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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Being personal online… let alone publicly is scary for me and yet, just like in my clinical practice, I believe some transparency builds rapport. Not oversharing. Not emotional dumping, but intentional visibility. Irving Yalom speaks about the healing power of authentic presence. Carl Rogers emphasized genuineness as a condition for growth. Carl Jung wrote about integrating the self rather than performing a version of it. Those ideas live in me.

There’s something I call “therapeutic code switching.” It’s the discernment of who you are with, how much you share, and when. It isn’t about being fake, no no. This is a skill. It’s about being attuned. It’s knowing that safety and intimacy are built gradually and in a therapeutic setting. Not every client can handle a therapist’s transparency moments. That rings true for out in the world. Not every friend is the one you should turn to just because they are a friend. Not every family member is safe. I think many of us are still learning that skill especially in friendships, and almost always in romantic relationships. I want to be more personal here. Writing this. Letting you see that this work as much as it is for my dendrites, yes 🤗lol — it is also for you. And that is vulnerable. Having this many eyes on me gives me the eww feelings, but also shows me just how much we all share in what we carry silently.

But being seen enough for someone to invest consistently, inwardly, presses on an old wound. The part of me and maybe the part of many of us, that learned lovability is measured by performance. By productivity. By what we can do, provide, or prove. So yes, I’m public and yes, I offer education. But humanity doesn’t bridge gaps without relatability. We are relational beings. I know societal conditioning has another agenda about that. But, We regulate through…connection. When it comes to love, I think many of us struggle not with whether we want it, but with how to receive it without turning it into something we must earn or lose ourselves for.

Now, for my love letter to you all I am skipping the edits and obsessive proof reading and seeing what happens to my nervous system when I hit send and say “bugger off with it.” Perfectionism is a trap I have found myself looping in since being online and its annoying to say the least. My writing, my recordings. It. Must. Be. Perfect.

Ew Sav, why?

The old script of people pleaser perfectionist wanted to poke it’s head out and audition for it’s role again. Doing what you love is one thing, when it becomes all you think about is a completely different thing. The exposure therapy of my data revealed how lost we can get searching for answers, the why… This month not only marks the anniversary of getting online. Something my dear friend would be proud of. It also marks the 10th year of her passing. At the young age of 26 we lost her. This month is always a reminder of that loss. This work is a reminder of how hard it has been to let people in as close as we were. 11 years old, making flower crowns and talking about life. Little did she know she saved me during those moments. Losing a friend to suicide is …

confusing.

As an intuitive though— I knew… This isn’t Minority Report, as much as I wished it was.. Wondering what life would be like to have that friend that has known you since you were a kid. I have watched many have that in their life and always wondered what it felt like.

Then I zoom out.

And I look at how the world can get divided by a vote in a system that’s universally corrupt no matter what side you think is the morally “correct side”and yet we will burn nervous system calories defending our chosen side, as if that is going to save us from something.

We will mobilize.

We will argue.
We will subtweet.
We will rehearse conversations that never happened.
We will gaslight each other.

The energy expenditure is impressive, but wasted on the wrong things.

The same emotional energy expense we use to divide, to prove, to defend could be redirected inward. We could use that energy to walk away from dynamics that drain us.
To move on.
To lift something heavy.
To build something steady.
To sit in therapy and actually tell the truth.
To log off.
To go for a walk.
To eat better.
To rest.

But we don’t.

We stay activated.

We choose the familiar distress over the unfamiliar quiet, despite saying — we want peace.

So we suffer.

And that contradiction… fascinates me.

Even as a little kid I noticed tat about adults. Always “maybe” with everything, caught up in their own emotional mind movies. I was always the little milkdud kid that pointed and asked why.

Curious.

Nosey…

I am the block watch captain of the neighborhood…😂 Archie, Charles, and I… (2 out of the three of us are dogs by the way🤭) I observe never from judgement. I know that’s hard for some to believe. I use to do Uber throughout college in SF-Sacramento area. I met a lot of humans. Humans are like library books we can check out and listen to.

There is a story in each of us.

Do we listen though?

1 year of being online and I faced many emotions. Each one a somatic time capsule catapulting me through memories that were sedimented deep deep in the hippocampus archives. Memories, wounds, I thought I had sorted through. Resurfacing through this work and what I teach. Epiphanies, is what some clients call them. Sharing these moments with clients is probably one of the best parts of the job. Just two humans experiencing a moment.

but together.

I have such huge vision for this corner of the internet, but a border collie level of ADHD that was masked by the years of college, now suddenly surfacing when it’s time to pour fully into myself.

Executive freeze.

Yup— I experience it too. It’s bullocks if you ask me, but I have to check myself. We all do. I see it in my clients, I see it online, I see it in myself.

We are loading our plates to the brim then wondering why it’s too heavy to carry…

Symptoms start showing up.

One of the common themes I see across the board with us all. The pressure comes from within. Literally, it’s like someone is pushing on the internal suffering button but it’s really us stuck on it. Choosing suffering because the ideal alternative would be too painful to lose.

See,

Lose.

Already thinking of the worst.

*Can we Squirrel real quick.

I was watching the Love is Blind new season… I know I know.. I talk my shit throughout it okay…😂 One of the women was saying how her dream is to be “The Super Bowl house.” How many of us right now are the Super Bowl house and the Super Bowl house comes with its own sets of emotions.

Struggles.

Challenges.

Where did we get this idea that being an image meant joy comes with that image?

What would being the embodiment of that image look and feel like?

Homestead dreamers? Do you just want the chickens and the land or do you want the discipline to maintain the chickens and the land?

Do we want the husband, the wife, the house. Or do we want the safety, regulated nervous system, and the ability to rest and not feel the need to jump up and “be productive” in our marriage and in our house?

What if the external image is what many of us already have, but the feeling we thought we would feel hasn’t showed up yet. Or it did— but it was fleeting. What if instead of wishing for the image of the person you can laugh and chill with. You also imagined an image where you were both chilling and regulated, calm, at peace. Nothing is unspoken, no emotional debt is in the tank. People feel heard.

What would that feel like?

What if we didn’t have to fill our plates to the brim because we could actually surrender into relaxation time, or self-care time. We can take off the mom or dad role for a day or two and take care of (insert name). Yeah… Remember her? Remember him? What are they up to? When was the last time you check in with them?

That’s what this work is for me. A check in. I am excited to see where we take this corner of the internet. I am learning a lot about myself in the process. Sometimes I just want to write without the expectation (I place on myself.) Just to show up as this version —Sav. I created the Chasing Milligrams Free community so we can all see the world through each other’s eyes. What brings us dopamine and joy. What can we motivate each other to do for ourselves.

I hope to see you all over there. So we can get a bit more personal and remind ourselves. Despite the noise. There are humans who still want to connect with each other.

—Till next time

Come as you are Where you are.

We forget how recent the invention of emotional language is.

Therapy wasn’t always a given. Boundaries were seen as rebellion.
And safe spaces?

What. Are. Those?

Our parents and grandparents were surviving eras where “speak when spoken to” was not just a rule it was a nervous system strategy. A way to stay safe. To avoid shame. To avoid being “too much” for a world that didn’t know what to do with feelings. What was experienced wasn’t just emotional neglect—it was cultural conditioning.
Whole generations were shaped by wars, recessions, displacement, systemic oppression, assimilation, and survival labor. Softness wasn’t an option. Inquiry wasn’t a luxury. Emotional safety was not on the menu for discussion.

So they didn’t ask questions.
They didn’t challenge the scripts.
And when they did feel, they buried it under work, control, alcohol, God, resentment or silence, and now we’re here. A generation raised by generations who never learned to name what is hurting them. What they're holding. What they’re drowning in.

Labels Without Inquiry Become Another Form of Silence

We live in a time where you can scroll Instagram and find an emotional diagnosis before you find a reflection. But even now, in the age of therapy-speak, I see it again: people slapping labels onto themselves or others (“narcissist,” “toxic,” “trauma response”) without ever slowing down to sit in the space between.
To ask:

• What is the function of this behavior?

• What is it protecting?

• What’s the relational dynamic that’s reinforcing it?

Because when a family system starts using the language of pathology without practicing the courage of inquiry, it starts to get dangerous. Instead of being shamed for speaking, people are now shamed for not having the “right” language.
Instead of curiosity, we offer critiques.
Instead of compassion, we get content. What’s worse is the undercurrents silently pull the collective under with them. Deep into the upside down, where Drifting occurs (Napoleon Hill). The suffocation is subtle, like carbon monoxide. We don’t even realize the neuro-impact of sameness — the arrested development that comes from punishing nuance.

So how can we have the safety to speak?
How do we bridge these gaps?

Tiptoeing Isn’t the Same as Peace

Many families look functional on paper. Everyone knows their role.
But underneath?

• Tiptoeing.

• Avoidance.

• Loyalty to the loudest person in the room. The one no one wants to upset.

And when everyone’s walking on eggshells, no one’s telling the truth.

There’s no space for grief.
There’s no model for repair.
There’s no rupture and therefore, no opportunity to rebuild.

Why? Because rupture requires confrontation. And confrontation threatens the system. Especially a system held together by unspoken roles: the Scapegoat, the Hero, the Golden Child, the Lost One. And so, silence wins again.

The system survives, but the individuals inside it don’t.

What Happens When the Parents Try?

Let’s bring it into the present:
What happens when a parent is trying?
They’re going to therapy. They’re reading the books. They’re showing effort.

But the adult child doesn’t trust it.
Not yet. understandable right? Because the pain didn’t start last year—it started in their formative years, they have been navigating life with fearful avoidant wiring that says:

• Is this real?

• Will you go back to the way you were?

• What do I do with this softness now?

Fearful avoidant attachment doesn’t just say “I don’t want you.”
It says: “I want you, but I don’t trust you.” So when both people have been hurt, there’s often no clear villain. Just years of misunderstood nervous systems trying to protect themselves by shutting each other out. Perpetuating the loop.

You Can’t Build a New System with One Person

How many times have you seen a partner change for two weeks… then revert?

Maybe the work didn’t stick.
Maybe it was performative.
Maybe their nervous system couldn’t sustain the change.

But here’s the other question:

Did you change?

Did you change?

Did you reinforce your boundaries? Or did you cave the moment you felt the connection you’d been craving? Because we cannot build a new dynamic using the same internal architecture that supported the old one. Even in relationships, the scaffolding matters. If the blueprint stays the same — self-abandonment, fear, appeasement, so will the outcome. The structure must shift to hold what’s sustainable for you.
Not for the group.
Not for the person whose comfort everyone’s still protecting.

When Empathy Meets Discernment

Now, here’s the razor’s edge we’re all walking:

What do we do when the older generation is willing to try, but is afraid? We hold space. We model. We communicate slowly. This models co-regulation — the foundation of secure attachment, where nervous systems learn safety through repetition and relational pacing. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work on constructed emotion and Porges’ Polyvagal Theory both support the idea that emotional safety isn’t taught through words alone — it’s absorbed through regulated presence. We give earned trust, not blind loyalty. This is the difference between anxious appeasement and secure discernment. One is demonstrated by fawning behaviors and the other by relational clarity. This ties directly into trauma-informed relational dynamics where fawning (a common survival response) can masquerade as loyalty, but is actually a fear-driven submission pattern (Herman, 1992; Walker, 2013).

Now, can you see why exercising blind loyalty online becomes counterproductive to your ascension? If we exercise it online with those that favor our beliefs, image, we lose capacity for nuance with the people who actually matter in our personal lives. Blind loyalty flattens complexity. It creates echo chambers, not emotional growth. If we wan to explore our brains then we must respect their need for pattern recognition. With that being said healing still requires tolerating dissonance. Cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957) shows how humans avoid discomfort by clinging to affirming environments, even at the cost of growth. Exposure to discomfort in a safe container is what rewires belief systems. Nuance is a learned skill, a muscle needed to help us bridge the gaps in our own personal relationships. Online mimicry becomes the muscle that stunts the development of emotional fluency. Social mimicry (Chartrand & Bargh, 1999) and identity diffusion (Erikson, 1968) both explain how people perform belonging behaviors online that lack integration. This makes true emotional intimacy harder in real life.

So what do we do when they’re not willing?

We discern. We protect ourselves. We build distance that keeps our peace from becoming another casualty, because peace that must be kept through self-abandonment…
…is not peace.
It’s performance.

And a life lived as performance is a slow chokehold of death.

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So What Do We Do?

We start speaking.
Even if our voice shakes.
Even if no one else is ready.

Even if we’re scared.

We bring gentleness and accountability.
We name patterns out loud not just to call them out, but to break them. We stop outsourcing safety to those who never had it themselves, and we start practicing the discomfort of showing up truthfully, consistently, and with intention without waiting for others to go first. Now here’s the part most people overlook: this isn’t just about rupture. It’s about repair, and not just repair through grief or talk — but through play.

According to Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, play is not just a behavior; it’s a neural circuit, one of the core systems our brains rely on to build social bonds, reduce fear, and rewire old patterns through safety and joy. In other words, play isn’t silly. It’s sacred. And for many of us, it was the first thing to go when we were forced to grow up too fast. That’s why I created the Nervous System Playground™ — a soft, science-backed space for adult nervous systems to practice embodiment, safety, and skill-building through experimentation, reflection, and yes... even fun. It’s currently waitlist-only, but if you’re feeling the ache of this work and want a place to metabolize the pain without turning it into a performance, the doors open February 14th.

You can join through my Substack now — the founding member price is available until March 1st.

Because healing isn’t just about naming the trauma. It’s about remembering how to live beyond it without waiting for apology.

It’s about ending the reenactment even if that means you have to remove yourself from it.

Till’ next time Data Collectors

Come as you are, where you are…

References & Continued Learning List

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

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

Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.

Chartrand, T. L., & Bargh, J. A. (1999). The chameleon effect: The perception–behavior link and social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(6), 893–910.

Cozolino, L. (2014). The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.

Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis. W. W. Norton & Company.

Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford University Press.

Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books.

Hill, N. (1937). Think and Grow Rich. The Ralston Society.
(Referenced for the concept of “drifting” as a psychological and behavioral pattern.)

Levine, P. A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Maté, G. (2003). When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection. Wiley.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press.

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

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Books.

Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Guilford Press.

A common theme for my work is culture, but specifically how culture is used in the context of mental health. When people say, “It’s just our culture,” what they often mean is:

To feel my heart in this piece, I will link a musical goodie—a heartstring puller—because the ache of this loss is not one I forget. As I approach the anniversary of her passing, I do this work for her. I do this work for all those silently suffering.

I have been standing firm on my word for this year: C O N G R U E N C E

And one thing I have learned about culture is it’s not a fixed rulebook. It is a living system that is shaped by people, values, and choice. It was never meant to protect harm or silence discomfort. What I keep observing in moments of deep incongruence is this:

what’s being defended isn’t culture at all.

It’s control.

There is a difference between honoring ancestry and enforcing obedience. So let’s Zoom in— these same avoidant systems operate through the lens of protection, but the obedience is selective. When “culture” is used to shut down questions, punish dissent, or preserve power, it stops being cultural and becomes a mechanism of avoidance. Now, Zoom out: especially here in America you’ll see this pattern everywhere.

• We call it boundaries.

• We call it self‑care.

• We call it protecting our peace.

But so often, it’s the same old thing

• We avoid discomfort.

• We avoid accountability.

• We avoid complexity.

And then we moralize the avoidance using God, religion, culture, or the phrase that cuts my heart every time I hear it in session:

“This is just how it is.”

And if you zoom out just a bit more —
you’ll see it on a much larger stage.

• We call it allyship.

• We call it cancel culture.

• We call it staying “safe.”

• We call it “doing the work.”

But watch closely:
How often is it just emotional reactivity in disguise?
How often is it performance that avoids repair?
How often is it a new language used to shame, exile, or scapegoat
while the same core pattern of avoidance stays untouched?

When we normalize that logic, gaslighting gets reframed as love. Control gets reframed as belonging, and anyone who questions, names a pattern, or disrupts the script gets labeled “unsafe,” “negative,” or “too much.” Why? Because the system the illusion depends on gets fracture. The certainty that people once clung to (attached to) snaps. There is nothing to grab onto anymore… At least, that’s what we think…

Now, let’s pause for a moment… Something most avoidant systems don’t want to face is the fact that healthy cultures don’t fall apart when they’re questioned. They fall apart when they can’t be questioned.

• Healthy cultures/ families can metabolize feedback.

• They can hold nuance.

• They can evolve. I have seen and held those families in it.

Avoidant cultures — can’t.

• They rely on silence.

• They rely on conformity.

• They rely on everyone agreeing not to name what’s actually happening.

The not naming is the reinforcement that allows. So, What often gets labeled as “just the culture” is actually selective avoidance. The rules only apply to certain people.

The ones who won’t push back.

The ones who won’t disrupt the system.

That’s how you know it isn’t really culture at all and just the word being used to justify shutting down the conversation. Those are the data bits of exercising discernment that we can see. But, how many of you have been told to keep your head down? Probably many… Which is why it may not be easy for everyone to see because in involves getting uncomfortable and the willingness to actually see what is and not what you gaslighted yourself to believe. This comes with grief. Grief for the family we believed in, the family we needed, the family we hoped would change. Would grow.

Because real cultural norms are consistent.

They apply across the board.

When rules only exist for the people least likely to resist, they stop being norms and become mechanisms of control that are designed to maintain comfort and power for select people or person. Can you see it yet? We are watching it live in the Macro everyday.

Now, congruence…

When people are incongruent in what they say, it becomes hard to continue to listen because it’s no longer about language—it’s about embodiment. A new muscle we must learn to exercise, but most importantly discern in others. In a world full of performance‑based healing, I can smell incongruence everywhere. But when God and culture are used to hide that incongruence, when spirituality becomes a shield instead of a mirror designed to help us grow. That is when I see harm multipliy quietly, but spread fast.

That’s when the ache goes unnamed.

That’s when the glue keeps holding… until it can’t.

This is where the safari takes a turn. So we need to turn the volume down and give respect for this part.

How High-Functioning Grief Becomes Invisible

Avoidant families don’t go silent—they just go strategic. Which is why data collectors it is important to have discernment skills. This is the arena where the under currents live. Everything in this forest we explore is not about what the eye can see, It’s about what is felt.

In avoidant families there is not alot to see or hear.. why?

Well it’s avoidant🤣

There is nothing being said and nothing to hear. So that emotion gets rerouted into sarcasm, jokes, unconscious behaviors. What we call over here as Undercurrents. Those invisible Tron highways that the eye can’t see but the body can feel. Grief gets flattened into “just get over it” . It’s called “drama” when someone speaks truth, and the system rewards the one who suppresses it.

Let’s understand, These families don’t say “Don’t feel.”

No, no, no. That would be to overt. To obvious.

They say:

“Not like that.

“Put a smile on your face”

“Not here.”

“Not now.”

They say it through covert tactics. So the structure forms quiet and coercive. There’s usually one loud child. The “difficult” one. The defiant one, and then there’s the other one. The one who “looks fine.” The one who performs, produces, and plays mediator.

The glue.

The bridge.

The one nobody worries about, because they worry about everyone else and that’s the one whose ache goes unnoticed. That’s the one who internalizes the system’s emotional debt. That’s the one who gets called “strong” while they slowly disappear Because in families like this, productivity is the currency.

Backs become bridges.

Children become therapists.

Women become service animals to people who just don’t want to be uncomfortable.

Self-sacrifice becomes status.

Until one day, the glue snaps.

And the system, in it’s shock, says:

“But I thought they were fine…”

I don’t write this lightly. I write it because I’ve lived it, because I lost the one no one thought they had to worry about. The one who held the room while barely holding herself. Getting the text that your friend is “dead” is not something I want anyone to experience.

That’s why I do this work.

That’s why I challenge comfort.

That’s why I won’t sugarcoat dysfunction just because it hides behind “culture” or “faith” or “they did their best.” Because “best” isn’t good enough when someone’s nervous system is at stake and love isn’t love when it comes with emotional costs. As much as I wish we could Tom Cruise Minority Report our way into preventing every suicide. Not every death is preventable. I know that. We cannot save everyone.
But we can stop pretending that silence, avoidance, and emotional illiteracy aren’t part of the landscape that leaves people unseen until it’s too late.

All we have to do is talk.

Listen.

Try to understand.

But we don’t.

Not until someone breaks.

Not until the funeral.

Not until the body tells the story no one wanted to read. We say “mental health matters,” but what we mean is:

“It matters when it makes me look good.”

“It matters when I can use it to justify a boundary I didn’t want to explain.”

“It matters when I can explain my behavior instead of work on changing it.”

“It matters when I can use it as a shield, to avoid having to sit in someone else’s discomfort.”

So what are we really “raising awareness” for? Because just like families, societies have their scapegoats.

Their golden children.

Their bystanders.

And the saddest part is, we know who’s carrying the weight. We watch them every day.

Overfunctioning.

Over-Explaining.

Soothing.

Performing.

And we let them, because it frees us. Because their pain is quieter than our guilt.

Now, Zoom in— take a look around your family foundational blueprint… Does anything resonate from this for you? Feel familiar? Is there any discomfort with that?

Where?

Now ask yourself:

Which discomfort do you choose?

The one you’re in now: cozy, familiar, stagnant, slowly draining you by the hour. Or the discomfort that comes from starting something new unfamiliar at first, but temporary. The kind of discomfort that only lasts until you no longer feel it because you moved.

You pivoted.

You rose.

And suddenly, the thing that felt unbearable…

is behind you.

All it takes is getting past that one emotion.

Fear.

Fear of what will happen, what will they say, what will people think.

But we only have one life. Why choose to suffer in it?

This is a call for eyes to open. For dinner tables to hold more than silence. For systems to stop expecting women to be the sponge and the spine, because when the glue is gone, there’s nothing left to hold you.

And you don’t get to say

“We didn’t know.”

You did.

You just didn’t want to feel it.

A Note for Anyone Struggling Right Now

If this piece stirred something heavy for you, you don’t have to carry it alone.

If you are experiencing thoughts of self-harm, suicide, or feel like you might be in danger, please reach out to someone who can support you. Help is available, and speaking to a trained listener can make a difference — even if it doesn’t feel like it yet.

International Support Lines:

• 🇺🇸 USA

  • 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — Dial 988

  • Text “HELLO” to 741741 — Crisis Text Line

  🇨🇦 Canada

  • Talk Suicide Canada — 1-833-456-4566

  • Text: 45645 (4pm–12am ET)

  🇬🇧 UK

  • Samaritans — 116 123 (24/7)

  🇦🇺 Australia

  • Lifeline — 13 11 14

  🇮🇳 India

  • iCall — +91 9152987821

• Worldwide: Clink Link

You don’t need to earn rest. You don’t need to justify why it hurts.

Let this be the moment you decide: You’re worth staying for.
Let the ache speak and let someone answer.

You are not alone. 🫶🏽

** Learning means just try it. I wore the mic for this and I learned not to do that. I also am getting over a cold 😩 .. This was so fun for me but I apologize for the poor audio. I am also learning not to obsesses in perfection. So — exposure therapy is hitting hard for me in this work because in my writing I want it the work to be perfect. Perfection is a trap, a trap I have found myself stuck in this year a lot since starting this work…

This is how I learn about myself. I hope this models something for you.

I’m sitting here planning how I’m going to batch all my essays and written works and it hits me again—there are people paying for this. I have paid subscribers now. That’s wild to me. Not because I don’t believe I’m worthy of it ( there is an old version of me that would have believed that I was unworthy) but because it still blows my mind that people are showing up. That people are reading. That people are investing in something I created. As I sit with that truth I realize I need to say something that I’ve said before but I think it deserves a real home now. This entire process, this entire world I’ve stepped into? It’s exposure therapy. Not in the cute, trendy way. I mean it literally. I mean it somatically. I mean it in the most vulnerable, skin-peeled-back, nervous system recalibrating way possible.

I’ve always been obsessed with human behavior. I didn’t plan to be in this field. I just ended up here. But the part of me that studies things— the observer, the watcher, the gatherer of patterns. That girl, yeah — she’s been here all along. I’ve always studied myself. Always. Before I had clients, before I had tools, before I had language. I was my first experiment. Now, educating online, sharing this work, doing what people call “content creation”... it’s just another lab. Except this time the variables include strangers on the internet, screen time, spiritual intimacy, visibility, projection, the threat of misinterpretation, the beauty of resonance, and the constant practice of being real while being seen. In a world that thinks authenticity is rare. Is it? Or is it hidden?

Subscribe now

I’ve been in and out of executive freeze all day. Mild urgency. Anxiety that stays level at a low buzz, but enough to still feel uncomfortable. That’s the part people don’t talk about. When you’re healing, you’re not suddenly a peaceful forest monk. You still do the same shit sometimes, but now you’re watching yourself do it. Now you’re catching it.

Naming it.

Adjusting it.

That’s what this season has been for me. A mirror. A nervous system safari. A field study I never planned to run, but now that I’m in it. I see everything differently. This is a phenomenon I see regularly when my clients finally see —finally realize they have been walking around the world with the perception of their parents. They have imprisoned themselves into that story. When they finally realize they do in fact have the power to try another story on—regardless of what people feel about it. Sometimes it may be “too late” according to their perception.

What most people don’t realize is that I didn’t even start this account until February 2025. That’s it. That’s when I started. And I only started because my husband deployed and I needed somewhere to put my brain. I needed to create a place to metabolize everything I was carrying because otherwise my mind was going to start turning on itself and my marriage. This work became my medicine. And now, almost 80,000 people on IG later, it’s become a movement for me.

Here’s the thing though, something I’ve noticed and this is across my clinical work, my own relationships, my own spirals, and now this digital world too. A lot of people are tired not because of laziness (eh some are) or broken, but because they’ve only ever known survival. Their bodies are spinning all day and all night and they don’t know how to stop.

Hobbies?

What are those when you’ve never had them? When your inner world is chaos, when you’ve normalized anxiety as fuel for ‘motivation’—you don’t know how to just be. You don’t know how to soften.

So you loop. and loop. and loop.

You perform.

You collect language. Rhetoric, identities.

You gather healing tools like Pokémon cards, shop therapists the way you shop partners. Then, when someone holds a mirror to that, when someone asks, “Hey... are you actually using the tools or just talking about them?” It feels like an attack. So now we’re in a weird era of self-work where people want the performance of healing, the performance of accommodation, without the interruption of their loops. And I get it. I really do. But I also think we have to tell the truth about it. Eventually you just have to— DO.

Start.

Do. The. Thing.

Stop talking about it.

Stop planning it.

Just DO it!

In therapy? Ok, DO the work. Sit with yourself, spend time alone, pause before reacting. Assess where you maybe policing others as a way to avoid yourself, but you must DO.

People have been telling me since 2014 to get online. I’ve always had “the voice.” The “energy.” The “vision.” According to their analysis, But I didn’t think I looked the part. I had insecurities. I still do. But I’ve done so much work over the years to unlearn what was conditioned into me. What I didn’t realize until this year was how much of that conditioning was still living in my body. Many if of us we forget this fact, we think we are healing but for some we really are isolated from anything that creates any nervous system movement. I’ve remembered things through this process, this work. Trauma memories, somatic fear responses that I didn’t even know were there. My inner child has been loud.

My inner teen?

Well… she needs an entire essay. I think majority of us need some time with out inner teenager.

My adult self has been exhausted. And still—I show up. Not because I’m performing. But because this is the first time in my life where I’ve let myself be seen fully. And that’s the most terrifying and liberating thing I’ve ever done. It’s the most rewarding development to witness in my clinets as well.

What no one talks about is what your body does when it’s being seen—even in a positive light. Even when the comments are kind. Even when people are loving and grateful and amazing. When your partner loves you and repair occurs in ways you could never imagine. Or— your family wants repair.

The problem?

Your amygdala doesn’t have eyes. It doesn’t know who’s safe and who’s not. All it knows is that you’re exposed and everybody else? They’re the op.

That’s why even praise can feel scary from certain people.

That’s why “visibility” isn’t a dream for everyone. Healthy relationships? Healthy friendships? For some of us, it’s a trauma trigger. An activator, that comes bearing the gift of intense discomfort. And I’ve had to learn how to stay in the room with that instead of running. How many of you are in family systems that run?

That. Is. Lonely.

This whole thing has changed how I show up in my marriage too. The putting myself out there. You maybe asking how does that relate to your marriage? Well, just like I tell my clients. Skills? They roll over to other areas in your life. For me it rolls over in the feeling of being able to speak my truth more, where I once would suppress for the comfort of others. Allows me to surrender into loving my husband without fear. That subtle tension, or anticipation of the other shoe dropping. A feeling I think many of us feel when we find something that feels to good to be true after years of pain and struggle in relationships.

BUT— do you see how easy it can be to get addicted to the same conflictual cycle almost as a way to keep you in the “looking for love” stage?

Almost as if you are always looking never ready. A safe island if you ask me. That’s how survival strategies develop overtime right under our nose. This rings true even in family therapy. Even when families who have been in dynamics for years, finally make it to family therapy. To show up that alone demonstrates willingness and intention to the family. But the moment the family feels the shock – the static. The higher self wants to do the work, but struggles with being hijacked by the nervous system—it takes over. As soon as it feels that shock of activation—Some scurry away afraid to return. Instead of sitting in that discomfort to alchemize it, train the nervous system raptor that it is safe.

You see, that work is not easy. To be burned and to forgive. You know they say forgiveness is for you yada yada we know this— but what do you do before your consciousness grasps the concept that it really is for you. For you so you can release the grip on the rose you don’t realize has thorns and is cutting you. Blood dripping pain you don’t even realize is self inflicted—and many of us — we engage in this level of self harm. ALL. THE. TIME. (I’m talking to those of you who creep your ex’s social)

Accountability is the prerequisite of healing, but for some reason many seemed to have skipped that important detail. We instead went straight to talking about the healing.

Cognitive challenge:

Almost the same way you or your partner talks about changing or working on improving their/your behaviors.

I’ve realized there were times I wasn’t fully accountable. I was emotionally reactive but felt justified in that reactivity. Especially so because I had come from abuse, been with abusive partners, I had been wounded. But that’s the thing—justification might make you feel right, but it doesn’t make you relational. I had to learn that just because you’re hurt doesn’t mean your partner has to pay the debt for that. Parents— the nuance here can direct at you as well. Some of you are making one child pay for another child’s behavior when they were that age. Instead of admitting your fear of a repeat, you step into control as a means to regulate your own anxiety, grief, guilt, or shame. It’s a spill over effect. What you avoid in skills in your relationship it spills over into your parenting, your relating with peers, coworkers, and friends. Even when we try to. convince ourselves “well it's them, I can do xyz with everyone else.” Pause. Does everyone else challenge you or test you in the way that you partner, your family member, your friend etc does? If not then they are not the same circumstances. We forget if the poison of resentment is present it can sabotage. (Vecna energy) Think of resentment like salt in soup too much of it—well it has to get tossed.

I’ve grown more in the last 9 months through this work. Not because I became someone new. But because I finally made space for her. And now, here she is.

Writing.

Speaking.

Teaching.

Being witnessed.

Still healing in real time. (Because healing is not a destination)

This is exposure therapy. And I’m doing it out loud. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to be consistent. Consistency is the number one muscle that involves discipline. Many of us get stuck here. Sometimes its not even about going to therapy it’s about making a decision. Sometimes going to therapy is a latch ditch attempt to stall or procrastinate. Sometimes it’s a way the nervous system outsources the blame for the relationships. Either way. Exposure therapy opportunities out out there! Every day is an opportunity to expose yourself. Try a new route to or from work, walk a different direction or in new location. Speak up, you never no unless you try. The word is out there. You never know what can happen.If it’s just a no it’s a no.

That’s it.

A no.

Do you know how many “no’s” the most successful people had to face and still continue to face?

So ask yourself.

If you are sitting with something distressing or even heavy. Take a moment. If you moved forward with what you know deep down. what would happen? It’s scary yeah? But isn’t that what makes it bad ass? To do something that is scary. Imagine the version of you coming out the other side mission complete? Sit with that image in your mind. See if you can feel it in the body. Is it worth it? Does the little you deserve it?

I think so…

For my Sanctuary members: I’ve added an extended voiceover of this piece, with deeper reflections on visibility trauma, nervous system reactivity, and how performance is sometimes a protector.

Want More?

🌱 New here? Welcome to the Soft Hours.

Every week I write from the in-between: the quiet space where insight meets embodiment. If you like this style, consider joining the Sanctuary tier to access the full archive and upcoming live Lecture Halls.

Paid subscribers receive

Something sacred.
Something structured.
Something that invites you closer.

I will share this at the end. ✨🥰 hehe…

✨🧙🏽‍♀️ If you’ve ever left a conversation feeling like you betrayed yourself, this one’s for you. Let’s talk about the undercurrent.

Hello Data Collectors!

This morning my brain was squirrel’n.

Thinking about how important rapport and alliance-building is in the field of mental health. I found myself reflecting, with nuance obvi ☺️— The thought I had to myself.
“Damn, this field: therapists, coaches, psychiatrists, etc.—they can be deeply manipulative too, especially toward patients and clients.”

Do you see why people pleasers can actually be dangerous? Not just in helping roles, but also relationally too! You never truly know if the rapport they’re offering is authentic or if it’s an unconscious strategy to mask discomfort through over-accommodation or a forced trying of “I’m so flexible and cool.” This is something I’ve had to examine deeply in my own behavior—as a former people pleaser. How many times did what I say not match what I actually felt, thought, or said to myself later?
How often was there a misalignment between my internal dialogue and the words that left my mouth?

That’s when the undercurrents show up.
The inner huffing and puffing.
The resentment that builds silently.
We agree to host the holiday gathering, but deep down, we don’t want to.

Growing up, I could always feel those undercurrents. What I call the TRON-glow effect that neon-threaded, invisible highway of unspoken or suppressed communication that most people don’t even notice.Because it’s not visible to the eye.
It’s felt. Like the light trails in TRON, these emotional signals pulse through the room. Subtle, electric, and often denied. Only those who’ve lived this way will know exactly what I’m talking about.

So, as clinicians—yes, the connection may be questionable.
I think about this from the lens of someone like me: where insecure attachment eventually becomes secure. (That doesn’t mean the nervous system won’t still experience what I call “relapse.” That’s normal. I view those moments as self-tests. Little life check points to make sure we’re serious about never abandoning ourselves again.)

Sometimes we pass those tests.
Sometimes we fail.
Sometimes we miss the opportunity altogether—leading to stagnation, or drifting.

That’s why this work—this career—must involve the heart. No relationship can thrive when ego is lurking in the shadows. If we are working with those who already struggle with insecure attachment. How will they ever feel safe withus? This poses a question for the concept of double binds, but let me stay on track. The same goes for therapy. I think of Carl Rogers, Irvin Yalom, Carl Jung, Aaron Beck just to name a few whose philosophies I embody. Because I truly believe that genuine rapport is critical.

Not frenemy vibes.

Not “Ooo let me hear how they suffer so I can feel better about myself” social hour. (Yes, that happens.) Just two humans, one who sincerely cares about the other’s safety and wellbeing—engaging in a dance of connection, built through presence, attunement, and acknowledgment. This doesn’t mean there’s no challenge. This doesn’t mean there’s no accountability. One thing my clinical work has taught me through thousands of subtle data points is this:
Humans need to feel like they belong.
We need to know: I’m not alone in this.

Not in a “misery loves company” kind of way, but in a way that heals. The kind that says: Grab my hand. Lift your chin up. I see you. It’s a reminder that yin and yang are always in motion. That we shouldn’t get too comfortable only receiving pleasantries and dopamine the way the algorithm conditioned us to. That we are more than consumers of content and comfort. We are higher beings. (I know—crunchy language. This is where you get to shine: Try practicing mental hoodie swaps—if the words I use don’t fit, just swap them. You wouldn’t keep wearing a hoodie I handed you if it was too tight, right? Same thing. Let your mind stretch into what does fit.
….and hey… Did you see what I did with that hoodie line 👀? That was a test on people-pleasing. ☺️

Anways, We are resilient. Determined. Adaptive.
Whether we believe it or not. We’ve built some of the most advanced technologies the world has ever seen and yet we’re slowly emotionally imploding because of those same technologies. Sure, this might sound like an overgeneralization to someone on the outside. But if you’re part of my Safari, if you ride through this metaphorical jungle with me You know my perspective is just one grain of sand. One thread in the web. That’s the beauty of human nuance.

From my lens…

The fact that there are people willing to try on my sunnies and see through them —Notice I said See through them, not just look. That means something. Not to keep them on forever, but to add them to your growing collection of nuanced perspectives. 🕶️😎

That ability to try on another’s lens without collapsing is what develops critical thinking. It’s the mark of emotional maturity. The capacity to hold multiple truths at once. It’s what builds connections/relatinoships through attunement.

It’s what I call:

Holding 💩 with gloves on.
(Which introduces the next essay: Don’t Touch Without Gloves On. A Mindfulness-based Perception Practice )

I will be getting that to y’all next week!

What came up for you during this Soft Hours sesh?

This one is here to be that Hum you hear in the background but can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from. Let this move through you during your day. So you can catch the moments where what you say and what you think are not in allignment. What sister Shivani calls “unpure” energy. If we are retiring from people pleasing we must learn to feel brave in our own authentic truth.

My guidance would be to watch the movie on Netflix The Last Word. Beautiful message if you can see it. 😊 Ironic how that happens right?

I hope you all find softness during your weekend.

🔔 Closing Announcement (membership news)

If you’ve made it this far into this reflection, thank you.
I want to end with something I’ve been holding in my heart for a while now:

The Sanctuary is coming.
A dedicated space for those of you who’ve been quietly collecting truths alongside me—who crave more than content.
More reflection.
More belonging.
More access.
More moments that bring you back to yourself.

For $15/month, here’s what’s unfolding inside:

• 📚 A new scholarly article every week, grounded in research and reflection

• 🎧 My voiceover versions of those essays—with added commentary, riffs, and spoken nuance that didn’t make it to the page

• 🕯️ Weekly Soft Hours™ drops—my signature slow-burn essays, just like this one

• 🎙️ Audio-based voice notes and podcasts—raw, real, and unfiltered

• 🧠Entry into the Lecture Hall: Sancuary Edition—where I teach frameworks, break down case studies, and walk through key Safari concepts

• 📓 The Weekly Ledger™—a digest of the on-screen clinical captions in my videos that you all love + a “Highlights from the Streets” column where I reflect on human behavior, themes from comment sections, DMs, and cultural patterns I’ve observed

• 💬 Access to monthly Live Q&As with me—where we get to process and connect in real time

• 🛍️ Special discounts + early access on live intensives, courses, and event series

• 🫂 Most importantly—a soft, quiet, structured place to belong, grow, and be witnessed

And here’s what I want you to know:
This isn’t a lifetime membership.
Just like therapy, it’s meant to be what you need, when you need it.
Come close. Stay for a season. Take what resonates and leave what doesn’t.
You don’t owe this space permanence. Just presence.

This is a come-as-you-are kind of home.
No pressure. Just invitation.

And to my free readers—

Nothing is changing for you. I haven’t forgotten you and I never will.
You’ll still receive:

• 📚 One research-backed scholarly article per week

• 🕯️ One Soft Note™ each week (a shorter reflection or prompt)

• 🧭 Access to Quests—the gamified, interactive learning journeys and reflection experiences

• ✍🏽 Occasional bonus notes, podcast-style reflections, and check-ins

Whether you stay free or step into the Sanctuary, Your presence means everything.
You belong here.

I created this space for all of us who are tired of shouting to be seen.
This is a come-closer kind of membership.

We’re building it one light beam at a time.
And if you feel the pull I’ll be there. Waiting for you to come learn with me!

Come as you are. Where you are. 🫶🏽
—Sav

tap tap plays “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5 🎶

I realized something about myself this week: The most important parts of my healing don’t happen in sessions, in the books, or in the projects. They happen in the soft, unseen hours. Those quiet moments between who I’ve been and who I’m becoming.
Those liminal hallways some of us linger in because we’re too afraid to walk through the door into the unknown. Those moments of wisdom that arrive after the conflict — the wisdom we know lives inside us, but we forget to tap into.

The pause is sacred, because it’s where I finally hear myself instead of the echoes of others’ demands for performing, fixing, or explaining. A place where I can finally sit with my own voice and analysis of the world.

So I created a home for those moments here.

Soft Hours — the moments I meet myself.
And I’ll keep a soft space to land, so you can meet yourself here too. 🫶🏽

This is the first one.

Let’s dive in….

I was making the bed this morning, putting everything together for the dogs, getting things ready for to start our morning and I could hear the voices—no no not those kind of voices…

The voices of women soured by the bitterness of what it means to be a woman in today’s society. Rehearsing the same story:

“It’s always me. I’m the only one doing anything— F*k the patriarchy!!”

And I think to myself… “but you’re the woman.”

Now hold on, I said it like that for a reason. Calm ya titties down mama.

It’s not about roles. It’s about biology. It’s ancestral behavior. This is what we automatically do.

We tend.

We prep.

We anticipate.

We hold.

Breathe, this was not an insult. As Dr. Gabor Maté writes in The Myth of Normal, women’s bodies are often the barometers of family systems. We pick up what hasn’t been processed. This isn’t just socialized — it’s nervous system-based co-regulation.

Louann Brizendine — The Female Brain

Neuropsychiatrist, research on sex-specific neural circuits.
Brizendine explains that women’s brains are biologically wired with heightened mirror-neuron activity, stronger attunement networks, and increased capacity for emotional reading and connection. This makes women naturally skilled at sensing relational shifts, anticipating needs, and regulating others through warmth and presence — a true evolutionary advantage. She also emphasizes that this “deep empathy circuitry” is a sacred biological gift: it keeps families bonded and communities emotionally coherent.
But she also warns that when these circuits are overused, unbalanced, or tied to survival responses, they lead to burnout, resentment, and chronic self-abandonment.

Something I see very often in the couples work I do with women.

Which leads to the problem I am about to focus on.

The problem is:
We have to learn how to stop doing it automatically.

It’s innate. And it’s a gift.
But that gift becomes a f*cking curse when you don’t know how to let off the gas pedal. Many of us don’t know how because flooring it to over-functioning was how we stayed safe and were even seen or measured as “good.”

🛑 Don’t cook that week.
🛑 Order takeout.
🛑 Let the family know, “This is what we’re doing.”

Self-led wife:
Talk to your family.

“Hey, I’m____ this week. I’m not feeling well. We’re gonna do ‘fend-for-yourself’ dinners. Grab what you can and make it.”

You do not have to always perform and function.
You think you do.
And because you believe that you do, you project it onto the family system that you created. Lisa Feldman Barrett teaches in How Emotions Are Made that your brain is not reacting to reality — it’s predicting what’s going to happen based on past experiences. So when you assume you’re the only one who does everything, your brain collects data to confirm that, even if it’s no longer fully true. Now get this okay, this is where it gets wild… Are you ready…

The algorithm..

Now if Napoleon Hill was here, he would be sounding the alarm yelling “Outwitting The Devil” because that’s what the algorithm is. Remember Yin Yang, but also remember selective attention and how the algorithm functions. We are familiar with where your attention goes energy flows yeah? How come we forget that when we have our phones in our hands? Especially in moments of activation and upset?

The Invisible Gorilla Experiment is wild because it exposes how our minds actually work, not how we think they work. When your brain is under cognitive load, meaning you’re locked in on a task or a story, your mental resources narrow. You don’t have unlimited attention; you have a spotlight. Whatever that spotlight is pointed at gets all the juice. Everything else—even something as obvious as a person in a gorilla suit—gets filtered out.

But, it’s not just focus, it’s expectation. Your brain builds a mental schema of what “matters” in the moment. In the study, people were told to count basketball passes, so their brains literally tagged everything else as irrelevant. The gorilla didn’t “blend in”—their brains deleted it. That’s how selective attention works.

We do this very behavior in our relationships all. The. Time. Ladies, we do it with our men too. Just like they do it with us. This is nervous system behavior, which is why I call our nervous system raptors—we must learn to train.

The famous Gorilla experiment I will link the video here.

Another experiment was done linking a gorilla within medical scans at different opacity levels testing expert observers —radiologists. I will link that article and here.

Now for some of you…

Look around:

• Your mug

• Your wall

• Your couch

• Your car

It doesn’t matter what kind of car or house it is — you did that.
Even if your man is the provider — you shaped that too.
And men I see you… The same goes for you. You did that too. You shaped that…

Many of us are walking in our own living hell because our minds are clouding reality. We don’t see the blessings we created with our partner or our family— why? Because we are riddled with guilt. We start casting mind movies that say “well other people struggle.”

It’s your thinking.

It’s the mental rehearsal you’ve been running. It's the inattention blindness we have because we are locked in on focusing on other people we miss are blessings.

That mental rehearsal? It literally wires your brain. As Dr. Joe Dispenza writes in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, “nerve cells that fire together wire together.” Which means the more you think the story, the more you become the story.

Tell your family:

“I’m sleeping in tomorrow.”

And a lot of you can’t…
Because of the partner you chose and continue to tolerate. (Grasping for extremes here still does not erase that truth and you know it… )

That’s a different situation.

But a lot of us are in healthy family systems/ couple dynamics and we’re afraid to surrender to that health. We’re watching the algorithm. We’re watching other people’s fires, and we’re looking at our own lives and feeling guilty for being blessed. These days people feel guilty just for being okay. You’ve got white people feeling guilty for even existing. For things in the past they never were apart of. Talk about scapegoat. ( a family meeting we are all going to have) You’ve got women feeling guilty for not having a traumatic marriage or for having a healthy relationship. Men, who stay silent because they are faithful and can’t co-sign the “fella’s” behavior.

It’s wild.

Think about it… If that’s the world we are living in, it makes sense why people seek out belonging where sameness lives. Because well — safety.

This all came to me while making the bed.
That’s how this stuff works.

You’re doing the dishes.
Folding the laundry.

Doing the stuff you’d have to do whether you are single or not.

Some of y’all make your kids do it, but you’re still up here clocking your partner’s every move like you’re keeping a tally sheet, because you are.

“s/He didn’t do this. s/He never does that.”

That’s why you’re exhausted. Full time job no pay… and many of you are projecting that very sacred rage that is truly not your husband’s debt to pay. We can’t make men pay just because we were born a woman.

Many of you screaming “F*ck the patriarchy” okay….now what?

*pause real quick—squirrel moment. I want you all to think of this image in your mind every. time. I challenge you by say: “okay and…”

This is what my brain means when I challenge you this way.

I am not being a hard ass. I am naming behavior. Ok, now what?

Instead of alchemizing that rage you dump it onto the nearest man and the nearest women speaking up for those men. Does that mean all men are innocent? No. Does that mean I don’t understand xyz situations? Definitely not. It means it’s another truth that exists alongside all the other truths that don’t center you or your feelings. That nuanced truth doesn’t take away from you, me, or anyone else.

Hard pill to swallow—I know, i’ve been there.

Sometimes, Ladies — we’re selfish.
Because we only think about ourselves and our own ego loops, trauma, and “needs.” The nuance here is, yes men do it too. But I am not talking about men I am talking about women. Harriet Lerner says in The Dance of Intimacy that when women become overfunctioners, they tend to blame, micromanage, or distance themselves in relationships instead of learning to tolerate someone else’s pace or imperfection. Something that in my couples and families work I do not see many women doing. Even in family sessions with other female members.

That’s not empowerment ladies…Where are y’all hearing this? This is the low hum of anxiety control and its being disguised as strength and independence.

Think of it like this, You say you’re a strong, independent woman who doesn’t need anyone. Okay. Let’s test that strength. If you’re truly that independent, why do you collapse the moment accountability taps your shoulder?
Why do you deflect?
Why do you grasp for someone else to blame the second the mirror turns back toward you?

Answer these questions honestly without grasping for externalizing statements such as:
“well he did…”
“she/he made me…”
“if he/she wouldn’t have…”
“if he/she actually cared…”

None of that.
Not this time. okaaay?

This is what the real shadow work feels like: uncomfy huh? Doesn’t feel good when we come out from underneath that self-righteousness. It feels… exposed.

So, can you sit with the version of you that says s/he doesn’t need a man/woman, but still panics when s/he’s asked to regulate, repair, or take responsibility for her/his part?

I guess we will find out when you…
Try a different story.

…Till next time, Loves.

Come as you are— where you are.

—Sav. 🫶🏽

References & Extended Readings

• Brizendine, L. The Female Brain.
  Research on women’s sex-specific brain circuits, emotional attunement, and relational intelligence.

• Maté, G. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
  Women as emotional barometers in family systems; stress embodiment.

• Lerner, H. The Dance of Intimacy.
  Overfunctioning patterns in women; relational pacing; anxiety-driven responsibility.

• Barrett, L. F. How Emotions Are Made; Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
  Predictive processing, constructed emotion, and how past experiences shape current perception.

• Kahneman, D. Thinking, Fast and Slow.
  Cognitive load, attention filters, confirmation bias.

• Hebb, D. O. The Organization of Behavior.
  “Cells that fire together wire together”; neural plasticity.

• Doidge, N. The Brain That Changes Itself.
  Neuroplasticity and mental rehearsal.

• Dispenza, J. Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.
  Repetition and emotional rehearsal wiring identity.