Data Collectors,

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

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

Am I trying to be right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let them.

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

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

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

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

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

The important distinction here is:

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

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

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

Let me know.

Till next time data collectors.

Come as you are where you are.🫶🏽

Data Collectors,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay... but what does that actually mean?

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

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

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

Okay? And?

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

Example:

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

Okay... why?

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

The dysfunctional dance.

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

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

Let’s zoom in closer here.

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

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

Let’s zoom out a little more.

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

'“I don’t get enough attention.

They made me feel neglected.

They don’t make me feel good enough.

I always feel left out.”

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

Spend some time here because this concept is hard.

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

Remember, The Body Keeps the Score.

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

Let’s zoom out even more...

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

BAM.

Now you don’t feel good enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sister... I feel you. It’s hard.”

Wish her well.

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

What is that feeling creating inside of you?

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

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

But then you realize something else.

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

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

Share

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

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

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

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

“What did they mean?”

“What was that smirk?”

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

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

Think about it this way.

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

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

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

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

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

“Am I with the right person?”

“Does he love me?”

“Does she love me?”

“Am I being taken advantage of?”

“Is this the right job for me?”

“Why do they always have to talk shit?”

It’s the pathway of hypervigilance.

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

Let’s call that the Regulated Lane.

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

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

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

Do you see what just happened?

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

Because the amygdala doesn’t have eyes.

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

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

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

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

Exactly.

Now you’re in the Charlie Day cycle.

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

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

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

You see what I did there?

Now we have a roadmap.

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

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

Does that make sense?

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

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

Snap.

Now you’ve drifted into another lane.

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

Remember, this is the Highways of Functioning.

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

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

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

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

Back to sequence.

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

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

Share The Safety to Speak™

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

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

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

So let’s begin.

Case Study One

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

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

What are the objective facts?

What did we actually witness?

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

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

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

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

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

Now let’s pause for a moment.

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

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

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

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

Do you see the connection now?

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

So we loop.

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

So what is your poison?

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

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

What does embodiment actually look like for you?

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

Now, here’s what concerns me.

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

I don’t believe that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next time data collectors

Data Collectors,

Happy July,

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

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

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

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

“They’re going to react.”

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

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

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

So we say nothing.

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

Does it make sense though?

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

My theory…

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

I see it every day.

Everybody has something to say.

Everybody has an opinion.

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

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

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

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

It leaks.

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

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

The energy has to go somewhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Till next time Data collectors.

Reflection

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

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

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

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

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

Today, we are pulling up the map and looking at how we actually talk to each other. Or rather, how we fail to talk to each other. In human relationships, whether that’s with your partner, your family, or the culture at large—there are three primary highways of communication. When we know how to navigate them, they lead to connection, repair, and true belonging. But right now? Our collective infrastructure is broken. Most of us are either hiding out in safety zones or trapped on what I like to call Spicy Island.

Let’s look at the map.

The Three Highways of Communication

To understand why we get so gridlocked, we have to understand the routes we choose to take:

• The Logistical Highway: This is the transactional route. “Who is picking up the kids?” “Did you pay the electric bill?” “What time is the meeting?” It’s safe, it’s clinical, and it requires zero emotional vulnerability.

• The Interpersonal Highway: This is the relational route. It’s where we check in on the state of us. “How are you holding up with work?” “I feel like we’ve been passing ships lately, and I miss you.” It acknowledges the other person’s humanity and the space between you.

• The Expression Highway: This is the raw route. This is where we share our internal world—our boundaries, our grief, our core needs, and our direct impact. “When that happened, I felt incredibly hurt and unseen.”

Here is a vital truth: We need the Expression Highway and the Interpersonal Highway working together in order to have connection, repair, and belonging.

What we actually do: we camp out on the Logistical Highway as a defensive strategy to avoid the Expression Highway entirely. Why? Because over time—in our relationships, our communities, and our online spaces—our amygdalas have been conditioned to believe that the Expression Highway is a dangerous, volatile place to go. Over time we condition the nervous system to expect shitty tennis matches and nervous system activation. We’ve learned that if we express a raw truth, we will be punished for it. So, we stay transactional. Now, if we look around though you will realize we can’t build intimacy on a highway of logistics— too many of us need depth. Eventually, the pressure builds, we swerve off the road, and we skip the path of repair entirely—landing us straight on Spicy Island.

Welcome to Spicy Island: Think Spooky Island but Spicy style with DARVO, Weaponized Trauma & Pathology, and History Digging

Spicy Island is the land of high-reactivity and zero accountability. It is the destination we reach when we don’t know how to cleanly express ourselves, so we weaponize our defense mechanisms instead.

When we are on Spicy Island, DARVO behavior runs the show: we Deny the behavior, Attack the person bringing it up, and Reverse the Victim and Offender.

The Anatomy of a Spicy Island Pivot: Instead of hearing, “It hurt my feelings when you forgot our plans,”the response becomes, “You always expect me to be perfect, and your tone right now is actually making me feel unsafe.”

Suddenly, the original issue is gone. We deflect by digging into history, pulling up a Rolodex of past sins from 2018 to justify our current behavior. We over-explain. We weaponize therapy speak. We weaponize our diagnoses and our trauma—not as a pathway to be understood, but as a shield to avoid the vulnerability of clean expression. We scream that we are being blamed, but in the exact same breath, we blame, accuse, and attack. We do the very things that make the Expression Highway dangerous for everyone else, fully blind to our own hypocrisy. This is the ultimate tragedy: we use the hostile nature of the highway as our excuse to avoid it, while actively contributing to its hostility.

The Olympic Meaning-Making Team and “Shitty Tennis”

How do we justify this to ourselves? Well it’s simple: we are all gold-medalist members of the Making Meaning Olympic Team.

Psychologically, humans are meaning-making machines. When an event happens, we don’t just experience it; we immediately create a narrative around it. We have seen this over the course of our safari through human behavior. You see, because of confirmation bias, the moment we create that narrative, our brains hunt for proof to validate it. The feeling feels so intense that we treat it as an objective, default truth. “I feel rejected, therefore you are actively trying to maliciousy exclude me.” Once we decide our narrative is the absolute truth, we feel entirely justified in attacking and blaming.

This leads directly to what I call Shitty Tennis.

We all walk around with an invisible pile of shit anchored to our ankles. For some people, that pile is a mountain because of a total lack of self-reflection, zero accountability, and a habit of intellectualizing their growth instead of actually implementing themselves within it. In Shitty Tennis, the minute we feel an uncomfortable emotion, we can’t sit with it. We don’t take accountability for our pile. Instead, we grab our rackets and smack that shit right over the net onto the other person. “I’m feeling anxious, so I’m going to make this your fault.” They smack it back. No one is playing to win a game of connection; everyone is just trying to offload their discomfort. This is where you see insults, personal character attacks, and tactics utilize to GET A REACTION FROM YOU! Now— how to you get out of the match if someone is trying to summon you?

We must first learn boundaries but reinforcing them.

If you do not respond to someone’s shit that they throw no matter how bad you want to say something back. We must understand any attention is good attention even if it’s negative. So your reactive or even a response gives these individuals fuel. The key is no response. That causes their shit to get stuck on their side of the court. Thus— require them to sit in what I call SSRT (Shit Sitting Reflection Time) we rob people of SSRT every time we react and give them the distraction from that time out.

From the Micro to the Macro: Gotcha Culture and Power Dynamics

This isn’t just happening in your living room. We are seeing this play out on a massive, sociological scale. We are living in a macro culture of bait-and-switches.

In online discourse, people will bait you into a conversation under the guise of wanting to discuss one thing, only to flip it on you, exploit a nuance, and DARVO the entire interaction. We are trapped in a toxic Gotcha Culture. People follow creators, leaders, and peers not to learn, but to catch them slipping—to collect “frequent flyer miles” on the Spicy Island fast lane by diminishing their message or forcing performative accountability. It has become so dangerous that even premier researchers like Brené Brown have openly spoken about the reality of facing severe backlash and literal death threats just for trying to navigate complex topics. When the macro culture operates this way, our collective nervous systems register total unsafety.

We see this mirror itself in the workplace too. In professional environments, communication quickly turns into anxious tiptoeing. Why do you think that is? My theory— your livelihood is on the line. You have to feed your family. When organizations lack psychological safety, management relies on systemic power imbalances to keep people quiet. Employees repress their Expression Highway because the cost of speaking up is financial or professional ruin. Meaning you risk cut hours, write ups, etc. what ever way to intimidate you out of the behavior of self-advocacy. Now look online. We don’t like what someone said we try to cancel people. We try to silence them. We try to shrink messages that make us uncomfortable because sitting with the discomfort would require us to look at our own shit pile and sort through it.

You see—not to be petty (well maybe a little petty🤭) cancel culture is comical because they can only cancel someone who believes in whatever being canceled actually means. That would require picking up the shit (opinions) of others with your bare hands. I don’t recommend that.

The Goal is Repair, Not Perfection

Let’s be very clear about something: We do not always have to discuss macro-level societal injustice in order to have an honest conversation about what is happening unjustly inside a family system or a relationship.

The adolescent's attempt to engage in healthy differentiation is met with emotional flooding, defensiveness, and role reversal, effectively shutting down the conversation and preventing genuine family dialogue.

If you think about this from a development standpoint. This is how we become arrested in our communication development with the ability to express. It’s why many of us learned to shut down or react in explosive ways simply because patterns that occurred like the example above.

Now from the mother’s perspective.

When the Expression Highway and the Interpersonal Highway are connected, something beautiful happens: repair becomes possible.

Choosing to walk these highways isn’t about perfecting your communication. It’s not about never making a mistake, never feeling defensive, or never taking a boat ride to Spicy Island. It is about having the courage to dismantle the bait-and-switches, put down the Shitty Tennis racket, and step into the messy, vulnerable work of repair.

True belonging lives on the other side of that bridge. Let’s stop avoiding the drive.

Leave a comment below: Where do you find yourself getting stuck? Are you hiding out on the Logistical Highway, or are you a frequent flyer to Spicy Island? Let’s talk about it.

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Till next time data collectors

Data Collectors,

It’s been a little over a year since being online. As much as I love this work because it allows me to solidify what I am teaching in my own brain, there is another part of this journey that has become exposure therapy for me: the comments.

Now, before we jump into this vulnerable conversation, I want to segue into the understanding that this is not about the mob mentality members themselves. It’s about the wound that gets poked by them. Before you strap in, understand I speak in metaphors—If you haven’t caught my drift by now. So zoom in and examine where you may be engaging in the same behavior or navigating someone in your own life that mimics it. After all, the online discourse world is just another reenactment of the shit we all deal with at home.

Let’s zoom out.

My work has always bridged the micro and the macro in a way that highlights the mechanism—the muscles we use in both arenas. Recently, I have watched how the mob twists and turns your intentions, which is one of the reasons we are working through communication in Stop 2 of Rewiring Out of Resentment. My work never dives into the historical context of macro-level wounds. Never. Because that is not the point. We have enough platforms teaching or speaking on the historical content and much of the reason many want to force historical discussions is because of the booby trap design of deflecting from the original mission my work has always been about.

Societal condition/ messaging and modeling of human behavior.

My invitation for the Black community to discuss family matters, only to be insulted in return, poked a wound for me, and I want to share that with you all. In vulnerable Sav fashion. You see, I have no issue with people disagreeing. In fact, I encourage it. But what we are seeing in today’s society is that many people can only disagree by attacking your character and your intelligence. Something I am far too familiar with especially as a young professional. What is even more clever is that some of these behaviors are wrapped in covert forms of communication—passive-aggressiveness, subtle digs, and intense emotional undercurrents that make it appear as though someone is being kind when, in reality, the communication is backhanded.

This becomes especially difficult to identify when it is riddled with intellectualized language and fluffy, oversized words that make people appear as though they know what they are speaking on, yet they do not embody any of it outside of the performance.

That’s the issue.

That’s the mechanism, if you will, that I focus on.

We are being conditioned Pavlovian style for this to become our baseline for functioning. Read my essay on that conditioning here:

As I have sat with the wound and explored the original injury underneath it, I noticed something about frenemies, and I want to explore it through the lens of the people who follow my work.

You see, if you are following my account and collecting the fruit of this free material that many people pay for in therapy, you will notice something that I know I am not the only one to experience. Many follow me knowing I don’t discuss historical content. You get enough of that elsewhere. You followed because something made you click follow— whether you felt validated, gained insight, or learned a strategy you could use at home. You pick the fruit off the tree and eat it. You gather it and take it home with you.

Until one fruit you pick is sour.

You don’t like it, so what happens?

You condemn the entire tree.

This is what I am seeing in the relational habits of people. As a former people-pleaser and co-dependent, I realized I kept friendships with people who benefited from the fruit I provided. My fun, bubbly personality. The way I would drop everything to show up for you or your family. Anything. I’m a Cancer, so when I give, I give fully—sometimes to my own detriment—which is part of what I had to learn throughout my adolescent and early adult development. The issue, as I reflect on it, is that many people who take the fruit you bear will suddenly bond with others through shared dislike and gossip of the very fruit they picked from your tree to stuff their face with.

Ironically, social psychology has repeatedly found that human beings often form social bonds through shared enemies, shared outrage, and shared disdain. While this can create temporary feelings of belonging, research suggests these bonds are often weaker and less stable than relationships built on mutual respect, shared values, and genuine connection. It is easy to be friends with someone whose life is at rock bottom, constantly in unhealthy romantic relationships, and centers you. I tended to be on the co-dependent side in my early twenties. That benefited some of the friendships I kept around. We were GOOD as long as my life was low. The moment I got my own apartment, got into grad school, and my life started moving in a positive direction, suddenly it was an issue.

I started having boundaries.

I started prioritizing my time.

I was no longer as available as I once was.

What I did not understand at the time was that relationship systems often organize themselves around roles. Family systems theory speaks to this idea. When one person changes their role, the entire system experiences disruption. The people benefiting from your lack of boundaries do not always celebrate your growth because your growth requires them to adjust.

Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes they resent it.

These days, the level of opportunistic relationships that exist can feel disheartening. We love people for what they provide us. The moment they stop providing it, it is not enough to simply walk away. We have to badmouth their character so that we can feel righteous about the separation. This is why this work is exposure therapy for me. Having the courage to speak regardless of what the mob says about it— is sort of like my redemption for the amount of heartbreaks I felt in the friendship arena simply for developing into my pwn person. That’s the ache of this work that many of us want to avoid. The bonding over shared gossip and dislike for others who are most likely doing things you wish you could do. Psychologists sometimes refer to this as self-justification. If I can convince myself that you are a bad person, then I no longer have to examine my own motivations, entitlement, jealousy, or disappointment.

It’s giving sweet lemons and sour grapes.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, the “sour grapes” phenomenon comes from cognitive dissonance research. When we cannot have what we want, we often convince ourselves we never wanted it in the first place. Likewise, when someone no longer provides us with access, attention, validation, resources, or emotional labor, it becomes easier to devalue them than to grieve the loss of what they once provided.

In today’s society, we often bond through shared gossip and shared dislike of other people as I keep saying. This is problematic. What concerns me is that we mistake this for intimacy.

It isn’t.

Knowing what someone hates is not the same thing as knowing who they are.

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So, the same people that attack me in the comments for inviting a family meeting within the Black community are often the same people picking fruit from my free education—which, ironically, has nothing to do with the historical injustices the Black community has faced.

Do you see where I am going with this?

I think that’s why, the more followers I get, the more icky I feel inside. Because not all eyes that watch you are watching you from a place of positivity. “Evil eye energy” is what we call it within my home, and boy, oh boy, do many of us have frenemies in our circles— snakes if you will. Maybe we are fully aware of it, yet not courageous enough to walk away because we’ve convinced ourselves that someone is better than no one. What I have noticed is that many people are attracted to access long before they are attracted to connection. As long as they can access your time, your energy, your knowledge, your resources, your emotional labor, or your attention, everything feels fine. The moment access changes, however, the relationship is forced to reveal what it was actually built upon. Social exchange theory suggests that many relationships unconsciously operate through a cost-benefit analysis (Homans, 1958; Blau, 1964). While most people would never consciously admit to viewing relationships this way, many become distressed when the benefits they once received begin to change.

That is something I learned during my time living alone.

I genuinely enjoyed my own company. The solitude. The peace of never having to question why people were my friends or whether they were truly in my corner.

It was just me.

The issue with that, however, is that some of us can become so comfortable in our solitude that we lose sight of the fact that healthy relationships actually exist.

Not every person is a snake.

Not every person is using you.

Not every connection is transactional.

As I have explored resentment within myself, I had to acknowledge the role I played in keeping snakes in my garden. People who would use my pain as tea-time conversation with other people. People who consumed my vulnerability but never protected it. Looking back, I can see that part of my people-pleasing tendencies made me vulnerable to these dynamics. Research on codependency and overfunctioning often highlights how individuals can become conditioned to derive value from being needed, useful, available, or emotionally responsible for others (Beattie, 1987; Bowen, 1978). The difficult truth is that when your identity becomes organized around providing, you often overlook who is merely consuming the fruit from your tree.

Then something interesting happens. The minute you cut access, the narrative becomes YOU.

Not the behavior.

Not the boundary.

Not the change in access.

You.

“You’re different.”

“You changed.”

“You think you’re better than us.”

“You think...”

Family systems theory describes this as a system’s attempt to restore equilibrium when one member begins functioning differently (Bowen, 1978). When one person develops boundaries, increases self-respect, heals, or stops participating in old patterns, the discomfort is often projected onto them rather than examined within the group. In other words, your growth becomes the problem because it exposes the arrangement that previously benefited everyone else. What fascinates me is how quickly people will create stories to explain your boundaries. Psychologists call this attribution theory (Heider, 1958). Rather than considering that someone may have changed because they are growing, healing, protecting their peace, or reallocating their energy, people often attribute the change to character flaws.

She’s arrogant.

He’s selfish.

They’re stuck up.

They forgot where they came from.

The story becomes easier to tolerate than the possibility that access has changed. And maybe that is why so many of us stay connected to people who secretly resent us.

Because grief is hard.

Disappointment is hard.

Accepting that someone liked your fruit more than they liked you is hard.

I want to take a detour for a moment because I see this same mechanism show up in romantic relationships all the time. Now before someone twists what I am saying, I am not implying that women do not like good men, nor am I implying that men do not like good women. I am talking about something much deeper, this takes critical thinking— and to be a bit of a smarty pants; many people today struggle with the concept of critical thinking. What I am referring to is how human beings often mistake what is familiar for what is healthy. As a therapist, I see many women who continue to date genuinely good men only to find themselves confused by a lack of attraction. They care about the person. They enjoy the person’s fruit. They acknowledge that the person possesses many of the qualities they have prayed for, journaled about, manifested, and claimed they wanted.

Yet something feels off.

Many will describe the relationship as boring.

There is no spark.

No chemistry.

No butterflies.

No obsession.

No emotional rollercoaster.

As someone who was surfing the waves of chaos with men. I can confidently say healthy relationships are boring— in the best way. What attachment research has repeatedly demonstrated is that our nervous systems are often attracted to what is familiar long before they are attracted to what is healthy (Bowlby, 1969; Hazan & Shaver, 1987; Levine & Heller, 2010). The nervous system is not always asking, “Is this good for me?” Often, it is asking, “Have I been here before?” For individuals raised around inconsistency, unpredictability, emotional unavailability, criticism, abandonment, or chaos(chaos waves,) stability can initially feel foreign. Sometimes it even feels uncomfortable. This is because familiarity and safety are not always the same thing.

Many people who are accustomed to chaotic dynamics rooted in intense chemistry, emotional highs and lows, intermittent reinforcement,(bread crumbs) and passionate reconciliation can struggle when they encounter a partner who actually offers consistency and emotional safety. Research on intermittent reinforcement has shown that unpredictable rewards often create stronger behavioral attachment than consistent rewards (Skinner, 1953; Fisher et al., 2016). In other words, the relationship feels intense, so people mistake intensity for intimacy.

But intensity and intimacy are not the same thing.

One is activation.

The other is connection.

What concerns me is how much modern culture reinforces this confusion. Many people are consuming relationship advice from influencers whose income depends upon keeping you dissatisfied with what you have. Social media algorithms reward novelty, outrage, comparison, and emotional activation because those things keep people engaged (Haidt, 2024; Alter, 2017). Then we add romance novels good ol’ SMUT, BookTok, reality television, dating podcasts, and highly curated online relationships into the mix. Suddenly people become experts in aesthetics.

They know what attraction should look like.

They know what chemistry should feel like.

They know what the fantasy should sound like.

But they have never actually experienced secure attachment long enough to recognize it when it arrives. When it is sitting right in front of them.

They know longing.

They know chasing.

They know uncertainty.

They know obsession.

But they do not necessarily know connection.

Connection requires being known, it requires accountability. Connection also requires consistency and staying present after the dopamine wears off and the fantasy dissolves. Just like the friendships I mentioned earlier, many people become attached to the fruit while having very little interest in tending to the roots.

Because roots are where intimacy lives.

Roots are where trust lives.

Roots are where commitment lives.

The grass is not always greener on the other side.

Sometimes it’s just turf.

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Now back to the meaning-making mob.

This is exactly why I teach developing the courage to be disliked (great book by the way.) One of my biggest fears with getting online was the Black community— why s that I wonder? especially as a women who is of color. You see, as long as I name the pain, validate the ache, discuss systemic barriers, and highlight group-think dynamics, I am safe. As long as I am talking about what happened to us, I am safe. The moment I start talking about what we do with that pain, how it shows up in our relationships, our parenting, our communication, and the ways we perpetuate harm within our own communities, now I’m the problem. Thats ok though I volunteer as tribute🤣

The issue isn’t necessarily that the information is wrong. Research on cognitive dissonance has shown that when information challenges a belief, identity, or narrative we hold about ourselves, it creates psychological discomfort (Festinger, 1957). In other words, the issue isn’t always the message. Sometimes it’s the wound the message pokes. What’s fascinating to me is that many of these same people are still consuming my work. Their mouths are still stuffed with fruit from the very tree they claim is poisoned with “black betrayl.” They haven’t even finished chewing and swallowing what they already picked, and here we are watching the exact mechanisms I teach about unfold in real time.

The thing about intellectualized language is that it can create the appearance of growth without requiring any actual growth. Psychology has long recognized intellectualization as a defense mechanism where people talk about painful topics in highly analytical ways while remaining disconnected from the emotional work required to address them (Vaillant, 1992). We learn therapy language. We learn trauma language. We learn attachment language. We learn social justice language. We learn all the right words. Yet somehow the embodiment never arrives. The amount of people who hijack your intention, make it about the meaning they made, and then attempt to crucify you with words they learned from social media, ChatGPT, influencers, or years of mentally rehearsing their victim role is astounding. And before someone twists that statement too, I am not saying people haven’t been victimized. Many people absolutely have. I am saying there is a difference between experiencing victimization and building your entire identity around it. One seeks healing. The other seeks evidence and the need for an enemy.

The true ache for me comes from the people who continue falling through the cracks because we refuse to have these conversations. You’re telling me we can’t discuss absent fathers? We can’t discuss abuse? We can’t discuss sexual assault? We can’t discuss the number of Black children who report being dismissed, invalidated, blamed, gaslit, or DARVO’d when they attempt to disclose harm? We can’t discuss crabs-in-the-bucket dynamics? We can’t discuss generational trauma that gets passed from one generation to the next through relationships, parenting, communication patterns, and unresolved wounds? Because family systems research has repeatedly shown that patterns left unexamined tend to get transmitted across generations (Bowen, 1978).

Yet somehow discussing the pattern becomes more offensive than the pattern itself.

Then the conversation shifts.

“Oh, it’s because you’re not Black enough.”

Or my personal favorite.

“You’re not n**** enough.”

Yep. I’ve heard that one before.

What many people fail to realize is that acknowledging historical injustice and examining present-day relational patterns are not mutually exclusive. Both can be true. Historical injustice is real. Racism is real. Systemic barriers are real. And it is also true that communities have to be willing to examine how unresolved pain continues to shape behavior in the present. Those ideas don’t compete with one another. They coexist. What concerns me is when historical wounds become a shield against accountability. Because then we start reproducing the very dynamics we claim wounded us. You can’t fight dehumanization by dehumanizing people. You can’t heal hatred through hatred. You can’t create repair while simultaneously avoiding the conversations required for repair.

And perhaps that’s the strangest part of all.

The same “not Black enough” girl whose work you followed.

The same “not Black enough” girl whose fruit you picked.

The same “not Black enough” girl whose content helped you understand your relationships, your nervous system, your communication patterns, and your family dynamics. Is suddenly not Black enough to discuss family matters.

Which is literally my entire platform.🥴

This is what happens in society when we become reachers for everything except accountability. We will reach for blame, for a diagnoses. We will reach for trauma. We will reach for historical injustice, for explanations. We will reach for excuses. We will reach for anything that allows us to avoid the discomfort of examining our own behavior. Then the moment someone holds up a mirror, we become offended by the reflection staring back at us. Now let me pause here for a second because I’ve noticed something else. Mirror language has become a weapon too. Everybody loves talking about mirrors these days. Everybody wants to tell somebody else to “look in the mirror.” Everybody wants to accuse someone of projecting—wants to point out everyone else’s blind spots. What fascinates me is how often that language is being used by people who have already decided who the villain is before the conversation even starts let alone gets to the best part. The statement itself tells me something. It tells me you’ve already made meaning and assigned intent. You’ve already created a story about who I am before we’ve even entered into an actual discussion.

I see this in my comments all the time as well as the comments of others. “S/he needs to look in the mirror.” Loves, and I am holding your cheeks with this one (the cheeks on your face BTW I need to make that part clear🤣) that statement tells me far more about the baggage you brought into this relationship with me than it tells me about me. Somewhere along the way, whether through your family, a toxic ex, social media, influencers, self-development content, or a creator who profits off outrage, you’ve learned to expect manipulation from people. You’ve learned to expect hidden motives or someone trying to get one over on you in the name of building their “brand.” So now when somebody comes along and speaks directly, challenges your thinking, or invites self-reflection, you immediately sort them into the same category as everyone who hurt you before the same way you do at home with the people in your life. That right there is projection.

Now before someone gets offended by that word too, projection is simply the tendency to assign our fears, assumptions, expectations, and unresolved experiences onto another person (Vaillant, 1992). We stop responding to the person standing in front of us and start responding to everyone they remind us of. Research on attachment theory has repeatedly shown that many of us interpret present-day relationships through the lens of past relationships (Bowlby, 1969). In other words, we aren’t always responding to what is happening now. Sometimes we’re responding to what happened then. That’s why I find this so fascinating. People will enter my corner of the internet and immediately assume I am here to rage bait, get views, manipulate emotions, or stir up controversy.

For what?

For who?

If validation was my goal, I picked the wrong profession. What people often fail to realize is that they are bringing baggage into the relationship before the relationship even begins. They are assigning motives, intentions, and agendas that exist entirely within their own experiences and then interacting with me from that place. Thats the conditioning my work highlights. I am literally the girl on the freeway trying to rescue your stray dog ass and you keep trying to bite and claw at me. 🫣😂

What makes me laugh is that my entire platform is built around the exact opposite. I don’t care who you voted for. I don’t care what race you are. I don’t care how you identify or who you sleep with in your spare time. I don’t care where you come from quite frankly I love diversity and differences in humans— its my most favorite thing about us humans. You get to come as you are, where you are, and have The Safety to Speak.

Sit with that for a second.

For many people, that level of acceptance is completely foreign. Many people have never experienced a relationship where disagreement didn’t immediately become rejection. Many people have never experienced a relationship where accountability and compassion could exist in the same room. Many people have never experienced a relationship where curiosity was valued more than condemnation. That right there is why this work matters— at the heart and soul level for me. Because the same baggage people bring into my comment section is the same baggage they bring into their marriages, friendships, workplaces, and family systems. They project old hurts onto new people. They assign intentions that were never there. They create stories and then react to the stories they created. Social psychologists call this attribution bias. We assume we know why people do what they do, often without ever checking whether our assumptions are accurate (Ross, 1977). We make meaning first and investigate later—if we investigate at all.

Trust and believe, when I hold up a mirror, I am sitting with one too— ya girl is in the heat of this too. This platform has been exposure therapy for me. Being misunderstood. Being misperceived. Having intentions assigned to me that I never had. Having people tell me who I am instead of asking. All of it has forced me to sit with my own discomfort. I am not here to attack you. I am not here to humiliate you. I damn sure am not here to rage bait you. I am here to get you closer to yourself. That is a very different mission. And maybe that’s why some people struggle with my work. They are so accustomed to snakes in the garden that they no longer recognize direct communication when they see it. They are so accustomed to manipulation that they assume manipulation is happening. They are so accustomed to hidden agendas that they assume every agenda is hidden. As a collective we are so accustomed to chaos that we mistake clarity for an attack. So instead of sitting with what was said, we end up defaulting to, “S/he needs to look in the mirror.”

Meanwhile, what many fail to realize is that the mirror is already being used. That’s why this work exists in the first place.The irony is that everybody loves the mirror until it reflects them. We weaponize the mirror when it is pointed at someone else’s behavior. We use it to diagnose, analyze, expose, and condemn. Yet the second that same mirror reflects our contribution to the dynamic (mhmm I said it), now the mirror is problematic? The conversation is harmful? Now the person holding it is the issue. Social psychology has repeatedly found that human beings are far more likely to attribute their own behavior to circumstances while attributing the behavior of others to character flaws (Ross, 1977). In other words, when I hurt someone, there is always a reason. When you hurt someone, suddenly it’s who you are.

I made a video once talking about the baggage we bring into relationships. What fascinates me is how often we expect other people to sort our baggage for us. Its like that book “Are You My Mother” expect it’s “Will You Sort My Baggage”

We want everyone else to understand us, our baggage and to accommodate it. We want them to reassure us through it. Yet the moment we discover they have baggage too, we are disgusted.

We want grace for ourselves and perfection from everyone else. We want understanding for our wounds while struggling to extend the same understanding to theirs. Trust me when I say I have been there too!

What I find most interesting is that this same mechanism shows up in every community. We act like it belongs to one group, but it doesn’t. I see it in Black communities. I see it in Latino communities. I see it in queer communities. I see it in religious communities. I see it in self-development communities. I see it everywhere. It has become societies base line for functioning at this point. Communities that have experienced exclusion often recreate exclusion. Communities that have experienced bullying often engage in bullying. Communities that have experienced invalidation often invalidate their own members. This is one of the unfortunate realities of trauma. Unhealed pain often gets recycled relationally unless it is consciously interrupted (Bowen, 1978; Herman, 1992).

That is the hypocrisy that nobody wants to talk about. The very same externalization of blame that many marginalized groups have experienced from dominant systems often gets recreated within the community itself. The same silencing, character attacks. The same social punishment. The same “stay in your lane,” or “know your place.” The same bullying tactics. It’s the same pressure to conform. The same consequences for speaking outside the accepted narrative. The only thing that changes is who is holding the stick.

Being misperceived is one of the biggest activators for me which is why this work Is exposure therapy. It pokes directly at old wounds. Yet part of this journey has required me to learn how to sit in the discomfort of that cognitive dissonance while NOT trying to overexploit myself in order to get them on the same page with who I am— I have to LET THEM. Research shows that when information threatens a person’s worldview, identity, or beliefs, people often reduce that discomfort by rejecting the source rather than examining the information itself (Festinger, 1957). In other words, sometimes people are not reacting to what you said. They are reacting to what it would mean if what you said were true.

And let me tell you, learning that you cannot explain yourself to people who are committed to misunderstanding you is a special kind of hell for the nervous system. It is uncomfortable because, like Katherine Heigl said in a video where she addressed being labeled as mean, everyone loves a people pleaser—they damn sure don't like a secure woman.

One of the most uncomfortable parts of having a public platform is being exposed to just how much projection exists in society. Brent Brown mentioned this in a podcast with how much death threats she gets simply for speaking on a buzzword topic such as ICE. But, I’m not talking about clinical diagnoses or saying everybody has a personality disorder. I’m talking about the traits—the splitting, the black-and-white thinking, the chronic externalization of blame, the inability to hold two truths at once, the tendency to assign intent instead of asking questions, and the habit of making meaning out of something and then attacking people from the meaning they created rather than what was actually said. The internet rewards these behaviors because outrage gets engagement, engagement gets attention, and attention has become a form of currency that many of us will sell our soul for.

What all of this reminds me of are the friendships I kept in my twenties. My husband used to tell me over and over again, “They are using you for free therapy.” I didn’t want to believe him. Now, to be fair, not everyone does that. There are incredible people in this world. There are reciprocal relationships. There are people who genuinely want connection. But I am a creature of depth. I want people around me who can go beyond the surface, who can swim to the depths and play mermaids with me. I want people willing to challenge their own thinking. I want people willing to question the narratives they inherited instead of blindly repeating them.

Because the entire point of self-development is discomfort.

Growth requires discomfort.

Healing requires discomfort.

Accountability requires discomfort.

Looking at ourselves honestly requires discomfort.

The work is not identifying everybody else’s role in the dysfunction. The work is identifying our role in the relational dynamics we keep finding ourselves trapped in over and over again. Family systems theory has been teaching this for decades. If we keep showing up to the same dance with different partners, eventually we have to become curious about the choreography we brought to the stage.(Bowen, 1978). What worries me(if you haven’t noticed I am all of worries😩) is that society is increasingly rewarding victimhood over responsibility. And before somebody twists that statement too, I am not saying people haven’t been victimized. Many people have. I am saying there is a difference between acknowledging what happened to you and building an identity around why you can never change.

Because eventually every conversation becomes the same.

“Well, they did this.”

“Well, this happened to me.”

“Well, the system.”

“Well, my diagnosis.”

“Well, my trauma.”

And while all of those things may be true, none of them answer the question that actually matters:

Now what?

Now, lets get ready to dive deep—put your goggles on.

My challenge for those of you with that mentality is this:

Where are you exercising your free will?

To keep the snakes in your garden?

To keep the same patterns in your life?

To keep the same mentality and nervous system baseline you continue operating from?

Where is YOUR free will?

I ask this beucase the minute we start having that conversation, the insults begin. The Shitty Tennis match starts. Here come the character attacks and the good ol’ bait-and-switch. The original discussion gets abandoned, and now we’re arguing about everything except the thing that was originally brought forward. Raise your hand if this happens to you in your life at home or at work? Communication researchers have long noted that when people feel threatened by a topic, they often shift the discussion to a more emotionally comfortable battleground rather than engage the issue directly (Stone, Patton, & Heen, 2010). In other words, if we can’t win the conversation, we’ll often try to change the conversation. This is why there is so much intellectualized language. It’s why so many go to therapy to collect the language torehears their vicim roles at home out in the wild.

I recently posted something on my personal Facebook account about how wholesome it felt watching people from outside the United States come here for the World Cup. I talked about how beautiful it was to watch people experience America through fresh eyes and how it reminded me of how much many of us take for granted because we are so focused on the pain, trauma, wounds, division, and injustice that exist here.

What fascinated me was how quickly some people became upset at the suggestion that someone could appreciate the present while simultaneously acknowledging the problems. That right there is a psychological phenomenon worth paying attention to.

Research on negativity bias has consistently shown that human beings are naturally wired to pay more attention to threats, problems, dangers, and negative experiences than positive ones (Baumeister et al., 2001). From an evolutionary standpoint, that made sense. The brain prioritizes survival. The problem is that many of us become so conditioned to scanning for danger that we lose our ability to experience gratitude, joy, awe, beauty, or appreciation when they are right in front of us.

And honestly, that is a mental health conversation that not enough people are having.

I also have a BIG problem with people who essentially tell you to “know your place” because you choose to enjoy the one life you have.

How can we preach growth mindset while simultaneously reinforcing the very mechanisms that keep us stuck? Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset highlights the importance of believing that change is possible (Dweck, 2006). Yet so much of modern discourse rewards the opposite. We become attached to explanations instead of transformation. We become attached to identifying the wound instead of healing the wound. Many — and this is a big loop— become attached to discussing the problem instead of examining their role within it. The gotcha culture of trying to hold people accountable outside of ourselves is the biggest sickness of all.

Do you see the hypocrisy?

This is why family systems research has found that patterns repeat themselves across generations until someone becomes willing to interrupt them (Bowen, 1978). The faces change. The names change. The circumstances change. Yet the mechanism remains the same.

And this is exactly why my platform is not centered on historical injustice. Again— for those who still don’t get it. This is not about dismissing or saying it’s not real. It’s about exposing you to the conversation you claim to want to have yet continue to avoid.I have watched people use history the same way families use old arguments.

The minute someone initiates a difficult conversation, the discussion gets hijacked.

Now we’re talking about something that happened five years ago.

Now we’re talking about what somebody else’s cousin did.

Now we’re talking about another injustice.

Now we’re talking about another wound.

Now we’re talking about literally everything except the thing that required courage to bring up in the first place. The goal I have studied by humans who do this deflection art is this— if I can get you lost in the side quest, I never have to engage the original discussion.

And that’s the mechanism I’m interested in.

Not the side quest.

The mechanism.

The minute accountability enters the room, someone reaches the hippocampus archives, pulls out a completely different discussion, and now we are arguing about that instead. Before you know it, we are lost in what I call the Hippocampus Forest. We’re wandering through facts, timelines, side quests, and competing narratives while becoming increasingly disconnected from the original conversation that required courage to have in the first place.

How many of you experience that in your personal life?

How many times have you developed the courage to walk the Expression Highway and finally address something that has been weighing on your heart, only for someone to hijack the discussion and redirect it somewhere else?

You finally speak.

You finally advocate for yourself.

You finally address the issue.

And instead of engaging what you brought forward, the other person starts making rules.

“We can’t talk about that until we talk about this.”

“What about when you did this?”

“Well, before we discuss that...”

Suddenly the conversation you initiated gets held hostage by a conversation they never had the courage to initiate themselves. Researchers refer to this as deflection and whataboutism—communication strategies that redirect attention away from the original issue in order to avoid addressing it directly (Walton, 1998). In family systems, it often functions as a way to reduce anxiety while preserving existing relational patterns (Bowen, 1978).

The result?

Nobody feels heard.

Nothing gets repaired.

Everyone leaves feeling justified in the current pattern that needs healing.

And we all remain disconnected.

That’s what hurts.

As someone that holds space for the ache of ALL humans.

This level of self-perpetuated outrage due to mindset. it has nothing to do with people disagreeing with me or because somebody left a comment on the internet. What hurts is that it amplifies something that feels very familiar for me in my timeline. It touches a wound that has existed long before social media ever entered the picture. The wound that says I’m good enough as long as I stay in my lane, provide what people want. I’m good enough as long as I talk about what’s safe. I’m good enough as long as I provide something useful for everyone else to consume. I’m good enough as long as my thoughts, opinions, observations, and experiences remain convenient for the people around me.

And if I’m being really honest, I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I think many of us learned versions of that lesson growing up. Maybe it was in our families our friendships. Maybe it was in church or at school. We learned that belonging was often conditional— and to be loved meant only certain parts of us, but not all of us could be loved. We learned that people enjoyed the fruit we provided while having very little curiosity about the roots that produced it. That you could be celebrated one moment and criticized the next simply because we stepped outside of a role that other people had assigned to us. That’s why these moments sting more than people realize. Because it isn’t about the comment itself. It’s about what the comment touches. It’s about the younger version of me that spent years trying to earn belonging if I could just explain myself clearly enough, be agreeable enough, helpful enough, insightful enough, useful enough, maybe everyone would finally understand me.

One of the greatest acts of reparenting I have had to learn is allowing myself to be misunderstood without abandoning myself in the process. Not pretending it doesn’t hurt or convincing myself that I don’t care. Just sitting with the discomfort and reminding myself that disagreement is not abandonment, misperception is not rejection, and criticism is not proof that I have done something wrong.

What I keep realizing as I sit with all of this is that none of this is actually about the comments. The comments are just the doorway. They’re the thing that pokes the wound and invites me to go looking for where I’ve felt this before. That’s why I always laugh a little when people assume my work is about politics, racial injustice or whatever current outrage people are arguing about online. I mean aren’t y’all tired? My work has never been about that. My work has always been about conditioning, modeling how what happens in the micro is living in the macro thus conditioning us further to normalize this level of dysfunction and division.

It’s about the ways we learn to relate to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. It’s about the stories we inherit from our families, our communities, our culture, and our lived experiences. How the bells that rang decades ago cause us to still salivate to today, even when the original threat is nowhere to be found (Pavlov, 1927). It’s about the fact that many of us are still fighting ghosts. We are still reacting to old wounds as if they are standing directly in front of us, and because those wounds feel so real inside our bodies, we rarely stop long enough to ask ourselves whether the danger is actually here in the present moment or within ourselves.

That’s where free will enters the conversation for me.

Not in a dismissive “just get over it” kind of way. Quite the opposite, actually. I think healing requires us to be radically honest about what shaped us. But eventually there comes a moment where we have to decide whether understanding the origin of a pattern is enough, or whether we are willing to interrupt the pattern itself. Through our choice to choose differently.

Because those are two very different things.

I can tell you exactly why I developed certain fears. I can tell you exactly where some of my wounds came from. I can tell you who taught me to doubt myself, who taught me to shrink, who taught me that belonging was conditional. Understanding those things helped me make sense of my pain, but understanding alone didn’t heal it. At some point I had to decide whether I was going to continue organizing my life around what happened to me or whether I was going to begin organizing my life around who I wanted to become.

Maybe that’s the part that breaks my heart the most when I look around.

Watching people become so fused with their pain that they can no longer imagine themselves outside of it. The wound becomes the identity. The resentment becomes the personality and over time the injury becomes the lens through which every interaction is filtered. Then when someone chooses differently, when someone begins healing, creating boundaries, finding gratitude, challenging their own thinking, or stepping outside of the conditioning they inherited, it feels threatening. Why is that? Well my theory says its because their existence quietly asks a question many people don’t want to answer:

That’s a terrifying question, because now we’re no longer talking about history.

We’re no longer talking about trauma.

We’re no longer talking about what happened.

We’re talking about choice.

Call it Black hate.

Call it self-betrayal.

Call it anti-Black.

Call it whatever helps you sleep at night.

But as you continue picking fruit from this tree, just remember where it came from. It came from the same “not Black enough” girl. The same girl who learned very early that belonging often came with conditions. The same girl who spent years trying to earn acceptance by becoming whatever everyone else needed her to be. That same girl eventually realized that healing was never about becoming more acceptable to other people.

It was about finally becoming a safe place to come home to herself.

Come as you are, where you are 🫶🏽

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.; DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association.

Beck, A. T. (2011). Cognitive therapy of personality disorders (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.

Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly. Gotham Books.

Brown, B. (2015). Rising strong. Spiegel & Grau.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2017). Self-determination theory: Basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness. Guilford Press.

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Gilbert, P. (2010). Compassion focused therapy: Distinctive features. Routledge.

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work (Updated ed.). Harmony Books.

Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis. Basic Books.

Hayes, S. C. (2019). A liberated mind: How to pivot toward what matters. Avery.

Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment theory in practice: Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with individuals, couples, and families. Guilford Press.

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

LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: Using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. Viking.

Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT skills training manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.

Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The archaeology of mind: Neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. W. W. Norton.

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. Oxford University Press.

Porges, S. W. (2011). The polyvagal theory. W. W. Norton.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. Penguin Press.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

Sinek, S. (2009). Start with why. Portfolio.

Tatkin, S. (2012). Wired for love. New Harbinger Publications.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score. Viking.

Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. Basic Books.

Extended Reading

These books move beyond psychology into philosophy, spirituality, meaning-making, personal responsibility, and the internal narratives that shape how we experience ourselves and other people. While not all are scientific texts, each offers a perspective that complements the work of developing emotional maturity, self-awareness, and psychological flexibility.

Personal Responsibility & Emotional Freedom

• Letting Go — David R. Hawkins

• The Power of Your Subconscious Mind — Joseph Murphy

• The Untethered Soul

• The Surrender Experiment

• Man’s Search for Meaning

• The Obstacle Is the Way

Awareness & Consciousness

• A New Earth

• The Power of Now

• Awareness

• The Book

• The Wisdom of Insecurity

Trauma, Relationships & Inner Healing

• Our Inner Conflicts

• The Drama of the Gifted Child

• Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

• The Courage to Be Disliked

• The Four Agreements

Communication & Relationships

• Crucial Conversations

• Nonviolent Communication

• Difficult Conversations

Habits & Behavior Change

• Atomic Habits

• Tiny Habits

• The Happiness Trap

Data Collectors,

Welcome to our first skill acquisition. Remember when you see the 🖍️ it’s a skill.

I think one of the biggest reasons people are exhausted is because they’re walking around touching everything without gloves. Every comment, every facial expression, every sigh, every weird text message, every social media post, every opinion, every expectation, every family member’s mood, every piece of energy floating around the room. Then we wonder why we’re tired, drained, and burnt out. Imagine walking around your neighborhood picking up random piles of dog shit with your bare hands. You wouldn’t do it. You’d think I was crazy if I suggested it. Yet many of us are doing the emotional version of that every single day. Somebody sighs and we pick it up. Somebody doesn’t text back and we pick it up. Our mother-in-law says something weird and we pick it up. A stranger leaves a comment online and we pick it up. Our partner comes home in a bad mood and somehow we pick that up too. By the end of the day we’re carrying around a backpack full of things that were never ours to begin with.

This is where today’s crayon comes in. 🖍️ Glove Up.

The gloves are not avoidance. The gloves are not pretending you don’t care. The gloves are not becoming emotionally unavailable. The gloves are skills. The gloves are pause. The gloves are discernment and curiosity. The gloves serve as a regulation strategy. It's learning how to stop assigning meaning before you have enough information. One of the questions I ask myself all the time is, “Hold on... am I touching this without gloves?” Because the truth is most of us are not reacting to what happened. We’re reacting to what we think happened. That’s a very different thing.

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Think about how quickly the mind fills in blanks. Your partner sighs and suddenly you’ve decided they’re mad at you. Your friend doesn’t respond and you’ve decided they’re upset. Your mother asks a question and you’ve decided she’s criticizing you. A stranger disagrees with you online and you’ve decided they’re attacking you. If I stopped you right there and asked you for evidence, most people couldn’t give me any. The nervous system is making predictions. Aaron Beck’s work on cognitive distortions highlighted how quickly human beings jump to conclusions, personalize situations, and mind-read other people’s intentions without enough information to support those conclusions (Beck, 1976). In other words, we become convinced that our interpretation is reality. That interpretation then gets projected as the default view for everyone else, so when they don’t agree… There is an internalized feeling of rejection.

This is why resentment spreads so easily. The resentment isn’t just coming from what happened. It’s coming from the meaning we assigned to what happened. Once resentment has enough evidence, it starts running the entire show. Now every sigh means they’re annoyed. Every question means criticism. Every disagreement means rejection. Every mistake means they don’t care. John Gottman calls this Negative Sentiment Override, a relational state where the emotional climate becomes so contaminated that neutral or even positive interactions are filtered through a negative lens (Gottman & Silver, 1999). We stop collecting new data and start proving the old story.

The gloves ask different questions.

What do I actually know?

What am I assuming?

Is there another explanation?

Is this mine to carry?

Am I reacting to this person or what they represent?

Those are glove questions. That’s the work. Not becoming numb. Not becoming detached. Not pretending things don’t bother you. The work is learning how to investigate before you absorb. The work is learning how to sit in uncertainty long enough to gather more information. The work is realizing that not every uncomfortable feeling is a threat and not every activated response deserves your attention.

So this week’s crayon is simple. Pause before you pick it up. Before you grab the story. Before you grab the assumption. Before you grab the offense. Before you grab the resentment. Pause. Put your gloves on. Collect the data first. Just because something activated you doesn’t automatically mean it belongs to you. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. The skill is learning the difference. The reason I love this metaphor so much is because most people think they are wearing gloves when they aren’t.

They think gloves are emotional toughness.

They think gloves are avoidance.

They think gloves are not caring.

That’s not what I’m talking about.

I’m talking about skills.

I’m talking about the ability to remain connected to yourself while interacting with the world around you. For example, gloving up might look like realizing your partner’s bad mood is not automatically your responsibility to fix. Instead of scanning for what you did wrong, overexplaining yourself, or trying to rescue the emotional climate of the room, you simply ask, “Hey, is everything okay?” Then you allow them to own their experience. That’s a glove. It may also look like not trying to parent them into being the version of a mother of father that you want them to be. It looks like allowing them to fumble and experience the natural consequences of that. Gloving up might look like saying no to a request you don’t have the capacity for instead of saying yes and silently building resentment. A fantastic example is hosting thanksgiving dinner. If you really don’t want to but you still say yes. Now you are polluting everyone with your undercurrents. Slamming cabinets, washing dishes aggressively. All because you either can’t ask for help, or don’t have the courage to say no.

It might look like disappointing somebody instead of abandoning yourself. That’s a glove. Gloving up might look like realizing someone else’s urgency does not automatically become your emergency. Just because somebody is panicking does not mean you have to panic. Just because somebody is dysregulated does not mean you have to become dysregulated. That’s a glove. Gloving up might look like receiving criticism without immediately collapsing into shame. Instead of assuming you’re wrong, defective, selfish, irresponsible, or a bad person, you pause long enough to evaluate the information. Is there something useful here? Is there not? What belongs to me? What belongs to them? That’s a glove.

Gloving up might look like refusing to become your own defense attorney every time somebody misunderstands you. One of the hardest lessons I have learned is that misunderstanding is not an emergency. Some people will misunderstand you because they don’t have enough information. Some people will misunderstand you because they are activated. Some people will misunderstand you because it benefits the story they are already telling themselves pr they learned that misunderstanding you activates you—so they allow you to take that bait. None of those situations require you to abandon yourself in order to be understood. That’s a glove.

The people pleasers in the room are going to hate this next one. Gloving up sometimes means allowing another adult to be disappointed. Let me say that again for the people in the back. Sometimes gloving up means allowing another adult to be disappointed. You’re not being cruel or selfish. Disappointment is a normal human emotion, and it is not your job to prevent everyone from experiencing it. Disappointment is the portal to growth sometimes, and there is a few of us who are literally blocking that growth. The more I study resentment, the more I realize resentment grows where self-abandonment lives. Every time we override our own needs, suppress our own truth, ignore our own limits, or carry emotional weight that does not belong to us, we deposit another dollar into the resentment account. Then years later we wonder why we’re exhausted.

This is why I created the Glove Check🧤

Before you pick something up, ask yourself:

Is this mine?

Do I have enough information?

Am I responding to reality, or am I responding to a story?

Am I about to touch this with my truth or with my trauma?

Because the answer to those questions will determine whether you walk away regulated or emotionally contaminated.

Till next time Data collectors

Data Collectors,

Welcome to Stop 1 of the ROR series.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Avoidance

• Emotional dishonesty

• Chronic survival mode

• Hypervigilance

• Emotional rigidity

• Suppressed grief

• Unresolved attachment wounds

• Repetitive relational gridlock

How do you suspect the infection spreads?

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

Eventually, the entire relational field becomes emotionally contaminated.

Emotional Leakage

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

• body language

• sarcasm

• sighs

• irritability

• shutdown

• avoidance

• emotional numbness

• hypercriticism

• scorekeeping

• contempt

• chronic nervous system tension

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

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

• play disappears

• curiosity disappears

• softness disappears

• repair feels exhausting

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

Emotional Cost & Nervous System Currency

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

Conflict costs energy.

Suppression costs energy.

Masking costs energy.

Overexplaining costs energy.

Avoidance costs energy.

Hypervigilance costs energy.

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

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

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

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

So, what is the benefit of resentment?

Anyone?...

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

We get to avoid uncertainty.

We get to avoid vulnerability.

We get to avoid accountability.

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

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

Perception is the root of my work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why resentment can become so seductive.

Resentment gives us a story.

Resentment gives us certainty.

Resentment gives us someone to blame.

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

Joy asks us to soften.

Joy asks us to stay present.

Joy asks us to risk disappointment.

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

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

The Glove Up Concept

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

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

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

Not emotional walls.
Not avoidance.
Not detachment.

Skills.

1. Pause.

2. Observation.

3. Discernment.

4. Regulation.

5. Compartmentalization.

6. Non-reactivity.

7. Boundary awareness.

8. Emotional responsibility.

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

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

That is what the gloves are.

Not disconnection.
Not superiority.
Not avoidance.

Protection through skill.

THE FIELD OBSERVATION

One of the most important things to understand:

It is usually cumulative.

• Micro-moments.

• Repeated disappointments.

• Unspoken truths.

• Chronic emotional suppression.

• Invisible labor.

• Perceived inequity.

• Inherited modeling.

• Emotional exhaustion.

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

The nervous system stops asking:

“What else could this mean?”

And starts assuming:

“See? Here we go again.”

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

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

That’s the issue.

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

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

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

They look for the catch.

They wait for the other shoe to drop.

They anticipate failure.

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

That is resentment’s favorite playground.

THIS WEEK’S FIELDWORK

Your Assignment

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

Your assignment is to begin noticing:

• where resentment leaks,

• what environments intensify it,

• what interactions drain your energy,

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

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

• movement,

• novelty,

• walks,

• play,

• sensory regulation,

• intentional pauses,

• recreational activities,

• or moments of emotional compartmentalization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UNTIL NEXT TIME...

Your assignment is simple. Continue the joy experiment.

Collect data.

Observe your nervous system.

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

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

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

The goal is observation.

The goal is collecting evidence.

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

Collect the data.

The Safari has officially begun.

See you all out there!

And again.

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

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

Remember knowledge is power ignorance is a choice.

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extended Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🏕️ WELCOME TO THE ROR MAP™

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

🧭 Mission Briefing:

🎯 Primary Objective

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

🔬 Proposed Intervention

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

🧠 Operational Theory

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

🛰️ Research Environment

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

📂 Participant Role

Each participant acts as both:

• observer,

• and specimen.

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

⚠️ Field Conditions (What to expect)

Participants may encounter:

• discomfort,

• resistance,

• avoidance impulses,

• emotional fatigue,

• cognitive dissonance,

• and heightened defensive responses.

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

🎒 Recommended Safari Equipment

• Curiosity

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

• Comfortable shoes (For the runners when discomfort hits)

• Reflection journal

• Emotional honesty

• Willingness to stay in the vehicle during activation 😂

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

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

  • You can access previous entries Here.

🚫 Contraband Items (Do not Bring onto the safari)

Please leave behind:

• emotional scorekeeping,

• surveillance of your partner, other, or self.

• doom scrolling during joy activity or intervention implementation.

• “should” language,

• avoidance behaviors or anxiety loops

• substances used to bypass discomfort,

• and the belief that healing should always feel pleasant.

🧪 Select Your Research Environment

❤️ RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT 01

Romantic / Partnership Dynamic

Objective:

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

Field Questions:

• What repetitive conflict loop appears most often?

• What behaviors trigger emotional shutdown or activation?

• What emotional need feels unseen or chronically neglected?

• What resentment story do you replay most often?

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

• What role do you believe your partner occupies?

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

Nervous System Observation:

• Does your body brace around this person?

• Do you anticipate disappointment before interaction?

• Is emotional closeness associated with safety or exhaustion?

• Does joy feel accessible or threatening?

🌿 RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT 02

Family / Friendship / Workplace Dynamic

Objective:

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

Field Questions:

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

• What role are you unconsciously performing?

• What emotional burden feels chronically unacknowledged?

• What expectations feel unfair, unequal, or invisible?

• What relational dynamic feels impossible to escape?

System Mapping:

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

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

• Are boundaries present, inconsistent, or absent?

• What behaviors reinforce the loop?

🔥 RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT 03

Individual / Internal Resentment Dynamic

Objective:

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

Field Questions:

• What part of yourself feels abandoned or neglected?

• What internal narrative do you replay most often?

• What are you exhausted from carrying?

• What version of yourself are you grieving?

• What unmet need keeps resurfacing emotionally?

• What emotion feels hardest to release?

Internal System Observation:

• Does rest create guilt?

• Does joy feel earned or unsafe?

• Does stillness increase anxiety?

• Does your nervous system default toward self-criticism?

🧪 ROR BASELINE ASSESSMENT

Participant Intake + Field Readings

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

🧭 SECTION 1 — EMOTIONAL CLIMATE READINGS

(Relational Atmosphere Assessment)

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

🔢 Emotional Climate Total:

___ / 40

📍 EMOTIONAL CLIMATE INTERPRETATION

0–10

Minimal emotional gridlock detected.

11–20

Mild relational strain present.

21–30

Moderate emotional fatigue and disconnection detected.

31–40

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

🏃 SECTION 2 — ESCAPE & AVOIDANCE PATTERNS

(Withdrawal + Fantasy Readings)

🔢 Escape/Avoidance Total:

___ / 30

📍 ESCAPE PATTERN INTERPRETATION

0–10

Low withdrawal patterning detected.

11–20

Moderate emotional avoidance present.

21–30

High emotional disengagement and survival-based distancing detected.

⚡ SECTION 3 — NERVOUS SYSTEM ACTIVATION

(Physiological Reactivity Readings)

🔢 Nervous System Total:

___ / 30

📍 NERVOUS SYSTEM INTERPRETATION

0–10

Relatively regulated nervous system state.

11–20

Moderate activation patterns detected.

21–30

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

🧠 SECTION 4 — WILLINGNESS & PARTICIPATION

(Experimental Readiness Assessment)

🧪 Resistance Conversion Formula

10 - your resistance score = adjusted participation score

🧪 Example Calculation

Original Scores

• Willingness to Participate = 8

• Hopefulness About Change = 8

• Resistance Toward Process = 5

⚙️ Resistance Conversion Formula

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

Formula:

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

So:

10 - 5 = 5

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

🔢 Participation Capacity Total:

21 / 30

📍 PARTICIPATION INTERPRETATION

0–10

Low readiness for emotional experimentation.

11–20

Moderate openness with protective hesitation.

21–30

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

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

This score measures the current level of:

• emotional gridlock,

• resentment looping,

• nervous system strain,

• and relational fatigue present within the system.

• Add together the totals from:

  • SECTION 1 — Emotional Climate

  • SECTION 2 — Fantasy / Escape / Avoidance

  • SECTION 3 — Nervous System State

  ⚠️ DO NOT include: Section 4

🌿 0–35

Low emotional gridlock currently detected.

🌤️ 36–65

Moderate resentment looping and nervous system strain present.

🌧️ 66–95

High emotional gridlock and relational fatigue detected.

⛈️ 96–130

🔬 What Higher Scores Mean

Higher scores may indicate:

• increased emotional activation,

• chronic resentment looping,

• relational exhaustion,

• nervous system rigidity,

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

Lower scores may indicate:

• greater emotional flexibility,

• increased nervous system safety,

• and improved access to connection and regulation.

⚠️ ROR FIELD DISCLAIMER

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

It is designed to:

• increase awareness,

• observe relational patterns,

• identify nervous system strain,

• and track emotional flexibility over time.

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

Open Reflection

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

• What do you fear would happen if resentment softened?

• What feels hardest about choosing joy right now?

• What activity immediately triggered resistance in you and why?

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

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

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

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

• Have you become more practiced at protection than connection?

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

Free or Low Cost Activities

• Neighborhood walks

• Hiking trails

• Basketball at a local park

• Pickleball courts

• Board games

• Card games

• YouTube dance classes

• Stretching together

• Sunset drives

• Picnics

• Farmers markets

• Window shopping

• Community events

• Library events

• Public concerts

• Bike rides

• Watching the stars

• Cooking together

• Watching a comedy special

• Nature trails

• Beach or lake walks

• Home paint nights

• Video games

• Trivia nights

Paid Activities

• Arcades

• Bowling

• Escape rooms

• Comedy shows

• Concerts

• Recreational sports leagues

• Mini golf

• Pottery classes

• Painting classes

• Dance lessons

• Axe throwing

• Sporting events

• Museums

• Botanical gardens

• Kayaking

• Paddle boarding

• Yoga classes

• Couples massages

• Cooking classes

Important Reminder

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

The goal is:

• shared attention

• movement

• nervous system interruption

• novelty

• presence

• laughter

• reconnection through experience

Awkwardness is okay.

Silence is okay.

Resistance is expected.

You are not failing because discomfort shows up.

You are rewiring.

And rewiring requires repetition.

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🗺️ROR MAP Glossary

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

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

Along the way, you’ll also encounter:

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

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

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

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

🧭 The Safari Exists Across Multiple Terrains

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

• 📚 Substack essays

• 🎥 Longform YouTube videos

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

📱 Shortform Content (IG + TikTok)

The shortform content is designed to:

• make you think,

• react,

• feel,

• question,

• and reflect.

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

🎙️ Podcast / Audio Reflections

The podcast space is more casual and conversational.

Episodes may pull from:

• community experiences,

• case-study style reflections,

• relational dynamics,

• cultural observations,

• and personal transparency.

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

🗾The Map Begins here.

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

1. Orientation: (You’re in it 😉)

2. ROR //Stop 1: Next

3. TBA

4. TBA

5. TBA

Wheeew,

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

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

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

Relationships are the hook.

NEXT STOP:

🦠 ROR //STOP 1 — The Infection Model

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

We will examine:

• how resentment forms,

• the emotional environments that allow it to spread,

• the nervous system conditions that sustain it,

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

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

• emotional gridlock,

• energy expenditure,

• emotional contamination,

• protective adaptations,

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

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

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

The safari has officially begun.

You have been release into the wild 🤪

I will see y’all out there!

—Come as you are, where you are.

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

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

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

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

What does that tell you?

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

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

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

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

Or do you argue on the way there?

Or while you are there?

Or even the night fore you get there?

Reflect on the last time you both laughed together.

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

BUT…

What if you interrupted the whole thing with — fun?

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

Just fun.

Ladies, you still with me?

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

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

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

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

That’s the lie.

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

This is how we stay stuck in the dance.

It takes one to be willing to step out…

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

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

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

One thing I tell myself daily is.

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

Then commit to showing up.

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

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

1. Doesn’t trust it or

2. Doesn’t think the change will last.

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

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

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

“S/he won’t____ I know him/her”

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

“It’s not going to matter anyways…”

Fortune tellers yeah?

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

Go on...

Write it out, pen to paper.

Hold that paper in your hand.

Fold it up.

Date it.

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

Then put it down.

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

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

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

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

Sampling intellect and where to regurgitate it.

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

Sampling anything we can to support our stagnation.

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

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

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

At this point, we basically volunteer as tribute.

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Now, Lets talk steps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ready?

Directions

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

The Rules

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is Round 1 of Reflection Prompts.

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

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

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

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

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

   Or would part of you immediately prepare for its disappearance?

   Why?

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

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

Good Ol’ discomfort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Our Systems Get Hijacked

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

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

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

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

🛺💨

The Parent Glitch: Discomfort as Tradition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emotional Displacement and the Software of Shame

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

When I say this I say this with love mommas…

TOUGH. LOVE. SAVES. LIVES!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Biology vs. Betrayal

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

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

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

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

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

The Rupture of Growth

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

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

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

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

The “Emotional Stew” and the Narrative Prison

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

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

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

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

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

That was the goal all along right?

Till next time data collector.

Key Points for Integration

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

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

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

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

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

Extended Reading List

For the Neurobiology Enthusiast

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

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

For the Family Systems Seeker

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

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

For the “Dopamine Nation” Context

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

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

For the Boundary & Self-Work Journey

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

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

Reflective Question

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data Collectors,

What Are You Actually Bringing In With You?

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

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

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

How We Reinforce the Very Dynamics We Fear

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

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

📓 Field Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Not Use That Same Energy in the Opposite Direction?

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

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

What Is Commute Calibration?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mental Rehearsal: What the Nervous System Is Actually Practicing

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

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

• Calm is practiced before it is required.

• Receptivity is embodied before it is tested.

• Safety is generated internally rather than negotiated externally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Window of Tolerance: Why Regulation Must Precede Contact

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

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

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

Pause…

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

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

The Science Backs This Up

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

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

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

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

What You Radiate Is What You Regulate

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

Try This the Next Time You Drive Into a Hard Space

No pressure.

No perfection.

Just your intention.

Breathe.

Shake your hands.

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

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

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

And then say:

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

(add your own flavor to it)

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

Frequency Is Contagious. You Choose What You Spread.

You can be the toxin. Or the tuning fork.

You can be the storm. Or the anchor.

You can rehearse trauma. Or you can rehearse transformation.

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

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

That’s Commute Calibration.

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

Until next time data collectors

Leave a comment

References & Extended Reading List

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a clinician, I spend a lot of time teaching people how to find their voice. For people-pleasers, over-functioners, and chronic “shrinkers,” this work is necessary, a part of the life mission we must face; otherwise we risk being a drifter in the loop. Many of us were conditioned to make ourselves smaller in order to maintain peace in relationships. As a result, learning how to speak up, set boundaries, and advocate for ourselves becomes a crucial developmental step in reclaiming agency.

But—big but… there is a side of this conversation that rarely gets explored.

Sometimes the pendulum swings too far in the other direction. The person who once struggled to speak at all can move into a state where they feel the need to respond to everything. Every interaction becomes something to analyze, challenge, or defend against. At that point, speaking up stops being an act of sovereignty and starts becoming a symptom of an unregulated nervous system. Think rescue dog that is afraid of a bag blowing in the wind. It’s not scared of a bag? It just has to learn the rhythm of the wind. When the nervous system is stuck in what I call the Activated Survival Self (ASS), it stops behaving like a calm observer of reality and starts acting more like a narrative architect. It begins scanning the environment for threats the same way a safari guide scans the horizon for lions or the way a sniper stays locked in searching for the target. The problem is that when the nervous system has been trained to expect danger everywhere, it will often begin painting lions onto the faces of people who were simply walking through the grass. In other words, if the brain expects danger and cannot find it, it may start inventing it. Creating it out of thin air because, sitting in the truth that it was just a mirage created by their own internal world. That would require self-ownership, accountability of the untrained stallion of the mind and nervous system. Work that belongs to them that they have neglected.

This is how the reactivity trap forms. People move from people-pleasing into advocating, but the shift overshoots the mark and lands in hyper-defensiveness. When every bag blowing in the wind feels like a threat, you are no longer practicing advocacy—you are living as a hostage to hyper-vigilance. A large part of this process happens through the lenses we wear in our minds. Psychology calls these lenses schemas. Schemas are mental templates built through past experiences that shape how we interpret the present moment. They help the brain make quick sense of the world, but they also have a powerful bias built into them.

If you are wearing red glasses, everything looks red.

If someone enters a workplace already carrying the schema that “people here are judging me,” their brain will automatically filter the environment through that expectation. The colleague who admires their work becomes invisible. The neutral facial expression becomes suspicious. The person who didn’t hold the elevator suddenly becomes proof that the environment is hostile. What we are witnessing in those moments is confirmation bias amplified by the amygdala. The brain’s threat detection system is wired to notice anything that confirms its predictions while ignoring evidence that contradicts them. Neuroscientists call this predictive processing, where the brain constantly uses past experiences to guess what is happening in the present moment (Barrett, 2017). So basically, in Sav language. We are sitting in the hippocampus archives projecting the collection of events we find in there onto the environment and people in it. Painting the faces onto the lions.

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When the nervous system is activated, the brain doesn’t just observe reality. It begins directing a movie about it. Our committee in our minds (think inside out) They are up there directing each scene. This is where energy begins to leak into the environment in ways people rarely realize. Human beings are extremely sensitive to emotional signals. Research on emotional contagion shows that we unconsciously mirror one another’s physiological states through subtle cues like posture, tone, and facial expression. If someone enters a room carrying the energy of suspicion or defense, other nervous systems pick up on it immediately.

You cannot emit the frequency of “stay away from me” and then feel confused when people keep their distance.

When others sense that guarded energy, they often respond by giving space. But here is the painful irony of our human behavior. The ASS interprets that distance not as respect for a boundary, but as confirmation of rejection or prejudice. In that moment a feedback loop is created (schema). The person’s hyper-vigilance pushes people away, and the resulting distance becomes proof that their fears were justified. What started as a protective strategy ends up creating the very isolation the person was afraid of.

I see this dynamic appear it’s pesky head across cultural lines as well. Whether the narrative is built around race, gender, class, or social status, there is a human tendency to turn entire groups into symbolic stand-ins for personal insecurity. It is far easier for the mind to say, “They are the problem,” than it is to acknowledge that the nervous system itself may be overwhelmed. True psychological resilience involves the ability to pause long enough to question the story the mind is telling. Sometimes the person in front of you is simply another human being with their own internal world. Sometimes the reaction you are feeling is less about the present moment and more about a memory archive your nervous system has not yet processed.

The hippocampus is basically the archive center. It stores past experiences that the amygdala then uses to detect potential threats in the environment. Imagine opening a memory box of picture all holding the image of painful events “imprints” from your time line. We basically throw those events onto the present moment. When those memories are unresolved, the brain can begin projecting old pain onto new situations. What feels like an immediate reaction to the present moment is often the nervous system sitting inside of that memory box. In psychology, this process is closely related to projection and cognitive distortions. Mind-reading, for example, occurs when we assume we know what another person is thinking without actual evidence. Labeling occurs when we assign a global negative trait to someone or an entire group based on limited information. Both distortions simplify the world into easy categories so the brain can feel more in control of uncertainty.

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory also helps explain this phenomenon through the concept of neuroception, the nervous system’s unconscious ability to detect safety or threat. When someone has experienced repeated trauma or exclusion, their safety meter can become miscalibrated. A neutral glance can register as hostility. A moment of silence can feel like rejection.

Pause for a moment.

As a multicultural woman, the situation I see A LOT is the concept of white people being unsafe. Since being back in California visiting. If I had a dollar for every time I heard “ugh they are so racist.” It drives me bonkers because how the hell do you know that simply by walking past a person who looks different than you? It’s such a statement of ignorance and reveals your ASS. White people have become the scapegoat for many people and their own unhealed and unacknowledged fears. Fears that quite frankly are being perpetuated by the media. How will you feel safe with people who do not look like you if all you ever do is hang around sameness? How are we so entitled to demand grace for our fear of coming out of our comfort zone. Yet, do not extend that grace outwardly? How can you come in with an energy of judgment, emit that outwardly than snap at people for becoming tense around you? Feels like waking on eggshell energy and I wonder how many of use feel that way.

If the ASS inside say “yeah but white people—-” shhhhhhh inner child, what has a white person done to you that you are not already doing to yourself?

The nervous system reacts before the thinking mind has time to investigate.

Over time, if someone only spends time with people who reinforce their existing worldview, this hyper-vigilance never gets challenged. Social psychologists refer to this as the absence of intergroup contact, a concept first studied by Gordon Allport. His research showed that meaningful interactions between different groups significantly reduce prejudice and fear. When we remain in self-segregated environments, the nervous system never has the opportunity to retrain itself to feel safe around difference. This contagion even impacts people within the white community. As someone who is white, black, and Native America (Muscogee 🥰) I have seen it with my family. Those who are white no longer feel safe around people who look like them. This is due to the need to feel belonging with their family and if they have family that are POC they choose to belong there and adopt the schema of that group whatever that is.

Many times I believe, the judgment we feel is really just the vulnerability of feeling naked— being in a different environment and around difference. That naked feeling goes away the more we practice and train the nervous system to learn there is no threat around difference.

Avoidance keeps the schema alive.

This is why developing discernment is so important in psychological growth. Advocacy and awareness are essential, but they must be balanced with curiosity and self-reflection. Otherwise, the brain’s survival system can quietly transform into a narrative machine that interprets every ambiguous interaction as confirmation of danger. That’s exhausting for you. When that happens, the world begins to look like a field full of lions—even when most of the people walking through it are just trying to get through their day. A simple practice can help interrupt this pattern. Before reacting or “calling something out,” pause long enough to perform what I call a reality audit. First, notice what is happening in your body. Are your shoulders tight? Is your chest constricted? Is your mind racing ahead of the evidence? Naming the sensation helps bring the nervous system back into awareness. You can name it… “Ahh the ASS is online…”

Next, identify the story your brain is telling. What assumption are you making about the other person’s intentions? Once the story is clear, challenge it by imagining at least three alternative explanations for the situation. (if your mind rejects those truths, note that down, you just discovered the entrance into your limiting belief realm. Understanding that perhaps the person is curious rather than judgmental. Perhaps they are distracted by something happening in their own life. Perhaps they admire you and simply feel intimidated. There are so many other possibilities besides… “they’re a racist, they're phobic, they are jealous.”

Finally, take a slow breath and consciously soften the defensive posture your body may be holding. Allow yourself to make brief eye contact without the shield of assumption. This is softening the field allowing yourself to be seen as the softer you and not the hypervigilent ASS. Often the “lion” that seemed so threatening disappears once the nervous system stops projecting the content of the hippocampus archives onto the people in the environment. None of this means ignoring real prejudice or injustice. Those realities exist and deserve to be addressed with clarity and courage. But psychological maturity requires the ability to differentiate between what is happening in the present moment and what the nervous system is replaying from the past. What is real injustice, and what’s truly you creating injustice for yourself by disconnecting you from connection.

If we never learn to question the stories our survival system tells us, we risk becoming people who judge others before we truly know them. In that moment, the lion we were so certain was standing in front of us may have been something we painted there ourselves.

Let me know what came up for you with this time.

I love seeing your comments, your shares of what was challenging. Thank you all for sitting in the muck with me. My heart is so full 🥰

Till next time.

Come as you are where you are.

References & Further Reading

For readers who want to explore the psychology and neuroscience concepts referenced in this essay, the following works provide foundational research and accessible explanations of how the nervous system, perception, and social cognition shape human behavior.

Predictive Processing & Constructed Emotion

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

Barrett’s work explains how the brain constantly predicts what is happening in the present moment using past experiences stored in memory. Rather than reacting purely to the external world, the brain constructs emotional experiences based on prior learning, which helps explain why unresolved memories can shape how we interpret people and situations.

Extended Reading

Barrett, Lisa Feldman. (2020).
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

A shorter and very accessible explanation of predictive brain theory and how perception is shaped by prior experience.

Polyvagal Theory & Neuroception

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

Porges introduces the concept of neuroception, the nervous system’s unconscious process of detecting safety or danger. When this system becomes dysregulated due to trauma or chronic stress, neutral interactions can be perceived as threats.

Extended Reading

Porges, Stephen W. & Dana, Deb. (2018).
Clinical Applications of the Polyvagal Theory.
W. W. Norton & Company.

Provides practical applications of polyvagal theory in therapy, trauma recovery, and nervous system regulation.

Cognitive Distortions & Schema Theory

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

This book outlines how early life experiences create schemas, or mental templates that shape how individuals interpret relationships, safety, and belonging. Schemas influence perception, often operating outside of conscious awareness.

Extended Reading

Beck, Aaron T. (1976).
Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders.
Penguin Books.

Beck’s foundational work on cognitive distortions explains mechanisms such as mind-reading, labeling, and confirmation bias, which influence how people interpret social interactions.

Emotional Contagion & Social Signal Transmission

Hatfield, Elaine, Cacioppo, John T., & Rapson, Richard L. (1993).
Emotional Contagion.
Cambridge University Press.

This research explores how human beings unconsciously mirror each other’s emotional and physiological states through facial expression, posture, tone, and subtle cues. Emotional states can spread through social environments without conscious awareness.

Intergroup Contact Theory

Allport, Gordon W. (1954).
The Nature of Prejudice.
Addison-Wesley.

Allport’s work introduced Intergroup Contact Theory, which demonstrates that meaningful interaction between members of different groups significantly reduces prejudice and fear. Avoidance and social segregation tend to reinforce stereotypes and perceived threat.

Extended Reading

Pettigrew, Thomas F., & Tropp, Linda R. (2006).
A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

This large-scale study confirms that intergroup contact consistently reduces prejudice across cultures and social contexts.

Fear Learning & the Threat Detection System

LeDoux, Joseph. (1996).
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life.
Simon & Schuster.

LeDoux’s work explains how the amygdala processes threat and fear, often reacting before conscious thought has time to evaluate a situation.

Extended Reading

Sapolsky, Robert M. (2017).
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
Penguin Press.

A comprehensive look at how biology, culture, and environment shape human behavior, including threat perception, bias, and group dynamics.

Trauma, Perception & Nervous System Conditioning

Maté, Gabor. (2022).
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.
Avery.

Maté explores how trauma and social environments shape nervous system responses, influencing perception, health, and relational behavior.

Extended Reading

van der Kolk, Bessel. (2014).
The Body Keeps the Score.
Penguin Books.

Explains how trauma becomes encoded in the nervous system and body, affecting perception, emotional regulation, and interpersonal relationships.

Additional Psychological Foundations

Kahneman, Daniel. (2011).
Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kahneman’s work explains cognitive shortcuts and biases that shape human decision-making and perception.

If You Want to Explore This Topic Further

If this essay resonated with you, the areas of psychology worth exploring include:

• Predictive Brain Theory

• Polyvagal Theory

• Schema Therapy

• Cognitive Distortions

• Intergroup Contact Theory

• Trauma and Nervous System Regulation

• Social Signal Transmission and Emotional Contagion

Each of these frameworks contributes to understanding how the human brain interprets safety, threat, and social relationships.

The key takeaway across all of them is simple but profound: The brain does not simply observe reality. It interprets it through memory, expectation, and nervous system state. Sometimes, the lions we see in the field are not actually there.

Sometimes they are projections from the archive we carry within us.

How come humans today can’t have conversations? Just say what they feel? Mean what they say? We can’t make statements to what is true for our own lived experience anymore. Losing out on flavor for this world.

Why?

I have come to believe it’s due to the fear of someone else implying a meaning behind what is true for us. That then meaning is defended against by that very individual who demands you be accountable. Remember, accountable for what? What did you do besides express what is true for you? The meaning they made with your truth became what they punish YOU for..

Let that sink in for a moment.

We as a species do not feel safe to communicate with each other. Language, the very ability that makes us vibrant beings…It vanishes... We tiptoe, bite our tongue—Swallow… We have been conditioned to believe. Speak and you risk being punished for not being in sameness as the rest of the group. You get called labels. These are really glorified rumination loops of people who never trained the stallion of their mind to…Settle. Down.

Is the world ugly. yes

Is there injustice? yes

But riddle me this.

What are we doing in the mind with what we see in the world?

How often do we reflect on our own mind activity and whether it is being casted on to others as definitive truth because we “feel that way?”

Disagree = you must be a racist?

Really? or is that your protector part holding the mic?

The polarity is so extreme I can’t help but scream to myself.

How is this not a Cluster B crisis.

HOW CAN THE COLLECTIVE NOT SEE IT?

I feel these days some conversations are bait traps for people — tests to see how far someone can push you. You can pick this data clue up in the tone: hostile, instigative, agreeable but clearly from an ulterior motive or agenda. This energy is not pure. This energy is what dictates the emotional climate so the collective can’t reach each other. Can’t speak.

It mixes with the wounds from past lovers, caregivers, friends.

I have seen it in the way strangers comment to strangers online, responding as if the other person’s words, work, performance, etc., is a direct attack against them. Because their amygdala sees the ghost of what really wounded them, not what is actually happening. Many of us never sit with those wounds, which makes it easier to cast that part onto others.

One truth I have known to realize through my work with others.

Most of us have our heads so far up our own ass to make things a personal attack against others intentionally. Majority of us are stuck trying to untangle the loops in our own mind.

Till next time

🫶🏽

See you in the next one data collectors.

I want to start of by saying this topic was inspired by a safari member of ours who wrote into my DM with a very amazing question. I want to share it with you but I will protect the identity of the person.

What you read below is based of this response.

Are we ready?

Let’s get into it.

The Mirror of Fear: The Anxious, The Avoidant, and the Gap Between

“Allowing someone to pass” I love this. This right here is radical acceptance. Is this easy to practice? Not in the slightest. Especially, in a society today that is conditioning narcissistic and borderline personality traits in people who need their wounds named in order to be safe. No.

The reason this work is not easy is because the oppositional force to healing is resistance and well— resistance is being conditioned pavlovian style in the micro (us). The resistance to accountability, responsibility, and ownership of where you are NOW, instead of pointing the finger at the elders or parents who have harmed us.

To me, “letting someone pass” is an act of unconditional love for yourself. It’s the visceral realization that if someone insists the sky is green, you don’t have to litigate the blue. You don’t have to prove, you don’t have to fix, and you don’t have to convince them of anything. Zoom out…

Haven’t you noticed. We are nothing but beings stuck in loops of feeling “not good enough” “not worthy enough.” So we over perform, over function, or over induldge to cope with the pain of “not being enough.” We’ve become a society that is constantly “proving” ourselves at work, in our families, and in our relationships. We are bleeding out our life force energy trying to be “seen” by people who won’t ever notice us because they are just a reenactment of a lesson we needed to learn, maybe 5 years ago so we can finally ascend.

Think of it like Iyanla Vanzant’s In the Meantime— if we are starting in the basement, the goal is to move up the floors. We can’t do that if we’re weighted down by litigation. "That policing behvaior that came from a whole year of being stuck at home in isolation with hysteria fill and a sickness that was infecting everyone. Was it COVID or was it this very emotional contagion? thats up for you to reflect on. Look at the psychological implications of what happens to humans when stuck inside fo far too long?

The birth of:

Hall Monitors,

“You aren’t politically correct” police

What society calls “Karens”

Don’t be fooled. These hall monitors, mob mentality members are the ones who have no control in their own life so they are out in the world controlling others. This provides the mob mentality member (we have all been there by the way) an escape into the illusion of control, so it can distract them from their own internal feelings of hopelessness.

See the loop?

If I can correct you I get dopamine. Now we have a bunch of dopamine addicted hall monitors running the streets instead of policing their own habits, routines, and mental health.

If someone wants to be wrong, let them. That’s the “Let Them” theory in action. When we are actually at peace within ourselves, we don’t need to control the external environment or the people in it. We can just allow them to be exactly where they are.

What will you do with all that extra time from hall monituring it up? OMG, maybe you can get to that walk you have been wanting to do for age, or make some bread, watch that show you wanted to…

Time becomes available when the mind is not fixated on the behavioral change others will not do. Focusing on them while you do not do what you could be doing is the hypocrisy loop we don’t see.

The Shadow of Survival: Identification with the Aggressor

Now, let’s zoom back in.

We point a lot at the older generation, but lets remind ourselves they still raised us. What survival adaptations did we inherit simply for being in proximity to them?

This is self-assessment.

We often identify as victims of communal narcissism, but we rarely discuss the Narcissistic Survival Adaptations (NSA) we adopted to endure it.

• Identification with the Aggressor: This Freudian concept explains how a child adopts the traits of a controlling caregiver to feel a sense of power rather than helplessness.

• Proximity as Leverage: We may find ourselves using proximity to a partner’s internal world as a way to bend or influence them—the very habit used against us as children.

Let’s unpack the last one because I myself have had experiences where that very proximity leverage has been used against me in friendships with women. These women are typically the ones that dictate emotional climates within their own family. I correlated some of the harm done to me by being a people pleaser. Now, Some people get close boucle they want to know the shadow aspects of you so they can feel better about themselves. This is very common. This Is where the need for discernment comes in.

The “Huge Child” and Arrested Development

Clinically, many adults we encounter (including ourselves) are functioning from a state of Developmental Arrest.

• The Puer/Puella Aeternus: These Jungian archetypes represent the “huge child” in an adult body someone who was never safely mirrored and thus never moved into functional adulthood.

• Adaptive Child vs. Functional Adult: Pia Mellody’s framework describes the “Adaptive Child” as the part of us that uses manipulation or control because it doesn’t believe in the safety of the “Functional Adult” boundary.

In Pia Mellody’s framework, this is the distinction between the Functional Adult and the Adaptive Child. When we are “allowing them to pass,” we are operating from the Adult; when we are trying to fix the external environment to feel safe, we are operating from the Child.

We cannot complete our missions in life from the operation of the child.

In this section of your Field Notes, we’re looking at the hard truth of the “Mission Block.” If you’re stuck in the Adaptive Child loop, you aren’t just stressed you’re essentially “offline” drifting is what Napoleon Hill would call it from your own destiny. You can’t reach the higher floors if you’re busy fortifying the basement.

The Mission Block: Survival vs. Alignment

When you operate from the Adaptive Child, you are trapped in the Activated Survival Self. In this state, your nervous system is “firing and wiring” in a loop of hypervigilance. You think you’re in a place of power because you’re controlling the environment, but clinically, you’re just in a state of high-functioning panic. Over time this consistent exposure raises your baseline for functioning.

• The Amygdala Hijack: Your brain is stuck in a survival loop, which means you literally cannot access the Prefrontal Cortex, the part of you required for vision, mission, and long-term creation.

• The Alignment Problem: You cannot complete your mission in life from a survival state because your “authentic self” isn’t the one driving. The Adaptive Child is an expert at surviving the past, but it has no idea how to navigate the present.

• The Schema Trap: You can’t advance to the next mission if you’re still playing by the rules of the child’s schema. It’s like trying to run new software on an old, corrupted operating system.

Debunking the Myth: What is a “Functional Adult”?

I myself find myself looking for the “adult ADULTS” 😂 We’ve been sold a lie that being an “adult” means having a mortgage, a job, and “shoulding” yourself into submission. But as we see in the field, many of these “adults” are just huge children with bigger bank accounts, more toys, and kids.

In our work, Adulthood is not a chronological age; it is a regulated state.

1. Presence over Performance: A Functional Adult lives in the present moment, not the “In the Meantime” basement of past reenactments.

2. Internal Agency over External Control: An adult doesn’t need to “litigate the blue” because their reality isn’t up for debate. They have nothing to prove.

3. The Anchor: Adulthood is the ability to stay okay within yourself even when the external environment is falling apart or someone is insisting the sky is green.

4. Relational Equality: The adult operates from a place of “equal to”—not the “superiority” or “less than” dynamics that the Adaptive Child uses to feel safe.

The Ascension

If the goal is to move up the floors, the “Functional Adult” is the elevator. You have to be willing to sit in the neurosis of adulthood, the discomfort of not controlling others—so that you can finally have the energy to complete your mission.

Your mission requires your presence and the Adaptive Child is always somewhere else, trying to fix a past that’s already over.

The Adaptive Child: The Survival Expert

The Adaptive Child is the version of you that stepped in when the actual adults in the room were “huge children” themselves. It is a set of behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that you “adapted” to survive a communal system that wasn’t safe or sane.

• Motivation: The primary goal is control as a form of safety. If I can manipulate the environment or “fix” the narcissist, then I won’t be hurt.

• Behavioral Traits: This part is often “less than” or “superior to” others. It’s the part that engages in the “What About Me?” sticker behavior or uses proximity to influence others.

• Reality Perception: It sees things in polarities (black and white). It’s the part that feels a “Narcissistic Injury” when the world doesn’t name its pain.

• The “Fleas”: This is where we harbor our Identification with the Aggressor. We use the same controlling tactics we learned from the narcissist because, to the Adaptive Child, power is the only alternative to powerlessness.

The Functional Adult: The Grounded Anchor

The Functional Adult is the part of your psyche that lives in the present moment. It is the “you” that has moved up from the basement to the higher floors.

• Motivation: The goal is connection and self-regulation, not control.

• Behavioral Traits: It operates from a place of “equal to” others neither a victim nor a perpetrator. It recognizes that its value is inherent and doesn’t need to be proven or litigated.

• The “Let Them” Theory: The Functional Adult is the part that can “Allow Someone to Pass”. It understands that someone else’s insistence that “the sky is green” is a reflection of their developmental arrest, not a threat to the Adult’s reality.

• Boundaries: Instead of trying to change the other person (external control), the Functional Adult sets a boundary on what they are willing to tolerate (internal agency).

The Balancing Act in the Field

The “neurosis of being an adult” is that we are constantly toggling between these two. We go to work as the Functional Adult, but the moment a boss or a spouse triggers an old “narcissistic injury,” the Adaptive Child grabs the steering wheel.

The work of “ascending” is learning how to notice when the child is trying to “fix the environment” and gently bringing the functional adult back online to keep the Prefrontal Cortex from checking out.

The Cognitive Tax of the “Green Sky”

Every time you try to change someone else’s distorted reality, you are paying a Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) Tax.

• Amygdala Hijack: Arguing with a narcissist triggers your survival brain.

• Top-Down Regulation: “Allowing them to pass” is a conscious choice to keep your PFC online. If you spend your life “fixing” the narcissist, you develop a chronic mood that eventually becomes a temperament and a personality.

Conclusion

The balancing act is realizing that we only try to fix the environment when we are not okay within ourselves. When we lack internal agency, we resort to external control. The work is to move from External Control to Internal Sovereignty.

Your manipulation was once your medicine, but now it is your poison.

If you are waiting for the environment to change so that you can finally start your life, you are being held hostage by your own Adaptive Child. This part of you thinks that controlling the “green sky” is the path to power, but it’s actually the anchor keeping you stuck looping in the basement.

• The Adult Reality: Being a “Functional Adult” means realizing that your mission is independent of other people’s dysregulation.

• Radical Acceptance: When you stop litigating, you stop giving your power away to people who aren’t even in the room with you.

The Work: The next time you feel that pull to “fix” or “prove,” ask yourself: Am I trying to move up a floor, or am I just decorating the basement?

Let them pass, so you can finally arrive.

Let me know what comes up for you with this one. Thank you to the person who wrote in. ‘Allow them to Pass’ is my new Mantra 🥰

Till next time Data Collectors.

Reference List

• Dispenza, J. (2012). Breaking the habit of being yourself: How to lose your mind and create a new one. Hay House.

• Freud, A. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. International Universities Press.

• Jung, C. G. (1959). The archetypes and the collective unconscious. Princeton University Press.

• Mellody, P. (1989). Facing codependence: What it is, where it comes from, how it sabotages our lives. Harper & Row.

• Schwartz, R. C. (2001). Introduction to the internal family systems model. Trailheads.

Before we begin, due to the society we live in and the amount of polarity and "whataboutme" toxin plaguing the planet.

Let’s ground in the reminder:

Think every time you plug your brain into the work. You are now in connection with yourself. We are all in the room—together. When those of you share, bear with me, okay? I love to see it. The gridlock moments, the frustrations, the realizations—the "shift" is what my clients have been collectively calling it. Sharing helps not just me, but those in the background silently watching, listening, and reading.

In my work with humans. Please trust me when I say:

As someone who has worked in many different settings living in El Paso has ignited a level of emotion in me for the clients I serve here. Let me be frank here (not sure why its frank, but thats for another day…)

For the women or men who have been harmed by family members who have engaged in SA acts, coercion acts etc. While their parents, family etc covered it up—kept it silent, and told their child to stay quiet about it. These cases always make me wonder why.

I bring that curiosity into the room.

For many, MANY, having these conversations is extremely uncomfortable. I mean, on the uncertainty scale you’re talking UN.CER.TAIN.TY… Are you catching what I’m throwing? This is scary for the generational roots of some of these families. I know we love the Costco style of things sometimes, but this work gets heavy. Especially if kids, or even the adults, fear that the family will collapse once they share the information or emotions that are heavy on their heart with the family.

What do you think the issue with this is, long term?

Keeping it a secret

Because over time keeping that secret is essentially the muscle you teach the family. Silence, Swallowing, aching alone. Can you imagine what little kids feel when their parents “don’t believe them” simply because believing them puts them at risk of danger.

Zoom Out…

This happens in the workplace all. the. time.

Can you imagine if you are navigating this in the workplace AND at home. Which one are you going to prioritize? Well if we look at the hierarchy of needs.

If your job is at risk, what provides your physiological needs: water, food, sleep, shelter? Your brain can only focus on those needs until you can achieve them. Now, see where "Love & Belonging" is on the image above? Many of our own parents, elders, colleagues, etc., choose belonging because their amygdala, just like ours—considers the concept of belonging a physiological safety need. It is the biggest threat to self. So much so, we lose track of ourselves and maybe can’t even hold a job, stable relationships, etc. The job represents a level of commitment that (like Leonardo DiCaprio and his dating age rules 🤭) some people cannot access or are unwilling to. This simply can be because the level of comfort associated with being committed to something, even a job, long-term is terrifying for some. "Am I going to be stuck here forever?"

Now, consider the concept Napoleon Hill coined as “drifting” from his book Outwitting the Devil. When we lose track of ourselves, sometimes we end up prioritizing relationships over our children. We prioritize ourselves over our children.

So, when we pick that need to belong. It could be belonging to a work system, it could be the feeling of needing to belong to a side (a parental side, a political side, a friends' side) that side could also be choosing the side of yourself. Every single one of those decisions is polarity, which we have to be careful of because the mind is sticky and rigid. If we train it to be consistently that way without adding the flavor of new ones, we are weakening our muscles of critical thinking and our ability to learn discernment. What ends up happening is we stretch our window of tolerance.

We stretch our window of tolerance.

Looking at the image below, being stretched into the different color zones. The red zone or the brown zone happens because the environment or other people are stretching you outside of what is the optimal arousal zone. The zone we want to aim for. Understand that even having days where we end up in the hyperarousal zones, but we make it back into the optimal arousal zone, those are still fantastic wins. If we have days where we're stuck in the hyperarousal zone, let's see if we can work on our level of metacognition here— so we can train our ability to notice when we drift into the red zones.

When we stretch our window of tolerance, we are basically telling our "little self" as we hammer that square peg into that round hole: "This is not sustainable for us." We say to the subconscious, "You can’t handle anything else but the pain and discomfort of this round hole we do not fit into." We dismiss our nervous system; we dismiss our resiliency of what we have already endured and survived; we dismiss our brain's magic ability to rewire. We keep hammering away, chipping at ourselves, not realizing the long-term effects this will have on our sticky little brain.

Teaching that silencing what happens is safer than speaking up is a lie. Also remember: every knowing being of what information is forced into silence, their body knows the lie it is holding. Think of the mind-body connection here. It almost makes us reflect on recent research by Dr. Michael Slepian (Columbia University), which has shifted our understanding of secrecy. It isn’t just the “hiding” that hurts; it is the cognitive load of living with the thought. We often talk about “carrying” a secret or “weighty” regret as if it’s just a metaphor, but the biology to that story tells a much grittier version.

When we hold onto a lie or a deep-seated regret, our brain doesn’t just store it in a quiet folder; it treats that information like a constant, low-grade threat. Dr. Michael Slepian (2019) found that the real damage of secrecy isn’t the “act of lying,” but the exhausting mental loop of thinking about it. This “cognitive load” keeps the body in a state of high alert, which eventually shows up physically.

Now, zoom out. Where are you looping in the same way, keeping you on high alert? Women? Many of us feel our partner needs to change his behavior, delete his socials, and do what you say in order for the relationship to be at “peace.”

Think of it as a "Body Tax." When you’re stuck in the Hyperarousal Zone the top part of Dr. Dan Siegel’s (2012) Window of Tolerance your nervous system is red-lining. You see this in the field as chronic jaw clenching, "mysterious" digestive flare-ups, and a heart rate that won’t settle down. I see it in my clients' sleep patterns, inflammation in the face, back pain, and irregular or missing cycles for women. Roese and Vohs (2012) point out that chronic regret acts like a glitching program in our hardware; we keep trying to "fix" the past, which spikes our cortisol and creates systemic inflammation. Essentially, if the mind refuses to process the pain or tell the truth, the body starts screaming through symptoms to get our attention. Do we listen? Probably as much as the parental wound listened to the little you…

As the saying goes, the body keeps the score.

Internalized Patriarchy Is a Survival Strategy

Now, one of the patterns I have been seeing and holding for many clients in this city. Across workplaces where men act inappropriately toward younger women, a consistent pattern appears again and again. There is almost always an elder woman in proximity to power who minimizes complaints, discourages reporting, reframes harm, or “handles it quietly.” She may scold the man privately. She may offer vague reassurance. She may advise the younger woman to “let it go,” to “be careful,” to not cause trouble. What she rarely does is confront the system or side publicly with the vulnerable.

Is this a coincidence?

I think it’s conditioning.

Research in feminist psychology and sociology consistently shows that women who came of age in rigid patriarchal systems often internalize male-dominant norms as a means of survival rather than their true internal belief. Deniz Kandiyoti famously described this as "patriarchal bargaining"the unconscious negotiation women make to secure safety, resources, or status within male-dominated hierarchies. Um… Tyra Banks? Perfect example of that. Can we see how silent we as a collective get when the label of "villain" gets placed on someone that looks like you? Hmm… Now we start reaching for justifications. I call this the selective outrage.

For elder women, proximity to male authority often became the price of stability.

Speaking up historically meant:

• loss of income

• social exile

• retaliation

• moral condemnation

• or becoming the “difficult woman”

So silence became framed as a wisdom many chase and even are honored for. Endurance became framed as strength. Compliance became reframed as well…Maturity.

What do you think this does to the collectives sticky brains?

They adapt into the belief that compliance is safe and demanding it is the mature thing to do.

Why Younger Women Are More Threatening Than the Man Himself

From a systems perspective, younger women are considered dangerous because they are unconditioned. Divergent much?

They haven’t yet learned to override discomfort.
They haven’t yet traded safety for belonging.
They haven’t yet normalized harm as “just how things are.”

Family systems theory shows that individuals who disrupt homeostasis even by naming truth are often targeted more harshly than those causing harm. This is something even I have experienced first hand being online. And guess what, it’s the women who are the most aggressive in the DM’s.

Now, In these dynamics, the man is predictable. The younger woman is destabilizing to the predictable system. So the system responds by silencing her, not stopping him. Raise your hand if you have been silenced in the workplace? Shit, over 10 years ago, I had a whole orthodontist demand I take my review down, tried to bride me with services to do it. This shows up everywhere

Now I want you to reflect briefly for a moment. Any of this sound familiar for you?

Attachment, Power, and Identification With the Aggressor

Clinical psychology adds another layer.

Anna Freud described identification with the aggressor as a defense mechanism where individuals align with power to reduce their own vulnerability to what is threat to their safety. Elder women who endured sexism, harassment, or exploitation without protection often unconsciously identify with male authority rather than with younger women whose pain reactivates unresolved grief, rage, or helplessness. Protecting the man protects the psyche from confronting what was never protected in themselves.

Grief…

Why “Handling It Quietly” Feels Safer Than Accountability

Organizational psychology research on institutional betrayal shows that systems often prioritize reputation management over individual safety. Elder women placed in supervisory or gatekeeping roles are frequently tasked explicitly or implicitly with containment rather than justice.

This creates a role conflict:

• Confronting the man risks destabilizing the institution.

• Supporting the younger woman risks exposing systemic failure.

• Silencing preserves order.

Order becomes confused with ethics.

Cultural Context Intensifies the Pattern

In collectivist or reputation-based cultures including many medical, religious, academic, and tight-knit ethnic communities, hierarchy is protected at all costs. I have seen this in therapy sessions and in clinical behavioral health capacities, especially with children and the loyalty binds to the parent, even if that parent is harmful. Research on honor-based systems shows that whistleblowers are often treated as traitors, regardless of what the truth is. Elder women, having survived within these norms, may view silence not as a form of harm, but as responsibility.

Also, zoom out a bit.

This is what helps us lead with curiosity instead of blame, because those of us that are accustom to living in chaos waves, the moment we reach the calm waters of the lake, we begin to feel unsafe. Why? Because the waves are familiar and we built skills adaptations to survive those waves. This is the same concept of the generations before us that do not know how to adapt to a world with "boundaries" and "safe spaces." Often, especially here in this city, I will see the older generations of women weaponize those very terms to get back the control that worked for them, but disconnecting their family from themselves in order to manage the women's emotions. This is what outsourcing is. In cultures where we scapegoat "The Culture" to justify harm, this is why you see it in the workplace; it spreads there.

The younger woman is framed as reckless.
The elder woman is framed as realistic.
The man remains untouched.

Sort of the same dynamic when they were kids right? (now, pause. We know if we are exercising our dendrites for nuance this is not the case for all correct?)

Just checking…

Think about it. Many times when I work with clients who have been cheated on, the woman turns on the "other woman" instead of turning on the man who was unfaithful. This in itself represents the very pattern these young women, as kids, watched their mothers do. They would hold the daughter accountable while bypassing what the son does. I saw this within my own family dynamics growing up, but also my husband’s family. I married into a Punjabi family; the hardest part about being in cultures that use religion and "this is how we are" is how often I watch little girls get bypassed. Little girls get slapped, or even their lip gets busted, because their little brother was never taught respect, boundaries, and the word "no." Many times in families that do not have the skills on how to navigate these complexities, they laugh when incidents happen. Many mothers also feel unsupported when faced with challenging boys with bad behavior and aggression. So how do they even get support? Especially if the elders are telling them how to parent.

This Is How Patriarchy Replicates Itself Without Men Having to Enforce It

How do you think patriarchal systems survive? Truly? It didn’t survive because men are powerful. They survive because women are trained to manage harm quietly, absorb discomfort, and redirect accountability downward. This does not make elder women villains, but for many who have not exercised the cognitive muscle of discernment, they will see this as blaming women. That is quite the contrary to my work. I speak about these patterns because someone has to.

For many who grow up in abusive environments with a mother or father who would allow the brother to get away with being physically harmful to the daughter,and only intervene with the son screamed for mom. If mothers and son cultures are being scrutinized for the way in which they are parenting, especially their boys. They are going to do what they need to do in order to survive that dynamic. Not understanding the unconscious dynamic they're creating within their children.

Field Note: The Metabolism of Harm and the Body Tax

This conversation is not about bashing men, and it is definitely not about bashing women. I want to go on a brief tangent real quickly about this because it is probably one of the aches I have experienced the most being online publicly. The amount of people who discharge their own unhealed wounds onto you, simply because they never learned how to metabolize them, is the same ache that shows up in the workplace. I myself have experienced workplace dynamics: being ambushed, having women threaten my license—all of it. Working in a school setting in this city really opened my eyes to selective avoidance: how we bypass harm depending on who did it, yet hold others accountable simply because we don’t like them, or because they said something we misperceived, or better yet, hating you because of how much others love you.

It’s easier to frame discussions that are difficult by externalizing blame, yelling “victim blamer.” But the one thing I have learned about those who scream that? They often suppress, hide, and cover up harm. This suppression isn’t just a social habit; it’s a physiological burden. As Slepian and Moulton-Tetlock (2019) noted, the “cognitive load” of keeping secrets or hiding harm drains our mental resources and keeps the nervous system in a state of constant, low-level threat.

How are families supposed to heal if the older generations shut you down from talking? Meanwhile, they still expect you to honor what they need you to honor for them because it regulates them. But have we ever asked what makes our parents and the generations before us so activated to begin with? Avoidance and suppression do so much to the body. Chronic regret and unresolved trauma act like a “glitching program” in our biology, spiking cortisol and causing systemic inflammation (Roese & Vohs, 2012).

Substance use gets manifested as a coping means because to live with harm, an ache, or a breach of safety—without being protected by your own parents—feels like a level of abandonment. It leaves you feeling safer to just mimic the same adaptations they keep trying to instill within you. This is the core of the "mind-body" trap: when we are forced out of our Window of Tolerance (Siegel, 2012) by a lack of protection, our bodies begin to "keep the score," manifesting that emotional abandonment as physical pain, fatigue, or addiction. It is about understanding how certain people repeatedly get away with harm inside cultures and systems built on avoidance and why that pattern persists across generations.

Because when harm is never named, it doesn’t disappear.
It mutates and spreads.

This Happens to Men Too and Often by Other Men

Men are also harmed in these systems. In workplaces, institutions, teams, fraternities, religious settings, and medical hierarchies, younger or lower-status men are often subjected to boundary violations, humiliation, coercion, hazing, or sexualized misconduct by more powerful men.

And the response is often the same:

• minimize

• normalize

• joke

• redirect

• silence

“Don’t be dramatic.”
“That’s just how he is.”
“You’ll get over it.”

The system protects the offender because he holds power and the culture has learned to orbit around it. The same way it learned to orbit around the woman in the other example.

Avoidance Is the Root, Not Gender

Cultures that are organized around avoidance prioritize:

• harmony over truth

• reputation over repair

• stability over safety

• containment over accountability

In these systems, naming harm is more threatening than the harm itself.

In these systems, naming harm is more threatening than the harm itself. So the response becomes managerial in nature. This is how people “get away with things”—not through conspiracy, but through collective discomfort with confrontation. If I had to point the finger at the culprit of what I see in the community I serve in El Paso, this is the pesky culprit: Fear of confrontation.

It Starts in Childhood and It’s Not Subtle

What I have seen in my clinical practice, especially at the time when I was working with children... Unfortunately, due to the amount of subpoenas you get when working with kids, it just became so problematic for my other clients to work with kids because now we pull systems in. But what happens if the system the child’s family is in is also the same system that the city operates in? Now you have school staff, judges, therapists, and doctors that condition the same avoidance. It’s probably why me working here ruffles feathers, because I have no issue with confrontation, because I don’t see it as confrontation; I see it as communicating.

In many families, little boys are allowed to:

• hit

• bite

• spit

• rage

• break boundaries

Behaviors that would be swiftly corrected in daughters are reframed as:
“He’s just energetic.”
“He doesn’t know better.”
“Boys will be boys.”

Meanwhile, daughters are taught early to:

• self-regulate

• anticipate others

• manage emotions

• be agreeable

• take responsibility

This is not because parents don’t love their sons; it is because many mothers do not feel safe enforcing consequences on boys the way they do with girls. Why is that, I wonder? Who is watching? 👀

That discomfort matters, but so does the need for inquiry.

The Invisible Tron Highways (A.K.A: undercurrents of energy)

When Avoidance Meets Puberty, the Body Carries the Cost

When behavior is never named, limited, or metabolized, it doesn’t resolve, it discharges. This discharge becomes the invisible Tron highways of undercurrents the eyes can’t see but the body can feel. When that incongruences is named gaslighting starts. We see this at the macro all the time, we DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse, Victim, Offender.

Unaddressed aggression, entitlement, shame, and confusion often convert into:

• hypersexuality

• compulsive sexual behavior

• substance use

• emotional numbing

• risk-seeking

This is what happens when we regulate the wrong way because no one taught us the healthy way. Avoidance doesn’t create peace it creates pressure. What happens to people under pressure with no release valve?

They implode on themselves. If you are in the cross fire that means you too.

Why Elder Women Protect Men Later in Life

When sons grow into men without ever encountering meaningful relational limits, the system adjusts around them rather than asking them to adjust or at least learn to adapt.

Elder women often step in as buffers:

• smoothing conflicts

• explaining behavior

• discouraging complaints

• reframing harm

Psychodynamically, this is linked to identification with the aggressor, a defense described by Anna Freud, where aligning with power reduces one’s own vulnerability. Protecting him feels safer than confronting the system that failed to protect anyone. Have a son and your mom will start interfering with your parenting because her old operating system can’t understand the new age princinspae of accountability. Also, please note. there are many mothers who step into the identification role with their own daughters. This could be due to wanting access to grandkids, or fear of losing the relationship. We also want to consider the intrinsic motivation behind those fears and attachment regardless if valid. Validity is not the point here. Inquiry is. The goal is to understand the why behind the behavior within ourselves. So if you are playing the role as the mother of the daughter who you fear will cut you off, take the grand kids, etc. That message is for you. Reflect, How did my daughter learn this. Not from the lens of blame. From the lens of investigator of patterns.

Now, Circling Back:

We have to circle back to where this begins: the family system. When silence shows up as a means of safety, it creates a devastating bind. Imagine a little girl coming forward to her mother, letting her know, “Hey, your boyfriend touched me,” or “So-and-so did XYZ.” If that mother has unhealed attachment dynamics, if she hasn’t learned how to advocate or voice her truth—she is paralyzed. She may be too afraid of rocking the boat with the family member whose son did it, or she’s terrified of the fallout within the family structure or her own partnership. The reasons don’t matter when we look at the impact long term. In that moment, that mother may unconsciously silence a real, visceral trauma in her daughter. The harm gets minimized because of the mother’s fear of facing a discomforting conversation.

This is exactly why, when I train my clients through effective communication protocols, I tell them: It is not about doing it perfectly. It’s about getting it out. That is the real work just getting it said. Because if you don’t do it now, the world will eventually put you back into that exact same position. You’re going to have to do it at work for yourself, or you’re going to have to do it somewhere else to advocate for your own child. The “Body Tax” and the systemic pressure will keep rising until the silence is broken.

The Conversation That Needs to Happen

The real question is not "Who is the villain?" It is:

• Why does confrontation feel more dangerous than harm? Especially a harm that many of us are already silently suffering in?

• Why are daughters expected to tolerate limits sons are not given?

• Why does silence feel like safety? Who taught us it? Where do you think they learned it from?

• What would accountability look like if it wasn’t confused with punishment?

This is not a gender war (despite the algorithms plot to turn the genders against each other. ) This is a systems inquiry, and systems only change when what was once unspeakable becomes discussable. All my work asks is…. Let’s put it on the table.

Like kinetic sand that we dig our hands in— Feel and explore.

Reflection for the Reader

1. Where have you seen harm redirected instead of addressed?

2. When has “keeping the peace” required someone else to carry the cost?

3. Whose safety was ultimately protected?

What came up for you with this?

Our corner of readers is growing and this is so so exciting for our corner of the internet! 🥰

As always Safari members.

Come as you are. Where you are. 🫶🏽

📣Don’t Forget: Advice Column is available.
For questions, patterns, or situations you’re carrying write in.

Link here.

References

Kandiyoti, D. (1988). Bargaining with Patriarchy. Gender & Society, 2(3), 274–290.

Roese, N. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). The Visualization of Regret: A Functional View. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 21(3), 172-177.

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

Slepian, M. L., & Moulton-Tetlock, E. (2019). The Cognitive Load of Secrecy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(2), 217-232.

Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.

Data Collectors…

Happy Monday!

Let’s talk Activated Survival Self (ASS)

There’s something I heard once that stuck with me:

This is not about good or bad, right or wrong. It’s about what’s sustainable for you. Understand in this context ass is the part of ourselves we hide. These parts come out when we are moody, tired, upset, or angry. They show up when we are suppressing our truth or when our boundaries are being stretched past our own window of tolerance. It’s the part of us that activates when we feel judged, exposed, threatened, or at risk of losing control. It’s what Jung would call the shadow self— the disowned parts of us that surface under pressure. In here, I call it the Activated Survival Self, and if I’m honest, this isn’t about spotting the ass in other people. It’s about noticing it with ourselves.

The Activated Survival Self shows up when we’re trying to protect ourselves, but most of the time, we’re not protecting ourselves from other people. We’re protecting ourselves from… ourselves.

From shame.

From inadequacy.

From the fear of being replaceable, unworthy, too much, not enough.

That’s when we avoid. That’s when we react. That’s when we triangulate instead of communicate. That’s when we blame tone instead of facing the message. That’s when we say, “Not everyone can leave,” “Not everyone has access,” “Slavery! What about that, huh?!” anytime we are faced with our own agency, instead of asking ourselves why we’re tolerating what we say is intolerable. We jump to the extremes, and those are often data.

Realizing how I am showing up in my marriage pressured, revolving in the old script and the metacognition training is showing me how my nervous system wants to blame my husband. This is what many women fall into. Doesn’t help that all we see is women scapegoat men for what they refuse to face.

Ego noise.

All the tension, pressure cooker energy. That wasn’t about my husband. That was about the version of me that had quietly outsourced parts of myself and called it “doable.” “Okay… not an issue.” The part of myself that autopilots right back into the old version of myself that over-accommodates for someone else’s comfort. When we love our partners we must be careful not to love at the cost to ourself. That love can easily become resentment. My husband and I have faced our fair share of seasonal challenges. Each time evolving us into a level of awareness that brings me back to looking at myself.

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I want to start this series because well… my ass shows too. And lately it’s been peeking it’s little self out and causing me to self-sabotage, over-function, do too much. You know the drill. I noticed earlier this month when I published 9 pieces of work in 2 weeks. I needed to. Slow. Down.

That was a sign.

A sign that showed me I was in the ASS default mode network, looping and looping, and an interruption was needed fast.

This series isn’t about shaming the ass. It’s about naming it. Because once you can name your Activated Survival Self, you stop confusing it with your identity or other peoples assumed intentions. You will start noticing it as a sign that something is out of alignment with you and your inner self. Exploring what brings you back into alignment balanced and not feeling so disoriented all the time. Doing this content work only puts all my millions of ideas in a place where object permanence lives heavy. Working from home, does not help the discipline either. But it does in fact provide opportunities to build it.

The Activated Survival Self does not listen. Nope… it does not regulate. It does not self-reflect. It denies, deflects, and tone-polices.

What I am see now with people’s ASS is, It will quote therapy language, repeat buzzwords, and perform insight, but it won’t embody any of it. The ASS protects ego stability at all costs. The trap is trying to win over the ASS that is within yourself by succumbing to it, or in others by reacting to it.

Trying to explain yourself better.

Trying to perfect your tone or adjust it.

Trying to prove you’re loving enough, calm enough, patient enough to deserve being heard. All that does is condition the world that you will shrink for them… At the expense of yourself. Relationships, Marriages, Workplace dynamics all challenge us with this.

Understand, the Activated Survival Self is not relational; it’s protective. We can’t reason with someone’s defense system when their identity feels threatened nor can others reason with us. The only move is refusal. Refusal to engage the defensive behavior. Refusal to argue with distortions from other people (which much of what people say is a distortion). Refusal to shrink yourself to make someone else more comfortable in their avoidance.

You wait for the self to return. If it returns.

Now What triggers the ASS to show up?

Well that depends on you, your triggers, and your nervous system baseline. In future writings and podcast episodes we can unpacks this further. Part of my ASS is trying to Costco style everything to the point of burn out for me. 🤭

Here are some examples to see where we have fallen into ASSery

1. “Not Everyone Can Leave” as Identity Armor

You see an educational post about boundaries or leaving toxic environments. Your chest tightens. Instead of asking yourself why you’re still staying, you post:

“Not everyone has that option.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“This is privileged advice.”

Are structural barriers real? Yes.
But sometimes that statement becomes an emotional shield and a way to normalize endurance instead of confronting fear.

Bypass move: Reflection
Is my comment about systemic reality… or is it regulating my attachment to suffering?

2. Triangulating Instead of Communicating

Your ASS avoids direct discomfort. Instead of asking the person directly, you tell three other people how upset you are. You gather allies. You rehearse the injustice.

You say:

“I just need to vent.”
“I don’t want drama.”
“I don’t even care that much.”

But you do care about that really. You’re just scared of confrontation and found a way to co-regulate at the expense to never facing the issue.

Bypass move:
I’m talking about them instead of to them because I’m afraid of rejection.

3. Over-Functioning to Prevent Abandonment

   You anticipate needs. You smooth everything over. You manage emotions for two. Your ASS believes if you stay useful, you’ll stay safe.

Bypass logic: I’m just supportive.
Truth: You’re afraid to stop and see what happens if you don’t perform.

4. Losing Self and Calling It Devotion
   You stop asking what you want. You stop checking your own signals. You become reactive instead of reflective. Your ASS has fused with the relationship.

Bypass logic: “This is what commitment looks like.”
Truth: Commitment without selfhood breeds resentment.

As I explore my own ASS and how it shows up under environmental pressure or perceived pressure due to old scripts trying to come back online. I challenge you all to do the same. Women, for many of us, that script goes online when we are in relationships. Understand that much of the information out there is designed for the ASS to come out. Many people have their ASS permanently stuck as their baseline for functioning and have no idea why.

What I mean by this is: if you are always at an 8+ on the nervous system activation scale and 10 is the highest (meaning explosive, reactive behavior), while 3 or below is rest-and-digest, the goal state do you know what you need to get there?

Have you ever even been there?

If you have never been under a 3 on the nervous system scale, how will you know that you arrived there? What will you notice? What will you see? What will it feel like? This is training. Because if you can’t even notice your own rate fluctuating—and what environmental or internal factors influence it—how do you expect your partner to?

Your children to?

People in your life to?

That’s the ASS right there, creating an unconscious contract for others. Outsourcing the internal work.

Everyone’s ass shows up eventually.

Mine.
Yours.
Your partner’s.
Your boss’s.
Your favorite influencer’s.

The question isn’t whether it exists. The question is whether you can see it when it’s yours. If you can only identify the Activated Survival Self in other people, you’re still inside yours. This series isn’t about shaming it. We don’t do that shame business over here. The goal is to sit with it, look at it, feel it, but most importantly, name it.

If that feels uncomfortable, good. That means we’re close to something honest.

We’re not here to erase our shadow. We’re here to integrate it.

Till next time.

Come as you are, where you are 🫶🏽

INTRODUCTION

Tone policing …. Have you heard of It?

It’s rarely ever about tone.
It’s about discomfort, shame activation, and the collapse of someone’s nervous system into a story about what your tone means about them. What looks like “you’re being rude” often reveals, “Something in me got touched, and I’d rather correct you than face it.” This is not about invalidating the real impact tone can have, tone matters, yes. But the meaning we attach to tone is a psychological Rorschach test that exposes our conditioning, our trauma, and our developmental gaps. Clinical research on shame (Nathanson, Scheff) shows that when internal distress cannot be metabolized, it is externalized through correction, accusation, or moral framing. In trauma-exposed populations, tone becomes a proxy battlefield because it feels safer to regulate delivery than to confront content. What presents as “civility” is often an unconscious attempt to regain nervous system control. This pattern is not random; it reflects learned survival strategies shaped by culture, identity pressure, and relational power dynamics.

From a clinical perspective, these patterns are best understood through the interaction of identity pressure, shame conditioning, and nervous system adaptation, rather than through character or intent. Groups that have historically faced surveillance, marginalization, or moral scrutiny often develop heightened sensitivity to perceived threat, including threat embedded in language, tone, or confrontation. In such contexts, tone policing functions as a regulatory strategy, an attempt to restore internal safety by controlling external input. Across clinical populations with mood disorders or trauma-based personality structures, particularly those involving shame vulnerability or identity diffusion, direct naming can activate collapse, rage, or defensive moralization rather than reflection. The observed behaviors are therefore not random, nor are they uniformly distributed across populations; they reflect adaptive strategies shaped by developmental history, cultural conditioning, and chronic stress exposure. What appears socially as overreaction or control is often clinically legible as survival logic carried into environments where it no longer serves.

This article explores:

1. Why people fixate on tone

2. Why marginalized groups police one another

3. Shame → Deflection → Role Reversal (the UNO Reverse pattern)

4. How families groom us into tone reactivity

5. The micro–macro link between personal relationships and social behavior

6. Why discomfort exposure is essential for development

7. Research on perception, shame, interoception, and moral superiority

8. The sociological impact of 2020 on entitlement, vigilance, and mistrust

9. Why people interpret naming as shaming

10. How tone policing reinforces stagnation, personally and culturally

Clinical note:
Each of these dynamics reflects the interaction between nervous system regulation, shame processing, identity threat, and learned relational survival strategies. Rather than isolated social behaviors, they represent patterned responses shaped by developmental conditioning, family systems, cultural reinforcement, and trauma exposure. Taken together, they illustrate how avoidance of discomfort at the individual level scales into rigidity, control, and moralized reactivity at the collective level.

When Tone Policing Isn’t Really About Tone

Tone policing is a defensive maneuver—a neurological shortcut used when the nervous system doesn’t want to metabolize truth.

Polyvagal Theory (Porges)

When someone hears something that activates shame, the body often drops into:

• Dorsal collapse (“I’m being attacked”)

• Sympathetic fight/argue (“Fix your tone”)

• Fawn (“I’ll be good if you soften your delivery”)

The cognitive brain then scrambles to justify this reaction, often locating the “problem” externally.
Tone becomes the scapegoat.

Tone is the decoy.
Shame is the trigger.
Deflection is the strategy.

📓 (Field Notes)

From a neurobiological perspective, shame is one of the fastest emotions to collapse access to the prefrontal cortex. When shame is activated, the nervous system prioritizes threat reduction over meaning-making, which limits curiosity and increases reactivity. In this state, the brain seeks an externalizable cause to explain internal distress, because turning inward would require tolerance of vulnerability. Tone becomes an ideal target because it is subjective, socially reinforced, and morally defensible. Correcting tone allows the individual to regain a sense of control while avoiding engagement with the content that triggered shame. Clinically, this maneuver functions as a protective bypass—it preserves self-image and nervous system stability at the cost of relational truth and repair.

Over time, repeated reliance on this strategy reinforces avoidance pathways rather than integration, making discomfort feel increasingly dangerous and correction feel increasingly justified.

The Story We Tell Ourselves About Tone

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s theory of constructed emotion shows us that the brain fills in perceptual gaps with prediction.
So when someone says something direct, the listener’s brain asks:

• “Is this safe?”

• “What does this say about me?”

• “What old template does this resemble?”

Tone becomes the surface-level justification for deeper fear-based meaning-making.

People aren’t reacting to what was said, but what their body interpreted it to mean.

📓 (Field Notes)

According to predictive processing models, the brain does not passively receive information; it actively constructsexperience based on prior learning, emotional memory, and bodily sensation. Interoceptive signals, such as heart rate, gut tension, or muscle contraction, are interpreted by the brain before conscious language emerges. When these bodily cues resemble past threat states, the brain assigns meaning rapidly and defensively. In individuals with trauma histories or shame conditioning, directness is often pre-associated with criticism, rejection, or loss of attachment. As a result, the nervous system generates a narrative that feels factual but is actually inferential. Tone becomes the story the mind tells to make sense of a bodily alarm it does not yet know how to regulate.

Clinically, this explains why reassurance rarely resolves tone-based conflict. The issue is not misunderstanding; it is misattribution driven by somatic memory. Until the body learns that directness does not equal danger, tone will continue to be experienced as threat rather than information.

Family Conditioning: Where Tone Reactivity Begins

So many adults were raised by parents who said in their sweetest voice:

• “You can talk to me.”

But when you actually did, they:

• Dismissed

• Minimized

• Gaslit

• Accused

• Deflected shame

• Claimed someone “put you up to it”

This creates a vicious cycle:
Tone doesn’t feel like communication to them—it feels like danger.

This also trains people to weaponize tone against those who confront them because:

• “If I can make you wrong, I don’t have to feel what you just triggered in me.”

This is how entire families collapse into:

• Avoidance

• Delusion

• Chronic misattunement

• Fragile self-image

• Punishing the truth-teller

📓 (Field Notes)

From a developmental and family systems perspective, this pattern reflects attachment injury paired with emotional invalidation. When caregivers verbally invite honesty but behaviorally punish it, children experience a double bind: connection is promised, but truth threatens attachment. Over time, the nervous system learns that expression equals risk, and tone becomes fused with survival. In these environments, the child does not learn how to repair rupture; they learn how to avoid it. Direct communication becomes associated with shame, retaliation, or abandonment, while indirectness and emotional suppression are rewarded as safety. This conditions a hypervigilant relational stance in which confrontation is perceived not as information, but as threat.

Clinically, this is where tone sensitivity becomes intergenerational. Adults raised in such systems often react to present-day conversations through the lens of unresolved childhood dynamics. Weaponizing tone allows them to regain control and avoid the internal collapse that once followed speaking honestly. The truth-teller is punished not for being wrong, but for destabilizing the family’s emotional equilibrium.

The UNO Reverse Strategy (Role Reversal as Self-Protection)

This pattern appears everywhere in my Safari data:

Person A: Names a dynamic clearly.
Person B:

• Avoids shame

• Clings to pride

• Flips the narrative

• Portrays themselves as the harmed party

This creates a warped hierarchy where:
Accountability = Attack
Honesty = Abuse
Naming = Shaming

Person B now gets to maintain innocence, superiority, and emotional control without ever engaging in repair or growth.

This is common among:

• Men (especially Black men raised under respectability pressure)

• Individuals with fragile self-concepts

• People conditioned to equate discomfort with humiliation

It’s survival—not villainy.
But survival strategies cannot build intimacy or community.

📓 (Field Notes)

Clinically, this maneuver reflects a shame-avoidant defense organized around self-preservation rather than malice. When accountability threatens identity coherence, the psyche prioritizes stability by externalizing fault and internalizing victimhood. Role reversal allows the individual to remain emotionally intact without confronting dependency, vulnerability, or error. This strategy is reinforced in environments where dignity, respectability, or moral positioning are tied to survival. In such contexts, admitting harm can feel synonymous with annihilation. While adaptive in high-threat systems, this defense becomes relationally corrosive over time, blocking mutuality, accountability, and repair. What once ensured survival ultimately prevents connection.

2020’s Sociological Impact on Shame, Entitlement & Hypervigilance

The pandemic and social justice uprisings produced a generation that:

• Became chronically online

• Obsessed over moral purity

• Developed hypervigilant perception

• Adopted outrage as identity

• Learned to avoid discomfort via performance

• Mistook emotional intensity for clarity

This created what I call the Panic Child Culture—adults policing one another’s tone, language, and choices as a way to regulate their own internal chaos.

“Don’t shop at Target.”
“We hate Teslas now.”
“That word is problematic.”

These are not moral truths.
They are subjective survival codes and they are being enforced as universal laws and the default for everyone. Those pesky unconscious contracts. Sociologically, this is the same mechanism behind cult dynamics, purity culture, and rigid family systems.

📓 (Field Notes)

From a clinical and sociological lens, prolonged exposure to collective threat collapses tolerance for ambiguity and increases reliance on external regulation. During periods of uncertainty, individuals seek psychological safety through rules, certainty, and moral alignment. Online platforms amplify this response by rewarding vigilance, outrage, and performative correctness with belonging and validation. Hypervigilance narrows perception. Nuance is experienced as danger, disagreement as threat, and neutrality as betrayal. Emotional intensity becomes mistaken for insight because it feels stabilizing to the nervous system. Clinically, this mirrors family systems where emotional chaos is managed through rigid rules rather than emotional processing.

The Panic Child Culture is not evidence of moral evolution; it is evidence of widespread nervous system overwhelm. What looks like conviction is often dysregulation seeking structure. Without discomfort tolerance and internal regulation, communities default to control, surveillance, and tone enforcement as substitutes for safety.

Why Marginalized Groups Police Each Other

Ethnographic observation and sociological theory point to:

• Internalized oppression → Lateral aggression

• Identity fragility → Policing “the in-group”

• Collective trauma → Hypervigilance

• Moral performance → Social currency

Black people correct other Black people.
Queer communities police language.

Not all.
But enough to map the pattern.

📓 (Field Notes)

Clinically, lateral policing emerges when external threat cannot be safely confronted, forcing regulation inward rather than upward. In marginalized or historically surveilled groups, belonging becomes conditional, and deviation is experienced as danger to group survival. Correcting the in-group provides a sense of control, moral positioning, and temporary safety when systemic power feels inaccessible.

Identity fragility intensifies this dynamic. When identity itself carries unprocessed trauma, disagreement threatens not just beliefs but coherence of self. Moral performance then becomes a stabilizing behavior, rewarded with inclusion, protection, and status. Over time, emotional vigilance replaces relational trust, and correction replaces curiosity.

What appears as accountability is often a form of anxiety management and it is being disguised as ethics. The nervous system mistakes control for safety, and communities begin reenacting the very dynamics they were formed to resist.

The Link to Couples & Family Gridlock

If naming is interpreted as shaming, then:

• No repair can happen

• No developmental correction occurs

• No intimacy grows

• No honest conversation can survive

Tone sensitivity → Shame activation → Perception distortion → Emotional shutdown.

You can’t build a relationship with someone who experiences every boundary as an attack.

📓 (Field Notes)

From a couples and family systems perspective, repair requires the capacity to tolerate discomfort without collapsing into defensiveness. When shame is easily activated, the nervous system prioritizes self-protection over connection, making mutual influence impossible. Boundaries are misread as rejection, and feedback is experienced as character assassination rather than information.

Over time, this creates relational gridlock. One partner learns to self-silence to preserve peace, while the other remains emotionally unchallenged and underdeveloped. Intimacy erodes not because of conflict, but because truth becomes unsafe. Clinically, this pattern mirrors early attachment environments where emotional expression threatened connection, and it reliably reproduces disconnection across generations.

Discomfort Exposure Is the Muscle We Need

Growth requires:

• Discomfort

• Shame tolerance

• Nervous system endurance

• Discernment

• Emotional agility

You can’t become who you are without feeling things you’ve spent years avoiding.

Tone policing destroys this process by redirecting the discomfort back onto the other person.

📓(Field Notes)

From a neurodevelopmental perspective, emotional growth occurs through graded exposure to distress within a tolerable window. Avoidance may reduce discomfort in the short term, but it prevents the nervous system from learning that intensity can be survived without collapse or retaliation. Shame tolerance, like any regulatory capacity, strengthens through experience, not protection.

Clinically, tone policing functions as a displacement maneuver. Rather than metabolizing internal activation, the individual externalizes it, interrupting learning and reinforcing fragility. Over time, this erodes discernment, as discomfort becomes synonymous with danger rather than data. Emotional agility cannot develop in environments where discomfort is consistently redirected or punished.

Tone AND Truth: The Nuance

Tone matters.
But tone is not all that matters.

Sometimes the presence of tone tells us:

• “A boundary is being hit”

• “A truth is landing”

• “A cycle is repeating”

• “Someone finally found their voice”

Instead of asking:
“Why is there a tone?”
People ask:
“How dare you have one?”

That is the sickness.

📓 (Field Notes)

From a clinical standpoint, mature communication requires the ability to differentiate affect from intent. Tone carries information about nervous system activation, but it does not inherently invalidate content. When systems focus exclusively on tone, they often do so to avoid engaging with meaning, responsibility, or change.

In regulated relationships, tone is interpreted as data, not disqualification. It signals pressure points, unresolved patterns, or moments of differentiation. Pathologizing tone suppresses voice, reinforces power imbalances, and privileges comfort over truth. Clinically, this dynamic preserves dysfunction by silencing the very signals needed for repair.

The ability to hear truth with tone is not a threat to safety. It is a marker of psychological maturity.

Conclusion

Tone policing is not a communication issue. It is a regulation issue.

Across families, relationships, and cultures, tone becomes the battleground when shame is intolerable, truth feels destabilizing, and nervous systems lack the capacity to stay present with discomfort. What is framed as civility or safety is often an avoidance strategy that protects fragility at the expense of growth. So ask yourselves can you afford that? When tone is used to disqualify truth, development comes to a halt. These patterns do not emerge in isolation. They are shaped by early family conditioning, reinforced by identity pressure, amplified by digital culture, and normalized by systems that reward performance over processing. Survival strategies that once protected individuals and communities from harm are now being misapplied in contexts that require discernment, differentiation, and accountability.

Leading with curiosity is critical, because narcissism is not always the Voldemort-style villain we imagine. Often, it is a frightened, panicked child who was abandoned emotionally, left without the skills to ask for help, and forced to adapt in order to receive care or survive at all. That adaptation may later cause harm, but it did not begin as cruelty. It began as protection.

Curiosity does not excuse harm. It allows us to interrupt the loop.

Growth requires the willingness to feel what we have been taught to avoid, to hear truth without collapsing into shame, and to remain in relationship without outsourcing discomfort onto others. When tone is met with discernment instead of defensiveness, and truth is met with regulation instead of control, intimacy becomes possible again.

The work ahead is not to eliminate tone, but to build the nervous system capacity to hear it.

That is how individuals mature.
That is how families repair.
That is how cultures evolve.

Extended Reading & Clinical Foundations

Nervous System Regulation & Trauma

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

• van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score.

• Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture.

• Ogden, P., Minton, K., & Pain, C. (2006). Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy.

Shame, Defensiveness & Moral Emotion

• Nathanson, D. L. (1992). Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self.

• Scheff, T. J. (1967). Toward a Sociological Theory of Shame.

• Brown, B. (2012). Daring Greatly (for cultural shame literacy, not diagnostic framing).

• Tangney, J. P., & Dearing, R. L. (2002). Shame and Guilt.

Constructed Emotion, Perception & Meaning-Making

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

• Siegel, D. J. (2012). The Developing Mind.

• Friston, K. (2010). The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory? (advanced reading on predictive processing).

Family Systems, Attachment & Differentiation

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

• Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and Family Therapy.

• Main, M., & Solomon, J. (1990). Procedures for Identifying Disorganized Attachment.

• Siegel, D. J., & Hartzell, M. (2003). Parenting from the Inside Out.

Personality Structure, Narcissism & Defensive Adaptation

• Kernberg, O. (1975). Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.

• Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self.

• Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love.

• Ronningstam, E. (2011). Narcissistic Personality Disorder: A Clinical Perspective.

Social Identity, Power & Moral Policing

• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.

• Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish.

• Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind.

• Bandura, A. (1999). Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities.

Emotional Labor, Culture & Performance

• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart.

• Illouz, E. (2007). Consuming the Romantic Utopia.

• Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism.

• Turkle, S. (2015). Reclaiming Conversation.

Collective Trauma, Moral Panic & Social Contagion

• Durkheim, E. (1897). Suicide (foundational for collective emotional regulation).

• Girard, R. (1986). The Scapegoat.

• Moscovici, S. (1985). The Age of the Crowd.

• Sunstein, C. R. (2019). How Change Happens.

Clinical Adjacent / Integrative Perspectives

• Wiest, B. The Mountain Is You (popular synthesis of emotional avoidance).

• Tolle, E. The Power of Now (non-clinical but relevant to reactivity awareness).

• Perry, B. D. What Happened to You? (developmental trauma lens).

Before I begin, there are reflection questions at the end of this essay :)

I recently rewatched the 1996 movie The Mirror Has Two Faces, and what struck me besides the nostalgia (which is why I love to watch old movies- ) was discomfort. The film felt less like a romantic comedy and more like a quiet warning that somehow slipped past us. It asked a question we no longer seem interested in asking: What happens when desire replaces devotion, and stimulation replaces intimacy? In today’s culture, love is often spoken about as a feeling, an aesthetic, or a performance. Sex, meanwhile, has been elevated as proof of connection. Fast, accessible, and detached from responsibility. The problem is not sex itself. The problem is what we’ve asked sex to stand in for.

From a clinical perspective, this confusion is not accidental. Attachment research has long shown that humans are wired for bonding through attunement, not novelty alone (Bowlby, 1988; Ainsworth, 1979). Yet modern dating culture prioritizes chemistry, immediacy, and desirability, signals of arousal—over the slower signals of safety, curiosity, and trust. That Dopamine high many chase in the early stages of falling for someone gets mistaken for intimacy. While a. spark gets mistaken for a bond. I watch this play out in my clinical practice with clients as well as my peers.

Neuroscience helps explain why this illusion is so convincing. Novel sexual encounters reliably activate dopamine pathways associated with reward and anticipation, but dopamine is not the bonding chemical—oxytocin is. Oxytocin is released through consistency, emotional safety, eye contact, mutual regulation, and time (Carter, 1998). When sex happens without relational containment, the nervous system may be stimulated, but it is not necessarily soothed or secured. This is why people can feel exhilarated and empty at the same time. A pattern I see often with many clients. Especially those where love was not something observed.

Sociologically, we are living in what Zygmunt Bauman called liquid love—relationships designed to remain flexible, non-binding, and disposable. Commitment is framed as a threat to freedom, while detachment is framed as empowerment. Needing depth is quietly recoded as insecurity. Wanting emotional continuity is labeled “too much.” What often goes unnamed is that this ethos mirrors avoidant attachment at scale a cultural norm that rewards emotional distance while punishing dependency, even though dependency is biologically normative.

Women’s bodies become central casualties in this system. When desirability is treated as social currency, bodies are no longer homes—they are products. Zoom out, in todays society more so, alteration is encouraged. Optimization of self is rewarded, and aging? Well aging has become pathologized. Being wanted becomes conflated with being valued. This is something I see in youth especially these days where “getting a man” is what many high school girls are looking for even if that “man” is unhealthy. So, the question subtly shifts from “Am I known?” to “Am I consumable?”

One of the most radical ideas in The Mirror Has Two Faces and one of the most endangered today is the notion that conversation itself can be erotic. Not performative banter, but a sort of sustained curiosity. The kind that requires listening, tolerating difference, and staying present when fantasy collapses. Can any of you reading remember a time where you experienced a level of conversation like that?

Today though, what I see with peers, friends, family, and the people I work with is that people often know each other’s bodies before they know each other’s inner worlds. I joke that we let our freak flags fly, exchanging bodily fluids but can’t exchange vulnerability. We touch before we talk, then wonder why we feel unseen. The downstream consequences are visible everywhere. Despite unprecedented access to sex, dating apps, and erotic imagery, loneliness rates continue to climb. In 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released an advisory declaring that loneliness and social isolation in the United States had reached epidemic levels and represent a significant public health concern with about half of American adults reporting measurable loneliness and associated health risks comparable to smoking or obesity. Clinically, I see people who are sexually experienced but emotionally underdeveloped. Adept at performance, unfamiliar with the art of repair. They confuse independence with isolation and autonomy with disconnection.

Then there is the collective denial around consequence. We speak of sex as casual, but biology has never agreed to that contract. Children are not accidents of recklessness; they are reminders that sex has always been a creative force, whether we respect it or not. The shock is not that pregnancy happens it’s that we’ve culturally dissociated sex from meaning so thoroughly that we act surprised when life emerges from it. Now, breathe…This is not a moral argument. It is a nervous system one. When intimacy is rushed and attachment is avoided, people remain chronically dysregulated. They chase stimulation to soothe what only safety can heal. Over time, desire burns hot and fast, while love—slow, requiring patience and accountability which feels unfamiliar and even threatening.

The “Always the Bridesmaid” Belief and the Sexual Shortcut

Now, one thing that really stood out for me with this movie that I see in my clinicial practice. One of the quieter but most revealing threads in The Mirror Has Two Faces lives inside Barbra Streisand’s character in her assumptions. Before anything is confirmed, she already believes she will not be chosen. When Jeff Bridges’ character shows interest, her mind reflexively fills in the gap: He must want my sister. He must already have slept with her. No one wants me without an ulterior motive.

This is not vanity or insecurity in the shallow sense. Clinically, this is a core limiting belief a schema organized around undesirability. She even names it publicly in her classroom: “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” When beliefs like this calcify, they don’t just shape self-esteem; they shape behavior, expectation, and attachment strategy. From an attachment lens, this belief creates a relational paradox. If you expect not to be chosen, emotional intimacy becomes dangerous because it invites confirmation of the wound. Sex, however, offers a shortcut. It provides immediate evidence of desirability without requiring sustained emotional exposure. In that sense, sex becomes safer than love. Neurobiologically, this makes sense even if it doesn’t heal. Sexual engagement reliably increases dopamine, which temporarily improves mood, confidence, and felt worth. In a society organized around feeling better now, this relief is seductive. The problem, as we already noted, is that dopamine does not bond it motivates. Bonding requires oxytocin, which emerges through safety, predictability, and emotional presence over time. But time is exactly what a person with a “not chosen” belief struggles to tolerate.

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For some women, this creates a painful loop:
If I am not inherently desirable, then I must compensate. Sex becomes proof of value. Performance becomes a form of protection. While being wanted in the moment substitutes for being chosen over time. Clinically, this is where reenactment shows up. After sex, when dopamine drops and oxytocin was never fully established, the nervous system can spiral: rumination, shame, abandonment fear, self-blame. The original belief (“I’m not enough”) feels reinforced rather than challenged. The body got relief, but the attachment wound stayed intact. What makes this especially heartbreaking is that it’s not driven by excess desire it’s driven by self-erasure. The belief is not “I want sex,” but “I need to be good enough to be kept.” In a culture that markets sex as empowerment without addressing attachment wounds, this distinction is rarely named. The film quietly exposes this truth: when someone does not believe they are choosable, they will reach for whatever offers temporary evidence of worth. Sex sells not because people are shallow, but because many are unconsciously trying to disprove a story that has lived in their nervous system for years. And no amount of being wanted in the moment can heal a belief formed in the absence of being chosen.

Protective Realism, Schema Activation, and the Loneliness of Being “Fine”

Midway through the film, something subtle but clinically rich begins to surface. This is no longer about whether sex matters—it’s about what happens when both people suppress desire in the name of safety. Barbra Streisand’s character has swung the pendulum hard in the opposite direction of objectification. Her teaching reframes love as intellectual partnership, minimizing physical desire not because sex is bad, but because sex has historically cost her something. This is what I would call protective realism a belief system that masquerades as maturity, but is actually a trauma-informed adaptation: If I don’t want it, it can’t hurt me.

This is common today. People present as detached, “cool,” sexually casual, emotionally unbothered, while quietly bypassing the energetic and neurobiological exchange that comes with sexual contact. The body, however, doesn’t participate in the bypass. Oxytocin still releases. Attachment systems still activate. For many, sex without connection doesn’t feel liberating it can actually feel lonely, because bonding chemistry was initiated without relational containment. The film captures this realization. At the park, she watches couples touching, laughing, existing in easy affection. She notices a former student who has become engaged—there is no hatred, no contempt, only recognition. That is something I want. The grief is quiet. The question still remains unspoken.

So why doesn’t she say anything?

This is where schema activation explains the freeze. Her longstanding belief I am not chosen, I am tolerated makes need expression feel dangerous. Asking risks confirmation of the wound. Silence feels safer than rejection. Suppression becomes self-protection. Meanwhile, Jeff Bridges’ character is not “above” shallow dynamics he came from them. His turn away from sex appears less like transcendence and more like an overcorrection too. He is trying to be different, trying to honor what he believes she wants. In doing so, he suppresses his own desire. This is mutual masking.

There’s a critical scene in the restaurant that shows what attunement can look like. He tells the waiter she prefers her dressing on the side. She feels seen. Her body softens. That is attunement—accurate perception paired with responsive action. But moments later, when he asks her what she wants or needs from him, she says nothing. The opportunity closes. Attunement is not mind-reading. It requires expression + response. Without both, connection stalls. He notices her rituals the careful construction of the “perfect bite,” the sensory precision. He sees her. She sees him holding himself together, clearly struggling with restraint. The sexual tension is palpable, embodied, mutual and still unspoken. Desire is present. Safety is present. Voice is absent. Where does this ring true for you in your life?

Clinically, this is the cost of unresolved attachment schemas:

• She doesn’t ask because she learned that wanting disqualifies her.

• He doesn’t initiate because he learned that desire harms or overwhelms.

Both are attempting to protect the relationship. Both are slowly starving inside it.

Her hidden eating treats stashed away, pleasure taken privately is not incidental. It’s displacement. When desire cannot be expressed relationally, it seeks safer, solitary outlets. This mirrors what many people do today: consume pleasure quietly while denying the deeper hunger underneath.

From a neurobiological standpoint, this makes sense. Humans seek regulation. If relational oxytocin feels risky, the nervous system reaches for substitutes dopamine hits, sugar, sex without attachment, distraction. These soothe briefly but do not satisfy. Over time, the result is a particular kind of loneliness: being with someone while feeling unseen.

This is why attunement not sex alone is the antidote. Attunement means:

• noticing internal states,

• expressing needs without collapse,

• responding with presence,

• and marking your partner as chosen privately and publicly.

Without it, even well-intentioned relationships can feel hollow. With it, desire doesn’t threaten safety it deepens it. What this film quietly exposes and what I see daily in clinical work is that many people are not avoiding sex because they don’t want it. They are avoiding it because they are afraid to ask, afraid to need, afraid to discover whether they are actually chosen. Meanwhile those who chase sex avoid the vulnerability needed to bridge the gap in communication.

Perhaps the film’s quiet grief was this: that love without objectification requires courage, and courage is harder to sell than fantasy. But fantasy, no matter how polished, cannot regulate a nervous system or anchor a life. The question worth asking now is not whether we are sexually free, but whether we are emotionally available. Whether we are known. Whether we are building bonds that can hold time, conflict, and consequence.

Because when love becomes an illusion and sex becomes the substitute, people don’t become liberated. They become alone — together, but unattached.

Final Reflection

Attunement Is the Antidote (Not Sex, Not Distance)

What finally breaks the illusion in The Mirror Has Two Faces is not sex itself it’s truth being spoken. When she reappears blonde, fitted black dress, visibly embodied the shift is not cosmetic. It’s somatic. She is no longer shrinking. She is no longer hiding. She is no longer asking permission to exist. The confidence she radiates does not come from weight loss or makeup. It comes from a reorganization of belief: I was always pretty. I was always worthy of desire. I just didn’t live inside my body before.

And this is why his reaction matters. He becomes unsettled not because she looks “too sexy,” but because the relational power dynamic has changed. He says, “I’ll just have to get used to this,” as if her embodiment is something to tolerate rather than respond to. She immediately corrects the frame: No—we don’t have to continue this.

That moment is not rejection. It is differentiation.

She finally names what was buried under years of protective realism:

• She wants sex.

• She wants passion.

• She wants mess and chaos.

• She wants aliveness.

Not because she is insecure but because she is integrated. Which is why it was so beautiful to watch her develop as a character. This is the turning point the culture often misses. Wanting passion is not immaturity. Wanting sex is not shallow. Wanting intensity does not negate safety. What makes relationships lonely isn’t the need for desire its desire without attunement or attunement without embodiment.

Attunement is the antidote because it holds all of it:

• Desire without objectification

• Safety without suppression

• Passion without disappearance

Attunement means noticing, responding, choosing—out loud. It is the difference between “I see you” and “I will adjust myself to you.” It requires voice. It requires risk. It requires the courage to say, This is what I want, even when the answer might disrupt the bond.

She finally does that. And when she says, “You forced me to look at things I was too lazy or too scared to look at,” she is not blaming him, she is claiming herself. The illusion collapses here: love without embodiment is hollow, and sex without attunement is lonely. The answer was never one or the other.

The answer was integration of both…

Attachment Archetypes at Play

This film works because neither character is “the problem.” They are mirror wounds learning regulation in opposite directions.

Her Archetype: The Quietly Wounded Integrator

• Core schema: I am not chosen.

• Origin: maternal projection, sibling comparison, cultural prioritization of “sexiness.”

• Adaptation: intellectualization, suppression of desire, self-containment.

• Strength: emotional regulation, coherence, capacity for truth without collapse.

• Growth edge: expressing needs before certainty of being chosen.

She was never loudly insecure. She was conditioned, and once the belief loosens, confidence emerges naturally—without aggression, without contempt, without revenge.

His Archetype: The Avoidant Romantic Intellectual

• Core fear: If sex enters, connection will be lost.

• Origin: prior relationships where desire eclipsed safety.

• Adaptation: overcorrection—removal of attraction from the equation.

• Strength: emotional openness, verbal intimacy, curiosity.

• Growth edge: tolerating desire without catastrophizing loss.

His mistake was not lack of attraction. It was fear of what attraction might destroy.

The Dynamic

• She hid desire to avoid rejection.

• He hid desire to preserve connection.

• Both mistook suppression for maturity.

• Both experienced loneliness inside safety.

This is not an anxious–avoidant cliché. It’s a mutual protective standoff.

And this is why sex becomes such a charged symbol in modern relationships: it’s not about pleasure it’s about proof. Proof of desirability. Proof of safety. Proof of being chosen. Without attunement, sex carries too much weight. With attunement, it becomes expression instead of evidence.

Here’s The Bottom Line

What this film quietly teaches and what shows up daily in clinical rooms is this:

People don’t avoid sex because they don’t want it.
They avoid it because they are afraid of what it will cost.
And people chase sex not because they are shallow,
but because they are desperate to feel chosen— now.

Attunement is the only thing that dissolves both illusions.

What came up for you while reading this? I compiled some reflective prompts at the end of this article for your own processing.

• Attachment & Schema Theory: Early relational experiences shape core beliefs about desirability and safety; unmet needs often lead to suppression rather than expression (Bowlby; Young et al., Schema Therapy).

• Neurobiology: Dopamine drives motivation and reward; oxytocin supports bonding and emotional security (Carter, 1998; Feldman, 2012).

• Attunement: Secure attachment depends on accurate perception and responsive behavior, not intention alone (Siegel, 2010).

• Reenactment: Suppressed needs often reappear through displacement behaviors (e.g., food, casual sex, over-functioning) rather than direct communication (van der Kolk).

Reflection Questions:

Desire & Belief

1. When did you first learn whether or not you were “choosable”?

2. How do you know when someone wants you—what evidence do you look for?

3. Have you ever used desire (or sex) as proof of worth rather than expression of connection?

Sex vs. Intimacy

1. In your life, has sex ever felt safer than asking for what you actually need?

2. After physical closeness, do you feel more connected or more alone?

3. What does your body feel after intimacy, not just during it?

Protective Realism & Detachment

1. Where in your life do you present as “fine,” “chill,” or “unbothered” while quietly wanting more?

2. What desires have you minimized because wanting felt risky?

3. What would it cost you to admit out loud what you want?

Attunement

1. Do you feel chosen privately and publicly in your relationships?

2. When was the last time someone noticed something small about you and responded to it?

3. Are you waiting to be seen without ever saying what you need?

Expression & Suppression

1. What do you do with desire when you don’t feel safe expressing it relationally?

2. Where does your unmet longing go—food, work, fantasy, sex, withdrawal?

3. How do you know when you’re protecting yourself versus abandoning yourself?

Integration

1. What would it look like to hold both safety and passion at the same time?

2. What parts of yourself are you ready to stop hiding?

3. If you believed you were already worthy of being chosen, what would change?

References

The Mirror Has Two Faces
Streisand, B. (Director). (1996). The Mirror Has Two Faces. Columbia Pictures.
— Used as the primary cultural and narrative case study for attachment dynamics, desire suppression, and attunement.

Bowlby, J. (1988). A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development. Basic Books.
— Foundational attachment theory informing bonding, safety, and relational regulation.

Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1979). Patterns of Attachment. Psychology Press.
— Empirical grounding for secure, avoidant, and anxious attachment patterns referenced throughout the essay.

Carter, C. S. (1998). Neuroendocrine perspectives on social attachment and love. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 23(8), 779–818.
— Evidence distinguishing dopamine-driven reward from oxytocin-mediated bonding.

Bauman, Z. (2003). Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Polity Press.
— Sociological framework for non-binding, disposable modern relationships (“liquid love”).

Murthy, V. H. (2023). Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
— Cited evidence supporting the claim that loneliness is a public health crisis affecting roughly half of U.S. adults, with health risks comparable to smoking and obesity.

Siegel, D. J. (2010). The Mindful Therapist. W. W. Norton & Company.
— Source for the definition and importance of attunement as accurate perception plus responsive action.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
— Supports discussions of somatic memory, reenactment, and nervous system-driven behavior.

Young, J. E., Klosko, J. S., & Weishaar, M. E. (2003). Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide. Guilford Press.
— Clinical grounding for limiting beliefs, schema activation, and protective adaptations (“I am not chosen”).

Extended Reading & Viewing List

(For readers who want to go deeper into the themes of the essay)

Attachment, Desire, & Intimacy

• Johnson, S. (2008). Hold Me Tight. Little, Brown and Company.

• Levine, A., & Heller, R. (2010). Attached. TarcherPerigee.

• Tatkin, S. (2011). Wired for Love. New Harbinger.

Neuroscience of Bonding & Regulation

• Feldman, R. (2012). Oxytocin and social affiliation in humans. Hormones and Behavior.

• Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W. W. Norton & Company.

Cultural Critiques of Sex, Love, and Modernity

• Illouz, E. (2007). Consuming the Romantic Utopia. University of California Press.

• Illouz, E. (2012). Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity.

• Turkle, S. (2011). Alone Together. Basic Books.

Mother–Daughter Dynamics & Projection

• Benjamin, J. (1988). The Bonds of Love. Pantheon Books.

• Lerner, H. (1985). The Dance of Anger. Harper & Row.

• Forward, S. (1989). Toxic Parents. Bantam.

Embodiment, Desire, and Integration

• Perel, E. (2006). Mating in Captivity. HarperCollins.

• Perel, E. (2017). The State of Affairs. Harper.

Happy Saturday

Let’s have a chat about this past week’s Safari ride because the data from our trip is intel into our shadows.

I will link the video this article is referring to at the end of this essay.

Picture this.

You’re scrolling, minding your business, and suddenly a name appears. A name conditioned by your nervous system to mean threat.

You don’t think.

You salivate.

You comment.

You assume intent.

You project.

You moralize.

You scroll faster.

This isn’t a character flaw on your part.

It’s a form of conditioning and it’s Pavlovian, but instead of dogs and bells, it’s you and the algorithm.

Let’s dig deeper🔍

Pavlov’s Dogs, Meet the Algorithm

In Pavlov’s famous experiment, dogs were trained to salivate at the sound of a bell, that sound became linked to the arrival of food. So the dog developed the understanding bell means food, that right there is classical conditioning.

Perceptual Conditioning: How the Nervous System Learns Reality

Alrighty data collectors. To understand how conditional caregiving shapes adult perception, we have to step outside moral language and into learning theory. And Safari riders— this is the time to place your perception goggles off of default view mode network. Classical conditioning, first described by Ivan Pavlov, demonstrates that the nervous system learns associations automatically, outside of conscious choice. In Pavlov’s experiments, dogs did not “decide” to salivate at the sound of a bell. Their nervous systems learned through repetition that the bell predicted food. Over time, the signal itself became reality. This matters clinically because children & adults are not learning meaning through logic. They are learning through pairing.

Emotional Classical Conditioning

In human development, the “bell” is not a sound.

It is:

• A parent’s facial expression

• A shift in tone

• Emotional withdrawal

• Silence

• Praise paired with productivity

When a child repeatedly experiences:

• Affection + approval immediately following cleaning, helping, or compliance

• Emotional withdrawal or coldness immediately following noncompliance

The nervous system learns a pairing:

Productivity = connection
Rest / refusal / autonomy = danger

This is not a belief the child chooses. It is a conditioned perceptual reflex.

Just as Pavlov’s dogs salivated before food arrived, the child’s nervous system activates before rejection occurs anticipating loss of connection. The same way we anticipate loss of XYZ as adults and unconsciously sabotage good things.

Why Perception Becomes Rigid

Classical conditioning operates below cognition.

This is why, later in life:

• Neutral feedback feels threatening

• Boundaries feel like punishment

• Silence feels abandoning

The adult is not “overreacting.”

Their nervous system has learned:

These signals precede pain.

Conditioning is associative, not logical, counter-evidence does not immediately undo it. You cannot “explain away” a conditioned response any more than you can tell Pavlov’s dog to stop salivating by reasoning with it.

This is why reassurance often fails.

The body has already decided what is happening.

The same way people assign meaning and motive to strangers videos online simply because of their algorithmic patterns. Keyword—their.

Conditioning and the Illusion of Victimhood

When early conditioning pairs disconnection with danger, the adult nervous system begins scanning environments for threat.

This can manifest as:

• Chronic perception of being targeted or mistreated

• Hypervigilance to tone, expression, or silence

• Interpreting neutral events as personal attacks

It is also important to note. These process are not conscious forms of manipulation they are protector parts defending what the nervous systems has been conditioned to protect due to perceptual bias formed through that very conditioning. The nervous system is responding to old pairings, not present reality. The same way it responds to old blueprints in conflict with our partner. This is also why attempts to challenge the perception often escalate distress: because it gets interpreted as further evidence of threat.

Why Some People Collapse at Boundaries

Classical conditioning also helps explain the opposite phenomenon.

Children who were never paired with:

• frustration

• limits

• emotional rupture + repair

They did not learn that discomfort can be survived. So when adulthood introduces boundaries or consequences, the nervous system lacks a conditioned pathway for tolerance. (no crayons aka “skills”for this level, because those skills were never developed)

There is no “bell” that predicts repair.

Only danger.

So, the collapse that shows up is the evidence of unconditioned fragility.

Clinical Implication: Deconditioning Perception

Since these nervous system responses are conditioned, healing does not come from insight alone.

It requires:

• Repeated exposure to limits without abandonment

• Consistent pairing of boundaries with safety

• New associations between frustration and survival

In learning theory terms, this is not erasure it is extinction and replacement. The rewiring work that we do here in this corner of the internet. The old association weakens only when a new one is reliably experienced. Just like when trying to build new habits. You have to actually experience this new habits ignorer for them to imprint as new habits that replace the old ones. Until then, perception (the filtration system of our brains, that filters the information we download from the environment based on our internal lens and blueprints) will continue to override reason.

Why This Matters

When we frame these behaviors as character flaws, we miss the mechanism. We miss the patterns that are needed for this rewiring work to occur.

This is not about people being difficult.

It is about nervous systems that learned early:

Reality changes without warning.

And until perception is retrained through lived experience, the body will continue responding as if the past is still happening. So what occurred in the comments of our 3rd stop of the safari tour. (Instagram)

What happened in the comments wasn’t about ice. Nor was it about policy or ideology.

Making it about those is hijacking my entire corner of the internet. It was about what the name Renee Good triggered. When that name appeared, people’s brains immediately lit up and it wasn’t because of anything I said, but because Renee Good is now a conditioned cue tied to fear, identity, political frames, and deep emotional meaning. Her death was widely documented and shared online, and it became a symbol that activated a whole network of associations outrage, loss, injustice, tribal narratives, and pre-existing beliefs about state violence and race. So when that name was introduced into the conversation, many people weren’t engaging with the point I was making, they were responding to the affective charge attached to that name. Their nervous systems had already learned to react much like a Pavlovian conditioned response, because the topic touches on lived experiences, political identities, and collective trauma. They weren’t hearing my actual content about perceptual undercurrents; they were responding to what that name already meant emotionally to them.

That’s the pattern. It’s like everyone’s been trained to collapse into reactivity when the “signal” hits their nervous system, regardless of the context or relevance. Yours is no ice argument, no sideways deflection; it’s a classic example of how conditioned associations — a name, a symbol, a prior emotional investment — will hijack interpretation, distract from the original meaning, and create a whole new narrative that feels moral to them but has nothing to do with what you actually wrote. It’s the same way people weaponize parental dismissiveness or reflexively defend interpretations that don’t align with their already decided moral truth — they don’t argue the point, they defend the emotional architecture they’ve constructed around the cue. That’s why the conversation detoured: not because of logic, but because the brain salivated to react before it even registered the argument.

The most action out of all the videos, because people have been conditioned to collapse at the sight of their own projection of meaning while bypassing the original message. So now, the same logic that frames my work is supported all the sudden becomes” jarring” the moment a topic the public deemed as political comes up? Suddenly we are selectivity bypassing research on nervous system and neuroscience as a means to avoid our relationship with the algorithm.

What’s social media if not the modern bell?

🛎️ You see a name, a face, a tone, a topic, or even a color…

🛎️ Your nervous system rings the alarm.

🛎️ You react quickly, defensively, irrationally—before you even know why.

This is rehearsed survival. Your body is responding to training, not to truth which has multiple angles not just your own. But we as a collective don’t realize it despite the information out there. Why is that? Because scrolling became baseline for some many of us and that baseline created nervous system reactivity based on a curated algorithm that we consented too every time we log on. We argue psychology when these platforms were created with psychology in mind.

Comment Section Contracts (You Didn’t Know You Signed)

The moment you see someone online, your nervous system starts assigning contracts:

• They must speak softly.

• They must never say something that disrupts my bias.

• They must never mention mental health if it challenges a beloved public figure.

• They must reflect my pain, or they are a threat.

So when I say something neutral like, “If we care for Renée Good, can we talk about mental health?”—the contract breaks.

It has nothing to do with what I said.

But because of what your body was conditioned to feel when her name appeared. That’s why in this weeks Safari ride our third stop had a lot more comment activity. Because that’s how the algorithm works. It assessed my video took key words and sent it to the people it KNEW would react. How does it know that? Your behavior online that it is monituring. Your heart still bleeds, still aches for the events you keep clocking into.

But let me cognitively challenges us all.

It’s not about our hearts, it’s about her wife, her kids, the people who witnessed, the people who saw. This is how narcissim spreads. And when you have likes supporting your rightiousness to scream her name. While those involved are the ones whose days are altered because of this. THAT is the shadow work. And when VECNA comes you hate to see it— so what do we do? Flip it onto the messenger, make it about my minority status, my license, and your assumed intent—the noise.

And that discomfort (the 💩 we throw in shitty tennis matches) get's projected right onto me. Or baiting others into back and forth “debates.” See the pattern? Because it’s that very pattern that sends couples and families to therapy. How are clinicians suppose to help guide these turbulent conversations if people dictate the direction.

Nervous System Hijack, Explained

Let me say this plainly:

Your nervous system does not stop functioning when you enter a political conversation. It does not disappear when the topic makes you feel morally righteous. It does not excuse projection, cancellation, or character assassination.

When a trauma-trained nervous system perceives threat (even imagined), it will:

• Freeze or fawn (confuse safety with silence or loyalty)

• Fling blame toward the most available target (me, in this case)

• Rewrite the narrative to protect its own identity

This is what live reactivity looks like. It’s not what the eye can see, but what the body can feel. This is the training. Thats when we pull out our notebooks and get to data hunting 📓✏️

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DARVO, Deflection & My Chocolate Factory of Exposure Therapy

When you can’t sit with nuance, you:

1. Deny what was actually said

2. Attack the messenger

3. Reverse roles to become the victim

4. Over-identify with your perception as fact

That’s DARVO. And it’s everywhere online, in family systems, in breakups, and especially in comment sections.

Even when I speak from neutrality using metaphors, analysis, and years of clinical training the performance of moral superiority will hijack the room. The energy and you. You get swallowed up into the upside down.

“You should know better as a therapist.”

“You’re weaponizing your credentials.”

“You’re a minority, how dare you say that?”

What you’re really saying is:

“You didn’t reflect my pain the way I needed you to… so now you’re unsafe.”

Now where else in your life do you use that same muscle? 🔍 (This is the work)

It’s Not About Me. It’s About What I Mirror.

This platform has always been a mirror and no not in the gotcha culture kind of way. When some of you project that over here it's a little upsetting even for me. Because really? What benefit do I have trying to get people reactive and upset? How does that serve me?

My job isn’t to be liked.

It’s to be real, regulated— with milkdud animation, and rooted in nuanced truth. Let me be real here aside from making the content and doing all this work behind the scene. I have no idea what I am doing online and am learning as I go. Thinking I do this for my “brand” is a projection of your use and feelings towards these platforms.

I could have disguised myself as a talking tree but instead I showed up as myself.

And true transparency: I know my heart, what grief I hold for the world, and the services I give back to it. I will never explain or model that level of explaining to prove myself to people that are not apart of my real reality. I don’t want that for my clients, for myself, or for you. Fawning is now regulation. Over explaining only reinforces those who avoid and attack. That’s the sickness my work reveals in us all.

I have seen too many lives lost because of the streets of the algorithm. To many aches held to lose sight of my mission of this work. To train us to sit in discomfort without immediately cutting off, assigning blame, reacting whether internally or externally

You know, *insert giggle… I laugh because it’s “we love how authentic you are, keep being you!!” and then a trigger word is said and it’s “ no not like that” “ you’re a professional” “ you shouldn’t talk that way”

Do you think David Goggins cares when people tell him about his personality? Or how he speaks? When I was first introduced to his work that man scared me! 🤣 I thought “ why is he yelling at me” 🤭 It was until I got past the noise and reached his message that I could get passed the discomfort of my own projection of what his Goggins essence means. It is fascinating to experience how much people support you until your work touches something in them they don’t want to face. Then it’s watch your language, mind your tone, you’re a lady don’t speak that way.

My inner teen: “Says who?” 🤭

I joke my corner of the internet is the sacrifice

I model what happens when you:

• speak from neutrality

• blend soft tones with sharp clarity

• don’t back down when your nervous system says, fawn now or lose love

Love, in these corners, often comes with unconscious contracts “strings attached”:

• Only smile like this.

• Only critique that group.

• Only post soft, palatable healing.

• Only call out what I approve of.

When I don’t follow the contract?

🛎️ Salivation.

🛎️ Reaction.

🛎️ Mislabeling.

🛎️ Block and unfollow.

💥This Is Exposure Therapy

Every time you enter this corner and get activated by:

• My tone

• My neutrality

• My refusal to pick sides

• My ability to speak as Sav, not just a licensed therapist…

You are walking into a therapeutic field trip A Nervous System Safari where what gets activated in you is the curriculum. Again no— this is not me framing it this way to project defensiveness and internalized antiblack alksfhasjrbg;eorbg;er whatever noise… Stories some of the mob mentality members come up with. You can disagree but when you assume another’s intent from that disagreement that’s the very data in your behavior needed to be assessed by you!

Because this same behavior online…

Is how you treat your partner.

Is how you mishear your child.

This is how you collapse under discomfort in family dynamics. It’s also how you sign contracts for others based on how you feel. But that inner world is yours to manage not the outside people you outsource that work to.

From Projection to Reflection

Instead of saying, “I don’t support ICE” in response to a post that was never about ICE to begin with…

Pause.

Zoom out.

Ask: What did I make that post mean about me?

What bell did the algorithm ring?

Ask:

• Why did I assume this was a trap?

• Why did I respond like it was personal?

• Why do I believe certain topics are off-limits for someone with my skin tone, license, or personality?

I also am curious, why would people assume the same person you have been “standing by” is going to say something to be harmful on purpose? Can’t you see why so many have social anxiety these days? Y’all will turn on the very hand that feeds you just because you felt some heat and made meaning out of it declaring that meaning as universal truth. The video that got the most attention this week was the video that upset people the most. Guess what, we weren’t even in the conversation some took it too. That’s the trap…The portal back into the upside down even if it’s connected to rhetoric, politics, religion, etc.

None of that changes the fact our nervous systems our being trained by external forces outside of ourselves by undercurrents many are untrained to see.

That’s the conversation.

That’s the playground.

That’s the work.

The Brain Was Never Built for This

Through the gift of discomfort, we train the muscle required to allow the noise of the world even the ache of headlines, tone policing, and public projection—to move through us without becoming us. But let’s be clear: our brains were never designed to know what was happening all over the world at once. That is not what the human nervous system was built for. It was built to track what’s happening in your body, your home, your circle. your presence in that moment. And now it’s being force-fed crisis after crisis, betrayal after betrayal, accusation after accusation and then punished for not reacting the right way. You were conditioned to carry all of it. Not to care, but to react.

And the symptoms show up.

In your relationships.

In your anxiety.

In your burnout.

In your overexplaining.

In the way you collapse when misunderstood.

In how quickly you project an entire story onto a comment, a clip, or a face online.

All that overstimulation we call ADHD now? Yeah, that label ends up becoming a linguistic shortcut. Now all we have to do is just log it as ADHD instead of inquire about what’s happening internally to create the symptom that is showing up in the first place.

All of this creates nervous system hijack, not clarity not awareness.

The same nervous system that lights up when your mom walks into the room and ignores you, or when your partner starts a fight and somehow you end up apologizing.

It’s the same loop.

It’s the same muscle memory. And instead of seeing that loop the undercurrent I’m pointing to—it gets flipped onto the messenger. The focus shifts to the tone. Or the license. Or the “wrong” words. And that… that right there is the loop we’re rewiring. That’s the whole point. It’s not comfortable, but it’s also not off-limits just because your nervous system said so. Declaring something “off-limits” just because it activates you? That is control and we feel entitled to it. If we are not mindful that’s the very kind of narcissism born from a culture of algorithmic fawning and performance.

Now here’s my trip. My transparency.

I call this exposure therapy because I’ve never liked the algorithm to begin with. I actually despise what it’s done to people. What it’s done to our perception. How it flattens truth, twists communication, and trains people to emotionally gamble with every post, every comment, every thread. I didn’t enter this space because I love content. I did it because I wanted to make nervous system literacy accessible to the people, but also to me. What better way through felt safari experience.

Because let me tell yall ! 😩

I knew if I was going to walk into the lion’s den of unprocessed projection and pain, I had to do it as my full self. No character. No licensed avatar. Just Sav. The little milkdud and her brain she is sharing with you all. And it hurts when people twist your intent. Let’s not pretend it doesn’t. Especially when you’ve spent your whole life trying not to be misunderstood. Many of us were trained to shrink. To be overly kind. To contort ourselves just to avoid being misperceived. But that part of my nervous system? I don’t let her drive anymore. That muscle? I no longer exercise it. And what I’ve learned in the field notes is that some of y’all can’t stand a securely attached person who refuses to perform for your approval.

That’s because many of us are still out here performing.

To be picked.

To be chosen.

To be seen.

To be loved.

To be understood. But you don’t even do any of that for yourself. And so when someone like me shows up steady, direct, loving but not fawning your nervous system calls it a threat. You start attaching all these projections “You’re unaccountable.” “You’re harsh.” “You don’t care.” All because I didn’t cave or explain in the tone you demanded. All because I didn’t obey the contract you silently wrote and expected me to sign without reading. (The very thing we do to our loved ones)

Now here is the alarming part at least for me. Many of you are using therapeutic rhetoric to spiritually bypass your own shadow work. You’re misusing the words “projecting” “manipulation” and “accountability” to avoid what the mirror is showing you. You’re George-of-the-jungle swinging from word to word, hoping the psychology terms can carry you away from the discomfort I’m inviting you into. But let me ask you this—what do I get out of projecting? What do I gain from deceiving the public, from spending hours creating content, researching, citing, and filming… just to “manipulate, project or get defensive?” Where’s the logic in that? It’s odd how quickly people assign me an emotion. Ladies, y’all hate when your partner says “she has an attitude.” When they don’t like your tone. Same thing your mother did when you established a boundary.

Same nervous system. Same script. Same loop

And we keep getting stuck in it while gaslighting those aware, awake, and that can see clearly as the manipulators.

Getting pulled right back into the upside down.

Many of us are still training the muscle to see beyond what the eyes can see. To feel into the undercurrent. To observe what wasn’t said but was fully felt.

🛺🧙🏼‍♀️Buckle up, let’s field trip to a somatic journey through Case Study examples. Understand I have seen this behaviors across, cultures, faiths, and social classes. We are looking at human behavior not the subcategories we created humans to be in. Goggle up, Let’s zoom in🥽🔍

A father who doesn’t show up consistently for his kids shows up late—again. The school staff gives him a look. Not rude. Not even aggressive. Just neutral, but aware. He feels that undercurrent. He picks up on it. And what does he do? He explodes. “How dare you judge me!” Not because she judged but because he already felt the truth in the room. So explodes to avoid it… but wait… he doesn’t explode on the teacher he holds it in… he waits… then displaces that explosion on the partner. Why? Because no way he would do that performance publicly and tarnish his image.

That’s a man who has no regulation, but enough to encapsulate it until he is in the space or near the person who will allow that discharge. That’s a man who’s never been held accountable. So now, to avoid the shame, he turns it into a fight. And society might even label that moment as “bipolar” or “rage issues” or “anger management” when really, that was a nervous system collapse in a stew of emotional guilt. An emotion he may have never learned how to sit with and process as a child. The Mob of women who hate men right now will say “so he should grow up, he is an adult.” and my cognitive challenge to that is. Do you say the same thing to women?

Society always sees the undercurrents when it’s a man but what about a woman?

Example:

A woman was hurt—badly. A rupture that never got repaired or maybe even acknowledged. The kind that teaches the nervous system that closeness is dangerous and unpredictability is now a threat. She doesn’t walk around thinking “I’m traumatized.” She walks around thinking “I have to make sure this never happens again.” So she becomes anxious. Hypervigilant. She scans. She watches tone, timing, behavior. She doesn’t experience this as control. She experiences it as safety.

She starts regulating her anxiety by regulating her partner.

Who he can talk to.

Who he can see.

Where he can go.

Whether he can have social media.

What’s “appropriate.” What’s “disrespectful.” She calls it boundaries. She calls it protection. She calls it trauma-informed. When the partner reflects it back, names the control, the restriction, the imbalance—she collapses. Not into curiosity and not into reflection.

Into panic.

Tears.

Overwhelm.

Victimhood. “You’re attacking me.” “You don’t understand what I’ve been through.”

This isn’t because what her partner said was abusive but because it punctured the system that’s been keeping her regulated. That system was avoidance. That avoidance conditioned a nervous system to never learn how to sit with guilt or shame without needing someone else (outsourcing) someone to rescue it.

Now add kids to the mix.

The father. The grandparents. Extended family. Everyone learns the same rule very quickly: if we don’t comply, we lose access. So they tiptoe. They placate. They shrink. They absorb her emotional explosions soothes don’t lose access to the kids. The stay in the relationships as to not leave the kids alone with this woman. Because these same patterns. They are done to the kids too. And without realizing it, those very family members reinforce the pattern. Every time her anxiety explodes and the system rearranges itself around her, her nervous system learns: this works. Every time people silence themselves to keep the peace, her system learns: I don’t have to tolerate discomfort others will carry it for me.

Our mothers do this when they triangulate, our grandparents do this, people do this.

Understand, by the time of adulthood this may not always be conscious.

That’s the conditioning. The shame, guilt, etc is the sensational alert in the body guiding you to the source of the ache within. That’s the internal assignment for us all.

Now, I squirreled a bit let me get back on track…

This same woman goes to therapy convinced the problem is the partner. And early on, that makes sense because her pain is real. But when a competent therapist eventually names both sides of the equation the trauma and the control—the collapse happens again.

This time with accountability.

She deflects with tears. Trauma language. Victim storytelling. Not to deceive, no no no let’s make this clear. This is an unconscious process— the moment we get activated into accountability but more importantly activated into the exposure of facing and having emotional ownership of Guilt, Shame, Embarrassment etc… When we have never had to face those… We pufferfish 🐡, we activate, we spiral into nervous system tunnel vision to regain regulation for ourselves. In this example she knows the only way she knows how which is to explode, collapse, cry, etc.

This is puffer fish behavior folks. This is egocentric loops that can turn into vulnerable (covert) forms of narcissism. The form many of us want to turn a blind eye to because it reveals the parts of ourselves that check into the vulnerable narcissism hotel from time to time. This is how the nervous system attempts to regain narrative control. To preserve her image. To avoid guilt and shame that her system was never taught to metabolize. As a child, those emotional states were bypassed, never held. Because someone fixed it. Someone soothed it. Someone absorbed it for her. Or someone flat out avoided it and avoided the little her just like what occurred to the little him. So now as an adult, avoidance isn’t a choice. It’s the system.

People call this anxiety. Or “just trauma.” Or “empowerment.” What it actually is, is a nervous system that learned to externalize discomfort instead of tolerating it.

SSRT time.

Shit Sitting Reflection Time. The enforcement portal needed for us as humans to learn to sit in our shit and the discomfort that comes with it. When we don’t the house now becomes full of elephants. Everyone knows what can’t be said. Everyone knows what will trigger her. Everyone organizes their behavior around it. They survive around the dysregulation instead of through it. And because there are no natural consequences, no limits that are allowed to land—the pattern never rewires.

This occurs because no one ever taught her that she could survive the feeling she’s been running from her entire life. This is what we’re doing now in macro-level conversations. You think just because we’re talking about race or politics or systems that nervous system function suddenly disappears?

No.

Those same undercurrents live there too. But instead of acknowledging them, people weaponize identity, morality, or cultural status to skip the mirror. “Oh, she’s an elder, so we can’t challenge her.” “Oh, that’s a black parent, so they get to weaponize religion or silence you.”

No, loves.

Over time that becomes emotional abuse, and we are making this the norm culture just so we can avoid the discomfit that comes with having the conversation. These are the highways generational trauma rides on. And now the algorithm has learned how to mimic those same highways training you to react, to fawn, to accuse, to cut off—depending on who did it and how you feel about them. And that to me, is the most terrifying part. When your perception is hijacked, you think it’s discernment.

But it’s not.

It’s reactivity and the things that are happening in that reactivity. Are now being justified, bypassed and that’s the awareness we need to start bringing to mental health.

Final Reflection

This is the discomfort I sit in every time I show up to the corner to speak these truths knowing full well I will be misunderstood.

My Exposure therapy mission is learning to Let Them create the narrative without collapsing into fawning to be accepted and I model it publicly through my work and transparency moments. (the moments where I specifically tell you where I am at, not what you interpreted) If your nervous system was trained to mistake discomfort for danger, Then being in this corner might feel wrong at first.

But it’s not.

It’s repatterning in real time. Playground style!🛝☺️

And that’s exactly why this space exists.

So, how are we feeling?

Where are we at right now?

What are you carrying that you have been conditioned to hold that you are free to let go of?

What will you pick up for yourself now that the space within has been cleared?

That’s your homework.

Till next time data collectors.

Come as you are. Where you are. 🫶🏽

References

Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent–child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
→ Attachment, proximity-seeking, threat perception, early relational conditioning.

Bouton, M. E. (2007). Learning and behavior: A contemporary synthesis. Sinauer Associates.
→ Classical conditioning, extinction, replacement learning, cue-based responses.

Cozolino, L. (2014). The neuroscience of human relationships: Attachment and the developing social brain (2nd ed.). W. W. Norton & Company.
→ Social neurobiology, co-regulation, shame, guilt, and nervous system learning in relationships.

Hill, N. (1937). Think and grow rich. The Ralston Society.
→ Concept of “drifting,” distraction, and loss of conscious direction (used metaphorically).

Kernberg, O. F. (1975). Borderline conditions and pathological narcissism. Jason Aronson.
→ Splitting, projection, image preservation, shame avoidance, ego defenses.

Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
→ Emotional dysregulation, invalidating environments, collapse under accountability.

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. Oxford University Press.
→ Classical conditioning, cue-based learning, automatic nervous system responses.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
→ Integration, perception, bottom-up processing, nervous system hijack.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
→ Trauma memory, somatic reactivity, past-as-present responses.

The Algorithm is loud but there’s a particular kind of silence I’ve been noticing. A silence that shows up when harm doesn’t match the usual narrative. Society today is quick to name harm when it’s a man harming a woman. We’re fast to diagnose, expose, and react often with moral clarity as if we saw the dynamic first hand. But.. What happens when harm flows in the other direction? Now what?
When the woman is the one silencing, stonewalling, manipulating, infantilizing…
When the father becomes the scapegoat or disappears out of fear or shame…

Suddenly the volume drops.
The curiosity fades.
The story changes.

And I think we need to talk about that.

Kristy Scott & Desmond Scott: The Cultural Case Study

As a clinician it’s been my due diligence to make sure I keep this noise from infiltrating my own perception. Once I am the session room, or placing my attention on the lives of other’s situations—what I think seizes to exist. I am a hunter, like a veloceiraptior hunting prey, except I hunt for the patterns that go unnoticed, unspoken, or completely bypassed.

I’m interested in how we respond to these narratives to these patterns.

So lets collect the data:

A woman files.
Says he cheated. (This is very important data) but what is more fascinating is how quick the internet believes her. Full stop.

Later, Desmond releases a statement—not denying the infidelity, but revealing that he asked for separation first. A subtle SOS embedded in his admission, one that of course gets bypassed but in the most invalidating way, this level of invalidation is mockery. Remember, we are a society that screams “Mental Health Awareness” just remember that… So, because the narrative was already set he cheated, she was betrayed—
there’s no space left for complexity or even nuance.

We say “believe victims” without vetting facts.
We say “create safe spaces” while treating someone’s public humiliation as viral entertainment. We say “be kind” while stitching and stitching and stitching our way into psychological warfare—all in the name of justice.

Now let’s really be honest:
There are influencers, celebrities etc, who don’t care about the grief, the trauma, or the nervous system collapse they care about the reward of aligning with the “correct” side. And now we’re being algorithmically rewarded for blind loyalty. Say the “right” thing, support the “right” person, and boom—you get the clicks, the validation, the exposure. Even if you don’t know the person. Even if you don’t care about the truth.
Just support the “side” and you’ll be included.

This isn’t about taking sides. It’s about how fast we choose one before asking questions. Nuance, critical thinking, discernment. These are crucial mind muscles that are necessary for a healthy nervous system and healthy attachment. We must learn how to train these otherwise the polarity poison from the upside down pollutes us all!!

The Somatic Safari Begins

This series is my way of thinking out loud—my brain hunches that I gather from therapy rooms, cultural patterns, nervous system data, and lived observation. You’ll often hear me say this is a mental gym, but it’s also a somatic field trip a safari ride through human experience.

Are you ready to begin?

As always we’re going to have to call on Doc for this one…

For the first stop on our Safari field trip, we have to go back in history. I don’t want to spend too much time in history because—well, we pull from historic wounds all the time in this generation. The sole reason for taking you this route is to refresh the memory. Many women, our mothers as children, grandmothers when they were children, so on had childhood experiences that didn’t have the safety to speak let alone held. Let your mind’s eye picture what it meant to be a woman in a prior generation—maybe the 1930s, 40s, 50s. Think about what it meant to have your worth directly tethered to how quiet you could be, how clean your home was, how compliant your children looked, how devoted you were to being small, selfless, sacrificial, and “seen but not heard.” Think about what it meant to have no bank account, no legal autonomy, no right to say no without consequence.

Yes, these are historical facts.
But more importantly they are psychological blueprints. In family systems terms (Bowen, 1978), this was role-based conditioning at its core. These women didn’t just accept their roles—they adapted to survive them. And survival adaptations, when repeated over time, become traits, coping mechanisms, patterns. Soon they develop into personality traits.

From Silent Wives to Strategic Mothers

Now, I want you to take this further. Don’t just see those women. Feel into them. Imagine what it takes to stay married to someone abusive because there are no resources to leave. Imagine what it feels like to lose a child to war and still be expected to cook, smile, and serve dessert.

Now ask yourself:
What kind of adaptations does the nervous system develop in that environment?

Fawning. People-pleasing. Emotional shutdown. Overfunctioning. Control masked as care, affection, love. Fragility that get’t masked as submission.
All of these are classic trauma adaptations (Herman, Trauma and Recovery)and when weaponized over time, they become covert control tactics passed down through generations. In The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller explains how children of emotionally repressed parents often become “mirrors” for the adult’s unmet needs.
That doesn’t go away just because the mother is “doing her best.” It gets coded into the emotional ecosystem of the home.

Somatic Checkpoint: Pause & Scan

So before we leave this historical stop on our safari Tour, I want you to check in with your body. What are you noticing?
Is there tension in your chest? A heaviness in the belly? A flutter in your throat?
What memories are flashing? What sensations are surfacing?

Pause.
That’s data.
We’re not judging it. We’re not labeling it.
We’re collecting it because what we don’t metabolize what the generations before us couldn’t metabolize—we often end up reenacting.

Back to the Now: The Inherited Survival Playbook

Okay, now we’re back. 2026. Present time. But are we really free from those patterns?

Because here’s what I’m seeing:

A whole generation of women raised under the unspoken rules of survival.
Where emotions were manipulated for attention.
Where silence was a form of protest.
Where tears could be turned on to deflect accountability.
Where shame was redirected before it was felt.
Where “I’m just a bad mom” or “You always think I’m wrong” was a way to shut down the conversation instead of sitting in it.

That’s the survival strategy being played out live!
And it’s one many of us were raised under. Janina Fisher (in Transforming the Living Legacy of Trauma) calls these “parts adaptations” — parts of the self that developed for protection, not connection. But when left unchecked, they become loops.
They hijack intimacy. They sabotage repair. They hide in plain sight.

I see them…

Can you?

Why Would That Stop at Motherhood?

Now ask yourself:

If those were the survival strategies modeled in the home…
What makes us think they would magically stop once someone becomes a wife or a mother? If anything, the nervous system may feel more unsafe in marriage.
More trapped. More visible. More needed. (Insert arranged marriage women)
All of this means, more vulnerable. So, when a nervous system feels cornered, it doesn’t reach for self-reflection. It reaches for what worked:
Covert control. Emotional redirection. Narrative flipping. Fragility. Defensiveness. Manipulative incompetence. These are not “toxic traits.” They are unmetabolized trauma loops we grasp for when we don’t have the crayons to use in that situational event. This is problematic because, when we fail to name them they become intergenerational inheritance.

And that’s what we’re here to interrupt.

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Clinical Lens: Generational Injury Doesn’t Skip the Boys

In Scattered Minds, Dr. Gabor Maté emphasizes that emotional availability and regulation are crucial in childhood—not just for girls, but for boys, too.

Yet boys are often raised with a split experience:

• Over-mothered (infantilized)

• Under-fathered (neglected or absent)

• Emotionally dismissed (“Man up”)

• Emotionally smothered (“He’s my whole world”)

Some daughters became shields.
Some sons became pawns.
Some got both.

I’ve worked with men who were raised by mothers in survival mode, covertly controlling, emotionally dysregulated, narratively manipulative.
This wasn't because they were “bad,” but because no one had taught them another way. Given them the what I call crayons to color life with. Remember, some of us were only give very few if any.

Now, Fast forward to the future… (I told you this was a field trip) those boys are noe men who carry the shame of collapsing as fathers.
They’re terrified of messing up.
They freeze when left alone with the baby and it’s not because they don’t care, but because their own nervous systems are still children.

And shame… is louder than logic.

Now let’s pause…

Because I can already feel some of the internal voices rising up. Some women reading this are saying, “Well, we didn’t get that either. We didn’t have support. We were scared too.”

And that’s the point.
We know.
We know you didn’t get that.
We know you weren’t mothered.
We know the system didn’t nurture your fear or guide you through your first time.

And still—you chose your partner. You said you loved him.
You stepped into this life with him, which means at some point, there was trust. There was intention. There was a “yes.”

So this… this is where love shows up.
This is where the vows get tested.
This is where we either pass down our blueprints or we interrupt the loop.Because when a man becomes a father, he’s not just hearing your voice.
He’s hearing his mother’s voice in his head, in his body. He’s hearing the tone of every woman who disarmed him with love but punished him with silence.
And yes, you are going through your own unraveling too. But that’s the part we forget: you’re both scared. You’re both brand new. And no one taught either of you how to do this with nervous system safety.

Do men need to step up?
Absolutely.
But how can they learn in an environment that shames them before it shows them? How can any of us? Parents…

Let’s be real. Most women didn’t get shown either.

Most women are entering motherhood terrified, overwhelmed, emotionally raw.
And that cocktail of anxiety, hypervigilance, and responsibility often leads to control. Why? Because control feels safer than chaos and many women confuse safety with control the same way their mothers, grandmothers etc did.

So what do we do?
We micromanage.
We take over.
We silently narrate: “You don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll do it.”
And the baby becomes a battleground for competence.

Now, Here’s the issue…
If the first message a man receives after becoming a father is “I don’t trust you,”
don’t be surprised when he shrinks.
When he defers.
When he stops trying.
When his nervous system says, “See? I knew I couldn’t do this.”

That’s not him weaponizing incompetence.
That’s his trauma saying, “You’re right. I’m not safe here.”

And that’s the setup for the very problem we claim we didn’t sign up for.

When we say, “Why won’t he help with the baby?” Well… maybe it started the moment he tried and felt like a burden. Maybe he started clocking the eye rolls, the corrections, the side comments. Maybe his freeze response activated because his nervous system got paired with your disapproval instead of your belief.

This is not about blame. This is about wiring. Making it about blame proves your nerves systems need to be the victim. Were you raised under that? The minute the baby enters the world, a new energetic contract is written and both partners bring their nervous systems into that contract. If we want fatherhood to feel like a safe identity for men, we need to ask:
How am I showing up in those first moments, those first weeks, those tiny ruptures?
Am I reinforcing his fear of failure?
Or am I modeling what repair looks like?

Because your regulation—or lack of it—is now shaping two generations.

Weaponized Accountability, Cultural Projection, and the Scapegoat Complex

A lot of us were raised in systems where being accountable was a survival strategy, especially if you were the scapegoat. You learned to take the blame to keep the peace.
To carry the dysfunction so the family didn’t collapse. So now, as adults, when someone calls us out—we’re not just hearing feedback. We’re hearing danger.

But here’s where it gets tricky: Some people only demand accountability from others to avoid doing their own work. They perform call-outs as a form of power not as a path to healing. They weaponize “insight” as a form of shame-displacement.

And some of us grew up with people like that.

So when we say we fear “being corrected,” what we’re really afraid of is being abused again under the guise of accountability. This is why we have to build new emotional ecosystems.

What I call The Rules.

These must include not just safe spaces but mature ones. Spaces that distinguish between a call-out, a correction, and a conversation.

What We Don’t Clean, We Pass Down

We talk a lot about the “mother wound.”
But what about the mothering wound in men? What happens when boys are raised by women who never processed their own grief, shame, fear, or trauma? What happens when emotional enmeshment gets mislabeled as love? When the son becomes the therapist, the emotional husband, the emotional hostage? And what happens when these boys grow up, try to become fathers, and no one has trained their nervous systems to tolerate the identity of being needed?

Some collapse.
Some disappear.
Some rage.
Some cheat.
Some distract.
Some shut down.

Now, our safari is about to hit some bumpy terrain as we pivot perspectives and explore the area of mens impacted development. Because what we’re seeing now is the result of those dynamics we already named. Some of these men?

They were infantilized.
Some? Parentified.
Some? Both.

And when boys are raised like this, they often go one of two ways.

They either become submissive, passive, shut down or they become aggressive, controlling, manipulative. There’s rarely a third path without deep inner work and external reparenting.

Let’s start with the first one.

You’ve probably seen the collapse.
The freeze.
The stonewall.
The delayed routines. The disappearing acts right before breakfast.
The drawn-out trips to the bathroom every time bedtime starts.

Let’s Zoom Out.

This is regressed child behavior. Think about kids who stall when they don’t want to do something. This isn’t just irresponsibility, it’s the nervous system stalling, it’s nervous system movement. It’s fawn and freeze patterns wrapped in “I don’t know how” and reinforced by a partner who keeps saying, “You’re doing it wrong.”

Think about it. If men are always doing it wrong when will they ever do it right to your standards? Do you even have standards? Or is being constantly unfulfilled a baseline personality trait that creates a double bind not just for your husband but also for your kids? A reenactment of your mother’s moods maybe?

But then there’s the second path.

The one that doesn’t look like collapse.
It looks like dominance.
It looks like gaslighting.
It looks like a man who makes his partner feel small, confused, doubting her own sense of reality—because that’s what he had to do to himself to survive his own upbringing.

This is often when narcissism enters the chat, not as a personality disorder right away, but as a pattern of delusion required to maintain a sense of self. It’s not that he wants to lie or manipulate. It’s that he was never allowed to just be.
And when you’re raised by a mother or any caregiver for that matter who emotionally hijacks every moment, who re-centers everything around her pain, her emotions, her shame—you learn to do the same, because it’s the only way you ever got attention, safety, or identity. We must not confuse these with “skills.” These are maladaptive survival patterns.

If we never pause to name them, we start reinforcing them.
We start dating them.
We start building families with them.
And then calling it fate when it falls apart. So many women are in relationships with men like this men who are drowning in shame but performing control.
Men who seek validation through cheating, flirting, overworking, or status, because it’s the only way they know how to feel good enough. Now here’s the thing…
A lot of those women are reenacting their own wounds, too. They choose these men because the dynamic is familiar. Because it matches what their nervous system was raised on. And that’s not chemistry.
That’s trauma. That’s your past recycling itself.

All of this doesn’t excuse anything. We name to interrupt the reenactment.

Macro-Micro Loop: Is Culture Conditioning the Family, or the Other Way Around?

Here’s a hypothesis I’ve been sitting with:

We are fed narratives.
Who deserves empathy.
Who should be forgiven.
Who is always safe.
Who is always harmful.

When was the last time you asked yourself… “Where did we get these blueprints from?” Who told us we had to chase perfection, be the “good wife,” raise the polite child, and suppress our mess?

Advertising did.
The church did.
The state did.
The neighborhood did.
The PTA did.

Marketing campaigns didn’t just sell us products—they sold us identities.
They sold us what safety was supposed to look like and then punished us for not achieving it. But what happens when modern influencers are perpetuating a life that not even they are living? This is why discernment skills are so important.

The deeper truth: We don’t have to keep reenacting any of it, and that is terrifying for some of us. We don’t have to let the algorithm of our nervous system or society decide our values. We don’t have to choose between family conditioning and cultural messaging. We can choose something else: We can choose alignment. That’s what this whole field trip is about. Not burning down the system, but getting honest about whether it’s been living in our bodies this whole time and the necessary rewiring work needed rewire what’s been imbedded within our system.

Closing Thought: The Shame You’re Avoiding Is the Growth You’re Delaying

Let me say this plainly:

I’m not here to argue that all men are victims. I’m not here to suggest women can’t be harmed. I’m not here to “both sides” real abuse. I’m here to say that our perception filters… You know the ones shaped by pain, family roles, culture, and shame— yeah, those filtration systems often prevent us from seeing the full picture.

And that blindness…
hurts our kids.
hurts our partners.
hurts our healing.

More importantly hurts ourselves.

The shame you’re avoiding isn’t dangerous.
Sitting with it is the real work.

That’s the hypothesis.
I’ll see you on the next field trip.

🎵Music: “Etc…”- Franz Gordon

Licensed via Epidemic Sound