Within the last five minutes, Rick Rubin posed the question, “If you were to move into a house on the top of a mountain that no one could ever come and visit, and you made that the place that you most wanted to spend your time, and you really curated it to your taste, what would it look like?” He then went on to say, “I don’t decorate my house to impress anyone else. I decorate it to be the best version of the house I want to live in.”

It got me thinking about how much we, while maybe uncomfortable to admit, metaphorically decorate our house to impress others. We buy name brands, we go to big colleges, and we pursue what I like to call “gilded” careers—not the careers we are most passionate about, but ones that look rich, shiny, or beautiful on the outside while actually hiding a less valuable reality underneath. It made me wonder… Why don’t we decorate our houses for ourselves? Why is it that we are willing to trade in our freedom, fulfillment, and happiness for status and acceptance amongst others?

When we were young, we could never imagine decorating a house solely to impress others. We decorated our house in any which way we desired, with never a thought about how it would be perceived by others. We were wild. Authentic. Curious. Imaginative. We expressed ourselves without shame. We loved without conceptualizing love. We drew pictures like this without a care:

So, truly… what happened? Where did all of that stop? When did we trade our truest, most free, authentic expression for what our parents, teachers, religious leaders, friends, and media said we should do instead? How did we go from drawing crazy pictures and dreaming of being astronauts in outer space to putting on concealer and a fake smile to cover up the dread and exhaustion of living another day? Where did the vitality of life go? How did we forget that it’s an incredible miracle to be living creatures having experiences on this giant floating rock? Well, I found the answer in Don Miguel Ruiz’s book, The Mastery of Love.

He explains how as we begin to get older, we undergo a process of learning how to exist in this human world—a process called domestication. We learn all of the “rules of society, its laws, its religions, its different cultures, and ways to be.” We learn what is considered good and bad, what is right and wrong, how we ought to act and ought not to (at least how society and our parents define them). We learn that we are rewarded and praised when we do things that others—our parents, teachers, religious leaders, friends, etc.—consider “right” and “good,” and we are punished, criticized, and rejected when we do the opposite.

It’s like when one child gets a good grade and receives praise, excitement, and maybe even a reward, but another child gets a bad grade and is met with disappointment, criticism, or a loss of privileges. One child does what they’re told and receives affection, approval, and is called well-behaved, while another talks back and is met with anger, punishment, and is called disrespectful. It’s when a kid cries in public and is scolded, shushed, or taken outside.

What drives the effectiveness of such a process is the element of fear. Don Miguel Ruiz writes, “We are afraid to be punished, but later we are also afraid of not getting the reward, of not being good enough for Mom or Dad, sibling or teacher. The need to be accepted is born. Before that, we don’t care whether we are accepted or not.”

While I agree with what he writes here, I just couldn’t help thinking that it couldn’t be the full answer. I understand that we enjoy praise and do not want to be punished, but so much so that we are willing to abandon ourselves for it? What even is fear anyway, and why does it rule us in this way?

The simplest definition I could find and settle on was this: Fear is the mind and body’s response to a perceived threat. Its purpose is protection, and it makes complete sense. As I wrote in Why We Refuse the Call to Change, “The human nervous system is built for survival. Our brains evolved with one dominant goal: to stay alive.” So, fear engages our survival instincts by getting us ready to respond to the perceived threat.

What doesn’t quite make sense is that we will experience fear when there is actually no literal threat… until you take a step back and look through an evolutionary lens.

Biological evolution moves much slower than technological and cultural change, meaning the world has changed at a rate significantly faster than our human evolution can keep up with. We are not the modern humans we believe ourselves to be. Rather, we still possess ancient, hardwired survival instincts: “Many behaviors that frustrate us now are not character flaws but adaptive strategies from our evolutionary past, still active in a world they never intended for.”1

Biba Rey, in her article, Which Modern Behaviours Are Leftovers From Survival Instincts, explains that “For most of human history, survival depended on a small set of priorities: detecting threats quickly, staying connected to the group, conserving physical and mental energy, and responding fast rather than accurately.” In this context, anxiety, conformity, an aversion to friction, and immediate reactions that are sometimes illogical all make sense, for they are quite literally the survival mechanisms that have allowed our species to make it for as long as we have.

So, when Don Miguel Ruiz speaks of the need to be accepted, he is referring to one of our most deep-rooted survival mechanisms. Being rejected by your family or group could mean losing protection, food, resources, and mates. Consequently, the brain learns to treat threats to connection, acceptance, status, and identity as though they were threats to life itself, because they pretty much are.

Imagine a scenario where a child is angry, and in response, their parent says, “Stop being dramatic.” The child’s anger doesn’t disappear, but now they face a choice: trust their anger, or maintain connection with the parent. For the child, connection wins every time and has to, because a child is dependent. So, they learn that maybe my anger is wrong. Then it becomes maybe my feelings are wrong. Until finally, it becomes maybe I can’t trust myself.

Repetition of moments like these, where intuition is overridden, develops into a sense of powerlessness, as we slowly lose trust in our own inner guidance. We think, if my feelings, instincts, and boundaries can’t be trusted, who should I trust? Eventually, the answer becomes everyone else. We learn that direction, validation, approval, and permission live outside of us. We’ve all heard of the concept of finding oneself—we search far and wide, maybe even travel multiple countries looking for this elusive “self,” as if it would be anywhere else but within!

What’s tragic is that this adaptive strategy of maintaining connection for survival becomes outdated as we move into adulthood, yet many of us continue to habitually and mechanically carry it out without ever questioning it. It has become programmed into us the same way one would program a blank computer, but it happened before we were consciously aware, before we had any conscious ability to discern whether we actually wanted to install the program.

These programs then go underground and run our lives. We begin constructing an identity around what receives acceptance, while our most authentic self gets pushed into the background. Everything we learn turns into a standard of perfection we hold in our minds—a standard that we always strive for but will never actually achieve. Maybe it’s If I’m good, people stay. If I’m helpful, people stay. If I’m quiet, people stay. Or If I’m successful, people stay. And because we believe that connection can be threatened, we must remain always vigilant and never complacent in the hunt to become and stay good enough. It’s a catch-22 (or maybe it’s not… I’ve just always wanted to use that phrase 🤪).

Pretty much everyone has an inner critic that lives in their mind that is always judging, always finding something not good enough. Again, this is part of the survival mechanism, and ironically, it is only trying to protect us! The inner critic is trained to reward and punish you as your parents or society would’ve when you were younger, based on how well you meet the expectations of others—the standard of perfection—in order to maintain connection. It is trying to ensure that you deal with any threats to connection before they fully play out and people see the version of you that’s not societally acceptable or palatable. It is trying to put you in a box so you’ll always be digestible, and others won’t choke on the totality of your multi-passionate complexity. It’s making sure the you that is full of desire and creativity and childlike wonder is hidden in a society that rewards compliance and lackluster.

I’ll never forget the moment I began creating other versions of myself in my own life. I was in second grade, and this girl, Ashley (oh, how the name makes me cringe), went around asking, “What’s my name? What’s my name?” And when you would respond, she would accuse you of saying the “A-word”. Naturally, we began discussing which letter words we actually knew, to which Ashley ended up telling on us to the teacher.

I got in big, big trouble for all the curse words I said and knew (as if it was my fault!), and all I remember walking away from the experience was thinking, Ok, so I can’t say certain things in front of certain people, or I’ll get punished. From that point on, I began understanding what certain groups expected of me—my parents, my teachers, my friends—and started creating different versions of myself for each.

The truth is, once we enter adulthood, once we are on our own, we no longer depend on our parents for anything, and therefore do not need to continue trading in our deepest desires for their approval and acceptance, yet we do not know how to question the program, to rewrite it. Many will live their entire life according to others, rather than pursuing themselves and their innermost truth, purpose, and direction.

Hence, following a path that was prescribed by society but doesn’t feel right, staying in an emotionally abusive relationship you knew wasn’t right from day one, spending all of your hard-earned money on a purse to show off to others, no longer pursuing an artistic skill because once you were told to never show it to anyone.

All of this to say: there is hope! We don’t have to carry on this way! With awareness, understanding and a new response, we can change our relationship to fear. We can retrain and reparent ourselves to know that it is safe to be who we truly are. We can forgive ourselves and accept ourselves and turn inwards to look at and be guided by the infinite intelligence and wisdom that lives within each and every one of us.

And in a future essay, I’ll be discussing how. Make sure to subscribe if you’re interested in getting that essay.

For now, all my love!

Gracie 💓

But let me rewind quickly.

A few years ago, I realized that I was destined for more than the life prescribed by the matrix. I realized that I desire freedom in all senses of the word—financial freedom, mental freedom, time freedom, location freedom. I desire fulfillment in the work that I do. I want it to mean something and to be of value in a world where so many people chase value-detracting ideas just to make a quick buck. And lastly, I desire flow. The ability to adapt, to pivot, to trust faithfully that I’m being guided, and to let go of the need to control.

So, I started looking back at my experiences, the lessons I’ve learned, and how I can share all of it with others so they can hopefully experience less suffering than I did and I can make a living from it. I started working on a Substack, a YouTube, and a TikTok. I read lots and lots of books. I started coaching clients and building out an 8-week coaching experience.

The journey has been exhilarating, to say the least. I’ve had so many ups and downs, so many moments of perseverance through doubts, so many moments of faith out of simply having no other choice. And I’m only just getting started. I have a vision that extends so much further than my conscious human mind can comprehend. A vision that expands each and every moment, just like the Universe.

Nobody prepares you for this journey. For walking an alternative path to the majority. For trying to follow your own inner guide after a lifetime of learning to trust external sources more. For bringing something into this world from the empty space of nothingness, pretty much the same way a baby comes into this world. It’s certainly not for the faint-hearted, and sometimes, it brings with it suffering. Cue: present day.

I know a lot about the nature of suffering. I know what it’s caused by, and I know how to cure it. Intellectually, that is. To have the awareness needed during the experience itself is still something I’m working on. I am a human being, after all.

In response to my suffering, I have lightened my load of responsibility. I have stopped pushing myself as hard as I have been the past few months. I figured that maybe what I’m experiencing is a bit of burnout, and so maybe the antidote is free time. But the burden of unclaimed time and space is almost as difficult as the pushing and working.

I work, and I work so hard that what am I meant to do in my free time? In the unclaimed space, my mind busies itself with fearful thoughts: Maybe this isn’t what I want. Maybe I’m not cut out for this road. Maybe I ought to just go get a regular job.

Even louder than the fearful thoughts, two conflicting voices have emerged and exist in me at once. Ironically, that’s one of the exact pillars of the work that I do—helping women hold space for contradiction so that a deeper truth may emerge. Yet while I help others in these exact moments, I sometimes lack the objective space and awareness to see this theme play out in my own life.

As humans, we don’t love the idea of contradiction. We are naturally very dual creatures that see in terms of “right” and “wrong” and “good” and “bad,” until trained otherwise. This is a consequence of having an ego, whose job is to create a coherent identity.

The ego wants to be able to say: This is who I am. This is what I believe. This is what I want. This is where I’m going. The way it does this is through drawing boundaries—self and other, acceptable and unacceptable, “me” and “not me.” It says, I am good, therefore I am not bad. I am strong, therefore I am not weak. I am this, therefore I am not that.

Contradiction, however, threatens that coherence. It introduces the frightening possibility that maybe: “I am this… and I am also its opposite.” Suddenly, the neat story of “me” begins to break apart. We discover that we are capable of both goodness and cruelty, strength and weakness, courage and fear.

In my case, the two conflicting voices present were saying: “I have built something meaningful. I can see how this could become financially sustainable. I’m incredibly close to bringing this eight-week path into the world. I don’t actually want to throw it away.” And at the same time: “Something in me is tired. The way I’ve been doing this feels forced. I need space, and I don’t know what wants to happen next.” This dissonance and not-knowing brought with it an intense discomfort.

My conscious mind has been so desperate to solve the tension and discomfort of this experience, to mitigate my suffering, that I began putting all of my energy towards trying to figure out which voice was “right” and which I should follow. My mind treated the situation as a problem that must be solved, and in doing so, I failed to remember that both can exist as truths at the same time, and I need not act on either.

The truth of the matter is, I don’t know! And perhaps, I’m not meant to yet. I think that’s what makes the whole thing so uncomfortable—the ambiguity of it all. My old orientation isn’t carrying the same energy anymore, but my new orientation hasn’t yet appeared. I am left with all this unclaimed, unstructured, empty space, and in that, my ego desperately wants to collapse that ambiguity into a decision. My mind wants certainty and control, and does not know how to operate without that.

However, learning to hold space for uncertainty, to be vulnerable, is one of the most important skills we can practice as human beings. In my essay on how vulnerability isn’t weakness, I touch on the fact that risk, emotional exposure, and uncertainty are inextricable parts of the human experience, and there is nothing we can do to get rid of them. As scary as it may be that things are uncertain—that we don’t know if our business will succeed, if our marriage will last, if life will go on another day—the sooner we can accept this, the more effectively we can handle it and the more fully we can engage with life. Certainty was always a facade! We don’t have all the answers. Our minds were only ever holding onto illusions to make us feel better.

In regard to my situation, I have no clue whether this whole thing will work out. But I truly believe that if something is meant to be yours, it will not pass you by. You don’t have to cling or force. So, I have decided to give everything a little rest. To focus on me and tend to myself and my interests in the same way a gardener looks after their seeds. If my desire to keep going cannot sustain itself through a break, I have likely been too caught up with what my ego wants for me rather than what my soul, my deeper Self, intends for my life. If it was never divinely mine, then I’m willing to let it go because I know that means something that is divinely mine is waiting to come in.

The work here isn’t to pick one voice over the other and run with it. It’s to instead hold space for the contradiction long enough that a third possibility can emerge—what Carl Jung called the transcendent function. It's a new orientation that becomes visible because you've stopped demanding that either voice win. This is how psychological development takes place. This is what moves us further to wholeness, to which we are all innately driven by our Psyche.

Wholeness does not come from choosing the “good” half of ourselves and rejecting the rest. It comes from recognizing that both possibilities exist within us, and learning to hold the contradiction without needing either side to define the whole of who we are.

All this to say, if there is an inner, mental conflict you’re struggling with, maybe it’s time to create unclaimed space. To say, “both of these exist, and maybe both of them can be true at once.” To surrender the need for control and certainty. To take a break and move towards something that draws you in—maybe a book, a hobby, or something else—even if that thing is not necessarily productive. I think it is only then that we can allow for the truth to emerge.

All my love,
Gracie 💓

From the moment my ex-boyfriend and I first started talking, we were together constantly. When we weren’t together, we were texting. And when we weren’t texting, I was thinking about him.

At first, it felt super exciting, since I had never really been in a relationship before. All I knew was that someone wanted to spend all of their time with me, and I wanted to spend all of my time with them! It was so refreshing to feel like we both liked each other that I pushed aside any doubts or concerns I had.

However, as time passed, my entire life slowly started revolving around him and his life. We became glued at the hip. I slept over at his place every night, hung out with his friends, did the things he wanted to do, ate where he wanted to eat, and so on and so forth. I began organizing all my days around him. Whatever piece of me that was there before the relationship was getting erased, almost as if we were morphing into one.

The more time we spent together, the more it started to intensify into something more like an addiction than something I enjoyed. I was happy when we were together, but devastated when he would leave me to do something else. I put all of my energy into making him the happiest I possibly could. I loved taking care of him and wanted to do the best job I possibly could (I hope you know, I’m cringing too.) He was my drug, and soon it became my entire identity.

I depended on him for almost everything. He made practically every decision for me, down to what I would eat or what we would watch, even sometimes down to what I was allowed to wear. It was practically like I was living on autopilot. I had become a passive observer of my own life. My peace depended on him, my worth depended on him, my sense of being loved depended on him.

Naturally, when he cheated on me, I was absolutely devastated. It felt like my entire reality — everything I knew to be true up to that point — was shattered. Like an earthquake shifted the ground beneath everything I thought was solid. Like having the wind completely knocked out of me. It was one of the worst pains imaginable, and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone.

Everything after that was just a complete and utter mess. The months that followed felt less like a story and more like a tide — I would pull away, he would pull me back, hope would carry us forward, reality would drag us under, and before I knew it, we were right back where we started. We tried and we tried, only to be met with the same devastating conclusion: this won’t work. By the time we couldn’t carry on the toxic cycle anymore, I had completely lost my mind — not a shred of it felt as though it belonged to me anymore — and my friends were telling me to get checked for bipolar disorder.

BIG EMOTIONS

After I finally left for good, I felt a whole swath of different emotions: from hatred, disgust, and sadness, all the way to love, longing, & grief, and sometimes even joy and relief. But there was one emotion that consistently inhabited my body and persisted more than the rest, one that scared me a lot, which was anger.

I was so angry. Indescribable levels that I had no idea how to handle. I felt that the way everything went was so unfair. I loved him, and at the time, I couldn’t understand why that wasn’t enough. I wanted that to be enough. But it wasn’t, and we were forced to part, which really angered me.

It felt wildly unfair to me that I had given the relationship everything I had, every single part of me, and all he did was cheat in return. It felt unfair that I loved him unconditionally, even after the first cheating instance, and it still wasn’t enough. I wished so badly things could’ve been different, and I blamed him for all of it: the reason we couldn’t be together, for hurting me so badly, for leaving and giving up. For not being the man I wanted. For putting me in a position where I basically had to choose between him and myself.

I started drinking because I couldn’t handle the pain that I felt. I didn’t know how to cope with a loss of that size. It felt like I was dying sometimes. So I drank and was very mean at times, because that’s all I knew how to do at the time. I didn’t know how else to handle those feelings that I had never felt so big before.

He would try to apologize to me at times, and honestly, I couldn’t even hear him. I didn’t even try to listen because it was blocked by anger. I was so angry that someone who supposedly loved me could betray me and hurt me so badly. And repeatedly, too. I was so angry that, for so long, I had been emotionally manipulated, abused, and neglected.

Looking back now, I know that there were pieces of the story I couldn’t yet see. All I could see at the time was what he had done. And from that perspective, my anger made perfect sense.

After all, it was he who cheated. He who lied. He who broke promises. He was the one who repeatedly crossed boundaries and then apologized, only for the cycle to happen again. When I looked at the relationship, it seemed obvious who the problem was. The evidence appeared overwhelming, and everybody around me agreed.

What I couldn’t see yet was that my anger was trying to show me something important. I just wasn’t looking in the right direction.

anger was trying to tell me something

One of the most important things I’ve learned throughout healing is that emotions carry information. They are not random, they are not mistakes, nor are they things to suppress, avoid, or get rid of. Rather, they are messengers.

Anger, in particular, often appears when something within us recognizes that a boundary has been crossed. When something is not okay, something feels unfair, something needs our attention. As Julia Cameron writes, “Anger is meant to be listened to. Anger is a voice, a shout, a plea, a demand. Anger is meant to be respected. Why? Because anger is a map. Anger shows us what our boundaries are. Anger shows us where we want to go.”

In that sense, my anger made sense. My boundaries had been crossed. Promises had been broken. Trust had been violated. Of course, I was angry.

So, I thought my anger was only pointing toward him. I thought the message was: “Look at what he did to you.” And there was some truth in that.

However, the other thing I’ve learned throughout healing is that emotions will persist until their message has been fully delivered and digested by the recipient. So I knew when my anger continued to persist past the initial anger at my ex-boyfriend, there was another message hidden underneath it. One that was much harder to hear. One that would completely change how I understood the relationship, my suffering, and my role within it.

My anger wasn’t only asking me to look at him. It was also asking me to look at myself.

the truth i didn’t want to see

Healing has a funny way of bringing us face-to-face with the truths we’re most determined not to see. As I sank deeper into feeling my anger and learning from it, I realized how, by putting all of my energy and attention into what he did, I bypassed ever asking what my role had been in the relationship.

Once I finally became willing to ask that question honestly, memories started flooding back. All of the moments where my intuition told me something wasn’t right. The moments where I knew I deserved better. The moments where I knew I was unhappy and wanted to leave. The moments where every part of me knew this relationship was hurting me.

And yet I chose to stay. Not once. Not twice. But for years.

I started realizing that while he had betrayed me, I had also been betraying myself... and I think it actually hurt way worse. I betrayed myself every time I ignored what I knew deep down, every time I silenced my intuition, every time I convinced myself (or allowed him to convince me) that something unacceptable was acceptable, and every time I chose the relationship over myself.

Up to that point, I had taken every ounce of my power and handed it over to him. I learned to trust his voice more than my own. His judgment more than my own. His reality more than my own. I became more concerned with what he wanted than what I wanted. I had lost myself entirely (or so I thought), and I allowed myself to believe that I was powerless throughout it all (note from future self: you didn’t know any better yet).

I thought that I had found love, but looking back now, I think I had also found a way to avoid myself. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, I think it felt easier having someone else decide what life looked like. It saved me from having to do the hard, uncomfortable work of figuring out who I was on my own. I don’t think I minded trading in some of my freedoms for the feeling of safety and comfort that the certainty of his decision-making offered me.

Hence the addiction. Less time alone meant less time to reflect on my own choices (or lack thereof). Less time to face the truth that what I was allowing to occur in my life was against my better judgment. Less time to face the truth that in spending all of my time with him, I was abandoning myself.

Nonverbally, he had made a promise that he was going to be responsible for my life, and I accepted it. He told me he would never leave, but he did. And sure, I ended things, but he was supposed to come back, to fight, to find me and convince me to come back.

The swath of emotions I experienced after was a direct result of the significance of the loss in my life. No longer could I depend on him to make my own decisions. No longer did I have someone else taking up every moment of my time and attention, so I wouldn’t have to spend a moment on my own. I was free… but that was terrifying? What is freedom, and how does one live freely?

The truth is that when the relationship ended, I was left standing face-to-face with myself, which was terrifying because I had absolutely no idea who that was anymore.

This is what I call self-abandonment — outsourcing the responsibility of living our own life to something external.

We prioritize what we hear from external sources — whether it be our parents, our institutions, society, or even tools like ChatGPT or flipping a coin — to direct our internal life and to make our decisions. We look to the outside to answer the inner questions: Who am I? How should I live my life? What should I care about? What should my path be? How should I dress? and the list goes on. We stop listening to ourselves and the wise inner guide we all have within, instead taking what others say as truth. We become passive observers of our own life.

Naturally, my next question after learning all this was: why would we ever want to do such a thing as abandon ourselves?

This will be the focus of one of my upcoming essays. Subscribe to get it straight to your inbox.

For now, all my love.

Gracie 💓

With confusion, I asked her how not crying corresponds to doing better, to which she replied, “I’m a tough cookie,” “I don’t let anyone see my emotions,” and “I hate showing signs of weakness.”

This was slightly baffling to me, considering I am one of the biggest criers you’ll ever meet. I will cry about just about anything if it makes me feel that way, so much so that my best friend has had concerns about whether or not I might be facing a mental health crisis (I promise I’m not… if anything, the opposite!).

The thing is, crying is my outlet. I don’t do it because I’m sad (well… unless I’m sad), but because it’s a release for me. I have the whole process down to a science (Read: There's a better way to handle your feelings), and every time I do it, I feel so much better. Crying is my superpower. Plus, I believe that trying not to cry is way worse than just letting it out.

I know there are probably not many of us avid criers and that I am one of only few; however, I had no clue how significantly the sentiment swayed to the other side. People truly equate crying with weakness and feeling with failing. I see it in my clients. I see it on social media. I see it in most men. I even see it when I watch Love Island UK (the better Love Island🤭). They tell each other, “Don’t cry. Be strong. Don’t let him see that.” As if they are in a battle, and emotions are a sign of defeat!

These exceptionally damaging, pervasive beliefs are actually symptoms of a much larger epidemic, one surrounding vulnerability. This was confirmed to me when, while browsing books at Barnes & Noble, I picked up one titled Daring Greatly by Brené Brown and, by accident, opened it straight to a section called Vulnerability Myth #1: “Vulnerability is Weakness”. I bought the book instantly.

what is vulnerability?

Brené Brown is, as she writes on her website, “a researcher, storyteller, and Texan who’s spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy.” More specifically, she’s a grounded theory researcher, meaning the way she conducts her research is by talking to real people, listening to real stories, and then extracting patterns and creating theories from those conversations. After thousands of them, she decided to define vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” What a beautiful, concise, and accurate way to put it!

If you think about the times in your own life when you have been most vulnerable, you will, without fail, consistently find these three ingredients. I certainly see them in my own vulnerable times, whether it was saying I love you first and not knowing if it’ll be reciprocated, telling my parents I didn’t want to pursue accounting anymore (their dream for me), going to the gym as a female who doesn’t know how to lift, sharing content, starting my own business, and so on. In each of these examples, I put myself out there (emotional exposure) with no idea (uncertainty) how it would be received (risk).

However, none of these scenarios are comparable to the time I was betrayed by the man I loved. After a three-year on-and-off tumultuous relationship, I was left with a lot of pain that I didn’t know how to handle or whether I could handle. But don’t fret because I had an escape plan: drink. And drink, I did. (That is, until I got bronchitis and physically couldn’t keep drinking. Turns out, drinking isn’t a very effective coping mechanism…)

At the time, I was very bitter, very angry, and swore I would never love or trust another person again. It’s no wonder why: I took a risk by choosing to open myself fully to someone and to love unconditionally, and in return, I was met with a complete shattering of my reality and the most excruciating heartbreak. Words cannot properly convey the pain I experienced during that time. Why would I ever do that again?

Looking back now, having experienced so much more love—both from myself and from others—I’m so glad that I didn’t actually let that pain convince me to harden or close my heart. That simply would’ve been the worst thing I could’ve done, for myself and for everyone in my life.

Yet I cannot turn a blind eye to how many people have chosen this route, thinking it is the best or only way forward after a painful experience or heartbreak. I see it in my father, who was hurt by his family early in life. I see it in my sister, who was hurt by her first group of close friends. I see it in many of the amazing women I get to speak to through my work. And I even see it in the comments on my YouTube: “I chose to be single after a long relationship with an abuser. I wouldn’t trust another relationship.”

I say none of this with any shame or judgment directed to these people. In fact, I completely understand the reasoning behind this route, as it’s the one I tried to take when I turned to alcohol. We close our hearts because, excuse my French, but pain fucking hurts, and sitting with pain is extremely uncomfortable, and well, painful.

closing your heart doesn’t work

Part of the issue with taking this route, however, is that it doesn’t actually work. If we don’t let out our emotions, they find other ways out. David Hawkins, psychiatrist and spiritual teacher, found that, “Because most people repress, suppress, and try to escape from their feelings, the suppressed energy accumulates and seeks expression through psychosomatic distress, bodily disorders, emotional illnesses, and disordered behavior in interpersonal relationships.” His research very clearly shows that suppressed emotions don’t just disappear. Rather, they go underground and continue influencing our thoughts, behavior, stress, and relationships. When we do not honor and process our pain, it lives on in us, and it colors our lives in negative, fearful ways.

The other part of this issue is that we may think we are protecting ourselves from pain when we choose to numb and distract ourselves—whether it’s through alcohol, drugs, partying, socializing, shopping, watching TV, scrolling on social media, or something else—but what we are really doing is numbing ourselves to everything. In turning away from feeling our more painful, darker emotions—those of fear, shame, grief, sadness, and disappointment—we actually turn away from the more pleasant, lighter ones as well.

Brené Brown explains, “Vulnerability is the core of all emotions and feelings,” meaning that we cannot shut ourselves away from feeling, and therefore vulnerability, without closing ourselves off to life itself. She writes, “Vulnerability is also the cradle of the emotions and experiences we crave. Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

Whether you think it’s a blessing or a curse, feeling is the price, and the privilege, of this human experience. We do not get to cherry-pick which emotions we want to feel and which we don’t—it simply doesn’t work that way. It is only through the balance of light and dark that we find any meaning in this human existence.

To love is to be vulnerable. To feel is to be vulnerable. To be human is to be vulnerable. Every single day we wake up and have no idea what the day is going to bring. When we choose to love someone, we have no idea what it may bring. As Brené Brown writes:

“Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we cannot ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment’s notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow—that’s vulnerability. Love is uncertain. It’s incredibly risky. And loving someone leaves us emotionally exposed. Yes, it’s scary, and yes, we’re open to being hurt, but can you imagine your life without loving or being loved?”

Risk, emotional exposure, and uncertainty are inextricable parts of the human experience, and nothing we do can get rid of them. By trying to fight this fact of our existence—by trying to turn off feeling—we create suffering for ourselves, and only we pay the price by denying ourselves all the things that make life meaningful. We cannot see beauty in life when our insides are teeming with unprocessed pain.

embracing vulnerability is embracing uncertainty

But I only say all this because there is hope. There is a pathway forward, and it starts with changing our relationship with uncertainty. Instead of seeing it as something to fear, we can choose to see it as a wondrous unknown that births miracles and glorious surprises. We can choose to see life as an unfolding story with infinite possibilities and believe that it is always working out in ways we cannot yet see.

In fact, I am convinced that the uncertainty of it all is what makes life worth living. If we already knew how every single detail unfolded in every moment down to the minute of our death, why would we go on? Certainty kills wonder, and wonder is what makes this human life so magical.

Years ago I wrote an entry in my journal that I come back to often:

There is so much excitement in the unknown.

I believe it’s exactly that reason people enjoy going out to bars at nighttime: you never know what the night has in store for you or how it will unfold. You are hopeful about the people you will see or meet, the memories you will make, the laughs you will have and share. Really, you are excited and eager to see how the story unfolds.

So, why is life any different? Is it not, too, an unfolding story with infinite possibilities? That each sunrise brings with it the hope for and excitement about what that day may bring—all the people you may meet, laughs you may have, memories you will make? When did life lose its excitement so that we had to start relying on our nights out and reality TV to provide us a kick instead?

At some point, we started allowing our past to define our future and traded chasing our dreams for what is safe and predictable. However, I believe there truly is no reason each day can’t bring with it the excitement of endless possibility. After all, it was just a random day you met (or will meet) your soulmate, your best friend. It was a random day that you gained clarity on a dream, you became closer with God.

So please, with each rising sun, cast away your worries, doubts, assumptions — all stemming from the past — about how today will go, and let God reveal to you what He has in store for you, which is better than anything you could have imagined for yourself. Allow yourself to wander, to be swept with the knowing and the trusting that you will find (and that the Universe will guide you) right back home, exactly where you were intended to be.

it’s ok to feel

In order to do this, we must also discard our fear of our own inner world and emotions and unravel the myth that feeling is failing and vulnerability is weak.

Emotions are energy, and they cannot hurt you. They carry messages and intelligence regarding our deeper subconscious beliefs, boundaries, and more. While some can be very uncomfortable to sit with, they are passing sensations that, if not resisted, become depleted of any charge.

We do not need to numb ourselves. Rather, we need to learn to become more present and to increase our capacity to stay during those difficult moments. We must know that we can sit with our emotions and remember that they are temporary. We must separate our worth from our outcomes. When we fail, it doesn’t mean we are failures. In fact, we are brave for trying. We must let it hurt so that we can let it heal.

I will finish with another quote from Dr. Brené Brown: “Yes, we are totally exposed when we are vulnerable. Yes, we are in the torture chamber that we call uncertainty. And yes, we’re taking a huge emotional risk when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. But there’s no equation where taking risks, braving uncertainty, and opening ourselves up to emotional exposure equals weakness.” Feeling is not failing, your emotions are not unsafe, and your vulnerability is not something to avoid or shut down.

So, if you’ve been hurt, I completely understand the temptation to want to shut down and protect yourself from pain, and I’m a big proponent of taking all the time you need to process your experience before opening yourself up to go back into the arena. Learning to trust again and being vulnerable with another human is difficult, but love is always worth it.

Most importantly, if you took the leap to be vulnerable with somebody in the past and they hurt you, their actions are the only weakness. What you showed by opening yourself and your heart was not weakness, but courage, because to engage with life by embracing our vulnerability is truly the most courageous act of all.

All my love,
Gracie 💓

What if I never find a love like this again?

It’s the type of love that feels so intense, so all-consuming, it’s hard to imagine anything ever comparing. Yes, there were the betrayals, the lies, the disrespect—but there were also the moments afterward: the flowers, the letters, the gifts, the promises. And those moments felt so good that they convinced me this kind of love was too rare to walk away from.

It’s bizarre and incredibly deceptive the way a single thought can keep us in places we’ve already outgrown. Deep down, we know something isn’t right. We know it’s time to let go, to move forward, to heal. Yet we stay, paralyzed by a future that hasn’t happened.

What if I never find this again? What if this was my only chance? What if I’m making the biggest mistake of my life?

The more we try to answer those questions, the more lost we become. We stop trusting ourselves. We don’t know what’s true anymore. What’s right or wrong.

By the end of this essay, I don’t necessarily want to convince you that you’ll find another love. I only want to help you see that this fear isn’t actually about finding love at all. Only then can the fear begin to lose its grip.

implicit yet incorrect assumption #1: love is found externally in & through somebody else

When you think back to those moments when you felt the deepest love... where did you actually experience it? I’m guessing your answer is: inside of yourself. Maybe you felt it in your chest, your stomach, your body, your mind. He certainly didn’t physically hand you the feeling, and he couldn’t place it inside of you either.

Think about something or someone else you’ve loved. Maybe it’s music, your parents, a sport, the ocean, your dog. That feeling again is felt inside of you. It isn’t that the hobby or art that generates your love or grants it to you. Rather, each of these gives your love somewhere to go.

A tad more somber, but when someone dies... does your love die with them? When the relationship ended, did all the love leave?

All of these experiences point to the fact that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t the source of your love. Maybe he was actually the recipient.

Another person can awaken the love that already exists within you, but they cannot create it. They can share love with you, but they cannot become its source. Love is not something that can be taken or given, and it is not something that we get only when we are good. It is only possible for it to be perceived in such a way.

Love never comes from outside of us. If there was ever a time you felt happy and in love, it was a result of the love coming out of you. You are the source! The source has always been within. We believe we find love in another person, but what we truly find is an opportunity to experience the love that already exists within us.

The moment we believe another person is the source of our love, we become dependent on their presence, their approval, and their choice. When they leave, we do not only grieve the relationship—we believe love itself has left us. However, that love isn’t gone; it’s just lost its object. The intensity being grieved is that of your own experience and capacity to love because you feel as though it has nowhere to go.

It’s incredibly liberating to know that losing them does not mean losing love itself. Although losing them as a companion in the experience of love is painful, love itself remains untouched. Happiness can only come from inside of you and is the result of your love; therefore, you are responsible for your happiness (this is great news!).

implicit yet incorrect assumption #2: love is scarce

Have you ever been convinced someone was upset with you, only to realize later they were just having a bad day? Or maybe there have been times you’ve lain awake imagining the worst possible outcome, only for none of it to happen?

Fear has a funny way of shrinking our world. It distorts our perception. John O’Donohue writes, “Fear is like fog; it spreads everywhere and falsifies the shape of everything.” It’s almost like seeing the world through the light of a flashlight and thinking that’s all there is to see.

Instead of seeing possibilities, we really only see loss. Instead of seeing all the love that still exists in our life — friends, family, purpose, beauty, future people you haven’t yet met — our attention becomes fixed on the one place love no longer is.

Five years, maybe ten or twenty years ago, it is likely you didn’t know this person existed, nor could you have predicted your meeting. So how can you be so certain you've already met everyone you'll ever love?

Love is not actually scarce. Fear only makes it appear to be that way.

Fear tells us that love is limited. That there is only one chance, one soulmate, one person who can complete us, turning love into something we must compete for, cling to, and protect. And when that person leaves, fear whispers that we have lost our only opportunity to be happy.

Just like in the other cases, this is not the full truth. This is the light of the flashlight — only one particular lens. Don Miguel Ruiz writes, “We search for love outside of ourselves when love is all around us. Love is everywhere, but we don’t have the eyes to see. Our emotional body is no longer tuned to love.”

At one point, we were children full of love, and true love was our nature. However, through experiences of rejection and punishment, our lives have become so full of unhealed wounds, unresolved pain, and self-judgment that we become blind to the abundance of love that surrounds us.

Every person you meet is unique, every relationship is unique, and every moment of your life is new. Life is always creating possibilities beyond what the mind can imagine. Don Miguel Ruiz likens our hearts and the love they create to a magical kitchen that can produce the best food at any time, in any quantity. What he’s really trying to convey is that love is not a limited resource or a prize that only a fortunate few receive. Whether we experience this love or not depends on our willingness to reopen our hearts and keep them open after experiencing hurt. (once again, this is great news!)

implicit yet incorrect assumption #3: I can’t create a beautiful life alone

More deeply embedded within the fear of not finding another love is the belief that one won’t be okay if that is the case. In other words, I’m not okay on my own. The quality of my life is determined by my romantic relationships, and I need a relationship to be whole.

A beautiful life is not something another person builds for you. It is something you create through the way you love, the way you see, the way you give, and the way you live each day. When you finally discover that beauty comes from your relationship with yourself and with life, you stop asking another person to become the foundation of your happiness.

That’s not to say that a lot of beauty doesn’t come from romantic relationships. Rather, by believing they are the foundation of a beautiful life, we neglect all of life’s other countless sources of joy: creativity, friendship, nature, purpose, service, curiosity, gratitude, and so on. A romantic relationship can enrich those things, but it certainly doesn’t create them.

As Don Miguel Ruiz writes, “When love is coming out of you, you are not searching for love because you are afraid to be alone. When you have all that love for yourself, you can be alone and there’s no problem. You are happy to be alone, and to share is also fun.”

It is freeing to realize that the quality of your life comes from how you choose to live it, not from your relationship status. Then love is no longer a rescue from loneliness. It becomes a gift you share from the abundance of a life that is already full.

so… how do we move forward?

but first, a greater note on the nature of fear

In his book The Power of Now (a great book that I recommend to every living being), Eckhart Tolle writes, “Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry — all forms of fear — are caused by too much future, and not enough presence.”

To summarize this teaching (if you’d like a longer essay on this, let me know!), the present moment is all that exists. As Tolle writes, “There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be… Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.”

Suffering is defined as a resistance to what is. And well, if the present moment is all that ever exists in any given moment, then the present moment is what is. If we choose to live anywhere else mentally, past or future, we are resisting what is, overlooking the joy that exists right now, and causing suffering for ourselves in the process.

He writes, “This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now. You are in the here and now, while your mind is in the future. This creates an anxiety gap. And if you are identified with your mind and have lost touch with the power and simplicity of the Now, that anxiety gap will be your constant companion. You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection — you cannot cope with the future.”

If you’re experiencing fear (and not the kind where you shrink back when someone is going to hit you), I gently urge you to come back to this very moment and ask, “What is true right now?” Ask, “Am I thinking about and imagining a future that does not yet exist?” If so, there is nothing you can actually do with or about it. As he says, you can always cope with this moment, but you cannot cope with the future. And ironically enough, by living in the future, you miss the only place from which your future is actually created.

Ask yourself, “What do I need in this moment right now?” Maybe it’s the feeling of safety, so you carry out a meditation or nervous system regulation exercise. Maybe it’s the feeling of joy, so you take yourself outside to spend time with the trees or watch the sunset. You get the gist. Onto the next.

fears are beliefs we’ve agreed to

Every fear points to a belief we have agreed to (probably unconsciously and probably when we were quite young).

Here are some very human examples of hidden agreements beneath our fears:

• Fear: “What if I embarrass myself?” → Agreement: Making mistakes means there’s something wrong with me.

• Fear: “What if they don’t like me?” → Agreement: My value depends on other people’s opinions.

• Fear: “What if I fail?” → Agreement: Failure determines my worth.

• Fear: “What if I miss this opportunity?” → Agreement: Good opportunities don’t come around twice.

• Fear: “What if I disappoint my parents?” → Agreement: I am responsible for other people’s happiness.

• Fear: “What if I never become successful?” → Agreement: Success determines whether my life has value.

• Fear: “What if I end up alone?” → Agreement: Being alone means something is wrong with me.

See the pattern? We have beliefs that we have agreed to, whether we realize it or not, that drive us, our fears, and our behavior. For many of us, we believe we are not enough. We believe that love can be lost, given, taken, or earned. We believe our happiness depends on another person. We believe our future is already written. Then we experience fear as though these beliefs were factual truths.

David Hawkins, in his book Letting Go, writes, “Fear of life is really the fear of emotions. It is not the facts that we fear but our feelings about them.”

The event that each fear points to is really a neutral event. Ending up alone is a neutral event until we add a meaning—maybe that it’s awesome because we love to be alone or maybe that it’s horrible because it’s a sign that something is wrong with us. In every case, you’re not actually afraid of the situation occurring. You’re afraid of the story you’ve attached to it.

The really great news is that an agreement is only true for as long as we continue to believe and agree to it. The moment we question it, we discover that much of what we feared was never reality, but instead a story we accepted without awareness.

So, put super concisely, here is a method for sussing out your agreements:

1. Become aware of the agreement. Notice what your mind is saying without judgment. Look out for fears.

2. Question whether it’s actually true or whether it’s what you wish to believe.

3. Notice who you’d be without believing it and how it makes you feel, along with the secret motivations that could be driving the belief. (Maybe if you allowed yourself to achieve your dreams, that means you’d be visible, and that is terrifying because of the possibility of rejection. Maybe if you thought being alone was OK, you would have to confront the ways you’ve abandoned yourself for other people, and that scares you. There is no shame in any of these.)

4. Choose a new agreement that’s more aligned with truth, love, and your desired reality.

the root agreement

Most people when they hear you are afraid of never finding love again, or specifically, a love so intense, they will likely tell you, “Yes, of course you will find another love. Don’t be silly.” But arguing with the fear on that level does not target the root agreement.

Maybe you’ve noticed it or maybe you haven’t, but each of the implicit assumptions we looked at revolves around a deeper root theme, which is “I've made something outside of me (in this case another person) responsible for what is ultimately my responsibility.” The core agreement here is that “My well-being lives outside of me.”

It’s manifestation is thoughts of “I’ll be okay if...” I’ll be okay if… I find someone new, they apologize, I get closure, I know I’m making the right decision, I stop missing him, or fill in the blank. Every sentence ends with: “...then I’ll finally be okay.” In this case, your peace has become conditional. It’s waiting for permission from life, but really, it’s giving your power away.

When you make another person responsible for your sense of worthiness, love, and belonging as well as your happiness, identity, safety, future, and peace, you set yourself up for failure because nobody other than you was designed to carry the weight of your entire inner world. In no case can something or someone that is not you satisfy your needs and desires for love and happiness, nor are they meant to. When you form dependencies and begin to believe, “I need them to love me,” “I need life to work out,” or “I need certainty,” you’ve unknowingly handed your power to something outside yourself.

This is how most of us are brought up and raised, so there’s absolutely no shame if you have been doing this. The great news, however, is that now that you are aware, you don’t have to continue agreeing to it. You can choose a new agreement. Instead of: “I’ll be okay when...” You can choose to believe: “I can be okay regardless.”

Believing this doesn’t mean that you don’t want love or that you won’t feel pain if somebody does hurt you; it simply means your well-being is no longer being held hostage by an outcome you can’t control. You’re taking your power back from sources that were never meant to power it.

So, how do you actually do this?

focus on growing love within yourself

First, you must forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for not being perfect. Forgive yourself for all the times you judged yourself for not being good enough. Forgive yourself for not always taking the best care of yourself. Forgive yourself for the times you chose to listen and prioritize other people and external things more than yourself. You are human, and nobody ever taught you this stuff.

Then, accept yourself. Perfection is an impossible standard that doesn’t actually exist! You are good enough and worthy of love exactly as you are. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you, and you don’t need to change or perform anymore. (P.S. It’s okay to have goals still — accepting yourself just means that you don’t hate yourself while you try to achieve them. The intention behind your actions is different. You chase your goals because you love yourself and you deserve those things, not because you fear what happens if you don’t achieve those things or because you want to punish yourself for not being good enough.)

Finally, become your own safe place. Pour into yourself all that you used to pour into others or what you wish they poured into you. Cultivate that love with yourself. You wish he would get you flowers? Go get them for yourself. You wish he would text you good morning? Get a journal and write kind things to yourself each morning, or speak to yourself in the mirror saying what you wish he said. You wish he would take you to dinner? Go take yourself to dinner!

Learning more about who you are, forming a relationship with yourself, and over time, becoming your own safe place is one of, if not the most, beautiful parts of life. When you become your own safe place, you’re slowly reclaiming every piece of yourself that you outsourced. You stop asking someone else to provide your worth, your identity, your peace, your direction, your safety, or your hope, because you can finally be that for yourself.

The truth is, relationships were never designed to carry the weight of your entire inner world. You’ll find all of your relationships improve (or the ones not aligned or healthy will fall away to make space for the ones that are) when you begin doing this.

As Don Miguel Ruiz writes, “You have to focus on the most wonderful relationship you can have: the relationship with yourself. It is not about being selfish; it is about self-love. These are not the same. You are selfish with yourself because there is no love there. You need to love yourself, and the love will grow more and more. Then, when you enter a relationship, you don’t go into it because you need to be loved. It becomes a choice. You can choose someone if you want to, and you can see who they really are. When you don’t need their love, you don’t have to lie to yourself.”

Remember:

What makes you happy is love coming out of you.

Love is meant to be fun and enjoyed, not full of drama and control to prove one’s worth.

If one person doesn’t love you, someone else will love you. There is always someone else. It’s better to be with someone who wants to be with you than to be with someone who has to be with you.

Love is infinitely abundant.

And finally, a beautiful life begins with you.

All my love,
Gracie 💓

As human beings, our lives are suffused with growth. Whether or not we realize it, we have grown from a tiny clump of cells into an infant, a toddler, a child, a teenager, then an adult. And even when physical growth stops, mental, emotional, and spiritual growth never does.

Although many people, if not all, try to refuse change at first, there is no such thing as staying in the same position. Whether it’s toward or away from our desired position, growth is always happening. We all know it: change is the only constant. (In this essay, I will use the words growth, change, and transformation interchangeably.)

Whether it’s because life has forced it upon us or because we consciously choose and desire it, whether it’s because someone has broken up with you or you decided you’d like to quit your corporate job to pursue your creative dreams, we all reach a point where we must accept that change is the only way forward and lean into it. Cross a threshold into the unknown, if you will.

A few years ago, I endured a pretty painful breakup following an extremely unhealthy relationship. I gave everything I had in the fight to keep the relationship alive until I had nothing left, completely ignoring my inner knowing that it was costing me myself. I knew that if I continued on in the relationship trying to make it work, I would end up in an insane asylum, or worse, dead. (I wish I were joking.)

Until the realization truly hit that I could not keep living that way, I was actively trying to prevent the death of the relationship. Once it finally did hit, I traversed into a new territory, no longer refusing and resisting reality, but instead accepting the truth of the situation: I had to let go and move on.

I knew that there was a long road of healing ahead of me, but I had no clue what an absolute rollercoaster it would actually be. I always thought that, in walking away, intellectual understanding of the relationship’s unhealthy impact would be enough for me to let it go and move on. I thought that seeing the truth clearly would translate to never missing him.

To my surprise, my true experience of healing was pretty opposite to my beliefs. Feelings of longing to go back would frequent my emotional body, against my better mental judgment.

And when they did come up, I assumed they meant something about me. That maybe I was crazy, or I had failed, or I hadn’t healed quite nearly as much as I thought I had (or maybe at all whatsoever). I could not understand the contradiction between my desire to move forward and heal and the pull of my feelings to regress and go back to him.

What I did not, and could not, know at the time was that those feelings were not indications of failure, but rather of growth. Before, I would feel those feelings and urges and take them as commands to act. However, this time I had awareness of them, and of the choice I could make whether to listen to them or pick something new.

Because precisely in the moment I chose to let go and move on, or in any moment you make the decision to heal, grow, or become someone new, life begins bringing you situations that ask: Will you return to who you were… or grow into who you’re becoming?

Joseph Campbell, American mythologist and writer, called these situations tests, and they are situations that appear after you (willingly or unwillingly) commit to change.

tests

Some examples:

Maybe you finally decide to start the thing you’ve been talking about for years — a business, a creative project, a healthier routine — but the moment it feels harder, slower, or less glamorous than you imagined, you almost immediately want to quit.

Maybe you finally start showing up consistently to the gym, applying for jobs, posting your work online, or doing the inner work, only to feel discouraged when results don’t come as quickly as you hoped.

Or maybe it looks like being stressed, lonely, or tired and feeling the old habits call your name again: procrastination, numbing, self-sabotage, going back to what is familiar simply because it is familiar.

Read more

Note: This is the second essay in my series: Identity Transformation Files, a collection of essays exploring the lost wisdom of healing, awakening, and identity transformation. You can find essay 1, “Your Pain has Purpose,” here.

Tony Robbins once said, “Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”

And I’m sure you understand the saying on a deeper level, too, whether it’s ignoring a strange pain in your body until it gets worse, putting off getting your car checked until it breaks down on the side of the road, or avoiding a conversation you know you need to have… until it explodes into something bigger.

Again and again, life shows us the same pattern: it often would have been easier to face the truth when it first appeared.

So my question is: Why don’t we?

Why do we so often wait until things become unbearable? Why do we resist the knowing we have deep down that something needs to change? Why do so many of us remain in situations, relationships, patterns, and identities that are no longer aligned, even when some part of us can already feel the cost?

These are the questions this essay seeks to cover. Let’s begin with something most of us have experienced.

The moment you know

There is usually a moment before every meaningful change in our lives when, deep down, we know. The knowing may be quiet, subtle, and difficult to articulate, but it’s there. It is the feeling that something is no longer right. It is the realization that a relationship is harming us, that a path no longer fits, that a version of ourselves we have been living from is no longer sustainable.

We may not have the language for it when we first feel it, and we may not know exactly what comes next. But something within us recognizes that we cannot remain exactly where we are forever.

And yet, even with that knowing, most of us do not move right away.

Instead, we look away and pretend the knowing isn’t there, or that it’s incorrect. We continue on as if nothing has changed, even though something within us has. We distract ourselves from the discomfort of what we’ve realized, because acknowledging it fully would require a response we don’t yet feel ready to give.

No, why of course there isn’t an intuition burning in the back of my head telling me I need to break up with my partner! Or that I need to quit my job! Or that I’ve outgrown this version of myself!

In many ways, it’s like that moment in Barbie when she suddenly brings up thoughts of death in the middle of a perfectly curated, idealized world:

The room goes quiet. The energy shifts. And almost immediately, the response is to shut it down and return to what feels comfortable.

Like, no, Barbie! We don’t talk about those things because we would rather pretend everything is perfect! Please also keep pretending because you’re making the rest of us who don’t want to face the uncomfortable truth.

The truth, when it first appears, can be deeply unsettling. It disrupts the version of reality we’ve been living in. So rather than face it, we often try to contain it. We treat it like something that shouldn’t have been said out loud, something that makes things messy, something that threatens the illusion we’ve been maintaining.

But the moment you know is significant, because once something becomes conscious, it doesn’t fully go away. You can ignore it, you can distract yourself from it, you can pretend it isn’t there—but somewhere in the background, it remains, quietly waiting to be acknowledged. We’ll get into this more in a bit.

A universal pattern of transformation

Do not fret, however, because this is not a unique experience. Rather, it’s quite a universal pattern.

Joseph Campbell, an influential 20th-century American professor, writer, and mythologist, devoted much of his life to studying stories across cultures. In fact, after graduating, he withdrew from the conventional path entirely and spent several years living in the woods, immersing himself in mythology, religion, and literature, reading as widely and deeply as he could. And what he noticed was something fascinating: no matter where the story came from, many of them seemed to follow the same underlying structure. Different characters, different settings, different time periods… but the same emotional arc.

He decided to call this pattern the Hero’s Journey.

At its core, the Hero’s Journey is the story of transformation. It begins with an ordinary life, something familiar and known. And then, at some point, that life is disrupted. Something happens—a realization, an opportunity, a loss, a feeling—that invites the person to step into something new. Something unknown.

Campbell called this moment the Call to Adventure.

And if you think about it, that is exactly what we were just talking about. The moment you know. The quiet realization. The internal shift that says, something here is no longer right.

However, even more interestingly, he found that the hero’s response to this call was not usually courage. Or excitement. Or immediate readiness. It was refusal.

In story after story, the hero hesitates. They question the call. They avoid it. They try to remain in the life they already know, even when that life is clearly no longer working. They convince themselves it’s not that serious. That it can wait. That maybe nothing actually needs to change.

Campbell called this stage the Refusal of the Call, and more importantly, he did not see it as a flaw in the journey. It is not a mistake or a sign that something has gone wrong, and certainly no human is alone in the instinct to resist change.

Which brings us to the real question… why?

Why we refuse the call to change

Read more

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you,” the great poet Rumi once said.

After getting cheated on and enduring several years of emotional abuse, I could not fathom how that could be true.

At the time, I often joked that I could have happily lived my entire life without going through that experience. But beneath the joke was something deeper and more painful: I truly believed the past two years of my life had been a complete waste. I felt like I had failed. I felt angry, bitter, and if I’m being honest, I felt stupid.

I always asked myself questions like: “How could I have let this happen?” “How could I have stayed so long?” and “Why did this happen to me?” and felt haunted by them.

What I couldn’t understand at the time — and what none of us can understand when we are standing in the middle of pain — is that meaning rarely reveals itself while we are inside an experience. Meaning almost always comes later.

Often, we must live the question for a long time before the answer reveals itself. Otherwise, we spend much of our precious time and energy searching for explanations, or creating false ones, that take us out of the experience we are meant to be present with, and ultimately prevent us from healing and realizing a new meaning.

Looking back now, however, I can see that my experience was not at all random. It was not meaningless. In fact, it taught me more than I could have ever imagined.

I learned about love — both what it is and what it is not.
I learned about boundaries.
I learned about discernment.
I learned what I want in a relationship, but just as importantly, what I will never tolerate again.

Most of all, I learned something about myself.

I learned how often I had been abandoning myself in order to be loved by someone else. I learned how much of my worth I had placed in external validation. And slowly, through the painful process of healing, I began learning how to return to myself.

At the time, however, none of this felt like growth. It felt like destruction.

This is one of the great paradoxes of the human experience: transformation often begins with breakdown.

And interestingly enough, this paradox isn’t unique to human life — we see it reflected throughout nature as well:

When it’s time for a seed to grow, the pressure inside causes its shell to crack open. From the seed’s perspective, it looks and feels like destruction. But biologically, it is the beginning of life. If the shell never breaks, the seed never becomes a plant.

A caterpillar enters its chrysalis and dissolves almost completely before reorganizing into a butterfly. Its former structure must disintegrate before something entirely new can emerge.

Even forest fires, which appear catastrophic, often serve an essential role in nature. In many ecosystems, fire clears old growth, releases seeds that only open under intense heat, and returns nutrients to the soil. What looks like devastation is actually part of renewal. Without it, stagnation builds and the forest slowly loses its vitality.

In nature, breakdown and growth are not separate events. They are two parts of the same process. No organism evolves without disruption. No new form emerges without breakdown. No expansion happens without rupture.

I believe the same is true for us. We experience loss and get stuck, failing to realize that transformation always contains loss. We are unable to see that what feels like destruction could actually be the beginning of development.

Of course, nobody ever teaches us this. So, it is only natural that when we are in the midst of hardship — heartbreak, betrayal, loss, or confusion — we ask ourselves: why would this happen to me? Or even, what kind of loving God would allow this?

And maybe, we become angry with ourselves for not knowing better about something we couldn’t have known better about. We tell ourselves painful stories: that we are weak, foolish, broken, or unworthy. And because of those beliefs, many of us stay stuck. We remain trapped in resentment, shame, or self-blame, believing that life has treated us unfairly.

But what I have come to understand (after significant pain and processing) is something very different: our painful experiences are not meaningless interruptions in our lives. They are invitations — to grow, to awaken, to become more deeply ourselves.

Madonna once said in an episode on the Jay Shetty podcast: “We all say goodbye to our inner selves at some point.” I immediately understood her words as a reference to self-abandonment, but I was unable to come to an understanding as to why we would ever do such a thing.

It took me a long time to realize the following, but the truth is, you can’t know what it means to return home unless you’ve had the experience of leaving it.

Our self-abandonment and our suffering… it isn’t a punishment, rather it’s a teacher. It is what allows us to feel the sting of separation so that we long to come back to alignment. Because if God (or Source, the Universe, Creator, or whatever you believe in) only let us live in kindness, love, and harmony, we’d be robots. There’d be no growth, no contrast, no ability to choose love.

Without the experience of fear, we wouldn’t recognize the relief of love. Without knowing darkness, light wouldn’t move us the way it does.

Life is paradoxical, but it wouldn’t be complete otherwise.

Before hardship, we tend to see things as fragmented or separated parts: good and bad, faith and doubt, success and failure. However, it is through my most difficult and painful experiences that I have learned that failure is not separate from success; it is a part of it. That doubt is not separate from faith and confidence, but rather a part of it. Being triggered does not mean we have not healed, but rather it is an important part of the process. Each part makes up the whole, and without one or the other, life is not complete.

Knowing this, it becomes easier to see how pain is a necessary part of the larger whole that is the growth and awakening process. It has a strange way of waking us up and guiding us to look deeper.

Pain is not the end of your story. Rather, it is the very birthplace of your transformation.

And really, our pain and suffering become a doorway — a doorway to understanding yourself more deeply, to releasing the beliefs that caused you to suffer, to discovering the love that has always existed inside you. Pain and suffering are the raw material of your soul’s development.

Very few people wake up one day and decide to completely transform their lives simply because things are going well. Most people do not awaken spiritually because life is comfortable. When life is comfortable, we tend to stay asleep in patterns that are not truly aligned with who we are.

Instead, they do so because life has become so painful that they can no longer continue living in unconscious patterns. Because when something breaks our heart open, we begin asking deeper questions. We begin searching. We begin listening.

(my take on) the purpose of life

Carl Jung once wrote that every human being lives by a myth, whether they realize it or not. By this, he meant that we all carry some underlying story about what life is and what it means to be here. That story shapes how we interpret everything that happens to us: our struggles, our relationships, our choices, and even our suffering.

Some people believe life is random. Some believe it is about survival, success, or achievement. Others believe it is something deeper.

Personally, I feel strongly drawn to the idea that the purpose of life is to become who we truly are. Not the version of ourselves shaped by fear, expectation, or conditioning — but the deeper Self underneath all of that. The Self that is curious, loving, intuitive, creative, and deeply alive.

Many spiritual traditions express this idea in different ways. Some call it awakening. Some call it remembering. Carl Jung called it individuation: the lifelong process of becoming the most authentic and integrated version of yourself.

However we choose to describe it, the idea is simple: life invites us to slowly return to our true nature. And sometimes, the experiences that seem the most painful or confusing are the very ones that push us toward that realization.

Further, there is a perspective that I personally find meaningful — one that may or may not resonate with you, and that’s completely okay.

Take what resonates and leave what doesn’t, but the idea goes something like this. The following is a passage by @universalphresco369 on Instagram that expressed this perspective so beautifully:

“Before you took your first breath, your soul made a sacred choice. It chose to incarnate in this exact moment in history—not by accident, but with divine intention. You chose the family you would be born into, not because they would be perfect, but because they would sculpt you. You chose the challenges you would face, not to break you, but to awaken the strength within you. You chose the heartbreaks, the friendships, the betrayals, the love—all the souls who would walk beside you, some for a moment, some for a lifetime—to reflect back the truths you needed to remember.

You mapped out the lessons that would crack you open and lead you home. You knew there would be pain, but you also knew there would be growth. And you understood that every experience would be a stepping stone back to your highest self.

This personality you wear—this identity shaped by culture, survival, and time—is not the real you. It is a mask, a role, a character you agreed to play in the theater of this life. But beneath it, beyond the fears and the labels, you are eternal. You are the soul, the witness, the light. Your task now is not to become something new, but to remember who you’ve always been. To strip away the illusions and return to oneness with your truest essence. That is the real journey. That is your purpose. That is why you came.

I do not believe life to be random chaos. I believe it to be more like a classroom. Every experience becomes an opportunity to grow, to understand yourself more deeply, and to dissolve illusions about who you thought you had to be.

From this perspective, it’s important to note that life is not something that is happening to you. It is something that is ultimately happening for you.

But again, this doesn’t mean every experience will feel meaningful in the moment. In fact, most of them won’t. When we are inside pain, it rarely feels like a lesson. It feels confusing, unfair, and overwhelming.

And I want to be very clear about something: none of this means that you deserved your pain. It doesn’t mean what happened to you was fair, justified, or necessary. It simply means that even painful experiences that break us open can eventually hold wisdom that help guide us back to ourselves.

But even mistakes — the choices we wish we could undo — often carry wisdom within them. As Eckhart Tolle writes in The Power of Now: “If it is a mistake, at least you learn something, in which case it’s no longer a mistake.”

And that is the beautiful thing about being human: even our missteps move us forward. Maybe an experience teaches you to trust your intuition. Maybe it teaches you to set boundaries. Maybe it simply teaches you what you don’t want, which can be just as valuable as knowing what you do want.

But at the very least, you learn. And to learn is never a mistake.

my advice to you if you’re in the middle of it

If you are in the middle of your own painful chapter right now, I want to offer you one final thought.

Although I do believe that our pain can carry deeper meaning, I am not suggesting that you should try to rush to understand that meaning right now. Nor am I suggesting that you should force yourself to feel grateful for an experience that is still deeply painful. That is not how healing works.

So if you are hurting right now, and maybe you can’t see a light at the end of the tunnel, please know that you don’t have to try to make sense of it yet. You don’t have to search for the lesson. You don’t have to pretend that everything is okay.

All I ask is that you hold on and have a little faith. Faith that healing is possible for you. Faith that even if this moment feels confusing and painful, you are not lost or broken. You are simply in the middle of your journey.

Faith does not require you to understand the path. Faith simply means you trust that there is a path, even when you cannot see it, and that the path has a purpose.

And that path forward is not about fighting your pain or trying to escape it as quickly as possible. It is about learning to face it. To sit with it. To honor what you are feeling without judgment. If you feel sadness, allow the sadness. Make room for your tears and let them flow! If you feel anger, allow that anger. Stomp, scream, and throw things (without hurting anyone of course). If you feel confusion, allow the confusion. Embrace it all.

Healing happens when you are able to meet your experience with compassion rather than resistance, so I encourage you to spend time with your painful feelings and approach them with curiosity. After all, they are just temporary visitors.

In fact, I truly believe that just as our bodies naturally know how to heal after getting a scrape or a cut, it is the same with mental and emotional healing. That when we are able to get out of the way of healing by fully experiencing whatever is present, we allow that healing process to take place. It’s not about learning how to heal, rather it’s about learning how to stop interfering with the natural process.

The truth is that your pain may have touched your experience — but it has never touched your essence. Who you truly are was never broken. It may feel like you have lost yourself, but more often, what we call “losing ourselves” is simply becoming familiar with the previously unfamiliar, deeper parts of who we are. And sometimes, it takes walking through darkness to discover the light within us.

The places where you feel broken today may one day become the very places where your light shines brightest.

You may one day find yourself understanding others in ways you never could before. You may one day discover strength, compassion, and wisdom that you didn’t know existed within you. And one day — perhaps slowly, perhaps unexpectedly — the fog will begin to lift.

You may look back on this chapter of your life and see it differently than you do today. Not because the pain wasn’t real. But because you will see how it shaped you. How it changed you. How it guided you back to yourself.

So please do not rush to label this chapter of your life as meaningless. You are in the middle of a story that is still unfolding. And the most important chapters are often written after the moment that feels like everything has fallen apart.

Your pain is not the end of your story. It may, in fact, be the beginning of your awakening.

So for now, be gentle with yourself.

Keep going.

And trust that somewhere beneath the confusion and the hurt, something within you already knows the way home.

Love,
Someone who has walked through the darkness and found her way back to the light. ❤️

P.S. If you’re in a place of darkness and/or readiness to journey on home to yourself, I’d be honored to work with you 1:1. Please message me for more information on scheduling! Sending so much love.

What does it mean to heal?

How do you define the word healing?

These are just a few of the questions that have heavily persisted in my mind over the last year.

You see, the word healing has such a strong root in our everyday language that many of us mistakenly believe we are all in full agreement and understanding regarding the meaning o…

Read more

I experienced a lot of betrayal within that relationship, and so my nervous system began operating on one rule: never let it happen again. And suddenly, “being careful” felt like the wise thing to do. A smart way of protecting myself from getting hurt again.

So, I started watching people. Reading between the lines. Scanning for evidence. Keeping my heart half-open, half-braced.

But over time, I realized something very uncomfortable: I wasn’t actually safer, I was just more tense. I wasn’t calmer either, in fact, I was actually always hyper-aware and in fight or flight. I was just waiting for the moment something went wrong so I could say, see? I knew it.

And slowly, almost without realizing it, that stance began to poison my ability to connect.

I could engage, but I couldn’t relax. I could date, but I couldn’t soften. I could like someone, but part of me was always watching, evaluating, preparing for impact.

It wasn’t until I recently came across a distinction in a book on Adlerian psychology — between trust and confidence — that I realized why this was happening.

And what Adler calls “trust” is not what most of us think it is.

trust vs. confidence

In Adler’s framework, trust is defined as a conditional belief. It’s: I’ll have a relationship with you and keep you in my life because I believe you will behave in a certain way.

I trust you as long as you don’t hurt me.
I trust you because you’ve been reliable in the past.
I trust you because you’ve “earned” it.

It’s basically an exchange, and it makes sense. It makes us feel safer in our relationships once there’s a commitment or some kind of “proof” like a label. There’s an implied guarantee in the situation.

Confidence, on the other hand, is defined as unconditional belief.

To have confidence means to give others the benefit of the doubt before you have sufficient objective proof to decide otherwise. In other words, it simply means not doubting someone from the get-go.

It looks more like: I choose to relate to you without suspicion, surveillance, or any preconditions. It’s not “I’ll love you as long as you never hurt me.” It’s “I’ll meet you openly.”

Now what shook me from the book was the philosopher’s assertion that the basis of interpersonal relationships is not trust, but rather confidence.

the case for confidence > trust as the basis of a relationships

When I first read that confidence should be the basis for interpersonal relationships, naturally, my first question was “why?” Why couldn’t healthy interpersonal relationships be founded on trust?

Well, the philosopher argues that trust creates a vertical relationship, which can be defined as a relationship that is hierarchical, controlling, and status-based, positioning one person as superior (above) and another as inferior (below)

Because when you “trust” someone in a conditional way, it means that one person is evaluating and the other person is being evaluated. And a relationship that involves constant evaluation always turns into some version of hierarchy and control.

Not only that, but it’s also exhausting.

It’s anxiety-provoking to constantly check whether someone is behaving the way you expect them to. And if you’ve ever been in a relationship where you were testing someone (even subtly)… you know what I mean.

You’re noticing how long they take to respond. You’re reading into their tone. You’re scanning for signs. You’re basically trying to confirm: Are you safe? and exhausting yourself in the process.

But the worst part of this behavior is that, regardless of whether or not the person is actually behaving how you expect them to, in every case where you believe someone is betraying you, you will always find proof (even when they’re not). The reality is that when your nervous system is convinced danger is coming, it becomes really easy to interpret everything as evidence.

So, while you may believe you are being smart and protecting yourself, it is actually more likely that you are deluding yourself.

Moreover, a relationship built on “trust” can very quickly become a relationship built on doubt, which can be extremely troublesome, because people can feel doubt. Immediately.

If you’ve ever had somebody doubt you, you know that you can feel it. You can feel when someone doesn’t believe what you’re saying is the truth or is suspicious of your every move.

And if doubt is where a relationship starts, that’s about as deep as the relationship will ever be able to go.

clarifications about confidence

I’ll be honest, though, the second I read the phrase “unconditional confidence,” I was like… absolutely not. As someone who has been taken advantage of before and betrayed, I really thought the author was making the case that I should’ve stayed around in my first relationship and kept believing in the person who had betrayed me.

But after sitting with it longer and marinating in the author’s words, I realized something really important: Adler is trying to make the case for unconditional confidence as a starting posture for relating with others, not a contract.

Adler is not saying you should stay in harmful relationships. He is not saying you should forgive someone who is abusive. And he is not saying to override your boundaries, ignore your intuition, or tolerate betrayal.

Continuing to believe in someone after they hurt you does not mean believing in their reliability, morality, or suitability to remain in your life.

It simply means refusing to reduce them (or humanity as a whole) to an enemy, a villain, or a lesser human.

And this one took me a while, because after I was betrayed, I genuinely thought my partner was evil on the inside. I couldn’t comprehend how someone could do that, or how someone could do that to me. Did I deserve it?

But eventually I realized something that is hard to hold and yet so important to pave the way for healing, which is: when a person acts in a way that is harmful to you, it is not because they are “inherently evil” and you deserved it in some way, but actually because they hate themselves. Because they are suffering so deeply on the inside, they chose the worst possible path forward, thinking it was the best or only way.

However, let me be very clear: I do not say this to cause pity. We do not feel bad for the person, justify their actions, or forgive and return to them. It is not our job to fix. Not our job to save. Not our job to stay.

Simply just our job to understand: it was never about you.

To bring compassion into our hearts — for them, for yourself, and for the reality that someone else’s behavior is not a reflection of your worth.

Their behavior is their responsibility. Your behavior is yours. There is no crossover.

“okay but gracie… what if someone takes advantage of you?”

When you approach all relationships with unconditional confidence, the reality is that there may be a time when someone takes advantage of you.

And if that happens, you should allow yourself to feel as upset as you need to be. Feel your sadness, your anger, your grief. Feel it to your heart’s content.

Then remove yourself and move on, knowing: This has nothing to do with you.

An example

Let’s use cheating as an example, since that’s one of the clearest “betrayal” scenarios.

Unconditional confidence as a starting posture looks like: “I will relate to you without any preconditions or suspicion. I place my confidence in you.” (Quick emphasis on starting posture — you always have the freedom and choice to remove yourself and to not relate with another person.)

But if your partner then cheats, unconditional confidence looks like:

“What you did caused me harm.”
“I am removing myself from this relationship.”
“I do not need to dehumanize you.”
“I do not need to hate you.”
“I do not need to doubt all people and close my heart because of this.”
“Your behavior is your responsibility, and mine is my own.”

And yes, of course, it’s easier said than done.

When you’ve been hurt, your body wants revenge. Your mind wants to make them the villain. You want to make it mean something about you.

But this posture is saying:

I am allowed to leave. I am allowed to grieve. I am allowed to be devastated.

And I’m also not going to let what you did harden me into someone who can no longer love.

so, how do you recover and still stay open?

This is the biggest question, right?

How do I stay open when I’ve been hurt? How do I not become suspicious, guarded, and bracing for impact?

Because the most important part of confidence isn’t preventing pain. It’s preventing hardening. Refusing to let betrayal turn into your worldview.

If you experience a betrayal and decide “everyone is untrustworthy”, you don’t just close your heart to them. You close it to life.

And as I mentioned at the beginning, I did this.

After my betrayal, I started relating to people with suspicion. I was always on alert. Always scanning for proof that they didn’t like me, or weren’t trustworthy — even when they were.

I thought I was protecting myself, but I didn’t realize how much I was poisoning my own ability to love. Because in the long run, this stance only hurts you.

It creates anxiety. Self-abandonment. Constant bracing. Fight or flight.

And it turns every future relationship into a courtroom.

And well, Adler’s psychology is called the psychology of courage for a reason. Because at the root, it requires courage. It requires risk.

But the practical anchor he gives to keeping your heart open is this: you have to accept yourself fully and completely.

When you accept yourself, for all that you are and all that you aren’t, you stop living as though someone else’s choices determine your human value. You stop making other people’s choices mean something about your worth.

You realize: someone else’s betrayal has absolutely no reflection on your value, your lovability, your goodness, or your future. And in fact, it only reflects them.

If someone takes advantage of you, you can set a boundary and leave. It does not have to become a proactive suspicion toward everyone else forever.

The fact is that relating to others inherently involves risk. So if you’re going to open your heart again, you have to accept that there is a possibility you may get hurt again.

But you should also always remember: You can survive it. You can feel it. You can let it pass through you. And you can come back home to yourself again.

the whole point

The overarching point I’m trying to make is this:

Please, never allow someone to ruin your confidence in humanity.

Please never allow someone to make you think your only option is to harden. To close your heart. To relate to everyone in fear, doubt, and suspicion.

If someone takes advantage of your confidence, you can remove yourself from the relationship. You can leave. You can grieve. You can heal.

But please… for yourself, for the world, and for the people you haven’t met yet who will love you well…

Please continue to believe in humanity with unconditional confidence.

I’ll finish with this quote from the book, because it captures it all perfectly:

“Think about it this way. We can believe, and we can doubt. But we are aspiring to see others as our comrades, not our enemies. To believe or to doubt — the choice should be clear.”

If you made it to the end of this, I want to hear from you. Does this resonate? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Is this a new concept for you?

And if you’re still here, I hope you know: you are so strong for continuing to move through life after everything you’ve been through.

You are so loved. You are so entirely and completely worthy, even if you don’t feel like it right now.

And if you can’t believe that yet, I’ll believe it for you until you can.

Sending you all my love,
Gracie <3

P.S: Are you struggling to open your heart back up? If so, and you’re ready to stop suffering and start healing, explore who you are free of trauma, and fully come home to yourself, I’d be honored to work with you 1:1. Please message me for more information on scheduling!

I couldn’t even begin to understand the range of complex emotions I was feeling, from hatred, disgust, and anger, all the way to love, longing, & grief. I was completely consumed, and I had no idea what to do with it. I needed relief.

So, I did what any other college student with little responsibility and an inability to cope would do: I started drinking.

In what felt like a perfect twist of fate, I made a new best friend who was also going through a difficult breakup, and who also felt as though going out and getting blackout drunk was the best way to deal with a difficult situation. (We enabled the FUCK out of each other, and as I’m sure you can imagine, it was pretty bad.)

So, we began frequenting our local college bars, maybe 5-6 times a week. We drank until we could no longer properly speak or stand up straight (my heart goes out to the younger version of me). Most nights, we had no clue where we ended up or how we made it home. You would think that in itself would be enough to make us stop. But no, unfortunately, we would wake up together the next morning and laugh our asses off about our stupid behavior and decide to do it all over again the following night.

For a few months (until I got sick with bronchitis and literally could NOT go on like that any longer), we continued on in that manner — drinking to cope. Not only did it give us a temporary escape from our heavy feelings of heartbreak, but it also gave us an excuse to act crazy (I’m embarrassed at the number of times I tried to call my ex on any given night out or the attempts to see him).

Needless to say, this was a very harmful and ineffective approach to coping with our situations (or more accurately, our emotions about the situation).

And it wasn’t until I picked up the book Letting Go: The Pathway to Surrender that I realized there was a better way.

We all try to avoid our emotions

David Hawkins writes: “If we take a close look at human life, we see that it is essentially one long elaborate struggle to escape our inner fears and expectations that have been projected upon the world… we have a fear of these feelings because we have no conscious mechanism by which to handle the feelings if we let them come up within ourselves. Because we are afraid to face them, they continue to accumulate and, finally, we secretly begin looking forward to death to bring all of the pain to an end.”

When I say my jaw dropped after reading this… my jaw dropped.

My mind instantly took off and began to spiral. It was like a switch flipped, and suddenly my thoughts were racing ahead of me — rapid-fire questions, memories, realizations — all crashing into each other at once. One question turned into five, then ten, each one pulling me deeper into the same uncomfortable possibility: Could it really be that I’m just afraid to face my feelings? Was that the reason I stayed way too long in a relationship that deep down I knew wasn’t right for me? Was that why I drank so much? Is it true that if I had a “conscious mechanism by which to handle my feelings,” that my life would be better and freer of negative emotions, and even the occasional thoughts of death?

I was skeptical, but I sure as hell wanted to find out.

The 3 major ways we handle our feelings

David Hawkins continued on: “We have three major ways of handling feelings: suppression, expression, and escape.”

What the hell does all this even mean? I kept reading, desperate for answers.

Method 1: Suppression and Repression

The first methods, those of suppression and repression, are ways that we try to push our feelings down in an attempt not to have to look at or deal with them. The difference between the two is that repression happens unconsciously, whereas suppression happens consciously.

I mean, let’s be real. Most of the time, feelings are so inconvenient. Plus, we aren’t even sure what to do with them when they come up anyway. So, we utilize these methods to try to avoid feeling them and just suffer through and function as best we can.

The reason repression is an unconscious avoidance of our feelings is “because there is so much guilt and fear over the feeling that it is not even consciously felt at all. It becomes instantly thrust into the unconscious as soon as it threatens to emerge.”

Once repression occurs, we must continually ensure that it remains repressed and out of our awareness, which is usually achieved through denial and projection: “Because of guilt and fear, we repress the impulse or feeling, and we deny its presence within us. Instead of feeling it, we project it onto the world and those around us.” We project by finding an enemy, someone to blame, whether it be a person, place, institution, or even something further like climatic conditions, astrological events, God, the devil, luck, political rivals, and the list goes on.

Method 2: Expression

The second mechanism for handling our feelings is expression. Through expression, we let out our feelings by talking, venting, or using body language.

Contrary to popular belief, expression is not an effective mechanism for dealing with feelings in a beneficial way. As David Hawkins writes, “This is a very important point to understand, for many people in society today believe that expressing their feelings frees them from the feelings. The facts are to the contrary. The expression of a feeling, first, tends to propagate that feeling and give it greater energy. Second, the expression of the feeling merely allows the remainder to be suppressed out of awareness.”

This popular (mis)belief comes from a misunderstanding of Sigmund Freud’s work: “Freud pointed out that suppression was the cause of neurosis; therefore, expression was mistakenly thought to be the cure… what Freud actually said, in classical psychoanalysis, was that the repressed impulse or feeling was to be neutralized, sublimated, socialized, and channeled into constructive drives of love, work, and creativity.”

Dumping our negative feelings onto someone else only causes that person to feel attacked, which then means they now have to find a way to cope with the feelings (realistically, also through suppression, expression, and/or escape). Ultimately, this causes the deterioration of a relationship.

Method 3: Escape

Finally, the third mechanism is escape. Through the method of escape, we create a diversion to avoid feeling our feelings.

Think entertainment, think liquor, think workaholism.

Sounds familiar, right? That’s because “escapism and avoidance of inner awareness is a socially condoned mechanism.” I mean, think of one common evening activity for adults that does not include drinking. It’s a lot harder than it should be!!!! (I’m sober now, so I would know).

The issue here is that the external pursuits that allow us to avoid facing our inner selves and emotions eventually become addictions, as we depend on them to keep us distracted and grow scared of being without them.

Another example is found in the role our phones play in our lives. Whenever we sit down to eat, go to the bathroom, or just have a minute alone—bam, Instagram reels, TikTok, Candy Crush. As David Hawkins writes, “people are desperate to stay unconscious… people are terrified of facing themselves. They dread even a moment of aloneness. Thus, the constant frantic activities: the endless socializing, talking, texting, reading, music playing, working, traveling, sightseeing, shopping, overeating, gambling, movie-going, pill-taking, drug-using, and cocktail partying. I definitely felt a bit ashamed reading this, but also a feeling of knowing there is a truth to the words.

At this point, I felt struck in the heart. It hurt to admit, but David Hawkins was right: I was desperate to stay unconscious and grew an addiction to alcohol as a means of doing so.

The big issue is: these methods are faulty & ineffective.

Although there are actually times where these mechanisms can be used intentionally and prove beneficial — for instance, in major life crises where the overwhelm is too big to deal with all at once, or if you are right in the middle of an important business meeting — overall, they prove faulty, stressful, and ineffective. This is because “each of them requires increasing amounts of energy in and of itself. Enormous amounts of energy are required to keep down the growing pressure of the suppressed and repressed feelings.”

As more and more energy goes to avoiding our feelings, we lose energy for other things, such as creativity, spirituality, interest in others, which halts our growth and ultimately leads to the development of illness, disease, disorders, aging, and premature death. We also become more selfish, causing harm in our interpersonal relationships. “Most of all, the effect is the inability to truly love and trust another person, which results in emotional isolation and self-hatred.”

Yup, this is a serious matter.

A better way to handle our feelings: letting go

I’m sure you’re thinking, OK GRACIE WE GET IT. SO WHAT IS THE ANSWER, WHAT IS THE BETTER, MORE EFFECTIVE METHOD? At least that’s how I was feeling at this point in the book.

It’s actually quite simpler than one would expect, and it’s what David Hawkins calls “letting go.”

What is the mechanism of letting go?

Well, “Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it.” Put simply, letting go means allowing a feeling to come up with no resistance or judgment and an understanding that it’s temporary, fleeting, and not the truth of who you are.

If you resist the feeling, you actually fuel the feeling, and it will continue to persist: “It is resistance that keeps the feeling going… A feeling that is not resisted will disappear as the energy behind it dissipates.”

It’s important to note that when practicing letting go, you should ignore all thoughts. Thoughts arise as a result of the accumulated pressure of a feeling and “are merely rationalizations of the mind to try and explain the presence of the feeling.” There will always be more if that is where your focus remains. It is the underlying feeling that must be looked at.

You are not your feelings

As you begin to practice letting go, or in other words, non-judgmentally allowing, accepting, and experiencing your feelings without doing anything to resist them, you will begin to become aware of a truth:

“Feelings come and go, and eventually you realize that you are not your feelings, but that the real “you” is merely witnessing them… The “you” that is observing and is aware of what is happening always stays the same.”

I like to use a wave and shore analogy to help me think about this:

Our feelings, thoughts, and experiences are waves.

Waves are temporary. They rise, crash, pull back, come and go. Some are tiny ripples, some are high tide, and some are full-blown tsunamis. But at the end of the day, they are all just waves, and waves are temporary.

We, on the other hand, our true selves (the observer of our thoughts, emotions, and experiences), are the shore.

The shore is unchanging. The shore is eternal. The shore doesn’t chase the waves or fight them or try to hold onto them longer than they’re meant to stay. it just… exists. and allows.

The moment you attempt to resist the wave, whether through judging it, shaming it, or fighting it, that’s where suffering begins.

At the end of the day…

You cannot avoid emotional pain.

However, you CAN avoid suffering, which comes as a result of letting the wave be the wave and allowing it to pass (as it always does).

You will soon realize that your feelings are not as scary as they may seem, and you indeed DO have the capacity to handle them!

Eckhart Tolle in the Power of Now says it best: “The pain-body may seem to you like a dangerous monster that you cannot bear to look at, but I assure you that it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.”

Once you master the skill of non-judgmentally experiencing your emotions and allowing them to dissipate, your life will change. Your perception of the world and of yourself will change for the better, and you will begin to feel happier, more loving, and more easygoing. This is because “fear of life is really the fear of emotions. It is not the facts that we fear but our feelings about them.”

Once you realize you can handle your emotions, you realize you can make it through anything. You realize it is safe to open your heart again and allow love back into your life.

And I promise, you can handle them.

I’m rooting for you.

Sending you all my love,
Gracie <3

P.S: If you’re ready to stop suffering and start healing, explore who you are free of trauma, and fully come home to yourself, I’d be honored to work with you 1:1. Please message me for more information on scheduling!

One of the biggest illusions we carry regarding healing is this idea that it’s a destination. That if we just do enough inner work, cry enough, journal enough, understand enough, or grow enough, we’ll one day step into a perfect version of ourselves who never hurts again. We imagine a “healed” self somewhere ahead of us, waiting in the future, living a calm, peaceful life untouched by triggers, sadness, longing, or confusion.

But that idea creates impossible pressure. It sets you up to fail. Because feeling deeply is a part of being human, and no amount of healing will ever remove your capacity to feel pain, grief, desire, or heartbreak. Those things are temporary experiences, not signs of weakness. You will never get rid of them. And you’re not meant to.

The truth is that healing isn’t a finish line you cross. It’s not the moment you stop hurting. Healing is how you meet yourself in the moments that you are hurting.

Healing is not the absence of pain, but the presence of compassion when pain arises.

When you say you want to be “healed,” what you’re really saying is: I want to feel safe with myself. I want to feel at peace with myself. I want to feel loved by myself.

Which leads us to the second part of the illusion: those feelings you’re longing for — safety, peace, self-love — they aren’t ten steps away. They aren’t coming in the future. They are only available to you in this present moment.

This truth will take some grappling with, but nothing has ever happened outside of the present moment. As Eckhart Tolle teaches in the Power of Now: the past happened in a previous “now,” and the future will happen in a future “now.” The only place anything can ever actually take place — including healing — is here, in this moment.

Which means that the version of you that you are imagining — the peaceful you, the grounded you, the self-loving you — does not exist in the future. She can’t, because the future doesn’t exist and it never will. She can only exist right now, in the only moment that will ever exist.

There is nothing in the way of you experiencing this healing right now, and it’s found in the way you relate to yourself right now.

The healed you is not revealed in your results or your achievements or the absence of pain. She is revealed in your reactions. In the way you respond to yourself when you’re hurting. Do you shame yourself for missing someone who hurt you? Or do you soften, place a hand over your heart, and say, “It’s okay that we feel this. It’s temporary. I’m here for you.”

The key to healing is this:

You suffer when you fight your experience in the present moment. You heal when you allow it without judgment.

May you choose to be kind to yourself. <3

Sending all my love,
Gracie

P.S: If you’re ready to stop suffering and start healing, explore who you are free of trauma, and fully come home to yourself, I’d be honored to work with you 1:1. Please message me for more information on scheduling.

it comes from a book called the courage to be disliked, and it introduces the idea of etiology versus teleology.

what is etiology?

etiology is defined as the study of causation. it focuses on why something happens. it sounds like: this happened to me, therefore i am like this now. my present behavior is explained by my past experiences.

in more concrete terms, it can sound something like:
“i can’t trust anyone because i was betrayed.”
“i’m broken because of what i went through.”
“i am like this because of something that happened in my childhood.”

it’s the belief that who you are today is determined by what happened to you in the past.

so, what’s the problem?

well, the book challenges etiology by suggesting that if we explain everything solely through past causes, we end up believing our lives are determined, and that we cannot change because the past has already decided who we are.

this is where etiology becomes dangerous: the “why” becomes a prison.

the issue with etiology is that it does not allow you to change your life or move forward. in fact, it does the opposite: it keeps you stuck by allowing you to blame the past for your current behavior. by placing blame on something that occurred, you are taking away responsibility. you’re excusing yourself from doing the work to change your current behavior.

i mean, imagine you get a fever and you go to the doctor, and the doctor just tells you, “well, you’re sick because you went outside yesterday when it was cold and rainy.” you’d be like… okay. i don’t really care about why. i need medicine. i need a path forward. i want to get better.

well, there’s no difference with mental trauma.

if all you do is investigate why you are the way you are, you might find a justification, and it might serve some use in ensuring the situation doesn’t repeat, but it does not necessarily provide a pathway for change. it becomes: “it’s not your fault you’re like this. it’s what you went through’s fault.” and i understand the comfort in that. but by doing that, you also take away your agency.

that’s where teleology comes in.

teleology: the question that changes everything

teleology is the study of purpose — not the past cause of a behavior, but the present goal that behavior serves.

it asks:
what is this behavior trying to achieve for me right now?
what is this pain protecting me from?
what is this story giving me?

and i know that can sound almost offensive at first. like, what do you mean my suffering is serving me?

i felt the same way.

but then i looked at my own life.

the moment i realized i was keeping my trauma alive

after my emotionally abusive relationship ended, i talked about it constantly.

at first, that made sense. i needed language. i needed validation. i needed to piece together reality after it had been distorted for so long.

but eventually, i noticed something strange.

i didn’t miss him. i didn’t want him back. i had moved on in every obvious way.

yet i still brought him up. i still told the stories. i still explained myself through what happened.

and one day a friend asked me, “do you still have feelings for him? why do you talk about him so much?”

i went home and spiraled because that question genuinely scared me.

i thought, why am i still talking about this if i don’t want him?

and the answer was uncomfortable, but freeing:

because identifying with my trauma was doing something for me.

as hard as it was to admit, i got so many payoffs from blaming my ex and identifying with my trauma:

• it helped me avoid fully feeling what it meant to let that chapter be over.

• it gave me a clear villain, so i didn’t have to confront the parts of me i abandoned.

• it gave me certainty: i know exactly who i am — i’m the girl who survived that.

• it gave me a kind of “specialness” (even if it was painful): you wouldn’t understand what i went through.

• it gave me innocence. it gave me a story. it gave me a others’ pity.

and maybe most of all?

it protected me from the unknown.

as humans, we are wired to seek comfort and familiarity. and as weird as it is, our suffering offers us both. we know what to expect.

let’s be real: maintaining a victim narrative is rarely comfortable — but it is familiar. and familiarity pretty much always feel safer than the unknown terrain of healing (at first).

whereas healing, although it’s better for us in the long run, is unfamiliar. we don’t know what we’re going to confront. we don’t know how hard it’s going to be. we don’t know if it will feel too hard to handle (even though nothing truly is, it can feel that way before you learn how to hold it).

real healing requires you to step into a life where you are no longer organized around pain, which, if you’ve been in survival mode for a long time, can feel absolutely terrifying.

so, in the end, we choose familiar suffering over unfamiliar freedom. not because we want to suffer, but because our nervous system recognizes it.

“does this mean trauma isn’t real?”

no. and i want to say this gently but clearly: your trauma is real.

what happened to you happened. it impacted you. your reactions were adaptations. they protected you.

whether it was hypervigilance, numbing, distrust, people-pleasing, freezing, overexplaining, collapsing, obsessing, needing closure, spiraling.

these are not character flaws. they are survival strategies. they served a goal at one point.

but here’s the shift: a survival strategy can outlive the situation it was created for.

and when the situation is over, the strategy can become the cage.

so the question becomes: what goal is this behavior serving now, even if the goal is outdated?

the most healing question i’ve ever asked myself

when i was stuck and in the thick of healing, i kept asking:

why am i like this?
what happened to me?
what’s wrong with me?

and those questions kept me staring backwards, looking for causes and causes for those causes.

but the question that helped me start walking forward was this:

how is my current suffering serving some goal?

is it keeping me safe from rejection?
is it keeping me from having to trust again?
is it keeping me from risking being seen?
is it keeping me from stepping into a version of myself who doesn’t have the old story to lean on?

and i know that sounds intense. but i promise: this isn’t about blaming you.

it’s about giving you your agency back.

because the good news is: if it’s a goal, it can be changed. (yay!!!)

contrary to popular advice, healing doesn’t begin when you perfectly understand the past; it begins when you realize you are allowed to choose a new future, and that you are powerful enough to survive the discomfort of becoming someone new.

you are not determined by what happened to you

there’s a quote from alfred adler that i haven’t stopped thinking about since i read it:

“no experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure… we are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”

what happened to you is an objective fact.

but the meaning you give it? that’s where your freedom lives.

you can be the woman who went through something unbearable and decided she is broken forever.

or…

you can be the woman who went through something unbearable and decided she will never abandon herself again.

and i know it’s not always easy. i know healing can feel like walking out of a burning house and still smelling smoke on your clothes months later.

but recovery is possible. your identity is not fixed. you are not doomed to repeat what hurt you.

and if you don’t know where to start, start here:

instead of asking “why am i like this?” ask “what do i get to choose now?”

now is your time to come home to yourself.

sending all my love,
gracie <3

ps: if you’re ready to stop suffering and start healing, explore who you are free of trauma, and fully come home to yourself, i’d be honored to work with you 1:1. message me for more information on scheduling.

Subscribe now