🗺️📍ROR: The Fruit You Take
On Conditional Belonging, Projection, and the Courage to Be Misunderstood
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 We have enough platforms teaching or speaking on the historical content and much of the reason many want to force historical discussions is because of the booby trap design of deflecting from the original mission my work has always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.
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.
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.
What fascinates me is how often we become the very thing we claim to hate.
We complain about disconnection while emotionally cutting people off. We complain about not being heard while refusing to hear. We complain about people avoiding accountability while immediately reaching for someone or something else to blame. We complain about manipulation while manipulating conversations. We complain about invalidation while invalidating anyone who brings us information that makes us uncomfortable.
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:
“If change is possible for you, what does that mean for me?”
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