🌅Soft Hours: vol.1 — Try a Different Story

Where I meet myself in the soft, unseen hours and keep a soft space for you to meet yourself too.

Data Collectors,

tap tap plays “Sunday Morning” by Maroon 5 🎶

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

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

So I created a home for those moments here.

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

This is the first one.

Let’s dive in….

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

We tend.

We prep.

We anticipate.

We hold.

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

Louann Brizendine — The Female Brain

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-led wife:
Talk to your family.

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

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

The algorithm..

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

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

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

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

The famous Gorilla experiment I will link the video here.

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

Now for some of you…

Look around:

• Your mug

• Your wall

• Your couch

• Your car

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

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

It’s your thinking.

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

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

Tell your family:

“I’m sleeping in tomorrow.”

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

That’s a different situation.

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

It’s wild.

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

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

You’re doing the dishes.
Folding the laundry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

None of that.
Not this time. okaaay?

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

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

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

…Till next time, Loves.

Come as you are— where you are.

—Sav. 🫶🏽

References & Extended Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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