📓 🧠 Introducing: Field Notes: Perception Check

Like a good therapist calling you in… but publicly.

Photo by Kolby Milton on Unsplash

Happy Weekend Data Collectors!

We all have moments where we think we’re seeing reality clearly when in fact, we’re just staring into a polished mirror of our own nervous system. Perception Check is a new micro-series of Field Notes I’ll be dropping here on Substack.

They’re short, spicy, and a little uncomfortable, but they’re not here to shame you. They’re here to stretch you. Starting this week, I’ll be posting short-form drops in the Notes section of Substack. Tiny truth bombs for your nervous system, packaged as little letters from me to you.

Every few days, I’ll be delivering what I call Perception Checks:

💭 Cognitive challenges

🧠 Nervous system truths

📚 Clinical and sociological patterns

✨ And the small psychological traps we fall into when we confuse our feelings/ nervous system activity for facts.

WHY PERCEPTION CHECK MATTERS

From a clinical and sociological perspective, we are all navigating the world through layers of personal activation, group identity, and unspoken conditioning.

That means many of our “truths” are actually shaped by:

• Identity fusion (Swann): when we fuse our safety with a label or group

• Emotional reasoning (Beck): when we believe something is true just because it feels true

• Symbolic threat theory (Stephan & Stephan): when we misread someone’s autonomy as personal harm

• Performance rituals (Goffman): when we act out belonging to protect our social standing

Understand— These aren’t flaws, they’re protective strategies. Naming them is not a threat to your safety either. It’s an offering to stretch your capacity. It’s the work of building muscle to hold the weight of nuance. But— if left unchecked, they keep us from developing discernment, emotional regulation, and true autonomy.

📬 HOW THIS WORKS

Each Perception Check is designed to be:

• ✨ Bite-sized (well..maybe big bite sizes😅) — a quick flash of insight or challenge

• 🔍 Backed by research — no influencer fluff here

• 💬 Interactive — you’re invited to comment, reflect, or disagree

• 🔗 Connected to deeper work — each one ties back to my larger series, The Weekly Ledger

WHO IT’S FOR

• People who want to stop reacting and start reflecting

• Therapists, thinkers, feelers, and the beautifully overwhelmed

• Anyone doing inner work who’s sick of the self-help fluff and ready for some psycho-spiritual accountability

🧙🏽‍♀️This isn’t about catching you “being wrong.”

I want to squirrel real quick into a side note. This is something I tell my clients and I’m going to tell you. It’s never about “am I doing this right?”

Trying to perfect-tify everything is the fast track to going mad. I notice many clients come to therapy, zipped up in a glow of need, desperate for the confirmation that they did it “right.” Presenting as the little child turning to parent looking for approval. It’s not about what I think or deem is “right” or “wrong” because truly what is right?

It’s about what is sustainable for YOU and you alone. Not your family, friends, partner, therapist. What’s right for you. Many of us lose sight of that fact simply because we spend too much time around sameness or in shrink-ness (people pleaser mode) that we forget we are a whole individual being capable of holding more than what’s comfortable and familiar.

These Field Notes— Perception Checks, they’re about building the capacity to hold multiple truths without collapsing into control, shame, or superiority. To face discomfort, hold it, and know that despite not agreeing with it— it’s a truth that exists for others whether you like it or not. That’s the training.

Standing strong in the safety you learn to cultivate within yourself, from the interpersonal work YOU put it— well.

That sounds like a gift if you ask me. 😉

Welcome to the mental gym. You’re already in session.🤓

📓Field Note: Perception Check #01 Look out for it!

Feel free to forward, comment, or whisper to your ego gently:

‘We’re just learning here. You’re safe to grow.’

See you out in the wild!

Come as you are, where you are— Sav🫶🏽

📚 References for Clinical Receipts:

• Swann, W. B., Jr., Gómez, Á., Seyle, D. C., Morales, J. F., & Huici, C. (2009). Identity fusion: The interplay of personal and social identities in extreme group behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 995–1011. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013668

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

• Stephan, W. G., & Stephan, C. W. (2000). An integrated threat theory of prejudice. In S. Oskamp (Ed.), Reducing prejudice and discrimination (pp. 23–45). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

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