This is another view, or take, or just a similar thought — packaged a little differently — of the article The space between independence and being held.

The society tells us to be independent, be happy with being single, have the hot single girl summer, enjoy dating, have fun. But what if I don’t want any of that? Fuck, how much I’d want to be held, cared for, have someone to ask if I’ve eaten, if I got home safe, how I slept. That quick “I’ll handle it” replaced with “Let me do this for you.”

As we have started to support, even romanticise, the independence of a woman — which there’s no denying has more than a good reason for it — we also somehow started to despise the notion of just admitting that, god, how much we want to be held, have that special person in our lives, and believe in the lasting relationship. How did it almost become criminal to admit that one would really want to have a relationship? Even writing this down feels wrong, somehow bad and ominous, that now it would definitely avoid me like a plague, that the universe has now marked me as too desperate, too needy, too attached, or not detached enough. Or not healed enough, because after all, don’t we all need to be healed, independent, and perfectly happy-on-our-own versions of ourselves before we can even slightly hint that, okay, “now I’m ready for a relationship”? And still it is wrong to say that “I want one.”

Half of my instagram feed is happy couples, weddings, engagements and babies, and the other half is the celebration of independence, hot girl summer, and man haters. But where do you fit if you are single, happily found your independence, had fun, started to build a solid foundation for yourself, but now some days all that you want is to have your person around. At what point did we start thinking that staying nonchalant and cool is what we need to be to find our partner? That notion of almost over-independence and not even accidentally showing that you care have blended together creating the idea that we are not allowed to admit how much we actually want a relationship.

I have seen questions on social media about what men or any romantic partner actually then gives to your life when you have your friends, family and yourself to rely on. I admit that one could say almost nothing, but where is the romance, the partnership, the idea of sharing the most mundane things with your partner and still finding them attractive. Seeing them grow, seeing yourself to grow with someone. I want all of that.

The brand of the perfectly healed, always-fine woman

There is a very specific version of the modern woman that gets praised: she is emotionally intelligent, self-sufficient, thriving in her career, travelling alone, buying her own flowers, not checking her phone, not waiting for anyone. She is the main character of her own life, and that life looks very good on Instagram. She is “in her healing era,” “in her feral girl summer,” “in her reputation era,” “in her main character arc” — every single season is branded, optimised, and turned into a hashtag.

But I would say somewhere underneath that, there is another version of you. The one who is tired of being the main character all the time. The one who would quite happily trade a solo trip for someone to come home to. The one who doesn’t actually want another summer of casual hook-ups, mixed signals, and performing “I don’t care.” (And if you do want that, I’m more than happy for you!) She wants to be known, chosen, and cared for in a way that lasts. And yet, she has learned to hide that, because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

The internet has made singlehood into its own brand identity. You can’t just be single; you have to be strategically single. You have to be the “hot girl summer” type — loud, liberated, unapologetic — or the “healing phase” type — soft, introspective, self-work-heavy — or the “main character” type — mysterious, untouchable, focused on her own path. But what if you don’t want to be a brand? What if you just want to be a woman who wants love?

Cultural narratives around “hot girl summer” and empowered singlehood have often shifted from self-confidence into a more toxic ideal that promotes a kind of performative detachment. In that world, openly wanting a committed relationship can feel almost embarrassing, as if you’ve failed at being properly modern, properly feminist, properly healed.

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There is a particular feeling that comes when you finally begin to date someone who feels safe after years of not having that (no matter how long or short it lasts). It is soft and disorienting at the same time. Your body notices the difference first: how you sigh more easily, how your shoulders drop, how your evenings feel less like waiting to be disappointed. You realise you are not rehearsing every sentence. You are not timing your texts. You are not checking whether you’ve been “too much” or “too quiet.” You stop dreading to tell them your plans with friends, or their reaction if you didn’t text them back immediately. You sit across from them and, for a moment, you simply exist.

And then almost in the same breath your nervous system starts doing exactly what it was trained to do. It scans. It builds stories. It looks for the familiar exit signs. Even when someone is showing up, being kind, being consistent, some older part of your brain is still whispering, “This is where it goes wrong.” Love after hurt can feel safe and terrifying at the same time; people whose nervous systems learned to pair closeness with danger often misread positive cues as potential threat, even in genuinely safe relationships.

During the last few years, I learned to connect silence to something being wrong, and unanswered messages to anger or things falling apart. My nervous system now even tracks certain words or sentences that became too familiar in contexts that meant emotional pain and feeling unsafe. Even though now they are completely normal, completely outside of the old context, my body still braces itself just by hearing them.

But then, on the other hand, there are the completely normal messages and conversations that happen after I’ve already convinced myself I said something and ruined everything. There is the calmness that follows while being with someone, and not the anxiety I had got used to. There is the care you receive without feeling indebted to someone. That is exactly what I always craved, and never quite believed I would actually have, and those small, almost invisible things are the ones that end up healing you the most. They start slowly rebuilding the narrative inside your head, and one day maybe your body forgets the old pain and anxiety.

When your brain doesn’t believe the safety

You may notice tiny things and turn them into prophecies. A slower reply becomes the beginning of the end. A neutral tone becomes proof of fading interest. A quiet day becomes a sign that you care more. Your mind starts connecting dots that don’t need to be connected, inventing a future where this becomes “like the last one” and you end up hurt again. It’s not that you want to sabotage it. It’s that your system is still trying to protect you from pain it already knows too well.

If you’ve spent years in chaotic or emotionally unsafe relationships, calm can feel unfamiliar enough to be suspicious. Healthy love after abuse or chaos often feels wrong at first — not because it is wrong, but because your body has adapted to expect adrenaline, inconsistency, and emotional whiplash. So when someone is attentive and steady, part of you relaxes and another part panics. Peace can feel like panic, because your nervous system still assumes that closeness is the place where bad things happen.

How safe love slowly rewires the body

But here is the quiet, hopeful part: your brain is not fixed. Attachment research and trauma neuroscience suggest that repeated experiences of safe, attuned connection can slowly rewire your nervous system to read safety where it used to read threat. This means that every time you stay, breathe, and choose not to run from genuine care, you are not just “being brave” in a poetic sense — you are literally teaching your body a new association. “This is closeness. Nothing terrible is happening. I can be here.”

It doesn’t happen overnight. Usually it looks less like a movie scene and more like very ordinary moments: you share something vulnerable, they respond with care, and nothing explodes. You say no to something, and they don’t leave. You have a wobble, and they stay. Each time your brain expects the familiar crash and it doesn’t come, the old narrative loses a little power. The danger script gets slightly softer. The idea that love can be safe becomes less theoretical and more embodied.

The risk of loving again

Though, the truth in loving always is that it never comes with no risk at all. You might still lose it, it might still not be the last one, no matter how badly you’d want it to be. You might still cry over messages, or feel your chest ache when a chapter ends. Choosing to love does not eliminate the possibility of loss. But choosing not to love doesn’t eliminate pain either. It just trades the pain of risk for the pain of never letting anyone matter.

For me, it has become an important realisation that I would always rather risk it than not love. That letting myself be seen, cared for, and held even with the possibility of being hurt again feels more honest than building a life around never being touched. That the point of healing was never to become so invulnerable that nothing can reach me; it was to become solid enough in myself that I can let love in without abandoning myself if it goes wrong.

And that is the beauty of it, it’s not about dreading a possible breakup even before you’ve seen any sign of it at all, but the reality of life that I’d always rather love again and again, be touched by people around me, and as an endless romantic, by someone special for the rest of my life.

Choosing hope over the old script

So when I sit with someone who feels safe now, I try to remember this: my nervous system is allowed to be scared. It is allowed to scan, to tell old stories, to react. But my choice doesn’t have to be led only by that fear. I can listen to the part of me that is hopeful, the part that wants to believe this time is different, the part that knows that risking love is not foolish but human.

Because in the end, the real milestone is not “finding the perfect person.” It is reaching the point where you know that your heart can survive imperfection. That you can hurt and heal and still remain open, and someone will actually hold your hand through all of that. That you can feel the old alarms and still choose to stay present in a relationship that feels safe. And that letting yourself love again, even with all the fear in the room, is a way of honouring the part of you that never stopped wanting connection even when the past tried to teach you not to.

And eventually that fear gets smaller, or maybe the good and the safe gets bigger around it, you realise that you are building something that you always wanted to build with someone who without even realising it has helped you heal something that they didn’t break in the first place. And that is worth staying open and loving again.

xx

The more I’ve learnt to listen to myself and the constant inner dialogues I have inside my head, the more I’ve learnt to love it. I’ve started to notice how, when I stop fighting my brain and start actually hearing it, something soft happens: I feel more like me. I fall in love with myself even more, which is something I didn’t think I’d be able to write, ever. I think it’s something unique and exciting to not have a “normal” brain even though the other side of it can be annoying to myself and probably to many around me.

The brain that doesn’t do straight lines

I have a long list of things that I think at least are something slightly not normal but somehow make me feel like myself, things people even recognise me for. I cannot sleep without some type of background music. I have absolutely a million tabs open. I jump from task to task because my concentration rarely lasts long enough to finish something in one go. I’m a very slow reader. I cannot plan usually. I’m very “fun driven” — things need to feel fun for me to be able to focus or get going. I’m impatient and I want things to happen yesterday. I unfortunately cut people off (because I had something to add to the conversation and if I don’t say it then I won’t remember it), and often might seem like I’m not listening (only because inside my head I went somewhere else or are already in some new part of that same conversation).

And then I procrastinate. It is extremely hard for me to start things even something as small as going to bed or brushing my teeth. I get addicted to things easily. I get addicted to feelings, to energy, people, being out, experiencing things. And then when you’ve had that high that stimulates your brain in that specific way, you crash down (quite literally). The next day you are more tired than you’ve ever been. It’s not just the feeling of needing to sleep, but complete incapability of doing anything.

If you live in a female body, this kind of pattern often gets missed or minimised. Inattentive adhd in women is frequently underdiagnosed; it can show up more as daydreaming, internal chatter, emotional intensity, overthinking, disorganisation, or exhaustion rather than obvious hyperactivity, and many women end up describing themselves as “lazy” or “bad at adulting” instead of noticing that their brains simply don’t run on the same tracks.

It sometimes feels like a rollercoaster, or a constant chatter inside your head that never ends. But then it’s that preoccupation, the feeling of getting stuck in the idea and never actually starting it. You can think about the thing endlessly, and still not move. You can care wildly, and still not act. To people on the outside, this can look like you don’t care, don’t try, don’t follow through. To you, it feels like your brain truly cannot begin.

The invisible part of women’s adhd

If you’ve grown up rewarded for being “good,” quiet, capable, or low-maintenance, it makes sense that you learned to hide the chaos, not ask for help, and overcompensate. Many women with adhd develop coping mechanisms that mask symptoms — working late, over-preparing, apologising constantly, pushing through burnout — which is one reason the struggle is often invisible.

So instead of being seen as someone with a different neurotype, you’re seen as someone who “forgets things,” “is all over the place,” “is flaky,” “starts but doesn’t finish,” or “just needs to be more organised.” Internally, you may start to believe those labels. You may look at your open tabs, half-finished projects, impulsive decisions, and inability to start certain tasks and think, “What is wrong with me?”

And yet, if you look closely, there is a pattern. You may notice that:

• You can focus deeply on things that genuinely interest you, to the point of hyperfocus.

• You struggle with anything that feels boring, repetitive, or unstructured, even when it “should” matter.

• You live in cycles of energy and crashing out: intense, fun, social, out, then suddenly exhausted, blank, unable.

• You carry a lot of shame about not being able to “just do the thing.”

That shame is one of the most painful parts. The adhd itself is one thing. The story you tell about it — lazy, unreliable, messy, dramatic, inconsistent — is another. Especially for women, undiagnosed adhd is associated with lower self-esteem, exhaustion, and feeling overwhelmed by life’s demands. It’s not just the symptoms. It’s what you think the symptoms say about you.

But honestly though, yes, there’s a lot of talk about the feeling of shame around this topic, but if I’m honest, I in some very weird way love it because it has actually helped me to understand who I am — and that is a stronger feeling than the shame. Yes, it is more than annoying very often, especially in those moments when you truly feel incapable of moving or getting things done, and I don’t want to minimise the pain that adhd brings to many of us, especially women. But also, it has helped tremendously when I started to name it, almost joke about it, and carry it with some kind of pride.

There is a strange relief in saying, “this is my brain,” and then letting that sentence be soft instead of critical. Once I stopped treating every scattered thought and every unfinished task as a character flaw, I could see patterns instead of failures. I could see the parts of me that are intense, creative, intuitive, emotional, and fun-driven, and realise that they are not accidents — they are me. Naming it, laughing with it, and sometimes loving it has been one of the ways I’ve slowly pulled my identity back when especially in my previous relationship I heard one too many times that I’m unemphatetic, or uncaring because I once too many times cut them off, or seemed like that I wasn’t listening or that I was uninterested.

Loving the way your brain moves

There’s a lot of those aspects that are difficult to handle, but then on the other side, I care deeply. When I’m there with the people I care about and feel like I’m safe with, I love a lot. I might not get the plan together, but if someone makes it, I’ll be there. When I’m there, I’m there. I’m often the one without filter. My thoughts and conversations jump from one end to another. I open up easily. I feel big (good and the bad).

This is the part of my brain I have started to fall in love with: the intensity, the bigness, the way I connect dots, the way I can feel a room, the way my attention may be scattered in some places and laser-focused in others. The way I can care about ten things at once and somehow keep all of them emotionally alive. The way I see patterns, possibilities, and stories where other people see a straight line.

Adhd in women does not only bring difficulty. It often comes with creativity, intuition, sensitivity, and strong emotional attunement — traits that can be deeply valuable when they are not constantly shamed or suppressed. When I stop calling my brain “wrong,” I can see that it has been trying to show me something about who I am. That I am not a spreadsheet person. That I am not a linear person. That I am not here to live a neat little life, colour-coded and calm. I am here to live in bursts, in waves, in big feelings, in messy stories — and to learn how to take care of myself inside that.

The rollercoaster and the crash

I get addicted to feelings, to energy, people, being out, experiencing things. When you’ve had that high that stimulates your brain in that specific way, you crash down. The next day, you are tired in a way that isn’t just physical. It’s like your entire system has shut down. You feel incapable of doing anything.

If you have this kind of brain, there is often a strong pull toward stimulation: social events, new projects, new ideas, scrolling, texting, going out, falling in love with potential. That’s not coincidence — adhd brains are often wired to seek dopamine and novelty, which can make routine feel suffocating and highs feel irresistible. But highs without care lead to crashes. If you are not regulating, you will burn out. Not because you are weak, but because you are running your nervous system on spikes instead of rhythms.

There is also this other thing: the preoccupation. The constant chatter inside your head. The ideas that light up your system but never quite become reality because starting is so hard. It’s not laziness. Executive dysfunction — difficulty initiating, organising, sequencing tasks — is a core feature of adhd and can make starting feel like climbing a mountain even when you know exactly what to do. When you understand that, you can shift from “Why can’t I just do it?” to “How can I support my brain to begin?”

Making it relatable, not diagnostic

This is not a call for everyone to self-diagnose. It’s not a rejection of formal diagnosis either. Diagnosis can be life-changing, validating, and practically useful for many women who have spent years feeling like failures in a system that was never designed for their brains. But I also think there is value in telling the truth about the lived experience, even when it exists in the grey zone.

Because whether or not you ever sit in front of a psychiatrist and get three letters attached to your name, you still wake up inside this brain every day. You still live with the loops, the tabs, the procrastination, the intensity, the crashes, the big feelings, the fun-driven focus, the jumping conversations, and the inability to keep things “small.” You still carry the shame and self-doubt that comes from trying to fit a scattered, creative, sensitive brain into a culture that often rewards only the linear.

So maybe the point is not, “Do I have adhd?” but, “What kind of brain do I have, and how can I stop hating it?” What happens if, instead of seeing your scatteredness as a moral failing, you treat it as information? What if you let yourself need more structure, more support, more breaks, more novelty, more movement, more compassion — without making that mean you are less capable, less intelligent, or less worthy?

Letting women feel seen

Women with adhd are often very good at hiding their struggle. At working late, over-preparing, apologising, over-functioning, self-blaming, and then quietly burning out behind the scenes. Many don’t realise there is a name for what they experience until much later. Some never do. But even without a label, the struggle is real, and so is the possibility of relating to yourself differently.

If any of this sounds like you — the tabs, the jumping thoughts, the difficulty starting, the big feelings, the emotional crashes, the way you are both deeply caring and utterly overwhelmed — then you’re not alone. There are many women whose brains move in loops instead of straight lines, in waves instead of steps. Women who are not broken, just wired differently. Women who deserve lives designed around the truth of how they function, not around the shame of how they don’t.

The more you listen to your own mind — not to criticise it, but to understand it — the more you may find that the very traits you’ve spent years trying to erase are the ones that make you you. Not a problem to be fixed, but a pattern to be honoured, supported, and maybe even loved.

The peace is real, but it is purchased with pieces of your identity. (and other thoughts of how I ended up trying to keep the peace that was never supposed to last anyways)

It can happen so slowly that you do not notice it while it is happening. You start adjusting your tone. Then your preferences. Then your needs. Then your opinions become easier to soften, your boundaries easier to blur, your real feelings easier to postpone. You tell yourself you are being understanding, flexible, mature, easy to love. But somewhere underneath all that accommodation, you begin to shape shift and blur the lines who you are. Not dramatically, and not all at once, but just a little less yourself every time you choose peace over honesty.

I thought that I was intensely in love (and I’m sure I was). And that is the danger that we face at the beginning of a relationship, in that soft space in between getting to know someone, realising that we care about them and want them and the independence that we experienced but are kind of afraid to need to go back to (once we finally feel like we found our person). And before I even realised I started to change my words, feelings, reactions to fit the “perfect picture” of a relationship that was supposed to be the ultimate end goal in my life. I changed my view of many things, not radically, but just enough to eventually start shaping my idea of who I actually am or who I wanted or needed to be to be loved and loveable.

A lot of people think disappearing in a relationship means becoming completely dependent or losing all individuality overnight. But often it is much subtler than that. It looks like agreeing when you mean no, or not bringing something up because you don’t want to make it awkward. It looks like swallowing a hurt because you don’t want to seem dramatic. It looks like becoming so focused on keeping the relationship stable that you stop noticing how unstable you are becoming inside it. The peace is real, but it is purchased with pieces of your identity.

This is especially easy to do if you are someone who learned that love is something you keep by being manageable. If you grew up around tension, unpredictability, criticism, withdrawal, or emotional volatility, your nervous system may have built a whole strategy around preventing rupture. You become the one who smooths things over, who anticipates moods, who makes yourself smaller so the connection can stay intact. It is a survival skill. But in adult relationships, what once protected you can quietly become the thing that erases you. And the scary part is that you don’t see that happening because you think that you are doing god’s work (or therapists) to be emotionally aware, loving, caring and what ever you are telling yourself.

The danger is that self-abandonment can feel like devotion when it first starts. You may even think you are being loving. You are compromising, accommodating, adjusting, making space. Those things are not inherently bad. Healthy love does involve flexibility. But there is a line between mutual adaptation and self-erasure, and many people cross it without realising because they have learned to measure love by how much they can tolerate rather than by how fully they can be themselves. Healthy love involves flexibility but when we cross the line to compromising, we end up to the space where neither partner is fully happy. And then one day you look in the mirror and don’t quite know who is looking back at you, let alone how you ended up there.

The real question is not whether you can keep the peace. It is what the peace costs. If you are repeatedly going quiet, shrinking your reactions, suppressing your preferences, and taking yourself out of the picture just so the connection stays comfortable, then the relationship may be functioning, but you are not. You are performing stability while privately disintegrating. And that is not sustainable love. That is self-abandonment with good manners.

Not disappearing in a relationship begins with staying in contact with yourself. That sounds simple, but it asks for a lot. It asks you to keep noticing what you feel before you explain it away (no matter how much that realisation and the truth would hurt). It asks you to check whether your “yes” is genuine or reflexive. It asks you to remember that your discomfort is worth listening to even if it creates a moment of tension. And if that tension is taken seriously, calmly and as a sign to grow, you just might have found a true gem, but if not, don’t try to turn the sharp edges of a piece of glass into that gem. It’s not worth it to cut yourself in that process. It asks you to believe that being honest about your needs does not make you difficult. It makes you present, and yourself and someone will love you for that.

There is also a deep fear here that many people carry: if I stay visible, I may not be loveable. If I tell the truth, I may upset the balance. If I take up space, I may lose the relationship. So instead you start rehearsing a smaller version of yourself. Less emotional. Less demanding. Less complicated. But the tragedy is that the very strategy meant to protect the relationship often weakens it, because a relationship cannot truly hold what is never spoken (and if it doesn’t hold, don’t tighten your grip).

And so I realised that the relationship I thought would be my last was actually built on a false image of myself that was the “acceptable” version, the “lovable” version. F* that, I want the version of myself who is actually me (with the slight chaos and everything) and someone who is ready to love that version of me.

The work, then, is to practice not disappearing in small ways before you are forced to confront it in big ones. Say what you actually want. Notice when you are adapting from love and when you are adapting from fear. Let yourself take up conversational space. Let your preferences exist without apology. Let your boundaries be real even when they disappoint someone. A healthy relationship should not require you to erase your edges in order to belong.

And maybe that is the most important thing to remember: love is not meant to make you less visible or less your own. It is meant to make you more known. If you have to disappear to keep someone close, the connection is already asking too much of you. The right love does not require self-erasure. It asks for honesty, presence, and the courage to remain intact even when it would be easier to fade.

xx

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So many women have said it before and now it’s my turn — I believe that in some ways, or maybe in many ways, female friendships are the greatest loves and soulmates you will ever have, maybe more than you will ever find in any guy. Not because romantic love cannot be beautiful, and not because I’ve become cynical about men (because trust me, I still believe in romance and the love of my life finding his way into mine), but because there is something about being deeply known, consistently held, and repeatedly chosen by women that has changed me in a way romance hasn’t.

I have realised how my best friends have become the ones I text first about anything and everything. They have, without even knowing it, started to heal my anxious attachment, picked me up when I truly didn’t know how to get by another day, and listened to my countless more-than-five-minute voice notes about stories of my ex, good dates, bad dates, spiralling thoughts, loneliness, and the craving of being with someone. And drunken voice notes about a hookup, the frustration about my own life, and the fear of not being enough. I’ve never needed to fear that I’m too much, or too little, too loud, too quiet, or too something with them. I’ve never needed to think that I cannot text them too fast, or that I’m not texting them enough — I do it every day anyway — or that I cannot show up with them exactly as I am: sometimes spiralling, sometimes drunk, sometimes sad, sometimes extremely happy and high in life.

What safe love started to feel like

Female friendship is the one that teaches you how safe and secure attachment to another person feels, especially if you haven’t really had that example yet. Attachment patterns shape friendships as well as romantic relationships, and secure friendship often looks like emotional honesty, trust through time and distance, and a sense that silence does not automatically mean something is wrong. They show you how being quiet for a few days doesn’t mean that you’ve done something wrong, that they’re leaving you, or that the whole thing is about to collapse. They do not let you pull away in fear of losing them and avoiding the love they have to offer you.

And weirdly enough, I only gained these friends a little over a year ago, and only eight months ago I realised they’ll be there even when that guy isn’t. That realisation changed something fundamental in me. It softened the old belief that love is unstable, temporary, or always about to disappear. It made me see that devotion does not always arrive dressed as romance. Sometimes it arrives as a woman replying to your chaotic messages with, “Breathe. You’re okay. I’ve got you.”

The women who rebuilt me

They’ve raised my self-esteem, somehow picked up the pieces of my self-image, told me that I’m strong over and over, and pointed out how I’m becoming the person who I was and who I was always meant to be. Women’s friendships are strongly associated with emotional support, social support, self-esteem, and feeling understood, which may be part of why these bonds can feel so healing in adulthood. They’ve taught me that I don’t need to bend over and beyond, shrink myself, or bury parts of me to fit into someone else’s image of the acceptable girlfriend, lover, partner, future wife, or mother. And along the way, I declared that they are my soulmates.

There is something so quietly life-changing about being mirrored by women who keep reminding you who you are when you forget. Not in a performative way but in the most ordinary and loving way possible. They remember your strength when you lose sight of it. They hold a version of you in their minds that is bigger, truer, and kinder than the one fear gives you access to on your worst days. And if you are lucky, they hand that version back to you again and again until you begin to believe it yourself.

A love that doesn’t ask you to shrink

Female friendships don’t ask you to quiet yourself when you want to send that too-long voice note that sounds more like a podcast after you’ve had a bad day. They feel your energy from just two messy messages and tell you to breathe deep. You are fine telling them every day how gorgeous they are, how much you miss them when you are apart, and you never need to question whether you are being too intense or too much. Research on women’s friendships consistently points to higher levels of intimacy, support, and self-disclosure, which helps explain why these relationships can feel emotionally spacious and deeply regulating.

That, to me, is one of the most healing parts. So many of us have learned to monitor ourselves in love — to watch our tone, time our messages, edit our feelings, and decide whether we are being too needy, too available, too expressive, too eager. But in the right female friendships, that whole exhausting internal performance begins to loosen. You get to be loving without strategy. Honest without punishment. Emotional without shame. You get to be a full person instead of a carefully managed one.

What friendship taught me about healthy love

I have learnt that they can actually teach you so much about healthy love when you lost the sense of how it is supposed to feel like. Friendship can become a template for secure attachment because it lets the body experience a different relational rhythm: someone stays when you are honest, distance does not equal disappearance, and your feelings are met with curiosity rather than defensiveness. Sometimes that lesson lands more deeply through friendship than through romance, because friendship can feel less loaded, less performative, and less tied to old fantasies.

You start to understand that healthy love is not always dramatic. It does not always arrive with obsession, confusion, and emotional whiplash. Sometimes healthy love looks like consistency, repair, patience, mutual effort, and someone who knows how to hold both your chaos and your joy. Sometimes it looks like a woman who listens to your ten-minute voice note, sends one back, and makes you feel less alone in your own head.

More than love and relationships

And not just about love and relationships, but about healthy dependence, life, discipline, and goals, and how life is not supposed to be measured only by money, relationships, achievements, and goals. But rather by how much you’ve experienced, how much fun you’ve had, how many wine glasses — or bottles — you shared, and how many runs around Hyde Park you did with a throbbing hangover just because you do it for the girls. Women’s social ties are linked to support, resilience, and wellbeing, and they often become a resource not just for emotional life but for how people navigate stress, identity, and daily living.

That part matters too. Female friendship is not just emotional depth and healing conversations. It is also silliness, rituals, chaos, laughter, shared language, badly timed nights out, the kind of stories that become mythology between you. It is discipline wrapped in tenderness, accountability wrapped in love, and the strange miracle of becoming a better version of yourself partly because your friends keep dragging you back to life. Sometimes literally, sometimes emotionally, sometimes with coffee, sometimes with a run, sometimes with one brutally honest chat.

The greatest loves of my life

There is something about being loved by women who know you deeply that softens the whole architecture of your heart. It makes you less afraid of your own feelings, less ashamed of your intensity, and less likely to believe that love has to be earned by being convenient. It teaches you that consistency can be warm, that being missed does not mean being controlled, and that honesty does not have to come with punishment.

I think that is why female friendships can sometimes feel like the greatest loves of your adult life. Not because they replace romance, but because they remind you that love was never supposed to make you disappear. It was supposed to make you feel more like yourself. And when you are really loved by your girls, that is exactly what happens. They do not just witness your life. They help you come home to it.

xx

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There is a particular kind of heartbreak that doesn’t just leave you grieving a person — it leaves your whole body confused about what love is supposed to feel like. You tell yourself you want something calm, steady, mutual, and emotionally safe. You want someone you can actually lean on. Someone who doesn’t disappear, destabilise you, or keep you guessing, or crumble your sense of self. But then you meet someone kind and available, and instead of relief, what rises first is suspicion. Or boredom. Or a low-level urge to pull back before they get close enough to matter.

Or other option is that you find someone who is different, but in some ways still similar. You are aware enough to recognise some pattern or spiral forming in your head and you are not quite sure what it is because you don’t even know that person. But your nervous system has recognised something that your conscious mind maybe hasn’t yet. And before you even realise you are obsessing over that new person, getting attracted to them without quite even knowing how. And that whole feeling feels so familiar in the most intoxicating way.

Your nervous system has recognised something familiar in them and without your conscious consent got attracted to them the same way you did to that person who lowkey destroyed you just a short while ago. The worst part is that you don’t realise this before you’ve already built a specific image of them inside your head.

This is one of the most disorienting parts of healing in relationships: when your conscious desire has changed, but your emotional wiring has not fully caught up yet. Attachment research suggests that earlier relational experiences shape how people seek closeness, interpret cues, and respond to intimacy in adulthood, and breakups can intensify those patterns rather than simply erase them. So even if you genuinely want to be cared for, your system may still be organised around vigilance, self-protection, familiarity, and that disorienting feeling of needing to earn the love you are seeking. You may find yourself scanning for incompatibility before connection has had a chance to breathe. You may feel more activated by unpredictability than by steadiness. You may mistake the rollercoaster for chemistry and calm for emptiness, simply because chaos is what your body has learned to recognise.

That doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means your nervous system is doing exactly what it was trained to do: anticipate pain before it arrives, search for evidence that this will end badly, and avoid getting too comfortable in something that could hurt. The problem is that the same intelligence that once protected you can now make it very hard to receive the kind of love you say you want. Not because it isn’t available, but because peace can feel unfamiliar enough to register as boring, and unfamiliarity often feels unsafe at first.

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There is a particular kind of happiness that arrives when you finally stop waiting for someone else to make your life feel whole. It’s quiet, deep, and strangely stabilising. You realise you can go to dinner alone, travel alone, make decisions alone, sleep alone, build a life alone—and not feel like you are missing yourself. And yet, even in that steadiness, there can still be a softer longing underneath it all. A longing not for rescue exactly, but for relief. For someone else to hold the thread sometimes. For someone to handle things. For someone to notice, to step in, to make a decision, to take care of you in the simple, ordinary ways that let your nervous system unclench.

I’ve now been almost 8 months single (first time in my adult life), and while I’ve been happier than in many years, I’ve also had those nights when you just really want to have someone right there with you and talk about your day, crash out and they’ll help you to pick yourself up, dance around the living room, make food or order in, decide things together, someone to rely on (and someone to fix that lightbulb). I’ve felt like wanting someone for countless mornings, mid-day when I’ve wanted to tell about that one annoying thing at work, or how I messed something up and needed to hear someone to say that it’s all going to be okay.

What makes this feeling so hard to talk about is that we are often taught to frame it as an either/or. Either you are fiercely independent and therefore should not want anything from anyone, or you are deeply relational and therefore should not be comfortable on your own. But real life is messier than that. You can be profoundly happy alone and still want a partner, a lover, a friend, or a safe person who says, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.” You can love your own company and still crave the experience of being considered, anticipated, and cared for. You can feel proud of the life you’ve built and still want someone to take some of the weight off your shoulders. That does not make you inconsistent. It makes you human. And ultimately it indicates the deeper desire to relate to someone, build the life you are dreaming of with someone.

Sometimes that longing has nothing to do with romance in the glossy, idealised sense. Sometimes what you are really craving is nervous-system relief. You want someone who remembers the appointment, handles the admin, opens the jar (I cannot buy wine bottles with normal corks at the moment because I cannot for the life of me get them open myself), books the thing, notices when you are tired, and makes life feel less like a solo performance of competence. For many women, especially those who have spent years being the responsible one, the emotionally aware one, the one who keeps things moving, that craving can feel almost embarrassing. But it is not childish to want to be held in ordinary ways. It is not regressive to want support. It is not weak to want a relationship where you do not have to be the one doing everything, emotionally and practically, all the time.

And this is where the deeper work lives: learning how to hold your independence and your longing without shaming either one. The happy-single part of you is not lying. She really does love her life. She likes her space, her freedom, her momentum, her ability to choose herself. The softer part of you is not needy in a bad way. She is pointing to a very real desire for attunement, rest, and shared responsibility. The goal is not to silence one part so the other can win. The goal is to become the kind of person who can say, “I am deeply content on my own, and I also want to be cared for,” without immediately translating that into self-doubt.

That translation is usually where the pain gets tangled. Because many of us were taught that wanting care makes us less self-sufficient, less evolved, less “healed.” But wanting to rely on someone sometimes is not a failure of healing. It is often a sign that your system is ready for interdependence instead of constant self-protection. The deeper question is not, “Why do I want this?” The deeper question is, “Can I desire support without abandoning myself in the process?” Can I ask for help without making it mean I’m incapable? Can I receive care without making it mean I’m not strong? Can I be open to partnership without turning it into a verdict on my worth?

When you understand the shape of your desire, you stop pathologising it. You stop calling yourself dramatic for wanting care or being close to someone, or just wanting someone. What you actually want goes deeper than that and it’s often forgotten. You stop judging yourself for craving steadiness, when your nervous system may simply be exhausted from always being on. And you begin to see that the fantasy of someone taking over is sometimes less about dependence and more about collapse: the fantasy that, just for a moment, you would not have to think, decide, manage, or anticipate. You could simply be looked after.

Of course, there is a difference between healthy support and giving your power away. The work is not to find someone to become your parent. It is to get honest about where you are over-functioning because you’ve had to, and where you are longing for a relationship that feels collaborative, safe, and easing rather than draining. Mature love does not erase your agency. It expands your capacity to rest inside it. The right person will not make you smaller so you can be cared for; they will make care feel safer because you do not have to disappear to receive it.

And maybe that is the heart of this whole conversation. Being single can teach you how to be enough for yourself. Wanting someone to rely on can teach you where you are still tired from carrying too much alone. Both truths can coexist without cancelling each other out. In fact, they often need each other. Your joy in being single keeps you from settling out of fear. Your longing for care keeps you from hardening into self-sufficiency as a personality. Together, they help you stay honest. Together, they point you toward a life that is not built on denial, but on discernment.

You do not need to apologise for the part of you that is happy. And you do not need to apologise for the part of you that wants to be held. The work is simply to let both parts speak, and then to build a life and relationships that can hold the full truth of you.

xx

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I have swayed in between of insane forward movement and staying completely stuck in every failure, set back, my own history and background for most of my life (I guess that is also the Aries in me). I have found it hard to consistently look forward without letting things that don’t fit into my life anymore dictate my current reality and hence my future as well. As Joe Dispenza wrote: “If we are recreating the past day after day, thinking the same thoughts, we are broadcasting the same electromagnetic field over and over again, sending out the same energy with the same message. […] The only way we can change our lives is to change our energy, to change the electromagnetic field we are constantly broadcasting. In other words to change our state of being we have to change how we think and how we feel.”

Stop living from your past, start creating from your future

This is the last piece of writing I’m going to make around authenticity for now. It distils the essence of identity work into something grounded and practical: stop living from your past conditioning, and start creating from your future identity. You’re no longer only healing what happened to you; you’re consciously rehearsing who you are becoming.

Think of it like this. Your old identity is the autopilot self built from yesterday’s experiences, emotional memories, stress responses, family rules, and relational conditioning. It’s the version of you that knows how to keep everyone comfortable, stay safe, and repeat familiar emotional states even when they don’t feel good. Your authentic identity is the self you choose on purpose—the one your inner child, your body, your shadow, and your truth have been pointing toward all along. She is not a fantasy person. She is a direction.

This isn’t about becoming someone “better” in a shame-based way. It’s about shifting your emotional home base so you’re not constantly recreating the same stories with new people, new jobs, new settings, or new outfits. The outer details may change, but the inner pattern stays the same until you decide to interrupt it. Identity work is the place where that decision becomes embodied.

Old identity vs. authentic identity

Your old identity was built through childhood expectations, emotional memories, unprocessed pain, habit loops, stress patterns, and relational conditioning. It is deeply familiar, even when it hurts. It knows how to anticipate disappointment, perform competence, manage other people’s moods, or shrink itself in order to stay safe. It is the self that says, “This is just who I am,” when really it is often just who you had to become.

Your authentic identity is built from conscious choice, emotional freedom, aligned intention, new neural pathways, present-moment awareness, and self-trust. It’s who you were before the world told you who to be, plus everything you’ve learned on this journey. She honours what she feels. She sets boundaries without collapsing. She listens to her body. She makes micro-aligned decisions. She speaks her truth. She stays regulated enough to hold all of that.

This identity is not something you wake up with fully formed. It is not a fixed destination or a perfect version of you who never doubts herself. It is something you practice daily until it starts to feel natural. And because it’s built through repetition, you don’t need to reinvent your whole life to begin—you just need to start choosing in the direction of the self you want to become.

Identity is thoughts, emotions, and repetition

Your identity is not just what you say about yourself. It is the combination of thoughts and emotions you rehearse over and over until they become your default way of being. The loop looks like this:

• Thoughts create emotional chemicals.

• Those emotions create your state of being.

• Your state of being influences your choices.

• Your choices shape your external life.

• Your external life reinforces your original thoughts.

This is why changing behaviour alone can only take you so far. If you keep thinking, “I’m too much,” “I’m not enough,” or “I always get abandoned,” your body will keep producing the emotional state that matches those beliefs, and your actions will unconsciously follow that emotional script. Then your outer life starts looking like proof that the original thought was true.

To change your life, you can’t only change what you do. You have to begin changing how you are—the emotional home you keep returning to. That means paying attention to the thought-emotion loops you rehearse most often and asking whether they are building the future you actually want. If they aren’t, then the work is not to force positivity, but to slowly and consistently choose a different inner rhythm.

Breaking the addiction to familiar emotions

Your body can become addicted to certain emotional states in the same way it can become accustomed to sugar, caffeine, or any repeated stimulus. If your system has spent years living inside worry, stress, overthinking, self-doubt, resentment, or fear, then calm can actually feel unfamiliar at first. Peace may feel boring. Self-respect may feel tense. Stillness may feel suspicious.

That doesn’t mean those states are wrong. It means your nervous system has learned to treat familiarity as safety, even when that familiarity is painful. So it unconsciously reaches for situations, people, and interpretations that recreate the old emotional weather—not because you like suffering, but because the body prefers the known.

Living authentically means choosing new emotions on purpose. Calm where there used to be chaos. Self-respect where there used to be shame. Curiosity where there used to be fear. That is how identity starts to change from the inside out. Your new self has to become emotionally familiar before it can become structurally stable in your life. In other words, you don’t wait until you feel like a different person; you practice the emotional state of that person until it begins to feel like home.

The re-identity loop: awareness → interrupt → redesign → embody

This is the practical framework for becoming who you want to be. It is simple, but not always easy, because it asks you to notice the old self without collapsing into it and to rehearse the new self without pretending.

Step 1 · Awareness

Start by noticing your old thoughts, emotional habits, and patterns. Things like:

• “I always mess it up.”

• “Everyone leaves.”

• “I can’t trust my feelings.”

• “It’s safer if I stay small.”

Instead of treating them as truths, begin seeing them as old programmes—rehearsed loops that were once protective but are no longer the whole picture. Awareness does not solve the pattern, but it interrupts the trance. Once you can name the loop, you are no longer completely inside it.

Step 2 · Interrupt

Next, disrupt the pattern before it carries you away. You can do this through breath, mindfulness, or truth-telling. A physiological sigh, a grounded exhale, or a hand on your chest can help regulate your body enough to create space. Naming your thought as a thought—“This is an old story, not my current reality”—can also break the spell just enough for you to choose differently.

This is the pause where choice enters. Without the interrupt, your old identity keeps you moving automatically. With it, you create a gap between stimulus and response, and in that gap your future self can begin to take the wheel.

Step 3 · Redesign

Now you choose what you want to live from instead. This is where you start selecting:

• thoughts that align with your authentic self

• emotional states you want to live in, such as peace, grounded confidence, self-respect, and joy

• a self-image that feels truer, like “I am someone who honours herself”

• daily intentions such as “Today I make 1% more authentic choices”

You are not pretending everything is perfect. You are setting a new direction. The point is not to deny reality; it is to stop organising your life around your most wounded interpretation of it. This is where identity becomes intentional instead of inherited.

Step 4 · Embody

Finally, you start feeling the emotions of your future identity now. What does it feel like in your body to be her? How does she walk, breathe, speak, and make decisions? What does she tolerate differently? What does she no longer negotiate with herself about?

The more often you step into that feeling—even for 60 seconds at a time—the more your brain and body get repeated evidence of a new self. This is where psychology and manifestation meet in a grounded way. You are not trying to magic your way out of reality. You are giving your nervous system proof, over and over, that a different state of being is possible.

That proof matters. Because identity is not only what you believe intellectually. It is what your body expects, what your choices reinforce, and what you return to when no one is watching. The future self is not waiting at the end of your healing. She is built in the moments when you decide, again and again, to act from the person you are becoming.

What is one thought, feeling, or identity loop you’re ready to interrupt this week?

There is always a moment before the “yes” where your body already knows the truth. The small clench in your chest, the fake brightness in your voice, the way your energy drops even as you’re saying, “Yeah, that’s fine!” For people‑pleasers, that moment gets overridden so fast that you barely register it—your nervous system rushes in with old rules about keeping the peace, and your mouth answers for you. This part of the work is about slowing that down just enough that your inner authority has a chance to speak.

And sometimes you have been telling yourself for so long of some certain situations that that’s who you are and things that you want to be that you realise you’ve been stuck in a cycle of people-pleasing only after something gets thrown off of its usual course. Your energy goes flat, your mood feels low or heavy, and something just feels off. It’s the subtle signs that tell you you’ve been abandoning yourself for too long.

In this article you will find a link at the bottom to a fillable Notion module with extra journal prompts.

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I have been a people-pleaser for as long as I can remember. That part of me comes from my childhood when I learnt that it is better to be '“agreeable” and “easy” than bring up my own thoughts, or needs. I learnt to scan the mood and the energy of the room and then did what ever I could to make others feel better because I had learnt that my life would then be easier as well. As we all know, that usually works when you are a child, until then it doesn’t anymore.

People‑pleasing is a survival strategy, not your personality

People‑pleasing is not who you are; it’s who you became to stay safe, accepted, or connected. At some point, your nervous system quietly linked a set of rules that felt non‑negotiable: acceptance equals survival, approval equals safety, harmony equals love, self‑silencing equals connection. So you learned to read the room, smooth things over, and become whoever other people needed you to be. You became hyper‑attuned to tone shifts, micro‑expressions, and the slightest hint of disappointment, and you adjusted yourself accordingly—smaller here, softer there, more agreeable everywhere.

For a while, it worked. You were the good one, the reliable one, the easy one. You avoided blow‑ups, you stayed close to people who might otherwise have pulled away, you earned praise for being mature, understanding, low‑maintenance. But the cost was your authenticity. Somewhere along the way, your own preferences, opinions, and limits got blurry. You started to measure your worth by how pleased other people seemed, and to confuse genuine kindness with constantly abandoning yourself. This work is about disentangling those two.

This module is not here to shame your people‑pleaser; it’s here to honour the intelligence behind it and then gently retire it from running your life. You’ll explore why this pattern formed, how it shows up today, and how to release it with compassion instead of self‑attack. You’ll start building internal boundaries, emotional clarity, and the confidence to express your truth without feeling responsible for managing everyone else’s feelings.

Why we people‑please: the psychology behind it

People‑pleasing is a self‑protection strategy, not a character flaw. When you zoom out, it usually grows from a mix of attachment needs, nervous system survival responses, shame, and the roles you were handed in your family or culture.

From an attachment perspective, people‑pleasing is a way to avoid disconnection or abandonment. If love felt conditional—on you being easy, helpful, accomplished, quiet, or “good”—then staying attuned to others and suppressing your own needs made emotional sense. Your younger self wasn’t trying to be fake; she was trying to protect her belonging.

From a nervous system lens, this pattern often maps onto the fawn response—the “please and appease” survival response that shows up when fight, flight, or freeze don’t feel available or safe. If fighting back would have escalated things, and leaving wasn’t an option, your system learned: “If I become what you want, you won’t hurt me, leave me, or be disappointed in me.” Over time, that appeasement becomes automatic.

Layered on top is shame and belonging: the fear of being “too much,” too demanding, too sensitive, too opinionated, too needy. Many people‑pleasers were explicitly or implicitly told they were only lovable when they were accommodating. So they became “the good one,” “the responsible one,” “the peacemaker,” the emotional shock‑absorber in their family system. Your younger self did exactly what she needed to do to survive emotionally. Your adult self is allowed to learn a different way.

What people‑pleasing really is

On the surface, people‑pleasing can look like being kind, helpful, or flexible. Underneath, it often looks like:

• saying yes when you mean no

• softening or changing your truth to avoid tension

• taking responsibility for other people’s emotions and reactions

• prioritising being liked over being real

• regulating your own worth through others’ responses

• shape‑shifting to keep the peace

It’s conflict avoidance disguised as kindness. It’s self‑abandonment disguised as generosity. You might tell yourself, “It’s just easier this way,” while your body tightens and your resentment quietly accumulates.

Over time, this pattern exhausts your authenticity. You end up drained, vaguely angry at everyone and no one, and unsure of who you actually are when you’re not performing “the reasonable one.” You might find yourself thinking, “I don’t even know what I want anymore,” because you’ve spent so long calibrating to everyone else’s wants first. Reclaiming your inner authority starts with telling the truth about what this pattern costs you, not just what it protects you from.

The nervous system and the fawn response

Your body doesn’t choose people‑pleasing because you’re weak or indecisive; it chooses it because, at some point, it felt like the safest option available. When your nervous system senses danger—whether that’s overt conflict or just the threat of disapproval—it typically scans through a few basic responses: fight (push back), flight (get away), freeze (shut down).

If none of those feel possible—maybe fighting back was punished, leaving wasn’t an option, and freezing only made things worse—your system may default to fawn. Fawning is the “please and appease” response:

“If I become what you want, you won’t hurt me, leave me, or be disappointed in me.”

In fawn, you over‑understand others and under‑understand yourself. You track their moods, anticipate their needs, and adjust quickly to keep things smooth, often without even noticing you’re doing it. Your body might say no (tight chest, sinking stomach, tension), but your mouth says, “Sure, that’s fine!” Fawning is not you being fake; it’s your nervous system whispering, “Keep them happy and we’ll stay safe.”

This module is about helping your body feel safe enough to make a different choice. As you learn to regulate your nervous system—through breath, grounding, movement, and self‑reassurance—you create a gap between the trigger and the appeasing reaction. In that gap, you can respond intentionally instead of automatically. You’re not trying to bully yourself out of fawning; you’re teaching your system that you can tolerate the discomfort of someone not being perfectly pleased with you and still be okay.

Internal boundaries: the real cure for people‑pleasing

People‑pleasers usually don’t lack boundaries; they lack permission to honour them. Deep down, you already know when something doesn’t feel right—you feel it in your body. The problem is that the moment you sense someone else might be disappointed, your inner rules rush in: “Don’t upset them. Don’t be difficult. Don’t be selfish.”

Internal boundaries are the beliefs and rules you hold inside yourself that separate what belongs to you from what belongs to other people. They sound like:

• “My emotions belong to me, and theirs belong to them.”

• “My job is authenticity, not managing everyone’s reactions.”

• “I can disappoint someone and still be safe.”

• “Someone being upset does not automatically mean I’ve done something wrong.”

When these internal boundaries are weak, you absorb everything. Other people’s moods become your responsibility, their disappointment becomes your fault, and your nervous system panics at the thought of saying no. When internal boundaries are strong, external ones—what you say and do—become much easier and more natural. You can feel someone’s discomfort and still stay connected to what’s true for you.

We will be strengthening those internal boundaries so that “I’m allowed to have a different preference” and “I’m allowed to be a separate person” shift from scary ideas into lived reality.

The de‑people‑pleasing framework: STOP → FEEL → CHOOSE → SPEAK

You don’t break a lifelong pattern by deciding to be “braver” one day. You break it in tiny, repeated moments where you choose a slightly more honest response than the one your nervous system wants to give. This framework—STOP, FEEL, CHOOSE, SPEAK—is your step‑by‑step method for interrupting the automatic pleasing loop.

Step 1 · STOP

First, you interrupt the automatic yes. This is where you create a crack in the old pattern.

• Pause.

• Take one slow breath.

• Use a buffer phrase like: “Let me think about that,” “I’ll check my schedule and get back to you,” or “Can I get back to you tomorrow?”

You’re not being difficult; you’re buying time for your authentic self to come online before your people‑pleaser answers on autopilot. Even a two‑second pause changes the trajectory.

Step 2 · FEEL

Next, you check in with yourself. This is where you turn the spotlight back inward after scanning everyone else. Ask:

• “What am I feeling?” (emotion)

• “What do I want or need?” (preference, limit, desire)

• “What would feel true right now in my body?”

Your body is usually ahead of your mind here. Tight, heavy, contracted often means “no” or “not like this.” Spacious, warm, grounded often means “yes” or “yes, with adjustments.” You don’t have to over‑explain this to anyone; you just have to be honest with yourself about it.

Step 3 · CHOOSE

Now you notice the choice point:

• the old identity: pleasing, appeasing, over‑agreeing, over‑explaining

• the authentic identity: truth‑telling, self‑respect, mutual responsibility

You are not expected to slam from one extreme to the other overnight. Even a tiny move toward the authentic choice rewires the pattern. That could look like:

• saying, “I actually don’t have capacity for that,” instead of automatically saying yes

• asking, “Can we split this?” instead of silently doing everything

• admitting, “I feel a bit uncomfortable with that,” instead of swallowing it

Each time you choose authenticity over automatic appeasement, you are teaching your system, “We can survive this.”

Step 4 · SPEAK

Finally, you voice your truth in a tone that is both clear and kind. You’re not responsible for predicting or managing the other person’s reaction; you’re responsible for being as honest and respectful as you can. Some phrases you can borrow:

• “I need a moment to think.”

• “That doesn’t feel right for me.”

• “My preference would be…”

• “I’m not available for that, but here’s what I can do…”

• “I actually don’t have the capacity to take that on.”

At first, your body might shake, your heart might race, your inner critic might scream. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong; it means you’re stepping out of an old survival pattern. Repeating this breaks the fawn loop over time—not by force, but by practice.

Every time you STOP, FEEL, CHOOSE, and SPEAK, you reclaim a piece of your inner authority. You begin to experience that you can be honest and still loved, clear and still connected, boundaried and still kind. And slowly, the person you’ve been performing and the person you actually are begin to line up.

If you think about your current life, where do you notice your people‑pleaser showing up the loudest right now—work, friendships, family, dating?

Your shadow doesn’t heal because you understand it; it heals because you start relating to it differently in the exact moments it usually hijacks you. This lesson is about that level—the “in the moment” work that turns triggers, jealousy, shame, and weird reactions into information and power instead of proof that you’re broken.

The shadow part of you are not something to be ashamed of, they are the ones that kept you safe in many situations and when you are able to validate them their power over you lessens and they become the beautiful quirks that make you you.

In this article you will find a link at the bottom to a fillable Notion module with extra journal prompts.

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In the last few years, I’ve met my defensiveness, many times, in the moments when I hoped that I could’ve kept it hidden. Slowly I learnt that part was the child in me who felt not enough, who felt the sharp pain of failing, of not being good enough, of being inconvenience, and that child learnt to protect themselves by becoming defensive fast, being perfectionist and a people-pleaser.

And when I failed to show up for myself and my inner child in conflict situations, and stayed in a relationship that wasn’t aligned with who I was, I abandoned that child alone and the only model that she had to protect herself was defensiveness. The first thing I started to change this pattern was to validate the feelings, validate the skills that she needed to muster, to be able to find a way to protect herself.

Most people hear “shadow” and think of something toxic, dangerous, or evil that needs purifying. In psychological terms, your shadow is much less dramatic and much more personal. It is simply the collection of traits, impulses, and needs that were unsafe, inconvenient, or “unacceptable” to express in your world. They got pushed into the dark not because they were inherently bad, but because your environment couldn’t hold them.

Your shadow can include things like anger, sensitivity, ambition, sexuality, confidence, grief, authority, vulnerability, assertiveness, emotional depth, emotional needs, and creativity. If you grew up being praised for being quiet, you might have pushed your natural loudness into the shadow. If you were told not to be “full of yourself,” you might have buried your confidence. If your sensitivity was mocked, you might now reject your own emotions and call it “being strong.”

Shadow work is not about eliminating these parts or unleashing them recklessly. It’s about bringing them back into the light in a grounded, self‑respectful way, so they can become resources instead of saboteurs. If you struggle with authenticity—if you feel like you’re constantly editing yourself, performing different versions of you, or resenting people who seem free to be how you secretly are—your shadow is active. This work helps you meet those disowned parts, understand why they went into hiding, and invite them back in a way that supports your life instead of blowing it up.

The psychology of the shadow

Jung’s shadow: the rejected self

Carl Jung described the shadow as the parts of the self that the ego rejects—not because they are inherently bad, but because they were judged, shamed, or punished in your environment. Maybe anger was dangerous around a volatile parent, so you learned to be “nice” instead. Maybe being proud of yourself drew envy or criticism, so you learned to minimise your wins. Maybe being sensitive got you called weak, so you armour up and roll your eyes at “dramatic” people.optimahealthservices+2

When you suppress a part, it doesn’t disappear. It becomes unconscious and starts driving your behaviour from the dark. The anger you never allow yourself might leak out as passive‑aggression, resentment, or a sudden blow‑up “out of nowhere.” The sexuality you shame might show up as secret behaviour you feel awful about afterwards. The power you disown might project onto others as jealousy or intense judgement. Shadow work doesn’t create these traits; it simply reveals what has been there all along, so you can choose what to do with it.

Projection: what you can’t stand in others

A big clue to your shadow is what you can’t stand in other people. Projection theory says we often react most strongly to qualities in others that we haven’t made peace with in ourselves. For example:thegentlecounsellor+2

• Judging “cocky” or confident people → often points to unclaimed confidence and power in you.

• Disliking “dramatic” or “emotional” people → can reflect your own unexpressed emotion and sensitivity.

• Rolling your eyes at “needy” people → often mirrors denied needs inside you.

Your triggers are not random; they are pointers to shadow material. This doesn’t mean everyone you dislike is secretly perfect and you’re wrong. It means that when your reaction is disproportionately intense, it’s worth asking, “What part of me is this touching?”

Parts work: the shadow in IFS

In Internal Family Systems (IFS), shadow material often shows up as different kinds of parts. There are Exiles—younger, wounded parts holding pain, shame, or fear that no one helped you process. Then there are Managers and Firefighters—protective parts that use perfectionism, control, numbness, anger, withdrawal, or other strategies to keep that pain buried and to manage your life.balancedawakening+2

From this perspective, your shadow traits are not trying to ruin your life. They’re trying to keep you safe based on old information. The part that sabotages your relationship right when it gets close might be trying to protect you from abandonment. The part that shuts down when someone is angry might be trying to protect you from a fight that once felt life‑threatening. The part that judges others might be defending against the terror of being judged yourself.

Shame: the glue that keeps the shadow hidden

Shame is the emotion that whispers, “If anyone saw this part of me, I’d be rejected.” It’s the glue that keeps the shadow buried. You might feel shame about wanting rest, sex, attention, success, expressing anger, or needing reassurance—not because those things are wrong, but because at some point, you got the message that they were. Shadow work dissolves shame not by forcing the part into the spotlight, but by bringing it into compassionate awareness. Instead of “This part is disgusting,” you begin to see, “This part is scared and trying to help in the only way it learned.”positivepsychology+2

Somatic shadow: where your body holds what you hide

Your body often stores what your psyche can’t fully process. Suppressed anger can show up as jaw tension, clenched fists, tight shoulders, migraines. Suppressed grief can feel like chest tightness, a lump in the throat, heaviness, tears that never quite come. Suppressed desire or sexuality might show up as pelvic tension, numbness, disconnection from your own pleasure. Suppressed confidence and power might look like collapsed posture, avoiding eye contact, speaking in a smaller voice than you actually have.neuropsychologycoach+2

As you integrate shadow parts—acknowledging them, giving them healthy channels, setting boundaries where needed—your body often feels more open, grounded, and alive. Your voice deepens, your posture changes, your breathing expands. Shadow work is therefore a huge part of embodied authenticity, not just a mental exercise.

Signs you’re operating from the shadow

You might be living from your shadow when you notice yourself overreacting or under-reacting to situations and not quite understanding why. Maybe someone sets a small boundary and you feel oddly devastated, or someone gives you a compliment and you feel anger or distrust instead of joy. You might judge others harshly, constantly criticise, or resent people who freely express the very things you suppress.

You may fear being “too much” or “too intense,” feel ashamed of normal desires—rest, sex, attention, success—and repeatedly find yourself in the same relationship patterns again and again. You might sabotage opportunities right when things are going well, pick fights, disappear, or suddenly “lose interest” as soon as you’re seen. You may numb out instead of feeling—scrolling, bingeing, overworking, drinking, obsessively planning—or feel inauthentic, hidden, like you’re always playing a role and never fully landing in your own skin.

Shadow patterns protect you—until they start to imprison you. They are strategies designed for an old context running your current life. The work now is not to get rid of them, but to understand, update, and reclaim the power and aliveness they’ve been sitting on top of.

The shadow integration framework: Notice → Name → Normalise → Integrate → Embody

Shadow work can get mystical and abstract, but in practice it’s very concrete. This framework gives you a simple way to work with your shadow parts when they show up in everyday life.

Step 1: Notice

You start by noticing when a doorway into shadow has opened. Common doorways include jealousy, irritation, envy, shutdown, self‑sabotage, judgment, and resentment. Something in you flares or collapses, and your first impulse might be to scold yourself, justify it, or pretend it’s not there. Instead, you experiment with getting curious:

“Something important is happening here.”

You don’t have to analyse it right away. You just register: This is a moment where a hidden part of me might be speaking.

Step 2: Name

Next, you give the part a name, like you did with inner child work. This doesn’t mean giving it a cute nickname (though you can); it means identifying which flavour of you is up. For example:

• “My jealous part is here.”

• “My angry protector is activated.”

• “This is my needy child part.”

• “My ambitious part wants expression.”

• “My shut‑down part is overwhelmed.”

Naming creates just enough distance for choice. It shifts you from “I am jealous, I am awful” to “A jealous part of me is online right now.” That small shift is the difference between being fused with the shadow and being in relationship with it.

Step 3: Normalise

Then you speak to the part with compassion rather than contempt. You might say quietly:

• “You make sense.”

• “You’re trying to protect me.”

• “You’re not bad; you learned this a long time ago.”

This doesn’t mean you let the part take over or justify harmful behaviour. It means you recognise that, at some point, this strategy was intelligent. Maybe your anger protected you from being steamrolled, your numbness protected you from overwhelming feelings, your jealousy protected you from being blindsided, your control protected you from chaos.

Shame says, “This part of me is disgusting.”
Shadow work says, “This part of me is scared and trying to help.”

That reframe softens your inner battle and opens the door to integration.

Step 4: Integrate

Integration is about asking:

“How can this part express itself in a healthy, respectful way?”

You’re not trying to get rid of anger, need, power, or vulnerability; you’re trying to find their grown‑up forms. A few examples:

• Anger integration

  • setting firm, clear boundaries instead of swallowing everything

  • having honest, contained conversations instead of silent resentment or explosive fights

  • giving your body an outlet—punching a pillow, vigorous exercise, shaking, vocalising—in safe spaces

• Jealousy integration

  • naming the fear beneath it (“I’m scared of being replaced or left”)

  • expressing your need for reassurance or clarity in close relationships

  • using jealousy as data about what you desire (more attention, commitment, creativity, visibility)

• Power / confidence integration

  • making small decisions instead of always deferring

  • practising confident posture and a steadier voice, even in low‑stakes situations

  • leading small things: planning a meet‑up, presenting an idea, initiating a project

• Vulnerability integration

  • sharing feelings with someone safe instead of shutting down

  • asking for help and letting it be okay that you can’t carry everything alone

  • letting yourself be seen when you’re not okay, without immediately apologising

Integration doesn’t mean letting the part run wild; it means giving it a seat at the table. You say, essentially, “You’re welcome here, and we’ll find a way for you to contribute that doesn’t blow up the house.”

Step 5: Embody

Finally, you take aligned action as your whole self, including the parts you used to exile. This is where authenticity shifts from an idea to a felt reality. Embodying your integrated shadow might look like:

• speaking your truth instead of silently judging

• taking up more space in a room or conversation (physically and energetically)

• saying yes to opportunities that scare and excite you, instead of shrinking away

• setting limits without drowning in guilt or over‑explaining

• choosing relationships that honour your full range instead of only your “easy” side

These actions are not about being loud or dramatic for the sake of it. They’re about letting more of you be here, in your voice, in your body, in your choices. Over time, the traits you once felt ashamed of—your intensity, depth, neediness, anger, ambition—become part of your power: the fuel behind your boundaries, your art, your leadership, your capacity for intimacy.

You don’t have to drag every shadow into the spotlight all at once. You just have to be willing, one trigger at a time, to pause and ask: “What part of me is speaking right now, and how can I bring them in closer, instead of pushing them further away?”

There is always a younger you in the room. The one whose stomach drops when a message is left on read, whose chest tightens when someone raises their voice, who feels like a burden for needing anything at all. Inner child work isn’t about indulging that part; it’s about finally letting them know there is an adult here now who can hold them.

This paid lesson is about turning that idea into lived practice—simple, repeatable ways to actually meet, soothe, and re‑parent your inner child in your real life, not just in theory. Use these as rituals you come back to when you notice yourself reacting from a younger place.

In this article you will find a link at the bottom to a fillable Notion module with extra journal prompts.

Read more

I’ve heard the term ‘inner child’ first time for a long time ago, but it never quite resonated with me. One part of me thought that mine should be just fine because my childhood wasn’t “that bad”. But the truth is, for your inner child to need your adult self now, doesn’t take big T trauma. It only takes small moments that have compounded over time when you’ve felt controlled, ignored, left alone.

I started exploring my inner child in my previous relationship in my attempt to heal myself to ‘heal my relationship’ (that didn’t work because ultimately you cannot do the work for the other person) but I got closer to my inner child, which was all that I eventually needed to find the strength to leave the relationship that too much resembled the image of a relationship I had from my parents when growing up.

My inner child had learned to stay quiet, not raise conflict, not to be “difficult”, people-please, not set boundaries. The list could go on. And these were the traits I still applied to my adult relationships. And it wasn’t until I was able to notice them, connect with curiosity, validate my own feelings, nourish myself and rewrite the stories as my adult self that I was able to control my defensiveness, and also leave a relationship that was unhealthy for me.

The “inner child” isn’t just a cute meme, a journaling trend, or an excuse to blame your parents forever. It’s a way of describing the neural, emotional, and relational imprints your early experiences left on your nervous system. The brain doesn’t just store memories as stories; it also stores them as patterns of expectation and sensation—what love feels like, what danger feels like, what you have to do to stay safe and connected. Those early templates don’t vanish when you grow up. They keep living inside your reactions, especially when you’re tired, stressed, or emotionally close to someone.

Every adult carries multiple younger versions of themselves:

• the child who felt unseen

• the child who felt responsible for everyone

• the child who felt unsafe

• the child who learned to fawn and be “easy”

• the child who became the “good one”

• the child who stayed quiet to avoid trouble

• the child who needed more tenderness

• the child who needed more structure and protection

These parts are not metaphors; they’re clusters of memory, sensation, and belief that were formed when you actually were that age. Today, they tend to show up in patterns like self‑doubt and second‑guessing, people‑pleasing and over‑functioning, fear of conflict or being “too much,” emotional shutdown, perfectionism and control, or repeatedly choosing partners who feel familiar rather than truly healthy.

Inner child work is not about staying stuck in the past or turning your caregivers into villains. It’s about saying: “I want to understand where this pattern started so I can finally stop reliving it.” When you can see the link between a 7‑year‑old who learned to be the helpful, quiet one and a 28‑year‑old who can’t set a boundary at work or in love, you stop calling yourself crazy and start seeing the logic. Inner child healing becomes the bridge between insight and transformation: it helps you see what your past self needed, and how you can become that safe, attuned adult for yourself now. It also reconnects you with the things you loved as a kid—your play, creativity, and weirdness—which often point toward future passions, friendships, and even work that feels deeply authentic.

The psychology behind your inner child

Attachment: your first blueprint

From birth, your nervous system is learning: Is the world safe? Do people come when I cry? Is it okay to have needs? What do I have to do to keep love? Your earliest caregivers answer those questions not with lectures, but with how they show up: how consistent or inconsistent they are, how emotionally available or checked‑out they feel, how safe or chaotic the environment is, how they respond when you’re in distress, and how they set limits and boundaries.

Over time, this becomes your attachment template—your internal sense of what love feels like and who you need to be to stay connected. If the atmosphere was warm and responsive, your system may have coded love as “steady, safe, and repairable.” If it was unpredictable, critical, or emotionally distant, love may now feel like “walking on eggshells,” “performing,” or “holding everything together so no one explodes.” Your adult patterns are often your childhood survival strategies dressed in grown‑up clothing. If “being the helper” kept you loved as a kid, it makes sense that you still over‑give now. If being quiet and “easy” kept you safe, it makes sense that your voice goes missing in conflict.

Emotional memory: the past lives in the body

Your nervous system remembers emotional experiences even when your conscious mind doesn’t hold a clear story. Neuroscience describes how early experiences are stored not only as explicit memories (things you can describe) but also as implicit emotional memory—body sensations, startle responses, gut feelings, and automatic beliefs about yourself and others.

That’s why you can feel deeply hurt even when you “know” something isn’t a big deal, panic about abandonment even with a loving partner, or shut down in conflict even when you genuinely want closeness. In those moments, your body is reacting not just to this situation, but to every past moment that felt similar. Your inner child is essentially the part of you still living in that earlier emotional time zone, reacting like the threat or loneliness is happening all over again.

Parts work (IFS): meeting your inner family

Internal Family Systems (IFS) takes this further and suggests that your psyche is made of parts, not just one unified “me.” Some parts hold your wounds, some parts try to protect you from ever feeling those wounds again, and some parts frantically distract you when pain gets too close. Inner child work often focuses on:

• Exiles – wounded child parts carrying sadness, fear, shame, loneliness.

• Protectors – perfectionism, people‑pleasing, anger, withdrawal, control; the parts that manage life.

• Firefighters – shutdown, numbing, bingeing, scrolling, overworking; the parts that slam the emergency brakes when feelings get too intense.

Every part is trying to protect you, even if its methods are outdated or messy. The goal is not to kill off your inner child or your protectors, but to let your grounded adult self step in as the leader—so those parts can finally relax a little and stop running your whole life from the shadows.

Re‑parenting: becoming who you needed

Re‑parenting is what happens when your adult self starts giving you what you didn’t get enough of then: the validation you never received, the boundaries you needed someone else to set, the protection you lacked, the emotional presence you missed, and the basic sense of safety and nurturance every child deserves. It’s not about rewriting history or pretending your childhood was perfect. It’s about stepping into emotional adulthood and saying: “I can’t change what happened, but I can absolutely change how I care for myself now.”

In practice, that might look like: telling yourself “Of course you’re upset, that was scary” instead of “You’re overreacting”; choosing not to over‑explain yourself to someone who’s shaming you; cooking yourself real food when you’d normally skip meals; going to bed when the younger part wants to scroll until 2am; or saying “no” when the inner child is terrified of disappointing someone. These tiny acts, repeated over time, slowly rewrite the internal message from “No one is coming” to “I am here for me now.”

How your inner child shows up in adult life

You may have a younger part asking for attention if you fear being “too much” or “too needy,” panic when someone pulls away or doesn’t reply, or feel responsible for other people’s emotions and moods. You might notice you’re terrified of upsetting or disappointing people, you shut down when conflict arises, you struggle to trust good things that are actually healthy, or you long for nurturing but feel awkward or guilty receiving it. Over‑apologising, shrinking yourself in groups, or feeling like a child inside in adult situations—job interviews, performance reviews, relationship talks—are also common signals.

Seen through an inner child lens, these are not random quirks or personal failings. They’re unhealed experiences asking for care. The part that panics when someone doesn’t text back might be the teenager who was ignored, the eight‑year‑old who never knew when a parent would be loving or cold, or the little one who only got attention when they were “good.” Your adult brain might know it’s just a busy day. Your inner child reads it as abandonment and spirals.

Working with your inner child matters because until those younger parts feel seen, soothed, and protected by you, they will keep hijacking your reactions. You can try to change your behaviour on the surface—set boundaries, communicate better, choose different partners—but if the five‑year‑old inside still believes “love disappears if I’m honest,” you will feel like you’re pushing against yourself every step of the way.

The inner child healing process: Notice → Connect → Validate → Nourish → Rewrite

Think of this as a gentle sequence you can walk through when you feel yourself reacting in a way that feels “younger” than the situation calls for. You don’t have to do it perfectly for it to work; even a clumsy version is still a new experience for your system.

Step 1: Notice

The first step is simply to notice when a younger part is online. This is less about analysing and more about catching the flavour of your reaction. Some clues: your tone becomes more childlike or small, you suddenly feel tiny, helpless, or over‑exposed, the intensity of your reaction feels much bigger than the situation on paper, you crave comfort rather than solutions, or you spiral, catastrophise, and feel abandoned over something that “shouldn’t” feel like a big deal.

Instead of judging yourself for this, you can quietly name it: “Something younger in me is here.” That one sentence already shifts you out of total fusion (“I am this reaction”) into a tiny bit of space (“Part of me is reacting this way”). Over time, you’ll start to recognise your specific inner child tells—maybe a certain heaviness in your stomach, or a familiar tightness in your throat, or a very particular kind of shame.

Write notes and reflections about noticing different clues:
– What does it feel like when a younger part is present?
– What kinds of situations tend to trigger that feeling?

Step 2: Connect

Once you’ve noticed, the instinct is often to scold or override yourself. Inner child work asks you to do the opposite: to connect with curiosity instead of criticism. You might gently ask:

How old do I feel right now?
Where do I feel this in my body?
What does this remind me of from earlier in my life?

You don’t need a precise age or a clear memory. You might get a vague sense of “small,” “teenage,” or “like when I was in that first relationship.” You might notice your chest feels tight in the same way it did when you were sent to your room, or your stomach flips like it did when someone raised their voice. The goal is simply to turn toward that part of you and say, in effect, “I see you. I’m listening.”

Step 3: Validate

This is where shame begins to melt. You speak to that younger part the way you wish an attuned adult had spoken to you back then:

• “Your feelings make sense.”

• “You were never too much.”

• “You were allowed to need support.”

• “I’m so sorry you went through that alone.”

• “You deserved to be protected and cared for.”

Validation doesn’t mean you endorse every thought racing through your mind. It means you honour that the emotions, in context, are understandable. When a younger part finally hears “Of course you feel this way” instead of “You’re overreacting,” the nervous system often softens—a small exhale, a loosening in the shoulders, a little less urgency.

Write notes and reflections here about how this made you feel:
– What did you tell yourself?
– Did anything shift in your body when you offered validation?

Step 4: Nourish

Validation is emotional; nourishing is practical. This is where you give your inner child what they need in the present, in physical, tangible ways. It might look like letting yourself rest instead of pushing through; offering reassurance (“I’m not leaving you; I’m staying with you in this feeling”); putting protection and boundaries in place with others; giving yourself warmth, kind self‑talk, and comfort objects (blankets, tea, soft clothes, music); adding playful moments and things you loved as a kid (drawing, dancing, building, reading in a cosy corner); or creating structure and routines that make life feel more predictable (regular meals, bedtime, money check‑ins, calendar planning).

Nourishing doesn’t have to be dramatic to count. Making yourself a proper dinner instead of skipping food because you’re anxious is re‑parenting. Putting your phone in another room at midnight so your inner teenager doesn’t scroll until 3am is re‑parenting. Saying “I’m not available to talk right now” instead of forcing yourself to be emotionally on‑call is re‑parenting.

Reflect on how this makes you feel:
– What are your favourite ways to cultivate your inner playfulness?
– What routines make you feel safe and held?
– What are your favourite affirmations or kind self‑talk lines?
– What comfort food or objects make you feel safe and loved?

Step 5: Rewrite

The final step is where your adult self gently takes the wheel. After you’ve noticed, connected, validated, and nourished, you ask:

“What does my adult self choose now?”
“What would a loving, protective parent do in this moment?”

Sometimes the answer will be to speak up, sometimes to pause, sometimes to walk away, sometimes to reach out. The action itself matters less than the place it comes from: not from a panicked five‑year‑old trying to survive, but from the steadier, wiser part of you that can see the bigger picture.

Every time you act from that place—even in tiny ways—you are quietly rewriting your internal story from “No one was there for me” to “I am here for me now.” That’s what inner child healing really is: not an aesthetic or a trend, but a gradual, deeply personal shift in who runs your life when things get hard.

For the woman who’s asking “Why can’t I just leave?”

This piece is for you if you’re caught in that in‑between place where:

• part of you knows this relationship isn’t right,

• another part is terrified to let go,

• and your nervous system is treating “leaving” like a life‑threatening event.

By the end of this article you’ll have:

• a clearer sense of why breakup decisions feel impossible (even when the relationship is clearly misaligned),

• a few concrete tools to see the relationship without the fog of hope and chemistry,

• gentle ways to move toward a decision you can live with, and

• first steps for detaching without losing yourself—so you can start to feel like you again, instead of just “his person.”

I lived in this in‑between for years. Half‑in, half‑out. Torn between staying with someone I loved, in a situation that hurt me, or walking myself through the pain of leaving.

It took me a long time to see the whole picture of the relationship I was in—the parts my friends and family kept gently circling, the toxic traits they named, the ways I was slowly disappearing inside it. At some point, I stopped trusting my own perception and started internalising the words I heard on monthly (if not weekly) basis.

I genuinely believed I was the problem. That if I could just fix myself, communicate better, be less sensitive, less “dramatic”, then the relationship would finally work. And that’s never how a healthy relationship works. You are never meant to be the only person doing the changing.

Late last year, I realised I’d come to the end of the road. There wasn’t another version of this relationship I hadn’t already tried to live through. That moment didn’t magically make everything easy—but it did mark the start of a different kind of journey: the long walk back to myself.

What I’m sharing in this piece are the tools I wish I’d had in those three years of internal conflict—the ones that would have given language to what my body was trying to tell me, and a map through the fog. My hope is that somewhere in here, you find even one sentence, one framework, one small practice that feels like a light switching on inside your own story.

We talk about “just leave” like it’s a switch you flip. But if you’re in a relationship that’s intense, on‑off, confusing, or quietly eroding you, leaving is not just a logistics problem. It’s a nervous system problem. Your body has paired this person with safety—even if they’re the one who keeps taking it away.

So when you try to go, it doesn’t feel like liberation.
It feels like death.

This article is your first glimpse into a different way: one that honours your attachment, your body, your grief, and your future self—without shaming you for staying longer than people on the internet think you “should” have.

Why breakup decisions feel impossible (even when you “know”)

You’re not stuck because you’re stupid or weak. You’re stuck because your brain and body got wired to see this person as your regulator.

A few things that can glue you in place:

• Intensity that feels like love. The relationship swings from deep closeness and “no one has ever loved me like this” to conflict, criticism, distance or volatility. Your system pairs relief after conflict with love, and it’s addictive.

• Hope addiction. You’re not only attached to who they are now; you’re attached to who they could be. You’re staying for the potential, the almost, the glimpses of what it could feel like “if only…”

• Fear dressed up as love. Thoughts like “I’ll never find anyone like him”, “What if I regret this forever?”, “What if I’m the problem?” feel romantic and profound. Underneath, they’re often pure fear—fear of being alone, of being wrong, of hurting someone, of starting over.

On top of that, your nervous system is constantly scanning for threat and safety. In a dysregulating relationship, it can learn:

• conflict = panic,

• reunion = relief,

• “leaving” = danger.

So of course you freeze. Of course you second‑guess yourself. Of course you keep asking other people what to do. Your system is simply choosing what feels safer right now, not what will be healthy long term.

You don’t fix that with “one more pros and cons list.” You fix it by bringing clarity, nervous‑system safety, and self‑trust back into the picture, one small step at a time.

Phase 1: Clear the fog before you decide

You can’t make a grounded choice while your brain is inflating every romantic memory and muting every red flag. So before you try to answer “stay or go?”, you need to see the relationship as it actually is, not as you wish it were.

Here are three simple practices to begin.

1. The “5 years from now” body test

You don’t have to decide your entire life today—but your body already knows how it feels about five more years of this.

Try this:

• Close your eyes and imagine your relationship exactly as it’s been in the last 6 months. No upgrades, no dramatic rock bottom—just… this.

• Now mentally extend that out for 5 years:

  • same patterns

  • same triggers

  • same repair style

  • same amount of emotional labour you do

  • same level of safety or eggshell‑walking

Then notice your body:

• Tight chest, pit in stomach, pressure, dread, heaviness, wanting to disappear? That’s a no, even if your mind argues.

• A strange sense of relief, a tiny drop of peace behind the sadness or fear? That’s closer to a yes, even if you’re grieving.

You don’t have to act on this immediately. Just let yourself register what your system is already telling you.

2. Fear‑based vs truth‑based wanting

Your “I want to stay” might be made of two very different ingredients: fear and truth.

Grab a notebook and draw two columns:

Left side: Fear voice
Right side: Truth voice

Let the fear voice go first. Write down everything that keeps you stuck:

• “What if I never find someone else?”

• “What if he really is my person and I’m ruining it?”

• “What if I hurt him and I’m the bad one?”

• “What if I regret it forever?”

Then let the truth voice speak:

• “I’m exhausted.”

• “I don’t feel emotionally safe.”

• “I’m smaller in this relationship than I am alone.”

• “My friends are worried about me.”

• “When I imagine my best life, it’s not this.”

Now ask yourself, honestly:

• What percentage of my desire to stay is fear‑based?

• What percentage is truth‑based?

You don’t have to “fix” it yet, or you don’t definitely have to have a clear percentage in mind, just a little guide whether it’s 50/50 or something else. Just seeing the split can dissolve some of the confusion. You cannot choose clearly when fear is carrying most of the equation.

3. The 72‑hour truth window

Your brain is a drama queen when you’re activated. Right after a big fight, a breakup scare, or a triggering moment, your emotional system floods your body with stress chemicals and attachment panic.

In that state, you’ll likely:

• obsess over the good moments,

• minimise the bad,

• convince yourself that the intensity means destiny,

• catastrophise every possible outcome.

You are not meant to make life decisions from that place.

For the next time you feel like you must decide right now, try this:

• Day 1: emotional storm. Do not analyse your relationship. Drink water, sleep, walk, breathe. Everything in your head today is extreme.

• Day 2: numb, spaced‑out, or flat. Your system is recalibrating. Still not a decision day.

• Day 3: little pockets of clarity start to appear. You can remember both the good and the harm. Your body feels slightly less like it’s on fire.

On Day 3 (or later), ask:

• When I imagine staying, does my body soften or tighten?

• When I imagine leaving, does my body soften or tighten?

You’re not looking for zero fear. You’re looking for which option brings a tiny bit more quiet, space, or breath. That’s the direction of your truth.

Phase 2: Moving from knowing to doing (without blowing up your life in chaos)

Clarity is one thing. Acting on it is another.

Most people either:

• stay for years after they know, slowly eroding themselves, or

• blow everything up in an explosion of pain and then doubt their own decision because it was made in heat.

There is a third way: slow, self‑respecting action.

A few things to start thinking about (without giving away every detail):

• Have you actually expressed your needs and concerns clearly before, or only hinted?

• Do you have one safe person you can tell what’s really going on?

• Do you know where you’d go, practically, if you needed space?

• What would make you feel proud of how you left, even if it was still painful?

You don’t need full answers before you do anything. But starting to build psychological clarity + emotional readiness + basic practical safety changes the way you move. It turns “maybe I’ll leave in a panic one day” into “I’m quietly setting myself up to choose myself, if and when I need to.”

Phase 3: Detaching without losing your mind

Leaving (or even taking serious space) is not the tidy relief the internet sometimes promises. It often gets worse before it gets better.

Why? Because:

• your brain is withdrawing from a pattern it became chemically attached to,

• your nervous system thinks it lost its regulator,

• your fantasies and future plans are collapsing.

That doesn’t mean you made the wrong choice. It means your system is recalibrating.

Here are three tiny tools you can use in that “I want to leave / I’ve just left / I’m trying to stay away” zone.

1. The 60‑second urge pause

When you want to text, call, stalk their socials, or “just check they’re okay”:

• Put your phone down.

• Say to yourself: “I don’t actually want him, I want relief from this feeling.”

• Set a 60‑second timer.

• Breathe slowly until it goes off.

• Text or call your mom, trusted friend or a sibling instead.

Most urges spike and fall within a minute if you don’t act on them. The goal isn’t to never reach out; it’s to stop treating every urge like a command.

2. A one‑sentence nervous‑system anchor

When you feel panic, longing, or guilt rise:

• Place a hand on your chest or sternum.

• Feel your feet on the floor.

• Say: “I am here. I am in my body. I am safe right now.”

You’re reminding your system that whatever your thoughts are doing, this moment is survivable.

3. Reality > fantasy

Keep a private note (or page in your journal) called “Reality.”

Whenever your brain starts replaying only the sweetest memories or dream future, take 30 seconds to write one line about what it was actually like:

• how conflict actually went,

• how your body actually felt,

• what it cost you to keep the peace,

• how much of yourself you had to shrink.

You’re not doing this to demonise them. You’re doing it to stay in contact with the full picture, so grief doesn’t drag you back into the exact thing that hurt you.

This is just the beginning

If this felt like someone describing your insides back to you, you’re not alone—and you’re not broken.

There is a path from:

• “I feel addicted to this person and I hate myself for it,”

• to “I left, but I still feel like I’m dying,”

• to “I can’t believe I ever thought that was love, and I trust myself now.”

This article is just a first glimpse. There is so much more to say about:

• how to actually leave with self‑respect,

• what no contact really means (and when it’s possible, AND how to actually do it),

• how to navigate the grief crash without going back,

• how to rebuild an identity that isn’t organised around him,

• how to evaluate “change” if he comes back later, and how not to use that little hope of reconnection as an escape from your pain you are feeling right now

If you’d like more on this—deeper dives, step‑by‑step processes, nervous‑system‑friendly tools, maybe even a full course walking you through it:

• Comment and tell me which phase you’re in: fog, decision, or aftermath.

• Share this with the one friend who is quietly living this cycle.

• Tap the little heart or reply with “more on this, please” so I know this is something you want me to keep creating.

You are absolutely capable of leaving what isn’t aligned and building a life that feels like oxygen instead of eggshells. You don’t have to do it in chaos, and you don’t have to do it alone. I’m now on the other side of this and (not maybe fully there yet, but almost) and I know that this might be the last thing that you want to hear right now, but I promise, it is going to get better. You got this!

You don’t have to meditate for 45 minutes to be “regulated.” Your nervous system responds to tiny, specific cues: a sigh that signals “we can stand down,” eyes that scan a safe room instead of a threat, another human’s steady breathing next to yours, your feet touching the floor while your mind races.

The practices in this lesson aren’t about becoming Zen or never reacting again. They’re about building a bridge between “I know I’m dysregulated” and “I have something I can actually do to help my body feel a little safer right now.” Each one is designed to be simple, quick, and usable in messy real life—after a hard message, in the middle of a busy day, or when your chest is tight and your brain is telling scary stories.

In this article you will find a link at the bottom to a fillable Notion module with extra journal prompts.

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We hear so often about ‘regulating your nervous system’ but no one really tells what that actually means. I tried for years from a place where it would’ve never happened. In a situation that felt ultimately emotionally unsafe for me, no amount of meditating, breath work or grounding would’ve actually helped much, except in the fleeting moments.

And that is what we often get wrong. Our nervous system is so tied into our surroundings and it works like a sponge reading different cues, expressions, and attuning to the environment that sometimes ‘regulating your nervous system’ means removing yourself from an environment or situation that you know is not good for you. This is something I learn through out the last few years, and how much it now makes sense when I felt that nothing was helping to calm myself and my thoughts.

Your nervous system is essentially your body’s communication and control network. It’s the system that lets you sense the world, make meaning of what’s happening, and then respond—sometimes consciously, often automatically. It’s made up of your brain, spinal cord, and a huge web of nerves that run through your whole body, sending electrical and chemical messages back and forth all day, every day.

Those messages control everything from obvious actions like moving, speaking, and deciding… to quiet background processes like heartbeat, breathing, digestion, temperature, and hormone release. In simple terms: your nervous system is the part of you that keeps track of what’s going on (inside and outside), decides whether you’re safe, and tells the rest of your body how to respond.

When people talk about “regulating your nervous system,” they’re talking about supporting that communication network so it can move back toward balance after stress instead of getting stuck in survival mode. A well‑regulated nervous system can respond to challenges—your heart rate goes up, you focus, you take action—and then come back down again when the moment has passed, returning to a state where you feel relatively safe, present, and connected (talking about those moments when your body feels like you’re chased by a lion but you are just reading an email at the office).

A dysregulated system, on the other hand, tends to stay revved up (anxious, wired, easily triggered) or shut down (numb, detached, exhausted), even when nothing dangerous is happening right now. Regulation practices—things like breathwork, grounding, rest, movement, co‑regulation with safe people, and honest emotional expression—don’t “turn off” your reactions; they help your system find its way back to a zone where you can think clearly, feel your feelings without drowning in them, and choose your next move instead of being run entirely by old alarms.

We talk about “being authentic” like it’s just a question of courage or self‑knowledge: know your truth, then say your truth. But you’ve probably already had experiences where you knew exactly how you felt, maybe even rehearsed what you wanted to say—and then, in the moment, something else came out. You froze. You people‑pleased. You snapped. You went numb.

That’s not because you’re weak or fake. It’s because your nervous system gets a vote. When your body thinks you’re in danger—socially, emotionally, physically—it will prioritise safety over self‑expression every single time.

Authenticity needs three things: presence, clarity, and capacity.
You can know your truth, have the words for it, and even want to speak it—but if your system is overwhelmed, none of that will come out the way you intend.

When your system is under stress, you may:

• shut down

• people‑please

• snap or explode

• numb out

• avoid honesty

• freeze mid‑sentence

• lose your words

• catastrophise

• disconnect from your body

These are nervous system states, not character flaws. Your body is trying to protect you using strategies it learned a long time ago.

Regulation is not about being calm all the time or never getting triggered. It’s about being able to return to yourself—to come back to a state where you can feel, think, and choose at the same time. It’s about becoming the grounded version of you who can actually hold her truth, not just know it in theory.

You’ll learn how to move from:

• fight → clarity

• flight → groundedness

• freeze → connection

• fawn → truth

so that your authenticity becomes sustainable, not just something that appears on your best days and vanishes when life is messy.

Nervous system basics (Polyvagal theory)

Your system moves between a few main states. None of them are “good” or “bad”; they’re just information about how safe your body feels right now. Polyvagal theory describes three core patterns: ventral vagal (safe and connected), sympathetic (fight/flight), and dorsal vagal (freeze/shutdown).

1. Ventral vagal (safety & connection)

This is your regulated state—sometimes called the “safe and social” state. Here you tend to feel:

• grounded

• warm

• socially open

• clear‑thinking

• connected to yourself and others

• able to speak honestly and listen

In ventral, your body reads the environment as safe enough to relax its defenses. Your prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain that helps with perspective, empathy, and decision‑making) is more online, which makes authenticity, creativity, and nuanced boundaries much easier.

The goal is not to live here 24/7—that’s not realistic for human beings—but to visit more often and return more easily when you get knocked out of it.

2. Sympathetic (fight / flight)

This is your mobilisation state—geared towards action and protection. In sympathetic activation, you might feel:

• anxious

• angry or irritable

• urgent

• restless

• reactive

• like you’re rushing, talking fast, or abruptly shutting down

Your system feels like something needs to be done right now: argue, fix, explain, run, manage, defend. Boundaries often either come out sharp here (“I’m done, leave me alone”) or not at all, because you’re too busy firefighting to speak from clarity.

Sympathetic isn’t “bad”—you need it to take action and protect yourself—but when you get stuck here, authenticity can turn into reactivity.

3. Dorsal vagal (freeze / shutdown)

This is your immobilisation state. Here, your system has decided: “It’s too much; the safest thing is to pull away.” It can feel like:

• numbness

• disconnection

• low or flat mood

• heaviness and slowness

• hopelessness

• being withdrawn or spaced‑out

You might still look functional on the outside—going to work, replying to messages—but internally you feel far away, like you’re watching your life from a distance.

Dorsal also isn’t “bad”; it’s a last‑resort protection strategy. But if you’re often here, it’s very hard to access your truth, let alone express it.

Your ability to be authentic depends heavily on which state you’re in. You can’t expect yourself to communicate like a grounded queen when your body thinks it’s in danger.

This module is about learning to notice your state and gently guide it back toward ventral safety, so your truth has a regulated place to land.

The regulation pathway: Notice → Name → Normalise → Nurture

Instead of judging your reactions (“Why am I like this?”), you’re going to learn to work with your nervous system. This pathway is inspired by polyvagal‑informed approaches that emphasise awareness and compassionate response rather than forcing yourself to “calm down.”

Step 1: Notice

Ask:

What is happening in my body right now?

You’re simply gathering data. You might notice:

• Is my heart racing?

• Is my chest tight or heavy?

• Is my jaw clenched?

• Do I feel buzzy and wired, or heavy and far away?

• Am I breathing shallowly or holding my breath?

You don’t need to change anything yet. You’re just turning toward yourself instead of abandoning yourself.

Step 2: Name

Next, you identify the state as best you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Simple is fine:

• “This feels like fight/flight.” (sympathetic)

• “This feels like freeze/shutdown.” (dorsal)

• “This feels more like safe/connected.” (ventral)

Naming your state helps your brain move from pure survival into a bit more observer mode, which already creates a small amount of space and choice.

If you’re not sure, you can say:

“Something is happening in my system. I don’t have to figure it out fully to offer myself care.”

Step 3: Normalise

Here, you consciously step out of self‑blame. You tell yourself:

“My body is responding to stress. This makes sense.”

You are not weak, dramatic, or regressing. Your system is doing what it was wired to do to keep you safe, often based on past experiences where your safety or belonging really was at risk.

Normalising doesn’t mean you like the state; it means you stop attacking yourself for having it. That in itself is regulating.

Step 4: Nurture

Now you choose a regulating practice that meets you where you are—something to help your body feel just a little bit safer, softer, or more present. You’re not trying to jump from a 10/10 panic to bliss. You’re aiming for a 5% shift.

This might mean:

• If you’re in fight/flight: shaking out your hands, a brisk walk, a few longer exhales, changing rooms, a cold splash of water.

• If you’re in freeze/shutdown: gentle movement, light, music, a warm shower, co‑regulation with someone safe, orienting to the room by naming what you see.

• If you’re in ventral: savouring it, breathing it in, letting your body register “this is what safe feels like.”

Over time, this sequence—Notice → Name → Normalise → Nurture—becomes a habit. Instead of shaming your state, you support it. Instead of forcing yourself to be “chill,” you give your body what it actually needs to come a little closer to grounded.

Why regulation is the engine of authenticity

It’s tempting to think the work is: “figure out what I really feel and say it.” But without regulation, that plan collapses the second your system perceives threat. Your nervous system will always prioritise safety over truth until it learns that, in your current life, the two can coexist.

Regulation work is not a detour away from authenticity; it’s the engine that makes authenticity possible in real conditions—when you’re tired, triggered, disappointed, or scared.

A few examples:

• You’re in sympathetic fight, heart pounding, ready to fire off a long angry message. You Notice your racing heart, Name it as “fight,” Normalise (“of course I’m activated; that comment felt attacking”), and Nurture with a few slow breaths and a 10‑minute pause. Then you speak from clarity instead of reactivity.

• You’re in dorsal shutdown after a conflict, wanting to disappear. You Notice the heaviness, Name it as “freeze,” Normalise (“my body thinks I’m safer if I go away”), and Nurture with a warm drink, soft music, and stepping outside for light. Later, you’re able to send one honest line instead of ghosting.

• You’re in ventral safety with a close friend. You Notice your relaxed shoulders, Name it as “connected,” and Nurture by letting yourself share a slightly more vulnerable truth than usual. Your system gets evidence: “When I’m somewhat regulated, honesty actually deepens connection.”

Each time you walk the pathway, you widen your window of tolerance—the range where you can feel what you feel, stay in your body, and still have access to your voice.

This isn’t about becoming unbothered. It’s about becoming someone you can trust to come back to herself—someone whose authenticity isn’t fragile or only available on perfect days. As you keep practising awareness and regulation, your nervous system slowly learns a new pattern:

“I can feel a lot and still stay with me. I can tell the truth without abandoning my body.”

We know too well the feeling of your words getting stuck in your throat and you want to tell what is wrong, or what is bothering you but you just don’t get the words out of your mouth. Or at least I got very familiar with that feeling too often, and the first time I started changing was that I needed to force it. I didn’t have the knowledge I have now but eventually the result was the same, just maybe with a few more painful moments that I hope you are able to avoid.

Your voice doesn’t need a personality transplant; it needs practice in small, honest reps. This article is about exactly that—building real‑life exercises that help your nervous system experience, over and over, that truth can be safe enough, and it is safe enough to speak it out loud.

In this article you will find a link at the bottom to a fillable Notion module with extra journal prompts.

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I learn to do that to keep the peace because that’s what I had learned from very early in my childhood, scanning for other’s moods, to not come across as a nuisance or difficult. And that carried to my adult relationships.

Realising that took a lot of reflection and I hope that back then I would’ve had the tools I have now and that I want to share with you. But it felt like a little revelation in my brain when something in me just gave up the fight, and my mind finally took a breath and said that if I’m not enough as I am with my messiness, needs, opinions and wants, I’m not going to try and force someone to believe them, meet my needs or understand me anymore, and instead find a place where I feel like that I belong.

So many of us did the inner work first: we learned to name our feelings, spot our people‑pleasing, feel our nervous system rev up or shut down, notice when we’re abandoning ourselves in those small ways. But there’s this next, tender edge that often gets skipped: letting what’s true inside of you actually be heard outside.

Your voice is not just sound. It is:

• your truth

• your desires

• your needs

• your limits

• your preferences

• your identity

• your boundaries

• your vulnerability

Every time you speak, you’re not just making noise—you’re building a bridge between your inner world and the world around you.

If you grew up in a home, culture, or relationship where honesty was punished, ignored, or mocked, your nervous system did something very intelligent: it chose survival over self‑expression. It learned, deeply and quietly:

“Staying quiet is safer than being real.”

As an adult, that can look like:

• softening your truth to avoid conflict

• saying “I don’t mind” when you really, really do

• using hints instead of clear words

• apologising for having needs

• choosing silence over honesty

• rehearsing what you want to say but never actually saying it

• feeling invisible, misunderstood, or secretly resentful

None of this means you’re broken. It means your body did its best to protect you with the tools it had at the time.

This chapter is about restoring your authentic voice—gently, not violently. You’re not forcing yourself into big confrontations or performative truth‑telling. You’re practising speaking what’s real in small, doable ways, at a pace that feels safe enough for your nervous system to come with you. Over time, your body gets to learn something new:

“Being real is no longer a threat. It’s how I stay connected to myself.”

The science of self‑silencing & authentic voice

Self‑silencing: when you disappear in your own life

Psychologist Dana Jack describes self‑silencing as the learned habit of suppressing your feelings to keep relationships smooth. Instead of saying what’s real, you swallow it. Over time, research shows that this chronic pattern is linked to higher levels of depression, resentment, emotional exhaustion, and a painful loss of a felt sense of self.

When you silence yourself long enough, you don’t just hide your needs from other people—you start to lose contact with them yourself. You forget what your truth was because you never give it air.

Polyvagal theory & your voice

Your voice is wired into your nervous system. Polyvagal theory explains how, when your system feels safe and socially engaged, the ventral vagal state supports open facial expression, prosody in your voice, and easier connection. When your body senses threat, that system goes offline and more primitive survival modes take over.

That might look like:

• your voice getting smaller or shaky

• your throat constricting

• words getting stuck

• going blank, freezing, or changing the subject

Expression is not just a communication skill; it’s a physiological state. When your body feels safer, your voice flows more easily. This is why regulating your nervous system—through breath, grounding, co‑regulation, movement—matters so much for honest conversations.

The social mask

Sociologist Erving Goffman wrote about the “presentation of self,” where we perform socially acceptable versions of ourselves to fit into different settings. Over time, that social mask can become so automatic that the real self gets buried underneath.

Masks can be protective and sometimes necessary. But when you live almost entirely from the mask, you can end up feeling like a side character in your own life: agreeable, “easy‑going”, endlessly adaptable—and quietly disconnected from what you actually want.

In this work, you’re not ripping the mask off overnight. You’re slowly loosening it, choice by choice, so you can breathe as yourself again.

Expressive writing & speaking as medicine

Research on expressive writing and talking—much of it led by James Pennebaker—shows that putting your experiences into words can increase emotional clarity, deepen self‑understanding, and even support immune function. Participants who wrote honestly about difficult experiences often showed improved health markers and fewer doctor visits compared to those who didn’t express themselves.

Speaking truth, whether on paper or out loud, is not just cathartic. It is a form of medicine for your nervous system and your relationships.

Signs you’re not using your authentic voice

You might be holding your voice back if:

• you speak indirectly instead of clearly

• you minimise your feelings (“It’s fine, it’s not a big deal”)

• you apologise for things you didn’t do

• you fear being seen as “needy,” “dramatic,” or “too much”

• you avoid difficult conversations even when something is wrong

• you censor or soften your truth to manage other people’s reactions

• you resent people for not understanding needs you never actually voiced

• you communicate through tone, silence, or withdrawal instead of words

These patterns are learned, not fixed. If you learned to stay quiet, you can also learn to speak.

The self‑expression framework: Feel → Form → Speak → Ground → Repair

This framework helps your truth move from your body into language in a way that feels doable, especially if expression has felt unsafe.

1. Feel

Start inside. Before you try to say anything out loud, pause and notice what is actually happening in you.

Ask yourself:

• What do I feel?

• What do I need?

• Where is my boundary?

Feelings might show up as emotions, but they might also first appear as body sensations: tight jaw, burning in the throat, heaviness in the chest. You don’t need neat labels right away. It’s enough to acknowledge: Something is happening in me. It matters.

2. Form

Then, you give that inner experience a simple shape in words.

Use stems like:

• “I feel…”

• “I need…”

• “I prefer…”

• “I’m uncomfortable with…”

• “I’m not available for…”

Keep it short and clear. For example:

• “I feel overwhelmed and need some quiet time tonight.”

• “I’m not available to talk about this over text.”

• “I prefer not to joke about my body.”

You do not need to build a whole case. One clean sentence is enough to begin.

3. Speak

Now, you let the sentence leave your body. This is often the most charged step.

Say it as kindly and directly as you can. You might notice your heart pounding, your mouth going dry, or your mind wanting to backtrack. That’s just your nervous system remembering old experiences. It doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong; it means you’re doing something new.

To support yourself, you can:

• feel your feet on the floor

• slow your speech slightly

• imagine speaking on behalf of a younger you who never got defended

You don’t owe anyone a five‑paragraph explanation. Your truth is allowed to exist in ordinary, simple sentences.

4. Ground

After you’ve spoken, don’t skip this part.

• Take a few slow breaths.

• Notice what changed in your body.

• Place a hand on your chest or belly if it feels good.

Your system might need reassurance because historically, speaking up was risky. You can silently tell yourself:

“We’re safe now. I’m proud of you. You didn’t abandon yourself.”

Grounding after expression helps your nervous system update its story: “Speaking up can feel intense, but it doesn’t automatically equal danger or abandonment.”

5. Repair (if needed)

Sometimes your truth comes out wrapped in old survival strategies: a sharp tone, a raised voice, defensiveness. That doesn’t make your truth invalid; it just means your system was flooded.

You can repair the delivery without abandoning the truth. For example:

• “I’m sorry for the way I said that; my tone was harsh. What I said is still true for me.”

• “I snapped, and that wasn’t fair. I do need us to change how we handle this.”

Notice the difference between:

• “I’m sorry, forget it, it doesn’t matter” (self‑abandonment)

• and “I’m sorry for how I said it; I still mean what I said” (repair without betrayal).

You never have to apologise for the truth itself.

Repair is where you practise being on your own side and caring about your impact at the same time. That’s what makes your voice feel safer—to you and to the people you love.

As you move through this work, remember: your goal is not to turn yourself into a loud, endlessly “confident” person. Your goal is to become someone you can rely on to say what’s real—first to yourself, then gently, one sentence at a time, out loud.

Self‑trust is not something you “unlock” once and then get to keep forever. It’s a living relationship you have to keep returning to—especially in the small, boring moments no one claps for.

You already know what it feels like to abandon yourself in small ways: saying yes when your whole body is a no, laughing something off when it actually hurt, promising yourself you’ll “leave on time tonight” and then watching the hours slide past again. None of those choices are dramatic on their own, but together they send a clear message to your system: “My needs come last. My word to myself isn’t serious.” Over time, that message becomes an identity.

You also know—maybe in only a handful of memories—what it feels like to stay with yourself. The night you left the party when you were done, even though everyone else stayed. The moment you sent the honest message instead of ghosting. The day you actually started that project you promised yourself that you’d start last year. Those are small, quiet moments on the outside, but inside they land like: Wait…we didn’t abandon ourselves this time.

The previous lesson, taught us how integrity toward ourselves shapes our identity, and this is where we stop waiting to “feel” more confident and start behaving like someone we can trust. Instead of chasing huge reinventions, we’ll focus on small practices: tiny, repeatable actions that gently rewire how you relate to your own word and your own truth. Each practice is designed to be doable on your most average day, not just when you’re motivated. The goal isn’t perfection; it’s to collect evidence that, again and again, you chose to stand on your own side.

The practices below give you four different angles:

• proving that your word to yourself matters

• crossing the “scary but true” line with 20 seconds of courage

• training your brain to notice alignment instead of only failures

• borrowing wisdom from your future self so today’s choices serve who you’re becoming

You do not need to implement all of them at once. Start with the one that feels both slightly uncomfortable and genuinely accessible. Let it be light, imperfect, and human. This isn’t a performance; it’s a conversation between you and you.

In this article you will find a link at the bottom to a fillable Notion module with extra journal prompts.

Read more