I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. And for some reason, I’m finding it the hardest one to tell. Not because of what happened, although what happened was a lot. But because of how deep the roots go, and how much of who I thought I was turned out to be built on something I didn’t choose and didn’t fully understand until one book cracked it all open.

And when it cracked, it didn’t just crack in my mind. It cracked in my body. Vertigo so severe I couldn’t stand. A bone snapping in half the day after a dream told me to slow down. The weight of my own hair becoming unbearable on my neck. And a presence fused inside me that I’d carried my whole life without knowing it had a name.

Because the thing is, these beliefs and communities and habits and practices and ways of moving through the world, they don’t just influence who you are. They become the architecture of who you are. They live in your bones and in the way you hold and move your body and in the way you think and speak and in the relationships you build. Even the prayers I sometimes find myself whispering at 4am, because they were whispered into me before I could speak. It’s the load-bearing structure of self. And when it cracks, the body doesn’t just notice.

The body cracks too.

. . .

For decades, my trauma wasn’t something I understood. It was just the water I swam in. Just like the cool-aid of groupthink I was born into.

I couldn’t have named the split between my authentic self and my adapted self. I couldn’t have told you about the four flavors of rupture or drawn a diagram of my attachment system. I didn’t have language for any of it. I just had the stomach cramps and the kidney pain and the migraines, and a semi-frantic level of over-functioning and seeking-for and running-from - all at the same time. And underneath all of it, the chronic sense that something was off, underneath a life that looked, from the outside, like it was on track. Married with children, present father, community leader, successful career, etc.

And then I opened a book, and I could see it all. I could feel it all. Like opening a closet full of piled-up junk and having it all come tumbling out at once.

. . .

In 2020, a book was published, White Bird in a Golden Cage. Written by a woman who had been one of the closest people to Yogi Bhajan, the man I was raised to revere. The man my community treated as something between a prophet and a god. The man who had my parents give me away at eighteen months old, supposedly because they were failing to raise me right. The man who screamed at me when I was seven for daring to want them back.

I couldn’t put it down. It was simple, almost mundane at times, but also fascinating in this way that I can only describe as watching the reality behind a legend dissolve in real time. Imagine you’d grown up devoted to King Arthur. And imagine someone handed you a firsthand account from inside Camelot, and as you read, you could see exactly where the legend came from and which parts got exaggerated and which parts got left out and why. You’d be watching the mythology dissolve, and underneath it you’d find a man. Just a man.

That’s what it felt like.

His philandering with his secretaries. His abuse of power and the dynamics of his inner circles. I’d always kind of known. It was just something you didn’t really think about, much less talk about, because talking about it meant losing friends and losing community and losing connection, and eventually losing your sense of self. But here it was in black and white, so simple and so direct it was unavoidable.

And then something else started surfacing. A growing recognition that crept in slowly, like a slow burn, a slow ripping open.

He was petty.

Not occasionally petty. Fundamentally petty. Immature. Someone who always needed to get what he wanted and couldn’t accept no. Someone who controlled and manipulated and extracted from the people around him. And the more I read, the more I realized two things.

The first: I could see all of it. I’d always been able to see it. I’d just been looking through a different lens my whole life, the one that had been installed in me before I could choose, and reinforced by the community, my only human connections. And now, for the first time, I was seeing without that lens. The stark, clear truth with no mythology attached.

And the second: if I didn’t know who this man was, and I just witnessed a human behaving this way? I’d be unimpressed. I’d actually think he was a pretty shitty human being.

And intellectually and emotionally that was dizzying, nauseating, disorienting, because his community and his teachings and his vision and his persona... I could not find anything in my entire life that hadn’t been shaped by him, directly or indirectly. My childhood. My faith. The reason I was taken from my parents. My sense of self and purpose in the world. My lens of reality… All of it.

Then it also hit me somatically.

January 2020. I was sitting in a chair next to the window in my bedroom on a weekend afternoon, sun coming through, and as the ripples of all of this accumulated, something happened in my vision. Like a moment in a film when the camera zooms in while the background pulls away. Everything dilated. A flurry of noise and blur and vertigo all at once. I put the book down.

My stomach was twisting in knots, and there was this sickening, unsettling feeling and something else underneath it, something like morbid anticipation, because I could feel what was coming. One bookcase falls in a library. Then another. Then another. And you know the whole library is going down. A slow-motion domino cascade you can’t stop.

It got hard to breathe. I was just sitting there in the afternoon light, swallowed by it.

Not just what he did. How he was. That’s not a bad day. That’s who he is. And if that’s who he is, then everything built on the myth of who he was supposed to be...

I don’t know how much time passed there, but it dilated in a horrid moment of internal chaos.

At some point I picked the book back up and kept reading. I couldn’t put it down. Had to finish it.

Over the next few days, I could barely be present with my family. I was functioning on autopilot, going through the motions of being a father while my inner architecture rapidly filled with cracks like spiderwebs. Hairline fractures spreading through my psyche, through my nervous system, through my soul. Not a clean break. Not a dramatic shattering. Thousands of tiny cracks through a foundation that had held everything up for thirty-five years.

. . .

Life still demanded everything of me, and as a highly trained over-functioning self-abandoner, I kept up. Keep up and you will be kept up. But I was ignoring the growing catastrophe deep inside me.

A few weeks later, I had a dream.

I was on a speedboat, ripping through crowded waters. People everywhere, boats and kayaks and swimmers, and I couldn’t slow down. Or wouldn’t. All my energy was going into dodging and swerving around this person, that obstacle, this near-miss. Going so fast that avoiding disaster was a full-time job.

Until I hit someone. Hard. Caused real damage. Maybe killed them.

Then I was in a courtroom, being held to account. And my defense was: look at all the people I dodged. Look at everything I managed to avoid.

And the verdict was: “Fair enough. But if you hadn’t been going that fast to begin with, you never would have had this happen. Slow the fuck down.”

I woke up from that dream and thought about it for approximately five minutes. Then I got on with my day.

That evening I was on my electric bike, riding to pick up sushi for dinner. Still living the life that was about to end, though I didn’t know it yet. Riding fast, because I always rode fast. I popped up onto a sidewalk and a hedge started closing in, narrowing the path. Going too fast to brake. Two choices: swerve into the telephone pole or try to muscle through before the hedge caught my handlebars.

I tried to muscle through.

The hedge caught my handlebars. I went airborne. Landed hard on the pavement. Sprained my right wrist. Broke my left thumb, the bone between the thumb joint and the wrist, shaped like a little peanut. Snapped clean in two.

The left thumb. Same side as the humerus that broke when I was two. Same side as the elbow that broke when I was seven. The body doesn’t forget its fault lines. It returns to them.

The dream said slow down. The body said: I wasn’t asking.

. . .

With my thumb in a cast, I couldn’t tie my turban. My hair, which I had kept uncut my whole life as part of my Sikh practice, hung loose. My then-wife would comb it and braid it for me, and over the weeks, the weight of it on my neck became heavier and heavier. Not just physically. The hair was identity. The turban was identity. And the bone that broke made it physically impossible to maintain that identity on my own.

So when the 3HO/yogi foundation cracked, I did what any reasonable person would do with the remaining structure still standing. I leaned harder into it.

I had been Sikh my whole life. Not just “3HO-Sikh”, the version that had been filtered through one man’s agenda. I had also gone deep into the tradition on my own terms, the history and the philosophy and the lineage of the Gurus and the poetry of Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh. I studied it, I lived it, I loved it. It was more like a remembrance than a practice. And so, when 3HO fractured, I doubled down on Sikhism as the thing that was still real. The thing that was mine, not his.

And I thought that would work. That would be my saving grace. My lifeboat. How wrong I was…

Months later, I was in my kitchen. Kids already asleep. Late night cleaning, loading the dishwasher, putting dishes on the drying rack, while listening to a podcast about Sikh history and stories from the oral tradition. I’d been excited about this podcast. After the 3HO fracturing I had this vision of going deeper into Sikhism on my own terms, through the real stories, the oral tradition. I was leaning in further, making it truly mine.

And then I heard one of the Gurus described making certain decisions in a situation, and something in me went: huh. I don’t agree with that. Sure it’s progressive for the time, but it still feels pretty misogynistic. And as the stories continued: I don’t really like this. And then: wow.

That same fracturing sensation again. Like a tsunami in my brain and nervous system.

Not the same flavor as the 3HO one. That had been betrayal. This was quieter and, in some ways, worse. Because what I was realizing, standing there with my hands in the dishwater, was that I had been putting the Sikh Gurus on a throne in the same way I’d been taught to put Bhajan on a throne. That everything they said and did was perfect. Not just for their time. For me. My values. My truth.

I realized, pure and simple, that I simply aspired to be like them, to emulate them, and to live a life that they would deem worthy and successful. And that throne I put them on made me less than. It made my own knowing subordinate to theirs.

And that realization spiraled deeper… Not just that someone above me knows better than I do. But that it is a whole system. That some people are above me and I’m above others. That I’m following a formula and aspiring to a perfection that’s unachievable, benchmarking myself against a mirage. I was a good student. A good teacher. A good Sikh. But I didn’t actually know who the fuck I actually was underneath it all. Like, when everything was stripped away, and I had to stand in the flame of truth and life and death – who was I? What did I stand for??

My entire psyche and life had been built on hierarchy. Spiritual hierarchy. And Patriarchal hierarchy. And both pillars were cracking at the same time.

At the time, that evening I could feel something was off, but I couldn’t name it. Something disorienting that I couldn’t get my hands around. It consumed me. I tried to untangle it and make sense of it, but I failed. Eventually I went to bed.

I fell into a deep sleep full of intense dreams and woke up disoriented and confused. Laying there for a minute. “Okay. Time to get up. There’s a lot to do today”, I told myself. There was always a lot to do. Parenting and housework and work-work and cooking and logistics and dogs to walk and cleaning and more work. So I did what I did every morning. I took a deep breath and started to sit up to face it all.

A wave hit. The kind that smashes into you before you can brace, and suddenly my whole world was spinning and the ceiling was sliding and the walls were tilting and nausea flooded through me, hot and violent, and I fell back down, panting.

I tried again. Worse.

I lay there sweating, trying to drink water from the glass on the bedside table with hands that couldn’t find it. Shaking. Dripping sweat. Fighting down the urge to vomit. Every movement sent the room spinning. I kept thinking it would pass. It didn’t. I had to cancel my day and cancel my work and ask my then-wife to handle the kids and the household, all of it, while I lay there unable to lift my head.

There I was. The one carrying and holding so much for so many. And I couldn’t even hold myself upright.

With phone in hand, struggling to even see the screen, I reached out to a friend who did healing work and told her what was happening. She said she could help, and over the next three days she worked with me remotely, session after session.

Those days are blurred. I was in bed, dysfunctional, head spinning, hot and sweaty and nauseous, like a rag being whipped around in the wind. The internal architecture was falling, and my body was falling with it. Two identity foundations, the only two I had ever known, cracking at the same time. And my body lost its orientation. Because orientation, my place in space, in my reality, was exactly what had been destroyed.

. . .

During one of those healing sessions, my friend said something that changed everything.

She said there was a presence inside my field that wasn’t mine. That the man who had shaped my entire childhood, the man I’d been raised to revere and obey, was still in there. Fused with me. Unwilling to let me go. Holding me by the braid like a leash. Like a noose.

And my body detonated.

Because here’s the thing I had never been able to name. For my entire life, I could feel him inside me. Not as a memory. As a presence. I could always feel him and see him when I looked inward, and I could always see myself in him. And there was love in it, and respect and admiration, and tangled through all of that there was fear and the constant low hum of not-good-enough and the wanting of his approval and the aspiring toward something he represented that I could never quite reach. That once reached, maybe, just maybe, I would be worthy and safe and loved. For once.

All of it was woven together so tightly, so early, so deeply, that I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began. I thought that tangle was just me. I thought that’s what being me felt like.

And then she named it.

And my body said: YES.

Goosebumps everywhere. Tears. My neck buzzing. Heat flooding up through my chest and my neck and my face. Eyes wide. Breath short and fast. And this vortex of anger and grief and recognition all hitting at once. But underneath all of it, something I didn’t expect.

I didn’t know this was the truth I’d been trying to figure out how to explain. I didn’t know this was the validation I was looking for. But the moment she said it, I knew. That’s it. That’s what’s been in here this whole time. THIS is what has been running and ruining me for as long as I can remember.

She began the process of separating his presence from my field. Asserting my sovereignty. Drawing a line where none had ever existed. And as she worked, the vertigo began to lift. And something came in its place…

Hot tears running down my face. Anger and grief and rage buzzing through my body, as twitches of electric shocks ricocheted through my body.

And underneath all of that, something quieter. Something I didn’t have a name for yet. Space.

For the first time in my life, there was space inside me where he used to be. And it was disorienting in a completely different way than the vertigo, because I didn’t know what I felt like without him in there. I didn’t know what my own body felt like when it was just mine.

And in the days and weeks and months that followed, slowly, slowly, I began to find myself. For the first time. It’s beautiful and luxurious, and lonely and terrifying all at once.

He’s tried to come back since. Multiple times. But my boundary holds. Ferociously.

THIS is MY BODY. And YOU are not welcome here.

. . .

Here’s the thing. This story isn’t just about me. It’s not just about a cult, or a guru, or a turban, or a father having a moment.

This is about the moment the thing you built your life on turns out to be something other than what you thought. And not just one thing. The foundational pieces. The deep ones. The ones that were installed before you had the capacity to choose.

The body doesn’t politely update your beliefs. It breaks your thumb. It spins the room. It drops you and says: the architecture is coming down, and you can get out of the way or you can go down with it.

I went down with it.

The fracturing was the first of many deaths. The beginning of a cycle that would come layer after layer after layer, dismantling an identity that was never mine to begin with. A structure designed by someone else, for someone else’s purposes, long before I could consent or refuse.

You can't separate yourself from your architecture while you're still living inside it. When it comes down, you come down with it. And then, from the rubble, you start to find out what's actually yours.

That part comes next.

. . .

This is Part IV of The Compost and the Fire. Part V, “The Compost,” is coming next.

If this landed somewhere in your body, subscribe. There’s more where this came from.

Thirty or forty feet behind him, his mom, probably in her mid-forties. Trying to keep up. Happy and tired at the same time.

I caught her eye and said Happy Mother’s Day. She laughed with a slight sigh and said thank you.

So many emotions and feelings and patterns in that one moment. It sat with me. It kept expanding. It got me thinking deeper about motherhood. It’s kind of crazy if you really think about it…

Every one of us grew from a single cell into a whole body. Growing, swimming, sleeping, dreaming in the ocean of our mother’s belly. Her body, becoming ours. Her blood, turned into milk. Nutrients pulled from her body, her bloodstream, her bones if need be, to give us what we needed. Her heartbeat, the first rhythm we ever knew. Our first earth.

And then we emerged. Most of us can’t really wrap our heads around what that takes. The cramps. The childbirth. What it does to the body.

Then comes the rest of it...

The nights. The feeding. The holding. The watching and serving and worrying. The milestones and mundane. The showing up, again and again, sometimes from a full cup, sometimes from nothing at all. For years and years.

To the mothers, in all of it…

The joy and the exhaustion.

The pride and the doubt.

The ecstasy and the grief.

The moments of pure presence and the moments of wanting to disappear.

Sometimes within the same day. Sometimes within the same hour.

To the mothers who feel they are not doing enough, and to the mothers who know they are.

To the mothers who need rest, who need support, who need a village.

To the mothers who sometimes want to run, and to the mothers who keep choosing to stay.

To the mothers who didn’t choose this, and found themselves here anyway.

To the mothers who longed for this, and have not been able to.

To the mothers grieving children lost, and to the mothers loving children who are here.

To the mothers who gave up children they knew they could not serve, and to the mothers raising other people’s children as their own.

To the mothers whose children carry love and anger toward them in equal measure, and to the mothers whose children are still learning how to come home.

I see you. I honor you.

My own mother has felt many of these things. Our relationship is not a simple one. I carry love and gratitude for her, as well as anger and grief. And gratefully, a growing acceptance of all of it, sometimes in the same breath. And still, she gave me this body. I feel her in me, and I love her. She is the reason I am here to write these words.

To honor mothers is to honor our origin. The origin of everything.

If we miss that, we lose the truth of who we are and how we came to be.

What I want is for mothers, and all women, to be given the support, protection, respect, and grace they deserve.

And someday, all of us learning to feel and honor the connection, to live in reverence and balance with our first and last mother. The Earth. The body that held us first, and the body that holds us still.

To all mothers everywhere, may you be honored in the way you deserve.

Today, and every day 🙏🏼

. . .

Here’s something worth sitting with.

Your body made decisions about relationships and love before you ever spoke a word. And it made those decisions in response to systems that were already trying to shape you. Your body’s code and the system’s code were being written at the same time. And unless you go back and find what was written, it just keeps running. Quietly. From underneath. Shaping everything.

I know this because I went back. And what I found there rewired my understanding of every relationship I’ve ever had.

. . .

I don’t remember most of what I’m about to share in the normal way we usually remember things. There are no clean narratives here. What I have are fragments. Sensations. Images that surfaced decades later through somatic work and ceremony, rising up from a place in my body that existed before I had language to name it, strung together with timelines shared with me by my mother.

In a somatic rebirthing session about five years ago, my practitioner guided me back into the two-to-five-year-old range. Looking for the memories carrying the most charge. I went deep into an altered state, and got down on the ground. I lifted a floorboard and found these heavy, dark, glass-looking orbs underneath. Each one holding something immense.

And what happened was strange. As I picked up these orbs and went deeper into my subconscious, I would stop breathing. Stop speaking. Stop being consciously aware. My body would shut down completely and my practitioner had to keep pulling me back into the room, into my body, into my breath. Again and again. Because the body was taking me somewhere that existed before language, and when I got there, language shut off. Everything shut off.

That’s what pre-verbal memory is. It’s not a movie you watch. It’s a state you fall into. And the falling is what tells you it’s real.

This is a story my body told me. It took thirty-five years for me to be ready to listen.

. . .

At eighteen months old, I was left in Atlanta with a family that ran what amounted to a programming facility for toddlers in my parents’ spiritual community. Kids would get sent there when they had “attitude problems.” The adults would work on them until the problems were “fixed.” Then they’d get sent home. Think of it as the Dharma Initiative, but for toddlers.

Everything was structured. White clothes. White turbans. Sing-alongs, yoga, art projects, all in the image of the community and its leader.

The consequences for noncompliance were standing in a corner.

Public scolding.

Withholding food.

Cold showers with your clothes still on.

Sometimes there were potty training accidents. Then we were shamed for them. Publicly cleaned up and changed by a clearly-grossed-out, big-yellow-rubber-gloves wearing woman who didn’t want to touch us. No warmth in the handling of small bodies that still needed tenderness…

My parents didn’t want to leave me. My mother’s instinct was to keep me. But Yogi Bhajan, the leader of the community exploded at her, told her she was ruining me, told her she was breaking her agreement, and demanded she give me up for six months to “fix the damage” she’d done.

It broke her heart. But she did it.

And my dad? He followed along. Bhajan was the boss. When he spoke, everyone obeyed. So six months it was.

My mother’s agency was taken from her before mine was taken from me. She didn’t fail as a mother. She was systematically separated from her own instincts by a man who made obedience feel like devotion. Which, regrettably, is somewhat of a well-worn pathway from early childhood traumas. She carries this as the deepest regret of her life. She’s not the villain of this story. The system is.

I grew up with the community’s motto: Obey. Serve. Love. Excel.

I sang songs with those words and they felt beautiful. They felt like a formula for becoming my best self and taking my place in spiritual community.

Now when I read them, I want to vomit, to rage, and to cry.

Because love meant worthiness through approval and compliance. It was transactional: behave correctly, and you will be loved. And excel meant doing that even better and then being honored for it. Become the best 3HO kid possible. (Eventually, that is exactly what I lived for, until it finally broke in 2020, but that’s another story). Make obedience feel like belonging. Make resistance feel like failure. Make compliance belonging, and status.

Kids would arrive at that house bright. Eyes alive. And after a while, the sparkle would go out. Robotic. Compliant. Mission accomplished. And home they went. More kudos to the caregivers for being “child whisperers.”

Except for me. I stayed.

I didn’t break the same way. Every once in a while, something in me would plant its feet. My fists would pull in, my elbows would swing into my ribs, and I’d say NO. Short. Sharp. Not a tantrum. Not a performance. Just a sound that came from somewhere deeper than a toddler should have needed to go.

The last bit of me not blurring out and dissolving into the nothing of their asserted will overwriting who I was.

A periodic, bold, ditch effort to still have some semblance of me. As consciousness. As a person who existed.

By saying “no,” I was saying yes to the only thing I had left: I existed. The body’s first act of sovereignty, written inside a system designed to erase it.

But what I couldn’t resist was the forgetting.

It happened slowly. Like dissolving...

First I forgot my parents’ faces. What they looked like.

Then I forgot what they smelled like.

Then what our home looked like.

And eventually it just slipped away entirely.

I didn’t even know I had parents anymore. I didn’t know there was anything else.

The body had made its calculation: stop reaching for what isn’t coming. Holding onto what you can’t have costs energy a toddler can’t afford to spend. The forgetting isn’t failure. It’s the body’s most expensive act of mercy.

. . .

Then a flash ahead. From the house in Atlanta to wandering the high desert of New Mexico alone. Dirty. Dazed. Dehydrated. Twenty months old. Adults walking past in white. “Not my kid. Not my problem.”

And then a car pulled up. A kind looking man and a woman in turbans. They saw me before I saw them. Their faces went white. Their jaws dropped. They came running.

I looked up at them. Vaguely familiar. That’s it. The people who made me didn’t even register as people I knew.

They picked me up. They held me. And slowly, over days, I started to remember…

Oh… These are my parents. This feels good. Scary, but good.

My mother’s response was instant. “That’s it. We are taking him back.”

But within two weeks, the system had overridden her again. The six-month prescription wasn’t filled. She was told she was “overprotective.”

Let that land.

A mother who had just found her toddler wandering alone in a desert, who had to reintroduce herself to her own son because he’d forgotten she existed, was told she was the problem. Her instinct to mother me was reframed as her weakness.

That’s how these systems work. They don’t just override your instincts. They make you ashamed of having them.

When my parents left New Mexico, I was left behind. Again.

And my body did what it had already learned to do. It let go. I forgot them. Again. Because softening toward people who keep being taken away is a luxury the nervous system cannot afford.

For two or three more months. I went to a small school run by an older 3HO couple. They were sweet. Kind. I ended up calling them Grandma and Grandpa. Other 3HO kids came during the day for something like daycare. It was safe and fun, in a way. And some version of a normal childhood. But not.

Months later, my father came and brought me back to Florida. And I didn’t recognize him. My mother later said I had this look on my face “as if he had been abandoned and was searching for his parents in everyone’s eyes, even though he no longer knew what they looked like.”

And then I softened. Remembered them. Let them in. Started to feel safe.

And then got sent away again.

Pick me up. Put me down. Pick me up. Put me down.

Each time I softened, it cost me something. Each time I opened up, the ground disappeared. And each time the ground disappeared, I had to harden again. And then they’d come back, and the hardening would have to melt, and the melting was terrifying because I already knew what came next.

In a ceremony decades later, the truest sentence of my early life surfaced from somewhere below language:

Pick one. Just make up your damn mind, and I’ll deal with it. But don’t do this back and forth anymore. I can’t take it anymore.

I can survive being left. I can survive being held. What I couldn’t survive was the constant switching. Just choose. Either one I can build a life around.

In that same ceremony, there was a pain inside me. Physical, visceral agony, deep inside my gut, against my spine. So sharp I wanted to cut it out. And the more I fought it, and screamed, the tighter it got. Until I finally realized: the pain was me. The emotional scar tissue of loving people who kept being taken away. Not a foreign object to be extracted. The tissue itself.

. . .

Back in Miami at two, terrified of being sent away again, my body found an opening.

One day on a local playground, at the top of a tall slide, another kid pushed me. And what surfaced in the somatic work years later: I let myself get pushed. The body didn’t need a plan. It needed a solution. And it had already discovered the only one that worked.

I broke my left arm. The humerus. Clean in half. Full body cast.

And everything changed. My parents stopped fighting. They focused on me. They stayed. In pictures of me in that cast, I look happy. Genuinely happy.

A toddler beaming in a body cast, because the cast was keeping me close to the people I needed. The body didn’t do this because it was broken. It did this because it was intelligent. Finding agency when every system around me was deleting it.

And five years later, as I wrote about in Part I, the same left arm would break itself again. The body doesn’t forget what worked.

And then there was the deepest code of all. My parents loved me. That was real. And despite that love, a system more powerful than both of them kept tearing us apart. A pre-verbal child can’t hold both at the same time. If how your parents behave is who they are, then my parents were people who give their child away. And you can’t bond to that. A toddler who can’t bond doesn’t survive.

So I split them.

Who they are: loving, devoted, wanting the best for me.

How they are: gone, erratic, handing me over. I bonded to the “who.”

I learned to tolerate and overlook the “how.” The body’s deepest act of intelligence, written inside the deepest act of systemic cruelty.

. . .

That split saved my life. Same intelligence as the “no.” Same intelligence as the broken arm. The body finding a way through an impossible situation.

But survival codes don’t expire. They don’t update themselves when the emergency is over. They just keep running.

I carried that split into every relationship I’ve ever had. I’d see someone’s potential, their “who,” and give infinite patience to their “how.” Focus on intention over action, possibility over reality. Building every bridge. Assuming the best version of a person was the real one and the version who kept showing up was one day away from their “true self.” I’d call it love. Loyalty. Seeing “the best” in people.

Kinda… maybe… but also no. It wasn’t any of those things. It was a toddler’s operating system doing the only thing it knew to do to keep the bond alive.

Maybe you know some version of this. Not because you grew up in a cult (or maybe you did). But because every family has its version of the system. Every culture has its rules about which parts of you are acceptable and which need to go underground. Every relationship has its silent negotiation between who you actually are and who you need to be to keep the bond. And the survival patterns you built in response, the adjusting, the reading of rooms, the bonding to potential, the pouring yourself into connection until there’s no self left, those weren’t character flaws. They were intelligence. Written in the body before the mind had a say. In response to a system you may not even remember.

The reprogramming is simple to name and brutally hard to live: let who someone is and how someone is be two sides of the same coin. Stop splitting them. Stop bonding to potential and tolerating reality. And stay inside yourself even in connection. Especially in connection.

I tried to do it the other way. Bridge to others, and help them stay, against everything that didn’t work, against my own worth and values.

Physically, I tried to grab the pain and rip it out. To force the update.

What I found is that the harder you fight it, the tighter it grips. Because the pain isn’t something inside you. It is you. And the only way through is to soften into what’s already there and hold it differently than it was held the first time.

That’s the work. Not fixing. Not removing. Softening. Slowly, deeply, tenderly. Softening into self.

And that spark, the one that said “no” with clenched fists when everything else was being erased, the one that let a bone break to get what love couldn’t provide, the one that kept scanning strangers’ faces for something familiar, that spark is the same one doing this work now. Choosing myself. Never walking away. Rewriting the code. Line by line.

It never went out.

It just needed someone to finally stay with it, with me. And so I do.

And then I forget. And then I’m lost and alone again… until I remember, and softly and fiercely hold myself amidst it all. Over and over again. And slowly, it gets easier.

. . .

Somewhere in your body, there’s code you didn’t write. Rules about what love costs and whether the ground can be trusted. Written before you had words. Running ever since.

Are you ready to find out what it says?

And if you do... are you ready to stay with it?
. . .

This is Part III of The Compost and the Fire. Part IV is coming next.

If something in your body recognized itself in these words, stay close. We’re going deeper.

If this piece meant something to you, paid subscription is also available as a simple, optional way to support the writing.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers, kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion. I’ll also share a bit about what it was like reflecting on and writing each piece and the tricky things that arise in the process. And most importantly, I’d love to hear what is arising for you, and what this compassionate, embodied awareness of body and nervous system and self feels like.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

When the same kind of painful experience hits a child’s nervous system over and over, the nervous system stops treating it as something that happened.

It starts treating it as something that’s coming.

The experience becomes a prediction. A template. A map of how the world works and what it will do to you.

This is not a flaw. This is brilliant engineering. A child who can predict danger before it arrives has a better chance of surviving it. The body that learned to flinch before the hit, to brace before the loss, to go numb before the pain... that body knew exactly what was happening. And it did the best thing it could with whatever agency it had left.

Which, when you’re small, is almost none.

You can’t leave. You can’t fight back. You can’t change the adults around you. The only thing within your power is to change yourself.

So the body adapts. Brilliantly.

The problem is that the prediction doesn’t expire. You grow up. You leave the house, the school, the system, the family that built the template. But the map stays. And now you’re navigating adult relationships, friendships, work, trust, intimacy... with a map that was drawn by a child in crisis. The adaptations that saved your life at five are running your life at forty. And they will keep running it, invisibly, until you turn around and look at them.

That’s what this piece is. Me turning around.

I’ve come to call my patterns the Four Flavors of Rupture: Betrayal, Manipulation, Chaos, and Severing. They layer. They bleed into each other. But each has its own signature in my nervous system, its own way of landing in my body, its own way of shaping how I navigate the world.

Not the ruptures themselves. The responses. How my body learned to survive them. Those responses were wise. Every single one of them kept me alive when I needed to survive.

And every single one of them has been running the show long past when I needed them to.

So let me name them.

. . .

Betrayal

I was eleven years old, in my third year at boarding school in India. I was a junior boy at a school called 4S.

And in that world, food was everything. Food was currency. Food was power. We were malnourished, hungry, and homesick for the familiar comfort food of the West. So whatever snacks or treats had survived the mail and made it into your locker, that was status. It was the one thing you could control in an environment where almost nothing belonged to you.

I had a friend. A kid I’d grown up with. We’d played together for hundreds of hours. He was one of, if not my best friend. I went to India two years before him. And when he finally arrived, I was so excited. I remember thinking: I’m not going to feel so alone anymore.

But he came with a different energy. He read the room fast. The school was a Machiavellian ecosystem, a pecking order built on fear and scarcity, and he wanted to be at the top of it. Lord of the Flies with turbans, basically. And somewhere in that climb, he stopped being my friend.

I watched it happen over three, four months.

The slow erosion. The way he’d look past me. Stopped sitting with me at meals. Didn’t come find me on weekends anymore. Started running with a different crew and acting like our years of friendship didn’t exist.

And here’s what made it worse: I looked up to him. I wanted to be like him. He had the strength and the courage to play the game, and I felt too broken to do it. I was just surviving. Small and scared and reading novels to get through the days. Stephen King, John Grisham, James Clavell. He was thriving in the ecosystem. I was hiding from it.

I kept hoping the friendship would come back.

And then one Saturday afternoon, I walked into my room.

Three metal bunk beds. Six metal cupboards. Concrete floor. Grimy windows. The kind of room where everything was metal or dirt. I had a master lock on my cupboard.

It was the one space in the world that was mine.

I heard banging before I saw anything.

And then I was standing in the doorway, and all the blood drained out of my body. I froze. Everything locked up. And I felt something I can still feel when I close my eyes now... this cold, sinking feeling in my chest. Like all the warmth just poured out through the floor.

He was sitting there with a brick in his hand. Breaking open my lock. He looked at me with a bright ferociousness, not a trace of empathy. And five or six other kids were sitting on the bunk beds, watching. Something dangerous was happening and they were leaning in.

He was breaking open my locker to steal my food. To eat it and share it with the other kids and cement his place at the top. And he was daring me with his eyes.

“Go ahead. Challenge me. Give me a reason to take you down too.”

But there wasn’t anger in me. Not yet. There was just this deep, disorienting pain that felt like a cold dagger sliding into my chest. This kid I’d trusted. Looked up to. Hundreds of hours of play... all of it worth less to him than a power move in front of an audience.

I ran. I got to a phone and called my parents, sobbing so hard I could barely speak. My dad helped a little bit, but I don’t even remember what he said. I was so flooded. I just remember the crying and the not-knowing-what-to-do and the being so utterly alone with the shrapnel of a friendship I thought was mine.

After that, something in me broke with that trust. We orbited each other for years after. Friendly enough. Never close. The thing that had been between us was gone.

. . .

That’s Betrayal. When trust turns. When closeness shatters. When the person you counted on reveals themselves as someone else.

In my experience, it rarely shows up as one clean moment. It usually announces itself quietly before it arrives loudly. Months of watching the friendship change. Months of telling yourself it’ll come back.

And then the brick through the lock. The nail in the coffin.

And my chest goes cold.

And I realize:

It’s already gone. It’s been gone.

Here’s what Betrayal does in my body when it activates. My gut seizes first. Then the world shrinks and collapses. Like that camera trick in movies where the lens dilates on the character and everything goes warped. My core just turns off. Not weakens. Turns off.

All I want is to curl into a ball and scream.

I’ve felt that same body go cold in friendships that turned sour. With people who said one thing to my face and did another thing behind my back. I can handle change. I can handle endings. But the two-facedness, the discovering that what was shown to me wasn’t what was real, that’s what activates it. Every time.

And here’s the thing: the response to Betrayal also gave me something. That kid who kept getting blindsided by people he trusted eventually learned to read people. Learned to scan for the gap between what’s being shown and what’s actually real.

The gift is discernment. And it’s a real gift.

But the shadow is a lens that sees Betrayal everywhere, even where it isn’t. The radar that protected me at eleven is the same radar that makes it hard to take someone at face value at forty-two.

And every time, underneath the adult who can name the pattern, there he is.

Eleven years old.

Standing in a doorway.

Watching someone he trusted choose something else.

. . .

Manipulation

When I was a little over two years old and had been back with my parents for only a few months after a six-month separation, Yogi Bhajan, the spiritual leader my parents had given their lives to, told my mother to bring me to Europe so he could “make a man out of me” and “personally work on my nervous system.” My mother paid for her own plane ticket with money my parents didn’t have.

After a while in Europe, Bhajan decided my mother was babying me too much. He sent her home. So there I was, a toddler in a foreign country, in the care of people who were not my parents, under the direct attention of this man.

The banging had started before my mom left. But after she was gone, he took it up a notch. He would yell, bang things, clap, slam doors. Sudden, terrifying sounds. And he would watch me jump. He would watch a two-year-old flinch and jump and cry.

And he would laugh.

Here’s the thing. A toddler jumping at a loud sound is not a defect. That’s a healthy, functioning nervous system doing exactly what it should do. In the wild, that flinch response could save a child’s life. It’s the body doing its job.

Bhajan decided it was a problem to be fixed. He kept doing it, over and over, until I stopped reacting.

He told everyone he had “fixed my nervous system.”

But here’s what actually happened. I didn’t stop reacting. I dissociated. I disconnected from my body and went completely numb inside. A two-year-old who couldn’t run, couldn’t fight, couldn’t make it stop, did the only thing left: he left his body. That wasn’t a fixed nervous system. That was a shattered one that learned to leave. And that dissociation became my primary survival strategy for the next decade and beyond.

“Buck up and walk like a man,” Bhajan said to me. “Or we will leave you here in Paris.”

I wasn’t even three years old.

That’s Manipulation. Not the Hollywood villain version. The kind that wears the mask of medicine. The kind where the person hurting you is the same person everyone says is helping you. And I was too young to do anything about it. Everyone around me was too deep in his influence to see it.

. . .

Five years later, the same man screamed at me until I broke. Cleared the room, towered over me, told me my parents weren’t mine, told me my love for them was weakness. I was seven. I wrote about that in Part I.

After that, my gut, which had always known what was right and wrong, started turning on itself. And as a consequence, the migraines came. Debilitating. Almost daily. Every day after school, I sat alone in a dark closet, my skull splitting open, hiding from the light and sound, riding it out until the pain passed.

No adult asked why. No one checked the closet.

After a few months of this, I’m back in Florida from Virginia on winter break, visiting parents I don’t even live with anymore. They hear about my migraines. And they bring me before Bhajan.

For healing.

The man whose screaming caused the migraines. The man who laughed while he terrorized a toddler into dissociation. That’s who my parents bring me to. For healing. Because he is the healer. Because the community says so. Because questioning him would cost them everything.

He was sitting in my father’s Lazy Boy, in my parents’ living room in Florida. People crowded around. My parents standing in the back of the room, not quite guests in their own home.

He told me to get on all fours.

And because both my teacher and my parents were telling me to do it, of course I did it. Even terrified. Even not wanting to.

I think about that with my own sons now. I can’t imagine being a parent and allowing that. Permitting it. Enabling it. And then paying for it. My parents just sat there. The level of compliance that was normal in my world... can’t imagine what that kind of compliance must have been like for the people he was sexually assaulting. But that’s another story, and there are braver people than me who have told it.

He climbed out of the chair. Got on his knees. Wrapped his huge hands around my head. And started throwing it in every direction. Cracking my neck violently, over and over and over again. I was screaming. Crying. It went on for maybe thirty seconds, which is an eternity when a grown man is wrenching an eight-year-old’s head around.

While his parents stood watching.

And then I collapsed to the floor in the fetal position. Shaking and crying and in pain.

He stood up. Looked at my father. Held out his hand.

“That will be five hundred dollars.”

And my dad, a little shaky, pulled out his wallet.

And paid.

There was a woman in the room who had a knee problem and was going to ask Bhajan for an adjustment. She saw what happened to me and changed her mind. At least somebody in the room was listening to their body that day.

He put me on a diet of no salt and vanilla bean milk. The migraines stopped for about six months. Then they came back. My neck has been a problem ever since. It’s taken many thousands of dollars and many dozens of hours of chiropractic, cranio-sacral, and osteopathic work to get it to where it is now. It’s a hell of a lot better.

And it still aches.

. . .

That is what Manipulation does at its root. It doesn’t just hurt you. It rewrites the story of the hurt so completely that you can’t even locate the damage. Your suffering becomes your spiritual growth. Your pain becomes proof that you’re being shaped for something greater. And the body, the only part of you that never bought the story, just keeps screaming the truth that nobody will listen to.

Stomach cramps. Migraines. A neck that won’t stop aching. Thirty years of the body trying to get a word in.

For me, here’s what Manipulation brings with it. A fog. This sickly sweet feeling on top and underneath it, this shakiness. A confusion that starts in my core and just kind of erases me. I feel small and insecure. My feet disappear from under me. My posture goes. My voice goes up. And this young part wakes up, the one who’s quivering and wanting approval and wanting to be safe and celebrated. And that young part will do anything to get steady ground back.

Anything.

I recognize this pattern now when it runs in real time. Someone close to me says something that doesn’t match my experience. And there’s this moment where I can feel my own knowing sitting right there in my chest. Solid. Clear. And then their words come in. And up until recently, I would watch myself “set aside” my own knowing almost immediately. Like flinching from a loud sound. My body would turn away from its own truth and toward their version. I’d find the one kernel of truth in what they said and blow it up to a hundred percent. Own all of it. And the knowing would just sit there in my chest, waiting... like it was used to being ignored.

That’s the two-year-old’s legacy. A body trained to disconnect from its own responses. Forty years later, the pattern is still running. Just aimed at a different kind of bang.

And here’s what I want to be honest about: that pattern was smart. When the most powerful person in your world is dictating your reality, and your survival depends on staying in his good graces, then abandoning your own perceptions in favor of his is the best move you’ve got. A child who argues with the man everyone calls God gets screamed at, gets his neck broken, gets left in Paris. A child who goes along gets to stay.

The gift is sensitivity. Attunement. The ability to read the room at a level most people can’t touch.

The shadow is a body that still doesn’t fully trust itself. That still reaches for someone else’s version of reality before checking its own.

I catch it now, more often than not. I have to yank that reflex back like a wild horse. Feel it start to run, the self-abandonment, the believing-their-story, and go: wait. Actually, what’s my truth? The horse is getting easier to rein in. But it’s still a horse. And some days it runs before I can grab the reins.

. . .

Chaos

Here’s the thing about growing up without consistent connection. Your nervous system doesn’t just miss it. It adapts to the inconsistency. It learns the rhythm of on-off, here-gone, warmth-then-nothing. And that rhythm becomes the baseline. The water you swim in without knowing it’s water.

Given away at eighteen months.

Saw my parents two months later for a few days. Then no parents for another 4 months.

Back home for a bit.

Then taken to Europe and left there when my mother was sent away.

Then back home for a few more months.

Then permanently removed at three.

And then India.

My earliest years were a level of disruption that defies most people’s comprehension. Every therapist I’ve worked with who really understands what happened is astonished I’m even functional. There’s a deeper story underneath all of this, and I’ll tell it. But not here. Here is the shape of it.

Phone calls home that were supposed to be connection and instead were just scheduled devastation. I remember sitting in the office where they let us use the phone. My mom’s voice comes through and my whole body just collapses into the sound of her. And I can’t talk. I just break down crying. And she’s crying. And neither of us can say anything useful because what is there to say? I miss you? I know. Come get me? She can’t.

And so we just cry into the phone for however long they let us, and then we hang up.

And I feel like someone ripped a scab off and then just left the wound open.

And then over the next few days I slowly, slowly forget. The numbness settles back over like a film. I go back into survival mode. Functional again. Until the next call rips it open.

Connection. Relief. Disconnection. Shock. Pain. Numbness.

Repeat.

That was the rhythm my nervous system learned as the baseline for connection.

. . .

My third year, my mom came to India. I didn’t even know she was coming.

Some kid ran up to me and said: “Hey, your mom’s here.”

I thought he was fucking with me.

I walked outside and there she was. And the first thing I felt was shock. Pure disbelief. And then for a couple of minutes I was excited. Happy. Just... my mom is here.

And then the fear came. Not for me... for her. Is she safe here? Can she handle this place?

I was a child, and my first instinct when my mother appeared was to become her protector.

I don’t remember a lot about the visit. I remember feeling like she was less regulated, less safe. Like I couldn’t let go and be held. And I couldn’t fully receive from her.

Sometimes, part of me still resists receiving. It feels like it’s going to go away the second I relax into it. So I stay braced. Even with love in the room. Even with arms open in front of me.

That’s something I’m still working with. It’s one of the deepest pieces of this whole thing.

Over a summer break, back home, I remember breaking down and saying something to her that I can still feel in my chest.

“I feel like all you’re doing is treating me like a robot. You’re just telling me what to do and ordering me around. I just want to feel you. I want to feel connected to you. I want to feel warmth and love.”

When I said that, she broke down crying. She hugged me. She apologized. And she did better for a bit. But I don’t think she ever fully recovered from our rupture either. The system that broke me broke her too. Just differently.

At least that once, I named exactly what I needed. Clearly. Precisely.

And the need landed for a moment before the system swallowed it back up. Even when she was physically there, she couldn’t fully arrive. And I couldn’t fully receive.

When presence and absence stop being opposites and start being the same thing wearing different clothes...

That’s Chaos in connection.

. . .

And here’s what Chaos builds over time. An addiction to intensity. Because intensity is the only state your nervous system recognizes as real. Triage mode. And in triage mode, I’m worthy because I’m useful, and I’m distracted because I’m focused.

But stillness. Steadiness. Quiet. Just two people sitting in a room with nothing wrong.

What’s about to happen?

That’s the question my body asks every time things get too peaceful.

And the thing is, that vigilance kept me alive. A kid in an unpredictable environment who stays ready, who never fully lets his guard down, who can shift from relaxed to functional in a heartbeat, that kid survives. The scanning, the bracing, the triage mode, all of that was my body doing exactly what it needed to do.

It just never got the memo that I left.

Every summer I came home from India, it took my body two, sometimes three weeks to accept that I was somewhere safe. The dissociation that had kept me alive over there didn’t just switch off at the airport. The whole world looked different. Softer. Slightly out of focus. Like that lens effect in movies when someone’s dreaming. My whole somatic experience was wrapped in this filmy unreality while they scrubbed the caked dirt off me and picked the lice out of my hair. My nervous system was saying: don’t trust this. This is temporary. You’re still there.

You’ll always be there.

That’s the deepest cost of Chaos. Not the storms themselves. The inability to believe the calm is real.

I can usually let peace just be peace when I’m alone (but then Severing finds me there too). But around others, around relationships, around the dynamics where the old patterns were built, it can still be difficult. The scanning still kicks in. But the bracing is shorter now. And sometimes I catch it in time to soften before the whole system locks up.

Sometimes.

. . .

Severing

I ate a big, ridiculous ice cream cone at the airport. That’s what I most clearly remember about my departure.

It was August 1992. I was eight years old, about to fly to India. Boarding school. Ten years on the other side of the world. And I went two, three years before any of my peers. Not because I was ready. Because my life had already been pulled apart so many times that I figured I might as well get the show on the road.

The adults were so proud. “You’re so brave.” “You’re so courageous.” “The pressure turns the coal into a diamond.” I heard secondhand that Bhajan once said to a staff member who was advocating for the children’s well-being: “I don’t care how many we lose as long as we get one superman.” That was the system. The children weren’t being neglected by accident. We were expendable by design.

Years later, a researcher named Alexandra Stein would call what happened to me a bounded choice. The illusion of choosing when the alternatives have been systematically removed. I didn’t decide to go to India. I decided to stop resisting something that felt inevitable. But everybody threw a party for it.

So there I was eating this ice cream, and everything felt sort of okay. The community was there. I was getting all this validation. And the ice cream was so good and I was just focused on eating it, this sweet cold thing in my hands distracting me from the fact that my entire life was about to change.

The ice cream lasted until we were taxiing on the runway. Turns out a waffle cone is not a long-term coping strategy.

And then it was gone. And the distraction was gone. And I was just a kid on a plane. No one I was close to. Not a single adult traveling with us. Fourteen hours between strangers, hurtling toward a place I’d never been.

I remember the loneliness like a physical weight. Not sadness. Weight. Like gravity had changed and everything was heavier than it should have been.

We landed in Frankfurt. Twelve hours in the airport. Delirious. No one to meet us. We piled our bags in a corner and some of us slept on top of them because there was nowhere else.

Then another fourteen-hour flight. Long. Dark. Shaky. Strangers.

Then customs. Indian men pulling apart my things. Eight years old, being patted down in a foreign country with no one to call. Then a windowless bus, twelve hours through brutal heat in the middle of the night.

The smell of India was foreign.

The language was foreign.

The sights were foreign.

The culture was foreign.

Everything was scary and overwhelming and I was powerless and alone.

And somewhere in the dark, on that endless bus ride, I found the one thing that kept me from coming apart entirely. My Walkman. A cassette of sacred music that felt familiar and warm. I put it on, cocooned myself in the sound, and just... listened.

An eight-year-old boy holding together his own nervous system with a pair of headphones and a borrowed sense of home.

Without that music, I was lost at sea. In the dark. In the winter. And the only thing I could do was wrap a thin cocoon of warmth around myself and survive.

That’s it.

That’s all I had.

. . .

Four months later, my dad came to visit.

By then, I was skin and bones. Dark circles under my eyes. I’d had diarrhea for months from drinking water I’d been told not to drink but drank because there weren’t other options. Sometimes the hunger pangs got so bad I’d drink water just to feel full, knowing it would make me sick again. Other times I’d walk to the gardens and eat rose petals. Because it was something.

And then he was there.

Warm.

Safe.

He gave me hugs.

Nobody gave me hugs.

He brought me food.

Nobody brought me food.

He brought clean clothes. Clean socks. Clean underwear.

All of mine were shit-stained and full of holes.

He took me on a little trip. A hotel. What he described as disgusting, infested with rats and cockroaches. What I experienced as paradise. Good food. A clean bed. Warmth. Someone who was mine. I remember feeling like the whole world had changed color, like going from black and white to something warm and golden just by being near him.

His minimum was my miracle.

And the thing is, I didn’t think about the ending. I was just in it. In the warmth and the hugs and the food that didn’t make me sick and the hotel that felt like heaven. I wasn’t thinking about him leaving. I was just there. Just held. Just okay.

And then the days ran out, and suddenly it was his last day.

And the panic hit all at once.

Then I shared something I wasn’t supposed to share.

Among us India Kids, you didn’t tell. What happens in India stays in India. Don’t nark. Don’t be a wuss.

But I told him about a staff member who had slapped me so hard I almost passed out. Fell to the ground, saw stars, had a red handprint on my face for an hour.

I was eight.

I told my father this because I wanted him to save me. I didn’t have the words for it. I didn’t even know it was an option. But somewhere in my body, the telling of this was a signal flare.

Take me home.

Please.

Take me home.

He searched for the teacher. Couldn’t find him. Threatened the principal. Made it clear that if anything happened to me again, there’d be consequences.

And then he got on a plane.

And he left.

And I went back into the school alone.

We’ve talked about it since, he and I. He didn’t know it was an option to take me back. He didn’t think of it. He didn’t know I wanted it. We were all drinking the Kool-Aid. He wasn’t a villain. He was a father inside a system that had convinced him his child’s suffering was the price of his child’s greatness.

. . .

Severing is the deepest pattern for me. Given away at eighteen months. Left with strangers in Europe at two. Permanently removed from my parents at three. And then at eight, put on that plane.

And here’s the thing about Severing that makes it different from the other three: it doesn’t just happen to you. It teaches you to do it to yourself.

At eight years old, I chose to go to India. That sentence sounds like agency. It was self-severing. The cord had been cut so many times by other people that I picked up the scissors and started cutting before anyone else could.

And that was smart. A kid with no control over whether he gets sent away learns to send himself away first. A kid who keeps getting blindsided by loss learns to see it coming and beat it to the punch. The binary thinking, the sorting everything into together-or-gone, that gave me the only thing I had in a childhood with no stable ground: the illusion of control.

It just turns out that controlling the ending of things is a terrible strategy for building a life.

About a year ago, early in a relationship with a woman I care about, we got in an argument. Not a big one. Normal relationship friction.

My immediate response: I guess that’s it. We’re over.

She looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

Wait. What?

What she was experiencing was a disagreement. What my body was experiencing was the beginning of the end. Because that middle space, the not-knowing, the ambiguity, the place where things are unresolved but not over, that is the place my system can least tolerate. Everything in my childhood taught me that connection is binary.

Fully on or fully off.

Bonds didn’t slowly evolve or slowly end.

They snapped.

So my nervous system never built a filing cabinet for we’re in a fight but we’re still together. It only had two folders: together and gone.

I’m building more folders now.

Here’s where it gets twisted. Under this old lens, if I end it, I become every adult who put me on a plane and went home. And if they end it, I’m the child again.

Either way, the body loses.

Which means the only move left is to contort yourself into whatever shape the relationship requires so it never reaches the breaking point. To self-abandon so completely that you never have to face the severance.

I spent eighteen years in a marriage doing exactly that. Don’t get me wrong, there were gifts in those years. Growth. Happy moments. Real healing alongside the self-abandonment. But the self-abandonment was professional-grade and gold medal worthy. And I didn’t notice until there was barely any of me left.

Walking away from that marriage was the beginning of me learning how to choose myself.

That’s the part nobody sees about Severing. People think it looks like dramatic exits. Cutting people off. Burning bridges. And sometimes it does. But sometimes Severing looks like a person who stays and stays and stays while quietly disappearing from themselves.

Self-abandonment is Severing turned inward.

You cut the cord to yourself so you never have to cut the cord to them.

For me, when the severance does finally come, my body’s experience is amputation. Part of my nervous system just gets ripped away.

Jagged.

Raw.

Like someone took hold of something inside my chest and tore.

I’m further along with this one than I used to be. I can hold the middle now, the molten state. I don’t always nail it. But the gap between the trigger and my response, where the choice actually lives, is getting wider.

A fight is becoming just a fight.

Silence is becoming just silence.

And the space between connected and severed is becoming, slowly, what it always was.

Just space.

Where things can grow if you let them.

. . .

Here’s what I want to name before I close this out. These four patterns don’t just echo from the past. They shape the present. They become the lens your nervous system sees through, the menu it orders from. And the more activated you are, the more stressed, the more tired, the more depleted, the stronger that lens distorts. On a good day, you can see a pause for what it is. Just a pause. On a bad day, that same pause becomes proof that the other shoe is about to drop. Same moment. Different filter.

And sometimes, the hardest part is that the healthy thing, the stable connection, the person who actually shows up and stays... that doesn’t always register as safe. Usually it registers as unfamiliar. And when familiar has always been the dangerous thing dressed up as love, unfamiliar can feel like a different kind of danger. Even when it’s exactly what you need. So you reach back for what you know. Not because you’re broken. Because familiar feels like safe, even when familiar is the thing that keeps hurting you.

The work is redrawing the map. Teaching your nervous system that the predictions it’s been running since childhood are no longer the territory. That safety can look different from what you grew up with. That different doesn’t mean dangerous.

. . .

These four patterns don’t just live in the mind. They live in the body.

And not the way people usually mean when they say that.

The body doesn’t just “keep the score.”

A scorekeeper sits on the sidelines. They tally. They observe. They’re not in the game.

The body is not keeping score. The body is the field. The players. The whole game. It’s not recording the patterns. It’s living them. Right now. Every time a pattern fires, the body doesn’t consult a file. It’s right back on the field, playing the same game it’s been playing since before it had words.

. . .

Here’s what I’m learning.

Not what I’ve learned.

What I’m still learning, right now.

There’s a space between the pattern firing and the old response running. It’s small. Sometimes it’s barely a breath. But it’s there. And in that space is where the choice lives. The choice to check: is this actually happening right now, or is my eleven-year-old running the show? Is this actual Betrayal or is my nervous system making it look that way?

Is this the beginning of the end, or is this just a Tuesday?

Usually it’s a Tuesday.

That space is where the freedom starts. I won’t call it freedom yet because I’m still building the muscle. But the gap is there. And it’s getting wider. And some days I choose differently.

And some days I don’t.

And the practice is just that: practice. Not perfection. Not arrival. Just the willingness to stay in the game and keep choosing.

The naming was the first step. Remembering the experiences. Noticing the patterns. Giving them names so I could see them when they were running.

I’ve gone deep since then. Turned over every rock I can find. Swum down to the bottom and come back up. That’s its own story, and I’ll tell it. But not here. Here is just the naming.

Maybe your version of these patterns didn’t come from a cult. Maybe it came from a family that ran hot and cold. A parent who loved you fiercely on Tuesday and forgot you existed on Thursday. A relationship where the rules kept changing and you were always the one scrambling to keep up. A childhood where you learned, in your body, that the world is not a place where things stay.

The specifics change. The body remembers the same way.

So here’s the invitation. Not to adopt my Four Flavors as yours. But to stop for a moment and ask your body, not your mind, your body, what patterns have been running the show? What did your nervous system learn about the world when you were too young to question the lesson? What adaptations saved you then that are costing you now?

Name them.

That’s the first step. Not the healing. Just the seeing.

Because somewhere in you, there’s a map that was drawn by a child who was just trying to survive. And that map is still guiding you through every relationship, every risk, every moment you let someone close.

You can’t change a map you don’t know you’re following.

. . .

This is Part II of The Compost and the Fire. Part III is coming next.

If this landed somewhere in your body, subscribe. There’s more where this came from.

If this piece meant something to you, paid subscription is also available as a simple, optional way to support the writing.

Subscribe now

This is the first in a seven-part series called The Compost and the Fire. One man’s story of childhood trauma, spiritual fracture, somatic awakening, and the slow, ongoing reclamation of an authentic life. Not from above. From inside.

. . .

Here’s something most people don’t think about.

Babies don’t ask if they can be themselves. They just are. They cry when they’re hungry. They reach when they want to be held. They scream when something’s wrong. That’s authenticity. That’s the factory setting.

But that factory setting depends entirely on one condition: do I feel safe? Do I feel held? Do I feel like the people around me are going to keep me alive?

Because for an infant, connection is not a nice-to-have. Connection is survival. Literally. Babies who are fed and kept warm but not held, not touched, not attuned to... they can die. Not from disease. From disconnection. That’s how fundamental this is.

So the very first system that comes online in a human being isn’t the thinking mind, that’s much, much later. It isn’t even the emotional system. It’s the nervous system. Before a baby can think or feel in any conscious way, the nervous system is already attuning. Listening. Gathering information. Asking one question over and over: am I safe here? And then adapting based on the answer.

When that bond is solid, when a child feels safe and held and met, something beautiful happens. The child settles. And from that settled place, a self starts to emerge…

Separate needs.
Separate wants.
A personality.
An identity.
A voice…

Authenticity.

But when the bond isn’t solid? When connection is unreliable, or conditional, or just... gone? The child can’t afford to be themselves. Being yourself requires a foundation. And if the foundation is shaking, you don’t get to build. You just hold on.

And authenticity goes underground.

It becomes a luxury the nervous system can’t afford. And something else takes over. The adapted self. The one who figures out what earns connection, what earns safety. The one who reads the room, performs, contorts, complies. Not because they want to. Because the alternative is losing the bond. And the bond is survival.

This is what Gabor Maté calls the tension between attachment and authenticity.

I just call it the split. Because that’s what it feels like. You split in two. One part is real but hidden. The other part is visible but performing.

And here’s the kicker: that split is actually brilliant. It’s an intelligent survival response. A child who can adapt to keep the bond intact is a child who stays alive. It works. The problem is that it’s supposed to be temporary. A momentary override.

But when the conditions don’t change, when the unsafety is constant, that temporary override gets wired in. It writes itself over the factory settings. And now the adapted self isn’t a response anymore. It’s the operating system. It runs your relationships, your career, your spirituality, your entire life.

Quietly.

From underneath.

Until something cracks it open.

. . .

I know this split intimately. I lived it.

I was born into a spiritual community called 3HO, led by a man named Yogi Bhajan. My parents gave themselves to this community with the devotion of people who had found something that made life bearable after their own traumas. And the community took everything it could from that devotion. Including access to their children.

At 18 months old, I was brought before Bhajan. I didn’t want to touch his feet. I was tired and probably overwhelmed. He exploded. Screamed at my mother. Told her she was breaking her “agreement”, failing as a mother.

And in that moment, her maternal instinct broke against the wall of his authority. She and my father agreed to leave me behind with a group of caregivers in the community for the next 6 months.

I was given away at 18 months to the community “child whisperers”. I was not the only child this happened to. I watched other kids arrive with bright eyes and slowly go dull. Do what they’re told. Stop being themselves, having feelings, asking for what they need. Once that mission was accomplished and they became docile and obedient, they could go home. This lasted for 6 months.

I was given away again at 2.5 years old.

Then for good at 3 years old.

Other than short visits, I never lived with my parents again.

. . .

The years between 3 and 7 hold their own stories, their own weight. Another time.

But I’ll say this: back home at 2 years old, I broke my left arm. And when I did, my parents stopped fighting. They focused on me. They didn’t send me away again as I feared they would (until they did). But during that peaceful time at home with my parents, my nervous system took notes.

At 7, I broke the same arm. Left side. While my mother was in labor in Miami, I was in Virginia, living with a family that wasn’t mine. And something in my body did the only thing it knew to do to be chosen: it broke.

Then came the phone call. My dad, calling to say congratulations, you have a baby sister. At first I was entirely confused, not just because of the pain meds and broken bone, but because I truly had no memory of the pregnancy, or I couldn’t compute it. But my body somehow could, and did.

And in that moment, the fog cleared. She gets to live with my parents. My friends get to live with their parents. Every kid I know gets to live with their parents. Why can’t I?

That’s when I stood up. I told them I wanted to be with my family.

They didn’t know what to do, so they brought me before Bhajan again. He cleared the room, towered over me, and screamed. He called my parents his kids, not mine. He told me my love for them was making me weak. That I had to man up. Grow up. Think bigger. Go bigger. Stop clinging to this and live my destiny.

I was seven.

After that, the stomach cramps started. The migraines started. My gut, which had always known what was right and wrong, began to destroy itself. Decades later it would be diagnosed as celiac disease. But the root was not dietary. The root was a seven-year-old boy whose deepest knowing was screamed into silence by the most powerful person in his world, while every adult around him called it a blessing.

That was the beginning of a very deep silencing of my inner knowing. That is just now, decades later, coming back online.

. . .

This is what trauma does. Not the dramatic Hollywood version. The quiet, structural version.

It splits you down the middle. On one side: the authentic self. The one who knows, who feels, who has a gut response to what is right and what is wrong. On the other side: the adapted self. The one who performs, who contorts, who earns love through compliance and achievement.

And that split doesn’t stay personal. That’s the part most people don’t see.

Families carry it. Communities institutionalize it. Cultures build economies around it. Nations wage wars from it. The child who had to choose attachment over authenticity grows into the adult who builds systems that demand the same sacrifice from others.

Feel this or lose your belonging.

Perform this or lose your place.

Achieve this or you are nothing.

The extractive cycle begins in the nursery, then scales to the species.

. . .

But here’s what I want you to hear. Because this is important.

This is not just my story. This is a human story. The details differ. Maybe your version wasn’t a cult. Maybe it was a family that didn’t have room for your anger. A school that rewarded compliance over curiosity. A culture that told you what a man or a woman is supposed to be. A religion that named your questions as doubt and your instincts as sin.

The specifics change. The structure is the same.

Somewhere, somehow, you were asked to choose between belonging and being yourself. And you chose belonging. Because you had to. And something real went underground.

The question is: are you ready to go find it?

. . .

This is Part I of The Compost and the Fire. Part II, “The Four Flavors of Rupture,” is coming next.

If this landed somewhere in your body, subscribe. There’s more where this came from.

If this piece meant something to you, paid subscription is also available as a simple, optional way to support the writing.

Photo Credit: the incredible Kylee Dawn