actualinfinity

How to Protect Your Neurodivergent Nervous System Under Authoritarian Threat

smattus — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 08:37:59 +0000

A Resource Guide for What to Do When You’re Already Running on Empty

Special appreciation goes out to Paul T Shattuck, MSW, PhD*, who writes Stay Human – Shape Tomorrow* right here on Substack. Please subscribe and support his work.

Also, appreciation goes out to Patrick Casale (He/His), and Megan Anna Neff. 2026. Episode 144 (Season 5): “Neurodivergent Advocacy in Turbulent Times and The Future of Divergent Conversations.” Divergent Conversations, February 6, 2026. Podcast audio. https://divergentconversations.captivate.fm/episode/144

I’m a 53 year old autistic, gay fella who has complex-PTSD, and a whole host of other things that come with that special mix of sunshine.

I wrote this piece to help myself and my neurodivergent friends (and anyone else) to learn what living under the threat of authoritarianism does to the nervous system… and some gentle things we can do, when we don’t have a ton of capacity to do everything we would like to do.

I hope it’s useful for you.

Steve

I couldn’t get off the couch the other day. Not in a “lazy Sunday” way. In a way where my body felt like wet sand and my brain kept looping: what’s the point.

Kept telling myself, “you watched too much news yesterday. ugh.”

I know what that is. That’s a Shutdown experience. I’ve mapped this territory for years. And still… when the news hits a certain pitch, when someone screams something cruel in a parking lot and my stomach drops even though I keep my face perfectly neutral… because that’s what I do, right? I mask. I hold the face. I pay the cost later, alone, wondering why I’m so tired when I “didn’t even do anything.”

Many of us are scared right now. Or maybe you can’t name it yet, or wouldn’t exactly call it “scared”… just a tightness, a wrongness, a sense of waiting for impact. That counts too.

And if you’re scared, you’re probably trying to figure out what to do with that fear (or anger) without destroying yourself in the process.

This isn’t just politics. It’s the air. It’s the tone. It’s the hats people wear. It shows up in how your body tightens when you walk into a grocery store and feel something off in how people are moving… sharper, tighter, less patient.

Someone snaps at a cashier. Someone across the parking lot screams, “Go back where you came from.” You keep your face neutral. Your stomach drops anyway. And if you’re someone who masks… if holding that neutral face is labor your system has been doing since childhood… the cost of that moment is double what anyone around you realizes.

And if you’re like me, with complex-PTSD from abuse… when a voice is raised, or has that unique intonation to it… your whole body locks up in protection.

Online, it’s just as bad, if not worse. The pace is brutal. A new crisis arrives before the last one settles. The same arguments loop. Everything is urgent. Everyone is either “with us” or “against us.”

A lot of the public world starts to feel like a place where intimidation gets rewarded and cruelty becomes background noise.

Confusion isn’t an accident. Overwhelm is not a side effect. It’s a tool.

When people are flooded in their nervous system, they lose track of what matters, what’s real, what to do, and who to trust. They get tired. They get reactive. They isolate. They fight each other. Or they shut down completely.

If your system feels scared and overwhelmed, that isn’t a personal failure. It’s evidence your nervous system is detecting danger.

And it’s detecting it accurately.

Start Here (Especially If You’re in Shutdown Right Now)

This piece is long. If paragraphs aren’t landing… if your eyes are sliding off the page… start here. This is the whole thing, compressed into three moves.

If You’re in Shutdown: arrive + one thread.

Arrive: name 1 thing I see, 1 thing I hear, 1 thing I feel.
Thread: text someone, “Thinking of you. No pressure.”

If You’re in Sympathetic: channel + boundary.

Channel: one letter to a representative / one task / one meeting.
Boundary: one media limit. Then exit.

If You can access Safety: one lane of action, timed. 30 minutes. Then stop. Close the loop.

That’s the path. Not because you don’t care. Because you do… and because your nervous system is part of what you’re protecting.

If you want the longer version, keep going. If you can’t right now, you already have what you need. Bookmark this. Come back when your capacity opens.

What This Does to a Nervous System (And Why Neurodivergent Adults Get Hit Hard)

A nervous system can mobilize for a threat. It can recover. It can mobilize again.

But it isn’t designed for day after day of “something is happening” without resolution.

Research from trauma and neuroscience has shown that “trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant.”¹

When the alarm system recalibrates, the filtering system changes too. You start treating more things like threat. You can’t tell what to ignore. Everything has teeth.

For neurodivergent adults, this lands even harder because many of our systems already run extra labor… every day, before the political climate even enters the picture. Scanning for sensory threats (fluorescent lights, sudden sounds, texture shifts). Filtering (trying to distinguish signal from noise when everything registers as high signal). Translating (neurotypical social cues into something navigable). Masking (holding the performance of “fine” so you don’t become a target). And recovering from all of it… constantly, invisibly, with nobody counting the cost.²

You may already be doing “constant threat assessment” in a world that doesn’t feel predictable.² So when the outside world becomes louder and meaner, your body might start running like a smoke detector in a burning kitchen.

That’s not “overreacting.” That’s your system doing its job… with less margin than most people realize you’re working with.

The question becomes:

How do you work with your nervous system while the world stays unstable?

Your Overwhelm Is Engineered

Paul Shattuck, a writer, consultant, researcher, and longtime organizer, names what many of us are feeling: “Your overwhelm isn’t personal failure… it’s a natural response to engineered chaos.”³

Where wellness culture implies we should regulate our way through political crisis, Shattuck names what’s actually happening: authoritarian systems weaponize chaos to exhaust our capacity for resistance.

He calls this the “Authoritarian Harm Complex”… deliberate destabilization that targets “not just systems, but our sense of meaning, safety, connection, and agency.”

He identifies seven domains of harm: material, civic, moral, relational, narrative (what’s true), existential (what matters), and what he calls “internalized authoritarianism”… the psychic absorption of retributive logic.

When you start policing your own thoughts, second-guessing your own perceptions, or attacking yourself for not doing enough… that’s the intended outcome.

Shattuck writes about how we may feel like: “My body has been breaking down… exhausted in ways rest doesn’t fix.”³ Or the possibility of a “frozen feeling of disorientation, fatigue, ambient anxiety, and internal pressure to move without knowing where to start.”

He names this as a natural downstream effect of authoritarian assault.

And here’s the asymmetry that makes it even harder:

“Power is the ability not to have to learn.”

— Nick Walker (quoting Karl Deutsch), Neuroqueer Heresies

The system with power can stay simple. Everyone else has to become a full-time analyst just to survive the day.

Your goal is not to “keep up with everything.”

Your goal is: keep enough internal integrity to choose your life, and choose your action, without burning yourself down.

ANSEM as a Map (This is the Terrain)

The Autonomic Nervous System Experiencing Model (ANSEM) maps three territories:

Safety (connection and capacity available)
Sympathetic (mobilized… hyperarousal)
Shutdown (immobilized… hypoarousal)

This isn’t a personality test. It’s a live map of what your body is doing right now.

To learn more about the ANSEM, watch this video.

Safety is where connection and choice are possible. You can think clearly. You can feel without drowning. You can act without losing yourself. You can connect with others and yourself.

Sympathetic is mobilization, often by fear (but also by passion, desire, inspiration, ambition, etc.). Under threat, it’s fight and flight energy. It can look like urgency, anger, doomscrolling, compulsive planning, arguing, “I have to do something right now.”

Shutdown is immobilization, a constriction of energy. It can look like numbness, heaviness, blankness, avoidance, “I can’t,” collapsing into distraction, losing access to meaning, dissociation.

None of these are “bad.” They are intelligent strategies. That doesn’t mean they feel good… Shutdown can feel like death, Sympathetic can feel like drowning. But your system isn’t malfunctioning. It’s responding.

A note about blends: We are never sitting cleanly in one state in biologic and neurologic reality. But the ANSEM is an experiencing model, so in extreme states it can feel like we’re in a single state. In reality, you might be in a Sympathetic-Shutdown blend… that jangling exhaustion where you can’t stop thinking but also can’t move. Racing mind, heavy body. Wired and collapsed at the same time. If you can’t tell which state you’re in, that’s information too. Start with whatever feels most dominant, or just pick whichever menu below your eyes land on first. There’s no wrong door.

Each state comes with different access and different capacity. If you try to make high-output decisions while you’re in Shutdown, it’s like trying to sprint through wet concrete. If you try to “stay informed” while you’re in Sympathetic, it can become self-harm, or lead to harm to others. If you try to “calm down” while your system is mobilized, the energy often intensifies because it still needs a track.

So the work is not “feel better” or “calm down.”

The work is: match the move to the state.

Why Authoritarian Environments Target Your Nervous System

Authoritarian environments don’t only try to change what you believe. They try to change what your nervous system can tolerate and therefore, reduce your capacity.

Living with constant threat weakens your relational bandwidth. Under sustained pressure, your system doesn’t just feel bad. It loses access to connection… to yourself, to others, and to the Greater Reality of Love, or the Divine… whatever that means to you.

And connection is one of the main ways humans stay sane.

So authoritarian environments don’t only attack laws. They attack relational bandwidth. They turn the world into a place where your body doesn’t want to trust, doesn’t want to reach, doesn’t want to soften. That makes people easier to isolate and easier to steer.

They thrive when people are flooded, exhausted, ashamed, and alone. When community breaks down, people become easier to manipulate. When people feel helpless, they comply, disengage, or attack each other.

Which means: your nervous system is part of what you’re protecting.

A Path Neurodivergent Adults Can Actually Walk

What follows is not a cure. It’s not a five-year plan. It’s a way to keep your footing while the ground stays unstable. These aren’t steps in a sequence. They’re moves you can make in any order, from wherever you are right now.

Move 1: Name your state before you touch content

Before you scroll, check what state your nervous system is in. (If you’d like a PDF of the ANSEM, pleaser just comment “ANSEM” below and I’ll send it over.)

Ask: am I in Safety, Sympathetic, or Shutdown?

You don’t need perfect accuracy. You need a working guess.

Safety: you can breathe slow, feel your body, think in sentences, imagine doing one thing and then stopping, feel a kind-hearted connection with yourself or others.

Sympathetic: forward-leaning urgency, tight chest, racing mind, argument-building, “I must respond.”

Shutdown: heaviness, fog, numbness, “I can’t,” a pull to disappear, no access to meaning.

This is navigation.

If you can’t feel your body clearly… and this is common for many neurodivergent adults, it’s not a failure of awareness… use external cues instead:

Did I just snap at someone for no reason? (Likely Sympathetic)
Am I staring at the wall unable to move? (Likely Shutdown)
Can I think about tomorrow without panic? (Possibly Safety)
Have I been holding my breath? (Check… sometimes just noticing changes something)
Is my jaw clenched, are my fists tight? (Sympathetic is often in the hands and jaw before you feel it anywhere else)

If your senses feel muffled or far away… if the world looks flat or sounds seem distant… that’s information too. You don’t need to feel clearly to know where you are. Muffled is a location.

Move 2: Stop letting “urgent” decide your day

Authoritarian chaos runs on manufactured urgency.

Your nervous system hears “urgent” and thinks “danger.” Then it hands your attention away. For those of us with ADHD or attention differences, urgency can hijack the whole system in seconds… not because we lack discipline, but because our attentional wiring responds to intensity like a magnet.

Build a new reflex. One sentence. Out loud if you can:

A. “I don’t have to have a take on this right now.”

Or, slightly different:

B. “I don’t have to take this on right now.”

Those sentences don’t fix anything. They create a gap. And inside that gap, you get choice back.

Paul Shattuck calls these “gap-making moves”… small phrases and actions that interrupt automatic reactivity.³

They’re simple on purpose. You’re not trying to change the world in this moment. You’re trying to stay in contact with your own agency.

Move 3: Match the move to the state you’re in

Menu A: When you’re in Shutdown (immobilized)

I know this one quite intimately. Shutdown is where I go when the accumulation gets too heavy and my system says enough. It doesn’t ask permission. One minute I’m reading the news, the next I’m staring at the ceiling with no access to myself, motivation, or movement.

You’re trying to come back online. The moves need to be tiny, subtle, and avoid spiking you into Sympathetic. The smaller, the better.

These aren’t assignments. Pick one that feels least impossible right now… not to change your state… to meet yourself within Shutdown:

30-second arrival: name one thing you see, one thing you hear, one thing you feel in your body. If your senses feel muffled, that’s okay. “I see a wall. I hear the fridge. I feel… heavy.” That counts.
One thread of connection: text “Thinking of you. No pressure.”
Drink water slowly enough to notice temperature.
Cancel one nonessential obligation. This is a real move. Your system is telling you something about capacity.
Stand up and feel your feet for ten seconds. (If you have POTS, like I do… be careful with this one. Go slow. Hold on to something.)
Screenshot something for your “I’m Not Imagining This” folder (no analysis required).³ This is a place where you document evidence of harm or gaslighting. Requires no thinking. This supports you when you inevitably start to wonder if any of this is real.
Open your Waypoints folder… photos, poems, lyrics, anything that helps you navigate when frozen.³ A pre-made photo album on your phone with photos of family, poems, song lyrics, prayers, or anything that has helped before.
Say out loud: “I’m not failing for feeling overwhelmed. I’m responding to engineered chaos.”³

Scene: You’re on the couch. Your body feels heavy and far away. Your brain keeps saying, “What’s the point?”

You don’t argue with the thought. You name three objects in the room. You feel the blanket. You send one “no pressure” text. You drink water.

You don’t become “fine.” But you come back online by one inch.

That inch matters.

Your mind will likely say it doesn’t matter enough. That’s fine. It doesn’t have to matter enough, and you don’t have to convince yourself.

Then your mind will follow by saying something about how you really long to be able to do so much more. That’s real. That will bring up grief. Let yourself feel that… gently. Of course you do. And right now, you’re here. You did what you could, with graciousness and kindness and sincerity.

Nothing in our culture tells us that going this slow… this small… is worthy. But it is. And from a nervous system perspective it’s CRITICAL.

Here’s why: “Well-being depends on a flexible autonomic nervous system.”⁶ Shutdown isn’t flexibility. It’s conservation. So your moves are about gently restoring a little flexibility without demanding a leap.

Otherwise, if you go too big too fast, you keep yourself stuck in the loop.

Menu B: When you’re in Sympathetic (mobilized)

When you have a lot of mobilizing energy, you don’t need to erase it. You need to give it a track to run on so it stops eating you.

For some of us, Sympathetic is where we live… the constant hum of vigilance that’s been running since long before the political climate made it worse. If this is your baseline, be gentle about the difference between “I need to channel this energy” and “I need to rest from a lifetime of running hot.”

Channel moves (pick one):

Write one short letter to a representative. Three sentences is enough. Once you locate your representative’s phone, email, address… save that info wherever you’ll remember to find it (phone contact, notes, etc.) This makes it easier next time. You can also use a service like Resistbot.
Do one concrete support action: donate, share a resource directly to a person, offer a ride, sign up for a shift.
Attend one local meeting, even silently. Presence is real.³
Create a “Don’t Adapt to This” list: what you refuse to normalize. Keep it short.
Reach out to someone who might be isolating. Connection interrupts spirals³ and can help you co-attune, creating more safety in your system.
Do something with your hands that has a beginning, middle, and end: fold laundry, cook one meal, organize one drawer.³ This works partly because your hands give your nervous system proprioceptive feedback… the felt sense of contact, pressure, completion. If you’re someone who stims, this is the same principle. Your body knows how to use your hands to settle. Trust that.

Boundary moves (pick one):

Turn off notifications.
Put the phone in another room for 10 minutes.
Choose one trusted source at a set time, not “whenever I panic.”
Replace rapid-fire clips with one long-form explainer.
Take a no-scroll hour. Just be where you are without checking devices.³

Scene: You read something frightening and feel heat rise into your chest. Your fingers open social media by reflex.

You stop. You open a blank note titled “Don’t Adapt to This.” You write three bullets: “I won’t treat cruelty as normal. I won’t dehumanize people to feel safe. I won’t let my life become one long emergency.”

Then you write three sentences to an official. Then you close the app and take a shower.

The world didn’t change in ten minutes. But your nervous system did. It learned: “Energy can move through me without hijacking me.”

Podcast hosts Patrick Casale and Megan Anna Neff emphasize this: not everything is meant to be tracked, and paralysis is often the outcome of too much input.⁷

Information flooding is intentional. The constant barrage of crises is a deliberate strategy. Overwhelm and decision fatigue allow harmful actions to proceed unnoticed.

Your individual resistance doesn’t have to match the collective flooding. It’s meant to intimidate you and make you feel insignificant. You and your efforts are not insignificant.

Menu C: When you have access to Safety

You’re building things that last.

In Safety, pick a lane for the next 30 days. (For my neurodivergent friends… yes, I know… when did we have a 30-day stretch of “good?” This piece can be stretched / divided into segments over several months if need be.)

Consider three areas (write them down if that helps… or just hold them loosely if writing feels like too much right now):

People I can actually help
Skills I can actually offer
One place I can actually show up

Choose one intersection. Not forever. For 30 days (stretched or divided into segments if need be).

Then make it repeatable:

one weekly letter
one monthly meeting
one mutual aid task
one friend check-in every Friday
one resource doc you maintain and update
one local action (city council, mutual aid network, neighborhood group)³

Scene: You’re steady enough today. You don’t “catch up on everything.” You choose one action that touches real life.

You spend 30 minutes making a small resource list for your community. You send it to two people. You stop. You eat. You go outside.

Your body registers: “I am not powerless.”

That’s what Safety is for. Capacity.

Move 4: Protect your attention

A lot of neurodivergent adults get harmed by the belief that responsibility equals constant exposure.

It doesn’t. It equals chosen exposure.

And if deep research is your way of feeling grounded… if tracking patterns and building detailed understanding is how your system makes sense of chaos… that’s valid too. Some of us have nervous systems that settle through comprehension. The deep dive is the regulation strategy. Just check: is this increasing my capacity, or is it flooding me?

Here’s a structure that might work for you. Make adjustments for your particular system:

1. No news before you’re inside your body.
Water. Food. Bathroom. Two minutes of feet on the floor. Then decide. If mornings are already hard… if executive function doesn’t come online for an hour… build this around your actual rhythm, not an idealized one.

2. Two trusted sources, checked at a set time.
Once per day, or three times per week. Patrick and Megan note: you cannot support everything. Choosing which causes you track closely is required, not failure.⁷

3. Prefer long-form to rapid-fire.
Fast clips shred attention. Long-form restores context. Familiar voices, predictable structure, and known cadence reduce adaptive load.⁷ If you already have podcasters or journalists whose rhythm your system trusts… lean into that. Predictability is a gift to a neurodivergent nervous system.

4. Never scroll in Shutdown.
Shutdown plus scrolling deepens collapse. And this is often the first thing we do in Shutdown. If you need distraction, chose something inert (old sitcom, or fiction-based podcasts, for example).

5. Never scroll in Sympathetic.
Sympathetic plus scrolling becomes self-harm. Research shows that doomscrolling is physiologically destabilizing… rapid context shifts, repeated headlines, and intense visuals overwhelm neurodivergent systems.⁷

6. Use social media purposefully, then exit.
Social media has a unique strength: rapid mutual aid, real-time documentation, information sharing when traditional media fails. Enter for coordination or information. Do not linger indiscriminately.⁷

7. Retrain your algorithm.
Like, save, and share content that supports your nervous system attunement. Joy-based content… animals, humor, hobbies, beauty… helps counterbalance threat exposure.⁷

If these feel impossible, don’t shame yourself. Add friction. Move apps off your home screen. Log out. Put timers on them. Put the phone across the room for ten minutes. Ask someone to help you set it up if the executive function demand of changing your habits is the thing stopping you.

The goal is reducing the number of times your system gets hijacked without your consent.

Move 5: Protect joy as fuel

There’s a lie that says joy is irresponsible during hard times.

Joy restores capacity. And capacity is what makes action possible. This is especially true for neurodivergent nervous systems. Pursuing joy… even before what might seem like more basic needs (like cleaning or showering)… can increase capacity and safety.

And joy might look different for you than it does for other people. It might be stimming. Echolalia. Infodumping to a friend who actually wants to hear it. Replaying the same song forty times (this is mine). Rocking. Spinning. Watching the same comfort show for the dozenth time. Joy doesn’t have to look productive or dignified or even recognizable to anyone else. If it restores you, it counts.

If joy feels completely inaccessible right now… if you’re in that numb place where nothing lands… try “neutral good” instead: things that don’t cost you. A warm shower. A familiar song. Petting an animal. You’re not aiming for happiness. You’re aiming for “not worse.”

This can be small:

a song
a funny clip shared with a friend
a walk where you soften your eyes
five minutes with an animal
a meal eaten slowly
music, dancing, laughter… modeled especially by Black and Brown communities as refusal to surrender humanity⁷

Scene: You catch yourself laughing and then feeling guilty. You don’t argue with the guilt. You let the laughter happen anyway.

Later, you have enough energy to send one letter, or check on one friend, or show up to one meeting. Joy didn’t erase reality. It refueled you.

Paul Shattuck frames joy and “staying human” as part of resistance, not a detour from it.³ He writes: “Consciously choosing to allow joy, wonder, and connection to enter our lives, even when… especially when… the world feels designed to prevent it.”

Fun and play “restore energy, strengthen connection, and undermine the fear and solemnity authoritarianism thrives on.”

Move 6: Stop confusing intensity with impact

This is where caring people get destroyed. We think: if I don’t feel wrecked, I’m not doing enough. Even if you don’t consciously think that… it’s how we behave. It’s an undercurrent.

I catch it in myself constantly. The belief that my suffering is proof of my sincerity. That if I’m not up at 2am reading about the latest executive order, I’ve abandoned my people. My body absorbed that equation decades ago. Masking taught me that exhaustion equals effort equals worth. And, from my childhood abuse… I learned to stay ahead of the tide because when I didn’t it got worse.

Being wrecked is not a virtue. It’s often chronic Sympathetic plus shame.

Choose repeatable action over heroic action.

If you do everything for three weeks and then collapse for three months, your nervous system learns: “Caring equals danger.” Then even small action starts to feel unbearable. If this is you, and you want to take action to resist authoritarianism… this is a perfect time to practice shifting your relationship with this pattern. That will matter long-term.

The goal is sustainable endurance.

Shattuck is explicit: “We need tools that work to keep us steady now AND build capacity and endurance for years of resistance ahead.”³

And Patrick and Megan emphasize: resistance doesn’t have to be dramatic to matter. Neurodivergent participation will look different… often quieter, often behind the scenes, often relational.⁷

Quiet forms of resistance… writing, organizing behind the scenes, offering care, crafting strategy, research, digital coordination… are just as essential. Movements need more than front-line energy. They need organizers, writers, logistical support, financial coordination, moral anchors.³

You don’t need to become someone else to stay in the fight. You just need a way forward that fits you and your system.

Move 7: Practice sovereignty in micro-moments

Here’s a sentence to remember:

“The nervous system experiences power not as domination or collapse, but as sovereignty, choice, influence, and trust.”

— Dr. V. Domina on Substack

Authoritarian pressure tries to teach your body: “You have no choice.”

For many neurodivergent adults, this isn’t new. You’ve already spent years learning that showing your real self… stimming, saying no, needing accommodations, processing differently, taking longer, needing less stimulation or more… leads to punishment. So your nervous system learned: real choice isn’t safe. Authenticity gets you hurt – especially in relationship with others.

This is why practicing tiny moments of agency matters now. You’re not just resisting authoritarianism. You’re undoing decades of coerced compliance… the kind that started in classrooms and doctor’s offices and family dinner tables long before any political regime confirmed what your body already knew about how power works.

So you practice choice in tiny, daily ways:

Choose when you check information
Choose who gets access to your attention
Choose one action you can repeat
Choose one relationship you keep alive
Choose one “no” that protects you
Say “I’m protecting my energy” instead of making excuses³

That is nervous system countertraining. And these small actions change your neurology. It will get easier the more you do it, consciously, and with celebratory acknowledgment.

Shattuck names this the space “between trigger and response. That’s the space.”³ You’re not trying to suppress reactive states. You’re trying to notice them. To create a gap where choice becomes possible.

And doing these things nourishes two of the three Characteristics of Autonomic Tone: Self-Containment and Sovereignty. This supports nervous system well-being.

Move 8: Keep your humanity local and real

Authoritarianism turns life abstract. People become slogans, categories, enemies.

Your nervous system stays intact through the concrete:

a friend’s face
a neighbor’s name
a real need you can meet
a real boundary you can hold
a real choice you can make today

Scene: You feel yourself slipping into despair and isolation. You want to disappear. Instead, you go downstairs and get your mail. You say hello to one neighbor. You pet a dog.

You come back inside and send one “no pressure” text. You didn’t fix the country. But you refused isolation… which is one of the main goals of authoritarian pressure.

Local engagement increases impact. Working in immediate communities reduces abstraction and increases felt agency.⁷

This might look like:

Learning a neighbor’s name… just start there³
Attending a local meeting, even if you don’t speak³
Hosting a no-agenda afternoon tea where people can just be³
Reconnecting with someone you drifted from³
Checking on someone who might be pulling back³

And if leaving your house feels impossible right now… if the sensory demands of “out there” are too much on top of everything else… “local” can mean your online community, a Discord server, one text thread with people you trust. Connection doesn’t require physical presence. For a lot of us, the screen is where we find our people. That’s real.

Community is a primary stabilizer. Collective action and mutual support regulate more effectively than isolated coping.⁷

And here’s something crucial: resistance is plural. There is no correct or superior way to resist. Frontline protest is not the benchmark. Skills-based contribution counts. Values-based action is more sustainable than reactive action.⁷

Move 9: Know what to do when shame shows up

If you have any kind of public presence… even just a social media account… you might notice this pattern: awareness of your reach or privilege triggering a shame spiral. “I have a platform, I have privilege, therefore I should be doing more, therefore I’m failing” collapses into self-attack rather than action.⁷

For those of us whose systems run rejection sensitivity (RSD)… where the gap between “what I should be doing” and “what I can do” lands like a physical blow… shame doesn’t just slow us down. It can shut the whole system offline.

Doomscrolling fuels false narratives of inaction. Overexposure leads to “I’m doing nothing” stories that are inaccurate. When you attune even slightly, you can name real contributions already happening.⁷

If shame arrives, try this:

First, if shame hit like a freight train and you can’t think… just name it out loud: “Shame spiral.” That’s it. You don’t have to fix it yet. Just name it so it’s not invisible. Bonus points if you can call someone and share it with an understanding friend who won’t try to fix you.

When you’re ready, write a factual list of actions you’ve already taken this week. Not what you wish you’d done. What you actually did. Even if it’s “sent one text. Donated $5. Showed up to one meeting. Didn’t share that hateful post. Wished I could do more.” (Yeah… when you’re neurodivergent, even wishing matters… because even wishing takes more energy than you have to give. IYKYK)

Shame is demobilizing. Guilt and “not enough” narratives reduce capacity to act.⁷ When you replace shame narratives with factual accounting, you restore accurate self-assessment. And the last thing authoritarians want you to be able to do is track facts. So even this is training your resistance.

Move 10: Remember what your system is actually designed for

Your nervous system is not designed for endless solo vigilance.

“Our nervous systems are social structures that find balance and stability in relationship with others.”⁵

Co-attunement is not a luxury. It’s how the system works. Connection restores energy for many… human connection, conversation, collaboration, shared presence can increase capacity even when starting depleted.⁷

This is why isolation is so dangerous under authoritarian pressure. And why even one thread of connection matters.

If authoritarian harm thrives on fragmentation, then reconnection is a counter-strategy. It doesn’t have to be public or dramatic. Just one relationship. One thread.³

If you’re deeply introverted, or find that being in connection with others drains your battery… even if the connection is amazing, healthy, and enjoyable… you’re not broken. You just need to take these actions in small doses. Set clear boundaries, and honor them. If zoom is more sustainable than in-person… do that. If text is more sustainable than zoom… do that. If sending a voice memo into the void is all you’ve got today… do that. Adjust your relational engagement to fit what serves you and is sustainable.

A Note on Practice

If something on this list makes you feel worse, stop. Your nervous system knows what it needs better than any framework does. This isn’t a test. It’s a menu. Take what helps. Leave the rest. Come back another day and something different might fit.

What This Looks Like Over Time

You’re not going to do this perfectly. Some days you’ll doomscroll. Some days you’ll collapse. Some days you’ll rage at people who don’t deserve it.

That’s not failure. That’s being human under pressure.

What you’re building is not a system that never breaks. You’re building a system that knows how to come back.

You’re learning to notice states before they hijack you. To create gaps where choice becomes possible. To match moves to capacity. To protect your humanity while the world stays hard.

You’re developing autonomic tone… even though you may not even know what that is. Trust me… it is always healthy for your nervous system well-being.

And you’re doing it not alone, but in relationship… because that’s how nervous systems actually work.

The visible acts of defiance matter. But so do the invisible ones. The text you send. The meeting you attend silently. The joy you refuse to surrender. The neighbor whose name you learn. The one choice you make that proves to your body: I still have agency.

Crisis often reveals humanity. Disaster brings out collective care and mutual aid. The worst conditions can evoke the best responses.⁷ This paradox is fragile, but real.

And hope is not abstract. Hope is relational. Hope arises from witnessing people protect and care for one another.⁷

One Last Thing

Paul Shattuck writes: “Staying human isn’t just about feeling better and preserving our softness. It’s about protecting the inner architecture that lets us discern, connect, and act with integrity and sustainable energy.”³

You’re not just protecting your nervous system so you can feel okay.

You’re protecting your nervous system so you can stay human. So you can think clearly. So you can choose integrity. So you can discern what’s real. So you can act in ways that last.

That’s self-care as infrastructure.

And it’s one of the most strategic things you can do.

The Invisible Test

smattus — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 16:34:24 +0000

The longing underneath isn't wrong. The scorecard is how you avoid feeling it.

I hear this story from a surprising number of people.

You’re sitting right there next to someone you love and care about… present, paying attention, trying… and at some point the next day you find out that something in them was quietly keeping score on a test you didn’t know you were taking. You didn’t respond to the silence the right way. You didn’t notice the shift. You didn’t reach for them at the exact moment their nervous system needed reaching for, and now there’s evidence accumulating in a file you’ll never see.

You exist in a world of silent expectations that leave you being a reliable disappointment.

And then they say:

If you really loved me, you wouldn’t need me to say it. I shouldn’t have to tell you what I need or want. If you loved me… you would know.

It doesn’t feel like a belief. It feels like a baseline requirement for love.

Where it comes from

Before you had language, you had distress. And when you were in distress, someone came. They guessed. They cycled through possibilities until your system settled. Hungry? Tired? Diaper?

What got encoded wasn’t they figured it out on the third try. What got encoded was: relief came without me having to explain.

For most people, that encoding updates over time. You learn that your inner world is invisible to others. You learn that wanting something means finding a way to say it.

But for some of us, that update never fully completes.

Maybe early attempts to articulate were met with confusion or dismissal. Maybe your nervous system drew a conclusion: explaining doesn’t work. The only love that actually reached me was the love that came without me having to ask.

And if your brain processes language differently… if finding words for internal states is genuinely costly, not just emotionally but neurologically… the conclusion gets reinforced from every direction. Because translation has a price your system has learned it can’t reliably afford.

Often, people who say, “If you loved me, you would know what I need” aren’t intentionally withholding… at least not consciously. Sometimes, they are drowning in sensation they can’t convert to speech fast enough for the conversation to survive.

Sometimes, this is a protective belief that they (or maybe you) hold sincerely… built and reinforced slowly over time. It’s helped to navigate relationships and supported you in finding ways to connect with others whom you find safe.

What this costs

A need arises. It doesn’t get spoken. The other person… a separate nervous system with their own processing, their own blind spots… doesn’t respond to the thing they were never told about.

The silence becomes proof. See? They don’t see me.

Meanwhile, you are sending signals. A withdrawal. A shift in tone. A silence that means something very specific from inside your experience. But they don’t share your signal-processing system. They might be attentive, loving, and genuinely trying… and still not register what was never made explicit.

Over time, you accumulate evidence that you’re alone. They grow more confused, more cautious, more withdrawn… because nothing they offer seems to land.

Both of you end up isolated. Not because love isn’t present. Because the belief / translation cost requires love to look like something no human nervous system can reliably provide.

The thing underneath

The demand for mind-reading is a protection… a very old nervous system strategy that was brilliant in its original context and now produces the opposite of what it’s trying to secure.

Attunement is responsiveness to what has been made visible, even imperfectly. Telepathy is the expectation that what is unspoken should already be known. One builds relationship. The other quietly makes relationship impossible while wearing the face of a standard for love.

If you’re the one carrying this belief

Three invitations:

Notice when you’re scoring.
You don’t have to stop. Just catch the moment it starts… the flicker of “they should have known.” That noticing is the first interruption. Not because the longing is wrong, but because the scorecard keeps you from feeling it cleanly. Underneath the test is grief. The score is how you avoid it.

Start with the body, not the sentence.
If converting sensation to language crashes your system, don’t start with the finished request. Start with what’s true in your body. “Something is happening and I can’t find words for it yet” is a complete communication. It lets someone in without requiring the translation to be done first. You don’t have to arrive with the polished version. You just have to open the door a crack.

Let yourself be met imperfectly.
This is the hard one. Someone reaches for you and it’s not quite right… the words are off, the timing is slightly wrong, the gesture misses by a few degrees. Your system wants to file it as more evidence. What if you let the attempt register instead? Not as proof they understand you. Just as proof they’re trying. Imperfect meeting is still meeting. And for a nervous system that learned love should arrive fully formed or not at all… letting in the approximate is a radical act.

If you’re on the other side

Three invitations:

Get curious about what’s underneath the demand, not the demand itself.
When someone says “you should know,” what happens if you hear it as: something in me doesn’t trust that telling you will work? Or: my system is overwhelmed and translation just crashed?

Name what you see without requiring them to have said it first.
Not “I know exactly what you need”… but “I notice you’ve been quiet tonight. I don’t know what that means, but I want you to know I see it.”

Make it cheaper to ask.
Not by saying “just tell me what you need”… which, for someone whose system learned that articulation is expensive, sounds like one more performance. But by responding to the small, imperfect attempts with enough warmth that the old strategy becomes less necessary.

Is there a relationship in your life right now where you’re holding a need you haven’t spoken… and interpreting the other person’s non-response as evidence?

Your Resistance Knows Something You Don’t

smattus — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:11:19 +0000

I almost didn’t write this today.

There was a moment this morning as I started to write… that damn cursor blinking in a blank space… where my whole system went somewhere else. It’s not like it went to a specific place… like I was distracted. And it wasn’t avoidance in the way people mean it when they say the word, kind of like an accusation. This was something quieter. A kinda like a held breath. Waiting.

And then the override system kicked in: You’ve done this before. Just start. You HAVE to get this done.

I’ve been watching that sequence for a long time, in myself and in the people I work with. The override works. The task gets done. It kinda has to, in this fast moving, high pressure world we’re livin’ in… where we gotta eat and pay rent.

But something afterward feels like a significant pile of nothing… a hollowness that isn’t exactly tired, but like dragging yourself across a barren desert that your whole body was begging you not to cross.

That’s not a productivity problem.

When you force yourself through resistance, you’re asking one part of your system to override another part that’s already doing something. The body complies. You get the thing done… yes. (And I admit, again… in today’s world, sometimes we gotta.) But what happens is… the parts don’t integrate… they fragment. And for a lot of autistic systems like mine, this isn’t an occasional thing. It’s structural.

And fragmentation isn’t a metaphor… it’s the body that’s locked by noon, the hours that vanish at the desk, the body that complies all day and then goes offline at 2pm and refuses to explain itself.

Some systems live here chronically. Not because they’re broken, but because the world charges fragmentation as the admission price for participation.

You move through your days. You complete things. You’re supposedly staying afloat… barely.

But underneath all of it, something is quietly paying a cost you haven’t been authorized to spend.

The story most of us have drilled into us be all the “bros” is that resistance is the obstacle… discipline means overriding it… Hesitation is weakness, or drama, or being difficult. And if you’re neurodivergent, it becomes a symptom… something to manage, something to target, a part of you to eradicate.

If your hesitation was ever met with punishment, like mine was… labeled lazy, oversensitive, too much, disordered… you built an efficient bypass. The body learned that the cost of respecting it’s signals is higher than the cost of overriding. And then you called it coping. And then tolerance. And then, eventually, functioning.

What’s more helpful, if I do say so myself, is this: resistance is information.

The system isn’t refusing movement. It’s refusing this movement, at this cost, in this form, without what it actually needs.

It’s not obstruction.

Resistance is a precise communication from a system that knows something you’re not letting yourself hear yet.

Bypassing your own resistance isn’t protecting the project. It’s protecting the story.

The one where pushing through proves you’re okay… where override equals survival… where appearing functional is how you stay acceptable… to yourself and to everyone watching. This is what masking is at the nervous system level. Not just code-switching or hiding your stims. The override is the mask. And it costs exactly what you’d expect it to cost.

And the internal logic runs so fast, I still often miss it. It says, “if I stop… I’ll fall behind, disappoint someone, prove I can’t handle this.” So the resistance becomes the threat, and management becomes safety.

That logic was probably accurate at one time… and honestly sometimes, in our culture, maybe it still is… on rare occasions. However…

Systems don’t build bypasses for fun.

What the bypass outlasts is the original danger… you see, bypassing your resistance is a nervous system protective strategy that keeps running long after the threat is over…. long after the task is done. Long after the bill is paid, the email sent, the project complete. The mask stays on after the audience leaves.

(My sweet pal Connick is asleep in the sun right now, completely uninterested in any of this. LOL)

For some people it takes years of override before a crash makes the listening to your body’s “no” non-optional. The body decides. The bypass finally can’t hold anymore. And then, sincere neurodivergent people call that collapse a failure, a breakdown, a crisis… when what it actually is simply a nervous system system that hit its honest limit.

Some systems refuse the override from the start. Say no before the person has language for why. And people call it rigidity. Defiance. Pathology.

It’s actually protection arriving on time. A system that, somewhere, never agreed to the terms being offered. That refusal isn’t something to fix. It’s evidence of a system that knew something before the rest of you caught up.

That deserves more than a diagnostic label.

Most people I work with have spent years getting more efficient at the override. Faster. Less noticeable from the outside.

What they’ve lost in the process is the ability to hear the critical information the resistance was pointing to before they ran past it.

Some of that resistance was pointing toward something that mattered

Some of it still is.

From Wicked to Whole

smattus — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 21:04:12 +0000

how it all began

From Wicked to Whole

How Losing Everything Taught Me That Shame Isn’t Who You Are—It’s Just What You’re Carrying

the man you see smiling back at you?

he’s living proof that your deepest wounds can become your greatest gifts.

But back on February 1, 2007 it was a very different story.

I sat there before them – five men in dark suits, sitting in judgement of me. their words hung in the air like smoke: “we believe you are a wicked man.”

that was the moment I lost everything.

my family.

my friends.

my entire community.

all because I spoke my truth.

this was the day I was cast out of the only world I’d ever known. the day I chose authenticity over acceptance. the day i lost my religion but found my heart and soul.

that moment could have destroyed me, and almost did.

instead, it transformed me.

see, I know what it’s like to rebuild yourself from the ground up…

to question everything you ever thought you knew…

to face the abyss of unworthiness and shame

and then find your way back to love.

I’m Steve, and this is my story of transformation.

my path wasn't straight.

it wasn’t neat.

it sure wasn’t easy.

and that’s exactly what makes it powerful.

you see, before that moment of judgment, I’d spent decades trying to be perfect.

as an autistic child carrying the weight of sexual abuse that continued through my teens, I learned early that safety meant becoming invisible.

that worthiness was secured through high performance.

that love meant never making a mistake.

perfection wasn’t a choice – it was survival.

as I became an ordained minister 1986, I channeled the drive to please others – into trying to please God. I gave sermons to crowds of 14,000. I served at the world headquarters of my religion. I was an elder, a leader, a happily married man who had it all figured out.

or so I thought.

beneath the surface, shame was eating me alive. and every accomplishment – from building successful businesses to becoming an Operations Director at Ameriprise Financial – was just another attempt to prove my worth.

then came the annihilation.

at 35, I faced a truth I could no longer deny.

I am gay.

speaking those words out loud cost me everything I’d built.

my wife of 13 years.

my family.

every friend I held close.

my entire support system.

all of it was gone overnight.

but here’s what I didn’t expect:

in losing it all, I found myself.

in being cast out, I found my way home.

in facing my deepest shame, I found my greatest strength.

the journey wasn’t linear. there were dark nights. hard drugs. depression. two separate spiritual communities that welcomed me in, only to cast me out again when I dared to question their ethics.

but each time I fell, I learned to rise differently.

each rejection taught me to love myself more fiercely.

each wound became a wellspring of wisdom.

I became obsessed with dismantling the shame that had worn deep grooves through my heart like wagon wheels in hard, dry earth.

with that dismantling came new awareness about the conditioning I was living within – like a hypnosis – where thoughts, ideas, and beliefs I wasn’t even aware of had been implanted in me.

I was deconstructing everything: business and capitalism, sexuality and relationship, religion and spirituality, psychology and trauma.

eventually, I became certified in polyvagal theory. studied somatic trauma therapy. got a certificate in somatic parts work, dove deep into the neuroscience of healing. learned to embrace my neurodivergence, my autism, my sensitivity – not as flaws to fix, but as challenges to navigate and even gifts to cherish.

today, I bring all of it – the wounds and the wisdom, the falls and the rises, the expansion and the contractions, professional expertise and the personal transformation – to my work with others who are ready to write a new story.

what guides me now

isn’t dogma or doctrine.

it’s not rules or expectations.

it’s something deeper.

something truer.

it’s love.

not the greeting-card kind.

not the conditional kind.

but a love that’s warm, merciful, and fierce in its sincerity.

a love that moves from sovereignty and surrender.

a love that transforms everything it touches.

values & principles

this is the foundation of how I show up

reflective of my journey so far, everything I do is based on my core values and principles upon which everything else is built.

in every act of service, I do my best to show up through...

wisdom of the heart

not as some fuzzy concept, but as our deepest guidance system. the heart knows. the heart leads. the mind follows. when we stay anchored here, shame loses its grip.

power of presence

creating space where you can be exactly as you are. where your sensitivity is sacred. where your differences are divine. where your struggles are stepping stones.

unwavering respect for the sacred in all

recognizing that every being, every experience, every moment is a face of the Divine. even the hard ones. especially the hard ones.

radical and relentless curiosity

the antidote to attachment, the enemy of shame, the doorway to freedom. curiosity opens what judgment closes. it transforms what resistance holds rigid.

the magic of real relationship

not the surface kind, but the soul-deep kind. the kind that holds space for all of you. the kind that honors your journey exactly as it is. the kind that remembers who you really are. all with the remembrance that we are in relationship with everything – the animate and inanimate all around us. Everything is about our relationship with it.

this isn’t just philosophy.

this isn’t just business.

this is how we heal.

this is how we grow.

this is how we transform.

this is how we come home to ourselves.

three decades of experience

the proof is in the practice.

I’ve walked alongside thousands of stunning humans as they’ve navigated their own transformations. through my coaching practice, I’ve supported more than 2,400 beautiful souls – from brand new business owners to those running companies with millions in revenue.

but the numbers only tell part of the story.

what matters most is how we get there: with heart. with presence. with curiosity. with profound respect for your journey.

especially if you’re:

neurodivergent and navigating a world that wasn’t built for you
highly sensitive and learning to treat that sensitivity as strength
carrying trauma and ready to transform those wounds into wisdom
seeking spiritual connection that feels authentic and aligned
building a business that honors all of who you are
longing to be your full self, but hampered by exhaustion, burnout, or limited capacity

I bring more than professional expertise – though there’s plenty of that.

certified in polyvagal theory, experienced with somatic trauma healing, and certified with integrative parts work. over 15 years running my own successful business. decades of experience in business operations, HR, sales, and leadership.

but what truly matters, and what makes all the difference with your own transformation is walking through it together:

I know how to hold space for all of you.

I know how to walk the path of transformation.

I know how to guide you home to yourself.

ready to explore working with me?

Let^'s Walk Together

Safety is a Landscape, Not a Destination

smattus — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:59:22 +0000

the center is everywhere

There’s a certain kind of day that is gratefully post-storm, post-flare, post-catharsis, where the world feels like it’s tilting back into place, slowly, unsteadily.

You know those days that come after you feel like you’ve been through the washing machine… because you’ve just been tumbled around by life, wrung out by some un/seen cycle, and now you’re blinking in the light, disoriented but returned.

Those days are not a return to normal. They’re a return to something. And for me, that something is always a deeper encounter with safety… not the kind that’s engineered or scheduled, but the kind that arrives like spring after a long internal winter.

It’s unfamiliar, so it doesn’t always feel safe, but there’s a sense of a new access to safety that is awaiting me, like a gentle whiff of tacos from the taco truck down the street that I can’t quite see, but anticipate.

Safety Is Not a Stop on the Map

People often talk about safety (Ventral Vagal) like it’s a destination… something you get to after you’ve done enough work, processed enough trauma, or found the right tools. But for me, safety isn’t a goalpost or end zone. It’s a terrain… a landscape… a whole unfolding world.

Most of the time, I think we live on the outskirts of safety, you know… orbiting around it, craving it, tasting brief glimmers before being pulled back into survival. But once you get a toe in, once even one corner of your system gets to feel safe, you start to realize: this is not a point on a line. This is a whole ass continent.

It’s like in a video game, where a part of the map stays dark until you enter that zone. Then suddenly, the terrain lights up, detailed and alive. Safety is like that for me… a whole bioregion that comes into view only when I can meet myself gently enough to walk there.

But it’s also like trying to grab a handful of air. Go ahead… try it.

Did you get it?

It might feel elusive, because you can’t point to it and say, “There it is!” But at the same time, you totally DID grab it.

Yeah… safety sometimes feels like that. It’s actually so familiar (like air) that you almost can’t not grab it… but it’s also like air in that you can’t always point to it and say, “there it is!” because it’s so much more than that.

The Continuum and the sphere

If I had to draw it, I’d say there’s a continuum: on the left, contraction, fear, performance. On the right, expansion, flow, inspired transmission. And in the middle? Safety. Not as a midpoint, but as a gateway.

But I’d also say the real image isn’t a line, it’s a sphere. And maybe even that’s wrong. Because the truth is, I don’t think safety lives in geometry at all. it lives in relationship.

Safety isn’t about being on the right side of the sphere. It’s about being with… with your sensations, with your stories, with your sacred humanity… wherever you happen to land. And the center of that circle, if there is one, isn’t a place you arrive. It’s a presence you become.

Everywhere Is the Center

There’s a spiritual principle I’ve come to know in my bones… one that echoes through the mystics and through my own body alike: There is no center, because everywhere is the center.

I believe that Love (aka: Divine, Energy, Goddess, Universe, etc.) is the soup: the field that holds and animates all things. It’s what we’re all made of. It’s Source energy that holds everything, and all of us. There is nothing that exists separate from Love. It extends without limits in all directions, and is beyond time.

In this principle of Love, there is no point where we can step outside of it. No exile. No true distance. We may forget it. We may feel cut off from it. But we are never actually outside its embrace.

That means safety – true, relational, spiritual safety – is not a rare event or a reward for “getting it right.” It’s the constant hum beneath all experience. It’s what’s always within reach, even in pain, even in collapse. Not as a forced reframe. But as a quiet truth that remains, unthreatened by our forgetting. It is what allows and holds and is our nervous system, experienced through our finite minds and bodies.

Love is the experience that happens when power and beauty dissolve the illusion of separation, and we taste the Oneness of all that is. This is the core of safety.

This truth undoes all our linear stories. There is no forward or backward. No left or right of the center. There is only here. And here. And here.

Love (safety) is always touching you.

Even when you can’t feel it.
Even when your body is saying “run.”
Even when you are grieving or raging or numb.

You are not outside the center.
You are the center… just like everything else.
Which means: there’s no arrival.
Only remembrance.

Love as the Field

So, because I know these are profound perspectives, let me share this in another way, in case it’s helpful.

My deepest spiritual orientation is this: Love is the soup. The medium. The unnameable force that holds all things. And that Love doesn’t require a purpose. It doesn’t demand performance. It simply is… moving through all things, animating all things, not because anything needs fixing, but because Love can’t help but extend itself.

When I’m in safety… even if I’m feeling just anchored by a thread… I can remember that. I can access expansion, not as a push, but as a natural opening. Creativity returns. Desire becomes clear. Effort drops, but presence remains. That’s the rhythm I long to live inside.

Yet… still… that’s not a destination to arrive to. It’s a journey… a relationship… a remembrance.

And also, that rhythm… that remembrance… includes the struggle. It includes the part of me on the floor, weeping. It includes the ache, the grumpiness, the disorientation. I used to think those moments were failures, as if I’d fallen out of love’s favor, or as if I was somehow separated from Love / Safety. But I see it differently now.

for me, the revelation is this: just because I’m struggling, or feeling pain, or uncomfortable… or even if I’m unsafe… doesn’t mean love isn’t right here – in, on, around me – permeating every part of my being.

If you hadn’t noticed…. this is why the word LOVE appears at the very center of the ∞actualinfinity Autonomic Nervous System Experiencing Model. It is the centerless center. There is profound depth in every aspect of the model – symbolic and metaphorical and literal.

The Struggle Bus Is Not Outside the Divine

There’s this idea that ease and inspiration are “spiritual,” but pain and confusion are “problems.” I don’t buy it anymore. The struggle bus is not exile. It’s simply part of the terrain.

It’s not that I want to live there. I really, really don’t. But I’ve stopped pretending that love only lives in the light. Love is the whole thing: the ache, the awe, the blankness, the bloom.

And on the flipside… I don’t believe that we are meant to live on the “nicer” side of things all the time, either. I’d love to wake up every morning feeling inspired and whole and fully connected to meaning and purpose. But most days, I don’t. Not because it isn’t still available to me… I just am having a different experience. That’s not a failing, it’s just a happening. There is no more meaning to it than that. There’s nothing to get away from and nowhere to escape to.

That shift: from seeking safety as escape to recognizing safety as companionship, is the quiet revolution of my life.

All of It Is Welcome

So where does that leave me? Sometimes, in awe. Sometimes, in resistance. Sometimes, staring out my window at the most absurd thing like a Rolls-Royce SUV parked on my modest Chicago street, wondering how the world makes any sense at all.

But I keep returning to this: I don’t have to make sense of it.

I just have to stay with it.

With me.

With the safety that doesn’t always feel safe.

With the presence that doesn’t always feel present.

With the love that always holds, even when I can’t feel it.

It’s not about arriving, or even accessing that love and safety.

It’s about remembering.

nervous system regulation isn’t earned… it’s remembered.

And today, I remember.

Today, I hope you can remember too.

The Word That’s Keeping You at War With Your Nervous System

smattus — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 14:41:05 +0000

Language matters.

It’s 2 AM and you’re lying awake, heart hammering against your ribs like a caged bird. The team meeting was twelve hours ago, but your nervous system is still replaying that moment when everyone turned to look at you, waiting for an answer you didn’t have.

You reach for your phone and Google “box breathing techniques” for the hundredth time this month. Four counts in, hold for four, out for four. Your chest stays tight. Your mind keeps spinning.

Another failure to stay regulated.

The War You Never Asked to Fight

How many times have you been told, or felt, that you are dysregulated? how often do you feel like your nervous system is fucked and needs fixing?

How many times have you been told your anxiety is too much, your shutdown is laziness, your overwhelm is proof you can’t handle life like everyone else?

If you’re neurodivergent, you’ve been getting this message since childhood… that your natural responses are inappropriate, excessive, wrong. That you need to mask, manage, control yourself into acceptable behavior.

If you’re living under oppression, it’s even more fucked up. Your life is literally in danger just for existing, and you’re expected to “stay regulated”? What the hell?

So you’ve tried everything to regulate yourself back to “normal.” The breathing exercises that leave you more anxious. The grounding practices that feel like homework. The somatic therapy sessions where you learn fifty new ways to manage your “dysregulation.”

You’ve invested thousands of dollars and countless hours trying to control your body into compliance.

And you’re still losing the war.

Every panic attack is evidence you’re failing. Every shutdown means you’re not doing it right. Every overwhelm response gets catalogued as another malfunction in the broken machine of you.

Here’s the thought that haunts you at 3 AM: Why can’t I just be okay the way I am? Am I broken beyond repair? Why does everything feel so damn intense?

You wake up tired from fighting yourself all night. You spend more energy managing your nervous system than living your actual life. You’re becoming smaller, more careful, more afraid of your own responses.

This is how “healing” has been sold to you.

In reality, this is self-torture with a wellness label.

What the Industry Won’t Tell You

Here’s what no one in the wellness industry wants to admit, because it would collapse their entire business model:

The word “regulation” is the weapon keeping you trapped in this war.

Think about what regulation actually means: control, management, correction of something that’s wrong. Laws regulate criminals. Dams regulate rivers. Medication regulates symptoms.

Every single time you say “I need to regulate,” you’re positioning yourself as the warden of a defective system that can’t be trusted.

You’ve turned your nervous system into a misbehaving child that needs constant correction instead of the loyal bodyguard it’s always been.

You’ve been convinced to pathologize your own survival intelligence.

Your anxiety isn’t broken… it’s trying to protect you from something it perceives as threatening.

Your shutdown isn’t lazy… it’s your system saying “I can’t process any more input right now.”

Your overwhelm isn’t failure… it’s information about your capacity reaching its limit.

But the language of regulation turns all of this wisdom into pathology. It assumes something is fundamentally wrong with you that needs to be fixed, controlled, managed back to “normal.”

And your nervous system, which is exquisitely attuned to energy and intention, feels you bracing against it, holding your breath, clenching your jaw, treating it like a wild animal that might attack at any moment.

It knows you’re trying to control it instead of understand it.

The Word That Changes Everything

What if I told you there’s a word that completely transforms this relationship? A word that turns your nervous system from enemy to ally in a single breath?

It might seem like semantics, but language matters. words matter. words have power. they shape our stories and influence us in ways we can’t even understand. So…. just try this on for size. Instead of regulation….

Attunement.

When you attune to someone, you don’t try to control their emotional state. You listen deeply to understand what they’re experiencing. You match their frequency with presence, not force.

A mother attunes to her crying baby… not by making the crying stop, but by understanding what the crying means. A singer attunes to the music… not by forcing the the melody into submission, but by listening to what it needs to create harmony.

Attunement is companionship, not combat.

Notice how different these feel in your body:

I’m dysregulated → I’m dysattuned
I need to regulate my anxiety → I need to attune to how my nervous system is trying to keep me safe
Regulation techniques → Attunement practices

Feel that shift? The energy underneath the words changes everything.

Regulation implies pathology.

Attunement implies intelligence, wisdom, partnership.

What Attunement Actually Looks Like

When you attune instead of regulate, you become safe enough in your presence that your nervous system no longer has to defend itself from you.

Instead of demanding that your anxiety disappear: “I’m here. I’m listening. What are you trying to protect me from? What do you need me to know?”

Instead of treating shutdown as failure: “I hear you. You’ve reached your limit. What would help you feel safe enough to rest?”

Instead of forcing overwhelm to stop: “Thank you for this information about my capacity. What needs to be different so you don’t have to work so hard?”

This is the difference between being at war with your body and being on the same team.

Your nervous system has been waiting your entire life for you to stop trying to control it and start learning to understand it and its language… to see it clearly, and practice the language of curiosity instead of correction, companionship instead of control.

Picture this: It’s 2 AM again, but this time when your heart starts racing, instead of reaching for your phone to find another breathing technique, you place your hand on your chest and whisper, “Hey, I’m here. What’s going on?”

You don’t try to make it stop. You listen. You breathe with it, not against it. You ask what it needs instead of telling it to behave.

Your nervous system isn’t your enemy. It never was.

The Intelligence You’ve Been Fighting

Maybe… just fucking maybe… your nervous system was never actually dysregulated.

Maybe it was just waiting for you to be in relationship with it, instead of going to war.

Maybe your neurology isn’t broken, even if it works differently than neurotypical systems. Maybe different isn’t defective. Maybe that means there’s actually room for you to be you without compressing yourself into a standard mold of acceptability.

Maybe the only thing that needs to change is how you relate to the intelligence that’s been trying to keep you safe all along.

The wellness industry has been selling you weapons disguised as healing tools. Every “regulation technique” was another way to make war against the very system trying to keep you alive.

It’s time to stop the war and start the relationship.

Your nervous system isn’t something to regulate… It’s a relationship waiting to be remembered.

If you want to learn the language of attunement instead of regulation, this is exactly what we practice together in The Village. It’s not quite ready for you yet, but it’s coming soon. If you want to stay informed, sign up for Heart Notes – that’s where you’ll hear about it first.

You Don’t Have to Wait to Burn

smattus — Sat, 12 Apr 2025 14:11:31 +0000

I can't breathe.

The smoke is thick.
Silent.
Coiling around me like a noose.

I have been sitting in the quiet retreat of my home, tending the fire of my love, sealing it tight, trying to do it right.
Trying to build the perfect thing.
Trying to craft a life, a business, a container worthy of its sacred content.

Structure. Strategy. Systems.
Clean lines. Perfect plans. Predictable outcomes.

And it’s killing me.

It’s suffocating me, slow and sure, like a flame trapped in a sealed jar.

I love my quiet.
I love my solitude, spaciousness, and ease.
But something ancient and wild in me is done gasping for air.

How could something I love so fiercely be choking me?

I remember the first business blueprint I drew, and the second, seventh, and sevety-ninth… all hope and clean lines and promise.
I thought if I built it just right, I could keep the fire alive.
But I see now: the jar was never the protection.
It was the suffocation.

The truth shatters through the smoke:

I am already the fire.

I am not here to build a cage for it.
I am not here to make it neat, or palatable, or manageable.
I am not here to wait for permission to live.

I am the flame.
I have always been the flame.

And a flame must burn.

Not someday.
Not when the blueprint is perfect.
Not when the article is well-crafted.
Not when the crowd is ready.
Not when the path is smooth.

Now.
Here.
Today.

The smoke that’s been strangling me wasn’t some outside failure.
It was the consequence of trying to contain what was never meant to be trapped.

Love isn’t meant to be saved.
It isn’t meant to be stored.
It’s meant to burn.

It will either set the world ablaze with its warmth… or it will die trying.

And I…
I am done dying.

I am done waiting for a better website, a perfectly crafted article, a cleaner strategy before I dare to be real.
I am done pretending my love needs to earn its right to exist.

My love needs no permission.
It only needs air.
It only needs to breathe.

I don’t know what it will look like.
I don’t know if anyone will care.
I don’t know if anyone will come.

But that was never the point.

I will burn because that is what a flame does.
I will burn because that is what a heart in Loving Presence must do.

If my fire warms you, you are welcome to come closer.
If it moves you, you are welcome to walk with me.
If it frightens you, you are free to go.

But I will not stop burning to make anyone more comfortable.
I will not dim my light so others can pretend the world is not on fire.
I will not contain my love until it suffocates us both. or, us all.

Business or no business.
Plan or no plan.
Applause or no applause.

I will burn.

I will burn because the world needs heat more than it needs another perfectly polished, perfectly dead thing.
I will burn because love demands it.
I will burn because existence depends on it.

And whether the world watches or not…
whether it understands or not…
whether it comes closer or runs away…

The flame will keep burning.

I will keep burning.

Because a candle was never made to sit unlit inside a jar.
A flame was never made to ask who might read by its light.
It was made to blaze.
It was made to set the darkness trembling.
It was made to burn.

And so here I am.

Burning.

The smoke peels back.
The stars lean closer.
The air hisses with wild, new oxygen.

The flame breathes.

If you feel the heat…
if something ancient in you remembers the forgotten fire you carry…
if you long to once again step into the warmth of your own burning desire…
you are welcome here.

But with or without you…
with or without anyone…

My love will burn.

The Day I Realized I Wasn’t Broken

smattus — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 21:41:07 +0000

Some truths arrive like lightning —

…sudden, shocking, illuminating everything at once.

But this wasn’t that kind of truth.

This was more like watching a fortress crumble, stone by stone. Years of carefully constructed beliefs unraveling thread by thread, until what remained was both devastating and liberating in its simplicity:

I was never broken

But oh, how deeply I believed I was.

Picture a newborn, fresh to this world, already carrying the weight of disappointment — “We wanted a girl,” they said, as if my very existence was somehow wrong from the start.

Imagine a young autistic boy, trying desperately to meet eyes with kindness, only to be met with punishment when I couldn’t force it.

A child learning that safety meant performance.

That love had conditions.

That belonging came with a price.

In my world, there was no room for mistakes.

No space for human stumbling.

No warm embrace of imperfection.

Just endless pressure.

Relentless expectations.

The constant threat of punishment.

In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do.

- bell hooks

Perfecting My Disappearing Act

Kingdom Hall bathroom, 1987

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead like angry wasps, their harsh glow bouncing off the streaky mirror and the desperate shine of my polished shoes. At fourteen, I stood rigid before that unforgiving glass, a soldier preparing for battle.

My fingers moved mechanically through my hair — once, twice, ten times — trying to tame what others had always mocked. It had to be perfect. Perfection was the only armor I knew.

In my head, the Bible reading looped like a broken record: “Jehovah is my shepherd; I shall not want.” Each word had to land just right. Each inflection carried the weight of acceptance or rejection.

A bead of sweat traced its path down my temple. I wiped it away with the urgency of someone erasing evidence. Any sign of humanity felt dangerous.

My father’s face floated in my mind’s eye — sharp, critical, watching. His reputation balanced on the knife-edge of my performance.

Just don’t stumble.

Just pronounce every word right.

Just be the exemplary young man they expect.

The boy in the mirror was already practicing his disappearing act — shrinking himself to fit the mold, reaching for an impossible standard of flawlessness, hoping that maybe this time, perfect execution would earn a moment of genuine approval.

A glimpse of what it might feel like to be enough.

Neurodivergent Insight: Why Disappearing Hurts So Much

For many of us who are autistic, ADHD, or otherwise neurodivergent, this kind of “disappearing” isn’t just emotional. It’s neurological. It's called masking — a form of social survival learned early, often unconsciously, and reinforced by systems that punish difference. It can feel like becoming an expert in your own erasure.

The Cost of Disappearing

I became an expert at vanishing into other people’s expectations.

A master of reading rooms.

A scholar of survival.

My awareness turned razor-sharp, always scanning:

The slight shift in tone that meant danger
The subtle change in expression that spelled rejection
The invisible tripwires that could trigger punishment

When I discovered “healing,” I turned that same hypervigilance inward.

Self-awareness became a weapon.

Growth became another form of self-punishment.

Not only because I wanted to evolve — but because I believed I needed fixing.

Even after:

Getting clean
Coming out
Leaving the religion
Building a business
Supporting others in their own journey’s

That whisper remained:

You’re not enough.

You’re too much.

You’re still broken.

(What I couldn’t see yet was that some of the pain I carried wasn’t just trauma — it was the lifelong friction of living as an autistic person in a world that never acknowledged it, understood it, or made space for it.)

The Unraveling

Change came like dawn — gradually, then all at once.

First, in recovery, reading my journals from the depths of addiction. Seeing not just the darkness, but the light that never left:

The part that kept loving
The part that kept trying
The part that kept showing up

Then came the spiritual awakening through texts like “The Untethered Soul” and “Awareness.” The recognition that I wasn’t:

Just my thoughts
Just my pain
Just my trauma

I was the awareness holding all of it.

The love that witnessed the worst and stayed.

The presence that never needed fixing.

One night in 2014, my journal captured a turning point:

“When are you going to stop believing you’re broken?

When will you finally realize that you don’t need fixing?

You – just as you are, right here, right now – are everything this moment needs.”

The Truth That Changes Everything

Here’s what I’ve come to know:

Healing doesn’t happen through effort.

It happens through surrender.

We don’t climb toward wholeness.

We soften into it.

This is the heart of what I now call the

Gravity Model of Returning

a remembering that love, presence, and clarity aren’t goals to achieve.

They’re gravity. Already here. Already holding us.

And healing begins the moment we stop resisting that.

Most of us carry such heavy resistance.

We’re braced against life.

We’re forcing change.

We’re trying to regulate ourselves into worthiness.

But here’s the truth:

You can’t fix what was never broken.

You can’t earn what’s already yours.

Wholeness isn’t a destination.

It’s your natural state — revealed when you stop trying to be someone else.

So if you’re exhausted…

If your soul aches from endless self-improvement…

Know this:

You’re not broken.

You never were.

(Take a moment. Breathe. Let your body feel that truth—not just your mind.)

The day you stop trying to fix yourself

Is the day you begin to truly live.

Maybe you don’t need to rise.

Maybe you just need to stop resisting what’s already holding you.

Note for the Neurodivergent

The Real Reason You're So Tired ( It's Not What You Think)

If you've spent a lifetime wondering why everything feels harder for you, why perfection was the only safety you knew, or why rest never seems to bring relief — you're not broken either.

Masking, burnout, shutdowns, meltdowns — these are not failures. They’re your nervous system doing its best to protect you.

Healing doesn’t mean becoming more "normal."

It means remembering:

You were whole before the world asked you to be anything else.

The Impact You Can’t Measure: Why Real Success Leaves No Trace

smattus — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 13:00:12 +0000

Tell me this…

what happens when the thing that matters most can't be quantified?

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot lately. In a world obsessed with metrics—followers, engagement rates, client testimonials, revenue charts that go up-and-to-the-right—I keep coming back to this nagging thought: What if my deepest impact leaves no visible trace?

The Tyranny of Proof

Let me tell you a story.

Years ago, I was being considered for a promotion. My boss spoke with his superior about me, and the response was hesitation: “I’m not sure I can trust him. He’s too kind.”

Too. Fucking. Kind.

Like kindness was suspicious. Like consistent kindness must be hiding something.

Months later, after watching me closely, this same person pulled me aside and said something I’ll never forget: “I realized… you’re actually just that kind all the time. To everyone.”

His revelation wasn’t a compliment. It was a confession of disbelief—an admission that authentic kindness is so rare that when encountered, our first instinct is distrust.

This disbelief lands especially heavy for neurodivergent folks like me, whose sincerity or kindness is often dismissed as naivety—or worse, manipulation—simply because their expressions don’t follow expected neurotypical cues.

And isn’t that the world we’ve built? A place where even goodness must come with receipts?

The Badge Game

Even in spaces claiming “ethical marketing,” there’s this desperate clinging to proof. I know of this one organization that awards “ethical marketing” badges to businesses who take a pledge.

It’s like buying a t-shirt that says “I’M HONEST” and expecting people to believe you because of the shirt.

And the sad irony? Some of the businesses they promote use the same old manipulative tactics anyway. One business they champion outright refused to take the ethical pledge—and they still promote them as leaders in ethical sales.

What good is a movement for integrity if it still operates on the same game of optics?

The Cathedral No One Sees

There’s a story about three stonecutters asked what they’re doing.

The first says: “I’m cutting stone.” The second: “I’m building a wall.” The third: “I’m building a cathedral where people will find peace for generations.”

Most marketing advice tells you to be the third stonecutter—to tell a grand story about your impact.

But what if the most beautiful cathedrals are the ones no one ever sees?

What if the kindness you extend to a stranger changes something deep within them—something they never tell you about?

What if your honest “no” to a client who wasn’t right for your services saved them from wasting money—but they never circle back to thank you?

What if your decision to honor someone’s boundaries instead of pushing for the sale planted a seed of what healthy business relationships should look like—but you never hear how it grew?

And what about someone autistic like me? For whom the act of building quietly, inwardly, without performance, is itself sacred. I’m not failing to tell the story. The story simply lives outside the realm of language or optics…

… or metrics.

The Measurement Trap

This obsession with measurement creates a trap:

If it can’t be measured, did it even happen?If it can’t be proven, is it even real?If it can’t be tracked, does it even matter?

It’s like trying to count the stars through a keyhole.

It’s like trying to measure the ocean with a teaspoon.

It’s like trying to capture lightning in a jar.

Some things were never meant to be quantified.

And for neurodivergent folks, who are constantly measured against invisible neurotypical standards, the demand to “prove impact” can feel like a continuation of a lifelong pressure to justify their existence.

The irony? The numbers do matter—but not in the way we think.

You might gain 10,000 followers, but lose yourself in the process.

You might sell a million-dollar offer, but betray your deepest values to do it.

Meanwhile, the one heartfelt message that saved someone’s life?

That won’t show up in your quarterly review.

The Metrics That Don’t Make the Spreadsheet

I once tried to catalog all the ways my work might create change that I’ll never see:

The conversation that shifts someone’s thinking but they never tell me
The boundary I model that helps someone recognize their own worth
The quiet sense of safety someone felt in my presence, even if we barely spoke.
The permission I give that allows someone to finally exhale
The moment of presence I offer that reminds someone they’re not alone
The moment someone reads between the lines and feels me—without needing words.
The shift in their nervous system because mine stayed regulated.
The words I write that someone reads years after I’m gone

None of these fit into my quarterly business review. None show up in my analytics dashboard. None can be showcased in a testimonial.

And you know what? That’s exactly what makes them precious.

The Devotion to the Invisible

When I let go of needing to see my impact, something shifts.

My work becomes devotion rather than production. My writing becomes offering rather than persuasion. My presence becomes gift rather than transaction.

Listen: the people who will cry when you’re gone won’t be crying because of your follower count or your conversion rate or your quarterly earnings.

They’ll be crying because of how you made them feel. Because of the love you shared. Because of the way you looked at them like they mattered. Because of the time you truly listened.

These are the things that leave no mark except in the secret chambers of human hearts.

A Different Kind of Success

So I’ve made a choice. I’m trusting the impact I’ll never see. I’m releasing the need for external validation. I’m focusing on whether hearts feel more nourished, more seen, more safe—not whether I can prove it with data.

Is it the fastest way to build a business? Fuck no. Is it the easiest path? Not even close. Is it the kind of success that’s celebrated on magazine covers? Rarely.

For me, as an autistic person it’s not even an option to play the traditional game. I’m not choosing slowness to be noble.

It’s the only way I can survive and still feel like I’m staying aligned with who I am.

And maybe—just maybe—it’s the kind of success that actually matters in the end.

Because when my body returns to dust, the spreadsheets and follower counts will vanish like morning mist.

But the love? The kindness? The moments of presence?

Those ripple across generations in ways we’ll never fully comprehend.

And I’m learning to trust that that’s enough.

The Assault of Good Intentions: Boundaries, Consent, and the Wisdom of Not Knowing

smattus — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 21:20:11 +0000

I opened my heart, expecting to be held.

Instead, I was blindsided.

I stepped into the sacred space of my men’s group, heart in hand, ready to lay it bare. I set a boundary to protect my vulnerability. And then, like a wrecking ball, someone shattered it in the name of “help.” I couldn’t have known then that good intentions would leave such deep scars.

There were four of us men. The energy of our space was always thick with unspoken truths and anticipation. We gather weekly, not to fix engines or debate sports, but to practice being good men. Whatever that means.

I joined this brotherhood to practice vulnerability. To be held. To hold others. It was a noble pursuit lined with thorns of discomfort and the promise of growth. Little did I know, one ordinary evening would become an extraordinary lesson in the power of words and the sanctity of boundaries.

The Digital Campfire where My Vulnerability Got Burned

Our group had an app—a digital campfire where we’d share our thoughts between meetings. Sometimes it was a quick “hey, thinking of you guys.” Other times, it was a deep dive into the depths of our souls, echoing with the drip-drip-drip of raw emotion. Unusually refreshing for a group of men.

On this particular day, I felt a yearning to let a part of my experience – the context of emotional pain I’ve been living with – to be seen and held.

I shared a story so tender, so vulnerable, it felt like I was offering up my still-beating heart on a silver platter. The words flowed from me like water from a broken dam, a torrent of truth I couldn’t hold back if I tried.

But here’s the thing about vulnerability—it leaves you exposed. Raw. And sometimes, a little scared.

So, I did something I’d been practicing in my life and work. I made a clear request and set a strong boundary for the specific type of response that would feel supportive. Clear as a bell on a frosty morning, I said:

“I invite your witness. I welcome your inquiry. But please, please, ask for consent before offering advice or challenges.”

It was a small ask, really. A little fence around my tender sharing to keep it safe while it found its footing in the world.

Two of my brothers heard the tremor in my voice, saw the flashing neon sign of my need. They stepped up, strong and sure, honoring my request with the reverence it deserved. Their responses were a balm to my exposed nerves, a gentle “I see you” that didn’t try to fix or change my experience.

But the third man… oh, the third. Young in years, younger in wisdom. He came at my vulnerability not with care, but force—like a hand reaching into an open wound.

I had laid out a simple boundary: Witness me. Ask before offering advice. Instead, he steamrolled in with solutions, as if my pain was a puzzle he could solve.

I felt it in my bones, in the pit of my stomach, in the clenching of my jaw. This wasn’t just dismissal—it felt like assault. An invasion of the sacred space I’d requested, a violation of the trust I’d placed in our circle – and a violation of the agreements we, as a group, had all subscribed to.

Thank God, I wasn’t the only one who saw it. The others stepped in, too—naming what had just happened for what it was.

But he didn’t see it. He bristled at the idea that he had done harm. His good intentions should have been enough, he argued. His advice was meant to help. What was wrong with that? After all, we were learning to be men and to stand for something and he wasn’t gonna just back down because someone else didn’t like it.

I watched him dig in his heels, unwilling to consider the possibility that support without consent isn’t support at all. And something inside me ached – not just for me, but for all of us who’ve ever mistaken our perspective for universal truth, who’ve rushed in to “fix” when all that was needed was presence.

My heart ached for all the people in his life who would feel this same wound, who might not even have the words to name it.

Maya Angelou’s words surfaced in my mind: “When someone shows you who they are, believe them… the first time.”

I wanted to believe he would see it, that he would understand. But I also knew: Seeing requires willingness, and willingness cannot be forced.

I knew in my heart that his intentions were good. But good intentions never erase the impact of harm.

The Wisdom Came Through “For Me”

I left that conversation raw. Unsettled. A tightness in my chest, a question in my mind: How many times had I done the same?

How many times had I believed so deeply in my own perspective that I trampled over someone else’s truth without even realizing it?

That night, the lesson settled into my bones, and it has never left me.

I do not know the way forward. I do not have the answer. I do not possess the key that unlocks another’s growth.

This realization was both humbling and liberating. It stripped away the arrogance of assumed knowledge and replaced it with the wisdom of curiosity. It taught me that true connection, true support, comes not from having all the answers, but from being willing to sit in the questions together.

So now, when I sit with a client or pen words for the world to read, I carry this truth close to my heart.

I’ve learned to preface my thoughts with “For me…” or “In my experience…” — not as a disclaimer, but as an invitation. An invitation to explore, to question, to find resonance or discord in the unique landscape of another’s life.

I’ve come to understand that my own experience, no matter how profound, is but a single note in the grand orchestration of human existence.

I used to think that my experiences gave me wisdom. Now I see that wisdom isn’t about knowing—it’s about listening.

My Experience Is Just a Reflection

This journey hasn’t been easy.

For most of my life, I performed. Abandoning my own experience to meet the expectations of others was survival. It kept me safe in a world that often rejected my truth.

I learned to distrust my own experience. Shame crept in like a toxic fog, whispering that I shouldn’t feel the way I felt. That I was wrong for being me.

But healing taught me a different way.

At first, it was labored, deliberate—like learning to breathe all over again. But in time, I found something softer: the ability to hold my truth with love, respect, and grace.

Then, for a while, I swung too far the other way.

I thought my experience was THE experience. That because it was valid, it must also be right. And I wielded my truth like a sword instead of an offering.

Time, and many humbling interactions, softened me. I learned that my experience, no matter how true for me, will never be universal. That’s not a loss – it’s an invitation.

An invitation to share, to connect, to bridge the gap between our individual realities with curiosity and empathy instead of certainty.

Brené Brown reminds us: empathy is not just understanding and feeling someone else’s experience, but also as believing them in their experience – even when it differs from our own.

This goes both ways—we extend this empathy to others, yes, but also to ourselves.

It’s about believing our own experience, even when it differs from what the world tells us it should be. It’s okay to question, to interrogate our experiences, but we must do so with presence, not shame. With love, not violence.

So here I am, still stumbling towards love. Still learning.

The scars on my knees tell the story of my many falls. And I know—some people I love bear scars too, from the times I’ve forgotten and acted as if I knew better than them.

I admit–I can be (and often am) as messy as the brother in my former men’s group.

But these days, I try to walk with more awareness. More care. More humility. More willingness to offer not advice, but experience. Not universal truths, but personal discoveries.

Because wisdom doesn’t demand we have the answers. It invites us to listen, to hold space, to bear witness to another’s truth—without needing to make it our own.

And as I journey through this wild, wonderful life, alongside you, I remind myself:

My stories are mine. My experiences, unique. I share them not as gospel, but as offerings and invitations—gentle reflections of our beautiful, messy humanity. Because in the end, we are never truly alone.

For me, wisdom lives in the spaces between words. In the silence of true presence.

actualinfinity

How to Protect Your Neurodivergent Nervous System Under Authoritarian Threat

A Resource Guide for What to Do When You’re Already Running on Empty

Confusion isn’t an accident. Overwhelm is not a side effect. It’s a tool.

Start Here (Especially If You’re in Shutdown Right Now)

What This Does to a Nervous System (And Why Neurodivergent Adults Get Hit Hard)

Your Overwhelm Is Engineered

ANSEM as a Map (This is the Terrain)

Why Authoritarian Environments Target Your Nervous System

A Path Neurodivergent Adults Can Actually Walk

Move 1: Name your state before you touch content

Move 2: Stop letting “urgent” decide your day

Move 3: Match the move to the state you’re in

Menu A: When you’re in Shutdown (immobilized)

Menu B: When you’re in Sympathetic (mobilized)

Menu C: When you have access to Safety

Move 4: Protect your attention

Move 5: Protect joy as fuel

Move 6: Stop confusing intensity with impact

Move 7: Practice sovereignty in micro-moments

Move 8: Keep your humanity local and real

Move 9: Know what to do when shame shows up

Move 10: Remember what your system is actually designed for

A Note on Practice

What This Looks Like Over Time

One Last Thing

The Invisible Test

The longing underneath isn't wrong. The scorecard is how you avoid feeling it.

Where it comes from

What this costs

The thing underneath

If you’re the one carrying this belief

If you’re on the other side

Is there a relationship in your life right now where you’re holding a need you haven’t spoken… and interpreting the other person’s non-response as evidence?

Your Resistance Knows Something You Don’t

From Wicked to Whole

From Wicked to Whole

instead, it transformed me.

my path wasn't straight.

what guides me now

values & principles

this is the foundation of how I show up

reflective of my journey so far, everything I do is based on my core values and principles upon which everything else is built.in every act of service, I do my best to show up through...

wisdom of the heart

power of presence

unwavering respect for the sacred in all

radical and relentless curiosity

the magic of real relationship

the proof is in the practice.

Let's Walk Together

Safety is a Landscape, Not a Destination

the center is everywhere

Safety Is Not a Stop on the Map

The Continuum and the sphere

Everywhere Is the Center

Love as the Field

The Struggle Bus Is Not Outside the Divine

All of It Is Welcome

The Word That’s Keeping You at War With Your Nervous System

Language matters.

The War You Never Asked to Fight

And you’re still losing the war.

What the Industry Won’t Tell You

The Word That Changes Everything

What Attunement Actually Looks Like

The Intelligence You’ve Been Fighting

You Don’t Have to Wait to Burn

I can't breathe.

I am already the fire.

The Day I Realized I Wasn’t Broken

Some truths arrive like lightning —

…sudden, shocking, illuminating everything at once.

In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do.

- bell hooks

Perfecting My Disappearing Act

Neurodivergent Insight: Why Disappearing Hurts So Much

The Cost of Disappearing

The Unraveling

The Truth That Changes Everything

Gravity Model of Returning

reflective of my journey so far, everything I do is based on my core values and principles upon which everything else is built.

in every act of service, I do my best to show up through...

Let^'s Walk Together