I’ve been sitting with something lately. I think this is one of the greatest struggles of being human. We think we’re responding to what’s happening in front of us, but most of the time we’re responding to what our nervous system believes is happening. Those are two very different things. One is rooted in reality. The other is rooted in prediction. Our brains are constantly trying to answer the question, “Based on everything I’ve experienced before, what does this moment mean?” We don’t just experience life. We interpret it. That interpretation becomes our reality long before we’ve ever stopped to question whether the story we’re telling ourselves is actually—true.
So let me jump in with a personal story. Now, for those who do not understand my work. I am not here for the trauma bonding and getting you to feel seen in your ache while keeping you ruminating in it. My work is about challenging our own perceptions, behaviors, and the way we project them outwardly onto the people closest to us. The personal stories I share are not to villainize, anyone even if they are case studies. So let’s proceed.
Since returning home from my trip visiting family in California. I came home to my lego bonsai broken… Mind you this is not about the lego tree it’s about the principal. Now I ask my husband “why is my lego tree broken?” This man proceeds to tell me he “dusted it and it broke".” Now, this man does not dust anything that is not in his garage. My MIL lives with us and let’s just say, it’s been a rough couple years to say the least. What many of us do not realize, its never about the person themselves, its about the system they quietly bring WITH them. He proceeds to tell me a story that I know is false. My nervous system turns on, which as a result because I am a smiley person causes my face to change. Ugh, I don’t know about any of y’all but those of us who wear our emotions on our face. It can be hard. When I am not smiling— if I am concentrating, in panic mode, or even afraid. My face can have a hardcore RBF. It gets me into trouble. LOL. I digress. I am activated which means the story my mind starts to tell me considering my husband and I have been in a ROR season ourselves is— “You are picking your mother over me, you always pick her side.” All it takes is one feeling in the body, and the mind movies start to flow like an avalanche attack. I have been doing the work internally to really try, but in-laws… More importantly it’s what they do to our partners.
Ever heard of the statement regressed child? When we are around our family or even our parents and there are unhealed, unacknowledged wounds. We tend to regress to the version of ourselves that had to survive around them. For me I over function, for my husband— he disassociate into distractibility and autopilot mode. For others, they may start to engage in learned helplessness, people pleasing, etc. Take a moment and reflect what do you tend to regress into when you are around certain family, OR even specific coworkers. Yes, these same dynamics that we will be speaking on today get reenacted in the work place.
Anyways…
The longer I do this work—both professionally and personally—the more convinced I become that communication doesn’t begin when someone opens their mouth. It begins long before that. Before anyone says a word, our nervous system has already traveled through a series of internal highways that determine how we’re going to perceive what comes next. That’s why I’ve spent so much time developing what I call the Highways of Functioning.
We spend so much time trying to improve communication while completely overlooking the highways that produce communication in the first place. We focus on the argument, the defensiveness, the shutdown, the people-pleasing, the lie, the apology, the withdrawal, but all of those behaviors are simply the destination. They aren’t where the journey began. For me in this moment with my husband, mind you— just like many of the readers and followers of my work, we too are experiencing resentment towards each other— no one is exempt. With military life, not being in our home state of California, deployments, relocations, job stress, and adding in other family on top of a foundation that my husband and I have never really gotten to call our own. These little moments for us can turn into big moments when the foundation has cracks in it.
Within seconds, I could feel my body changing. My chest tightened. My thoughts sped up. My brain immediately started connecting dots that had absolutely nothing to do with a plastic tree. If he’ll lie about something this small, what else does he lie about? Who is he protecting? Why couldn’t he just tell me the truth? Am I being thrown under the bus again?
Let’s pause here beucase we gotta hop in the Delorean for this one. Let’s go back to my childhood where my mother would prioritize relationships over her children. Living in an environment where your own mother was surviving unhealthy relationships. It lead her to saving herself at the expense of her children. Now I do not share this to shame anyone. I share this to help the readers understand this is how our nervous systems get molded. By early childhood development and the attachments with care givers. I learned early on that I could not trust. I learned early on that you can be thrown to the wolves if it meant someone needed to protect themselves from a person they chose to be with. That could be your parent, step-parent, etc. Much of my attachment imprinting was rooted in watching little lies with the adults, get projected or displaced onto the child as a way for one of the adults to seek safety. Does that make sense?
So my amygdala —that doesn’t have eyes— is now taking me and my entire 35 year old body on a time travel date to the past. I felt fire inside. Now, it does not help that there is a lot of manipulation in the family system that my husband also survived. You see, in a society always screaming out that everyone else is the narcissist or manipulator. We forget that we all have survived something in our childhood. So when I am in this moment It was fascinating to watch because I knew enough to realize that I wasn’t reacting to the lego tree anymore. I wasn’t even reacting to the lie. I was reacting to the meaning my nervous system had assigned to the lie, and that meaning was pulling from roads that had been built decades before this conversation ever happened.
I think this is where so many of us get ourselves into trouble. We believe we’re responding to reality when, in reality, we’re responding to the filter we’ve been drinking life through for years. I’ve started thinking about it like a Brita filter. Water doesn’t go straight into your glass. It passes through a filter first, and whatever is inside that filter determines what eventually reaches your cup— and then reaching your stomach because you drink it up. I think our minds work the exact same way. Every interaction we have passes through our own internal filter before it ever becomes our conscious experience. Our childhood passes through that filter. Our attachment wounds pass through that filter. Our family system, our religion, our culture, our betrayals, our fears, our heartbreak, our previous relationships—they all become part of the filtration system we use to make sense of the world.
That’s why two people can experience the exact same event and walk away believing two completely different things happened. Such as siblings living in the same home. One person hears avoidance; another hears abandonment. One person hears hesitation; another hears rejection. One person notices a small lie; another person’s entire attachment history comes flooding back online. The event didn’t change. The filter did. That’s what I find so fascinating about human behavior. We spend so much time arguing over who has the correct interpretation while completely ignoring the fact that neither one of us is drinking straight from the source. We’re all drinking through filters that were built by experiences we didn’t always choose. So when you think about what kids do when they get caught or are in trouble. They end up lying as a means to avoid trouble but all it does it dig their hole deeper. Well, those kids are inside all of us adults. So when we regress, we engage in that same behavior as a means to avoid the discomfort of perceived threat, conflict, etc. Not necessarily as a means to protect someone except ourselves.
That realization has softened me—not because it’s made me excuse behavior that hurts, but because it’s helped me separate understanding from agreement. Reminder, you do not have to agree to acknowledge or reach some sort of clarity. Those two things are not the same. Understanding someone doesn’t remove accountability. It doesn’t erase consequences. It doesn’t suddenly make harmful behavior healthy. What it does do for me at least is interrupt my certainty that everything happening in front of me is happening to me. Sometimes the behavior we’re experiencing has very little to do with us and everything to do with the highways another person’s nervous system has been traveling for decades in order to function and survive. That doesn’t mean we tolerate it, no no no. So for those of you whose pesky little brains think that what I am saying means tolerate abuse. I want us all to turn on our discernment mechanisms. This work does not always apply to those in extreme situations. The issue though is we live in trauma territory and many people think not getting their way is traumatizing.
This work means we stop reducing human beings to the worst thing they did in a moment when their nervous system was trying to survive. In my ASL interpreting we frequently used API- assume positive intent. I means have you ever had to cuss someone out but it wasn’t you that was saying it, you had to be the translator for it? When it comes to API I think we’ve become really bad at that as a society, but think about it. Assuming the positive doesn’t really get someone to buy your course or click follow these days.
The Highways We Travel Before We Ever Speak
One of the greatest mistakes I think we make is believing that behavior appears out of nowhere. We watch someone lie, shut down, explode, become passive-aggressive, people-please, or avoid conflict, and we immediately make the behavior the entire story. We label the person instead of becoming curious about the highway their nervous system traveled before we ever witnessed the destination. Behavior is visible. The highway that produced it usually isn’t. Undercurrents— is what I like to call them. Before we ever arrive on the Communication Highways, our nervous system has already traveled through several internal roads that determine how we’re going to experience the moment. We all have a baseline. We all have a perception. We all have behavior because of that baseline and perception. Then, and only then, do we begin communicating with another human being, but get this. The problem is that most of us think communication starts with our words, when in reality it starts with our nervous system. Many people don’t communicate with their words at all. They communicate through avoidance.
Think about it for a second. Have you ever had one of those days where you’re exhausted, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and someone asks you a completely innocent question? On another day, you probably would’ve smiled and answered without giving it a second thought. But today? It feels like criticism. It feels like pressure. It feels like someone asking for one more thing when you don’t have anything left to give. The question didn’t change. Your baseline did due to the environmental situation. The same thing happens with perception. Our brains are prediction machines. They are constantly scanning the environment looking for familiar patterns because familiar patterns have kept us alive. The brain doesn’t ask, “Is this objectively true?” nearly as often as it asks, “Have I felt something like this before?” If the answer is yes, it starts pulling old files before we’ve even had a chance to consciously think. That’s why a small lie doesn’t stay small. It gets attached to every other memory within that hippocampus forrest (archives) that carried a similar emotional weight.
When I noticed my Lego tree had been broken, my brain wasn’t just looking at a broken Lego tree. It was looking for context. It was trying to understand why the explanation didn’t make sense, am I right about the findings? In this case yes, my husband did not dust it himself that makes no sense, why now, and why after I left? it was very clear his mother did, but was my interpretation from the nervous system accurate on why he lied about it? No— at first it wasn’t. As I sat with it, I realized something that honestly made me sad more than it made me angry. I don’t actually think my husband was trying to hurt me. I think he was trying to protect himself. Those are not the same thing. If you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you know I care deeply about making that distinction because intention and impact are two completely different conversations. The impact still matters. The hurt is still real. Accountability still exists. But understanding why someone behaved the way they did often changes how I decide to respond.
It only took me 15 mins after telling him he doesn’t need to lie about it. The context needed here is that there has been a lot of boundary violations, manipulation, triangulation, and just straight up dysfunctional dynamics interfering within our own marriage due to outside family influences. Many couples go through this when in-laws, family members, etc make their way within the marital union. So for my husband his A.S.S (activated survival self) Must have been not wanting to deal with conflict, making me upset beucase maybe he has caught onto the pattern within me, who knows. His A.S.S is very familiar with my A.S.S and so his nervous system took him down the path he is familiar living in. He had his reason for doing it. Now in many Indian families and other cultures— lies are a big part of how the system functions. Because we center around the elders and pleasing them. When I would do uber and lyft I picked up many people from different backgrounds. Young teens that would hop in the car change their outfits that they had underneath before getting to school, sneaking people in the home, lying about whether or not you ate meat before going to the temple or Gurdwara. This is normal behavior for many families. For me, lying makes me feel out of alignment. Why lie about something so small? I guess this is why I get called abrasive. I tend to name things.
Let me give you another example. Suppose every family system has a plate of meat. That meat represents, trauma, wounds, behaviors, patterns that all go unnoticed, or avoided. So that meat gets placed in the closet. Deep deep down in the closet. Overtime it starts to rot, that rot has a smell. Kids start to smell it and the system (parents) who learned from their parents. We don’t smell anything, maybe because they are nose blind. So now the kids learn to become nose blind to that smell. Now add in a new person not apart of that system. That start naming the smell. Calling it out, trying to look for it. Everyone is telling that person that smell does not exist—now they feel gaslighted because they can clearly smell the rotten meat. Was the system intentionally trying to gaslight that new individual? Or were they simply responding to their reality. That they have become nose blind to? That’s the point.
The more I reflected on it, the more I thought about how many people grow up in family systems where telling the truth isn’t actually safe. This is mostly because honesty disrupts the emotional climate. If telling the truth leads to someone exploding, withdrawing, giving you the silent treatment, shaming you, or making you responsible for their emotional state, your nervous system learns something very quickly: Protect the emotional climate first. That’s where little lies are born. I work with many kids and teens, and let me tell you, even adults—specifically husbands don’t feel like they have the safety to speak in the session due to what may occur after the session.
I don’t think most people wake up in the morning thinking, I’m going to become dishonest today. I think most people are trying to avoid discomfort they’ve learned is dangerous. Somewhere along the way, their nervous system decided that managing another person’s emotions was safer than tolerating another person’s disappointment. That strategy may have protected them as a child. It may have even protected them in an unhealthy workplace. But eventually that same strategy follows them into adulthood, into friendships, into marriage, into parenting, and into leadership. This is why I believe so many of us are arguing about behavior while completely missing the nervous system underneath it. We see someone avoiding conflict and immediately call them weak. We see someone people-pleasing and call them fake. We see someone shutting down and call them emotionally unavailable. We see someone lying and call them manipulative. Sometimes those labels fit— trust me—they do fit. Sometimes they don’t though and thats the part of the online space we don’t always address. But I think we’ve become far too comfortable ending the conversation where curiosity should actually begin.
That’s what I want this work to challenge. Not your boundaries. Not your discernment. Your certainty. Because certainty is comfortable. Curiosity requires courage. And I’ve found that healing ourselves almost always asks more of us than certainty ever will. Trust me y’all I am still learning this too.
Emotional Climate Managers
As I kept sitting with this, I realized the broken Lego tree wasn’t actually what my nervous system was responding to. It was responding to something much older—something I see in families every single day. It was responding to what I call emotional climate management. I don’t think enough people talk about this because it’s so subtle that, when you’re inside of it, you don’t even realize it’s happening. You just know that certain people dictate the emotional atmosphere of an entire room, and everyone else unconsciously begins organizing themselves around that person’s comfort. Just look at some of the workplace dynamics people are tiptoeing in.
I’ve seen it in marriages. I’ve seen it in parent-child relationships. I’ve seen it in church communities. I’ve seen it in military families. I’ve seen it in corporate America. I’ve seen it in court cases where children are terrified to tell the truth because well—loyalty binds. They don’t want to upset mommy or daddy but being truthful in what they see occurring and how they feel about it. So what happens? They try to protect one parent’s feelings from the other. Different environments. Same highway.
Someone in the system cannot tolerate discomfort.
Everyone else begins carrying it for them.
That’s where I think these little lies are born. Maybe telling the truth means someone explodes. Maybe it means someone cries. Maybe it means someone gives you the silent treatment for three days. Maybe it means you’re called disrespectful. Maybe it means you’re shamed. Maybe it means you become the bad guy simply because you disrupted the emotional climate that everyone else has spent years maintaining.
Eventually, your nervous system stops asking, “What’s true?” and starts asking, “What’s going to keep everyone regulated?”
When I think about my husband, I don’t just see the man standing in front of me today. I see the little boy who learned how to survive inside of his family system. I see someone who had to navigate loyalty, obligation, respect, culture, expectations, and emotional consequences long before I ever entered the picture. That doesn’t excuse behavior that hurts our marriage, but it helps me understand that what I’m often witnessing isn’t simply my husband making a conscious decision to choose someone else over me. Sometimes I’m watching a child-sized survival strategy living inside an adult body.
Honestly, I don’t think this is unique to him.
Remember how I mentioned the workplace? Go to any workplace and you’ll find the exact same dynamic. Everyone knows who not to upset. Everyone knows whose mood determines whether the office is going to have a good day or a bad day. People start changing the way they communicate depending on who is in the room. They sugarcoat. They over-explain. They avoid difficult conversations. They gossip in private because they don’t feel safe speaking directly. Then we wonder why trust slowly erodes.
It’s the same highway.
Or think about parenting. A child or teen throws a tantrum, breaks a rule and is immediately given a consequence. Let’s say the father wants to be more stern with reinforcing these consequences while the mom struggles with being the “bad guy”. So despite grounding the child or teen she proceeds to buy them something. Mostly to soothe her own discomfort with the reinforcement of the boundary. This dynamic is what many parents struggle with. The parent immediately caves because they can’t tolerate the discomfort of their child being upset with them. The toy gets bought. The consequence disappears. Peace returns. The emotional climate has been restored, but nothing was actually repaired. The child didn’t learn how to tolerate disappointment. The parent didn’t learn how to tolerate being temporarily disliked by the child. They both learned that whoever experiences the most discomfort gets to control the system, and the parents may even end up divided because of it.
Whoever experiences the most discomfort often ends up controlling the emotional climate of the entire system.
I think that’s one of the greatest family systems lessons I’ve ever learned.
The irony is that the people carrying everyone else’s emotions often believe they’re the peacemakers. They think they’re keeping the family together, or that they are preventing conflict. But underneath that peace is usually fear. It’s not genuine harmony. It’s compliance. Everyone has simply learned which version of themselves they need to become in order to keep the system functioning. I know what that feels like because I grew up in a system like that. My nervous system learned very early to scan the room before I spoke. To read faces. To predict moods. To figure out who needed what before anyone even asked. That hypervigilance served me as a child. It made me incredibly observant. It’s part of what allows me to do the work I do today. But it also means my nervous system can mistake familiarity for truth if I’m not careful, utilizing pause, and deep discernment.
That’s why I’ve become so passionate about cleaning the filter I’m drinking life through. Because if I don’t, I’ll keep confusing old survival strategies for present-day reality. And I don’t want to build my life—or my marriage—on roads my nervous system paved decades ago.
Loyalty Doesn’t Always Mean Love
One of the hardest things I’ve had to accept is that loyalty and love are not the same thing. We talk about loyalty like it’s automatically a virtue, but I’ve come to believe that loyalty, by itself, is morally neutral. You can be loyal to truth, and you can be loyal to dysfunction. You can also be loyal to healing, and to secrecy. You can be loyal to a family system that taught you to abandon yourself in order to belong. Raise your hand if that last one hit you? I know it did for me.
That’s what makes loyalty binds so difficult to recognize as adults.
As adults, loyalty binds become much harder to recognize because they disguise themselves as personality. We call someone conflict avoidant when, in reality, they may have spent thirty years learning that conflict was never emotionally safe. We call someone a people pleaser without asking what happened the first time they disappointed someone they loved. We criticize someone for lying without wondering if honesty once carried consequences their nervous system still remembers. Again, this isn’t about removing accountability. It’s about refusing to reduce human beings to behaviors without understanding the roads that produced them. Todays society is so focused on what we want to see as the villain, but what if we are all a villain to someone out there in the world, even if we weren’t intentionally trying to be?
The more I’ve reflected on this, the more I’ve realized loyalty binds exist far beyond the family. They exist everywhere we build identity. They show up in our politics, our religions, our communities, our workplaces, and even in the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Every single one of us is looking through a lens. The question isn’t whether you have one. The question is whether you are aware that you’re looking through it, drinking life through that tainted Brita filter.
For some people, it’s a political lens. Every interaction gets filtered through Republican or Democrat. For someone else, it’s a religious lens. Every disagreement becomes a battle between good and evil. For someone else, it’s a racial lens. As a multiracial woman, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this one because I’ve experienced what it’s like to exist in multiple worlds at once. I’ve had people tell me that if I don’t automatically agree with every perspective coming from one community—the black lens, then somehow I’ve betrayed that community. I’ve been called anti-Black simply because I refuse to see the world exclusively through a Black lens.
Here’s what I want to be very clear about.
I’m not saying my perspective is the correct one.
I’m saying I don’t want any single lens to become the only lens I look through.
The same is true for gender.
The same is true for sexuality.
The same is true for religion.
The same is true for culture.
The same is true for trauma.
The same is true for attachment.
The moment any one lens becomes the only lens through which I can understand another human being, I stop seeing the complexity of the person standing in front of me. I stop being curious. I start becoming certain, and our brains love certainty even if it’s false. Chasing certainty is one of the quickest ways to lose our humanity.
That’s part of what concerns me about the algorithm.
It rewards certainty.
It rewards outrage.
It rewards us for finding people who drink from the same tainted filter we do, while convincing us that everyone drinking from a different filter must be wrong, dangerous, or beyond redemption. We build entire communities around shared pain, shared anger, and shared enemies. We mistake agreement as a form of connection and outrage for wisdom—mob mentality behavior. You know I always say this as I reflect on my small group of friends. Many people today bond over shared gossip and dislike for others. Which is why it is so important to be cautions who you are breaking bread with. Sometimes misery does love company, but many times people need to trauma bond or co-ruminate with someone else to feel seen. Before long, we’re no longer seeing people. We’re seeing categories, pain, and shared dislike for others.
But then something happens that reminds me who we really are.
A natural disaster.
A mass tragedy.
A child goes missing.
Someone collapses in a grocery store.
A family loses everything.
Think about the images we’ve all seen after hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, or after 9/11. In those moments, people weren’t standing in the rubble asking, “Who did you vote for?” They weren’t checking voter registration before pulling someone from a collapsed building. They weren’t asking if the person bleeding beside them was Black, White, queer, straight, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, atheist, Republican, Democrat, or Independent.
They saw another human being.
And they moved toward them.
That’s the irony that keeps me hopeful.
I don’t believe compassion disappeared.
I think it gets buried beneath the filters we’ve spent our entire lives protecting.
Strip away the identities for just a moment, and our humanity has a remarkable way of remembering itself. We know how to help. We know how to comfort. We know how to protect one another. The question is whether we’re willing to remember that before life forces us into another crisis.
Because I don’t want to wait for tragedy to remind me that the person standing across from me is, first and foremost, another human nervous system trying to make sense of the world—just like mine.
Little Lies, Big Worries
When I first sat down to write this, I thought I was writing about a broken Lego tree. Then I thought I was writing about attachment wounds. Then I thought I was writing about loyalty binds. Somewhere along the way I realized I wasn’t writing about any of those things. I was writing about worry. More specifically, I was writing about how little lies have a way of creating really big worries. Not because the lie itself is catastrophic, but because the moment uncertainty enters a relationship, our nervous system immediately begins filling in the blanks—madlibs style. We don’t like not knowing. We don’t like incomplete stories. So our brain does what it’s always done—it starts predicting.
The irony is that little lies usually don’t accomplish what we think they will. We tell ourselves we’re protecting someone. We’re trying to avoid conflict. We’re trying to keep the peace. We’re trying to save someone from getting hurt. But if you’ve been reading this far, you already know what happens next. The lie doesn’t eliminate discomfort. It simply transfers it. Instead of having one uncomfortable conversation rooted in reality, we now have a nervous system trying to make sense of uncertainty. And uncertainty is fertile ground for worry.
The moment reality becomes unclear, our brains get to work. What else aren’t they telling me? Why didn’t they just tell me the truth? If they’ll lie about something this small, what happens when something really matters? None of those questions are irrational. They’re the brain trying to close an open loop. Our nervous system is desperately looking for solid ground, and when it can’t find it, it starts building stories out of old memories. That’s where the filter comes back in. We aren’t just responding to today’s moment anymore. We’re responding to every moment that ever felt like this one.
I think that’s why anxiety grows the way it does. It rarely starts with panic. It starts with uncertainty. Uncertainty becomes worry. Worry becomes hypervigilance. Hypervigilance becomes overthinking. Overthinking becomes assumptions. Assumptions become behaviors. Before we know it, we’re checking phones, reading into text messages, replaying conversations, asking for reassurance, withdrawing, people pleasing, shutting down, becoming defensive, interrogating, or pushing someone away before they have the chance to hurt us first. By the time the behavior shows up, we’ve completely forgotten that it all started with one tiny crack in reality that our nervous system couldn’t make sense of.
That’s why I don’t actually think self-sabotage begins with the behavior. I think it begins with the worry. Most people aren’t trying to destroy the relationships they care about. They’re trying to escape the uncertainty they don’t know how to tolerate. If I convince myself you’re going to leave me, maybe I’ll leave first. If I convince myself you’re lying, maybe I’ll start looking for more evidence until I accidentally create the very distance I was afraid of. If I convince myself I’m not safe, I’ll start protecting myself from a threat that may not even exist anymore. Suddenly the behavior makes perfect sense because it was never really about the behavior. It was about the worry underneath it.
That’s why honesty is so much more than a moral principle to me. I think honesty is one of the greatest gifts we can give another person’s nervous system. Honesty doesn’t guarantee they’ll like what they hear. It doesn’t guarantee there won’t be conflict or that they’ll agree with us. But it gives them something a lie never can. It gives them reality. Reality allows me to respond to what actually happened. A lie forces me to respond to everything my nervous system imagines might have happened, and I don’t know about you, but my imagination is almost always far crueler than the truth.
Maybe that’s why this little Lego tree ended up teaching me something so much bigger. Little lies don’t stay little because our nervous systems won’t let them. They become worries. Worries become stories. Stories become behaviors. Behaviors become relationship patterns. And if we’re not careful, we end up blaming ourselves, blaming our partners, blaming our parents, blaming our politics, blaming our culture, blaming everyone around us, when all along we’ve been drinking from a filter that’s been asking one question over and over again:
“Am I safe?”
Maybe that’s the real invitation here.
Not to become someone who never worries.
Not to become someone who never gets activated.
Not even to become someone who always gets it right.
Maybe the invitation is to become someone who notices when their nervous system starts writing a story and has the courage to pause before treating that story as truth. Because sometimes the greatest act of love isn’t avoiding an uncomfortable conversation. Sometimes it’s telling the truth, trusting that the relationship is strong enough to hold it, and refusing to leave the people we love alone with the stories their nervous system will write in the silence.
Little lies create big worries.
And I don’t know about you, but I think this world already has enough worry.
With love
