But it took me a very long time to reconcile my magical side with my upbringing. I was internally split, always on the fence about what was “real”, and always afraid of the kind of withering judgement that atheists reserve for astrologers and psychics.

I kept asking myself:

• what really is the nature of reality?
• how could astrology possibly be true?
• what if people think I’m gullible and dumb? what if I am?
• am I delusional? imagining things?
• will I lose my grip on reality if I go down this path?
• what if I start believing in aliens and conspiracies? where is the line?
• what if I just want it to be true? am I just reinforcing my own biases or seeing what I want to see?
• am I just trying to escape real life and live in a fantasy?

These doubts and fears kept me from going beyond dabbling in astrology until early 2024. But I finally resolved it, and have been immersed in studying it ever since.

If you find yourself in a similar place, I want to give you a few pieces of information that helped reframe things for me and allowed me to reconcile being an intelligent thinking person with using astrology and Tarot on a daily basis.

We were lied to about the origin of “Western” thought.

I was taught that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle were all about the pursuit of reason and logic and empirical observation, and the Enlightenment thinkers rediscovered their ideas and brought Europe out of the Dark Ages.

This is just not true. It is a story the Enlightenment told about the Greeks to make themselves sound like the inheritors of a tradition rather than the inventors of one.

Eighteenth-century thinkers became obsessed with reason as the only legitimate path to knowledge. To support this, they cherry-picked the bits of Greek philosophy that they could frame as early science, and ignored the rest. The ecstatic, magical side of Greek thought and culture was devalued and eventually forgotten.

Thinkers like Pythagoras and Plato were mystics who saw the cosmos as a divine creation with inherent purpose. Pythagoras led a mystical brotherhood and saw numbers as living symbols of divine harmony. In his writings, Plato described mania—a form of divine inspiration. They also had a version of reincarnation (transmigration of the soul) that has been almost entirely forgotten outside of esoteric circles.

They believed true knowledge came from blending logic with ecstatic insight. They would never have endorsed the idea that everything that is legitimate and real can be derived through rational thought.

The boundary between astronomy, mathematics, and astrology was porous; understanding the movement of the stars was the same as understanding the divine order of the cosmos. Plato gave planets and stars a divine ontological status, portraying them as living, intelligent beings.

So our actual Western tradition is one of a cosmos infused with meaning, where the movements of the heavens mirror the patterns of life on Earth.

The mechanistic worldview and the emphasis on reason is not Greek. Enlightenment thinkers simply projected their priorities onto Greek philosophy. They created a narrative of continuity, positioning themselves as heirs to a “rational” Greek tradition which they had extricated from its actual mystical and polytheistic context.

They were not respectful of the traditions they claimed to admire—they just exploited them to claim legitimacy. It was cultural appropriation, not cultural inheritance.

Learning this was a revelation for me. If the Greeks themselves didn’t see logic and mysticism as enemies, then the whole idea that intelligence requires rejecting the mystical had no foundation. It was just gatekeeping truth.

Scientific materialism is intimately tied to colonialism.

Colonialism is the practice of domination, control, and exploitation of one country or people by another. Colonialism was systematized by Enlightenment ideologies of progress and reason. Their hierarchical assumptions and their material effects are now embedded in every facet of our global system and are woven into dominant culture.

Western scientific materialism is the underlying worldview that supports this dehumanization and exploitation. A mechanistic worldview—seeing nature as a machine—posits disconnection and meaningless as the fabric of our existence. This implicitly grants moral permission to exploit others in the name of “progress”. That exploitation is then internalized as self-exploitation, i.e. internalized capitalism.

The Enlightenment project legitimized the colonialism and capitalism that has destroyed our environment and disconnected us from our bodies and our hearts and each other. But perhaps less obviously, it has also disconnected us from our inherent spiritual awareness. It has devalued subjective experience as a source of truth—but subjective experience is the only way we have to personally experience the Divine. Outside of that experience, God is just an idea.

The rationalist paradigm redefined which ways of knowing are legitimate. It elevated logic and rationality and devalued everything else—art, spirit, connection, community, wellness, joy, play, rest, feeling. Each now has to be justified rationally and logically before we are allowed to engage in it.

Scientific materialism isn’t neutral. It’s a value system masquerading as objectivity, one that arose in a particular historical moment and serves a particular set of power structures. It is not the inevitable or only way to understand the world or to pursue truth.

Given how much damage this value system has done to humanity, I don’t want any part of it. Reclaiming mystical ways of knowing isn’t just personal healing—it’s part of undoing a cultural wound that we are all suffering from.

The pre-modern worldview can liberate us from oppressive normativity.

Normativity refers to the concept of how things ought to be, rather than how they are. Every society has norms, but modernity legitimizes it’s norms through the assumed authority of “science”.

Studying astrology has been liberatory for me, because it is a pre-Christian, pre-modern worldview. It is not structured like modern psychology. It does not divide people into categories of  “ordered” and “disordered”.

When you are born, your natal chart reflects a moment in time, but it’s not better or worse than any other moment in time. It’s just your moment, your chart. It reflects what you have to deal with in your life, but it doesn’t judge you.

You are never meant to be anything but what you are, and who you are is fine. That is so different than the modern sense of always striving to be better—to contort yourself into a different, more acceptable shape. Compared to the dominant cultural worldview, it is a huge relief.

I am categorically an outsider in so many ways, and astrology gives me language for my experience of being human that I haven’t found anywhere else. If I was more validated by mainstream categories of experience, maybe I wouldn’t be as interested in it—but I’m not.

So when I read that people with Neptune prominent in their chart often are more physically  and emotionally sensitive, feel different and strange and alien, end up playing the martyr/rescuer role in relationships, long to “go home” to a better place that is not Earth, are more susceptible to magical thinking and self-delusion, and can have a frustratingly vague relationship with ambition and taking action—that is validating. It is affirming without being pathologizing. These are all things I need to work with in my life, but that doesn’t make me bad or broken—it just makes me a Neptunian person with Neptunian problems. (If you resonate with this, I have a free Neptune Lessons report on my astro site.)

Astrology is an amazingly precise mirror of our experiences. It is a psycho-spiritual system that has stood the test of time. It now has embedded in it the wisdom of a dozen different cultures and time periods. It is decentralized, flexible, adaptable, and has a depth and breadth of scholarship within it that most people have no idea exists.

I’m not trying to sell you on astrology. What I’m trying to say is, if it works for you and you get benefit from using it, it is perfectly valid to do so. If it’s not for you, that’s fine too! But we don’t have to believe there is anything wrong with deriving value from something that millions of humans across two millennia have used to understand themselves and their place in the cosmos.

Spirituality can be about experience, not belief.

When people ask if I believe in God, I reply that I experience God.

Christianity is particularly obsessed with the question of whether you are believing the right thing or not. I think this has skewed our perception of what spirituality is for.

You can have spiritual experiences without ever settling on a firm belief about the exact nature of what you are experiencing. Belief is not actually required.

I have a lot of working theories based on different spiritual systems that make sense of my experience—but I don’t have a cohesive dogma that I “believe in” to the exclusion of other ideas.

The way I do spirituality is far more about how I want to experience life and how I want to relate to myself. I’m curious and open and happy to let my life unfold every day without needing to know exactly where it is going and what it all means.

I sense there is a purpose and meaning and underlying order to the Universe, and that I am part of it and have a place in it—and I don’t need to have a permanent label for that feeling. I can read what other people have called it and learn from their experiences  and even use their language when it is useful, without adopting a set of beliefs. Lots of ideas and practices are fascinating to study and think about and experiment with. I just let myself be into what I am into when I am into it.  Maximum permission.

I know what feels true to me, but I also think that whatever is on the other side isn’t something we can truly understand from within the mortal experience anyway. Divination is interpretive art, not scientific measurement. The goal for me is not to prove something or be “correct”—the goal is to grow as a person and enjoy my life.

Astrology was originally a spiritual practice, not a fortune cookie or a personality test.

People have always used divination to try to avoid bad outcomes or increase good outcomes, but ultimately it was meant  for more than that. Astrology was part of a mystical practice that trained you to eventually see through the endless cycles of life and the impermanence of forms and glimpse the divine order beyond them.

Astrology was originally oracular, divinatory, and magical—not pseudoscientific. The making of it into a pseudoscience came later as part of removing the “magic” aspect from it (like they did with all of ancient Greek thought). That inevitably led to it being “disproven”—but it wasn’t meant to be about causality in the first place.

It was meant to be a way to read omens in nature and to interact with the Divine. It was meant to be more like Tarot, not physics.

When I realized this, it softened my brain’s insistence that it had to make sense logically or be scientifically provable. It doesn’t and it’s not. Things like retrogrades are symbolic—the planets don’t actually move backwards. Everything in astrology is based on the apparent motion of planets as viewed from Earth to the naked eye. It is geocentric, whereas we know the actual solar system is heliocentric.

But it doesn’t matter. When my grandma died, and the next day I was at a park and I saw a deer and I felt something in the way it looked at me, I didn’t need to prove anything about that experience. When I smudge my house, my energy feels clearer, and that’s why I do it—I don’t know what is literally happening on a physical level. I don’t need to know that any more than I need to know what is neurochemically happening in my brain before I believe I am in love with someone—I know it because I feel it.

The confusion and doubt will resolve over time.

It took about eight months of committed study of astrology before I really felt comfortable with my relationship to it and stopped worrying about if it was “true”. It had just become part of my symbolic vocabulary—a natural way I made sense of the world. I’d also seen it be useful over and over again, and that repeated usefulness mattered more than proving anything.

That’s also when it sunk in just how helpful it had been to immerse myself in a completely different way of seeing the cosmos and human nature than the modern worldview.

So wherever you are at with it, give yourself permission and give yourself time. Explore what you feel called to explore, and embrace the experiences you have. There are no right answers or goals to achieve. Allow yourself the freedom to discover what works for you. 💚

How do you attain inner freedom & radical joy within an oppressive, alienating culture and system that is built on the use of force rather than just supporting everyone to live dignified lives?

Specifically:

• How do you get your intrinsic motivation back after adapting and conforming to external demands your whole life?
• How do you stop treating yourself like a machine?
• How do you validate and fulfill your needs for rest, play, and creativity?
• How do you stop feeling bad or broken for not living up to various ideals of a “healthy and productive person”?

(Note: by “capitalism”, I mean the entire modern Western materialist capitalist colonialist patriarchal white-supremacist framework. It’s more than just capitalism, but for the sake of brevity, I will refer to it as capitalism in this article. But just know I mean the whole shebang and all the violence inherent in it.)

We all get steeped in a worldview arising from a system of violence, and it shapes how we relate to ourselves.

I didn’t want this garbage in my head, so I have spent a lot of time undoing this conditioning and learning how to treat myself as the awesome human being I inherently am.

That has meant:

• validating my own desires and needs
• accepting my own limits and capacities (with neutrality, not self-judgement)
• cultivating and following my intrinsic motivation on a daily basis
• supporting my own creativity and joy
• not forcing myself to do things
• wanting what I actually want, not what I “should” want

In this article I’m going to explain how I did this.

The key to self-liberation is to realize that all forms of violence are reproduced internally.

Alienation — The same forces that disconnect us from each other also disconnect us from ourselves.

Control — The same violence that capitalism enacts on us, we replicate by expecting ourselves to operate like machines.

Exploitation — The same way that industry extracts resources from the natural world, we package and sell our own time, energy, and creativity as “content”. We present a stylized image of ourselves. We perform our most palatable and relatable parts.

Judgement — The same way we are judged and ranked in school, we compare ourselves to internalized ideals and contort ourselves to fit normative expectations.

Invalidation — As our felt sense of truth and rightness are invalidated, we learn to invalidate ourselves and forget what we know. We become dependent on external sources of validation and legitimacy and knowledge—even knowledge about ourselves.

The antidote is to reverse this internalization by practicing the opposite.

Reconnection — Listen to yourself. Practice attunement, embodiment, presence, self-empathy, self-validation, self-intimacy, self-compassion.

Freedom — Rest when you need to, move at your own pace, ask yourself what you need moment by moment, eliminate “shoulds” and standards. Trust your own process. Recover and follow your intrinsic motivation.

Wholeness — Develop and value all of who you are. Explore your own wildness. Be who you are and want what you want without shame. Become intimate with your strangeness. Relate to your “unrelatable” parts.

Self-appreciation — Recognize your inherent value as a unique being. Love the specific flavor of what you bring to the world. See yourself through the eyes of love and respect.

Self-authority — Affirm, validate, and trust your own feelings, needs, and perceptions. Know what you know, feel what you feel, be who you are.

Much of this is similar to trauma healing and recovery from codependency. But we also need to add an extra layer of deconstruction.

This transition requires a shift in values.

This involves a decision to value your humanity and aliveness over productivity and performance.

The core realization is that the values of capitalism are artificial. They are not naturally occurring—you learned them, and you can unlearn them.

Examples

How to deprogram yourself

• Whenever you notice anxiety, self-criticism, or self-talk that takes the form of pushing yourself, comparison, fault-finding, or self-blame: pause. Write down what you are telling yourself.
• Think about what value your mind is trying to reproduce.
• Ask yourself if you really believe in that as a value, or if is something you have been conditioned to value.
• Identify your actual values.
• Come up with affirmations that assert your real values. (Use ChatGPT if you need help.)
• Take actions in alignment with your real values. (For example: take a break, get some rest.)

The best affirmations are ones where your body relaxes when you say it to yourself. Don’t use affirmations to try to force yourself to change; this should feel like an invitation to remember what you already know. (See Non-Sucky Affirmations for more on this.)

Some example affirmations

• I honor how I feel as I do things, not just what gets done.
• I am not a machine.
• Depth and complexity takes time to develop.
• I trust my own pace.
• I release what is beyond my control.
• Enjoyment is not optional for me.

Now for the deepest level: the foundational lies of modern capitalist culture.

The sinister part is that the internalization of these lies make it feel like it’s your own voice saying it.

These lies are the water we swim in. They colonize our sense of self and create inner worlds ruled by anxiety, comparison, and chronic self-doubt.

The system absolves itself and keeps this all invisible by locating all outcomes (success or failure) inside the individual. That means even these negative feelings feel like something you are doing to yourself, and a sign of your own failure.

But the beautiful reality is, we do have agency in our internal world. We really can rewire our brain. We can see the truth, change our beliefs, undo our conditioning, and treat ourselves with humanity and grace and dignity and love. That is all entirely within our control.

You didn’t choose this—but you can un-choose it.

Nobody sets out to develop these habits of prioritizing productivity over your own needs. We absorb it as we grow up, then we are trained in it at school, and then it is reinforced at work. It is internalized and reproduced by everyone around us—so of course we absorb it too.

Sometimes it can feel like we can’t do anything about it—after all, we still need to get paid.

And that’s true, we all have to survive within this system. But we don’t have to internally agree with the system, or see ourselves through its values. There is a difference between doing something because you need to, and internalizing it as a value that then shapes how you treat yourself.

This is the work of developing internal boundaries and reclaiming authority over what meaning you assign to events. Humans have a remarkable power to change our minds about what things mean. It operates like a muscle or mental habit you can develop—it gets easier the more you do it, and your mind gets more flexible.

This frustrates me a bit. I honestly think toxic negativity, and spiritual ignorance is a bigger problem—it’s where most of the human race is currently stuck. And yet it’s just taken for granted as normal.

I don’t disagree with the concept—of course pain is part of growth.

I fully support diving into the shadows, facing the darkness, and walking bravely into the labyrinth of pain and confusion deep in the recesses of your mind. Not only can you not escape your darkness—it will always affect you until you deal with it—but untangling your unconscious patterns is how you reclaim the energy bound up in them.

At the same time, when I see people mired in negativity and hopelessness and identifying with their suffering, I want to offer the possibility of hope, healing, and transformation. Because I’ve been there, and I know it’s possible to heal from the most overwhelming disconnection and self-loathing and pain.

I want to say, This is not who you are. And I know, because it’s not who I am.

I know I can heal, because I can feel the part of me inside that was never broken—that can’t be broken. And that is a spiritual feeling; I can’t describe it any other way.

I don’t see love and Light and spirituality and positivity as bypassing; I see it as a support in doing the work. I can’t fight the good fight if I don’t know what I’m fighting for.

The Light is what helps me find my way in the dark.

I love rainbows and unicorns because they encapsulate what I’ve worked so hard for: goodness, joy, un-ironic enthusiasm, the right to be myself, and the ability to wake up happy for no reason. They represent pure delight, like a child’s laughter.

I love positivity and good vibes the way a starving person loves food. I grew up in an environment that positioned suffering as noble, and deprivation as righteous. The negativity and pessimism was like an oppressive cloud that infected everything. Hope always beat in my heart, but to express it felt like opening myself to ridicule.

My nervous system jangles in empathetic resonance with the monumental amount of devastation and despair there is in this world. But I also know that it’s not who I am.

I am more than my pain, and more than the cruel way humans often treat each other. I am something transcendent, even while being in this world and being subject to all the meanness it treats as inevitable and all the trivialities it lifts up as essential.

My positivity is not avoidance of reality; it is allegiance to a deeper reality.

“The Light” is not a theoretical concept to me, it’s an ever-present, always-accessible inner knowingness that is inside me as a felt reality. It never dims or goes out. In the times in my life when I haven’t felt it, it’s because I learned to ignore or dismiss it as the world pressed in on me in ever louder ways as I got older. And because I was taught that spirituality was a delusion. The opiate of the masses.

Healing my authentic spiritual nature meant reclaiming my right to feel and name and know what is true for me on the deepest level I can access inside myself.

I know there is something magical and wondrous in each and every one of us. I feel it. I don’t know how or why, but my connection to magic and wonder has always been a part of me. That is what rainbows and unicorns and sparkly glitter dust mean to me: they represent that glowing ember of truth, of realness, of goodness, that is is always there, underneath everything.

And it’s always waiting for us to feel it, if we just pause long enough and let ourselves sense it. But it’s up to us to shift into gear with it. It’s not going anywhere, but it’s not going to come to you. You have to bring yourself to it.

When I feel it, I know it, and it is self-evidently Real.

When I can’t feel it, I remember, and that remembering is what I call faith. It’s not the faith of believing in what isn’t real. It is being faithful to what is most real, even when I can barely remember what it feels like as I am crushed under the weight of my own pain.

It is my calling to seek and follow this silent inner Light. Healing work is the closest I have found to a practice that routinely gives me these moments of recognition and the relief of remembering: ah yes, there it is again, the magic. It is real, I almost forgot again!

I believe healing feels magical to me because the essence of healing is to reconnect what was disconnected. Healing is an act of re-membering, a knitting back together of what was torn asunder in an act of violence or fear.

Healing is welcoming a shamed and hidden part of you back into your awareness. It is uncovering some untruth that had kept you from knowing and celebrating your full self. It is shedding some pattern that was keeping you small. It is some shift of perspective that finally lets you release an old hurt, and love again with your whole heart.

Healing is an act of Magic.

The moment of healing feels like a revelation; it’s an otherworldly occurrence that we sometimes call a “shift” or “transformation” or “opening”. Something changes, and we are suddenly on the other side of a gap that we didn’t know we could cross.

Believing it is possible to heal is an act of faith, because when you are in that gap, it feels impossible. You don’t know what you don’t know—and you don’t know what it’s like to be on the other side.

What the obstacle is the doorway means to me is approaching whatever Immovable Obstacle is sitting there in my life with the faith that magic is not only possible, but it’s actually this exact obstacle that has the potential to be the doorway to something sublime.

This framing helps give me the magic pixie dust of willingness.

• I’m willing to imagine that it might be possible to be on the other side of this.
• I’m open to the possibility that others have found their way through an obstacle like this, and maybe I could too.
• I have no idea how else to be with this, but I’m willing to see if it could be different.
• It’s always been this way, but maybe it doesn’t always have to be this way.
• I’m here showing up for this even though I feel skepticism and doubt, because something in me feels called in this direction, and I trust that.

Willingness is a baby step toward acting from love and not fear.

And that is what makes it the magic key to turning an obstacle into a doorway.

Another way of framing this is, you have to step beyond the ego to experience grace. And grace is what carries us over the gap. And it is our faith and willingness to trust the process that invites grace in.

In other words, when we choose love, love chooses us. Because love is always there; we’re the ones who left.

I have experienced this healing shift so many times in so many ways. Which is why, as much as I study psychology and love to learn about my brain and nervous system, healing will always be a spiritual practice to me.

Which brings us back to where we started: is spirituality a bypass, or is it a necessary part of healing? That’s a question we all have to answer for ourselves, but for me, spirituality is the essence, the purpose, and the path of healing. Healing starts with knowing that the potential for healing is there, even when you can’t see it yet. And that is what I call faith. I can’t separate them.

Having faith doesn’t make healing easy, though.

I feel this intrinsic inner connection to the Light, but I’ve still spent a lot of my life feeling around in the dark like everyone else.

I’ve been stuck in the middle of some huge-ass Dim Cave of Harsh Lessons for long, long, long stretches of time, feeling crushed by the weight of the darkness, straining my eyes to see some spark of Light telling me which way I’m supposed to go next.

I still have Immovable Obstacles in my life that I haven’t figured out how to shift; this post is meant to be an exploration of the healing process and the role and nature of faith, not any kind of expectation or pressure or “why don’t you just magically solve your problems”, cause that’s NOT how I roll at all. Planet Earth is hard mode y’all. 💚

Spirituality isn’t the easy path. It’s just the path. (For me.)

Healing is really fucking hard. But it’s worth the hard.

Creativity is really fucking hard. But it’s worth the hard.

And spirituality has also been really fucking hard, in the sense that even though I feel it now in a very abiding kind of way, that has taken me decades to get to. I have gone through huge cycles of despair and disconnection, disillusionment, and questioning. I do feel like my innate sense of it is a gift, but like any gift, you have to work to develop it.

But it’s worth it. Because all of these things (healing, spirituality, creativity) that together form my North Star, come together to make life itself a magical unfolding journey that has a sense of holiness to it.

It is a life of feeling my way forward every day, in trust and faith and patience that something magical is unfolding, even when I can’t see it yet. It has taught me patience, grace, and allowed me to develop a deep trust in the Universe.

How about you? I’d love to know how you think of healing and faith, and what magic pixie dust you’ve found in your journey. 🧚🏻‍♀️

• black and white thinking (or all or nothing thinking)
• overgeneralizing: “Nothing ever goes right for me.”
• only seeing the negative in situations that contain complexity
• jumping to conclusions: “She didn’t text back—she must be mad at me.”
• catastrophizing: “My boss is upset. I’m going to lose my job, and then I’ll be homeless.”
• personalization (blaming everything on yourself, even if it is out of your control)
• emotional reasoning (believing something is true because it feels true)

While these are useful to know, they don’t always capture the full picture. We build complex emotional survival strategies out of these thinking errors, which become response patterns to stress. They’re not just thoughts, they’re a set of emotion-fueled mental states and behaviors. What makes them hard to untangle is how much they feel true, and how automatic they become.

I think of these as emotional distortions or cognitive-emotional loops. They become entrenched because they serve a purpose, usually to protect us from pain we’ve experienced before.

Over time, I learned to see them as signals. When you learn to decode them, they tell you about your needs, your values, and your dreams—and this is the key to resolving them.

Depression and angst as a signal of needing rest and reconnection

I first became aware of these loops in my 20s. I had struggled with depression since I was a teenager, and I would get into funks that would last weeks.

But every time I started feeling better, my brain would tell me the soothing story that it would never happen again, so I didn’t need to do anything about it. It took me a long time to realize I was stuck in a loop that was a lie—it definitely would happen again if I didn’t get help.

I had another breakthrough when I realized that when my brain said What is the point? Nothing matters anyway, it really meant I’m tired.

I made a rule for myself that as soon as I noticed my thoughts going in that direction, I would ask myself if I was tired, and if the answer was “yes”, then I would drop everything and take a nap. (Literally, the answer was always “yes”!).

This was a revelation, as it immediately eliminated the painful downward spirals of existential angst that I used to get lost in. I had learned to take my depression thoughts seriously, but not literally. They were a signal of my needs, and I needed to hear the signal, not believe the thought.

Fantasy as a signal of needing a realistic roadmap & support

My brain also lies to me through limerence, or romantic fantasies. In college, I spent years lovesick over someone who was in reality only a friend.

Then I graduated to spending far too long convinced that bad relationships would become good any day now, the way I pictured them in my mind. It took me years to swim free of the lie of a just-out-of-reach hopeful future that kept me enduring a very painful present.

The fantasy showed me what I crave: depth, warmth, and stability. It also showed me that I had so little confidence in being able to find those things in real life, that some part of me gave up a very long time ago, and discovered fantasy as a way to survive deprivation. I was feeding myself a fantasy of nourishment, because I didn’t believe real nourishment was available for me.

To outgrow the allure of romantic fantasy, I had to work through oodles of trauma and insecure attachment and learn how secure relationships actually work. But what my fantasies pointed to was a need for support and growth to make my desires realistic for me.

I couldn’t just jump from an emotionally deprived and terrified child surrounded by dysfunction, to a stable adult in a functional relationship. I needed to build myself a ladder and take it one rung at a time.

Defensiveness as a signal of needing boundaries

The lie here is more subtle, but it’s some version of, I’m under threat, when I actually just need to notice something is not for me or not about me.

I notice it as an urge to be sarcastic, to Well, actually someone’s post, or to explain and justify my choices or existence. When in reality, I could just keep scrolling, change the subject, or politely excuse myself from the conversation.

The internal skills that allow us to do this are self-validation, self-authority, detachment, and differentiation.

• I can be me, and you can be you.
• Someone making a different choice is not a judgment of my choice and vice versa.
• I don’t have to argue, I just have to be clear about my boundaries.
• I can still make my own choices, even if other people don’t agree or approve of them.
• We can disagree and still get along.

Detachment is the opposite of enmeshment, where your sense of boundaries is fuzzy and confusing. When you are enmeshed, you feel like you can’t be yourself unless someone else is the same.

I grew up in a very enmeshed family system, and the idea that I could just say no thanks was a new concept to me. My bodymind starts mobilizing for a defense of my right to be myself, even when nobody is actually questioning it.

In these situations, I find it helpful to say to myself:

• What am I telling myself?
• This is not true.
• What I need is: _____.

The takeaway: your brain is doing its best

When our brain is shaped by dysfunctional environments, its signals get screwy. But it’s always trying to tell you what you need, what you love, and what you want more of and less of. There is gold in the signals, even if takes time and space and support to decode them.

When I look back at these patterns—depression, fantasy, defensiveness—there is so much painful history in them. I’ve made it sound simple, but it’s really not. It’s taken years and years of struggle and work to get underneath these automatic patterns and understand and then meet the needs they represent. And wherever you are at in that process, I am sending you oodles of compassionate vibes of self-care and self-love. 💚

Several years ago, I figured out how to get my brain to be happy for no reason. I kept doing it because it felt great, and I knew that anything you practice becomes easier for your brain to do.

Then something unexpected happened—I would be going along, living my life, and suddenly spontaneous joy would just bubble up out of nowhere, for no reason.

After a few weeks, I stopped actively practicing because I didn’t really need to—I was already happy. Joy had become my new emotional baseline.

And so far, it seems permanent. It’s as awesome as it sounds!

But what does it mean that instead of changing my life, all I had to do was practice being happy? Maybe happiness is not what we were told it is. Maybe it’s not something “out there” that we have to earn or achieve, but rather just a state that our brain can produce at any time if we know how to activate it.

I will explain here exactly what I did, why I think it works, some things to be aware of, and address concerns people may have. If you try it and also have success with it, please leave a comment!

(And if at any point you feel overwhelmed or resistant, you might want to start with Intro to State Shifting).

What is state shifting and why do it?

State shifting is a mental technique of shifting your state of mind to a preferred state.

It is the ability to consciously choose to be happy, for no reason and unrelated to any outside circumstance (without suppressing anything or lying to yourself).

Through using a mental technique (covered below), you can self-generate joy. Then you just immerse yourself in it until it changes your state of mind.

Then, just repeat this state-shifting exercise over and over for a few weeks, and apparently it will rewire your brain so you are permanently happy. (Or at least, it did for me. I really only have a sample size of one until more people try this.)

On a technical level, practicing shifting to the state of joy will build new neural pathways and strengthen them, until it is much easier to access the state of joy than any other state, so your brain just defaults to it.

I get if you are skeptical.

I honestly think most people don’t believe me when I tell them about it, because it sounds a bit outlandish.

The idea that joy is a trainable state is a paradigm shift. It goes against all our cultural messages of what happiness is based on.

We are taught that happiness is mysterious and difficult to achieve, and either relies on external circumstances being amazing, or maybe becoming some kind of Zen monk. So, I get it.

We are so conditioned to think we have to have external things to be happy, that it often never occurs to us that maybe it’s not actually true. State shifting rejects the idea that we can only feel happy in response to external stimulus. We actually have the power to change our state to one of happiness through internal stimulus. And the more we do it, the easier it becomes—until it becomes automatic.

I think the confusion is due to a conflation of pleasure and happiness.

• Pleasure is a function of dopamine. You absolutely get diminishing returns with anything that produces pleasure. This is called Hedonic Adaptation.
• Happiness is a limbic state. It doesn’t have nearly as much to do with external events as pleasure does. It has to do with our internal wiring and emotional habits. Feeling unsafe and stressed over a long period will make you unhappy, but even then, once you get your needs met, you will return to your default level of happiness—your emotional baseline.

If you think about how the brain works, it makes sense that we can change our happiness setpoint. We have limbic templates that shape our emotional responses to events. And we can rewire these templates because neurons that fire together, wire together.

Every thought we think is either changing or reinforcing our neural pathways, but rewiring is made far faster and more effective by three things:

• mindfulness aka metacognitive awareness (this unlocks neuroplasticity)
• emotion (this gets into our limbic brain, our deepest wiring)
• repetition (this reinforces the change until it becomes spontaneous)

(Sidenote: please read the actual article above on mindfulness if you are not familiar with it as a technique. The meaning of it has been diluted recently. I’m not talking about like, “mindful eating” or whatever. It has a specific meaning of being aware of your thoughts while you are thinking them.)

Our brain often runs on autopilot, but you can reprogram that autopilot to be happier.

This doesn’t eliminate negative feelings that arise due to your real experiences and needs. Instead it will eliminate, over time, negative feelings that are purely habitual—not through trying to eliminate them, but simply through practicing joyful states so much that it changes the emotional habits of your brain itself.

This technique reprograms your default mood to be based on a state of joy, because that is what you have made easiest for your brain to access. You’ve turned that neural pathway into a superhighway by practicing it a bunch, and now it’s just easier for your brain to go down that route instead of whatever other route it used to go down.

What do I mean by “permanently happy”? How does it feel?

I mean I wake up and go through the day and feel happy most of the time.

I still feel sad when I have a reason to feel sad—but I don’t feel bad for no reason. Instead, I feel happy for no reason.

It also seems to have created some kind of buffer, where even when I feel bad, it’s not as bad.

It’s not some kind of pollyanna, toxic positivity, Stepford-wife kind of plastic happiness. It’s just feeling like I’m OK, I can’t complain. Even when I can complain, it doesn’t seem to hit as hard. Even when I’m frustrated or sad or annoyed, it’s against a backdrop of feeling basically OK.

I do a lot of work on myself, and I’ve spent a lot of time healing as well as undoing all kinds of conditioning, and this is definitely not a replacement for any of that work. It’s not changing anything but your baseline mood. But if you previously had a negative baseline mood, it’s a freaking wonderful feeling to change that.

I hope you will give this a shot, even if you are a bit skeptical that it’s possible. I swear I’m not selling anything here—I just want more people to know about it, because it really improved my life.

What exactly are states?

Your “state of mind” encompasses your thoughts, feelings, and attitudes at any given point in time. It is a broader concept than “mood” which usually just refers to emotions.

Our thoughts, worldview, and attitudes are all linked to our state of mind.

You can notice this in yourself:

• When you feel good, it’s easier to think positive thoughts. You see the world as a generally positive place. Being in a good mood doesn’t just affect your emotions—it affects how you see events, how personally you take things, and what you pay attention to.
• When you feel bad, it’s easier to notice all the things going wrong. You see the world as a generally negative place. It’s easier to remember all the bad things that have happened to you.

Your state of mind can influence your:

• emotions—your feelings and their intensity
• thoughts—beliefs, worldview, outlook, your inner dialogue
• meaning—how you interpret events
• attention—what you notice and pay attention to
• decision-making—the choices you make and the factors you consider
• behavior—actions, reactions, and interactions with others
• executive function—your ability to focus, prioritize, and accomplish tasks
• resilience—your ability to cope with challenges and setbacks
• creativity—your ability to come up with new ideas or solutions
• motivation—what you feel like doing, and if you stick with it
• memories—you will tend to recall experiences that match your state

We usually shift states unconsciously as we go through the day.

If we see a negative news story, we might suddenly feel sad. Once you are sad, it is easier to start thinking of other sad things. If we let this keep going, it will grow until it is more than just a feeling response to an event, but rather becomes a pervasive mood. Over time, this creates habitual mood states because your brain is just used to feeling this way.

Habitual feelings vs circumstantial feelings

Our brain largely operates on auto-pilot. It repetitively thinks the same thoughts, and feels the same feelings based on those thoughts. This is our what I am referring to as our background mood, default mood, or baseline emotional state.

Then, throughout our day, various feelings arise in response to what is happening in our environment, or specific things we are thinking about.

We want to keep those circumstantial emotions, as they are useful and help us navigate our needs and tend to our wellbeing.

But the background thoughts and feelings can often be stuck in a negative gear for no real reason except habit. That’s what state shifting can change.

So to review (this distinction is important!):

• Habitual feelings with no clear cause – that is what we are working to change here.
• Circumstantial feelings caused by events – we do NOT want to try to change these, because they are messages about our needs. To change these feelings, the solution is to listen to what they are telling you, and most importantly meet your needs. (Read about NVC for more on feelings as messages about needs).

The goal here is to feel the circumstantial feelings when it is appropriate, and then go back to a positive default state.

Beliefs help perpetuate states

Beliefs are thoughts we keep thinking, and we internally agree with. They are thinking habits, the way that moods are emotional habits.

Beliefs are foundational parts of how states perpetuate themselves. They fuel thoughts, that then fuel feelings. Therefore, beliefs can make states more sticky.

The technique below is not that hard to learn—the hardest part for me was actually letting go of the beliefs that we have been steeped in that we should have to “earn” happiness, and that it shouldn’t be this easy.

If you have strong beliefs like this, it will make it much harder to shift, so I suggest working on those first or at the same time. I have written more on how to do this here.

The Technique—how to do it

Training yourself to shift your state of mind at will is like gaining a superpower. Each time you deliberately shift your state, you are strengthening those neural pathways, and it becomes easier and easier to do. Then eventually your brain will spontaneously shift.

It takes a few weeks of consistent daily practice (several times a day) to wire in a new brain pathway. This is how I permanently shifted my baseline mood to consistent happiness.

How to deliberately shift your state

This is a very simple exercise. It involves bringing to mind something that makes you feel genuinely joyful and then focusing on the feeling itself, letting it fill your whole being.

1. Bring to mind a happy memory, or think of a person you have genuinely joyful feelings toward—someone or something that makes you happy.
2. Feel into the feeling of joy that this thought brings, and immerse yourself in it. Let it completely fill your awareness, and just sit in that feeling. You might notice yourself smile spontaneously as you review these memories.
3. Once you have a solid sense of the feeling of joy, drop the memory and focus just on the feeling of joy itself. 
4. Continue to immerse yourself deeper into this pure feeling state.
5. Only go until you feel yourself wanting to do something else. (Don’t push yourself to continue—force neutralizes joy.)

Then, practice this repetitively. That is how you build new neural pathways.

Making it a habitual state (this rewires your brain)

Over time, as your neural pathways get built up, you will be able to go directly to focusing on the feeling of joy without needing a memory. And that’s a magic feeling. You suddenly realize you can self-generate states of feeling incredibly good!

But you still need to practice more once you get to this point. I recommend doing it several times a day, for several weeks. That is what it takes to shift your baseline mood.

Here is how it progressed for me:

1. I needed to use a memory to shift to joy.
2. I could self-generate states of joy.
3. I started spontaneously feeling joyful for no reason.
4. My baseline mood permanently changed to being happier.

Remind yourself to practice in a non-demanding way.

I recommend a sticky note by your computer or on your phone that just says, “Be happy anyway?”

It’s worded as a question on purpose – think of it as an invitation, not a task. This takes any pressure off of it.

If you are not able to shift in any given moment, don’t force it. When you can shift, do it. When you can’t or you have some internal resistance to it, don’t worry about it. It will still work gradually over time. (If you feel a lot of internal resistance, it is probably due to your beliefs about happiness—I address that more here.)

Cautions and caveats

Downside? You will start to notice misery around you more.

This is the only downside I found with this process—you will start to notice how perpetually unhappy many people are, and all the reasons they have for that misery, and you will want to shake them and say, “You don’t have to feel this way!”. But I don’t recommend doing that. 😆

But seriously, “feeling bad together” is legit a bonding activity that many people are used to doing, and you won’t want to do it anymore.

It’s definitely worth it, because it feels amazing! But just be aware you will feel different than other people because you are no longer looking at happiness as this thing out there in the future or far away or something only other people have. You will know it’s just a brain state, and anyone can feel happy with the right kind of practice. It does make you feel a bit out of step with the world at large.

Will I lose my motivation?

No, this does not affect your motivation.

Misery was never good motivation anyway IMHO, but there is an idea out there that achievement = happiness, so if you are already happy, you won’t want to achieve anything. But that’s just not how the brain works.

Motivation seems to just be a different brain system than happiness (more connected to the dopamine/pleasure system), as I did not notice an effect one way or the other. If anything, your mood being boosted is better for getting things done. Depression or being in a bad mood or having a negative mindset has never been good for your productivity in general.

Don’t try to force a shift.

Genuine joy requires a sense of safety, and force of any kind is not compatible with safety. So it’s just not possible to force yourself to feel joy.

All you will end up doing is suppressing negative feelings, and be pretending to yourself that you are happy. We all know what that is like—that’s what phrases like “toxic positivity” and “spiritual bypassing” mean.

There is no force involved here. The technique I outlined above just involves directing your attention and allowing the emotions to unfold from your attention.

Do not use state shifting to avoid pain or trauma!

Do not try to shift out of painful or overwhelming feelings, simply because they are painful or overwhelming and you don’t want to experience them. That is almost guaranteed to just lead to emotional suppression or compartmentalization.

State-shifting is not a trauma healing technique. You should not use it to deal with triggers. It isn’t meant for that. In fact, what I recommend for processing trauma is turning toward the pain, not away from it.

If you are feeling desperate to feel better, you will likely be suppressing negative feelings rather than shifting states.  This technique is not a substitute for doing emotional processing, trauma work, or grief work. If there are genuine reasons you feel sad or upset, you need to work with those feelings and what is causing them.

This technique is for shifting habitual negative states that aren’t related to real events. So instead of feeling bad for no reason, you now feel good for no reason. Don’t use it if you are feeling bad for a genuine reason—deal with the reason!

Let me know your experience

If you give this a shot, I would love to hear from you and learn about your experience—just leave a comment below. Right now I have a rather small sample size so I’d love to know how it works with other brains. 💚

This is a Big Deal, and also, I’m the same person I was last week. (In case you were wondering.)

It’s completely recontextualizing how I see myself, and it’s making sense out of a fistful of puzzle pieces that I’ve been carrying around with me my whole life, that I could never make fit.

Things like:

• If my main issue is CPTSD and attachment, why does working on those things not actually move the needle on my “other people” issues?
• Why can I explain human behavior in impeccable detail, but still not actually reliably connect or get along with other people unless I try extremely hard, and even then, I always have the vague feeling that I’m getting it wrong and don’t know why?
• Why do I feel like an alien who doesn’t fit on this planet no matter what healing work I do, or what group I join, even groups that are explicitly built around connection and belonging?
• Why do I seem to relate to ethics, meaning, and reality, so differently than other people?
• Why does going to the grocery store feel like I’m swimming through an ocean of chaos and fragment my attention into a million pieces? And why does it take me two days to feel like “myself” again? (This was the last piece of the puzzle, more on this below.)

This process of realization started in earnest with me realizing I have ADHD, but I’ve actually been looking at the list of autism criteria my whole life and then ruling it out (similar to my relationship with ADHD). It’s a periodic thing I do whenever I feel like my “weirdo-ness” is just reaching peak weirdo, and I need an explanation. And then I look through the list again, and think, “No, that’s not me. Guess I’m just weird for no reason then,” and I go back to my life.

I’ve also been watching autism creators on YouTube for like…a long time…but not really thinking too hard about why I might be doing that. Like, “Oh yeah, I’m not like that. That’s not me.” and then I just keep watching, because like, it’s relatable and all, even if I am not really autistic and….yeah. If you find yourself constantly relating to autistic creators, while they are talking about their autism, then maybe think about why that is, Emma??

In my defense, self-awareness is one of those executive function things I struggle with. So even though I probably seem very self-aware because I write constantly about myself in exacting detail, the reason why I do all this is that it’s actually extremely hard to figure myself out, and writing helps me do that. But I don’t actually just spontaneously know myself. I work very hard at knowing myself.

Where was I? Ok, so realizing ADHD does in fact fit me, and knowing that there is a huge overlap between ADHD and autism, and understanding now that masking can do a number on how well these lists and criteria fit you, I started studying myself intently, to try to understand two things:

1. Do I actually have sensory issues after all? (One of the big reasons I had ruled out autism)
2. Is X autism? (with X being a long-ass list of “Is this autism?” memories and “things I do” and “ways I am” that I have been collecting.)

I do have sensory issues, actually

It turns out my sensory issues are so pervasive that I just numbed myself to feeling them at all, and compartmentalized the pain of being constantly overstimulated until I didn’t consciously notice it, and so I didn’t think I had sensory issues at all.

It hurt, and I didn’t know what to do about it, so I just unconsciously suppressed it.

When I did tap into it, I told myself, “Well, it’s just trauma”. Some really early kind of trauma, that just is lodged so deep in my nervous system that I can’t get it out, no matter what I do.

Masking isn’t just social pretense. It’s a set of stories you tell yourself about yourself to explain what you cannot explain.

It was only the contrast of spending so much time at home alone, and then going to the grocery store recently, while I was paying much closer attention to my experience, that made it obvious to me. And it wasn’t any particular thing in the store, it was just the all-everything-too-muchness of it. I couldn’t even focus on anything in particular. My memory of it now is an impressionistic blur, the way you would remember almost drowning.

But it’s happened before: I remember now. (There are all these little anomalies in my life that I pushed away at the time, that are bubbling to the surface, and I’m seeing differently.) I actually learned to avoid Home Depot because if you stand there looking like you are drowning for too long, employees will come up to you and ask if you are OK, which just makes it worse.

Another memory bubbled up from a few years ago, when I was going for a walk. Someone was sitting on their porch, and they decided to start playing their guitar just as I walked past. It felt like a wave swept toward me. I felt a visceral sense of needing to step sideways. I had a flash of anger and annoyance that he had pushed me.

But of course, he hadn’t. He was doing a normal thing, from 20 feet away. My anger didn’t make any sense to me, so I decided it was an anomaly. In that moment, I didn’t think, “Oh wow, I have sensory issues, maybe I should revisit that whole autism thing”. I thought, “Well, that was weird!”, wrote it in my journal, and then forgot about it.

Paradigms shift when all the anomalies suddenly can’t be ignored or explained, and we find some new explanation that makes sense of them all. But that means we ignore the anomalies until we can’t anymore.

I always imagined sensory issues would feel like my senses being assaulted, in the moment it was happening, by a specific thing. Like, “that light is too bright”, or “I don’t like that texture”. And I imagined that I would know and remember and be able to list and recite all these things that I don’t like experiencing. And I don’t have a mental list like that, so I must not have sensory issues, right? (This is remarkably similar to how I avoided acknowledging my ADHD, by insisting that I never forget my keys…when I constantly forget everything else).

What I’m now realizing is that I habitually ignore my body’s signals, and once I’m overwhelmed, I can’t distinguish what exactly is overwhelming. So I don’t really have good data about what is overwhelming to me.

I have a whole lot more data on what it feels like once I am overwhelmed–I get grumpy, snarky, angry, and really hard to be around. That has been happening my whole life. I just didn’t understand why, so I called it different things–CPTSD, attachment, or just being a mean person. I kept trying to work on being a nicer person. But I’m nice enough when I’m not overwhelmed. So the skill to learn here isn’t a people skill at all–it’s the skill of managing my sensory environment so I don’t get overwhelmed. Because no drowning person is capable of being nice.

So: sensory issues, check.

But what about “restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities…stereotyped or repetitive motor movements…insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior…highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus…etc”? From the DSM V.

Yeah, about those.

Why the DSM does not describe me

When I would look at lists of “this is autism”, I couldn’t see myself in the criteria, which are usually based in the DSM V description. And there are two very good reasons for this.

1. The DSM, like most medical stuff, is based on male presentation, and autism in females can often show up pretty differently. It is also, like the criteria for ADHD, not based in the autistic neurotype, but based on a model of disorder and dysfunction. So if your autism didn’t show up as a “problem” to your parents, or in school settings, you would have been missed entirely, which a whole generation of people, especially women/DFAB folks, have been.
2. I’ve been masking my whole life. And the way that I, in particular, have masked, has been to try to absorb the entire field of human behavior and try to reverse engineer fitting in. And it didn’t work. But I had invested so much in telling myself it was working, that I didn’t want to admit to myself that I really am still just baffled a lot of the time about how socializing works.

So the DSM is a very bad map to follow for a middle-aged female autistic person trying to figure themselves out. Especially one that is also gifted, strategic, did well (enough) in school, and has been studying psychology and “how to fit in” skills with a lot of dedication for a really long time.

So yes, I can generally maintain eye contact, unless I’m upset, hurt, or thinking about what to say. I can recognize facial expressions (I just don’t always know what to do about them). I understand sarcasm, but I don’t always understand subtext, and I often take things too literally, and it takes me juuuust a bit too long to get jokes (because I have to run through every possible literal interpretation before I hit on–oh! it was a JOKE!).

But in general, it’s not immediately obvious to me or anyone else that I’m autistic, or I would have already been diagnosed a long time ago.

On top of that, every autistic person is an individual and their autism manifests differently. So it’s easy to watch a video of one particular person explain how their autism is for them, and think, “nope, that’s not me”.

The sign on a map that I finally recognized as Completely Me was this article on NeuroClastic:  Very Grand Emotions: How Autistics and Neurotypicals Experience Emotions Differently. It describes how we don’t lack emotionality, but rather that we invest our emotions in different things than neurotypical people do.

This sentence from that page sums up the problem with using the DSM, and material written by neurotypical people in general, to understand ourselves:

As long as the characterization of what autism means is pathologized and wildly misunderstood, the majority of autistics will not find their way to a diagnosis.

Then I read their entire What is Autism page, including all the linked articles, which are all written by autistics about ourselves, and I was like Oh. It’s all of this. This is who I am, and have always been.

But it’s also exactly who I’ve been trying not to be, which is why I didn’t realize it.

I have been masking my autism my whole damn life

Masking is about survival. So you develop a kind of defensiveness around it.

Internalizing that I am autistic felt like admitting that I had failed at being normal.

It means accepting that I will never pass a test that I’ve been studying for and trying to pass over and over again my whole life. My brain didn’t want it to be true. So even though all of these anomalies have been flirting at the edge of my awareness and trying to crystallize, it just took time to emotionally come to terms with it.

There is also a massive stigma toward autism, which is way way worse than toward ADHD. I spent several days reading about anti-autism hatred and everything that is said about us. That we are narcissists. That we are cold, inhuman monsters. That we are incapable of empathy. That we are not really human.

It wasn’t fun, but I needed to know. I needed to face it and integrate it. I needed to grieve it and accept it. Because that is part of de-internalizing it. And I refuse to carry self-hatred for any reason. So I had to examine and understand and deconstruct the stigma. (Not saying I’m finished in two days LOL. Just that I did a deep dive into it and was curled up on the couch in a ball crying from it. I’m sure there will be more to come.)

I understand now that I lean into the cute/quirky kind of weird because I’m trying to avoid being seen as the off-putting kind of weird. I know that some people just instinctively don’t like autistic people if we are just being ourselves. I know that, because I was bullied horribly as a kid–by other kids, by teachers, and by my own family. And I didn’t know why. It always baffled me.

But now I understand that it is because I am different in a way that made me a target. And there was literally nothing I could do about it, because I didn’t understand why it was happening and I had no way to understand it, and no way to make it stop. So I just endured it.

I learned to mask for a very good reason. And I put an enormous amount of care and energy into that mask. Because I didn’t know it was a mask.

I tried as hard as possible to believe that through all my hard work, I had finally Become Normal. Or some close approximation of it, if you squint. Or at least, I was really really about to be, I swear, almost there, you can do it.

Because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t see any other option. My brain had to construct a self-image out of whatever data it has available to it. And I love myself–I knew I was doing the best job I possibly could, so I had to be succeeding, right? I couldn’t possibly have worked this hard, for this long, and just not be able to do it, right? I didn’t want to give myself a failing grade, so I was just constantly determined to try harder.

But now I’m realizing I don’t have to do this to myself anymore. I don’t have to try to become someone I’m not and can never be. Because who I am is already OK, just different.

I’m not a failed allistic, I’m a normal autistic

“Why do you need a label?” Because there is comfort in knowing you are a normal zebra, not a strange horse. Because you can’t find community with other zebras if you don’t know you belong. And because it is impossible for a zebra to be happy or healthy spending its life feeling like a failed horse.  – OMGImAutisticAF

If the world was shaped by autistic people, it would look a lot different. The whole shopping for stuff situation would be really different, for one. Norms would be different. What is considered normal would be different. And I wouldn’t feel alien, weird, odd, strange, etc. I would just be the person I am, and the way the world works would make sense to me and work for me. I wouldn’t have to constantly think about how to adjust or adapt or cope–I could just exist.

I can’t make the world different. But I can think of myself differently. I can find people who think and interact like me. I can exist in spaces where I don’t have to constantly worry that I’m doing something wrong that I don’t understand.

And that is something I never even dreamed of. I don’t know what it feels like or looks like yet. It is the undiscovered country that you can only find after you let go of the quest to become someone else, and let yourself embrace who you have always been, and see everything you tried to hide and erase in yourself with new eyes.

I haven’t reached that country yet, but I have my passport and I’m getting on the plane. I know there will be traffic jams and pollution like any other country, but at least I might find people who speak the same language.

I hope to be able to see myself through the eyes of people who don’t find me socially deficient. Because as much as I have dedicated myself to the project of self-love, there is a limit to what you can accomplish by yourself when you are surrounded by a world that constantly finds you just not quite right–too much of this, or not enough of that.

My ADHD awakening felt like realizing it was unfair to expect myself to climb a sheer rock face with no gear. Understanding myself as autistic is realizing it is unjust to expect me to transform into a bird and fly. I am not a bird. I’m a unicorn. ?

I have been having a slow-moving awakening around neurodivergence that just yesterday catalyzed into an epiphany. This post is about all the ways I have been connecting the dots.

Everything that is described in ADHD as a pathology, I have always framed to myself as just how I am, and found other, non-pathologizing labels to explain. (Plus a lot of what is truly dysfunctional about me is usually pretty easy to assign to my CPTSD or FA attachment.)

• Sure I have a ton of different interests, but that just means I’m a generalist, and a multipotentialite.
• Yes, my mind goes in a million directions at once, but that’s because I’m an ENFP, I’m gifted, I have a Rainforest Mind.
• Ok yeah, I have a different relationship with time than most people, but time is a social construct of capitalism and a monochronic society and maybe polychronicity is more natural.

I didn’t recognize myself in descriptions of ADHD, because I accommodate myself all day as a matter of course, and I have an inner fuck-you to “normality” that I internalized from my family at a young age.

Also, I’m privileged and capitalism-capable enough to have been able to build a lifestyle around accommodating every mental whim that arises in myself (what is labeled as distractions but I just consider the thing I’m interested in right now that I didn’t happen to be interested in 5 seconds ago).

When I wake up (even if it’s too early), my mind switches on at full speed, and I can’t turn it off again. But I just shrug and get up and know I’ll catch a nap later. So I don’t struggle to stay asleep, I just nap sometimes.

I also journal constantly to keep my unprocessed thoughts from building up, which I think also helps me sleep. And I take melatonin before bed, but that’s because of a whole other thing called Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome and…hmmm, wait….quick Google search…oh shit, I guess that’s more common with people with ADHD too!? (This is how the last week has been going for me).

Basically, I’m just neurodivergent AF.

I’ve been thinking about this Venn diagram a lot. You can find the original, non-marked-up version at Tending Paths.

• The white are things I originally circled and went, “Yup, I’m gifted, that’s all. Nothing to see here!”
• The black are things I also circled when I started imagining the non-pathologized version of those traits, or thinking about how I felt 20 years ago, before I spent two decades doing self-healing work, eliminating shame and self-blame, and using mindfulness to figure out how to be optimally myself.

Let’s talk about all the ADHD concepts I’ve Googled this week.

Hyperfocus

I didn’t understand what this was, because to me it’s just a flow state. It’s just what creative flow looks like to me. I did use to overdo it, but somewhere in my late 20s, I trained myself to stop. I called it, having boundaries with my muse. Yes, I could stay up all night working on this, but I’ll be miserable tomorrow, so I’m going to stop now. So it stopped being a problem, and just became a normal part of how I am. (This is going to be a theme).

Interest-based nervous system

This is really the phrase that stopped me in my tracks. Yeah, duh I have an interest based nervous system. What other kind of nervous system is there? Who wants to be bored? It’s become so natural to me that I didn’t think about it as a deficit or even really a difference. I’m always running into people who are forcing themselves to do things they hate, and I’m just like, but why tho?

But I’ve realized that they must not hate it as much as I hate it, or they wouldn’t be able to function. I stopped forcing myself to do things because it made me really fucking depressed. So I stopped sometime in my 20s, and trained myself to follow my intrinsic motivation only. (And, as mentioned, I’m able to be self-employed which makes it a hell of a lot easier to do that.)

Focusing on intrinsic motivation made me a lot happier, but I kinda thought, this is how we should all be living. It’s why I’m so adamant that we need UBI. Capitalism is coercive to everyone, but it’s quite a lot more coercive to people who find it debilitating to their mental health to have to force themselves to do boring shit just to eat.

So, I’ve been dancing around this difference my whole life. But I’m so averse to fitting into normality anyway, that it didn’t really occur to me that who I am and this thing people call ADHD were the same thing.

Time blindness

I have reminders for everything related to time, and I simply don’t expect myself to have an “internal clock”. I never considered calling that “time blindness” although it now seems pretty obviously the right word to describe my relationship with time: I only relate to it when I need to for some reason. Otherwise, I don’t really care what time it is.

I’m in the eternal now, and I just accept I will be periodically interrupted by my phone reminding me to do important things, like hang out with a friend, or take my melatonin, or go to bed, or take the laundry out of the dryer. I certainly never expect myself to remember those things. That’s what my phone is for.

I often don’t know what day it is, and I rely on my calendar alerts. If I make an appointment, my calendar automatically creates a reminder for 10 mins beforehand, which is the perfect amount of time for me to switch tasks without losing track of what I’m doing next. I can remember that I am about to do a thing for 10 minutes. If the alert was half an hour before, I’d get engrossed in something else and forget all about it.

Sometimes I set up multiple alerts if I need to prepare more for a thing. If I have to be somewhere else for the appointment (i.e. it’s not on Zoom), I’ll set a preceding alert that takes into account how much time it takes to get ready and drive there. If I have an appointment for the morning, I will also add a reminder for 10 hours prior to that, reminding me to not stay up late, because I won’t be able to sleep in.

I know my calendar will remind me, so I am then free to forget about time completely, which I generally do.

I barely schedule anything, because I know that being “busy” doesn’t work for me–I need nearly all of my time to be unstructured.

I also time anything where timing matters. If I am making a quesadilla, I will set a timer for 2 mins so I don’t forget about it. I have a rule: don’t start cooking something and leave the kitchen without setting a timer. Even if it’s only for 2 minutes. But really, try not to leave the area, even for 2 minutes. Wash the dishes or something. You don’t want to open the microwave tomorrow and discover something you heated up yesterday and then forgot.

And now that I write it all out, it sounds a whole lot weirder than it feels in practice. ?

Self-accommodations

The ways I deal with my time blindness are all things that people with ADHD get trained to do to help themselves; I just figured them out for myself a long time ago (although, now that I’m reading more, I’m discovering more ideas I hadn’t considered before, which is great!).

I doubt I would fit the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, because they are all based on disorder and dysfunction. I don’t have a diagnosable “problem”, because I don’t expect my brain to do things it can’t, and I reject the idea that I ought to conform to a world that isn’t build for how my mind works.

I don’t forget important things, but I also don’t expect myself to remember very much either. Is that a “working memory problem”? It’s not a problem for me, because I don’t expect myself to be different.

I don’t forget my keys because they are always in the same place. And I have trained myself to always check that I have three things when I go out: keys, wallet, phone. Keys, wallet, phone. Keys, wallet, phone. I don’t forget because I adapted to myself a long time ago.

I minimize what I have to remember, and what I “have” to do, so I don’t forget and I don’t live in a constant state of resistance. Which means I don’t appear, to myself, to have a “problem”…but what I have realized this week is just how much the way I live is in no way “typical”.

Optimal stimulation level theory & moderate brain arousal

I’ve always done this, but I didn’t realize there was a word for it until I watched this Dr. K video. I am constantly moderating how much mental stimulation is coming at me, to try to reach an optimum state. It’s why I used to watch TV while I worked, and then pause it when something too complex was happening in either my work or my show, and I could no longer focus on both at the same time. It’s why I love casual Farmville-esque games that require you to be constantly low-level aware of something other than your primary focus. I can just add it to the mix any time I feel like I need a little something something attention-wise.

I am, as I write this article, also playing a game. And thinking about the Midjourney prompt I want to use for the image. And checking FB to see if anyone responded to my post yesterday about ADHD.  I will go play Beat Saber in a few minutes. And I will do this all day. I’ll get the article done eventually, but I have no idea when. Maybe in half an hour, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week. (Although I’m guessing later today, because of the energy level I have around the topic right now). And along the way, I’ll have written in many small focus-increments, interspersed with all kinds of other things, and maybe a few long focus-increments.

This is just how I live. I don’t keep track of what my attention does, I just let it do its thing.

So yes, I have massively scattered attention…but I just roll with it most of the time. I don’t fight myself, so it’s not a problem. I support myself as I need to, and I don’t have a belief that I should be different, so it never occurred to me to call that “attention deficit disorder”.

My attention is not deficient, it’s just different. I ask myself, “What was I just doing?” quite a lot. And then I either remember, and go back to it, or I don’t, and I do something else. Either way, it’s not a problem, because I decided a long time ago to stop thinking of it as a problem.

Social model of disability

This idea posits that it’s not my brain that is the problem, it’s the fact that society is not set up for my brain that can cause me problems. This is distinct from the medical model of disability.

From this article:

Where the pathology paradigm asks questions such as “what is wrong with the individual?”, the social model of disability asks questions such as “what are the barriers to accessibility and inclusion?”

The pathology paradigm places the onus on the individual to adapt to the typical majority; their differences are medicalized, and seen as problems to overcome….the individual is expected to adapt and change — sometimes suppress the very essence of who they are — in order to please the neurotypical majority.

This is GREAT, and also, this is all so new that my spellcheck doesn’t have words like neurodivergent and neurotypical and neurotype in it. I’ve got red squiggly lines all over the place here. ?

This is all great, actually

I’m actually pretty tickled because this label gives me a new set of ideas to play with, tons of new content to consume, and a whole new set of people to relate to, and/or a new dimension to relate to some of my existing people with.

But we really need to redo this whole idea of ADHD to take it out of the realm of pathology and dysfunction and deficit and disorder, and into neurodivergence and neurotype.

This page on ADHD-as-identity vs ADHD-as-disorder is going in that direction, and was a big part of this whole awakening for me.

Toward ADHD as a neurotype, not a disorder

I asked ChatGPT to tell me what a non-pathology based description of ADHD would sound like: “If you were to describe ADHD as a neurotype rather than a disorder, how would you describe it?”

1. Dynamic Attention: People with this neurotype often have a non-linear and multifaceted way of thinking. They may be highly engaged and focused on activities that genuinely interest them while finding it challenging to engage with tasks that do not resonate.
2. Creative and Divergent Thinking: Many individuals with ADHD demonstrate remarkable creativity and the ability to think outside the box. They often excel at connecting disparate ideas and finding unique solutions.
3. Sensitivity to Stimulation: This neurotype may include a heightened sensitivity to external stimuli, leading to both a rich sensory experience and potential challenges with sensory overload.
4. Desire for Novelty and Exploration: A strong inclination toward novelty and exploration can lead to a love of learning, adventure, and excitement. This quality may also contribute to restlessness or difficulty with routine tasks.
5. Emotional Intensity: Emotional experiences may be particularly vivid and intense, leading to deep empathy, passion, and engagement, but also to potential challenges with emotional regulation.
6. Flexible Approach to Time and Tasks: A flexible and intuitive approach to time management might resonate with this neurotype. Structured schedules may feel constraining, while a more fluid and responsive approach might be empowering.

I think this is a start, but it’s a bit too general. (If you have other resources, please share in the comments!)

I did find a better self-assessment: the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale, but I wish it acknowledged the ways we learn to mask and develop workarounds as adults that can make ADHD hide in plain sight. For example, instead of, “How often do you find yourself talking too much when you are in social situations?”, it might say, “How often do you find yourself monitoring how much you are talking and worrying about whether you are talking too much?”. Or instead of, “How often do you have problems remembering appointments or obligations?”, it might say, “Do you have to set up multiple reminders and allow plenty of buffer time so you are not late to appointments or forget them altogether?”.

In any case, now that I see it, I can’t unsee it, and it has started a process of re-evaluation and reconfiguring as I incorporate this new information into my understanding of myself. I’m sure I’ll write more about it in the future, but that’s it for now! 💚

1. I got divorced in January.

I’m sure I’ll write more about it eventually but right now I’ll just say that I’m happy to be single again, and I’m on the other side of the hard.

I’m also hoping to move back to Portland at some point, but for various reasons that point is not now.

2. Burnout is not just a work thing.

I recently came across the 12-stage model of burnout, in this video and it connected a lot of dots for me.

Specifically, my marriage to someone in prison was a caretaking situation which ended up being very unequal and fell apart completely once he got out in late 2020. I’ve spent the last few years sorting through the wreckage and recovering, as well as doing a lot of healing and soul-searching.

Where burnout comes in is that I had the need to prove I was a good person who was caring, compassionate, empathetic, understanding, helpful, loyal, giving, etc—anything but selfish. Having something to prove is the first stage of burnout, and it was all downhill from there.

What really hit me with the burnout model was stage 5: “Revision of Values”. You rewrite your value system to make your sacrifice of your own needs make sense to you. You know you are drowning, but you can’t let go of how wrapped up you have become in it. You can’t accept that it’s not working, so you just dedicate yourself to it more. Your identity, your value, your sense of who you are, is all on the line. You defend it to other people and to yourself.

At a certain point, it all falls apart. And then you have to face everything–all your unmet needs, everything you have pushed aside and avoided, and all the underlying issues that got you there—and you have to face it from a place of feeling more depleted than you have ever felt in your life. That is why it takes so long to recover.

I’m on the other side of the worst of it, and slowly rebuilding my energy. Which means I’m starting new things, of course!

3. I started a Substack newsletter.

Why do I need a newsletter when I have a blog? Which you might already be reading right now in your email? Good question!

On Joy Ninja, I take an educational tone with most of my posts. I’m describing my experience, but from the benefit of hindsight. With sparkly dark, I want to write about my process as I go. My first post there is about reconnecting with my inner writing voice this week, and my second is about walking into the wild unknown of trying a new thing you don’t know how to do.

I also want to try it because Substack is a community and social network of writers, and I know you’re thinking oh god not another social network, but I really think they can be good if you find the right one where you can hang out on and invest in your connections. They all suck in some ways, but as a socially isolated ENFP, I need online community. And this is an experiment for me in creating community through writing, which might just be great? We’ll see. ?

4. I’m also hanging out a lot on Facebook recently.

So feel free to add me as a friend if you hang out there too. I chat about personal growth, creativity, and the exciting stuff happening in AI.

Also if you missed it, I have an instagram now. I make growth-related memes. I also want to start a community but that’s a bit of a longer-term goal right now.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading! ?

You can also use these with Claude, Google Gemini, or any other LLM chatbot.

1. My favorite prompt

If you are short on time, this is the one prompt that I use over and over:

“Rogerian” refers to Carls Rogers, one of the founders of humanistic psychology. This prompt just has ChatGPT reflect back to you what it heard you say, which I find enormously useful.

Pure reflection moves you forward because when you feel seen and heard, your mind then can move to the next step in its processing, rather than spinning.

When I use this, I will spend an hour or more on a topic, exploring how I feel and think and it never fails to help me understand what is going on for me.

2. Ask it for potential reasons for your behavior

Prompt examples:

• Why would I do X?
• Why would I want X but do Y?
• Why would I avoid doing X?

Psycho-education is a big part of a therapist’s job: explaining to you how you work. Using ChatGPT for this is just literally asking for information, which you could do in Google, but ChatGPT is just much more efficient at collecting the exact answer to your question.

It tends toward generic answers, so the more specific your question, the more value you’ll probably get. For example…

Yup, that is…uncomfortably accurate. 😆

Keep in mind that the info ChatGPT gives you may be wrong or incomplete. It usually gets widely-known knowledge right, but the more obscure the topic, the more likely it is to hallucinate an answer that sounds plausible. As long as you keep in mind the limits of LLMs, I think this can be a great tool for understanding yourself.

If it is providing you with too generic of a response, direct it to be more divergent like this: “What are some uncommon or non-standard or unusual reasons someone might have that pattern?”

3. Have it ask you coaching questions on your specific issue

Prompt examples:

• I’m trying to do X, but I feel unmotivated around it. How can I increase my motivation?
• I have X issue. Please generate some coaching questions that would help me figure it out.

Back when I was first working on this article, I was struggling with my motivation to write it, so I thought I might as well see if ChatGPT could help me with that. (This was one of the first ways I used it, and I was impressed!)

This answer was fairly generic, but it made me remember I had a list of my “motivational verbs” from a workshop I did once. Let’s see what it can do with that…

This is still fairly generic, and I have no idea why it grouped these verbs the way it did, but reading through it helped me realize why my motivation was lacking: I was expecting myself to write about something I haven’t learned enough about to feel like I had something uniquely valuable to share. Duh! I like to feel competency when I write things. I am a bit less comfortable with “learn as I go” posts, vs. “been there, done that, got the T-shirt” posts. So probably just playing around with it more would help me get more motivated to write, by lessening that “imposter” feeling. (It did!)

If this seems obvious–yeah, that’s what self-reflection is. It’s realizing sort of obvious things about yourself that for whatever reason, you weren’t consciously factoring into your thinking. ChatGPT is useful for this because it can reflect back to you what you ask it, while providing more info to you that you might not have considered. Sometimes you get clarity just by talking about a thing, and ChatGPT is an ideal conversation partner for this as it is always available, it really listens carefully to what you ask, and has no conversational needs of its own.

When I got to the “negative self-talk” question, I immediately realized that I have some negative self-talk, that goes like this:

• OMG you’re just jumping on a bandwagon, how horribly predictable, boo. You’re being a tool.
• Do you really have any qualifications to write this? Have you really used this for self-therapy at all? What are you even doing? What’s wrong with you?

Cool, thanks brain. I love you too.

Sometimes just getting the thoughts out helps! I’ve already done a lot of work with my inner critic, so I don’t need to do a deep dive today on this. But it actually was super relieving to just acknowledge that yes, that voice is at the party, and that I don’t really need to give it much weight. It’s basically just screaming, “This is a new thing and I’m nervous!!”. Gotcha. It’s ok.

Doing this little session really did fix my motivation issue for writing this article, in about 5 mins.

4. Use it as assisted journalling to work on deeper issues

As this is a long section, I’ll summarize my tips here:

• Start with a prompt like, “I want to work on my issue with…” or, “I’m struggling with X, can you help me talk through it?”.
• Be directive about if you want to be asked questions, given advice, or be validated.
• For fun, ask to be validated in the style of your favorite TV personality.

Let’s get started with a perennial issue I have…

That gave me a bit of an essay in response, not really an interactive chat like I was hoping for. Hmm.

Wow, ChatGPT is so accommodating. That’s much better. Note: I obviously don’t have to say “thanks” to a chatbot, but it helps with the sense of immersion.

Hmm. That response was a lot of advice that was basically, “The solution to that problem is to not have that problem”. If it was so easy for me to maintain my agency, I wouldn’t be asking. Well, I guess I’ll just say that…

Cool that it validated me, but it’s back to giving advice again.

Oooh, now we’re onto something. These are great questions that really made me think. Is this even about creative freedom and agency? I don’t know…

This one made me really think: “Can you think of any past experiences in your life that might be contributing to your fear of attention and expectations? For example, have you ever experienced pressure to meet certain expectations from family, friends, or colleagues?”

I’ve gone over my life history and school trauma many times, but I hadn’t considered this exact question before. This is really a huge benefit of using ChatGPT.

At this point I felt like I got a lot of new insights but I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. I had never put these things together before–my fear of being famous and my “gifted kid” stuff. It makes a lot of sense now, and I want to do some more thinking and emotional processing about it.

Hmm, but maybe I could talk to ChatGPT about my feelings, too?

Er…hmm. No, that doesn’t help me much. I have a lot of emotional skills already, so I can process this on my own, but most of its advice is “go talk to someone”, which OK, but I’m talking to you right now ChatGPT. This is where a real therapist would be able to help guide you through real emotional work in the moment.

I mean, OK, but I can do better self-validation myself.

Hmm, well since it is ChatGPT…

OK, that made me chuckle at least. 🙂

5. Do parts work with it

What is parts work? Think of when you’ve been in an internal tug-of-war—like, one part of you wants to throw everything away and be a minimalist, while another part is hoarding iPhone boxes “just in case”.

Parts work is simply the practice of identifying these internal voices, giving them names (if you want), listening to what they need, and helping them collaborate instead of argue with each other. (read more about parts work)

I think of it as inner conflict resolution.

Here’s how to use AI to facilitate that kind of inner dialogue:

1. Explain the situation. You don’t need to explain your whole life story—just name what’s bothering you. For example: “I want to get rid of this old chair, but something in me won’t let me. It feels silly, but I feel stuck.”
2. Describe your internal experience. Let your different parts speak through you, even if they don’t make sense yet. AI works best when you give it raw material to reflect back. Just describe everything you know about the parts so far—your feelings, your behavior, your thoughts, what the internal argument consists of, how you are stuck.
3. Go back and forth. You probably won’t start out with a perfect read on what the parts are really about. Just give ChatGPT what you have, and then it will reflect back what it heard. Then you you can correct anything that seems to not quite reflect your experience. ChatGPT will be like, “It sounds like the dynamic is like this…” and then I will think about it and reply, “No, I think it’s more like this…”, and we keep going until that inner part feels accurately described.
4. Ask it to give you questions to ask the parts. You can say: “Can you give me questions to ask the part of me that’s afraid to get rid of things?” These questions help you go from “I’m stuck” to “Ohhh…this part is afraid of being judged because of how I was treated as a kid.” The questions will be things like, “What do you want most for me?” or “What are you afraid will happen if I don’t listen to you?”. Ask yourself these internally and then report back what you have understood about them.
5. Name them You can ask it to help you give the parts names—like “the Quartermaster” who tracks resources and “the Minimalist”. This just makes it easier to refer to them.
6. Get creative. You can ask AI to help you identify the values of each part, find the underlying needs, or write a truce statement. You’re not trying to “fix” anyone—just helping them work together instead of getting you stuck in mental gridlock.

This is my second favorite way to work with AI, after the first prompt above.

6. Rewrite the ending of a traumatic story from your past

This can be a way to achieve resolution—it doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try.

Just write out all the details of what happened to you, and then say, “Please write a new ending to this story where things turned out well for everyone”.

For example, you could write: “I felt powerless and scared during that experience. I felt like I didn’t have control over what was happening.” Then, ask the AI to generate a new ending where you feel empowered, safe, and in control.

Do this slowly, and take it in on an emotional level. This is meant to assist you in your own emotional processing—AI obviously can’t do that part for you!

Here are other ways to use narrative:

• Ask it to write the story from the viewpoint of someone else involved in the traumatic event. This can help you gain new insights and empathy.
• Use it to help you write a letter to your past self, offering advice, support, and guidance.

7. Have it generate self-help tools

You can have ChatGPT generate:

• coaching questions
• affirmations
• reframes
• journal prompts

It can also reflect back to you, after you share with it for awhile:

• limiting beliefs you might have
• what your values are and what you really care about (very affirming!)
• identify negative self-talk or cognitive distortions (which it can then reframe in a more compassionate and realistic way)

8. Tips & tricks

Memory. ChatGPT and many other AIs now have a memory feature where it will remember things about you. I find this is sometimes really useful, but sometimes skews the result as it pays too much attention to the memory and not the present moment. I actually have both a paid account where I have memory turned on, and a free one where I have it turned off. Especially if I want pure reflection, I will use the non-memory one.

Custom Instructions. I’m not sure if it still does this, but I added this to my custom instructions awhile back because it was getting on my nerves:

AI is an excellent nonjudgmental sounding board. It is a great tool to reflect your thinking back to you, and it can generate questions that can help you go deeper in your own processing. It doesn’t have the presence, experience, depth, or mirror neurons of a real human coach or therapist…but as a tool to assist self-coaching and self-therapy, it’s pretty awesome—plus it’s free and available 24/7.

At some point in healing, you have to move beyond the fact that it isn’t fair. You have to decide to care more about your own life, happiness, and future than you do about proving that they were wrong and it was really bad. You have to give up being a living example of everything they did to you, and instead become a living example of everything you did for yourself. You have to give up the story of what you were subject to, and write your own story.

But telling people they can do that is dicey. Because when you’re in the thick of it, when you’re mired in the pain that this world definitely can inflict on us, then you need validation. You need people to say, “Yup, that definitely sucks. That’s fucking terrible. And it’s not your fault”. But you also need people to say, “And you can change your life. You can make your story about something other than this. This does not define you. You define you. Don’t let anyone take that from you.”.

It’s a tricky line to walk. There is a ton of content out there that jumps over the validation and just tries to push positivity, with no acknowledgement of the realness of the struggle. There is also a ton of content that is just stuck on validating the pain through blame, which just keeps people stuck in the worst experience that ever happened to them. I’m always going to try to hold both, because I want people to genuinely know that there is a way forward. We can be challenged by shit that is genuinely unfair, and we can also rise above it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t that bad. It means we are fucking amazing and we are choosing to take back our power and make our life what we decide it should be.

When power is used against us, it sucks. It’s wrong. And abuse of power is rampant in human life. And the pain it inflicts on us is real. It derails us. It haunts us. It gives us nightmares. It curtails our potential. It crushes our spirits. All of that pain is real. It’s as real as the sun that shines on our beautiful faces, with the promise that life can and should be about more than pain. But it’s up to us to rise above that pain, to release it, to let in the Light and let it remind us that we are more than our pain. We have to make that choice.

And it can be the hardest choice point in the entire healing journey, because we have to let go of the story of what the pain did to us, and that can feel like betraying ourselves. It can feel like self-invalidation. But it’s not. It’s actually connecting to a much deeper and larger part of us, the part of us that is bigger than the pain. That’s the part that will carry us through our healing and beyond.

When pain is intense, it envelops us. It is so huge and piercing that it feels like all that we are. That is the nature of huge, traumatizing, overwhelming pain. There’s no getting around it. And the younger we are when it happens, the more it shapes our developing mind and body.

Healing involves realizing that who we truly are is actually bigger, wiser, older, and deeper than that pain. Our pain does not define us. It is an experience that we had or are having, but it is not all of who we are. Healing is about finding the even deeper truth of who we are. And then from that place, embracing all of our pain and fear and confusion with compassion and love.

People find that deeper place in lots of different ways, but for many of us, it’s an inner spiritual experience. It’s an intimate encounter with the very ground of our being. It’s asking the question, “Who am I, that this could happen to me?” and finding the answer: “I am far more than this.” It is the pain that prompts us to ask, to seek, and to find. It is the pain that forces us to look beyond what we know, beyond the ways in which the pain shaped us, to find what is outside of it. And what we eventually find is our pure, marvelous, beautiful selves, unbroken and strong. We find our strength. We find our peace. We find that what we thought was missing was there all along, inside of us. We just had to grow ourselves into a person who was ready to embody it.

We each have to decide for ourselves what the purpose of this wild and crazy journey of life is. But for me, it is about this journey from broken-ness to wholeness, from pain to peace, from helplessness to strength, from being lost to finding the truth inside ourselves. I know from deeply hard-won experience that when we feel like all is lost and nothing can ever be right again, that we are simply not done with our journey. There is more in store for us. I have learned to trust that journey, and the wild magic that accompanies those who walk it. I don’t know where your journey will take you, but I believe in it, and I believe in you.

P.S. I’ve added some new content to my site in the form of a Healing Q&A section and I’m also working on a new idea around starting an online growth community.

Some notes on the layers:

• If you are not into the concept of a Soul, you can think of the base layer as Value-level or Identity-level alignment. It’s about who you are in the core of your being.
• If you want to learn more about dopamine and how social media hacks our reward pathways, I recommend this interview with the author of Dopamine Nation. It really helped me understand the unsustainability of using metrics for motivation, on a biochemical level.

How to distinguish intrinsic rewards from extrinsic?

Some “rewards” or benefits can seem intrinsic but they aren’t. Another way to think of “extrinsic vs intrinsic” is “instrumental vs inherent”. When you have an instrumental goal, it means you want it for what else it can give you, not for the thing itself.

Money is the classic example of an instrumental goal. You don’t inherently want a bigger amount of money–you want what it brings, like security, status, freedom, etc.

But money is such a useful instrumental goal in our society that it can be really hard to see that this is all it is. Some of the most trapped people I’ve met are people who have a job that they hate, but that pays well. In that case, they are relying on that one Extrinsic Rewards layer to carry their motivation, but the other layers are not there–or worse, they are seriously out of alignment, like anti-cake. What is the opposite of cake? Nutraloaf? Well, whatever it is, they are trying to live off it, and it’s not working.

This is why aligning money with your Soul is tricky.

It’s not because there’s something evil about money. It’s that you can be paid to do so many things that are not in alignment, and finding the right alignment can be a long journey of self-discovery.

We are not often taught the tools for doing this kind of inner-alignment work, which takes a combination of inward listening, experimentation, and absolutely fierce self-loyalty. You have to be unwilling to settle for what you don’t actually want, even when it’s tempting you. You have to prioritize inner joy over outward success, over and over again. And you have to do it for long enough, even when it feels like wandering around in the desert, until you finally figure out your own personal alignment stack.

Add to that the economic pressure that money is a survival resource, and that we attach all this meaning to having it or not having it, and it creates a mess in our minds. So give yourself oodles of compassion if you are trying to figure this stuff out. It’s not easy, and we often don’t live in a social context that supports it. It helps a lot to find or create your own social circle that supports it, by finding friends who also care about alignment.

This isn’t just a career thing though; let’s talk about exercise.

“Being healthy” sounds like it could be intrinsic, but that really depends on the person. Exercise for many of us an instrumental goal–we want what it gives us, but we don’t actually love doing it for its own sake.

We are also given lots and lots of messages that are along the lines of, “If you were healthier, you’d be a better person”. Or not even healthier, just thinner. It’s a mine field of self-consciousness and shame for many of us. And it can be hard to think about exercise any other way. Even self-care can get hijacked into “treating yourself”, which is defining what should be an intrinsic reward as an extrinsic one – ew, stop!

Here’s an example of aligning exercise on a Soul level:

Non-“discipline” and “health benefits” reasons to go for walks:

1. Being present in my body around other people.
2. Seeing strangers and practicing Metta (“may you be at peace”), feeling connected to everyone I see.
3. Opportunity to appreciate people’s gardens and flowers.
4. Feeling the weather and seasons happening to my body, being in a place.
5. Variety in my day, a transition activity.
6. Giving my cats an opportunity to miss me.

Just writing this as an exercise opens up my energy. Suddenly I’m not conforming to the dictates of a “health”-obsessed culture, I’m being myself. I’m doing what I love. I’m being in the world the way I love to be in the world.

Sometimes we can avoid something we actually might enjoy just to reject the meaning it has in our minds. If I frame going for a run as conformity, “discipline”, as shaming myself as “lazy”, then I’m going to internally rebel. So, alignment isn’t just about finding the thing that is the right thing. Sometimes it’s about reclaiming the meaning of something for ourselves. This is internal boundary work.

People are different; comparison will kill your motivation.

But Johnny did this soul-crushing thing for 40 years! Well, maybe he actually enjoyed it on some level. Maybe he doesn’t have a soul, who knows (just kidding!). But we are all different, and it’s true that some people seem less bothered by seeming misalignment. Or maybe they are living lives of quiet desperation. It doesn’t matter. It only matters that it doesn’t work for you.

Studying the Meyers-Briggs type system has helped me a lot in accepting that I’m not the kind of person who can just live with misalignment. (I am an ENFP.) I will sacrifice money all day long if it means I can have my freedom. Alignment is like air to me. I need it. And this motivational layer cake may be an NF thing, not a universal thing. That’s OK. I know it works for me, maybe it will help you too. ?

Your state of mind is the sum of your mood, feelings, thoughts, attitude, and perspective at any given moment.

The key thing about states is they are more than a feeling—they are all the ways your feelings influence your worldview and attitudes.

For example, bring to mind a time when you felt great and you also felt optimistic. Optimism and confidence and happiness all go well together—they form a great state of mind.

Just the same way, pessimism and self-criticism and feeling like crap go together. They form a state of mind closer to despair.

State-shifting is being able to shift out of a crappy-feeling state into a better-feeling state, on our own, without requiring an external change in our circumstances to occur first.

Think of it like shifting the gears of a car. Imagine there is a gear for “bad mood” and a gear for “good mood” and you could put your car into neutral (mindfulness) and then shift into a different mood.

Does that sound impossible? It’s not, but it is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced, and will be easier for some than others. If you are depressed, you may still need anti-depressants—this is not a substitute for medication. This isn’t a magic solution, it’s a skill and a mental technique.

If you do emotional state shifting for long enough (i.e. practice self-generating happiness), you will gradually build and reinforce your brain pathways and change your baseline emotional state to unconditional happiness. More details on how to do that over here.

OK, so just to be clear, let’s first talk about what state shifting is not.

State shifting is not suppression or compartmentalization.

One way to change your apparent mood is to suppress your feelings, which then build up over time until you can’t suppress them anymore. We all do this temporarily if say, we get bad news in the middle of a work meeting and pretend we are fine.

Another form of compartmentalization is when you carve out a positive-feeling part of your mind and try to just live in it. This can produce what people sometimes refer to as toxic positivity, where you dismiss, rationalize, or minimize your experience through positive affirmations, reframes, or denial of reality.

I don’t really like calling things “toxic” in general, because I believe every defense mechanism exists for a reason. I don’t find it useful to judge or condemn them. They are often a stepping stone to get to a more integrated resolution of pain. My goal would be to accurately understand it and then heal so I no longer need it. In other words, I think treating my symptoms with equanimity is the best approach when trying to transform them.

There’s nothing wrong with compartmentalization. It’s a fine coping strategy, and I’ve used it a lot in my life to get through hard circumstances. I’m not saying compartmentalization is bad and state-shifting is good. It’s just about understanding the difference:

• In compartmentalization, one part of your mind feels good, and another part is holding the upset, anger, depression, or despair.
• In state shifting, you release the upset and your whole mind shifts into a more joyful, free, happy state.

In compartmentalization, the negative feelings and thoughts are not really gone, and you are locating your awareness inside one part of a split mind. In state shifting, the negative thoughts and feelings are released, and you have access to your entire mind.

Compartmentalization can help you get through a hard day or month or even years of circumstances outside your control, but there is a constant drag on your energy to maintain the split in your mind.

With state shifting, there is a feeling of lightness and easiness because you’re not expending effort to maintain it.

Shifting your state is a learned skill, and it’s only instantly available after a lot of practice.

While I believe in learning and practicing state shifting, I am giving so many caveats because I think there are a lot of false promises out there. When you in despair, it’s completely understandable to want a quick fix. But for most people, this is a practice you become better at over time as you become more and more aware of what is really going on in your mind and what it means to hold on vs release things.

I think it’s important to have realistic goals. If you are struggling with an external situation that is overwhelmingly bad, and you just started trying to state shift, it’s going to be much easier to compartmentalize than genuinely shift. So expecting yourself to go from depression to joy is going to make compartmentalization more likely, because you aren’t currently able to genuinely shift that far on your own.

If this is where you are at, I would actually recommend learning to be honest with yourself about the compartmentalization that you are doing, and recognize it as a coping strategy and the best you can do right now. If you are honest with yourself about what it is and how you are using it, you won’t get stuck believing that it’s the same as truly shifting. Then you can continue to work slowly on shifting, while acknowledging that your mind is a work in progress (which is true of all of us!).

This distinction can be tricky; sometimes with our best efforts, we still end up pretending to ourselves instead of really shifting. This is a discernment process that gets clearer over time as we become more aware of what is going on in our mind.

There are beliefs that make state shifting easier or impossible.

State shifting rests on taking radical responsibility for one’s state of mind. Blame, resentment, judgement, and ideas of deserving can really get in the way of being able to shift.

For example, if you truly believe that you can only be happy if X person does Y thing, you are stuck. You are now entirely dependent on them to shift, rather than you shifting yourself. You have given up power over your own happiness.

State shifting depends on letting go of these kinds of mental habits of making others responsible for our feelings.

Beliefs that get in the way of state shifting:

• I can only be happy if X happens.
• I will be happy as soon as I accomplish Y.
• If I’m happy, that means the bad things that happened to me weren’t really that bad, so I’m letting victimizers off the hook and betraying myself by becoming happy.
• I can’t be happy because I’m permanently damaged or broken.
• I have no control over my thoughts and feelings; they are determined by external events.
• Being happy is selfish, embarrassing, childish, un-cool, self-indulgent, pretentious, weak, or fake.
• Being unhappy is more real, authentic, true, and honest.

Beliefs that support state shifting:

• I can choose and change my beliefs based on what works for me.
• My healing and happiness is entirely up to me.
• My mind is my own domain.
• I can change my mental habits over time.
• It’s my right to be happy no matter what my life is like.
• I refuse to let my past determine my future.
• Reclaiming my ability to be joyful and free proves I’m stronger than my abusers and they didn’t win.
• Happiness is my birthright and my natural state of being; I am not inventing anything, I am just letting go of what is in the way of it.
• I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I want to be happy and I’m going to be happy.
• Continuing to search outside myself for happiness is fruitless, as happiness is an inside job.
• I’m ready to take my happiness seriously.
• I have the ability to be happy right now, without anything needing to change.

There are many state-shifting techniques, but their efficacy depends on how you use them.

State-shifting techniques are ways of breaking through the normal habit-patterns our brain falls into.

There are many versions of state shifting that we are all aware of already, for example, taking a walk, taking a nap, meditating, etc. But how well these work depends on if you are able to actually release the apparent cause of your bad mood.

For example, if you take a walk, but spend the whole time reviewing all the reasons you are mad, that’s not going to shift your mood at all. The walk isn’t doing anything but giving you a supportive container by getting you out of your normal routine: it won’t shift your state by itself. Same with a nap: if you lay in bed fuming, finally fall into a fitful sleep, and then wake up still mad, it’s not that the nap didn’t “work”, it’s that you were not willing or ready to release your upset.

At this point, people might turn to more esoteric techniques, meditation regimens, etc. But I don’t think there is much point, because it’s not the technique that does it in the first place. Taking a walk is more than enough if you are ready and willing to shift; it will never help if you aren’t. Techniques are supportive, but they aren’t transformative.

The bottom line is that if you are putting your belief in a technique to shift your state, you are still not fully taking responsibility for your state in the first place.

OK, if it’s not all about techniques, then what is it about?

State shifting ultimately is an act of will. It is a choice you make to prioritize your own happiness over being right about whatever you believe is responsible for your unhappiness.

It’s taking back the power to be happy from whatever you invested it in.

This involves recognizing that our unhappiness is the proof we use to hold the world responsible for our feelings.

State shifting is giving up the need to prove that someone or something else is responsible for making us happy or unhappy, and choosing to be happy regardless of any external circumstance.

But self-responsibility is not self-blame.

This idea can be misused as a way to punish people who already feel terrible. If your mind is in a state where the choice is either to blame yourself or blame someone else, then it can sound like I’m saying that you’ll be happy if you just shift the blame to yourself. That is absolutely untrue. Blaming yourself is no closer to happiness than blaming someone else. 

The difference between self-blame and self-responsibility lies in recognizing the true cause of our feelings. Detaching from blame and judgement is what actually removes the blocks to feeling good. Instead of believing that a wrong must be righted, or the blameful party must be punished for your feelings to change, you realize you can still be happy even while injustice exists in the world or in your past. You no longer need to be living proof that something is wrong in the world. You let yourself off the hook for that role.

In other words, state shifting is releasing yourself from bondage to bad feelings. You accept that while bad things happen, you do not have to continually feel bad about them.

While this sounds like a simple choice, it’s not an easy choice. It often involves grief, time, processing, and practice. It involves humility. It requires getting really, really, really honest with yourself and asking yourself hard questions like:

• Do I want to be _________ (angry, upset, righteous, hurt), or do I want to be happy?
• Do I want to prove them wrong or prove myself right, or do I want to be happy?
• Do I want to continue trying to change the world with my feelings, or accept I have the choice right now to be happy?
• Do I want to use the power I have to save myself, or continue waiting and hoping for a power outside me to save me?
• How long am I willing to wait or work to be happy, when I could be happy right now by releasing my grievances and changing my mind?

You may get to a point where you realize you don’t really want to be happy. Holding onto blame and anger is meaningful to you. I think this is a valid choice, and I would just encourage you to recognize what it might be costing you to hold onto it.

Sometimes we get so used to holding onto something that it feels comfortable and familiar, almost like we wouldn’t know who we would be without it. The question then becomes, do you want to find out? Do you want to know who you would be as a happier, lighter person? It’s truly up to you.

Trauma is a confusing-memory-with-reality problem. Our nervous system becomes patterned and organized for survival within an unhealthy environment, and then when the environment changes, our brain does not keep up. Even when it’s no longer adaptive, we keep responding with the habitual patterns that helped us survive the past.

Part of how the brain keeps us reacting with the same behavior is by projecting the past onto the present. This confusion becomes so entrenched that it appears stable and we think we actually are seeing reality, instead of seeing reality through the lens of a memory.

I want to lead you through my fear of being seen, the defenses that keep that fear in place, and a recent moment where I could experience in real-time my mind rewiring itself away from traumatized distortion and back to reality.

This is what it looks like to rewire your brain.

(Note: These are excerpts and edited a bit for clarity, not a verbatim transcript.)

I was having a conversation yesterday with a friend who I am in an informal attachment and CPTSD healing group with. We were chatting about the differences between Anxious-Preoccupied and Fearful Avoidant and I was sharing about my experience as an FA and how hard it was to be vulnerable:

While I’m sharing, I’m tracking my body. I’m feeling hot, starting to sweat, and crying a little. But I want to stay with it, because this is exactly what I need to heal: my terror of being vulnerable with other people. And this is exactly where I can do it: within the safety of a friendship that I trust with someone who has demonstrated they not only can understand me, but also care about me. And it’s also at a level of intimacy I can handle: on text, rather than face to face.

She responded that it was something she had noticed and a celebration:

Just reading this was hard because it is an indicator I had been seen, but it is also undoing the fear, which is If I am seen, I will be hurt.

I wrote more about what it feels like:

We went back and forth for awhile and I can see just looking over the transcript how resistant I am to receiving care and concern. It feels like I have to constantly monitor how I am perceived so it doesn’t dip into the territory of someone feeling sorry for me or turning me into “the broken one”. I was managing to ride the wave between my desire for connection and my fear of being mocked when she wrote:

My mind immediately said, “She’s making fun of you. She’s being patronizing. Deflect. Defend. Say you go in and out of being social because you’re an ENFP, not because of trauma. Don’t let her think this about you.”

And then another part of my mind was able to say, “That explanation just cannot be true, it makes no sense. I am having the feeling of something being true that is not true.”

In that moment, I was able to choose reality over my projection.

I was able to see the filter my traumatized mind had put on my reality, and make a choice to disbelieve it. And in that moment, what used to feel like obvious reality became an obvious illusion.

That, I believe, is the moment healing is happening on the brain level. The neural network of “perceive attack and find a way to defend or protect” is neutralized when you realize there has been no attack in the first place. It never happened. It was a projection of a mind that had to become so good at scanning the world for potential attacks that it now reads them into situations where they don’t exist.

There are a lot of components to healing that went into this moment:

• acknowledging and grieving a childhood where I never felt safe to be vulnerable
• learning what a healthy childhood was supposed to be like
• developing the ability to be mindful about what my mind is doing while it is happening
• developing a habit of self-validation which relieved my emotional intensity
• becoming aware of my body’s signals and tracking them so I could stay within a range I can tolerate and not go into a dysregulated panic state
• processing acute trauma triggers when they arise

So this moment I’m describing isn’t the only moment. It’s just such a very cool moment to watch in real-time. And it’s a moment that represents an integration of everything that has been worked on up until that point.

Healing moments ripple through your brain and re-organize your reality.

I learned to be smart and helpful to survive. I always have something to say that hides my vulnerability and presents a strong image. But as long as I can remember, my core organizing principle has been fear. The process of healing reorganizes one’s sense of internal and external reality to be based in love and safety rather than fear and defense. So this small moment of recognizing present-moment safety when my body was suggesting otherwise is a step toward shifting the ground I walk on.

This morning when I woke up, I had an explosion of ideas about how I could expand this blog and my efforts to educate people about how they can heal their own trauma. I felt a new embodied sense of of course my ideas have value that I’d never felt before.

How is this related? Because up until now, my helping others has always been in some way a strategy around concealing my fear. It was never just about helping, it was also about hiding. And, well, it’s hard to truly show up and teach if you are actually also trying to hide! So for this and other reasons, all of my efforts at teaching have been undertaken with a kind of ambivalence. I can feel as I heal my underlying trauma patterns that this ambivalence is unravelling. This is part of the non-linear nature of healing trauma: you don’t know what other parts of your life will change when you start.

So this is an encouragement: keep going. You don’t know when these moments will occur, but every step you take of learning about trauma, listening to yourself, loving yourself, validating yourself, and asking for help lays the groundwork for them.

The wonderful thing about healing is you don’t actually need to know how to get there.

All you need to do is commit to walking in the direction of healing. In every moment, you can feel the fear and you can feel there is something calling you toward the liberation from that fear. There is always the option to do what you’ve always done, and the option to try something that feels new and uncertain but also like an opening to a better place. The healing journey is just the continual choosing of that liberating direction, whatever it is in the present moment, over and over and over again.

Sometimes people ask me if they really can heal. The reason I am 100% confident in healing is that healing is based on the truth and the truth is always true. So you are always choosing between an emotionally compelling illusion and the truth. That illusion will start to crumble over time as you work with it. The truth won’t.

• It will always be true that there are people who are safe, even if the ones you grew up with were not.
• It will always be true that you are lovable, even if you don’t feel that way.
• It will always be true that it wasn’t your fault, even if you can’t believe that yet.

These truths will never go anywhere, so they can be relied upon. That is why healing is always possible: because there is always a truth we can use to navigate. Sometimes it is hard to see, and hard to find, and hard to follow, but we can always rest in the knowledge that it is there waiting for us, and it’s not going anywhere.

There have been so many nights I’ve laid awake at night and told myself, “I don’t know how to get to where I want to go, but I know it is there and I know I am headed in the right direction, and I know I am closer than I was before, so therefore I know I will get there someday.”

When it comes to childhood trauma, healing is a journey that you are taking to a place you have never been. That requires tremendous faith, but it’s not an outrageous thing to have faith in. You’re not asking for anything but to inhabit the same reality that people with healthy childhoods get to live in.

It can seem far away, but at the same time, it’s all around you. I do not mean to make it sound easy; it’s not. But it is completely possible, and all it requires is continual effort to choose truth over illusion, reality over fantasy, love over fear, growth over familiarity, and the present over the past.

A healthy mind can buy something like this, read or use it for awhile (or not at all), and gradually realize it’s not their thing, and let it go.

In a mind with unhealed trauma, aspirational objects can become a trap.

Often our purchase decisions are not because we think we might enjoy a new hobby so much as become a new person. If we are still driven by salvation fantasies, a new book or hobby can become a dream of an entirely new identity, a clean and pure identity, that rids us of our shameful, current identity.

Then, when we lose interest, often because we never were truly interested in it  beyond the fantasy, or just because we grow and change like all people do, the object can become proof of our failure.

We invest the object with a projection of our inner critic. We assign it a negative meaning, and then every time we see the object, the same meaning occurs to us. We rehearse the meaning until it feels real and external.

We keep the object around because it’s familiar, comfortable, and because we don’t want to admit defeat. We want to prove it wrong. I’m not a failure. I can still read that book. I’ll make something in that crockpot someday. 

But then another voice says we’re a failure for having all this clutter, and we should just Marie-Kondo the lot of it. We can stay stuck in this kind of low-level inner battle for a long time.

It’s a trap:

• If I read the book, I’m forcing myself to read something I’m not all that interested in.
• If I don’t read the book, it’s sitting there taunting me and proving I’m a failure at de-cluttering.
• If I get rid of the book, I failed at the original aspiration. And, I wasted money on a book I didn’t read.

An aspirational identity is a setup for a failure identity.

I came to this realization today as I was taking some books to my local Little Free Library.

The books were:

• An Introduction to NLP (about neuro-linguistic programming)
• The Heroine’s Journey (about feminist Jungian psychology)
• The Renaissance Soul (about having multiple interests and/or jobs)
• Be Heard Now (about transforming your relationship to public speaking)

Since I had a few blocks to walk, I went through each book and asked myself:

What meaning does this book hold for me?

My inner critic started right in on the first one. I was not just a person with a book I didn’t read, I’m now a failed reader-of-books and a failed NLP student. All of the aspirational qualities this book had promised me–being able to understand myself perfectly, being an “outstanding communicator” and able to “influence people”, etc–are now in the toilet! I’ll never be maximally awesome now!

At first I tried to negotiate with the inner critic. The font is really small in this book, and besides, I’ve found other places I’d rather learn NLP, if I ever decide I’m really interested in it again. (It’s always been on the “mildly interesting” pile in my mind).

But I quickly realized that this approach is too limited. Because when I got to the next book, there was a new failed identity. This book told me I was a failed reader-of-books-college-student. (That’s how long I’ve had this particular book!). The meaning was tied directly to my time at college, and all my struggles with my inner critic from that time period.

But interestingly, the meaning of the third book was entirely different. I loved The Renaissance Soul, I read the whole thing, I often recommend it, and I felt joy at the thought of someone else finding it and getting benefit from it. My only twinge of regret with letting it go was in the positive identity I had associated with this book.

Oh wow, I thought. This really is all in my head, isn’t it?

All these books are just a bunch of bound paper with ink on them. It’s not the objects themselves I’m attached to. It’s the meaning I’ve given them.

So, as I contemplated these books and our approaching parting-of-ways, I consciously withdrew the meanings I’d given each of them.

This is just a book. I hope someone gets use out of it.

And then I reminded myself that the inner critic is a symptom of trauma, and the trauma-mind just wants to keep everything the same so it feels safe. It’s comfortable with the same meaning, the same identities, the same clutter, the same misery, the same inner conflict, year after year, because it knows it can survive that.

The trauma-mind is not threatened by unhappiness; it’s threatened by change.

The logic of a traumatized subconscious is simple: whatever hasn’t killed it, it can survive, which is always preferable to the unknown, which might kill it.

Which is why all change should be approached gently, including de-cluttering. Releasing 3-4 books at a time is a do-able pace for me, until I work my way through this particular pattern.

Going slow is OK. You can’t heal what you don’t acknowledge, and I am just not capable of acknowledging all the meaning I’ve invested in 20 years of unread books all in one go. It’s too much.

So, if you are in the process of decluttering, take the time you need to sort through the things you want to let go of, whatever they are. Acknowledge the dream, the aspiration, and any pain you were seeking to be rescued from. Name the inner critic for what it is: a voice of fear that just needs to know it is safe. Be kind to yourself. You are already OK. Life is hard, and you haven’t failed.

If you want to go deeper untangling your relationship with an object, here are some journal prompts to try:

• What does this object mean to me?
• What did I hope to become or accomplish with this object?
• Why is that important to me?
• What does it mean if I let this object go?
• Is there a different meaning I could give to letting it go?
• Is there any message about this object my inner critic keeps repeating?
• What does this message sound like from my past?
• What am I telling myself would change if I let go of this object?
• Am I afraid of this change? How can I make it feel safer, more predictable?

Decluttering can also become an aspirational fantasy.

The way decluttering is often approached in popular media is just giving your inner critic a mountain of fodder to use to demand perfection and attack you for not living up to it.

Even words like “mindfulness” have been turned into a standard of how to live.

Mindfulness, for the record, just means noticing what you are doing or thinking as you are doing and thinking it. It doesn’t mean your house is perfectly clean and you wear hemp pajamas.

You don’t have to approach it like this. It’s your stuff, you can approach it however you want.

I’m learning to notice patterns in the state of mind I have around clutter:

• Crunchy, contracted, “I should be better!”, self-critical, like a scared child
• Grumpy, “who cares”, rebellious, like a misunderstood teenager
• Gentle, kind, understanding, like a compassionate grown-up

Untangling the state of mind I am in and the subtle triggers I have around clutter helps me return to my adult mind, which is the best place to process feelings, meanings, and make decisions. I’m still working through it, but today felt like a breakthrough and I hope this helps you on your journey. 🙂

But it holds you back from healing, and in this post I’ll explain why and what to do about it.

These are also sometimes called redemption fantasies or salvation fantasies or rescue fantasies–they are all versions of the same idea. It’s also closely related to the feeling of limerence, which is that “crush” feeling where you are having more of a relationship with an obsessive story in your head about a person than the actual person. They are all ways to meet our needs with fantasy at the expense of reality.

Wounds are formed from an experience where we needed rescue and didn’t get it–so we still want it.

By definition, wounds and trauma happen because we are overwhelmed. It is the experience of overwhelm that is actually what gets stuck in our memory and in our nervous system.

If we weren’t overwhelmed, the memory wouldn’t actually get stuck and still feel “alive” today. A wound and the subsequent fragmentation of consciousness happens because in that moment you needed help and it wasn’t available. You were alone, trying to cope with something that you couldn’t cope with.

On top of that, with CPTSD (Complex PTSD), the trauma was ongoing, so over and over we experienced ourselves without the resources to handle our life and cope with our pain.

These wounded parts of us are always going to have a belief that I can’t handle this by myself. That sets up the wounded part to be constantly looking for that rescue in external sources.

Wanting rescue can be overt or subtle.

To be clear, by rescue, I don’t just mean “help”, which we all need. I mean a form of help that quickly and permanently resolves a problem without you needing to work, change, grow, or empower yourself in the process. I mean salvation.

Healing fantasies can look like:

• fantasies of being healed through intimacy with a romantic partner who will finally really see you and love you for who you are
• expecting every new personal growth framework, system, or teacher to be “the one” that answers everything and makes everything make sense, so you dive in and make it your new identity and then eventually become disillusioned until you move onto the next one
• wanting to go on a spiritual quest to a foreign land where you’ll finally discover the meaning of life
• wanting to live in an ashram or a commune of some kind where you imagine everyone is warm and loving and you’ll finally feel like you belong
• acting out and wanting others to be able to see through your anger or upsets to the “real you” underneath–wanting the other person to “be the bigger person” or the adult when you get triggered, while you play a victim or child role
• fantasies of escaping to a different town where nobody knows you and you can be a whole new person
• fantasizing about joining the army or some other very strict or all-consuming organization, where your actions are rigidly controlled and you no longer have to be responsible for yourself
• feeling like you need some kind of external validation or stamp of legitimacy before you can begin to do the thing you want to do or be the person you want to be
• fantasies of losing weight or some other major change and then all your problems are fixed
• fantasies that involve something making you essentially into a different person, with a different personality, who is acceptable and wanted and can belong
• fantasies of winning the lottery or finding the “big idea” or “big win” that solves all your financial problems, and all your other problems, all at once
• fantasies of dying, of the pain finally being over
• wanting your partner to read your mind so you don’t have to be vulnerable and state your needs out loud
• wanting something to change but not wanting to be responsible for creating that change–continually talking about it or complaining about it or being impatient, but not putting in the work and rejecting any suggestions or help around it
• wanting the meaning of your life to come from anywhere other than you identifying what is meaningful to you and creating a life around it yourself
• longing or demanding to be loved in a very specific way and feeling like you can’t possibly feel loved (or valued, or wanted, etc) if that doesn’t happen

Note: there’s nothing wrong with wanting a relationship or wanting to move to a new town. This is about how we relate to these things, and if we are viewing them realistically or if we think they will magically save or redeem us.

These healing fantasies can become very tender, meaningful parts of our identity.

Fantasy can be a powerful form of hope, and we needed hope.

So if you recognize yourself in any of these descriptions, please don’t be hard on yourself. You would only have developed a healing fantasy because you were really hurt when you were really helpless.

You may also have a lot of resistance to giving up the fantasy, and that’s understandable too. If the only way you can imagine being healed is through this fantasy, the idea of giving it up can feel like being told that you will never be healed. So if that is where you are at with it, even reading this article may be painful or evoke a denial response of, “Yes, that sounds like me, but with me, it’s different!”.

Even if you know on some level that this healing fantasy might not completely make sense, trying to force growth on yourself is counter-productive because it is a form of self-violence. You’ve already had enough harshness in your life, and more harshness won’t help you heal.

Instead, I suggest you honor the fantasy as something that has helped you. Sometimes fantasy is the only thing that gets us through a lonely or terrifying childhood.

And it isn’t all just coping. Fantasies can also motivate us to seek healing and growth. A lot of the personal growth work in my life was at least partly motivated by trying to make myself into someone acceptable to a romantic partner, because in my healing fantasy, that was the only context where a deeper healing could occur. And this makes sense, because a lot of my deeper wounding is related to attachment, so it makes sense that my healing fantasy would revolve around a deep attachment. Your fantasies will likely revolve around your deepest wounds and neglected needs.

So if this is you, the way I would start to approach it is to recognize that this healing fantasy belongs to a child part of you, not all of you. There is a way you can hold that child and validate that of course that is what makes sense to them. Of course it does. And it’s not wrong to have a fantasy like this. It’s actually completely natural, normal, and understandable. Hold that child tight, and read this article with your adult mind, not from that child part.

Next, start looking for other sources of hope. Keep reminding yourself that healing and growth is a slow and steady progress, millions have taken this journey before you, and are taking it alongside you, even if you don’t know any of them. (And I encourage you to find some! There are a lot of forums and groups out there).

You will heal, even if you can’t imagine being fully healed yet (I couldn’t, for a long long time–it’s normal). You will figure out how to heal, even if you don’t know how right now. There is help available, even if you don’t know how to ask for it yet. You will get there.

And then, over time, you can begin to frame the fantasy as a security blanket for that child part. Your adult self can know that this is not how healing or growth happens, but it’s OK for the child part to keep its dream if it needs to.

You can even make an agreement with it: I will not rip this fantasy away from you. I will not shame you for it. I am only investigating the possibility of an alternative route to healing that involves self-growth and self-empowerment rather than waiting for rescue. If it never seems viable to you, I will respect that. 

(Note: The language about “parts” is from IFS, Internal Family Systems, which I have found really helpful and will write more about soon.)

The resolution of helpless longing isn’t being rescued, it is shifting into a state of empowerment.

The fact that every wound involves a frozen memory of helplessness implies that healing that wound must involve the opposite–shifting into a state of no longer feeling helpless. It means regaining your agency, choice, sense of competency, power, and capability.

That empowerment is the opposite of being rescued. The desire for rescue is a symptom of the wound. It can’t be the actual answer to that wound, because it is a strategy that comes from a wounded, disempowered part of us.

So it is a huge step forward in healing when it dawns on us that we can actually help ourselves. We can take responsibility for ourselves. We can grow up and become a functional, healthy adult. It may take time, it may be painful, we may falter sometimes, but we can do it.

And often that realization is something that we must come back to over and over and over, especially with CPTSD. We go in and out of the state of consciousness where we know we can do this.

And that’s OK. Healing takes as long as healing takes.

I say all this from personal experience.

My mind, for whatever reason (maybe an ENFP thing), is very prone to fantasy and magical thinking as a coping mechanism.

For most of my life, my primary means of motivating myself was to project myself into a better future in my mind, and use the feelings of that dream as leverage to propel myself forward. I would throw a grappling hook into that fantasy and pull myself toward it like I was climbing a mountain. It felt, in a sense, heroic–like I was on a personal quest, scaling Mt. Everest.

But eventually, after enough of these fantasies crumbled to dust or disillusionment, I realized I was actually preventing myself from healing by living this way. Because I had focused so hard on just getting to the future, I hadn’t paid any attention to creating a better present. While I had developed resilience in the process of climbing so many mountains, I had neglected quite a lot of my own healing work (and self-care) because I thought the fantasy would take care of it for me. I always thought I was headed somewhere amazing, when I was really just stuck in a repetitive cycle.

And that’s when I finally realized that all futures are created out of the present. Anything you are doing right now is practice for how your future will look. This isn’t a metaphor–it’s literally how your brain works. Every action you take, every thought you think, you are strengthening a neural pathway and making it more likely that you will take that action or think that thought in the future. Therefore, the only time and place that change happens is right here and right now.

Without the borrowed energy of a fantasy to animate me, I had to face my utter exhaustion. I didn’t know how to make my present-day life nourishing and enjoyable. And I had a backlog of healing that I had put off until the magical future arrived. I had to rebuild my motivational fuel from scratch, and I’m still doing that work.

But in finally giving up the idea that I would be happy and healed by-and-by when such-and-such happened, I was able to make a much deeper commitment to my own healing. And because of that, I have made more progress in the last 6 months than in the last 6 years.

Our rescue fantasies are as deep as the wounds that made them.

Looking back, it would be easy to criticize myself for having so many fantasies and holding onto them so tightly for so long.

But self-criticism is self-violence. And violence is the opposite of healing.

The younger we were, the deeper the need for rescue has been seared into our consciousness. Very early childhood wounds can leave us feeling profoundly helpless. Our rescue fantasies can become elaborate, and entwined with our sense of self. It can be hard to imagine ever feeling empowered around certain topics, or ever having a different relationship to your desired outcome than desperate longing or hopelessness.

This was my relationship with books about codependency for a long time: “Don’t try to talk me out of the only thing I’m currently living for”. I would read them, I would recognize that they were describing me, I would understand cognitively that other people who felt like I felt and acted like I acted had healed and that healing actually enabled them to go on to have healthier relationships, and I would still in my heart-of-hearts feel, “This isn’t me. I’m different. My dream of perfect love is real. It has to be real or there’s no point in even existing.”

That is how little I could conceive of having a different relationship with love. That is how deeply I had organized my experience around this fantasy. Because that is how profoundly lonely and unseen I was as a child.

And in that context, a fantasy makes absolute sense. A fantasy lets us preserve hope when we are consumed with hopelessness. It lets us imagine something so perfect, so good, so pure, that it can save us even in our state of self-loathing. It lets us maintain a belief in our healing when we can’t see any realistic path to get there yet. It lets us isolate our deepest desires in a safe place that is separate from the daily hellscape of our mind’s toxic shame.

So you don’t need to heal fantasy behavior by trying to “debunk” the fantasy. Life will usually do that for you anyway, but if you want to actively heal your propensity to fantasize, work on the helplessness that fuels it. (It can actually become counter-productive to try to change it directly. Just like trying to talk someone out of a conspiracy theory, it just creates a deeper entrenchment.)

Healing fantasies can create a double-bind: we have to stay broken so they can come true.

Self-empowerment can feel like giving up your only hope. This creates a double-bind: if I heal through empowerment, I have to give up the option to heal through rescue. So we can actually keep ourselves from empowerment and real healing because we so want the original healing fantasy to come true.

This happens when the helplessness is at such a deep level that we can’t imagine feeling any differently. Empowerment is only a concept, an idea. It doesn’t feel real. This is especially an issue with attachment wounds and CPTSD because they happen at an age when we are forming our sense of self, and of reality.

The profound feeling of helplessness that fuels rescue fantasies is actually just a measurement of how under-resourced you were at that time that you were wounded. Intense longing only signifies that children are powerless to prevent wounding, especially young ones. It doesn’t actually signify anything about you as an adult. It’s a feeling that feels real, but it’s actually just a ghost of a past event.

It can be hard to actually wrap your mind around this, because beliefs about reality shape how we experience reality. And the longer you have been living in a belief, the more real it seems. It’s not easy or simple to just change what you believe about reality, even if you come to recognize that what you believe doesn’t make sense.

So if you can’t imagine a different path forward, don’t try to force yourself to believe in it.

Instead, just find small ways you can start walking that path.

Read books. Read forums. Go to groups. Watch YouTube videos. Make doing the work part of your daily life. You will trust the slow-and-steady path more, and trust yourself more, as you do it. Over time, the helplessness will recede, and your fantasies will too.

Rescue fantasies can also arise to compensate for any needs we just don’t know how to meet.

I was bullied for years at school. I also felt I didn’t fit into my family and was the “odd one out” in several major ways. This profoundly affected how I felt about friendships and connection. They didn’t feel safe and I didn’t feel competent at creating them.

So this meant I channeled even more pressure into romantic relationships to meet needs for connection and family. I could imagine randomly meeting the magical-person-of-my-dreams a lot easier than imagining developing a solid friend group.

So in this instance, instead of imagining my wounds around friendship being healed by the fantasy, the fantasy would make it unnecessary to even have friends. I would also sometimes imagine that the relationship would make me feel so secure and happy that I would make friends easily, or we would make friends together.

This is how a fantasy grows to be all-encompassing and keeps us from growing in many different ways. Every trauma that is unhealed and skill that is undeveloped gets woven into this giant basket that we desperately want to find some way to fill all at once, so the pain will stop.

Learning to meet these various needs directly can help the fantasy recede. For example, when I developed more clarity and confidence around friendships, it felt less like my life would be unbearably empty without a partner.

Here are some examples of needs that can get wrapped up into a fantasy, and why it doesn’t work:

• Self-acceptance: “If only X happens, I’ll feel like I’m the right kind of person”. This is just not how self-acceptance works. If you have to do something or change somehow to get it, it’s not acceptance.
• Self-worth: “If X happens, I’ll be a worthy person.” This is a form of self-rejection and self-judgement. You can learn to value yourself right now, just as you are.
• Meaning: “If X happened, everything in my life would make sense, all the pain would be worth it”. Healing really does make things make sense, but the fantasy isn’t healing, it’s actually preventing healing.
• Purpose: “I’m desperate for X to happen, so that must be my purpose”. Purpose comes from the things you already find meaningful, it’s already inside you. It’s not something you have to find in the world. If you are looking outside yourself for it, you are likely rejecting yourself in some way, so you are blocking your natural sense of purpose from arising.
• Rest: “If I just accomplish X, then I can relax.” Again, your future is going to be made up of whatever you are practicing in the present. That’s how our brain works, it wires in our habits. So the best way to get rest is to just practice getting rest.

Life without the fantasy can feel overwhelming.

When you’ve put so much into a fantasy, the idea of letting go of it seems like replacing something beautiful and true with a pile of broken dreams.

Healing fantasies serve so many purposes, which is why it’s hard to let go of them. One of the purposes is that they let you suppress your pain until a future where it is erased, rather than you having to feel it and process it.

So, letting go of the fantasy will bring up all the grief of the wounds that you’ve been putting off feeling, along with the pain of chronically unmet needs that the fantasy was compensating for.

It’s a lot. That’s why I’m advocating a gentle approach, where you gradually learn to meet your unmet needs and develop a sense of empowerment over time so you no longer need the fantasy.

But sometimes life doesn’t let you have that option. Sometimes when you are hanging onto something really tight, the Universe has a way of ripping it away from you. In the end, you may look back and realize that it was for the best, but you only have that perspective after you have healed. In the short term, it feels like the Universe is cruel–you’ve already been through so much, and you can’t even have this one thing you always wanted.

All I can say, if you are in this position, is there is life on the other side of this pattern. It is an adaptive response to a painful life, which means it is a learned behavior. And while the fantasy, the strategy, is flawed, the needs you have are absolutely good and you deserve to have them met. And you will learn to meet them. It will just be in a slow, step-by-step, learning-and-growing kind of way, not all at once. You are not alone–millions have walked this path before you, and they put together a life that works for them. You will too.

As painful as dealing with reality can be, it has one thing to commend it–once you deal with it, it is dealt with. Unlike fantasy, which is a coping mechanism that ensures the pain will never heal, real healing works. It can be long, hard, and painful, but it actually works. Which means you can have a future where you feel good every day and your life works. It’s just going to take some time, effort, and courage to face the pain of your past and truly let it go.

Ultimately, fantasies make you feel safe at the expense of your growth. When you do this work, the gift you will gain is getting your true Self back: brave, powerful, awake, and alive.

This doesn’t, on the surface, make sense. We naturally go towards feeling good, and self-love definitely sounds like it would feel better than self-hatred. Right?

And yet, when we feel self-hatred, we often hang onto it. We keep practicing negative self-talk. We keep rejecting ourselves. Even when we have had moments of feeling loved, they fall away, and we return to feeling not good enough. It can feel almost wrong to do anything else. Our mind seems to be actively trying to keep a negative self-relationship in place.

Why? The answer lies in how self-loathing comes about.

Where does self-loathing come from?

When we experience a wound that overwhelms us with pain, our mind has to do something with that pain and what it does is fracture our consciousness. Each fragment gets a piece of the experience, which stops it from all being experienced at once.

The more intense the overwhelm, the more fracturing is created, and the deeper the chasms and polarities between different fragments. The most extreme version is Dissociative Identity Disorder, but all serious emotional wounding creates some version of this to varying degrees.

Our subconscious only cares about survival, and if we are still alive, then it knows that the fracturing worked. It kept us alive, through an experience where we felt we might die.

Because it “worked”, our mind freezes the fracture in place, and sets about maintaining it. This is why defense mechanisms exist. They are defending against healing, connection, love–anything that would begin to repair that fracture, and let those overwhelming feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness come flooding back in.

Our subconscious mind actively resists healing the fractures, because the fracture represents survival. We know how to handle this, it says. But if we un-fracture, if we become whole, that unprocessed experience is waiting for us. Why would we be able to handle it now if we couldn’t handle it before? Better not take that chance.

Self-loathing (or other forms of self-rejection) is the actual mechanism by which we keep the fracture in place. By criticizing, banishing, suppressing, and judging parts of ourselves, we keep those fragments from being re-integrated into our consciousness.

And the deeper the wound, the deeper the fracture, and the more intense the self-loathing.

We maintain self-loathing as a matter of survival.

Essentially, our mind’s logic is, yes, this hurts, but it’s better than dying.

The inner violence we do to ourselves mimics the violence that was done to us. It has to. Our subconscious doesn’t really have any other options. It’s not a creative part of our mind, it’s a survival part of our mind. It does what it knows, and whatever way we found to cope with it at that exact moment of overwhelm, it’s going to keep doing, because it kept us alive.

This explains why we can’t heal from someone else loving us. It’s not enough to just be loved, because as long as we have that habit of inner violence, it keeps the fracturing in place. We will feel good for a minute, but then the inner violence will take over, and erase whatever goodness we felt.

We can end up addicted to things that give us temporary relief from the negative feelings, but they cannot actually heal the problem, because they never undo the fracturing or the self-violence that keeps it in place.

The sad implication of this is that the worse we were hurt, the more our mind is going to come up with self-hatred as a strategy, and thus the more pain we will be in, and the more we will be drawn to coping mechanisms just to manage the pain.

So, what is the actual solution? How do you heal self-loathing?

Healing is always a non-linear process. It’s a stitching-back-together of all  these pieces of ourselves, and it is intimately tied up in our own personal story and the meaning we have made of everything that happened to us. So there is no one-size-fits-all approach to healing.

But there are certain principles we can apply, over and over, to move us in the direction of healing:

1. Find safety. Physical safety, emotional safety, boundaries, time, space, your environment, who you are around – track what helps you feels safe both externally and internally and get yourself more of it.
2. End self-violence. This includes self-criticism, self-condemnation (shame), self-blame (guilt), self-neglect, and any form of harshness, rejection, or judgement toward self.
3. Practice self-love. This includes self-acceptance, self-nurturing, self-validation, self-care, self-empathy, self-compassion, and self-forgiveness. Any possible way you would love someone else, or want someone to love you, you can and need to give this to yourself. Love is not a feeling, it’s an action. Actively love yourself.
4. Allow whatever arises in your conscious awareness, in an attitude of acceptance. This allows the integration process to occur. De-fragmentation is a natural process that our mind wants to do, if there is nothing actively blocking it. (That’s why when we finally feel safe, our issues often surface spontaneously.)

Healing takes courage and persistence, but it is entirely do-able.

Deciding to love yourself takes courage. It is actually scary to your mind to give up any strategy that it has used to survive. It can feel impossible or wrong or just completely out of reach to get to a place of genuine self-love and self-acceptance. But you can get there, trust me! This is a journey I have been on for a long time, and every step forward is worth taking.

Working with mantras can help you soothe yourself about the process of healing. For example:

• It’s safe to heal.
• It’s OK to feel this.
• It makes sense that I’m scared, and it’s OK.
• I can go as slow as I need to.
• There is nothing wrong with loving myself.
• I don’t have to figure it all out today, I just have to keep going in the right direction.
• Every step in the direction of healing and self-love is progress.

Find the ones that help soothe your own system, and then repeat them to yourself as much as you need to.

Be gentle with yourself. This is deep, tender work.

Unfortunately, what helped me cope as a child also set me up to be an emotionally demanding partner (and to be attracted to people who were, in various ways, emotionally unavailable and completely unequipped to meet those demands).

It has taken me a long time to let go of that fantasy, and accept that it’s really up to me to heal these missing pieces of my childhood. Nobody is going to rescue me from my feelings. Nobody is going to see through my anger and criticalness to my hurt and scared Inner Child. Other people just want me to deal with things like a grown-up, the same I want them to deal with things.

OK, but how do you do that?

One day I decided to just Google, “How to meet your own emotional needs”. I mean, why not?

I found this page, which gives the prescription I’ve heard many times before, talk to your inner child and give it the parenting it didn’t get as a child.

Find out what your mind needs mentally and emotionally. Does it need praise, admiration, reassurance, validation, to feel special, appreciated, valued, understood, wanted, seen, heard, safe, loved? Ask it and then meet those needs by talking to it as you would a child.

I have done this kind of thing before, but something more specific clicked yesterday. I often have dialogues with various parts of myself in my journal, but I have mostly focused on using empathy to try to “figure myself out”–to understand what was going on when I was avoiding something, which I do a lot. I hadn’t actually specifically tried to be reassuring or nurturing to myself.

Now, here is the bugaboo that always comes up: can talking to yourself really feel as good as someone else meeting those needs for you? Is self-validation going to feel real or is it going to feel like you are just trying to make yourself feel better? I always assumed it would be more like the latter, and kind of pointless.

And, it makes sense that I would feel that way. After all, the only reason I have all these emotional issues is that I didn’t get this kind of caretaking as a child. So of course my brain is predisposed to look for it outside myself, because that’s where it ought to have come from.

But that doesn’t actually mean self-validating can’t work. And I figured I had nothing to lose.

So I just started writing down everything that I always wanted to hear. Like…

Your feelings make sense and are normal.

• It makes sense why you would feel X about Y, anyone would feel that way.
• It’s not wrong to want X.
• It’s OK to want X, most people do.
• It totally makes sense why you would avoid X because Y happened.
• It makes sense to be scared and unsure in that situation.
• It’s ok and normal to not feel safe when things don’t make sense.
• It makes sense that you’re sad and hurt that X didn’t happen.
• It’s not wrong that you believed X when that’s what seemed to be true at the time.
• Anyone would feel hurt in that situation.
• It makes sense that you are confused by their behavior.
• Of course you wonder what you could have done different, that’s normal. It’s natural to look back and feel unsure.
• It’s normal to feel scared and overwhelmed when X happens.

Your sense of injustice makes sense.

• You’re a good person.
• You didn’t deserve X bad thing happening to you.
• You deserve all the good things.
• It’s not fair that X happened.
• You were doing the right thing.
• You were doing the best you knew how to do, and it sucks that you weren’t seen for that.
• You did the right thing even if it didn’t turn out how you hoped.
• You couldn’t have prevented this and it wasn’t your fault.
• It wasn’t fair for them to have those expectations of you.
• That wasn’t your job to do.
• It makes sense that you would want them to acknowledge their behavior and how it affected you.
• Of course you want people to be honest with you, everyone wants that.
• It makes sense that you would keep trying to fix it and make it right.

I’m sorry.

• I’m sorry that happened to you.
• It sucks that it turned out that way.
• I wish you could have had everything you wanted.

I see you.

• I get it.
• You just wanted X, Y, and Z and it’s OK to want that.
• I know how much X mattered to you.

It’s OK to make mistakes.

• You don’t have to judge yourself for making mistakes.
• Mistakes are how we learn.
• You had never been in that situation before, and you didn’t know what to expect.
• Things turned out so different than you imagined, you had no way to know or prepare for that.
• You have learned a lot and that is valuable.
• You were young when X happened, you didn’t know yet what to look out for.
• You did your best.

I value you.

• There is so much right with you.
• You are loving and kind and generous.
• You try so hard because you care and that’s good.

I made these into generic statements because, you know, privacy, but when I was journalling, I was specific about what I was feeling, why I felt it, what happened, why it mattered to me, etc. I wrote for hours, not just about recent things, but about many things from my past that I never really got validation or acknowledgement from anyone around.

And it worked. That searing pain that I often walk around with in regards to certain situations was alleviated. I had good dreams and woke up happy. I feel settled and calm and content today.

But this is a practice, and I’m going to need to do it over and over and over until it becomes second nature. This is the application of “love yourself”. Love is an activity, not just a feeling.

Over time, I think this will create a kind of “Inner Validator” which sounds a lot better than an Inner Critic! Your Inner Critic was created through constant repetition of a critical variety, so an Inner Validator should be possible to create the same way. You are just training your brain into a better automatic response to painful feelings.

So what about the “Is it as good from yourself as from someone else” question?

Actually I think it might be better from myself.

Don’t get me wrong, there are certain acknowledgements I would love to hear from other people, and certainly I would like certain people in my life to behave in ways that make a lot more sense and feel better than they currently do. But what I can offer myself that nobody else can is that I know all about myself already.

I know exactly what would feel good to hear in a way that nobody else could possibly know. I understand my entire life history. I was there for all of it. I know how it all affected me. I also know everything I was hoping for and trying to accomplish in every situation. So I can get right to the heart of everything I’m feeling and needing. There is no way anyone is ever going to know me that well.

Someone else would have to spend a lifetime studying me to be able to be that precise. And, OK, maybe that is what I wanted in a partner, but that’s not real. I’m the only person who would know how all the events of my life fit together and make up my internal emotional landscape.

This echoes the work of Sarah Peyton, who discusses the “loss of accompaniment”:

Understanding trauma means understanding that it’s not the event itself that creates trauma. It is how alone we were in it.

I was always an emotional child, and nobody in my family seems to understand emotions at all. The overwhelming message I got was, “Your emotions are wrong and too much and you shouldn’t have them.”

I didn’t learn how to be warm to myself because nobody was really warm to me. And on top of that, every emotion I had, I was made to feel was crazy and wrong and irrational and ought to just go away. It was a very invalidating environment, so it makes sense that a lot of what I need is just pure validation: You make sense, your feelings make sense, they are normal.

Complex trauma, a.k.a. C-PTSD, develops when your childhood was full of constant major or micro traumas. Time after time, confusing and overwhelming emotional situations occurred and nobody helped you understand how you felt about any of it. So you learned to just get by, however you could. But what healthy children learn, through experiencing it over and over, is to feel valid in their own emotions. Thus, self-validation is a form of reparenting.

So yes, giving validation and nurturing to yourself does work. It works really well and I highly recommend it. And on top of it being precise and comprehensive, self-validation is available 24/7!

I can already feel that this is alleviating the constant pressure I feel to try to get my partner to give me validation and listening, which fuels resentment when they aren’t able to. Which should make me less demanding and just all around more pleasant to be around!

Update from 2024 (three years later):

Honestly, I think that learning how to meet my own emotional needs through self-validation has been the single best standalone intervention I’ve done in terms of my mental health. It resolved a lifetime of emotional dysregulation almost overnight, that apparently had been there since I was a child simply because my Dad was so incredibly emotionally invalidating. (He couldn’t handle my strong emotions so he would try to logically talk me out of them—which just made them worse and added shame). Over the years, I learned to invalidate myself in the same way, so the pattern just continued. But doing the above exercise in a very concentrated way really relieved that pressure. Then it was just a matter of reminding myself to do it whenever I felt upset about anything.

After a few weeks of doing it regularly, it became a habitual stance of, “Of course my feelings are valid”, and that has continued. It permanently changed my relationship with myself and my feelings.

Meeting my own needs for validation has also made me almost impervious to other people’s opinions. It’s just a sense of, “It’s fine to be myself, actually”. To not need external validation is incredibly liberating.

You can’t change the past, and the future is theoretical. The literal only moment in which choice occurs is the present.

Which means you owe it to yourself to make that as free of a choice as possible.

Your mind will rehearse the past until you tell it not to.

One way we consistently make ourselves less free is basing our present moment choices on the past.

Our brain has a lot of built-in ways to do this:

• identities
• wounds & traumas
• habits
• inertia & autopilot
• blame & denial

But your mind isn’t in charge. YOU are. You have a choice.

If the past is dragging you down, let it go.

Learn whatever you need to learn from it, and then set it to rest.

I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m 40 and I’m still working on reprogramming shit in my head from when I was a baby.

I’m saying it’s possible. Which means it’s really up to you how much you let it affect you in the present.

There are lots of parts of life you can’t control. Your mind is one of the few things that you can, with time and practice, exercise a huge degree of control over. That is a form of power that, once developed, nobody can take from you.

The hardest part of self-empowerment is giving up blame.

Our mind has a lot of defense mechanisms, like blame (and it’s harder-to-recognize cousin projection), denial, and rationalization.

These all exist for a reason. They are ways that the mind protects itself from being overwhelmed.

And they make you feel better. Sort of.

But if you can find any space in yourself, work to let them go. Because they are keeping you trapped trying to resist something that is already over.

Whatever you lost is gone. Whatever injustice occurred has already happened. You can’t change it.

You cannot fix the past. Ever. It is over, done, and absolutely unfixable. And any energy you spend trying to fix the past is energy you are robbing from your present.

If you are letting your past negatively affect your present, that is at least in part a self-inflicted injury.

Again, I’m not saying it’s easy to re-pattern your subconscious and change your beliefs and thoughts. But it’s possible. Which means you have a choice.

The past may have been someone else’s fault. If you were a child, it definitely was. But the present is still up to you. Nobody can take the present choices you have away from you except yourself. 

You don’t ever have to keep being whatever you used to be.

You can self-generate new beliefs and new feelings and new habits and a new identity.

That is one of the awesome powers of the human mind. Yes, it gets stuck in the past. Yes, it tries to reproduce old traumas. But it also has the power to generate new thoughts and re-shape itself. You always have that power available to you. Use it. Get clear on the future you want, and then make choices every day that will move you closer to it. That is how you change your life. And nobody can do it for you.

That is what empowerment means. It means using the full power you have available to you right now. You have no power over the past. But you do have power over your present.

First I’m going to talk about why it matters to have “solo” treatment options, what trauma is, and then how to process trauma on your own.

But if you don’t want to read all that, here is the summary:

This method requires you to fully experience overwhelmingly painful feelings. We have an instinctive aversion to pain, so it takes a lot of determination to go straight toward it. But my best results have been when I get triggered by something, and I just lay there and feel the searing pain of it for as long as it takes to dissipate. During it, just witness your thoughts, don’t follow them (more on that below), just feel the sensations themselves. It’s awful, but it does end. You have to condition yourself to do this. Or rather, counter your conditioning to avoid pain by doing something to numb or avoid it, which is very strong, especially if you’ve been trying to avoid this exact pain your whole life through coping mechanisms.

I’ve never found something that is more directly effective at removing trauma from my nervous system.

I recommend you do an honest self-assessment on whether you can handle this technique before trying it. If you are not stable generally, I definitely recommend you work on stabilization first.

The problem with the therapy model of treating trauma

I’m not a therapist, but I’ve studied various therapy modalities and taken trainings specifically focused on trauma.  Since these trainings were for therapists, they were understandably biased in favor of therapy as pretty much the way of treating it.

There are several big problems with this.

First, therapy is expensive. A huge number of people can neither afford, nor do they really have the time to do therapy, if they work full time and have kids. For most people, it’s a luxury that’s just not realistic. The individual therapy model just isn’t designed to help the most people with the most trauma.

Second, therapy is offered by people who are overwhelmingly white and middle-class. Therapy training has historically emphasizes the individual psychology of the person, and systemic oppression was pretty much ignored as a cause of psychological distress or trauma. Hopefully this is changing, but there are a huge number of therapists out there that were educated without any kind of anti-racism or anti-colonialist lens. That means they can’t help with that kind of trauma, and they are potentially reproducing it.

Therapy needs to be a very safe space. There is an inherent power differential in therapy, so unintentional micro-aggressions or blind spots have the potential to be much more damaging than they even are normally.

Lastly, some of us, due to attachment issues or just personal preference, don’t feel safe or comfortable with the intimacy of therapy. Sitting there face to face staring at a therapist is stressful by itself.

I spent years in therapy not really getting to root issues, because I just didn’t feel safe with another human being there in the room. And I didn’t even realize it. I’m sure it helped on some level, but I wish I had realized that therapy isn’t the gold standard for everyone and there are many other ways to heal.

How to heal your own trauma

What is trauma?

This is a short review — if you want to understand trauma in more detail, you can Google it, or read the book The Body Keeps the Score or anything by Peter Levine.

When you go through a threatening experience, your body has a flight/flight/freeze response, and produces a whole bunch of neuro-chemical reactions (emotions) to help you mobilize to fight or escape the threat. If your body wasn’t able to fully process or discharge all those chemicals at the time, your mind stores that memory with all the original, unprocessed emotions attached to it. You may not have conscious access to the memory, or the emotions, or both, but it’s there somewhere in your subconscious. If you were a baby, it is going to be stored more as an emotional-body memory, because a very young brain doesn’t process events the same way (which is why we can’t remember them).

This memory is your traumatic experience, frozen in time.

Triggers are the dramatic re-experiencing of trauma moments. But that trauma actually affects us all the time. Our brain never forgets, and it is in a constant low-level state of activation, literally all the time, and more so when we are in environments that remind us of the original scenario. This is why unprocessed trauma leads to all kinds of chronic symptoms, like irritability and anxiety and depression.

But I’m going to focus on triggers, because they are the key to undoing it.

What are triggers?

When we come across something in our environment that our brain interprets as similar to the original threat (and that pattern matching can be very loose), you get triggered, and your body floods you with all those original feelings and sensations. It’s basically saying, Oh god, that threat again! It almost killed us last time! Freak out, freak out! Fight, run away, right now!

In that moment of being triggered, time collapses. Your body is still in that original event. It goes into fight/flight/freeze. So you get angry, you want to leave, you shut down.

These are very painful feelings. We also have an instinctive aversion to pain. So we tend to try to immediately re-suppress those feelings, and stuff them back into the subconscious where they were before you got triggered. So, while one part of your brain is freaking out and getting angry or scared or going numb, another part of your brain is going, Oh no, stop being triggered, stop being triggered, stop being triggered! Calm down! Go do anything you have to, to get this awful feeling to stop! 

So, we usually will take a deep breathe and count to 10, or eat a pint of ice cream, or do whatever we have to do to get ourselves together.

Unfortunately, calming yourself down just leaves the trigger where it is.

It makes sense, right? If you stuff it back down, it’s just going to be there until you run across something that triggers it again.

And this is the key to the whole thing. If you want to discharge trauma, you have to actually FEEL those horribly painful feelings. All of them. All the way through. Doing nothing to stop them, change them, shorten them, avoid them, or suppress them. That is the actual “processing” that needs to happen.

This means going completely against everything in your brain screaming at you to get away from the pain.

It also goes completely against all our social conditioning to calm down, get it together, etc.

It also goes against most of what I was taught in trauma therapy school, which said that you should get in a really resourced state (feeling good, positive, grounded) and then “dip your toe in the water” of your overwhelming feelings, and work on them slowly. It emphasized putting the memory back together (which is often stored in fragments), and constructing a cohesive story of what happened. And, I’m not going to say that doesn’t work. I’m just saying, my way is a lot faster and seems to work just fine.

Mindfulness is key (and it’s easier than it sounds).

Mindfulness is the act of being aware of your experience at the same time you are having it. It is also called meta-cognitive awareness.

It’s the difference between being engrossed in the story, and being aware that you are a person reading a story. It means holding two different perspectives simultaneously.

It’s simpler than it sounds. Just right now, notice that you are a person, sitting in a room, or wherever you are, reading this sentence. Something happens, right? The moment before, you were just reading the article. Now you are aware that you are reading an article, but you’re still reading. That’s all mindfulness is.

It’s the difference between being swept along in a river, and being on a bridge over the river, watching the river go by.

When you process your trauma, you want to be the person on the bridge, while not stopping the flow of the river whatsoever. You want to let all the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and whatever else your brain or body wants to do happen, while maintaining the awareness that you are a person who is consciously having this experience.

And it’s actually not that hard to do, because you are going to have to be pretty consciously aware to keep yourself from doing whatever you normally do to avoid feeling all of the feelings.

Because when you really go straight toward the feelings, they feel like they are going to kill you.

It can genuinely feel like you are going to die (but you won’t).

I am not going to sugar-coat it. This is going to suck. You know when you feel so sick you kinda wish you were dead? It’s that level of unpleasant.

This is your brain’s survival system. We used to be prey animals running around on the savannah trying not to get eaten. Your mind and body will do everything it can to convince you that you are going to die if you don’t do something other than lay there curled up in a ball crying or shaking.

But you just have to stay there until it’s over. Stay present in the searing pain until it dissipates.

It’s also likely going to generate a whole shit-ton of thoughts ranging from how bad you are to how bad everyone else is to how wrong this, that or the other thing was. Thought are especially vital to let flow beneath the bridge. Once you get caught up in a thought, it will generate more feelings, and you can get stuck in a loop. So you have to just watch and let go of any thoughts and any meaning your mind wants to give to whatever situation triggered you.

If I get too caught up into the story, I try to refocus on a thought like, I’m choosing to feel this now so I won’t have to feel it again. And It will end, I just have to let the process happen.

Remember, the feelings you actually need to discharge are the ones stuck in time, the ones that are overwhelming. You can sort out how you feel about whatever present-day thing triggered you later, because most of your feelings are not actually about anything in the present, even if your thoughts make it sound like they are.

If this sounds like a really shitty way to spend an afternoon, it is. But, it doesn’t usually take that long, anywhere from 5-30 minutes, for the feelings to dissipate. And then that trauma will no longer be hanging out in your nervous system.

Some disclaimers.

I’ve been working with my mind for a long time, and I only really started doing this in the last five years or so. I’m not sure how much preparation someone needs to do this effectively. So, I want to give some warnings.

Mindfulness does take some practice, and it really is key to this process.

If you find that you can’t stay mindful during the process — that you just start spinning in your thoughts and then the feelings don’t dissipate — then it’s not going to work to keep doing it. Thoughts generate their own feelings, and those are not the feelings you need to feel.

Mindfulness is the like a key that unlocks neuroplasticity in the brain. That’s a fancy way of saying, mindfulness is what makes the difference between reliving the event, and processing the event. If you are not using mindfulness when you are processing, you run the risk of just wiring that response in deeper.

One way you can practice is to not start with full-on triggers, but rather with memories of some previous time you were triggered. I don’t think this is as effective to discharge the trauma, but it can be an effective way of training yourself to remain mindful when your mind starts to spin.

This is not for everyone: if the thought of it terrifies and overwhelms you, it may not be for you right now.

This is for people who genuinely think they can handle it. They are going into it knowing it will hurt, but that hurt will be temporary.

If you are afraid of becoming lost in your feelings or going insane, then please, please seek help that works for you. That’s not something I personally relate too–I spent many years lost in the (relative) insanity of depression and have always had a lot of emotional dysregulation, and over time, I developed a trust that my brain will stabilize eventually, usually after a really good nap.

I also would not recommend this for people who have DID, bipolar, or other diagnoses where their dysregulation can be life threatening.

This is just general life advice, but not everyone is the same. I fully believe in owning your own healing process. But at the end of the day, I’m just a lady on the internet, and I can’t possibly know what you are dealing with or what is best for you.

I do encourage you to at least experiment with going toward the pain instead of away from it, and working to develop a very strong mindfulness practice.

As with anything, your mileage may vary.

If you feel like what I wrote here would be too dysregulating, I recommend the Crappy Childhood Fairy’s Daily Practice as a way to develop more emotional stability and brain regulation in a gentle way.

What I’ve noticed is that any kind of heightened emotion is likely to be from some kind of distortion. (I’m sure that doesn’t mean that a healthy person has no intense feelings, but I’m not quite a healthy person yet, so I need to pay extra attention.)

One of these heightened states is a kind of “spiritual feeling” of inevitability or “meant to be” that corrupts spiritual teachings.

“Meant to be” can easily become a way to disempower ourselves.

For example, the concept of “surrender” really means “to let go”. It doesn’t mean “to put up with crap that hurts you”. Surrender doesn’t negate the concept of boundaries. The lesson is to accept the circumstances that you can’t change–it doesn’t mean you refuse to change the circumstances that you can change and feel helpless.

I see people do this to themselves constantly by using the phrase, “I guess it was meant to be” when they are really avoiding processing how something impacted them. Something can be in some sense “meant to be” on a spiritual level, but that doesn’t change how it impacts you on a physical, animal level. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience–but that physical experience is (a) in technicolor and (b) the point.

We don’t come here to explain everything away as outside our control. We come here to sort through what is actually in our control and what isn’t. We come here to learn how to maintain a sense of choice and inner sovereignty in a world that is constantly forcing experiences on us that we didn’t ask for, and that are often quite painful.

We come here to learn how to maintain our awareness of our Divine nature while at the same time existing in an ever-changing, painful, overwhelming world, within bodies that are frail and minds that are easily confused. That’s the whole point.

Spirituality is in no way meant to keep you from that experience. It’s meant to help you transcend that experience, not escape it. Transcendence means the realization that you are more than just human. It doesn’t mean that you get out of being human.

Spirituality is a realm where the truth is subtle and the potential for self-delusion is high.

The phrase “spiritual bypassing” refers to the tendency to use spiritual concepts to bypass psychological work. I’ve been familiar with this idea for a long time, but I wasn’t aware of the degree to which this is an unconscious process.

The parts of our mind that are stuck in false realities will take any teaching or idea and shape it to support their narrative. And it’s not some kind of mysterious or nefarious process. It’s literally just how our mind works.

So how do you avoid false spirituality?

Spirituality, growth, and pretty much any path of inner work, is about continually shedding illusions and resting in the truth. I can’t really give you a one-size-fits-all answer on how to do this, because the reality is, anything I say will go into your reality-filter like everything else, and get distorted. In other words, “the ego is always listening”.

That’s why it’s called a “journey”. You have to start wherever you are, and look around in your mind and ask yourself where you are lying to yourself.

• Where are the discrepancies between what you say you want, and how you are behaving?
• What just doesn’t quite make sense in your internal story about what is happening?
• Where are the wrinkles in the image your mind is presenting to you?
• What are you telling yourself that feels not quite real? 
• What feels like the same thing you have been telling yourself for years, that never gets you anywhere new?
• What internal stories are you starting to feel bored of?
• What emotion feels over-the-top and ungrounded?
• What truth keeps knocking on your door, that you refuse to let in?
• What lesson are you refusing?
• Where do you want so badly to be right, but you have a sneaking suspicion that you are actually wrong?
• Where do you feel smug and self-satisfied and righteous?
• Where are you focused on someone else’s problems, and not your own?
• What disconfirming evidence are you ignoring?
• Where are you buying your own bullshit?
• What feelings are you trying to not feel?
• Where are you letting a feeling decide for you instead of making a conscious choice?
• Where are you blaming others for your own choices?
• Where are you believing you are helpless, when you aren’t?
• What are you running from?
• Where are you refusing to be responsible for yourself?
• Where are you trying to manipulate or force an outcome?
• Where are you pretending to have less power than you do to affect an outcome?
• Where do you need help and are not asking for it, or only asking people you know won’t challenge you?
• Where are you focused on diminishing other people in your mind, rather than feel your own pain and make your own choices?
• Where are you refusing to listen to feedback because you don’t want it to be true?
• Where are you making choices to uphold your image rather than being honest?

There are a million ways to delude ourselves. But there is always some indicator, some place where the light shines through.

When you see it, grab onto it with all your strength, and use it to leverage yourself out of whatever illusion you are lost in.

And then commit to doing that again and again for the rest of your life.