<script data-pm-proxy="intercept"></script><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" version="2.0" xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" xmlns:googleplay="http://www.google.com/schemas/play-podcasts/1.0"><channel><title><![CDATA[Courtney's Substack]]></title><description><![CDATA[My personal Substack]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com</link><image><url>https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yjAI!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d484b0-1f59-4013-99bc-9c5e53937ff9_908x908.png</url><title>Courtney&apos;s Substack</title><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com</link></image><generator>Substack</generator><lastBuildDate>Tue, 01 Sep 2026 14:22:34 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="/__u/askcourtney.substack.com/feed" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><copyright><![CDATA[Courtney]]></copyright><language><![CDATA[en]]></language><webMaster><![CDATA[askcourtney@substack.com]]></webMaster><itunes:owner><itunes:email><![CDATA[askcourtney@substack.com]]></itunes:email><itunes:name><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></itunes:name></itunes:owner><itunes:author><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></itunes:author><googleplay:owner><![CDATA[askcourtney@substack.com]]></googleplay:owner><googleplay:email><![CDATA[askcourtney@substack.com]]></googleplay:email><googleplay:author><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></googleplay:author><itunes:block><![CDATA[Yes]]></itunes:block><item><title><![CDATA[Do you find yourself more disturbed by not understanding cruelty than by the cruelty itself?]]></title><description><![CDATA[I can help you understand that.]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/do-you-find-yourself-more-disturbed</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/do-you-find-yourself-more-disturbed</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Thu, 27 Aug 2026 23:01:12 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 1456w" sizes="100vw"><img src="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png" width="1402" height="1122" 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/__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vh5g!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7dd7d412-1c64-4aee-abb0-b405a7f93071_1402x1122.png 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg aria-hidden="true" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a></figure></div><p>If that question landed somewhere uncomfortable, I want to sit with you there for a minute, because I think I can name what&#8217;s happening.</p><p>Understanding manipulation or cruelty requires being able to imagine acting that way yourself. If that&#8217;s not part of your wiring, you&#8217;re not actually analyzing behavior when you try to make sense of someone&#8217;s cruelty &#8230; you&#8217;re trying to reverse-engineer a language you&#8217;ve never spoken. You&#8217;re standing in front of a door with no key, certain that if you study the lock long enough, it will open.</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div><p>Here&#8217;s why this happens. Your internal logic runs on empathy, so you assume everyone&#8217;s does. It&#8217;s the only operating system you have, and it&#8217;s a good one &#8230; it&#8217;s probably why people trust you, why you&#8217;re often the person others come to when something has gone wrong. But that operating system doesn&#8217;t come with a cruelty module. So when you encounter behavior that has none of the empathy you&#8217;d bring to a situation, you don&#8217;t have a category for it (makes sense?). You go looking for the translation instead, which is the childhood wound, the bad marriage, the pressure they were under, the diagnosis that might explain it &#8230; anything that would make their behavior legible to you. </p><p>I want to be clear about something here, because I think this gets misread often. It&#8217;s not that you&#8217;re naive because naivety would mean you haven&#8217;t seen enough of the world to know better. This is something different, and it&#8217;s that you&#8217;re using the only tool you have to measure something that tool was never built to measure.</p><p>And here&#8217;s the part that&#8217;s hard to sit with- some behavior isn&#8217;t missing context but missing conscience, and no amount of searching will produce an explanation that doesn&#8217;t exist. You can excavate someone&#8217;s entire history and still come up empty, not because you didn&#8217;t dig deep enough, but because there was never anything down there to find. Some people do harmful things simply because they can, and because some part of them doesn&#8217;t register the cost the way you would.</p><p>This is disorienting if empathy is your primary lens, because it means the tool that has served you so well everywhere else in your life has a blind spot exactly where you need it most.</p><h2>A Tangible Step</h2><p>If this is a pattern for you, here&#8217;s a place to start.</p><p>Write down the story you keep telling yourself about why they did it. Get it all out &#8212; every theory, every generous interpretation, every &#8220;maybe they were.&#8221;</p><p>Then go back through it and cross out every sentence that starts with an assumption about their internal state. &#8220;They must have felt.&#8221; &#8220;They were probably.&#8221; &#8220;Something must have happened to them.&#8221; Cross all of it out.</p><p>What&#8217;s left is usually just the behavior itself, unexplained. Sit with that for a moment. Notice how uncomfortable it is to look at.</p><p>Now practice letting it stay unexplained for twenty-four hours before you go looking for a reason again. That&#8217;s the muscle you&#8217;re building &#8212; not indifference, not cynicism, just the capacity to tolerate the absence of a &#8220;why&#8221; instead of manufacturing one so you can feel safe again.</p><p>You don&#8217;t owe cruelty a story. Sometimes the most honest thing you can do is let it remain exactly what it is.</p><p></p><p>Xo,</p><p>Courtney</p><p></p><p>P.s. I&#8217;m creating tangible action steps for my subscribers who have pledged! Thank you!</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Truth We Keep Missing About the Lindsey Clancy Case (from a Trauma Counselor)]]></title><description><![CDATA[and it isn't what you think...]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/the-truth-we-keep-missing-about-the</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/the-truth-we-keep-missing-about-the</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 23:36:03 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5_2m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F01cf9369-3f82-4f1e-ba46-c6b4fa7b0c46_1122x1402.png" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5_2m!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F01cf9369-3f82-4f1e-ba46-c6b4fa7b0c46_1122x1402.png" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5_2m!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, 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/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5_2m!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F01cf9369-3f82-4f1e-ba46-c6b4fa7b0c46_1122x1402.png 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg aria-hidden="true" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a></figure></div><p></p><p></p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div><p>Since the Lindsey Clancy case has been back in the headlines, my inbox has been flooded with messages asking me to weigh in.</p><p>As a trauma counselor who specializes in trauma recovery, many people assume I&#8217;m going to tell them whether Lindsey Clancy was evil, whether postpartum psychosis explains what happened, whether medications were to blame, or whether the mental health system failed her.</p><p>The truth is, I don&#8217;t think those are the questions we should be asking.</p><p>Not because they don&#8217;t matter&#8212;they absolutely do. But because our obsession with finding one explanation often says more about our own nervous systems than it does about the complexity of what actually happened.</p><p>I think the Lindsey Clancy case has become a mirror.</p><p>Not just reflecting one family&#8217;s tragedy&#8212;but exposing how desperately our brains crave certainty.</p><p>When something horrific happens, our nervous system immediately begins searching for distance.</p><p><em>&#8220;That could never be me.&#8221;</em></p><p><em>&#8220;I would have seen the signs.&#8221;</em></p><p><em>&#8220;It was the medications.&#8221;</em></p><p><em>&#8220;It was postpartum psychosis.&#8221;</em></p><p><em>&#8220;She was simply evil.&#8221;</em></p><p>Every one of those statements has something in common.</p><p>They promise us safety.</p><p>Because if we can identify one cause, then we can convince ourselves that avoiding that one thing means we&#8217;re protected.</p><p>But trauma teaches us something different.</p><p>The nervous system doesn&#8217;t actually crave truth.</p><p>It craves predictability.</p><p>Those aren&#8217;t always the same thing.</p><p>When we feel threatened, our brains become less interested in nuance and more interested in certainty. That&#8217;s not because we&#8217;re irrational&#8212;it&#8217;s because certainty lowers perceived threat. It gives us the illusion that the world is understandable and therefore controllable.</p><p>But human behavior has never fit neatly into categories.</p><p>That&#8217;s where I think this conversation begins to fall apart.</p><p>Instead of asking, <em>&#8220;Who should we blame?&#8221;</em> I think we should be asking questions like:</p><ul><li><p>Why is postpartum mental illness still so misunderstood?</p></li><li><p>Why are so many parents afraid to disclose intrusive thoughts because they fear judgment?</p></li><li><p>How do clinicians differentiate between postpartum depression, postpartum OCD, bipolar disorder, and postpartum psychosis when symptoms can overlap?</p></li><li><p>What are the challenges of treating someone whose symptoms may be evolving quickly?</p></li><li><p>How do families recognize when someone has crossed from emotional distress into a true psychiatric emergency?</p></li><li><p>What does compassionate accountability actually look like when severe mental illness and devastating harm exist in the same story?</p></li></ul><p>Those questions don&#8217;t produce viral headlines.</p><p>But they might save lives.</p><p>As a trauma clinician, I&#8217;ve learned that healing rarely begins with certainty.</p><p>It begins with curiosity.</p><p>Curiosity asks better questions.</p><p>Curiosity tolerates complexity.</p><p>Curiosity allows two truths to coexist without rushing to eliminate either.</p><p>That&#8217;s incredibly difficult for the human nervous system.</p><p>We want one answer because one answer feels safer.</p><p>Life rarely gives us that gift.</p><p>Perhaps the greatest tragedy isn&#8217;t just that this happened.</p><p>It&#8217;s that our first instinct afterward is often to simplify something that demands extraordinary humility.</p><p></p><p>What are your thoughts? </p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[You Can Fall Apart and Still Be Someone Who Has Done the Work.]]></title><description><![CDATA[Your worst day doesn't define you.]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/you-can-fall-apart-and-still-be-someone</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/you-can-fall-apart-and-still-be-someone</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 25 May 2026 01:22:55 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 1456w" sizes="100vw"><img src="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic" width="1024" height="1536" data-attrs="{&quot;src&quot;:&quot;https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic&quot;,&quot;srcNoWatermark&quot;:null,&quot;fullscreen&quot;:null,&quot;imageSize&quot;:null,&quot;height&quot;:1536,&quot;width&quot;:1024,&quot;resizeWidth&quot;:null,&quot;bytes&quot;:142288,&quot;alt&quot;:null,&quot;title&quot;:null,&quot;type&quot;:&quot;image/heic&quot;,&quot;href&quot;:null,&quot;belowTheFold&quot;:false,&quot;topImage&quot;:true,&quot;internalRedirect&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/i/199132678?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic&quot;,&quot;isProcessing&quot;:false,&quot;align&quot;:null,&quot;offset&quot;:false}" class="sizing-normal" alt="" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Sa22!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5bd6278c-2057-4355-b993-e5c5191be08f_1024x1536.heic 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg aria-hidden="true" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a></figure></div><p>You still have it, you know? All that healing you did &#8212; you didn&#8217;t lose it. Even though in this moment it feels like it was for nothing, you still clocked in all of those months. You still showed up each day, checking yourself, choosing differently, doing the hard thing.</p><p>When your nervous system gets hijacked, it becomes about one thing: survival. What your body thinks you need in that moment &#8212; to run, to hide, to lash out, to sabotage any ounce of happiness you&#8217;ve finally let yourself have. Logic leaves the room. What &#8220;makes sense&#8221; leaves the room. Your body takes the wheel and it drives toward relief, not reason. But even in those moments, the scars are still there. The growth is still there. That voice buried deep, telling you it&#8217;s over &#8212; it isn&#8217;t telling you the truth. It&#8217;s just desperate for this moment to end.</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div><p>All those moments you chose to show up &#8212; they add up. They don&#8217;t disappear because you had a hard day or a hard week or a moment where you didn&#8217;t recognize yourself. That&#8217;s what gets lost when we&#8217;re in the thick of it, frustrated and spinning &#8212; we forget that you cannot undo something you have truly learned. Once you know it, once you&#8217;ve done the work to acquire it for yourself, it lives in you. It isn&#8217;t always accessible, especially in moments of deep pain or dysregulation, but accessible and gone are two very different things. The skills are there. Not all of them will be available to you at once, and that&#8217;s not failure &#8212; that&#8217;s just how a nervous system under threat operates. We make mistakes. We get trauma triggered. We act out of character. None of that means we lose everything we have worked for as individuals. Because deep change doesn&#8217;t happen on the surface first. It starts on a cellular level. Long before you can see it, long before anyone around you can see it, it is already burying itself into who you are becoming. It is already yours.</p><p>So take a step forward. Just one. Do one thing that the version of you &#8212; the one you&#8217;re afraid you&#8217;ve lost &#8212; would do. And then do one more thing after that. Eventually your nervous system will clock that too. It will register that you are still here, still moving, still choosing. Do as if you are, and you will start doing because you are. What you&#8217;re feeling right now is shame. The shame of &#8220;I messed up.&#8221; And somewhere along the way you were taught that mistakes lead to shame, and shame means you don&#8217;t get to stand back up. That it has to cost you something. That you have to go all the way back and earn it again. You don&#8217;t. You&#8217;re already up. You&#8217;re standing right in front of your next decision and you get to make it. Not from the beginning. Not from square one. From exactly where you are, with everything you have built still inside you, still yours, still counting</p><p>Xo,</p><p>Courtney</p><p>Have you ever felt this way?</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[Trying harder to heal is keeping you sick]]></title><description><![CDATA[I know that's not what you want to hear-and I know you need to hear it.]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/trying-harder-to-heal-is-keeping</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/trying-harder-to-heal-is-keeping</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Fri, 22 May 2026 00:22:26 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 1456w" sizes="100vw"><img src="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png" width="1024" height="1024" data-attrs="{&quot;src&quot;:&quot;https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png&quot;,&quot;srcNoWatermark&quot;:null,&quot;fullscreen&quot;:null,&quot;imageSize&quot;:null,&quot;height&quot;:1024,&quot;width&quot;:1024,&quot;resizeWidth&quot;:null,&quot;bytes&quot;:1797621,&quot;alt&quot;:null,&quot;title&quot;:null,&quot;type&quot;:&quot;image/png&quot;,&quot;href&quot;:null,&quot;belowTheFold&quot;:false,&quot;topImage&quot;:true,&quot;internalRedirect&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/i/198781235?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png&quot;,&quot;isProcessing&quot;:false,&quot;align&quot;:null,&quot;offset&quot;:false}" class="sizing-normal" alt="" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YZxQ!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F38cd185c-268b-4487-b746-75ee7d7a4546_1024x1024.png 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg aria-hidden="true" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a></figure></div><p>There&#8217;s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn&#8217;t have a good name yet. It&#8217;s not burnout exactly, and it&#8217;s not depression, though it can look like both from the outside. It&#8217;s the exhaustion of someone who has been working so hard on themselves for so long that the work itself has become the wound.</p><p>I see it constantly. People who are doing everything right &#8212; genuinely doing the work, genuinely showing up, genuinely trying &#8212; and something still isn&#8217;t shifting. So they assume the answer is more. More insight, more processing, more digging, more understanding of why they are the way they are. And the more they push, the more stuck they feel, and the more stuck they feel, the harder they push. It&#8217;s one of the most painful loops I witness in this work, because the effort is real and the intention is good, and neither of those things is the problem.</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div><p>The problem is that the nervous system cannot be healed by force. It can only be healed by safety. And those are not the same thing.</p><p>When we stay in constant pursuit of healing, we are continuously signaling to the body that something is wrong. That we are not okay. That the threat hasn&#8217;t passed. And the body &#8212; which is not listening to our intentions, only to our state &#8212; responds accordingly. It stays braced. It stays ready. It holds on tighter to exactly what we&#8217;re trying to release, because letting go requires a felt sense of safety that we never actually give it, because we&#8217;re too busy trying to heal.</p><p>This is not a mindset issue. This is not about thinking differently, reframing the narrative, or finding the right framework. <em><strong>It&#8217;s biology.</strong></em> The part of you that holds trauma is not a cognitive structure &#8230;<strong>it&#8217;s a somatic one. </strong>It lives in the body, in the nervous system, in the places that tighten before your mind even knows why. And that part of you does not respond to effort. It responds to safety. Real, physiological, felt-in-the-body safety. The kind that&#8217;s almost impossible to access when you&#8217;re in a constant state of searching.</p><p>Something else is happening for a lot of people, and I want to name it carefully because it&#8217;s tender and it&#8217;s real and it&#8217;s also keeping people profoundly stuck.</p><p><strong>Healing has become an identity&#8230;and I know I will get a lot of slack for this but it needs to be said. (Remember, I am </strong><em><strong>NOT everyone&#8217;s cup of tea</strong></em><strong>). </strong></p><p>Not a season, not a process, not something happening in the background of a life being lived &#8212; an identity. The central organizing story of who someone is. And I understand completely how it gets there. When you&#8217;ve been through something that shattered you, having a framework for the pieces feels like finally finding solid ground. The healing narrative gives the suffering meaning. It gives you language for things that used to be unspeakable. It gives you community, recognition, a sense that what happened to you matters, and that you matter because of what you survived <em><strong>(I totally get it).</strong></em></p><p>But there is a significant difference between a story you move through and a story you live inside of. And when healing becomes the story you live inside of, staying in pain starts to serve a function you may not even be aware of. It keeps the identity intact. It keeps you tethered to the narrative that finally made sense of everything. Moving forward &#8212; genuinely moving forward, into a life where the wound is no longer the main character &#8212; starts to feel like a kind of erasure. Like losing the version of yourself that finally had a name.</p><p>So the system protects the wound. Not out of weakness or resistance or any of the other things the healing content will tell you. Out of a very intelligent, very loyal attempt to keep you safe.</p><p><em><strong>And then there&#8217;s the layer no one in the wellness space wants to say out loud: a lot of what we call healing culture is dysregulation with better branding. (</strong></em><strong>I say it like it is).</strong></p><p>Consuming trauma content for hours is dysregulation. Constant self-examination with no rest is dysregulation. Talking about your nervous system while you&#8217;re flooded is dysregulation. The urgency underneath all of it &#8212; the relentless self-improvement, the searching, the sense that you need to figure this out right now &#8212; that is your sympathetic nervous system doing what it does, just pointed in a direction that looks like growth from the outside.</p><p>Actual regulation is quiet. It doesn&#8217;t look like much. It looks like a walk where your mind eventually goes soft and loose. A meal you were actually present for. A stretch of time where you weren&#8217;t cataloguing your inner state or running it through a framework. A moment where you forgot, briefly, that you were someone with wounds to heal. That&#8217;s the thing &#8212; real nervous system regulation often feels like nothing is happening, which is exactly why people who&#8217;ve built their sense of progress around effort keep dismissing it or moving past it, back toward something that feels more like work.</p><p>What I want to offer instead &#8230; and this is the thing I come back to again and again in my clinical work &#8230; is a reorientation away from healing as a goal and toward safety as a practice.</p><p>Not permanent safety. Not some arrived state where nothing is hard anymore. Just the question: what would it feel like, right now, in this body, to be safe enough? Safe enough to breathe without it having to mean anything. Safe enough not to be in the middle of a breakthrough. Safe enough to let an afternoon be ordinary, to let a feeling move through without turning it into a session, to let yourself exist for a little while outside the story of what happened to you.</p><p>Because the healing that actually changes people &#8212; the kind that&#8217;s durable and deep and doesn&#8217;t require constant maintenance &#8212; doesn&#8217;t happen in the efforting. It happens in the exhale. In the moment, the body finally gets the message that the threat has passed. That it&#8217;s allowed to set down what it&#8217;s been carrying. That you are not going to keep dragging it back into the fire in the name of getting better.</p><p>You cannot white-knuckle your way into a regulated nervous system <strong>(Trust me, I have tried)</strong>. But you can, slowly and with a lot of grace for yourself, learn to stop working against the very thing you&#8217;re trying to heal.</p><p>If something in you loosened while you were reading this, that&#8217;s worth paying attention to. That loosening is your nervous system responding to something true, and I&#8217;d love to hear about it.</p><p>If you want to understand what this actually looks like in practice &#8212; how to work with your biology instead of against it, what safety-as-a-practice means when your whole life has been organized around vigilance &#8212; this is the work I do. </p><p></p><p>I read ALL the comments btw so know that someone is here to listen. </p><p></p><p>Xo,</p><p>Courtney</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Good you May walk Past Everyday]]></title><description><![CDATA[What survival mode makes us miss...]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/the-good-you-may-walk-past-everyday</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/the-good-you-may-walk-past-everyday</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 11 Mar 2026 14:31:26 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 1456w" sizes="100vw"><img src="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic" width="1456" height="1941" 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/__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 424w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_848, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 848w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1272, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 1272w, /__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!npvt!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_1456, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_auto, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d6a9fd-66df-438b-adc7-3cba958e69b5_3024x4032.heic 1456w" sizes="100vw" fetchpriority="high"></picture><div class="image-link-expand"><div class="pencraft pc-display-flex pc-gap-8 pc-reset"><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container restack-image"><svg aria-hidden="true" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 20 20" fill="none" stroke-width="1.5" stroke="var(--color-fg-primary)" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"><g><path d="M2.53001 7.81595C3.49179 4.73911 6.43281 2.5 9.91173 2.5C13.1684 2.5 15.9537 4.46214 17.0852 7.23684L17.6179 8.67647M17.6179 8.67647L18.5002 4.26471M17.6179 8.67647L13.6473 6.91176M17.4995 12.1841C16.5378 15.2609 13.5967 17.5 10.1178 17.5C6.86118 17.5 4.07589 15.5379 2.94432 12.7632L2.41165 11.3235M2.41165 11.3235L1.5293 15.7353M2.41165 11.3235L6.38224 13.0882"></path></g></svg></button><button tabindex="0" type="button" class="pencraft pc-reset pencraft icon-container view-image"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="20" height="20" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentColor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="lucide lucide-maximize2 lucide-maximize-2"><polyline points="15 3 21 3 21 9"></polyline><polyline points="9 21 3 21 3 15"></polyline><line x1="21" x2="14" y1="3" y2="10"></line><line x1="3" x2="10" y1="21" y2="14"></line></svg></button></div></div></div></a></figure></div><p>I want you to picture something.</p><p>A four leaf clover but not the kind you&#8217;re imagining. Not green, not fresh, not the kind you find on a greeting card or in a lucky charm or that cereal box you recall from childhood. This one is old, tattered, and dried out from a long winter. The kind of thing most people &#8212; most of us &#8212; would step right over without a second thought.</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div><p><strong>I almost just did. </strong></p><p>Here&#8217;s the question I want to sit with today&#8230;what if that&#8217;s exactly what the best things in your life look like? What if good has been showing up for you again and again and you&#8217;ve been stepping over it because it didn&#8217;t look the way you decided it should?</p><p><em><strong>Guess what? We were taught to recognize pretty.</strong></em></p><p>From the time we were small, we were handed a picture of what good looks like. Lucky looks like green and lush and obvious. Love was pink or red and usually found on Valentine&#8217;s Day. Healing looks like waking up one day and feeling fine and your whole body just feels at ease. Opportunity knocks loudly at a door you&#8217;re already standing at and don&#8217;t even have to blink an eye.</p><p><strong>That doesn&#8217;t happen and I wish I understood that 20 years ago. </strong></p><p>We were conditioned to recognize good only when it arrived in the right packaging and that&#8217;s why many of us are on this constant journey to change who we are. We want to be unmistakable. </p><p>So what happens when it doesn&#8217;t? What happens when the blessing is the hard conversation you&#8217;ve been avoiding? When the right person shows up with bad timing and a complicated past? When the breakthrough is disguised as a breakdown&#8230; again? We do what we were trained to do and that&#8217;s to just look right past it.</p><p>But that conditioning isn&#8217;t the whole story because for a lot of us, there&#8217;s something deeper running underneath it.</p><p><strong>Survival mode changes how you see things. </strong></p><p>When you&#8217;ve lived through hard things like real hard things your nervous system learns to scan. It learns to look for danger before it looks for anything else. That&#8217;s not a character flaw or even pessimism but straight survival. That&#8217;s your brain doing exactly what it was built to do when life required it and you know what that&#8217;s something to be proud of. </p><p>But here&#8217;s what nobody tells you about operating in survival mode for a long time and that it narrows your vision. When the nervous system is in threat-detection mode, it filters and it prioritizes risk. It&#8217;s not that the good things disappear &#8230; it&#8217;s that your system stops registering them as relevant information. They get filtered out before they even reach your awareness.</p><p><strong>You&#8217;ve been scanning for what could hurt you for so long that you stopped seeing what might hold you.</strong></p><p>This is not about positive thinking. I&#8217;m not asking you to pretend the hard things aren&#8217;t hard or to slap a gratitude label on your pain - I&#8217;m not one to promote toxic positivity because I don&#8217;t got time for that. I&#8217;m talking about something more fundamental&#8230;the way trauma reshapes perception. The way a dysregulated nervous system will walk right past a four leaf clover &#8230;every single time because it&#8217;s looking for the thing that might kill it.</p><p><strong>and you know what? GOOD does not always announce itself as we expect it to.</strong></p><p>Think about the best things that have ever happened to you. Really think. How many of them arrived looking exactly like what they were? How many came quietly, sideways, in the middle of something else entirely? Jot them down, okay?</p><p>The mentor who showed up as a stranger. The ending that turned out to be a beginning when you thought it was over. The season of stillness that looked like failure from the outside but was quietly rearranging everything on the inside. The relationship that required more of you than you expected and made you more than you thought possible&#8230;</p><p>Good is not always loud, pink, red, or even lush green. Sometimes it is weathered and just survived a terrible winter only to be found by the right person because they were willing to see differently. Honestly, sometimes it looks tatters from the outside and completely intact and shiny from the inside. </p><p><strong>The question isn&#8217;t whether good is coming but whether you&#8217;ll recognize it when it gets here.</strong></p><p>You have permission to believe good is coming&#8230;</p><p>If you are in a hard season right now, I want to say something directly to you<strong> (yeah, YOU).</strong></p><p>The good has not left you and it will not abandon you. It did not pack up and go because the season got difficult or because you were too much nor did it decide you weren&#8217;t worth it because you&#8217;ve been struggling. It is not being withheld from you as punishment for not healing fast enough, not having enough faith, not being further along. </p><p><strong>IT IS STILL THERE.</strong></p><p>What I want for you is not blind optimism but a nervous system that&#8217;s settled enough to stop filtering out the good before it reaches you. I want you to have enough safety in your own body to let something beautiful in without immediately bracing for it to be taken away.</p><p>That&#8217;s the real work of doing enough of your own healing that you can actually receive it when it arrives.</p><p>Slow down for a moment&#8230;take a deep breath. I bet you&#8217;re shallow breathing right this moment. Release your tongue from the top of your mouth and stretch. I bet you were just &#8220;surviving the moment&#8221;&#8230;weren&#8217;t you? </p><p>The four leaf clover survived the whole winter and it didn&#8217;t go anywhere. It literally just sat there worn, quiet, unremarkable-looking waiting for someone to see it. </p><p>That&#8217;s the thing about luck, about grace, about the good things that are moving toward you right now and that&#8217;s that they are patient. They don&#8217;t require you to be ready for them they truly just want you to be present enough to see them. </p><p>So here&#8217;s your invitation today and it isn&#8217;t to force positivity because again - I don&#8217;t got time for that and neither do you. Ask yourself honestly, what have I been stepping over? What has been sitting right in the middle of my path that I&#8217;ve been too fast, too guarded, or too certain about what good looks like to even see?</p><p><strong>The good will find you. </strong></p><p><strong>&#8230;But you have to be willing to recognize it even when it doesn&#8217;t look the way you expected. Even when it&#8217;s been through a hard season. </strong>&#127808;</p><p><em>AskCourtney | CourtneyLee Navarro</em></p><p>To check out my ebooks:</p><p><a href="https://beacons.ai/ask.courtney">CLICK HERE</a></p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[You are Only Ever just ONE decision away from Changing your Life]]></title><description><![CDATA[and the time is now]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/you-are-only-ever-just-one-decision</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/you-are-only-ever-just-one-decision</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 04 Mar 2026 03:07:39 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yjAI!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d484b0-1f59-4013-99bc-9c5e53937ff9_908x908.png" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Let me tell you what I see every single day.</p><p>Someone sitting across from me who knows exactly what they need to do. They know. It&#8217;s not a mystery. It&#8217;s not buried deep in their subconscious waiting to be unlocked. They could tell you right now &#8230; the conversation they need to have, the boundary they need to set, the thing they need to stop tolerating. They know.</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div><p><strong>And they don&#8217;t do it&#8230;</strong></p><p>Many will think it&#8217;s because they are weak or broken, but the reality is that the easiest part is the knowing - the hardest part is the doing. I tell people this all the time, &#8220;We are human-beings, not human-doings.&#8221;</p><p>I&#8217;ve been a trauma counselor for 22 years, and if there&#8217;s one pattern I&#8217;ve seen more than any other, it&#8217;s this: people will endure years &#8212; YEARS &#8212; of misery they know how to end, <em><strong>because the decision that ends it terrifies them more than the pain of staying.</strong></em></p><p><strong>Read that again.</strong></p><p><strong>The pain you know will always feel safer than the freedom you don&#8217;t.</strong> That&#8217;s not a character flaw, but your nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to keep you alive by keeping you in the familiar. Your brain doesn&#8217;t care if the familiar is destroying you. Familiar means predictable, and predictable means survivable. That&#8217;s the math your body is doing every single day without your permission, and <em>THIS is why we stay stuck.</em></p><p>So when you tell yourself &#8220;I&#8217;m not ready&#8221;  that&#8217;s not wisdom talking but your survival brain negotiating with your future.</p><p>I need to say something, and I&#8217;m not going to sugarcoat it because that&#8217;s not what I do. I&#8217;m not everyone&#8217;s cup of tea, and I am okay with that. </p><p><strong>There is no &#8220;ready.&#8221;</strong></p><p>Ready is not coming to you. Ok? There is no morning when you wake up, and the fear is gone, the path is clear, and everything lines up perfectly for you to finally make the move. That right there is a fantasy that is <strong>destroying you</strong>. Waiting for it is the most expensive thing you&#8217;ll ever do because you&#8217;re paying for it with your life. There are years you won&#8217;t get back, and that&#8217;s too expensive, if you ask me. </p><p>Every single person I&#8217;ve ever watched transform their life &#8212; every one &#8212; decided before they felt ready and they made it scared. They made it with shaking hands and a sick stomach and absolutely zero guarantee that it would work because they were sick of waiting.</p><p><strong>They made it anyway.</strong></p><p>Here is the part nobody talks about. The decision itself? It&#8217;s usually not even that big. We build it up in our heads like it&#8217;s this massive, irreversible, life-altering thing, and sometimes it is just embarrassingly simple.</p><p>It&#8217;s saying &#8220;I need help&#8221; out loud for the first time.</p><p>It&#8217;s telling someone the truth you&#8217;ve been editing for years. </p><p>It&#8217;s putting down the thing you&#8217;ve been using to numb yourself and sitting in the discomfort of being awake. (sh**)</p><p>It&#8217;s not dramatic by any measure, and honesty is the thing most of us have been avoiding since childhood because somewhere along the way we learned that the truth made people leave.</p><p>Your nervous system is going to fight you on this, and I need you to know that going in. The moment you get close to the decision &#8230; the real one, the one you&#8217;ve been circling for months, is when your body is going to light up. You&#8217;ll feel your chest tighten and your thoughts spiraling. Every worst-case scenario is playing on a loop, and your brain is going to hand you a list of perfectly logical reasons why now isn&#8217;t the time.</p><p><em><strong>That&#8217;s not intuition, so don&#8217;t let it fool you. THAT IS your FEAR wearing a disguise.</strong></em></p><p>I teach my clients to learn the difference&#8230; intuition is quiet and it doesn&#8217;t argue with you. Fear is the one that&#8217;s so loud and never shuts up, and at times it is beyond convincing. </p><p><strong>The people who change their lives aren&#8217;t the ones who stopped being afraid</strong>. They&#8217;re the ones who got tired of letting fear make their decisions for them.</p><p>So here&#8217;s what I want to leave you with. </p><p><strong>You already know what you need to do.</strong></p><p>You have known this deep in your bones for a very, very long time &#8230;you&#8217;re just making the same one you made yesterday. In my opinion, that is the hardest thing to do. We don&#8217;t realize that staying where we are is a decision, and that&#8217;s because it doesn&#8217;t require any action, so we skate behind it, hoping not be noticed. That&#8217;s called inaction, and it has a huge cost. Do you really want to keep paying it? </p><p><strong>One decision. </strong></p><p>That&#8217;s the distance between where you are and where you could be. It isn&#8217;t a mile or a new identity by any measure. It&#8217;s just one, honest, scary, unglamorous decision that nobody&#8217;s going to applaud you for in the moment.  </p><p>Make it anyway.</p><p>You&#8217;re closer than you think.</p><div class="subscription-widget-wrap-editor" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe&quot;,&quot;language&quot;:&quot;en&quot;}" data-component-name="SubscribeWidgetToDOM"><div class="subscription-widget show-subscribe"><div class="preamble"><p class="cta-caption">Courtney's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><form class="subscription-widget-subscribe"><input type="email" class="email-input" name="email" placeholder="Type your email&#8230;" tabindex="-1"><input type="submit" class="button primary" value="Subscribe"><div class="fake-input-wrapper"><div class="fake-input"></div><div class="fake-button"></div></div></form></div></div>]]></content:encoded></item><item><title><![CDATA[I didn’t stop struggling - I just stopped doing it the hard-way. ]]></title><description><![CDATA[There&#8217;s a version of strength that will kill you.]]></description><link>https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/i-didnt-stop-struggling-i-just-stopped</link><guid isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/i-didnt-stop-struggling-i-just-stopped</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:48:40 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lOGE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c0e2d48-559c-4619-bb0c-1b05b1b5ea4d_908x908.jpeg" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>There&#8217;s a version of strength that will kill you.</p><p>I know because I lived inside of it for years. Jaw clenched. Shoulders up by my ears. Running on cortisol and the belief that if I just pushed harder, held tighter, stayed up later, gave more &#8212; I&#8217;d finally arrive somewhere that felt like peace.</p><p>I didn&#8217;t.</p><p>I arrived at exhaustion. At resentment. At the kind of tired that sleep doesn&#8217;t fix because it lives in your bones, not your body. I arrived at a woman who looked like she had it together and felt like she was unraveling in slow motion.</p><p>And the worst part? I thought that was the work. I thought healing meant white-knuckling my way through every hard thing, brute-forcing my way past pain, outrunning the grief and the fear and the little girl inside me who just wanted someone to say you don&#8217;t have to carry all of this.</p><p>Nobody told me there was another way. Or maybe they did, and I couldn&#8217;t hear it yet.</p><p></p><p>Then I made a decision.</p><p></p><p>Here&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve learned &#8230; the thing I wish someone had told me twenty years ago:</p><p>You can struggle on purpose.</p><p>Not the kind of struggling where life drags you through the mud and you just survive it. I mean the kind where you choose the hard thing. Where you sit with the feeling instead of running from it. Where you say the honest thing instead of the safe thing. Where you let yourself fall apart in a room with someone who can hold it &#8212; instead of falling apart alone in your car at 11 PM.</p><p>That&#8217;s a different kind of struggle. And it will change your life.</p><p></p><p>I&#8217;m a trauma counselor I&#8217;ve been doing this work for over two decades. I&#8217;ve sat with thousands of people in the worst moments of their lives &#8212; the moments where the mask comes off and the real stuff finally breathes. I&#8217;ve trained in IFS, Brainspotting, EMDR. I know the science. I know the neurobiology. I can explain what&#8217;s happening in your nervous system when you get triggered and your chest gets tight and your brain goes offline.</p><p>But none of that knowledge saved me from my own patterns&#8230;.</p><p>Because knowing isn&#8217;t the same as healing. Information isn&#8217;t transformation. You can read every book on attachment theory and still flinch when someone gets too close. You can teach nervous system regulation all day long and still be dysregulated at your own kitchen table.</p><p>Ask me how I know.</p><p></p><p>The shift didn&#8217;t happen in some dramatic moment. There was no rock bottom epiphany, no lightning bolt. It was more like erosion &#8230;the slow wearing down of my own resistance until I couldn&#8217;t pretend anymore.</p><p>I was a mother. A wife. A clinician. A woman who lost her brother and her mother to addiction. A woman who built an entire career on helping people heal while quietly wondering if she was allowed to need that same thing.</p><p>And one day &#8212; I think it was a Tuesday, because the big revelations always happen on Tuesdays &#8212; I just got tired of my own story. Not tired of the pain. Tired of the way I was carrying it. Tired of the version of me who believed she had to earn rest. Who believed vulnerability was weakness. Who believed that if she ever really let herself feel everything she&#8217;d been holding, she&#8217;d never come back from it.</p><p>So I stopped.</p><p>Not stopped working. Not stopped showing up. I stopped doing it the way I&#8217;d always done it &#8212; the way that was slowly grinding me into dust.</p><p>I started listening to the parts of me I&#8217;d been exiling. The scared part. The angry part. The part that still feels like a little girl pretending to be an adult. In IFS, we call them parts &#8212; these different pieces of us that carry different burdens, different beliefs, different jobs they took on when we were too young to know there was another option.</p><p>I&#8217;d been telling my clients about their parts for years. It took me a while to sit with my own.</p><p></p><p>Here&#8217;s what I found when I did:</p><p></p><p>The part of me that was exhausted wasn&#8217;t broken. She was faithful. She&#8217;d been protecting me my whole life. She just didn&#8217;t know she was allowed to put it down.</p><p>The part of me that was angry wasn&#8217;t toxic. She was right. She&#8217;d been telling me for years that something needed to change, and I kept shushing her because her voice was inconvenient.</p><p>The part of me that was terrified of being seen &#8212; really seen, not the curated version &#8230; she wasn&#8217;t weak. She was the bravest one in the room. Because she remembered what happened the last time I let someone all the way in, and she was still willing to try.</p><p>That&#8217;s what healing actually is. It&#8217;s not fixing yourself. It&#8217;s finding yourself &#8230; all the pieces you abandoned along the way because someone told you they were too much, too loud, too broken, too needy, too you.</p><p></p><p>I&#8217;m starting this space because I&#8217;m done with the highlight reel version of growth.</p><p>I&#8217;m done pretending that healing is linear, that you do the work and then you&#8217;re &#8220;healed&#8221; and you never have another bad day. That&#8217;s not how any of this works. Healing is messy. Growth is painful. Integration &#8212; the real kind, the IFS kind, the kind where you gather up all the parts of yourself you scattered across decades of survival &#8230; that&#8217;s the hardest thing I&#8217;ve ever done.</p><p>And also the most worth it.</p><p>So this is what I want to write about. All of it. The clinical stuff and the personal stuff and the places where they collide. What it&#8217;s actually like to be a mother who&#8217;s healing while raising humans. What it means to grieve people who are still alive and people who aren&#8217;t. What it looks like to build a life that&#8217;s honest instead of just impressive.</p><p>I&#8217;m not going to give you five steps to regulate your nervous system. (Okay, sometimes I might. I&#8217;m still a clinician.) But mostly, I&#8217;m going to tell you the truth. About my life, about this work, about what I see in the room with my clients and in the mirror when I&#8217;m brave enough to look.</p><p>Because I think that&#8217;s what most of us are actually hungry for. Not more information. Not more hacks. Just someone willing to say: Yeah. Me too. And here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m learning.</p><p></p><p>I didn&#8217;t stop struggling. I just stopped doing it the hard way.</p><p>I chose a different struggle &#8212; the kind that actually leads somewhere. The kind where you walk toward the thing you&#8217;ve been running from your whole life and you find out it&#8217;s not a monster. It&#8217;s just a kid who&#8217;s been waiting for you to come back.</p><p>If you&#8217;re here, I think maybe you&#8217;re ready for that too.</p><p>Welcome!</p><p></p><p>Xo,</p><p>CourtneyLee</p><div class="captioned-image-container"><figure><a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" target="_blank" href="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lOGE!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c0e2d48-559c-4619-bb0c-1b05b1b5ea4d_908x908.jpeg" data-component-name="Image2ToDOM"><div class="image2-inset"><picture><source type="image/webp" srcset="/__u/substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!lOGE!, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/w_424, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/c_limit, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/f_webp, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/q_auto:good, /__u/askcourtney.substack.com/fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7c0e2d48-559c-4619-bb0c-1b05b1b5ea4d_908x908.jpeg 424w, 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isPermaLink="false">https://askcourtney.substack.com/p/coming-soon</guid><dc:creator><![CDATA[AskCourtney]]></dc:creator><pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 01:06:04 GMT</pubDate><enclosure url="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yjAI!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff1d484b0-1f59-4013-99bc-9c5e53937ff9_908x908.png" length="0" type="image/jpeg"/><content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is Courtney&#39;s Substack.</p><p class="button-wrapper" data-attrs="{&quot;url&quot;:&quot;https://askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe?&quot;,&quot;text&quot;:&quot;Subscribe now&quot;,&quot;action&quot;:null,&quot;class&quot;:null}" data-component-name="ButtonCreateButton"><a class="button primary" href="/__u/askcourtney.substack.com/subscribe"><span>Subscribe now</span></a></p>]]></content:encoded></item></channel></rss>