work. My work is not for everyone. But many of us really have to get clear on the situations we are drowning in. Not everything is abuse, not everyone is a narcissist. Sometimes we are simply over staying our welcome in dynamics we have yet to build the courage to walk away from. Sometimes exercising your agency doesn’t look like speaking louder— it looks like staying silent or even removing yourself. Consequences aren’t about changing another person and their behavior. Sometimes they’re about refusing to continue participating in a dynamic that is slowly drowning you. The hardest part is recognizing that you’re drowning and the side effect of that is emotional spillage. Which doesn’t stay contained.

It leaks.

Emotional leakage is a term introduced by Paul Ekman to describe the involuntary expression of genuine emotions despite a person’s conscious attempt to suppress or conceal them. Ekman’s research demonstrated that emotions often “leak” through subtle, involuntary channels such as microexpressions, changes in vocal tone, facial tension, posture, and other nonverbal behaviors, revealing an emotional state that differs from what is being verbally communicated (Ekman & Friesen, 1969). While Ekman’s work primarily focused on nonverbal communication and deception detection, I believe the concept extends beyond the face. We must understand that the pressure cooker of unresolved emotions that are never processed do not simply— poof—disappear. These emotions are sneaky sneakersons and they often find expression elsewhere. They leak into our parenting, our romantic relationships, our workplaces, our interactions with strangers, and even the way we move through traffic. What begins as emotional suppression in one environment can become emotional expression in another. In that sense, emotional leakage is not only something we see on someone’s face; it can also be observed in the patterns of behavior that emerge when unresolved emotional experiences remain unaddressed. This is where displacement enters the chat. I have mentioned displacement numerous times in my work.

If all this emotional leakage is out polluting the air, how are we so confused why the world feels so angry? Maybe it’s because so many people are carrying emotions that don’t belong to the moment they’re currently standing in? They’re carrying conversations they never had. Boundaries they never set. Decisions they never made. Grief they never processed. Resentment they never addressed.

The energy has to go somewhere.

For myself, I am choosing to take that energy and for me it goes internally and it looks like this….

I giggle because this is something I show many of my clients and wanted to get framed for my office that way I can just point to it any time my clients immediately jump right back into the pull of the spiral. We don’t realize how much prefrontal cortex energy it takes to live in this constant state of hyper vigilance. For me it always feels like an urgency energy and it’s exhausting. I realize it’s my baseline for functioning simply because it’s what’s familiar to my childhood. How many of us rushed to get chores done just so we can be free from the home and go play outside? I lived my life rushing. So much so that my walking pace through out college was hyper speed😅. Living in that energetic state I did not realize when I was younger how it keeps my baseline for functioning in cortisol island. it becomes so normalized that we don’t even realize that we are stressed. Over time we tend to not consider the implications that does to our body.

I am learning to slow down, and boy oh boy is it uncomfortable. being online has a way of igniting that urgency energy as well. Now that people are following, watching, waiting. The pressure is on. But where did the pressure come from? Where does that pressure go? For some of us like myself— it goes inward. The Brain That Changes Itself reminds us that the brain becomes efficient at whatever it repeatedly practices. Neuroplasticity doesn't judge whether a pattern is helpful to us or harmful. It simply strengthens the pathways we use most often— this is what I keep repeating in my work. Especially when I connect Macro to Micro mechanisms of behavior and brain pathways. If we've spent years rehearsing vigilance, anticipating problems, and scanning for what could go wrong, those highways become incredibly well-developed. The brain starts choosing them automatically because they've become familiar. Meaning, we start internalizing the belief that it’s others outside of us that needs to change rather than the pathway we keep repeating. We have to develop the capacity to rewire out of our own behaviors.

So, Maybe the question isn’t whether you have the strength to do that. Maybe the question is whether you’re willing to use that strength where it actually matters. At home with yourself.

Why won’t the collective use it inside the one place where it might actually change our lives?

I don’t have the answer for that—maybe you tell me.

Below I placed some refection questions for us to ponder on.

Till next time Data collectors.

Reflection

• Where am I repeatedly choosing temporary comfort over long-term freedom?

• Is there a conversation, boundary, or decision I’ve been avoiding because I’m trying to manage someone else’s reaction?

• Where does my frustration usually end up when I don’t express it where it belongs? (zoom in here boucle sometimes that energy can look like self neglect.

• Am I exercising my agency where it matters most, or only where it feels safest?

• What would change if I stopped asking, “How do I make them understand?” and started asking, “What choice is mine to make?”

Data collectors, how has the year been treating you? I can’t believe we are already almost in July!! Goodness me—time is moving. I will be turning 35 this Friday, and I don’t know about any of y’all, but I tend to get the birthday blues rather than feel celebratory.

This month, at least for me, has felt heavy—very dragged.

I’ve had no energy, no motivation, and I’ve been in an overall slump. It’s hard when you are in the human service field. For some of us, this work really does fill us up, but in seasons when we are down in our own lives, it can be difficult to show up for others when you can barely show up for yourself. Those of you with kids, where you at? How you doing back there?

I find myself wanting to unplug and give up on the whole public content educator business. I’m currently building a learning space, but I also have the desire to host workshops where we can all learn in one space together while also gaining supervision status and providing clinical supervision. You ever have all these ideas that just keep popping up, but the basket is getting fuller and fuller? Laughs in ADHD. 🤭 We drown in the distraction of idea-making and brainstorming so that we avoid the actual creation of it all. This is what happens when our nervous systems are activated, and at least for me, my body can tell when I am trying to bypass by being “busy.”

As July creeps in this week... Cancer season. Sigh.

I’m in my moody season, but this moodiness comes from the weight of the collective ache. It’s not just me feeling it; many of us are. We are torn, indecisive, and afraid to move or jump into the unknown. We bypass our whole lives because we are afraid of the “what ifs.”

Many of us are comfortable with where we are: our routines, our careers, all of it. Even the pain that comes with life. Holding that ache for clients is rewarding, but without proper emotional hygiene, you risk absorbing what is not yours. We know leaving means working more than we do now or even leaving a lifestyle we currently have. Some of us are not willing to lose those things. Some of us are aware of the cost that walking away from something can bring; it’s a risk.

The algorithm tells you the universe has your back—just believe—and authors before us have written about this. But what does that actually look like? I mean, concretely. Can anyone describe it?

I notice humans reach for therapists as guides to hand our panic child over, not realizing that handing over the very child we continue to abandon with our own habits, just to give it to someone else, risks secondary injury.

Why do you think that is?

My theory—expectation.

I have been feeling a molasses-type sensation in my body.

S L O W W W W W....

I can admit to the neglect of my physical health through my workout routine and the complete disappearance of my meditation practice. As a result, I have been feeling the noise in my mind a lot lately. It has been throwing me off balance, right into avoidance, executive freeze, and straight-up drifting mode. I’ve been swirling in creative ideas, downloads, and existential reflective inquiries—corridors many don’t explore, though their peacocking leads you to believe they do.

The world is so full of it that those of us with the depth—the metabolic need for it, not to sound dramatic—get labeled as crazy. I am rambling, but this month has been a heavy lesson. I am seeing the pattern not only in myself and my own personal relationships but also with each other systemically. When we refuse to see the pattern, we create a prison that is a repeat of what we watched growing up. That’s why I am so intrigued by cancel culture. Who said we should care about them? Who are they to our lives? Do they pay your bills?

Many people are stuck because the “villains” in their lives may provide for them financially. This is where we are rooted in our comfort. I think about young ones transitioning from high school to college or young adults finally learning that they will have to take over their phone and car bills as a means to escape the control of their parents. Leaving these systems requires a total identity flip. Your life can go from being a suburban housewife and stay-at-home mom to being single and living in an apartment with your dog or cat.

Many of us say we are staying for the kids, but we are staying for the comfort of the living situation or because of the economy. Now, if it were truly that bad, we would do whatever it took to leave. That is humanity, and we don’t want to be honest about that. We have willpower, but we want to claim that we don’t. Insert free will here....

This learned helplessness is poisoning us and causing a rift because nuance exists, but we are being conditioned to bypass that ability. We use the discomfort that nuance creates to signal to us that it is “wrong” and that we should avoid it at any capacity. We use whatever it takes—the weight of this world we are all carrying—and we are normalizing that.

I recently read that the only time animals stay still is if they are sick or dying. I revisit this because the lack of motivation is the body’s mechanism shutting down because it’s not being used. Over time, the body essentially believes it is dying due to a lack of movement. That explains how sluggish we feel: the lack of motivation and drive, the cravings or overeating, the binging, all in the undisclosed name of avoidance. All of it weighs us down energetically, and it’s hard to find the energy to move through it into a walk, a workout, breathwork, or a journal session. It’s bloody hard, but that does not mean it’s impossible.

When we remove inquiry and normalize labels as conversation enders, we condition ourselves away from repair and into reinforced reactivity. This is psychologically alarming and concerning. We do not have the mental capacity to sit with this because we are too busy being conditioned to carry the weight of the world and being righteous in our political sides. This is all a distraction. But when we are tribal to it, we cannot see how it is the “devil energy” pulling us into drifting.

That’s why it’s easy to walk away, divorce, or cut someone off. It doesn’t require us to learn the skills necessary to communicate with people even when we’re upset. We lose friends over it due to heightened emotional states and a lack of willingness to hold onto our own views while listening to others. Somewhere along the line, we mistook nuance as a form of control. Nuance just means multiple things can be true, and for some reason, that angers people. I truly believe it’s because humans can’t stand when their power is given back to them, staring them right in the face.

Now, my hunch also is that people can’t stand when the world around them does not center their pain as if that’s the only pain that exists today.

You see this in marriage, where one partner learns helplessness. We make “should” comments due to the expectation that because they are an adult, they should know better. The more I work with humans, the more I realize many of us are just abandoned children who got bigger. We can navigate life and keep ourselves fed and housed, but when it comes to relationships, we flinch at the thought of leaving the sink full of dishes or staying on the couch when a husband comes home. We project the schema lens of our younger selves onto our current reality, and we live that out in our homes and at work.

We are exhausted. So exhausted. I feel it.

Soooo....

How do we give ourselves permission to rest and lean into that without guilt? What if that’s the muscle we must learn to practice?

We must stop allowing the stories the mind whispers to us to cloud our perception of reality that we later project onto our kids, partner, or whoever at work.

Ladies, something I have been discovering within myself as we go through the Rewiring Out of Resentment series. Much of the resentment I have toward my husband—and I have worked with many women and have women in my life who struggle with the same thing—is watching a man prioritize himself, his happiness, and his hobbies. Really pisses us off. I had to reflect as to why...

I believe it’s because women have been socially conditioned to self-sacrifice in the name of “love.” The women before us often fed everyone else except themselves or fed themselves last. They never rested as a means to take care of the home. Now, I don’t think this is healthy at all. Just look at the wellness of the women in our lives. Many have such hormonal imbalances simply because they operate with the belief that you are selfish to nurture yourself and rest. I disagree with this.

Yet, for those of us with these women actively in our lives, how do you learn the skills to bypass the undercurrents of that energy and choose to give yourself rest—not the overindulgent type of rest either? Our society today labels self-indulgences as self-care, and that is not the kind I am referring to.

For me, I live with a constant state of urgency in my body, as if I am late to be somewhere, and sometimes that somewhere is nowhere. I have had to really reflect on why, despite being an adult now, it is so hard for me to guide my body out of that automatic response. It’s almost as if my fascia has muscle memory to stay in urgency, and part of my mission is to rewire out of that.

Now, resentment in the body does not help. Being online and constantly reminding yourself of the ache in this world does not help either. So it really does fall on us individually to be intentional.

I am back in my home state of California, and I must say—I miss home so much. The air just feels better here.

While I am here, part of my intention is to incorporate joy and play back into my life regardless of the endless to-do list of tasks I feel I must all-or-nothing get done. The key here is to enjoy. Part of my mission, as someone with a very rigid schedule and routine, is to challenge that. I live in this “not on a school night” mentality, which is odd because I have been out of school for quite some time now. So work has replaced school, and the script just keeps replacing itself.

I want to teach my body that play and joy can, in fact, live on the days where work also lives. Meaning, I can do something fun (paddle boarding) right after my last client. I don’t have to go to the mundane routine of the “work week.” I can train my body to understand that work and play can coexist on days that are not just the weekend.

This feels sweat-inducing for me. 🫣 I mean, what’s the worst that can happen? Nothing.

So maybe that is the lesson here.

What can you do this week, despite work, that will fill your cup with joy and laughter? Is it meeting with a friend for a meal or a walk? Is it going on a hike or getting outside in nature? What does that look like for you?

For me, it looks like taking advantage of being back home and having that paddle board ready to go and hit the water. It looks like going on a lot more walks and even taking drives to the Bay Area to get a change in scenery and enjoy the ocean, even if I have work tomorrow.

It looks like slowing down and not all-or-nothing-ing everything on my list of a million things. It looks like developing systems for my brain to minimize urgency energy because my brain can understand that I have things written down—pen and paper—and my brain does not have to flip out wondering where that note I jotted down is.

Let me know what that looks like for you.

As we chase our milligrams by bringing joy in, I hope you share what that looks like for you! I have put some reflection questions down below for you.

Reflection Questions

1. Where in your life are you staying—not because you truly want to, but because the familiar feels safer than the unknown?

2. When you imagine giving yourself permission to rest or experience joy without first earning it, what stories or sensations immediately arise in your body?

3. If your nervous system truly believed that work and play could coexist, what is one small act of joy you would allow yourself this week?

—Till next time, Data Collectors.

Today, we are pulling up the map and looking at how we actually talk to each other. Or rather, how we fail to talk to each other. In human relationships, whether that’s with your partner, your family, or the culture at large—there are three primary highways of communication. When we know how to navigate them, they lead to connection, repair, and true belonging. But right now? Our collective infrastructure is broken. Most of us are either hiding out in safety zones or trapped on what I like to call Spicy Island.

Let’s look at the map.

The Three Highways of Communication

To understand why we get so gridlocked, we have to understand the routes we choose to take:

• The Logistical Highway: This is the transactional route. “Who is picking up the kids?” “Did you pay the electric bill?” “What time is the meeting?” It’s safe, it’s clinical, and it requires zero emotional vulnerability.

• The Interpersonal Highway: This is the relational route. It’s where we check in on the state of us. “How are you holding up with work?” “I feel like we’ve been passing ships lately, and I miss you.” It acknowledges the other person’s humanity and the space between you.

• The Expression Highway: This is the raw route. This is where we share our internal world—our boundaries, our grief, our core needs, and our direct impact. “When that happened, I felt incredibly hurt and unseen.”

Here is a vital truth: We need the Expression Highway and the Interpersonal Highway working together in order to have connection, repair, and belonging.

What we actually do: we camp out on the Logistical Highway as a defensive strategy to avoid the Expression Highway entirely. Why? Because over time—in our relationships, our communities, and our online spaces—our amygdalas have been conditioned to believe that the Expression Highway is a dangerous, volatile place to go. Over time we condition the nervous system to expect shitty tennis matches and nervous system activation. We’ve learned that if we express a raw truth, we will be punished for it. So, we stay transactional. Now, if we look around though you will realize we can’t build intimacy on a highway of logistics— too many of us need depth. Eventually, the pressure builds, we swerve off the road, and we skip the path of repair entirely—landing us straight on Spicy Island.

Welcome to Spicy Island: Think Spooky Island but Spicy style with DARVO, Weaponized Trauma & Pathology, and History Digging

Spicy Island is the land of high-reactivity and zero accountability. It is the destination we reach when we don’t know how to cleanly express ourselves, so we weaponize our defense mechanisms instead.

When we are on Spicy Island, DARVO behavior runs the show: we Deny the behavior, Attack the person bringing it up, and Reverse the Victim and Offender.

The Anatomy of a Spicy Island Pivot: Instead of hearing, “It hurt my feelings when you forgot our plans,”the response becomes, “You always expect me to be perfect, and your tone right now is actually making me feel unsafe.”

Suddenly, the original issue is gone. We deflect by digging into history, pulling up a Rolodex of past sins from 2018 to justify our current behavior. We over-explain. We weaponize therapy speak. We weaponize our diagnoses and our trauma—not as a pathway to be understood, but as a shield to avoid the vulnerability of clean expression. We scream that we are being blamed, but in the exact same breath, we blame, accuse, and attack. We do the very things that make the Expression Highway dangerous for everyone else, fully blind to our own hypocrisy. This is the ultimate tragedy: we use the hostile nature of the highway as our excuse to avoid it, while actively contributing to its hostility.

The Olympic Meaning-Making Team and “Shitty Tennis”

How do we justify this to ourselves? Well it’s simple: we are all gold-medalist members of the Making Meaning Olympic Team.

Psychologically, humans are meaning-making machines. When an event happens, we don’t just experience it; we immediately create a narrative around it. We have seen this over the course of our safari through human behavior. You see, because of confirmation bias, the moment we create that narrative, our brains hunt for proof to validate it. The feeling feels so intense that we treat it as an objective, default truth. “I feel rejected, therefore you are actively trying to maliciousy exclude me.” Once we decide our narrative is the absolute truth, we feel entirely justified in attacking and blaming.

This leads directly to what I call Shitty Tennis.

We all walk around with an invisible pile of shit anchored to our ankles. For some people, that pile is a mountain because of a total lack of self-reflection, zero accountability, and a habit of intellectualizing their growth instead of actually implementing themselves within it. In Shitty Tennis, the minute we feel an uncomfortable emotion, we can’t sit with it. We don’t take accountability for our pile. Instead, we grab our rackets and smack that shit right over the net onto the other person. “I’m feeling anxious, so I’m going to make this your fault.” They smack it back. No one is playing to win a game of connection; everyone is just trying to offload their discomfort. This is where you see insults, personal character attacks, and tactics utilize to GET A REACTION FROM YOU! Now— how to you get out of the match if someone is trying to summon you?

We must first learn boundaries but reinforcing them.

If you do not respond to someone’s shit that they throw no matter how bad you want to say something back. We must understand any attention is good attention even if it’s negative. So your reactive or even a response gives these individuals fuel. The key is no response. That causes their shit to get stuck on their side of the court. Thus— require them to sit in what I call SSRT (Shit Sitting Reflection Time) we rob people of SSRT every time we react and give them the distraction from that time out.

From the Micro to the Macro: Gotcha Culture and Power Dynamics

This isn’t just happening in your living room. We are seeing this play out on a massive, sociological scale. We are living in a macro culture of bait-and-switches.

In online discourse, people will bait you into a conversation under the guise of wanting to discuss one thing, only to flip it on you, exploit a nuance, and DARVO the entire interaction. We are trapped in a toxic Gotcha Culture. People follow creators, leaders, and peers not to learn, but to catch them slipping—to collect “frequent flyer miles” on the Spicy Island fast lane by diminishing their message or forcing performative accountability. It has become so dangerous that even premier researchers like Brené Brown have openly spoken about the reality of facing severe backlash and literal death threats just for trying to navigate complex topics. When the macro culture operates this way, our collective nervous systems register total unsafety.

We see this mirror itself in the workplace too. In professional environments, communication quickly turns into anxious tiptoeing. Why do you think that is? My theory— your livelihood is on the line. You have to feed your family. When organizations lack psychological safety, management relies on systemic power imbalances to keep people quiet. Employees repress their Expression Highway because the cost of speaking up is financial or professional ruin. Meaning you risk cut hours, write ups, etc. what ever way to intimidate you out of the behavior of self-advocacy. Now look online. We don’t like what someone said we try to cancel people. We try to silence them. We try to shrink messages that make us uncomfortable because sitting with the discomfort would require us to look at our own shit pile and sort through it.

You see—not to be petty (well maybe a little petty🤭) cancel culture is comical because they can only cancel someone who believes in whatever being canceled actually means. That would require picking up the shit (opinions) of others with your bare hands. I don’t recommend that.

The Goal is Repair, Not Perfection

Let’s be very clear about something: We do not always have to discuss macro-level societal injustice in order to have an honest conversation about what is happening unjustly inside a family system or a relationship.

The adolescent's attempt to engage in healthy differentiation is met with emotional flooding, defensiveness, and role reversal, effectively shutting down the conversation and preventing genuine family dialogue.

If you think about this from a development standpoint. This is how we become arrested in our communication development with the ability to express. It’s why many of us learned to shut down or react in explosive ways simply because patterns that occurred like the example above.

Now from the mother’s perspective.

When the Expression Highway and the Interpersonal Highway are connected, something beautiful happens: repair becomes possible.

Choosing to walk these highways isn’t about perfecting your communication. It’s not about never making a mistake, never feeling defensive, or never taking a boat ride to Spicy Island. It is about having the courage to dismantle the bait-and-switches, put down the Shitty Tennis racket, and step into the messy, vulnerable work of repair.

True belonging lives on the other side of that bridge. Let’s stop avoiding the drive.

Leave a comment below: Where do you find yourself getting stuck? Are you hiding out on the Logistical Highway, or are you a frequent flyer to Spicy Island? Let’s talk about it.

Leave a comment

Till next time data collectors

Data Collectors,

It’s been a little over a year since being online. As much as I love this work because it allows me to solidify what I am teaching in my own brain, there is another part of this journey that has become exposure therapy for me: the comments.

Now, before we jump into this vulnerable conversation, I want to segue into the understanding that this is not about the mob mentality members themselves. It’s about the wound that gets poked by them. Before you strap in, understand I speak in metaphors—If you haven’t caught my drift by now. So zoom in and examine where you may be engaging in the same behavior or navigating someone in your own life that mimics it. After all, the online discourse world is just another reenactment of the shit we all deal with at home.

Let’s zoom out.

My work has always bridged the micro and the macro in a way that highlights the mechanism—the muscles we use in both arenas. Recently, I have watched how the mob twists and turns your intentions, which is one of the reasons we are working through communication in Stop 2 of Rewiring Out of Resentment. My work never dives into the historical context of macro-level wounds. Never. Because that is not the point. We have enough platforms teaching or speaking on the historical content and much of the reason many want to force historical discussions is because of the booby trap design of deflecting from the original mission my work has always been about.

Societal condition/ messaging and modeling of human behavior.

My invitation for the Black community to discuss family matters, only to be insulted in return, poked a wound for me, and I want to share that with you all. In vulnerable Sav fashion. You see, I have no issue with people disagreeing. In fact, I encourage it. But what we are seeing in today’s society is that many people can only disagree by attacking your character and your intelligence. Something I am far too familiar with especially as a young professional. What is even more clever is that some of these behaviors are wrapped in covert forms of communication—passive-aggressiveness, subtle digs, and intense emotional undercurrents that make it appear as though someone is being kind when, in reality, the communication is backhanded.

This becomes especially difficult to identify when it is riddled with intellectualized language and fluffy, oversized words that make people appear as though they know what they are speaking on, yet they do not embody any of it outside of the performance.

That’s the issue.

That’s the mechanism, if you will, that I focus on.

We are being conditioned Pavlovian style for this to become our baseline for functioning. Read my essay on that conditioning here:

As I have sat with the wound and explored the original injury underneath it, I noticed something about frenemies, and I want to explore it through the lens of the people who follow my work.

You see, if you are following my account and collecting the fruit of this free material that many people pay for in therapy, you will notice something that I know I am not the only one to experience. Many follow me knowing I don’t discuss historical content. You get enough of that elsewhere. You followed because something made you click follow— whether you felt validated, gained insight, or learned a strategy you could use at home. You pick the fruit off the tree and eat it. You gather it and take it home with you.

Until one fruit you pick is sour.

You don’t like it, so what happens?

You condemn the entire tree.

This is what I am seeing in the relational habits of people. As a former people-pleaser and co-dependent, I realized I kept friendships with people who benefited from the fruit I provided. My fun, bubbly personality. The way I would drop everything to show up for you or your family. Anything. I’m a Cancer, so when I give, I give fully—sometimes to my own detriment—which is part of what I had to learn throughout my adolescent and early adult development. The issue, as I reflect on it, is that many people who take the fruit you bear will suddenly bond with others through shared dislike and gossip of the very fruit they picked from your tree to stuff their face with.

Ironically, social psychology has repeatedly found that human beings often form social bonds through shared enemies, shared outrage, and shared disdain. While this can create temporary feelings of belonging, research suggests these bonds are often weaker and less stable than relationships built on mutual respect, shared values, and genuine connection. It is easy to be friends with someone whose life is at rock bottom, constantly in unhealthy romantic relationships, and centers you. I tended to be on the co-dependent side in my early twenties. That benefited some of the friendships I kept around. We were GOOD as long as my life was low. The moment I got my own apartment, got into grad school, and my life started moving in a positive direction, suddenly it was an issue.

I started having boundaries.

I started prioritizing my time.

I was no longer as available as I once was.

What I did not understand at the time was that relationship systems often organize themselves around roles. Family systems theory speaks to this idea. When one person changes their role, the entire system experiences disruption. The people benefiting from your lack of boundaries do not always celebrate your growth because your growth requires them to adjust.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they resent it.

These days, the level of opportunistic relationships that exist can feel disheartening. We love people for what they provide us. The moment they stop providing it, it is not enough to simply walk away. We have to badmouth their character so that we can feel righteous about the separation. This is why this work is exposure therapy for me. Having the courage to speak regardless of what the mob says about it— is sort of like my redemption for the amount of heartbreaks I felt in the friendship arena simply for developing into my pwn person. That’s the ache of this work that many of us want to avoid. The bonding over shared gossip and dislike for others who are most likely doing things you wish you could do. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as self-justification. If I can convince myself that you are a bad person, then I no longer have to examine my own motivations, entitlement, jealousy, or disappointment.

It’s giving sweet lemons and sour grapes.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the “sour grapes” phenomenon comes from cognitive dissonance research. When we cannot have what we want, we often convince ourselves we never wanted it in the first place. Likewise, when someone no longer provides us with access, attention, validation, resources, or emotional labor, it becomes easier to devalue them than to grieve the loss of what they once provided.

In today’s society, we often bond through shared gossip and shared dislike of other people as I keep saying. This is problematic. What concerns me is that we mistake this for intimacy.

It isn’t.

Knowing what someone hates is not the same thing as knowing who they are.

Subscribe now

So, the same people that attack me in the comments for inviting a family meeting within the Black community are often the same people picking fruit from my free education—which, ironically, has nothing to do with the historical injustices the Black community has faced.

Do you see where I am going with this?

I think that’s why, the more followers I get, the more icky I feel inside. Because not all eyes that watch you are watching you from a place of positivity. “Evil eye energy” is what we call it within my home, and boy, oh boy, do many of us have frenemies in our circles— snakes if you will. Maybe we are fully aware of it, yet not courageous enough to walk away because we’ve convinced ourselves that someone is better than no one. What I have noticed is that many people are attracted to access long before they are attracted to connection. As long as they can access your time, your energy, your knowledge, your resources, your emotional labor, or your attention, everything feels fine. The moment access changes, however, the relationship is forced to reveal what it was actually built upon. Social exchange theory suggests that many relationships unconsciously operate through a cost-benefit analysis (Homans, 1958; Blau, 1964). While most people would never consciously admit to viewing relationships this way, many become distressed when the benefits they once received begin to change.

That is something I learned during my time living alone.

I genuinely enjoyed my own company. The solitude. The peace of never having to question why people were my friends or whether they were truly in my corner.

It was just me.

The issue with that, however, is that some of us can become so comfortable in our solitude that we lose sight of the fact that healthy relationships actually exist.

Not every person is a snake.

Not every person is using you.

Not every connection is transactional.

As I have explored resentment within myself, I had to acknowledge the role I played in keeping snakes in my garden. People who would use my pain as tea-time conversation with other people. People who consumed my vulnerability but never protected it. Looking back, I can see that part of my people-pleasing tendencies made me vulnerable to these dynamics. Research on codependency and overfunctioning often highlights how individuals can become conditioned to derive value from being needed, useful, available, or emotionally responsible for others (Beattie, 1987; Bowen, 1978). The difficult truth is that when your identity becomes organized around providing, you often overlook who is merely consuming the fruit from your tree.

Then something interesting happens. The minute you cut access, the narrative becomes YOU.

Not the behavior.

Not the boundary.

Not the change in access.

You.

“You’re different.”

“You changed.”

“You think you’re better than us.”

“You think...”

Family systems theory describes this as a system’s attempt to restore equilibrium when one member begins functioning differently (Bowen, 1978). When one person develops boundaries, increases self-respect, heals, or stops participating in old patterns, the discomfort is often projected onto them rather than examined within the group. In other words, your growth becomes the problem because it exposes the arrangement that previously benefited everyone else. What fascinates me is how quickly people will create stories to explain your boundaries. Psychologists call this attribution theory (Heider, 1958). Rather than considering that someone may have changed because they are growing, healing, protecting their peace, or reallocating their energy, people often attribute the change to character flaws.

She’s arrogant.

He’s selfish.

They’re stuck up.

They forgot where they came from.

The story becomes easier to tolerate than the possibility that access has changed. And maybe that is why so many of us stay connected to people who secretly resent us.

Because grief is hard.

Disappointment is hard.

Accepting that someone liked your fruit more than they liked you is hard.

I want to take a detour for a moment because I see this same mechanism show up in romantic relationships all the time. Now before someone twists what I am saying, I am not implying that women do not like good men, nor am I implying that men do not like good women. I am talking about something much deeper, this takes critical thinking— and to be a bit of a smarty pants; many people today struggle with the concept of critical thinking. What I am referring to is how human beings often mistake what is familiar for what is healthy. As a therapist, I see many women who continue to date genuinely good men only to find themselves confused by a lack of attraction. They care about the person. They enjoy the person’s fruit. They acknowledge that the person possesses many of the qualities they have prayed for, journaled about, manifested, and claimed they wanted.

Yet something feels off.

Many will describe the relationship as boring.

There is no spark.

No chemistry.

No butterflies.

No obsession.

No emotional rollercoaster.

As someone who was surfing the waves of chaos with men. I can confidently say healthy relationships are boring— in the best way. What attachment research has repeatedly demonstrated is that our nervous systems are often attracted to what is familiar long before they are attracted to what is healthy (Bowlby, 1969; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Levine & Heller, 2010). The nervous system is not always asking, “Is this good for me?” Often, it is asking, “Have I been here before?” For individuals raised around inconsistency, unpredictability, emotional unavailability, criticism, abandonment, or chaos(chaos waves,) stability can initially feel foreign. Sometimes it even feels uncomfortable. This is because familiarity and safety are not always the same thing.

Many people who are accustomed to chaotic dynamics rooted in intense chemistry, emotional highs and lows, intermittent reinforcement,(bread crumbs) and passionate reconciliation can struggle when they encounter a partner who actually offers consistency and emotional safety. Research on intermittent reinforcement has shown that unpredictable rewards often create stronger behavioral attachment than consistent rewards (Skinner, 1953; Fisher et al., 2016). In other words, the relationship feels intense, so people mistake intensity for intimacy.

But intensity and intimacy are not the same thing.

One is activation.

The other is connection.

What concerns me is how much modern culture reinforces this confusion. Many people are consuming relationship advice from influencers whose income depends upon keeping you dissatisfied with what you have. Social media algorithms reward novelty, outrage, comparison, and emotional activation because those things keep people engaged (Haidt, 2024; Alter, 2017). Then we add romance novels good ol’ SMUT, BookTok, reality television, dating podcasts, and highly curated online relationships into the mix. Suddenly people become experts in aesthetics.

They know what attraction should look like.

They know what chemistry should feel like.

They know what the fantasy should sound like.

But they have never actually experienced secure attachment long enough to recognize it when it arrives. When it is sitting right in front of them.

They know longing.

They know chasing.

They know uncertainty.

They know obsession.

But they do not necessarily know connection.

Connection requires being known, it requires accountability. Connection also requires consistency and staying present after the dopamine wears off and the fantasy dissolves. Just like the friendships I mentioned earlier, many people become attached to the fruit while having very little interest in tending to the roots.

Because roots are where intimacy lives.

Roots are where trust lives.

Roots are where commitment lives.

The grass is not always greener on the other side.

Sometimes it’s just turf.

Leave a comment

Now back to the meaning-making mob.

This is exactly why I teach developing the courage to be disliked (great book by the way.) One of my biggest fears with getting online was the Black community— why s that I wonder? especially as a women who is of color. You see, as long as I name the pain, validate the ache, discuss systemic barriers, and highlight group-think dynamics, I am safe. As long as I am talking about what happened to us, I am safe. The moment I start talking about what we do with that pain, how it shows up in our relationships, our parenting, our communication, and the ways we perpetuate harm within our own communities, now I’m the problem. Thats ok though I volunteer as tribute🤣

The issue isn’t necessarily that the information is wrong. Research on cognitive dissonance has shown that when information challenges a belief, identity, or narrative we hold about ourselves, it creates psychological discomfort (Festinger, 1957). In other words, the issue isn’t always the message. Sometimes it’s the wound the message pokes. What’s fascinating to me is that many of these same people are still consuming my work. Their mouths are still stuffed with fruit from the very tree they claim is poisoned with “black betrayl.” They haven’t even finished chewing and swallowing what they already picked, and here we are watching the exact mechanisms I teach about unfold in real time.

The thing about intellectualized language is that it can create the appearance of growth without requiring any actual growth. Psychology has long recognized intellectualization as a defense mechanism where people talk about painful topics in highly analytical ways while remaining disconnected from the emotional work required to address them (Vaillant, 1992). We learn therapy language. We learn trauma language. We learn attachment language. We learn social justice language. We learn all the right words. Yet somehow the embodiment never arrives. The amount of people who hijack your intention, make it about the meaning they made, and then attempt to crucify you with words they learned from social media, ChatGPT, influencers, or years of mentally rehearsing their victim role is astounding. And before someone twists that statement too, I am not saying people haven’t been victimized. Many people absolutely have. I am saying there is a difference between experiencing victimization and building your entire identity around it. One seeks healing. The other seeks evidence and the need for an enemy.

The true ache for me comes from the people who continue falling through the cracks because we refuse to have these conversations. You’re telling me we can’t discuss absent fathers? We can’t discuss abuse? We can’t discuss sexual assault? We can’t discuss the number of Black children who report being dismissed, invalidated, blamed, gaslit, or DARVO’d when they attempt to disclose harm? We can’t discuss crabs-in-the-bucket dynamics? We can’t discuss generational trauma that gets passed from one generation to the next through relationships, parenting, communication patterns, and unresolved wounds? Because family systems research has repeatedly shown that patterns left unexamined tend to get transmitted across generations (Bowen, 1978).

Yet somehow discussing the pattern becomes more offensive than the pattern itself.

Then the conversation shifts.

“Oh, it’s because you’re not Black enough.”

Or my personal favorite.

“You’re not n**** enough.”

Yep. I’ve heard that one before.

What many people fail to realize is that acknowledging historical injustice and examining present-day relational patterns are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true. Historical injustice is real. Racism is real. Systemic barriers are real. And it is also true that communities have to be willing to examine how unresolved pain continues to shape behavior in the present. Those ideas don’t compete with one another. They coexist. What concerns me is when historical wounds become a shield against accountability. Because then we start reproducing the very dynamics we claim wounded us. You can’t fight dehumanization by dehumanizing people. You can’t heal hatred through hatred. You can’t create repair while simultaneously avoiding the conversations required for repair.

And perhaps that’s the strangest part of all.

The same “not Black enough” girl whose work you followed.

The same “not Black enough” girl whose fruit you picked.

The same “not Black enough” girl whose content helped you understand your relationships, your nervous system, your communication patterns, and your family dynamics. Is suddenly not Black enough to discuss family matters.

Which is literally my entire platform.🥴

This is what happens in society when we become reachers for everything except accountability. We will reach for blame, for a diagnoses. We will reach for trauma. We will reach for historical injustice, for explanations. We will reach for excuses. We will reach for anything that allows us to avoid the discomfort of examining our own behavior. Then the moment someone holds up a mirror, we become offended by the reflection staring back at us. Now let me pause here for a second because I’ve noticed something else. Mirror language has become a weapon too. Everybody loves talking about mirrors these days. Everybody wants to tell somebody else to “look in the mirror.” Everybody wants to accuse someone of projecting—wants to point out everyone else’s blind spots. What fascinates me is how often that language is being used by people who have already decided who the villain is before the conversation even starts let alone gets to the best part. The statement itself tells me something. It tells me you’ve already made meaning and assigned intent. You’ve already created a story about who I am before we’ve even entered into an actual discussion.

I see this in my comments all the time as well as the comments of others. “S/he needs to look in the mirror.” Loves, and I am holding your cheeks with this one (the cheeks on your face BTW I need to make that part clear🤣) that statement tells me far more about the baggage you brought into this relationship with me than it tells me about me. Somewhere along the way, whether through your family, a toxic ex, social media, influencers, self-development content, or a creator who profits off outrage, you’ve learned to expect manipulation from people. You’ve learned to expect hidden motives or someone trying to get one over on you in the name of building their “brand.” So now when somebody comes along and speaks directly, challenges your thinking, or invites self-reflection, you immediately sort them into the same category as everyone who hurt you before the same way you do at home with the people in your life. That right there is projection.

Now before someone gets offended by that word too, projection is simply the tendency to assign our fears, assumptions, expectations, and unresolved experiences onto another person (Vaillant, 1992). We stop responding to the person standing in front of us and start responding to everyone they remind us of. Research on attachment theory has repeatedly shown that many of us interpret present-day relationships through the lens of past relationships (Bowlby, 1969). In other words, we aren’t always responding to what is happening now. Sometimes we’re responding to what happened then. That’s why I find this so fascinating. People will enter my corner of the internet and immediately assume I am here to rage bait, get views, manipulate emotions, or stir up controversy.

For what?

For who?

If validation was my goal, I picked the wrong profession. What people often fail to realize is that they are bringing baggage into the relationship before the relationship even begins. They are assigning motives, intentions, and agendas that exist entirely within their own experiences and then interacting with me from that place. Thats the conditioning my work highlights. I am literally the girl on the freeway trying to rescue your stray dog ass and you keep trying to bite and claw at me. 🫣😂

What makes me laugh is that my entire platform is built around the exact opposite. I don’t care who you voted for. I don’t care what race you are. I don’t care how you identify or who you sleep with in your spare time. I don’t care where you come from quite frankly I love diversity and differences in humans— its my most favorite thing about us humans. You get to come as you are, where you are, and have The Safety to Speak.

Sit with that for a second.

For many people, that level of acceptance is completely foreign. Many people have never experienced a relationship where disagreement didn’t immediately become rejection. Many people have never experienced a relationship where accountability and compassion could exist in the same room. Many people have never experienced a relationship where curiosity was valued more than condemnation. That right there is why this work matters— at the heart and soul level for me. Because the same baggage people bring into my comment section is the same baggage they bring into their marriages, friendships, workplaces, and family systems. They project old hurts onto new people. They assign intentions that were never there. They create stories and then react to the stories they created. Social psychologists call this attribution bias. We assume we know why people do what they do, often without ever checking whether our assumptions are accurate (Ross, 1977). We make meaning first and investigate later—if we investigate at all.

Trust and believe, when I hold up a mirror, I am sitting with one too— ya girl is in the heat of this too. This platform has been exposure therapy for me. Being misunderstood. Being misperceived. Having intentions assigned to me that I never had. Having people tell me who I am instead of asking. All of it has forced me to sit with my own discomfort. I am not here to attack you. I am not here to humiliate you. I damn sure am not here to rage bait you. I am here to get you closer to yourself. That is a very different mission. And maybe that’s why some people struggle with my work. They are so accustomed to snakes in the garden that they no longer recognize direct communication when they see it. They are so accustomed to manipulation that they assume manipulation is happening. They are so accustomed to hidden agendas that they assume every agenda is hidden. As a collective we are so accustomed to chaos that we mistake clarity for an attack. So instead of sitting with what was said, we end up defaulting to, “S/he needs to look in the mirror.”

Meanwhile, what many fail to realize is that the mirror is already being used. That’s why this work exists in the first place.The irony is that everybody loves the mirror until it reflects them. We weaponize the mirror when it is pointed at someone else’s behavior. We use it to diagnose, analyze, expose, and condemn. Yet the second that same mirror reflects our contribution to the dynamic (mhmm I said it), now the mirror is problematic? The conversation is harmful? Now the person holding it is the issue. Social psychology has repeatedly found that human beings are far more likely to attribute their own behavior to circumstances while attributing the behavior of others to character flaws (Ross, 1977). In other words, when I hurt someone, there is always a reason. When you hurt someone, suddenly it’s who you are.

I made a video once talking about the baggage we bring into relationships. What fascinates me is how often we expect other people to sort our baggage for us. Its like that book “Are You My Mother” expect it’s “Will You Sort My Baggage”

We want everyone else to understand us, our baggage and to accommodate it. We want them to reassure us through it. Yet the moment we discover they have baggage too, we are disgusted.

We want grace for ourselves and perfection from everyone else. We want understanding for our wounds while struggling to extend the same understanding to theirs. Trust me when I say I have been there too!

What I find most interesting is that this same mechanism shows up in every community. We act like it belongs to one group, but it doesn’t. I see it in Black communities. I see it in Latino communities. I see it in queer communities. I see it in religious communities. I see it in self-development communities. I see it everywhere. It has become societies base line for functioning at this point. Communities that have experienced exclusion often recreate exclusion. Communities that have experienced bullying often engage in bullying. Communities that have experienced invalidation often invalidate their own members. This is one of the unfortunate realities of trauma. Unhealed pain often gets recycled relationally unless it is consciously interrupted (Bowen, 1978; Herman, 1992).

That is the hypocrisy that nobody wants to talk about. The very same externalization of blame that many marginalized groups have experienced from dominant systems often gets recreated within the community itself. The same silencing, character attacks. The same social punishment. The same “stay in your lane,” or “know your place.” The same bullying tactics. It’s the same pressure to conform. The same consequences for speaking outside the accepted narrative. The only thing that changes is who is holding the stick.

Being misperceived is one of the biggest activators for me which is why this work Is exposure therapy. It pokes directly at old wounds. Yet part of this journey has required me to learn how to sit in the discomfort of that cognitive dissonance while NOT trying to overexploit myself in order to get them on the same page with who I am— I have to LET THEM. Research shows that when information threatens a person’s worldview, identity, or beliefs, people often reduce that discomfort by rejecting the source rather than examining the information itself (Festinger, 1957). In other words, sometimes people are not reacting to what you said. They are reacting to what it would mean if what you said were true.

And let me tell you, learning that you cannot explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you is a special kind of hell for the nervous system. It is uncomfortable because, like Katherine Heigl said in a video where she addressed being labeled as mean, everyone loves a people pleaser—they damn sure don't like a secure woman.

One of the most uncomfortable parts of having a public platform is being exposed to just how much projection exists in society. Brent Brown mentioned this in a podcast with how much death threats she gets simply for speaking on a buzzword topic such as ICE. But, I’m not talking about clinical diagnoses or saying everybody has a personality disorder. I’m talking about the traits—the splitting, the black-and-white thinking, the chronic externalization of blame, the inability to hold two truths at once, the tendency to assign intent instead of asking questions, and the habit of making meaning out of something and then attacking people from the meaning they created rather than what was actually said. The internet rewards these behaviors because outrage gets engagement, engagement gets attention, and attention has become a form of currency that many of us will sell our soul for.

What all of this reminds me of are the friendships I kept in my twenties. My husband used to tell me over and over again, “They are using you for free therapy.” I didn’t want to believe him. Now, to be fair, not everyone does that. There are incredible people in this world. There are reciprocal relationships. There are people who genuinely want connection. But I am a creature of depth. I want people around me who can go beyond the surface, who can swim to the depths and play mermaids with me. I want people willing to challenge their own thinking. I want people willing to question the narratives they inherited instead of blindly repeating them.

Because the entire point of self-development is discomfort.

Growth requires discomfort.

Healing requires discomfort.

Accountability requires discomfort.

Looking at ourselves honestly requires discomfort.

The work is not identifying everybody else’s role in the dysfunction. The work is identifying our role in the relational dynamics we keep finding ourselves trapped in over and over again. Family systems theory has been teaching this for decades. If we keep showing up to the same dance with different partners, eventually we have to become curious about the choreography we brought to the stage.(Bowen, 1978). What worries me(if you haven’t noticed I am all of worries😩) is that society is increasingly rewarding victimhood over responsibility. And before somebody twists that statement too, I am not saying people haven’t been victimized. Many people have. I am saying there is a difference between acknowledging what happened to you and building an identity around why you can never change.

Because eventually every conversation becomes the same.

“Well, they did this.”

“Well, this happened to me.”

“Well, the system.”

“Well, my diagnosis.”

“Well, my trauma.”

And while all of those things may be true, none of them answer the question that actually matters:

Now what?

Now, lets get ready to dive deep—put your goggles on.

My challenge for those of you with that mentality is this:

Where are you exercising your free will?

To keep the snakes in your garden?

To keep the same patterns in your life?

To keep the same mentality and nervous system baseline you continue operating from?

Where is YOUR free will?

I ask this beucase the minute we start having that conversation, the insults begin. The Shitty Tennis match starts. Here come the character attacks and the good ol’ bait-and-switch. The original discussion gets abandoned, and now we’re arguing about everything except the thing that was originally brought forward. Raise your hand if this happens to you in your life at home or at work? Communication researchers have long noted that when people feel threatened by a topic, they often shift the discussion to a more emotionally comfortable battleground rather than engage the issue directly (Stone, Patton, & Heen, 2010). In other words, if we can’t win the conversation, we’ll often try to change the conversation. This is why there is so much intellectualized language. It’s why so many go to therapy to collect the language torehears their vicim roles at home out in the wild.

I recently posted something on my personal Facebook account about how wholesome it felt watching people from outside the United States come here for the World Cup. I talked about how beautiful it was to watch people experience America through fresh eyes and how it reminded me of how much many of us take for granted because we are so focused on the pain, trauma, wounds, division, and injustice that exist here.

What fascinated me was how quickly some people became upset at the suggestion that someone could appreciate the present while simultaneously acknowledging the problems. That right there is a psychological phenomenon worth paying attention to.

Research on negativity bias has consistently shown that human beings are naturally wired to pay more attention to threats, problems, dangers, and negative experiences than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001). From an evolutionary standpoint, that made sense. The brain prioritizes survival. The problem is that many of us become so conditioned to scanning for danger that we lose our ability to experience gratitude, joy, awe, beauty, or appreciation when they are right in front of us.

And honestly, that is a mental health conversation that not enough people are having.

I also have a BIG problem with people who essentially tell you to “know your place” because you choose to enjoy the one life you have.

How can we preach growth mindset while simultaneously reinforcing the very mechanisms that keep us stuck? Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset highlights the importance of believing that change is possible (Dweck, 2006). Yet so much of modern discourse rewards the opposite. We become attached to explanations instead of transformation. We become attached to identifying the wound instead of healing the wound. Many — and this is a big loop— become attached to discussing the problem instead of examining their role within it. The gotcha culture of trying to hold people accountable outside of ourselves is the biggest sickness of all.

Do you see the hypocrisy?

This is why family systems research has found that patterns repeat themselves across generations until someone becomes willing to interrupt them (Bowen, 1978). The faces change. The names change. The circumstances change. Yet the mechanism remains the same.

And this is exactly why my platform is not centered on historical injustice. Again— for those who still don’t get it. This is not about dismissing or saying it’s not real. It’s about exposing you to the conversation you claim to want to have yet continue to avoid.I have watched people use history the same way families use old arguments.

The minute someone initiates a difficult conversation, the discussion gets hijacked.

Now we’re talking about something that happened five years ago.

Now we’re talking about what somebody else’s cousin did.

Now we’re talking about another injustice.

Now we’re talking about another wound.

Now we’re talking about literally everything except the thing that required courage to bring up in the first place. The goal I have studied by humans who do this deflection art is this— if I can get you lost in the side quest, I never have to engage the original discussion.

And that’s the mechanism I’m interested in.

Not the side quest.

The mechanism.

The minute accountability enters the room, someone reaches the hippocampus archives, pulls out a completely different discussion, and now we are arguing about that instead. Before you know it, we are lost in what I call the Hippocampus Forest. We’re wandering through facts, timelines, side quests, and competing narratives while becoming increasingly disconnected from the original conversation that required courage to have in the first place.

How many of you experience that in your personal life?

How many times have you developed the courage to walk the Expression Highway and finally address something that has been weighing on your heart, only for someone to hijack the discussion and redirect it somewhere else?

You finally speak.

You finally advocate for yourself.

You finally address the issue.

And instead of engaging what you brought forward, the other person starts making rules.

“We can’t talk about that until we talk about this.”

“What about when you did this?”

“Well, before we discuss that...”

Suddenly the conversation you initiated gets held hostage by a conversation they never had the courage to initiate themselves. Researchers refer to this as deflection and whataboutism—communication strategies that redirect attention away from the original issue in order to avoid addressing it directly (Walton, 1998). In family systems, it often functions as a way to reduce anxiety while preserving existing relational patterns (Bowen, 1978).

The result?

Nobody feels heard.

Nothing gets repaired.

Everyone leaves feeling justified in the current pattern that needs healing.

And we all remain disconnected.

That’s what hurts.

As someone that holds space for the ache of ALL humans.

This level of self-perpetuated outrage due to mindset. it has nothing to do with people disagreeing with me or because somebody left a comment on the internet. What hurts is that it amplifies something that feels very familiar for me in my timeline. It touches a wound that has existed long before social media ever entered the picture. The wound that says I’m good enough as long as I stay in my lane, provide what people want. I’m good enough as long as I talk about what’s safe. I’m good enough as long as I provide something useful for everyone else to consume. I’m good enough as long as my thoughts, opinions, observations, and experiences remain convenient for the people around me.

And if I’m being really honest, I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I think many of us learned versions of that lesson growing up. Maybe it was in our families our friendships. Maybe it was in church or at school. We learned that belonging was often conditional— and to be loved meant only certain parts of us, but not all of us could be loved. We learned that people enjoyed the fruit we provided while having very little curiosity about the roots that produced it. That you could be celebrated one moment and criticized the next simply because we stepped outside of a role that other people had assigned to us. That’s why these moments sting more than people realize. Because it isn’t about the comment itself. It’s about what the comment touches. It’s about the younger version of me that spent years trying to earn belonging if I could just explain myself clearly enough, be agreeable enough, helpful enough, insightful enough, useful enough, maybe everyone would finally understand me.

One of the greatest acts of reparenting I have had to learn is allowing myself to be misunderstood without abandoning myself in the process. Not pretending it doesn’t hurt or convincing myself that I don’t care. Just sitting with the discomfort and reminding myself that disagreement is not abandonment, misperception is not rejection, and criticism is not proof that I have done something wrong.

What I keep realizing as I sit with all of this is that none of this is actually about the comments. The comments are just the doorway. They’re the thing that pokes the wound and invites me to go looking for where I’ve felt this before. That’s why I always laugh a little when people assume my work is about politics, racial injustice or whatever current outrage people are arguing about online. I mean aren’t y’all tired? My work has never been about that. My work has always been about conditioning, modeling how what happens in the micro is living in the macro thus conditioning us further to normalize this level of dysfunction and division.

It’s about the ways we learn to relate to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. It’s about the stories we inherit from our families, our communities, our culture, and our lived experiences. How the bells that rang decades ago cause us to still salivate to today, even when the original threat is nowhere to be found (Pavlov, 1927). It’s about the fact that many of us are still fighting ghosts. We are still reacting to old wounds as if they are standing directly in front of us, and because those wounds feel so real inside our bodies, we rarely stop long enough to ask ourselves whether the danger is actually here in the present moment or within ourselves.

That’s where free will enters the conversation for me.

Not in a dismissive “just get over it” kind of way. Quite the opposite, actually. I think healing requires us to be radically honest about what shaped us. But eventually there comes a moment where we have to decide whether understanding the origin of a pattern is enough, or whether we are willing to interrupt the pattern itself. Through our choice to choose differently.

Because those are two very different things.

I can tell you exactly why I developed certain fears. I can tell you exactly where some of my wounds came from. I can tell you who taught me to doubt myself, who taught me to shrink, who taught me that belonging was conditional. Understanding those things helped me make sense of my pain, but understanding alone didn’t heal it. At some point I had to decide whether I was going to continue organizing my life around what happened to me or whether I was going to begin organizing my life around who I wanted to become.

Maybe that’s the part that breaks my heart the most when I look around.

Watching people become so fused with their pain that they can no longer imagine themselves outside of it. The wound becomes the identity. The resentment becomes the personality and over time the injury becomes the lens through which every interaction is filtered. Then when someone chooses differently, when someone begins healing, creating boundaries, finding gratitude, challenging their own thinking, or stepping outside of the conditioning they inherited, it feels threatening. Why is that? Well my theory says its because their existence quietly asks a question many people don’t want to answer:

That’s a terrifying question, because now we’re no longer talking about history.

We’re no longer talking about trauma.

We’re no longer talking about what happened.

We’re talking about choice.

Call it Black hate.

Call it self-betrayal.

Call it anti-Black.

Call it whatever helps you sleep at night.

But as you continue picking fruit from this tree, just remember where it came from. It came from the same “not Black enough” girl. The same girl who learned very early that belonging often came with conditions. The same girl who spent years trying to earn acceptance by becoming whatever everyone else needed her to be. That same girl eventually realized that healing was never about becoming more acceptable to other people.

It was about finally becoming a safe place to come home to herself.

Come as you are, where you are 🫶🏽

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.; DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association.

Beck, A. T. (2011). Cognitive therapy of personality disorders (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly. Gotham Books.

Brown, B. (2015). Rising strong. Spiegel & Grau.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Gilbert, P. (2010). Compassion focused therapy: Distinctive features. Routledge.

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work (Updated ed.). Harmony Books.

Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis. Basic Books.

Hayes, S. C. (2019). A liberated mind: How to pivot toward what matters. Avery.

Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment theory in practice: Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with individuals, couples, and families. Guilford Press.

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

LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. Viking.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. W. W. Norton.

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. Oxford University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory. W. W. Norton.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Press.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Sinek, S. (2009). Start with why. Portfolio.

Tatkin, S. (2012). Wired for love. New Harbinger Publications.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score. Viking.

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.

Extended Reading

These books move beyond psychology into philosophy, spirituality, meaning-making, personal responsibility, and the internal narratives that shape how we experience ourselves and other people. While not all are scientific texts, each offers a perspective that complements the work of developing emotional maturity, self-awareness, and psychological flexibility.

Personal Responsibility & Emotional Freedom

• Letting Go — David R. Hawkins

• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind — Joseph Murphy

• The Untethered Soul

• The Surrender Experiment

• Man’s Search for Meaning

• The Obstacle Is the Way

Awareness & Consciousness

• A New Earth

• The Power of Now

• Awareness

• The Book

• The Wisdom of Insecurity

Trauma, Relationships & Inner Healing

• Our Inner Conflicts

• The Drama of the Gifted Child

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

• The Courage to Be Disliked

• The Four Agreements

Communication & Relationships

• Crucial Conversations

• Nonviolent Communication

• Difficult Conversations

Habits & Behavior Change

• Atomic Habits

• Tiny Habits

• The Happiness Trap

Data Collectors,

One of the reasons I created the Glove Up crayon is because I learned this lesson the hard way. A couple years ago, I was contracted to work in a school setting and let me just say this now: schools are fascinating places to study human behavior. They are also breeding grounds for resentment. You have exhausted teachers, under-supported staff, impossible expectations, politics, gossip, triangulation, burnout, and people carrying around years of unresolved frustration. Put enough stressed-out adults into one building and eventually somebody becomes the emotional trash can.

Unfortunately, on this particular day, I volunteered as tribute. 🤣

I remember being called into an office. The energy felt off immediately. You know those moments where your body notices something before your brain does? Before anyone said anything, I could already feel the shift. Looking back now, that was probably my nervous system picking up cues that something wasn’t right. At the time, I ignored it. I walked in assuming we were going to have a normal professional conversation.

We were not.

Very quickly the conversation shifted into accusations. I was called unprofessional. I was called unethical. I was threatened with being reported. There was an attempt to position me as though I had somehow violated my responsibilities. The irony was that I wasn’t even employed by the school. I was a contracted provider. My role was different. My confidentiality requirements were different. My obligations were different. The very thing they wanted from me would have required me to violate the standards I was hired to uphold.

I knew that.

My supervisor knew that.

The law knew that.

My nervous system did not know that.

What fascinates me looking back is how quickly I stopped accessing the part of my brain that knew the facts. Daniel Kahneman talks about System 1 and System 2 thinking. System 2 is thoughtful, logical, analytical, and deliberate. It’s the part of the brain that gathers information and evaluates evidence. System 1 is fast, automatic, emotional, and survival-based. Guess which one was driving the bus that day?

Not the licensed therapist.

Not the logical adult.

Not the woman who knew exactly what her role was.

The scared kid.

The people pleaser.

The part of me that had spent years believing I was probably wrong.

The moment those women became emotionally charged, my nervous system shifted from top-down processing into bottom-up processing. In other words, my body started making decisions before my thinking brain had a chance to catch up. Stephen Porges’ work on Polyvagal Theory explains that when the nervous system detects threat, our ability to access curiosity, perspective-taking, flexibility, and critical thinking begins to shrink (Porges, 2011). The body prioritizes survival over accuracy.

And let me tell you, survival was in full effect.

I wasn’t asking myself, “Are these accusations true?”

I wasn’t asking myself, “Do they understand my role?”

I wasn’t asking myself, “Do they even have the authority they’re acting like they have?”

No.

My brain immediately went to:

“Oh my God, I’m in trouble.”

“What if they’re right?”

“What if I missed something?”

“What if I lose my license?”

“What if I’ve completely screwed this up?”

If you’ve ever struggled with people pleasing, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The nervous system becomes less interested in truth and more interested in restoring safety. My goal wasn’t clarity. My goal was making the discomfort stop. That is the trap.

For years I thought the lesson from that experience was about toxic workplace behavior. It wasn’t.

The lesson was about what happened inside of me when I encountered toxic workplace behavior.

Because here’s the reality. There will always be people who use intimidation. There will always be people who use shame. There will always be people who use titles, age, authority, experience, religion, education, or social status to establish dominance. Healthy people don’t need to do that. People who feel powerful don’t spend their day proving it. Most people who behave that way are carrying around their own unresolved resentment, insecurity, powerlessness, or pain. The workplace simply becomes the stage where they perform it.

That’s their shit.

The problem was I picked it up.

Barehanded.

I absorbed their certainty.

I absorbed their urgency.

I absorbed their interpretation.

I absorbed their emotional state.

Then I walked out of that office carrying a backpack full of things that never belonged to me in the first place.

When I finally called my supervisor, I was in tears. I was convinced my career was over. She listened quietly and then said something I’ll never forget.

“Savannah, they were completely out of line.”

That sentence hit me like a truck because it forced me to see how far my perception had drifted. My nervous system had become so convinced that I was the problem that it couldn’t even entertain another possibility.

And that’s the thing about not wearing gloves.

You stop collecting data.

You stop asking questions.

You stop evaluating reality.

You start absorbing.

These days, when somebody comes at me sideways, one of my favorite responses is:

“Is everything okay? You seem upset.”

Not because I’m trying to be passive-aggressive.

Not because I’m trying to win.

Because I’m placing their energy back where it belongs. On their side of the street. I spent too many years being the emotional Bounty quicker picker upper for everybody around me.

Not anymore.

The gloves taught me something I wish I had learned sooner:

Not everybody who is upset is right.

Not everybody who is loud deserves authority.

Not everybody who is certain deserves your agreement.

And not every pile of shit is yours to pick up.

🧤☕

Feel free to listen along.

You see, this song makes me cry every time I hear it.

I’ve always been a big Mac Miller fan. When he passed, it felt like a piece of me went with him. His music got me through some really dark seasons of my life. College. Heartbreak. Confusion. Fear. Becoming. There are certain artists whose words become attached to chapters of your life, and for me, Mac was one of them.

There’s a line in the song that always gets me.

Every time I hear it, I find myself thinking about how much of humanity is doing exactly that. We carry the weight of the world while avoiding the weight of our own lives. We point. We blame. We diagnose. We label. We explain. We search for certainty. We search for villains. We search for reasons. Yet so many of us never stop long enough to sit with ourselves.

The truth is we are all carrying something. All of us.

I’ve lost people in my life. Some physically. Some emotionally. At times, I’ve even lost pieces of myself. I’ve come back swinging every single time, but if I’m being honest, it isn’t the loss that scares me anymore. It’s the fear. It’s the panic. It’s the hypervigilance. It’s the constant anticipation that something bad is about to happen and from the work I do with clients and within myself. We are addicted to that baseline, despite prayers for change. We don’t know how to surrender to a life of peace—because peace is scary.

These days it feels like nobody wants to jump. We talk a lot about how we deserve better but never choose better. Ain’t that a trip. We’re all standing at the edge analyzing the water. Looking for guarantees—for certainty. Looking for proof that we won’t get hurt. The problem is life doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t. Trust me I have been trying.

We’re afraid to walk away.

We’re afraid to stay.

We’re afraid to surrender to the imperfect person we chose to marry, build a life with, or have children with.

We’re afraid to trust.

We’re afraid to let go.

We’re afraid to admit that maybe the answers aren’t as simple as the internet wants them to be that’s the sell out point if you ask me. Believing what the internet tells you.

It’s easy when everyone is a narcissist.

It’s easy when every relationship problem has a diagnosis.

It’s easy when every conflict can be reduced down to a label.

What isn’t easy is looking at ourselves. I mean really looking.

What isn’t easy is asking why certain things activate us the way they do.

What ghosts we’re still fighting. Let me tell you, as I sit in front of many clients who can’t see their blind spots from the angle in which I sit. Many of us are in fact fighting ghosts. Does that mean the pain is invalid? Not at all— but see how for some of us our minds take us immediately to “oh so you’re invalidating…” Why is that I wonder? I tend to absorb the grief of my clients. I love what I do, but it gets heavy at times. This work reminds me how similar we all are underneath the surface.

Everyone is carrying something.

The mother-in-laws.

The partners.

The celebrities.

The therapists.

The clients.

Mac says: “Weight of the world I gotta carry my own” look around. The moment we wake we have the world in our face. Yet we wonder why the weight within us gets neglected and some how that neglect is the partners responsibility, because well “they’re a narcissist?” Or because it’s the parent’s fault? The governments fault? Some people carry that weight loudly while others carry it silently. Some carry it through addiction, through avoidance. While some carry through achievement or through religion. Some through perfectionism, while others through control. Some through people-pleasing— while others carry through anger.

But everybody is carrying something.

There is no escaping it.

Which makes me wonder why it feels like everyone else is living their best life. I think it’s because we live in a culture that rewards performance over understanding. We are stuck in a pathological prison of pointing and blaming because it is easier than understanding. Understanding requires humility and curiosity. We are more curious about the labels than understanding the person in front of us. Understanding requires us to sit with discomfort long enough to ask a different question. We are not be conditioned for questions. We are being conditioned for accusations.

Curiosity leads us to the practice of asking, “What happened to them?” Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with them?” If we are really brave enough to stay in the heat of that discomfort long enough, eventually we find ourselves asking:

That’s where the work begins.

Lately I’ve been sitting with Proverbs 31 the ideal virtuous wife, and it’s had me thinking about women, history, culture, and the stories that get passed down through generations. Not just biblical stories, but human stories. For those already offended because you think this about religion, pause for a moment. That’s that shit i’m talking about right there. Always offended.. Sit here with me in this discomfort for a moment. Think about generations where women were treated as property. Think about cultures where a woman’s value was tied to marriage, obedience, or producing sons to be “good enough.” Think about the daughters born into those systems.

What was it like to be the firstborn daughter of a system like this?

What was it like to watch your worth be measured against things you couldn’t control?

What was it like to grow up learning that love, approval, or safety had conditions attached to it? And then what happened when those daughters became mothers? How do you think those wounds show up in the way they parented?

How did they affect the daughters?

The sons?

The marriages?

The family systems?

I find myself noticing these patterns everywhere. In my own family. In my husband’s family. In my clients. In myself, and yet so many of us can’t explore them because we’re too busy proving why our diagnosis explains everything. We want a label that lets us stop digging, but digging IS the mission of this work. Digging is what brings us closer to ourselves. We want certainty more than we want understanding, but remember understanding requires us to acknowledge that many of the systems we survived as children are still living inside of us as adults.

Just check your nervous system.

Many of us live in shotgun-level hypervigilance— still waiting for the acknowledgment we never received as a child and may never receive as adults. So what do we do? Dig to get our partners to provide what is ours to work on. Many of us want to be heard so badly that we don’t realize we’re recreating the same dynamics we’re trying to escape. We aren’t bad people— we are hurt people and it shows. We’re out here hurting people trying not to get hurt.

That’s what makes this so complicated.

It’s a blessing and a curse to notice patterns.

These days everyone gets reduced to pathology while I’m sitting here seeing the undercurrents of humanity. I can see what’s underneath the success.

Underneath the “happy.”

Underneath the “normal.”

But when you flip that stone over and get close enough. You realize underneath it all that we consider “highlights” there lives: Addiction, resentment, depression, loneliness, attachment wounds.

The family secrets.

The shame.

The ache.

Creatives of all types didn’t create what they did because they had low ACE scores (Adverse Childhood Experiences.) Most gifted people don’t. Their gifts, just like my own are grown in the same soil as the wounds. That’s uncomfortable to admit because we want healing to erase the wound. We must understand though—sometimes healing isn’t about erasing it. It’s about learning how to transform it. Imposter syndrome is real, even for me. I sit with clients much older than me. Clients who have lived entire lives before I ever entered the room. Yet when I sit with them, I don’t see age.

I see beings.

I see people carrying stories.

I see people trying to make sense of their suffering.

My gift for helping others came from wounds I endured, But that gift does not exempt me from doing my own work. I think many professionals forget that part.

It doesn’t exempt me from my fear.

My panic.

My distorted beliefs.

My stories.

It doesn’t exempt me from cleaning the lens I look through when viewing life. I know that sounds cliché, but many of us don’t want to:

And I think that’s where so many of us get stuck. We want our partners to turn our stones over and to validate us in ways we demand not realizing the war we started within ourselves trying to gather accountability from the people we chose. It creates a behavior that if we zoom in close enough to see. (if we turned that stone over) would realize just how much that war starts to mimic exactly what we survived as children. Becoming those very parents we had to survive. Thats how generational trauma works. You see— it’s a blessing and a curse to be a pattern recognizer because you can’t turn it off. These days we have hyper-focused into patterns of pathology instead of humanity.

Now, for some of us—we can give:

Everyone else understanding.

Everyone else grace.

Everyone else patience.

Yet we don’t offer it to ourselves.

Instead we overexplain.

We defend.

We prove.

We argue.

We try to get them to understand. While doing so we lose sight of how that very fight is what starts the self-abandonment.

We so desperately want to be heard.

Want to be chosen.

Want to be understood.

Yet we walk right past the one person we’ve neglected the longest.

Ourselves.

So— are you ready to jump in and swim?

• Barrett, L. F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made

• Brown, B. (2021). Atlas of the Heart

• Gottman, J. M. (1999). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

• Lerner, H. (1985). The Dance of Anger

• Siegel, D. J. (2010). Mindsight

Knowledge is power. Ignorance is a choice

Data Collectors,

Welcome to our first skill acquisition. Remember when you see the 🖍️ it’s a skill.

I think one of the biggest reasons people are exhausted is because they’re walking around touching everything without gloves. Every comment, every facial expression, every sigh, every weird text message, every social media post, every opinion, every expectation, every family member’s mood, every piece of energy floating around the room. Then we wonder why we’re tired, drained, and burnt out. Imagine walking around your neighborhood picking up random piles of dog shit with your bare hands. You wouldn’t do it. You’d think I was crazy if I suggested it. Yet many of us are doing the emotional version of that every single day. Somebody sighs and we pick it up. Somebody doesn’t text back and we pick it up. Our mother-in-law says something weird and we pick it up. A stranger leaves a comment online and we pick it up. Our partner comes home in a bad mood and somehow we pick that up too. By the end of the day we’re carrying around a backpack full of things that were never ours to begin with.

This is where today’s crayon comes in. 🖍️ Glove Up.

The gloves are not avoidance. The gloves are not pretending you don’t care. The gloves are not becoming emotionally unavailable. The gloves are skills. The gloves are pause. The gloves are discernment and curiosity. The gloves serve as a regulation strategy. It's learning how to stop assigning meaning before you have enough information. One of the questions I ask myself all the time is, “Hold on... am I touching this without gloves?” Because the truth is most of us are not reacting to what happened. We’re reacting to what we think happened. That’s a very different thing.

Subscribe now

Think about how quickly the mind fills in blanks. Your partner sighs and suddenly you’ve decided they’re mad at you. Your friend doesn’t respond and you’ve decided they’re upset. Your mother asks a question and you’ve decided she’s criticizing you. A stranger disagrees with you online and you’ve decided they’re attacking you. If I stopped you right there and asked you for evidence, most people couldn’t give me any. The nervous system is making predictions. Aaron Beck’s work on cognitive distortions highlighted how quickly human beings jump to conclusions, personalize situations, and mind-read other people’s intentions without enough information to support those conclusions (Beck, 1976). In other words, we become convinced that our interpretation is reality. That interpretation then gets projected as the default view for everyone else, so when they don’t agree… There is an internalized feeling of rejection.

This is why resentment spreads so easily. The resentment isn’t just coming from what happened. It’s coming from the meaning we assigned to what happened. Once resentment has enough evidence, it starts running the entire show. Now every sigh means they’re annoyed. Every question means criticism. Every disagreement means rejection. Every mistake means they don’t care. John Gottman calls this Negative Sentiment Override, a relational state where the emotional climate becomes so contaminated that neutral or even positive interactions are filtered through a negative lens (Gottman & Silver, 1999). We stop collecting new data and start proving the old story.

The gloves ask different questions.

What do I actually know?

What am I assuming?

Is there another explanation?

Is this mine to carry?

Am I reacting to this person or what they represent?

Those are glove questions. That’s the work. Not becoming numb. Not becoming detached. Not pretending things don’t bother you. The work is learning how to investigate before you absorb. The work is learning how to sit in uncertainty long enough to gather more information. The work is realizing that not every uncomfortable feeling is a threat and not every activated response deserves your attention.

So this week’s crayon is simple. Pause before you pick it up. Before you grab the story. Before you grab the assumption. Before you grab the offense. Before you grab the resentment. Pause. Put your gloves on. Collect the data first. Just because something activated you doesn’t automatically mean it belongs to you. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. The skill is learning the difference. The reason I love this metaphor so much is because most people think they are wearing gloves when they aren’t.

They think gloves are emotional toughness.

They think gloves are avoidance.

They think gloves are not caring.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about skills.

I’m talking about the ability to remain connected to yourself while interacting with the world around you. For example, gloving up might look like realizing your partner’s bad mood is not automatically your responsibility to fix. Instead of scanning for what you did wrong, overexplaining yourself, or trying to rescue the emotional climate of the room, you simply ask, “Hey, is everything okay?” Then you allow them to own their experience. That’s a glove. It may also look like not trying to parent them into being the version of a mother of father that you want them to be. It looks like allowing them to fumble and experience the natural consequences of that. Gloving up might look like saying no to a request you don’t have the capacity for instead of saying yes and silently building resentment. A fantastic example is hosting thanksgiving dinner. If you really don’t want to but you still say yes. Now you are polluting everyone with your undercurrents. Slamming cabinets, washing dishes aggressively. All because you either can’t ask for help, or don’t have the courage to say no.

It might look like disappointing somebody instead of abandoning yourself. That’s a glove. Gloving up might look like realizing someone else’s urgency does not automatically become your emergency. Just because somebody is panicking does not mean you have to panic. Just because somebody is dysregulated does not mean you have to become dysregulated. That’s a glove. Gloving up might look like receiving criticism without immediately collapsing into shame. Instead of assuming you’re wrong, defective, selfish, irresponsible, or a bad person, you pause long enough to evaluate the information. Is there something useful here? Is there not? What belongs to me? What belongs to them? That’s a glove.

Gloving up might look like refusing to become your own defense attorney every time somebody misunderstands you. One of the hardest lessons I have learned is that misunderstanding is not an emergency. Some people will misunderstand you because they don’t have enough information. Some people will misunderstand you because they are activated. Some people will misunderstand you because it benefits the story they are already telling themselves pr they learned that misunderstanding you activates you—so they allow you to take that bait. None of those situations require you to abandon yourself in order to be understood. That’s a glove.

The people pleasers in the room are going to hate this next one. Gloving up sometimes means allowing another adult to be disappointed. Let me say that again for the people in the back. Sometimes gloving up means allowing another adult to be disappointed. You’re not being cruel or selfish. Disappointment is a normal human emotion, and it is not your job to prevent everyone from experiencing it. Disappointment is the portal to growth sometimes, and there is a few of us who are literally blocking that growth. The more I study resentment, the more I realize resentment grows where self-abandonment lives. Every time we override our own needs, suppress our own truth, ignore our own limits, or carry emotional weight that does not belong to us, we deposit another dollar into the resentment account. Then years later we wonder why we’re exhausted.

This is why I created the Glove Check🧤

Before you pick something up, ask yourself:

Is this mine?

Do I have enough information?

Am I responding to reality, or am I responding to a story?

Am I about to touch this with my truth or with my trauma?

Because the answer to those questions will determine whether you walk away regulated or emotionally contaminated.

Till next time Data collectors