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 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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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?

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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.

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.

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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, 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.

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?

Data Collectors,

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

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

Yet, many don’t see it.

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

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

We get in our own way and we know it.

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

Think about it…

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

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

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

Staff member: A

Staff member: B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who said?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wild concept am I right?

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

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

Something I know I too can work on🤭

Till next time data collectors.

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I had to sit with The Why…

This is for me.

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

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

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

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

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

I was a “why” kid.

I still am.

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

You know about that pendulum swing, right?

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

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

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

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

You know …Depth…

Do we remember what that is anymore?

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

We all are, aren’t we?

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

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

Sometimes it makes me break because I go all in.

I burn out.

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

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

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

They changed mine…

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The Evolution of the “Disordered” Realm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myself…Always myself.

See…

The Terminal Crisis: The Death of the “Why”

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

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

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

Sit with that.

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

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

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

What do you think?

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

Just stuck…

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

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

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

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

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

Kind of like growing up with our parents.

Let’s pause for a second…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a setup.

That is the ache.

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

Examine it.

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

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

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

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

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

All we do is complain.

Why do you think that is?

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

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

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

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

That worries me.

Scares me even.

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

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

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

Now, I want us to really zoom out.

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

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

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

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

What do you get in response?

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

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

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

It is.

It truly is.

The perfect distraction from our own shadows.

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

The Cost of Clarity

This is the Cost of Clarity.

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

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

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

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

So…

Let them talk.

You have work to do.

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

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

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

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

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

The Anatomy of Surrender

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

Key word here is—with space.

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

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

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

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The Village We Try to Live Without

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

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

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

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

Trust your gut.

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

The one thing about language barriers:

Love is universal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

My mother-in-law.

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

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

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

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

Let’s unpack why.

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

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

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

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

But it isn’t just about marriages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You still chose that man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Traitor Within and the Narcissistic Pivot

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

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

Think about that….

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

We cannot demand grace while refusing to give it.

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

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

The Path to Worthy Love

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

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

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

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

I say this with love.

Till next time Data collectors.

Come as you are where you are.

Let me take you all on a little journey.

Based on the title…

How fast did you click this essay?

How quick did your mind stop and create a story? ← That’s the pattern we focus on.

This work involves us to all learn the skills to find the safety to speak regardless of what others may think, feel, or whatever about it. Haven’t some of us finally realized the level of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” that lives in this world? Was experiencing it from the parents and elders not enough?

Anywho,

It’s learning how to be in the frequency of truth regardless if that is not true for others or makes them upset.

Now let’s begins.

In typical Sav style, somatic is the way through this Safari. Let’s pretend this is the magic school bus safari style. First stop, Emotional Frequencies.

Emotional frequencies are nothing new.

Just peep The Hawkins Scale of Consciousness which proposes that every human emotion has a specific emotional vibration that emits a frequency measured on a algorithmic scale from 1 to 1,000. Low-frequency emotions like Shame (20) and Guilt (30) represent states of suffering and contraction, while the “tipping point” occurs at Courage (200), where an individual begins to shift from destructive to constructive behavior. High-frequency states such as Love (500), Joy (540), and Peace (600) reflect an expanded state of awareness that Hawkins claims can positively influence the collective energy of the world.

The data point I’m noticing through my studies of human behavior, is that these frequencies are felt before even coming into contact with a person.

I reflect onto why…

Well, going back to my foundational pillar of perception. Social constructs and the hippocampus archives— do a good job of filling in and perceiving people in a way that is not necessarily based on truth itself— it’s based on perception. When we are perceiving people based on constructs, group think, or what the world told us to believe (these days our TVs and our phones.) We rob ourselves of access to the very frequency needed to connect with others.

The Love frequency

Last night I was out with my aunt for her birthday. She had her friends and we were at a cantina in Cali with karaoke. For me, it has always been hard to be in social settings. But, when I am in the room, I am in THE ROOM. I can observe behaviors in everyone, not by choice, but by the frequency of presence. I know, I know the crunchy language for some of y’all. There is a method to my madness. In presence, you notice everything: body language shifts, unspoken truths or feelings, micro expressions all swallowed.

I watch how the regulars come in, hugging the bartender, coming to support his surprise baby shower.

I see people.

Adults, children, kids, seniors.

Everyone is in the frequency of love, connecting, hugging. The group I came with and everyone else in the restaurant, too. A woman in her late 70s, maybe early 80s, sang “New York, New York” by Frank Sinatra. The frequency of her voice catapulted me to the memory she was in— within that moment. The years when she was the heartthrob men chased. The queen she was, right there in that moment.

The gift of time travel.

Watching her sing her heart out, she closed her eyes to access the moment, the memory, the feeling. I was right there with her, surrounded by a loud bar, people talking, laughing, enjoying themselves. The moment I got to share with her. Did she notice? Wrong question. She was embodying presence, embodying love. She was not in the loud bar. She was with herself. And in that moment, I was with her too.

Frequency work honestly brings me to tears. As a woman of color to say “ I Don’t See Color” the part of me that is purely just here with myself in this moment writing these words can confidently say. Yes, I said what I said. I do not see color.

Does any of that mean injustice because of color does not exist? Did any of that say prejudices and those who judge over color doesn’t exist? No. It simply said that’s what I see.

Go to a playground…

In a non-creepy way and observe children.

They live in the love frequency.

They bond and connect with other kids, not other cultural backgrounds. They are in the purest form of connection because there are no constructs living in their mental garden yet, unless they’ve been placed there by parents or, these days, teachers (a discussion for another time.) Most kids live in the frequency of love because they are in the now.

Now, let’s pause.

Can the eyeballs see a difference in skin color? yes.

The moment our eyes glance at the world, the meaning of what we see is filtered. This filtration system isn't universal; it is uniquely shaped by our past imprints, our life experiences, and the constant narratives we feed ourselves. When someone lives primarily within the stories of their own mind, those stories trigger physical sensations in the body. Consequently, if they encounter a statement that contradicts their internal 'rumination loop,' the speaker of that truth is immediately perceived as a threat.

I think of Erik Erikson’s developmental stages and how some are stuck in what he called the Integrity vs. Despair stage. I have met my fair share of despair-ridden adults vibrating in the emotional frequency of regret. Now bring in the consideration of the mind-body connection and Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work. A chronic state of regret. Could you imagine its toll on the physical body, let alone the mind? These days, color is not the only issue that blocks us from accessing the frequency of love. Individual beliefs and opinions do. Can you believe that? We are actually being trained to feel unsafe with our own belief systems and original thoughts, making it harder to strengthen the muscle of discernment. Why do you think that is?

Do you know how sad my heart feels when I am in a conversation with someone who is stuttering over their words, not because they don’t know what to say, but because they are fearful of my perception — of them..

Harriet Lauler tells Amanda Seyfried’s character in the movie The Last Word…

I notice this to be true with humans. It's something for me I can feel when people are dancing around their truth in their mind, while struggling to find the words they think won’t upset me. That’s where I tell them “You're emotionally managing” Say what you need to say. The ability for someone else to speak their truth about something in the presence of me. I am honored for that. These days it’s rare to find other beings safe enough to process what’s heavy on your own mind. Without the nagging urgency of being cautious with your truth. Its exhausting. I know many of you reading these words right now are silently suffering in what you don’t feel safe to release.

I see you.

The image above is a scene from While You Were Sleeping. A 1995 film where a Sandra Bullock saves a names a man from the railroad tracks, while he is in a coma is invited into his family. She herself does not have a family. So she observes, takes it in, The presence of love between each member as they share excitement and joy.

I observe the frequency of everyone in this way. Especially when in public. People watching is such a favorite activity for me. I just love watching humans exist in their own ways. This is the state I was in last night at the karaoke. I go in and out from different areas, outside in the parking lot to the women drinking Buzz Balls. (Which by the way are disgusting) but to each their own. I have never been an alcohol enjoyer, and my body tends to inflame up like the nutty professor when I do indulge. So take that with some salt.

Just watching everyone enjoy themselves. Brings me joy.

Now, a bit of a story time from that evening. At the time of me writing this was last night. When this is posted it will be the future and this night will have becomes the past.

As I make my rounds to different areas of the nights event. I walk passed a woman who had a foreshadowing moment with me a hour earlier. She came in with a man and there was — let’s say—energy between the two of them. I walk past that same woman with a different lady she met inside smoking a cigarette outside. As I walk passed them I enter into her emotional frequency. For me it feels like That’s So Raven getting a vision. 🤭 For such a quick seconds, I experience her field.

“Fuck him, fuck this shit dude you think lalalala …”

Clearly she and the dude she came in with have some business to sort through. I touched heart and smiled because what I felt wasn’t necessaryily an ache. It was love. Love coming from a woman experiencing fear, anger is a secondary emotion. The frequency she was in underneath all the F bombs. That was fear. A fear many and I mean many of us women have faced in relationships. Sure enough when it was that womans time to sing 45 mins later. She chooses The Wreckers- Leave The Pieces and sings it directly AT her man.

My face was priceless.

I said to myself “oh, we doing that here? right now?”

I feel a sense of “touch heart” as we say in the Sign language interpreting world.

Because we are all so similar in our melodrama’s, our avoidance, and our fear of saying what we really want to say. Especially to the people we are closest to. What ends up happening is many of us. Women especially, don’t even know what we are mad or upset about. We just know how we “should” be responding. The way society conditioned us to respond.

And we don’t question that.

That level of unquestioning compliance does not sit well with me.

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Now

I am back home in California for a bit. It’s diverse here. That’s perception.

People in El Paso think it’s diverse there and all I can do is…. 🤨

Is it? Or do people mostly look like you and that makes you feel safe? Many of my clients that leave their safe areas of sameness go somewhere else and become nervous. I see this a lot in the black community. Where scanning for the other black person in the room is a mechanisms we train. These days if we are being truly honest with ourself. We train it, not the environment. We stay with the same culture background, with people that look like us. But guess what. Check the stories that group talks about?Listen closely, what is being shared, discussed, believed? How is repeating the same cycle narrative cycles that leave us feeling unsafe around white people, men etc. When will we ever feel safe? Is the goal to never feel safe?

its not about arguing the facts of injustice and racism. Wrong arena if thats what you came for. This is about what being in those arenas constantly, what symptoms is that behavior silently reinforcing in the background that you do not see?

In this restaurant everybody was so many different shades of skin completion, cultural background, and age. There were white people in the room. There were Black people in the room. The bartender was black. He probably was the owner. People loved that guy, he would say hi to families, kids, elders. He would hug and connect. Do you think anyone was bringing up politics? no. Because politics does not live in the love frequency. It's a construct, and constructs are drifting agents. The devil in Napolean Hills work Outwitting the Devil. Block you from the love frequency powers of connection.

One of the things that I’ve learned through this work and over 15 years of experience with children. Children are teachers and models of the love frequency. Observe kids outside playing. In the state of play.

Are they discussing politic?

Are they discussing why you voted or believe a certain way?

Are they judging you for your way to choose how to operate your life?

For how you dressed, and the way you did your hair that day?

No.

Kids teach us something so valuable about presence because you cannot access the Love frequency without it. That’s why play is so valuable to our sticky little brains and accessing the inner child within, instead of losing it to the noise of being an “adult.” Adults lost sight of play— some, really. We get lost in drifting. What Napoleon Hill would call the devil, to add my flare to it— the devil energy. This frequency is what causes us to “not feel like it” so we start scrolling, and dissociating through drinking and partying. Can you wonder why we don’t feel like it?

Sure, it’s fun, but it wreaks havoc on the body’s ability to get back up in frequency, especially with alcohol, due to it being a downer. According to the text Uppers, Downers, and All Arounders:

• The Chemical Anchor to Fear (100) and Grief (75): The text identifies alcohol as a Central Nervous System (CNS) Depressant. By increasing GABA (the brain’s primary inhibitory neurotransmitter), alcohol creates a “false peace.” In Hawkins’ terms, this isn’t the true Peace (600) of consciousness, but a chemical suppression that keeps a person trapped in the lower, non-integrated states of Apathy (50) or Grief (75).

• The Depletion of the Reward Pathway: According to the text, chronic use of downers disrupts the mesolimbic dopaminergic system. This is the pathway responsible for the “natural high” children experience during play. When this system is hijacked by substances, the brain loses its ability to generate the high-frequency energy required for Love (500) and Joy (540) without a chemical trigger, making the “portal” feel further away.

• The Hysteria Feedback Loop: Uppers, Downers, and All Arounders discusses how societal stress and “all-arounder” environmental stimuli (like constant digital noise) trigger the sympathetic nervous system. This keeps the body in a state of hyper-arousal or “hysteria.” When an adult tries to “quiet” this hysteria with alcohol, more noise from the program boxes (phone, TV, computer) they enter a cycle of “rebound anxiety,” effectively locking them into the frequencies of Fear (100) and Anger (150), preventing the rise to Courage (200) and beyond.

• Loss of Neuroplasticity (The “Sticky” Brain): The “sticky little brains” of children possess high neuroplasticity. The text notes that alcohol and certain drugs can lead to neurotoxicity and the shrinking of the hippocampus. This physically limits an adult’s ability to remain “present,” which Hawkins argues is the only state in which one can calibrate at the level of Love.

This leads me to my next point and from what I have learned being multiracial woman

Black

White

Native American (Muscogee🥰)

I can say this with pure love in my heart despite knowing it will upset others.

I don’t see color.

Yes I know I know you can SEE color with your eyeballs. 👀

But you can not see color with your heart, because Love is a felt frequency. It’s the frequency of healing. It’s the frequency of presence. It’s the frequency by which so many gaps get bridged through repair. Love is a frequency that is so powerful. We take that power for granted and give it to the devil energy that drifts us apart from it.

Let’s pause really quickly so we can each individually reflect:

What is our perception of love?

When you see the word:

LOVE

What comes up? What do you feel? What images or stories does your mind play?

Take a moment, real quick, and sit with that.

For me, love is an essence. You become so engulfed in that moment that you are locked into a frequency—almost as if time ceases to exist. I know we have all experienced that.

What does this look like for you?

This specific night mentioned in this essay, it looked like what happened at this restaurant: watching everybody love and share the collective energy of enjoyment without bringing politics or racism into the room to try and ruin it. Now, some people will bring it up, but that only demonstrates their inability to access the safety within. the same way women can’t surrender to trusting that men that do not cheat exist. Think about it: if the energy is softening and someone in their own private life has not accessed that frequency of softer energy—one that is safe and flowing—then, especially these days, that softness can feel like a trap. It’s giving “ A black river, perhaps it is not too deep” As winifred Sanderson touches the black road thinking it’s a black river.

This is especially true for those of us who linger in the corridors of the “Fear Wing” in the emotional frequency mansion.

I don’t fault these people; I worry for them.

Just like exercise, we need the ability to access the Love frequency (500). We can’t get there if the garden of the mind is full of drive-in-movie-sized stories about “XYZ.” That blocks us. It’s just like when we are in our relationships and we’re trying to bridge repair with our partner, but we can’t because the other person is still stuck. They are still upset, ruminating on a “mind-movie” story; making meaning from their distorted story. They are at a frequency that makes them unable to access the repair. This happens all the time.

Think about how many bids for connections left to hang there. Simply because the individuals were not on the same frequency to touch that love together.

I challenge you. See if you can access the inner children—the ones who can access the innate power of the Love frequency (500). This is especially vital now, with everything that infiltrates our minds, keeps us up at night, or keeps us in a constant state of worry.

I challenge you.

To the minority communities: the next time you see a white person, I want you to notice the story your mind creates for them. See what it tells you and how it impacts your body. Then, ask yourself:

“Is this true about that person?” Most likely not.

To the White, Caucasian however you identify community I challenge the same. How much of our beliefs is being shaped by information we gained through breaking bread with people or being told how to feel about people…

My gripe with the “race war” is the amount of POC who think the reverse prejudice that is taking place towards those who are white, or seen as “privileged,” is a behavior that aligns with our deep ancestral being. Truly, this is mother willow energy. The greats before us I truly feel knew something we didn’t. They tried to teach us in ways they thought would reach us. It was never about the division noise. It’s about the illusion of fear we all have which is why we create the division noise, to distract us from that fear.

Reflect on this.

The Biology of the "Story"

To tie this into the technical framework of Dr. David Hawkins and the physiological impact of “reverse prejudice”:

• The Frequency of Neutrality (250): Hawkins teaches that the first step out of conflict is Neutrality. This is the level where we stop judging others based on “stories” and start seeing them as individuals. When we project a “drive-in movie” story onto a stranger, we drop back into Anger (150) or Fear (100). This creates a physiological “armor” that prevents us from ever reaching the healing of the Love frequency.

• The “Us vs. Them” Neural Loop: According to Uppers, Downers, and All Arounders, the brain is wired for tribalism when it is in a state of survival. High levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) make the brain rely on stereotypes to “shortcut” safety. By pausing and asking, “Is this true about that person?” you are manually overriding the amygdala and engaging the Prefrontal Cortex, which is the physical gateway to presence and empathy.

• Heart-Space Energy as a Bridge: When I mention “heart-space energy,” what I am describing is what Hawkins calls the Calibration of Power.

  • Force (prejudice, fear, division) always requires an enemy to sustain itself.

  • Power (Love, Presence) requires nothing but the truth of the moment.

  By dropping the story, you aren’t just being “nice” to the other person—you are reclaiming your own frequency and allowing your body to exit the “Fear Wing” of the emotional mansion.

Here is a concrete example of what this would look like in practice.

The Example: The Unreturned Text

The Scenario: You send a thoughtful text to a friend, and they don’t reply for two days.

1. The Melodrama (Living in the Story): Your internal “filtration system” kicks in. You tell yourself, “They are ignoring me,” or “I must have said something wrong.” This is the rumination loop. Understand, some of us have loops that are pretty— intense and emotionally self harmful, where is all that built up going? Consider that data okay loves.

• The Result: Your body reacts with tension or a sinking feeling. Because you are living in this story, your friend has now become a “threat” to your peace of mind. To sustain this story, you might start digging up old “imprints” from the hippocampus archives of times people let you down (confirmation bias.) This is what your image calls “Force”—it requires an enemy (your friend’s perceived coldness) to sustain the drama.

2. Dropping the Story (Heart-Space Energy): Instead of feeding the loop, you choose to stay in the “truth of the moment”. The truth is simply: The text is sent, and there is no reply yet. * The Result: By refusing to assign a negative meaning to the silence, you aren’t just being “nice” to your friend; you are reclaiming your own frequency. You stay calm. You exit the “Fear Wing” of your emotional mansion and stay in a place of “Power” (Presence).

3. The Outcome: When the friend finally calls and says, “I’m so sorry, I had a family emergency,” the person in the melodrama feels exhausted from two days of imaginary fighting (looping). The person in the heart-space is already balanced and ready to actually be there for their friend.

Reflection: The Library of Life

I am not here to convince anyone of anything, but simply to share my brain and heart with the world in a way that is even scary for me at times. I am here to be Sav and to operate from the frequency of Love, because connecting with the “libraries of life”—which is what I call humans—is so important to me. It is what brings flavor to this world. If we can all learn to accept each other instead of dividing and letting the “devil win”, we can access the Love frequency effortlessly. Yes there is darkness. Yes, but light always shines through. Remember that.

I leave you with these questions:

• Has our obsession with inclusivity created the very division we claim to be fatigued by?

• How has our collective need to be empowered swung the pendulum in the opposite direction?

• Does empowerment come from pushing others under? So we can be on top?

In my heart, it does not.

That’s why I don’t represent flags, movements, or noise designed to cloud the collective’s judgment. I serve people—beings who are struggling. I hold the ache of those unable to metabolize. If I represent one flag, others may deem themselves unwelcome, and that is something those stuck and attached to ideologies can’t grasp because their minds have weak muscles for nuance.

My work starts with perception.

If you haven’t watched my YouTube video on perception and did the quest plus collected your 10 page reinforcement— you can do so here

Now, to tie this all up with some evidence to leave our sticky little brains in marination mode. We can look back at why my perception of Love being felt aligns with a lot of Hawkins teachings.

• The Trap of Ideology: Dr. David Hawkins noted that Pride (175) is often the most dangerous block to the Love frequency (500). Pride is the use of “flags and movements” it feels like empowerment because it is higher than Fear, but it is still based on “us vs. them.” As I said, it lacks the “muscles for nuance” required to reach the higher states of Reason (400) and Love (500).

• Metabolizing the Ache: In Uppers, Downers, and All Arounders, the inability to “metabolize” emotional pain often leads to the “drift” of substance use. When people cannot process their trauma, they cling to rigid ideologies as a shield. So, by staying neutral and refusing to fly a specific flag, we are creating a “low-cortisol environment” that allows others to finally lower their guard and begin to heal. This will feel very unsafe for some of you. Because the very flags we fly, ideologies we cling to, and beliefs we default to the world. Those become unconscious shields of false protection. Disconnecting you further from the world and presence around you.

• Effortless Love: Hawkins taught that Love isn’t something you do, it’s something you are when you stop resisting the truth of the present moment. By seeing people as “libraries” rather than “labels,” we start to manually shifting our nervous system out of the “Fear Wing” and into the frequency of repair.

When we shift our focus to stand in this neutral, heart-centered space, we do more than just share an opinion, we act as a biological and energetic 'tuning fork' for everyone around us. By refusing to get lost in the 'drift' of substances, political noise, societal division, or the gridlock of family dynamics and the desperate need to belong, we preserve the 'sticky,' present-focused brain of the inner child. In doing so, we transform the 'Fear Wing' of the emotional mansion into a sanctuary. A place where others can finally put down their flags, quiet their minds, and remember how to play.

The Neurology of the Narrative: Training the Dendrites🤗

To move from immediate reaction to discernment, we must understand that the brain is a pattern-recognition machine. When we focus on historical trauma or societal division, we are physically strengthening the neural pathways (dendrites) that look for those specific patterns.

Reflective Questions for Deep Analysis

• When we prioritize the search for ‘proof’ of division, are we observing reality, or are we training our dendrites to ignore the frequency of connection in favor of the frequency of conflict?

• If you feel offended when someone connects with your soul instead of your skin, what is the 'why' behind that offense? Are you defending your true frequency, or are you defending an assigned story that requires division to feel real?

• How much of our current outrage is a biological ‘echo’ of a past we did not personally live, and how does carrying that echo limit our capacity to inhabit the ‘Heart-Space’ in the only moment that actually exists— the presence?

Challenging the “Why” of the Offense

Questions to audit your own “Fear Wing” in the emotional frequency mansion.

• Why does the presence of a neutral ‘Tuning Fork’—someone who refuses to engage in the war of labels— feel like an act of violence? Does the peace others choose for themselves feel like a dismissal of your pain, or does it simply highlight the exhaustion of your own loop?

• Does focusing on the ‘constant injustice’ of the past provide a solution, or does it merely provide a familiar ‘flavor’ of adrenaline that the body has become addicted to?

• If we stripped away the stories, the news cycles, and the ancestral gridlock, what would actually be left between us? If the answer is ‘Love,’ then why is ‘Love’ treated as a dissociative statement rather than the ultimate embodiment of truth?

Practice: The Discernment Audit

To train the brain for this shift:

1. Notice the Trigger: When you hear “I don’t see color,” or any statement that typically trigger a nervous system shift notice where the heat rises in your body.

2. Identify the Story: What “loop” just started? (e.g., “They don’t care about my history,” or “They are privileged, they don’t understand.”)

3. Check the Frequency: Is this story serving your “Heart-Space,” or is it keeping you in the “Fear Wing”?

4. The Choice: Can you put down your flag for one minute and simply see the flesh as flesh?

Let me know what surfaces for you all. Even if uncomfy. We are here together. 🫶🏽

Till next time Data Collectors.

Data Collectors,

Apologizes for the echo, traveling means travel mic and environments that are not mine. I had to face the perfection head on. Post the audio or scratch it. I chose to post it. 🫣

Leaving the Clinician at the Door

I’m leaving the clinician at the door for this one. This is more Yalom vibes than diagnostic manual, and that has never been my jam. I’ve officially been building this work full/part-time for a year now, fully remote, fully self-directed, and what I’m learning about myself has very little to do with theory and a lot to do with structure. When someone is waiting for you at 2:00 PM, when there’s a bell schedule, a supervisor, a syllabus, your nervous system organizes around that expectation. There is containment. There is a rhythm that holds you. When you remove that structure and you become the container, something else surfaces. For me, masked ADHD patterns came to the surface in ways I didn’t fully notice before. The creative process lights me up. Writing, mapping, building frameworks, filming, thinking — that is not the problem. The friction lives in the systems around it. The tech. The backend. The uploading. The logistics. And when friction shows up, my high-functioning self does what she’s always done. She overrides. She hyper-fixates. She says, “We can handle it.” And because I can handle it, I do. That’s the trap.

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Hey Data collectors

I want to try something new, well not new for me but maybe new for you and I want to know what you think about it. I love my writings and the research— trust me I do. That is not going anywhere, but sometimes ya girl just wants to get on her type and not care what it looks like. I want to flow through the words that come to me in what i’m holding and wiling to share with you all but I also don’t want to be too much of a stranger.

This month marks 1 year of being online publicly and it feels like blur. Especially for me because I was someone that despised social media and was in the works of going nomad from it. Then my husband left for deployment this time last year and I knew.

I need to have something for myself to keep my mind busy otherwise it will in fact.

Run

A

Muck

I got online because I told myself I was repeating a lot of the same things to my clients anyway, so I might as well make a channel for it. This was despite hearing colleagues shame “therapist influencers” and talk about how “cringe” it all is.

The main reason I really wanted to get on here was the misinformation, the overgeneralizations, and the echo chambering of it all. I was examining and assessing, noticing patterns in clients across state lines and cultures—in myself, my family, friends, peers, and colleagues. I can’t teach and not practice what I preach, but I also don’t live in the realm of being who you aren’t. No thank you, that sounds “cringe” if you ask me. I realized the level of conditioning taking place in the streets of the online world. I noticed how differently you are treated as soon as you hit over 25k followers and how much ego lives in the world of social media content creating.

It makes me queasy.

Those with more followers than you follow you almost to “endorse” you as good enough. Is it exciting? Sure. But something I noticed was the old script in me wanting to come back online. “I can’t upset them, I look up to them” the people pleaser wanting to come out of retirement. I was afraid of losing a follow from the actors, celebrities, and musical artists with a large number on a digital page, inside a rectangle box that us humans can never put down.

Let’s sit with that for a moment.

Humans prioritizes this… yet wonder why we are full of symptoms?

I will experience people I know telling me how I need to show up online to appease the audience.

My inner teen is just like: “says who?”

This is an experiment for me and I can’t lose sight of that. It’s the same test I challenge my clients to take to put themselves out there in a way that doesn’t even require leaving the house. I mean, you don’t even have to get dressed if you don’t want to; that is clearly evident on the algorithm. No shade. Just, can you see it?

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All of a sudden you are over 50k followers and family, friends, and peers are talking to you like, “Oh, you’re famous now.” Ewww... I actually get what the teens call “the ick” when I hear that. The idea of being seen by all these eyeballs watching you, especially people you know, people who have known you, or people who just don’t even like you. It places you in what for me feels like an icky feeling. Maybe The “evil eye” energy being cast was something I always worried about when being online. When you open up and share, there will always be people who say something nasty.

Always. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles😉

Ying Yang.

Us humans became so emotionally entitled to assume we only get the pleasantries in life without the grief. Alan Watts teaching as well as Taoism talks about not knowing it was suffering if that’s all their ever was.

I am learning something about family, as imperfect as it may be, that it’s supposed to be imperfect. When we keep forcing it to be something that we as humans were never designed to be anyway, the body starts having symptoms. GERD, inflammation, chronic pain, tension, headaches... the list goes on.

The body is speaking to us daily. We have normalized dysfunction so much that we don’t even recognize the innate power within us.

Something I’m learning about being online is that I struggle with the concept of sharing things. Many of you—especially my sanctuary community—are here for the work, the discomfort, and the challenges. But I also haven’t shared that much about me. I forget that maybe some people actually do want to get to know the person behind the words and videos.

Deep breath.

Public sharing is hard for me even in my personal life. Depending on who.. I’ve mentioned before that it’s hard for me to be “seen”whatever that means, right? I used to have this distorted belief that unless I am in service, I am not safe. It’s a belief that has taken years of rewiring work. But…That doesn’t mean I’m free from old patterns and blueprints showing up.

It means I am required to do my part in managing them. This is the part those who scream “victim blamer” fail to realize about self-responsibility. If you are familiar with my work, you understand we challenge perspectives and question what is lurking in the shadow. Sometimes… We ourselves are whats hiding back there.

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I am no stranger to anxiety, depression, or ADHD. Most clinicians aren’t. The difference with me, personally, is that I don’t like to identify myself by the label.

Let me explain…

“My anxiety,” “my ADHD,” “my depression” it’s not mine.

I don’t want it. Right? We don’t want it? So if we don’t want it, why do we call it “mine?”

This is a concept I find myself reflecting on all the time. I have to check myself, because if the logic is true there, then it must be true with the concepts of “I don’t feel like it” or “the worst things always happen to me” stories that our mind plays. Many of my clients—myself included—tend to internalize blame, think of the worst-case scenario, and jump (more like backflip) into the catastrophe of it all. We do this because, if we are really honest with ourselves, there is a limiting belief somewhere that states: “Do I really deserve this?”

Now, let’s zoom out a bit and think of what we experience during the good moments. The wins, when everything is aligning. How are the people around us? Are they supportive? Do they whisper? Do they shame you or “must be nice” you?

If so, what does that feel like?

The part of my brain that can analyze the data all day is asking: is it the city I am living in? Is it the generational trauma that exists throughout it—the kind you aren’t allowed to name unless it’s in a political debate, and you better be on the “right side?”

As if there is one…

Anywho…

Many times people are “fake” happy for you and you can feel it, because energy doesn’t lie. Those are undercurrents.

What I am seeing online is an influx of people being themselves—more authentic, less performed. We share a lot online now and I have learned people almost expect it. They want personal info, details, etc. It’s the same reason we enjoy reality TV; it’s a good distraction. Now, The idea of people playing with your life in their minds? That feels scary to me, because many people, and we see it in the comments when we scroll—are just “discharging.” That discharge is the very pollutant I encourage my clients to face through exposure therapy work. Send that risky text that’s vulnerable. Ask that person out. Talk to your sibling and tell them how you feel. It doesn’t need to be perfect.

Otherwise, the buildup creates discharge and that discharge is what we dump on others when we need to release the emotional buildup from everything we avoid and suppress internally. Sharing me…Sav, and not just the parts that can be of service to others, is very uncomfortable for me. “Who cares?” is what the echo says.

But remember: exposure therapy is not about the reactions and responses you get from others. It’s about the training you do for yourself internally. This is where a healthy level of “narcissism” or I should say self knowing is needed in order to do the shadow work everyone talks about. We’ve essentially “Voldemorted” the term narcissism. Many of us are so terrified of the label that we struggle with cognitive dissonance when we actually have to embody a little “selfishness” for our own survival. We’re so afraid of being the “bad person” that we abandon ourselves just to stay “good” in everyone else’s eyes.

Data collectors…

Here’s the thing: that very concern—that deep-rooted fear of being a “narcissist” is exactly what makes you nothing like one. True narcissism doesn’t have a conscience that worries about being “the bad guy.” So if you’re worried about it, you’re already safe from it.

We need that healthy level of self-interest to actually do the shadow work. You can’t look at your own shadow if you’re too busy staring at everyone else to make sure they’re still smiling at you. You have to be “selfish” enough to look inward.

So… I finally landed the plane. Let’s get to introducing myself officially after a whole year!

Hi I’m Sav!

Savannah actually pronounced Suh-VON-NUh

I get the Savannah Georgia pronunciation all. the. time.

I prefer Savannah unless its my husband calling me that… Then its uh oh🤣🫣

I love… no… hear me for real on this, okay?

It’s Kristen Bell sloth-level for me with elephants. I love them. I’ve also been a Vans girl since the early 2000s, riding my skateboard in the streets of California from the ages of 12 to 18. I miss home. 🥹 Not living near an ocean hurts at a soul level for me.

I love to laugh and I’m quite childish, which makes my work so much more entertaining. I feel like my “sillygoose” energy helps bridge the gap to connection especially with work like therapy. Professionalism exists, of course, but I align so much with the work of Irvin Yalom, Viktor Frankl, Carl Rogers, and Carl Jung (The Red Book? Are you kidding? 🤓). This field needs more humanity, not more division. I think we can all agree the world needs it.

To be honest, we lost our sense of play. It’s something I personally and professionally feel is crucial for learning and evolving. Our brains want novelty, and this work is heavy…Play makes it manageable to carry. Play and, well... curiosity. We should all experience what it feels like to be safe to speak without fear of judgment. Building rapport in the therapeutic space is what truly makes me good at my job. It’s humans vibrating at the frequency of being seen, a level of validation that has no words.

But let’s talk about how I ended up here... because it wasn’t my first choice.

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