Content note: This article discusses postpartum anxiety, insomnia, suspected infidelity, emotional manipulation, suicidal crisis systems, the deaths of children, and the ongoing Lindsay Clancy trial. I am describing my own memories and experiences. Where I do not know what happened, I said so. I am not alleging that my former husband committed any crime or comparing his actions to allegations made about anyone in the Clancy case.

Yesterday, I published an article about the Lindsay Clancy trial and the women who recognize themselves in parts of her story.

I wrote about my own period of severe postpartum anxiety: my ex-husband deployed, a letter arrived from the IRS threatening our home, my baby refused to be held by anyone else, I stopped sleeping, and eventually my mother came to stay with me because I could not keep up by myself.

I understood what I had written, and why I wanted to write it. Then I woke up this morning and realized something that practically rewrote my reality.

Yesterday, I told you what happened when my mind stopped feeling safe, but I didn’t tell you what happened leading up to it.

I reduced years of betrayal, financial instability, confusing decisions, religious conditioning, swallowed anger, traumatic childbirth, and being repeatedly told I worried too much into one clean sentence:

My husband deployed, and then we received a frightening letter from the IRS.

That sentence was and is true, but it was also so incomplete that it essentially preserved the conclusion I had carried for years: the circumstances were ordinary, my reaction was too much, and therefore something inside me must have been defective and I was the real problem all along.

I didn’t consciously decide to conceal the rest; I thought it was taking the attention away from a tragedy playing out on a national stage and that what happened to me didn’t deserve to share space with the rest, but I was totally fine using myself as an example for terrible mental health. The truth is, I was afraid to explain it.

Some of that fear is practical, having made it through divorce and custody proceedings. I know that anything I say about my mental health, or my former marriage, can be removed from its context and made to mean something else.

But some of the fear is older than court.

Telling the complete story requires me to stop protecting the version of events everyone else found easiest to live with. It requires me to say that my anxiety didn’t just materialize inside an otherwise safe and stable home. It developed after years of adapting to an environment in which I often couldn’t trust what I was being told, where I didn’t believe I could leave, and had learned to treat my own pain as the biggest problem.

I am writing this now because I keep seeing women say they recognize themselves in Lindsay Clancy. I had message after message along with comments spread across social media. Some of those women survived postpartum anxiety, depression, psychosis, intrusive thoughts, insomnia, or the terrifying sensation that their own mind was becoming unsafe.

And some of them, I suspect, are still living inside the circumstances making them sick.

They may still be calling themselves unstable while organizing their entire lives around someone else’s unpredictability. They may still believe that needing help proves they are helpless. They may be afraid to describe what’s happening because the story sounds too complicated, because other people have it worse, because leaving does not feel possible, or because they know their mental health could be used to question their ability to care for their children.

Yesterday, I wrote about being lucky that someone came.

Today, I need to write about why I needed someone to come, and why receiving help never meant I was the problem.

I Learned to Swallow the Evidence

At this point in my story, my ex had already been in the military for several years. During his first deployment, he developed what I understood to be an emotionally intimate relationship with another woman. I suspected more, but I can’t prove it.

He still denies that anything happened and remains adamant that it did not count as cheating, and denies the idea that he slept with her. What I knew at the time was that he told me intimate details about the personal problems she confided in him. Then, after he came back, while we were looking for houses, he called her while I was sitting in the car to ask which neighborhood she lived in because he wanted us to buy a house there too. Later I saw text messages he exchanged with her. He called her Babe, and sent a selfie of his haircut. They even told each other how much they missed one another, but when I raised the issue, I was told the babe text was meant for me, and I was imagining things.

I definitely saw the red flags, but I was also around twenty-four years old and raised in a religion that taught me marriage was eternal, forgiveness was righteous, and a good wife was submissive enough to preserve the family through almost anything.

Divorce didn’t feel like an option available to me, which isn’t surprising when anger barely felt like one.

Eventually, he volunteered for a year-long position overseas. I agreed enthusiastically, even though I knew what being alone would require from me and even though the first deployment had already damaged my trust.

During that assignment, we were talking over Skype when his local phone rang. He answered it, and I heard a woman’s voice. He told me he was going to meet a male friend at a coffee shop so they could exchange music from their hard drives.

I could hear that he knew I had heard her.

And he could hear that I knew.

After we ended the call, he texted an apology. He said he wouldn’t have had to lie if it weren’t for the way I had reacted the last time.

Read that again.

He wouldn’t have had to lie if it weren’t for the way I had reacted the last time. He received a call from another woman, lied to my face about it, and then explained that his lie was caused by my reaction to his previous behavior.

To make it worse, this happened shortly before he was scheduled to fly back to the United States so we could take our family to Disney World.

I swallowed my hurt so I wouldn’t ruin the vacation with my feelings.

Can you imagine how fucked up that is?

I stood in the happiest place on Earth and protected everyone else from the consequences of what had happened to me.

I didn’t believe I had the right to feel angry. I knew it was silently expected that I would get over it so life could return to the way it had always been.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t just one isolated act of forgiveness; it was training.

Every time I swallowed pain to preserve the family, my subconscious learned the same rule: what happens to me is less important than keeping everything functioning.

The Flight Home That Followed Us for Years

My ex wanted to extend his overseas contract, but by then, I was at my limit.

I asked whether he even wanted to be with me anymore.

He insisted that he did and booked a flight home. For the first time in our marriage, I allowed myself to believe that something might actually change and that choosing to come home meant he was choosing us.

Ironically, that decision eventually contributed to the IRS audit that would arrive after the birth of our third child.

There are tax rules governing income earned overseas. I don’t remember every detail, and I’m the last person to offer tax guidance, but the issue was that he needed to be outside the country for a certain number of days to qualify for a particular tax exemption.

Between the Disney trip and his flight home at the end of the contract, we apparently fell short. As I remember it, the difference was off literally by a day or two.

He hired an accountant and assured me it was fine because travel days counted or because there was some other gray area. I remember asking whether the numbers worked, and the reaction was that I worried too much.

So I moved on with my life.

But “moving on” in our marriage usually meant that he made the decision and I delt with the anxiety.

Then Everything Changed at Once

We moved cities.

I left the church and almost immediately after I became pregnant with our third child, unexpectedly and almost immediately after making one of the largest identity shifts of my life.

The pregnancy wasn’t an easy one. My son had been born prematurely and spent time in the NICU. His chest was caved in when he was born. I had been born prematurely too. Because of my history and the family history, I received a weekly injection in my hip intended to reduce the risk of preterm labor.

I don’t think I have a single birth story that wasn’t traumatic in some way.

Throughout the pregnancy, I also knew that within a year or so my husband would likely deploy again.

Then, there was a plot twist.

As he explained it, he was no longer eligible to deploy because he was too close to his military separation date and regulations had changed. He would have to sign another contract.

I told him I was done being a military wife.

I didn’t want him to extend. I was already feeling the accumulated weight of being left home to carry our family while his decisions structured all of our lives.

He told me his leaders were pressuring him. They called and texted, saying he would be letting his unit down and asking what they would do without him. He emphasized that he would not sign because he was going to do the right thing for his family.

It felt like my dreams were coming true.

I had waited so long to be chosen first that the possibility felt like proof that all the times I swallowed my pain finally paid off.

Then he got new deployment orders.

I was incredibly confused. If the rule had been serious enough to require repeated pressure to sign a new contract, how could the deployment suddenly be okay without one?

I asked for answers, and there were none.

Years later, knowing how often important information was minimized or withheld in my marriage, I believe there was more to the story than I was told. I can’t prove what happened inside his command, and I will probably never know. What I can say is that something felt wrong enough that I behaved entirely outside my nature.

I wrote to the governor of Texas.

I didn’t expect a reply, but I got one. I probably still have that e-mail reply somewhere. I was desperate to tell someone that what was happening was wrong, and for a moment, it seemed like they listened, and it would be fixed. His orders were pulled, and I was elated. I had finally stood up for myself and my family, and it had worked.

My elation didn’t last long; in a matter of days, new orders were issued.

Again, I wasn’t given an explanation that resolved the contradiction, and he was sent to a different base, one that came with substantially less income than his civilian job. It felt to me like punishment for raising a fuss, although I cannot know whether it was.

What I knew was that he was leaving, the income was falling, and I was the one who had objected.

So even before anything broke, I was primed to believe the consequences were my fault.

The Letter

This is the part I was afraid to explain yesterday.

It was easier to write, “We received a letter from the IRS threatening our house,” and let the reader imagine an administrative disaster that happened to an otherwise stable family.

The fuller version implicates the entire structure of my life at the time.

It requires me to explain why the letter didn’t feel like one new problem, but like proof that every time I asked to be chosen, protected, or told the truth, something terrible happened and I was responsible for the cost.

I was a stay-at-home mother with no college degree and little conventional work history. My job had been supporting my husband and maintaining our home.

The reduced income might still have been manageable if our finances had felt stable, but I haven’t known financial stability in my adult life.

My ex spent money in ways that frequently left me worrying about how we would make ends meet. When I raised concerns, I was told to stop worrying.

I do worry too much, but that doesn’t mean every worry I have is imaginary.

Sometimes anxiety is an alarm malfunctioning in the absence of fire, and sometimes the house is filling with smoke while everyone tells the alarm to calm down.

Shortly after he deployed, a letter arrived from the IRS. It said that because we had failed to respond to earlier notices, this was a final warning. We owed a significant amount of money, and our home could be at risk if we did not act.

I would have panicked under any circumstance, but this wasn’t a normal circumstance to begin with.

I had recently given birth after a pregnancy shaped by the fear of another premature delivery. I had left the religion that had structured my identity and view of eternity. My ex-husband had deployed after a confusing chain of events I still didn’t understand. Our income had dropped, and our finances were already unstable. I had three children depending on me, including a baby who increasingly refused to be held by anyone else.

And the audit traced back to the overseas contract, the tax filing I had questioned, and the flight home I had asked him to take because I wanted to know whether he still wanted our marriage.

I had no part in preparing the tax return; I didn’t even hire the accountant. I wasn’t the one who decided that the grey area travel days were okay, but I still felt responsible. I had learned that if my needs influenced a decision and the decision later produced pain, the pain belonged to me.

Days after he left, the garage door broke.

Weeks later, the car my parents had given me broke down.

I drove his truck and watched my world become a series of failures I had to solve with less money, less sleep, and no partner physically present.

My anxiety grew worse every day, and eventually, I stopped sleeping.

Yesterday, I described that progression as postpartum anxiety because it was, but it doesn’t erase the conditions surrounding it.

Naming the nervous-system response without naming the environment can accidentally turn the woman into the problem and make a body reacting to accumulated danger look like a defective body producing fear for no reason.

My Brain Built a Disaster It Could Prepare For

I would fall asleep and wake with my heart racing, convinced something terrible was about to happen.

I checked windows and doors because I believed someone might break in. I became fixated on the possibility of a house fire because my children slept across the house from me. If something happened, I needed to reach all three in time.

Some nights, the only way I could sleep was to bring everyone into my room for a giant sleepover. If they were all close enough to touch, then I was safe to sleep because I could protect them from whatever catastrophe my mind insisted was coming.

At the time, this looked like my anxiety becoming detached from reality, because why was I SO convinced these dangers were real?

Looking back, I see something more complicated.

My life contained dangers I couldn’t control or even fully name. I couldn’t make my ex tell me the truth. I couldn’t make military decisions make sense. I couldn’t undo the tax filing. I couldn’t stabilize our finances. I couldn’t guarantee the house would remain ours. I couldn’t stop everything from breaking while I was alone.

So my nervous system found dangers it could respond to.

I could check a lock.

I could gather my babies into one room to sleep.

I could rehearse an escape from a fire.

I could remain awake and keep watch.

Hypervigilance creates the feeling of action when the real threat is impossible to resolve. The nervous system says: if I cannot identify the danger, I will identify all of them. If I cannot trust someone else to keep us safe, I will never stop watching.

My fear might have been excessive, but it didn’t grow from nothing.

Someone Came, but No One Named What Was Happening

I called my mother crying many times during that period of time, and eventually, she came to stay with me because I could not keep up by myself. My dad took 7 ½ long weekend trips regularly just to help me mow the grass because at the time, I was attempting to mow the yard by myself, with my baby girl strapped to my back in a carrier. Eventually she outgrew the regular one, so I carried her on my back in a pack meant for carrying babies on backpacking trips.

I was incredibly lucky.

I recovered.

But in revisiting this story, I realized something I had never fully understood:

No one suggested that I receive mental-health treatment.

No one said, “This sounds like postpartum anxiety.”

No one suggested therapy or medication.

No one helped me place the fear inside the context of childbirth, betrayal, isolation, financial instability, religious deconstruction, and prolonged stress.

There was always some layer of shame around the concept of needing psychological help.

What I received was supervision. I eventually did get treatment, but not for several more years, when I was again on the brink of collapse due to circumstances I didn’t cause.

My mother’s presence helped me survive the immediate crisis. I am still so incredibly grateful that she came. But the larger pattern taught me that when my mental health deteriorated, someone needed to babysit me because I couldn’t manage life alone.

The story became: Karly can’t cope.

Not: Karly has been coping with devastating circumstances for years and her nervous system has finally hit its limit.

The Terrifying Offer to Use My Mental Health

Our finances became bad enough that my ex began looking for a way to come home early.

At one point, he repeatedly encouraged me to approach the military and say my mental health was so severe that he needed to come home.

I remember pushing back and saying it wasn’t that bad; I just needed some sleep.

I don’t remember now exactly what that required. My understanding at the time was that making the plan work would have required me to present as profoundly psychiatrically unwell, possibly to the point of hospitalization or commitment.

He urged me to do it because it could fix the financial problem.

I didn’t agree, even though we had repeated conversations about how I could fix this and he could come home. Eventually he did come home early, not because of my mental health, but because of financial hardship.

Watching the Lindsay Clancy trial forced me to look back at those conversations differently.

Again, I am not accusing my ex of doing anything resembling the accusations strangers online have made about Patrick Clancy. I am not saying the two men or the two situations are the same.

I am saying that after my divorce and years of custody litigation, it is impossible not to recognize how differently my own story might have been documented if I had done what I was asked.

What would the record have said?

Would it have said I was a postpartum mother living under extraordinary, prolonged stress while trying to keep three children safe through deployment, financial crisis, and the possible loss of our home?

Or would it simply have said I was too mentally unstable to care for my children without my husband?

I worry every time I write publicly about my mental health that my honesty will be used against me. Women have historical reasons for that fear. Our distress is often invisible until we disclose it, and then the disclosure becomes evidence that we cannot be trusted with our own lives.

I Thought Support Proved I Was Incapable

This morning, while writing down these memories, I remembered another deployment when my brother and his ex-wife lived with me.

I remembered how relieved I had been that I wouldn’t be alone. Then a thought arrived so clearly that it reorganized the entire story:

What if I believe I can’t handle things on my own because that is how I was always treated?

I am actually incredibly capable.

I raised children through deployments. I managed homes, moves, medical fear, financial instability, betrayal, religious deconstruction, and eventually divorce and custody proceedings. I built a career without the education or work history I once believed I needed before I could count as an adult in the world. I have repeatedly created a life from circumstances I was told would destroy me.

Yet because I struggled with anxiety throughout my marriage, my mental health was often handled as though I were a frail little thing.

Not as the predictable consequence of living in a devastatingly heartbreaking environment, but because I was an issue, someone needed to stay with me, babysit me, and take care of me.

Support isn’t evidence of incapacity; humans are supposed to need one another. My mother coming to help wasn’t proof that I was helpless. But when support arrives without language, context, or treatment, the mind can draw its own conclusion.

I needed someone; therefore, I can’t survive alone.

I became overwhelmed, therefore I am defective.

I became frightened, therefore the danger was imaginary.

I needed help, therefore someone else must always be in charge.

That is how an experience becomes an identity.

The Subconscious Doesn’t Fact-Check the Family Story

The subconscious mind learns through repetition, emotion, association, and the meaning we assign to experience. It doesn’t sit down after a crisis with a yellow legal pad and ask whether the evidence supports the conclusion.

It notices patterns.

When I was in distress, other people took over.

When I questioned decisions, I was told I worried too much.

When a decision went wrong, I searched for the part where my needs had caused it.

When I felt angry, preserving the relationship mattered more than expressing it.

When I imagined independence, I had no model for what a woman like me was supposed to become outside marriage and motherhood.

Repeated long enough, those experiences formed an internal rule:

I cannot safely exist in the world without someone else taking care of me.

The rule felt like self-knowledge because I could find memories that appeared to prove it.

I remembered my mother coming to stay and my brother moving in. I clearly remembered the panic, insomnia, breakdowns, and days I felt like I was about to break into a million tiny pieces from a slight breeze, but I didn’t count the circumstances that made support necessary, or the hundreds of days I carried impossible loads before anyone noticed I was collapsing.

We Don’t Talk About Bruno

One of my favorite children’s films in recent years is Encanto. My youngest daughter loves to say, “We don’t talk about Bruno,” whenever she wants to avoid discussing something.

It is always funny because she usually applies it to topics no one actually needs to avoid.

While writing this, I realized that I feel like the Bruno in my family.

I am not saying my family sees me that way or deliberately avoids me. Most of them may be standing in the same awkward place I occupied when I suspected my husband was cheating: they know something painful is present, but they have no language for how to address it.

Imagine belonging to a family where everyone carries private wounds, but no one was taught how to speak about them. Even now, my mental health is often treated as a forbidden topic because it makes people uncomfortable. I spend a lot of my public life discussing trauma, anxiety, abuse, and the ways our histories shape us, but if you asked many members of my family what I struggle with, I’m not sure they would know.

Everyone can see me crumbling in real time, but when no one names what’s happening, it begins to feel like it exists only inside my head.

We don’t talk about Bruno.

And yet, I am Bruno, and all I do is talk about it.

I am the constant reminder of the price people pay inside institutions that prioritize obedience, family preservation, and appearances over truth.

The church taught me that a woman needed a man to lead and provide. My marriage repeatedly made independence feel both impossible and disloyal. My family knew how to offer immediate rescue but not always how to discuss the conditions that made rescue necessary.

Then I internalized all of it and asked myself why I can’t stand on my own two feet.

The Cage Was Real.

I know how it sounds to admit that part of me still believes I can’t exist in the world without a man taking care of me.

It sounds weak as fuck. It’s archaic, and it pisses me the fuck off, and it’s exactly what a high-demand religion trained me to believe.

I didn’t have people showing me that I could become anything other than a wife and mother. Later, when I built a career and created work I was genuinely proud of, I treated those accomplishments like they were less real because they didn’t resemble the conventional independence I had never been taught to build.

I kept myself small while raging at the cage.

I didn’t know I was basically locking the door from the inside because someone else spent years teaching me that outside was unsafe and I was unequipped to survive there.

That realization isn’t an accusation against the frightened version of me; she was just following the only map she had, but now I’ve found the key in my hand.

And that knowledge is almost frightening, because once I know the helplessness is not some immutable truth about me, I become responsible for changing it.

Why the Lindsay Clancy Conversation Matters

It is heartbreaking that it took the deaths of Cora, Dawson, and Callan, and the trial of their mother, to make so many women revisit the periods when their own minds became frightening places to live.

What happened to those children was horrific. Nothing about examining maternal mental healthcare minimizes their lives or the tragic manner of their deaths.

Lindsay Clancy’s defense argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and lacked criminal responsibility. The Commonwealth disputes that and argues that she understood and planned her actions. I don’t know what the jury should decide, and my recognition is not evidence.

But the testimony has documented a woman repeatedly seeking help.

She contacted providers and reported severe insomnia and disconnection. She used crisis resources. She went to emergency departments. She entered a psychiatric hospital. She tried changing medications. Her journal said she wanted help and wanted to be well.

Providers have testified that they didn’t observe psychosis. They have also acknowledged gaps in records, coordination, and knowledge of the other treatment she was receiving. Whether those gaps amount to legal negligence is unresolved.

My conclusion isn’t a court finding. It is the conclusion I can’t escape after hearing the pattern:

Lindsay deserved effective, coordinated help.

She tried to seek it, and the system did not successfully recognize or contain what was happening before her children died.

She was failed, and Cora, Dawson, and Callan paid the ultimate price for that failure.

Women are speaking now because many of us understand the difference between being surrounded by people and being seen. We understand what it is to be supervised through a crisis without anyone helping us understand it. We understand what it is to fear that disclosing our mental health will be used as proof that we cannot be trusted with our children. We understand what it is to appear capable enough that no one recognizes the emergency, and then interpret our eventual collapse as proof that we were never capable at all.

And I am writing for the woman who recognizes herself in this but hasn’t gotten out.

Maybe you’re still collecting isolated incidents and explaining each one away because none of them seems severe enough to justify the conclusion your body reached years ago. Maybe you have become the identified anxious person in your family, so every alarm you raise is interpreted as another symptom instead of possible information. Maybe someone helps you through each breakdown without anyone asking why you keep breaking down in the same environment.

You do not have to make a public accusation, solve every contradiction, or prove another person’s intentions before you are allowed to take your own experience seriously. You do not have to make a sudden decision that could place you at greater risk. But you do deserve somewhere safe to tell the complete story, including the parts you have been editing out to protect everyone else.

Write down what happened.

Preserve the context.

Tell a therapist, advocate, physician, or trusted person who will not reduce the entire account to “you worry too much.” If you are afraid that seeking mental-health support could be used against you in a relationship or custody dispute, consider speaking with both a qualified mental-health professional and a local legal or domestic-abuse advocate about how to seek care safely. Needing informed support does not prove the story being told about your incapacity.

Your symptoms aren’t a verdict against you, but sometimes they are information about where you have been living.

These conversations can’t end when the trial does. Mothers need language for intrusive thoughts that doesn’t automatically equate them with intent. Families need language for mental illness that goes beyond discomfort, rescue, and silence. Providers need systems that assemble patterns across appointments rather than requiring the sickest person in the room to coordinate her own care. Women need to be able to say, “I am afraid of my own mind,” before fear becomes catastrophe.

And those of us who survived need permission to revisit the story without automatically placing ourselves on trial. Before writing this, I still believed that everything that happened during that deployment had been my fault.

I was the one who did not want another contract extension.

I was the one whose needs affected his travel dates.

I was the one who wrote to the governor.

I was the one who could not sleep.

I was the one who needed my mother.

I was the problem running through every scene.

Except now, for the first time, I can step back and see the full environment around that version of me. And when I think about my story as someone other than me, it’s impossible to see that she wasn’t helpless.

She was twenty-something years old, postpartum, isolated, financially dependent, recently separated from the religion that had organized her entire identity, frightened of losing her home, caring for three children, unable to trust the information she was given, and trying to protect everyone while no one asked what all that protection was costing her.

Of course

The tragedy was that help arrived as someone coming to watch over me, not as a conversation about why I was falling apart. I wish it hadn’t taken watching another family’s catastrophe for me to sit up and ask:

So you’re telling me, after all this time, I really wasn’t the problem?

The answer is complicated. I have choices now. I have patterns that I am responsible for changing. I have a key in my hand, and it is my job to learn how to use it.

But the helplessness was never my nature.

It was a story written by an environment that kept overwhelming me and then treating my overwhelm as evidence about who I was.

Now I know.

And because I know, I can write something different.

If you or someone you know may be experiencing postpartum psychosis, treat it as a medical emergency. Stay with the parent and child and seek immediate help. In the United States, call or text 988 for crisis support. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available 24/7 at 1–833-TLC-MAMA (1–833–852–6262). Postpartum Support International’s HelpLine can be reached at 1–800–944–4773.

2. Link to each individual article with a brief summary of each one, but I don’t even know if you can read my Medium articles without a Medium membership.

3. Post each article separately over the next few days so that you get the full experience and the delicious anticipation of wondering what happens next.

I was torn between options one and three, but I finally settled on option three, so buckle up because we have some catching up to do. Apparently, before I can give myself permission to build everything I want to build, I have to understand the parts of me that are still hurt. So we gotta catch up cause I’m taking you on this journey with me.

How Many Times Does a Mother Have to Say She Isn’t Okay?

The Lindsay Clancy trial is not only asking whether one woman was criminally responsible. It is exposing how easily a mother can seek help repeatedly and still disappear through the cracks.

Originally published: Aug 11, 2026

Content note: This article discusses the deaths of children, postpartum mental illness, intrusive thoughts, psychosis, and suicide. The Lindsay Clancy trial is ongoing. This article reflects testimony and reporting available through August 12, 2026. Lindsay Clancy is presumed innocent unless and until the Commonwealth proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Before the Lindsay Clancy trial, I never would have said this out loud:

I see myself in Lindsay Clancy.

And I know many other mothers do too.

That doesn’t mean I believe postpartum anxiety and postpartum psychosis are the same thing. It also doesn’t mean I think I know what happened in the Clancy home on January 24, 2023. But I recognize parts of the woman writing in those journals.

After my youngest was born, my now ex-husband deployed.

There was already confusion surrounding his orders, and almost immediately after he left, I received a letter saying we were being audited by the IRS. It warned that if we didn’t respond immediately, they would come for our house, which is a terrifying thing to happen by itself.

Around the same time, my baby began refusing to be held by anyone but me.

I became convinced that something terrible was going to happen.

I thought the house was going to catch on fire while my babies were sleeping on the other side of the house and worried someone would break in and I would have to reach all three of them in time. I spent a lot of time putting wooden dowel rods in the windows and double-checking locks. Some nights, the fear was so intense that I brought everyone into my room and we had one giant sleepover because I needed all of my babies close enough to keep them safe.

Eventually, I stopped sleeping.

My mom had to come stay with me because I couldn’t keep up by myself.

I was incredibly lucky.

I recovered.

Now, *eyes on me* I am absolutely NOT saying that without my mother’s help, I would have harmed my children. I have never experienced anything like Lindsay described, and even thinking about how she must have felt having those thoughts makes me terrified for her. Intrusive fears aren’t the same thing as intentions. Also, let me say it again:

Postpartum anxiety is not postpartum psychosis, and neither diagnosis makes a mother inherently dangerous.

I recognize the terror of a postpartum mind convinced danger is everywhere. I hear echoes of my own worries in Lindsay’s journal entries: the constant scanning, the inability to shut her mind off, the feeling of drowning beneath everyone’s needs, and the desperate desire to feel well again.

What happened to five-year-old Cora, three-year-old Dawson, and eight-month-old Callan was a horrific tragedy.

But this article isn’t an attempt to investigate what happened inside Lindsay’s mind when they died. That question belongs to the evidence, the experts, and the jury hearing her case.

The question I can’t stop asking is what happened during all the months before it. How many times can a mother say she is not okay before the system considers her sick enough to protect?

This Is Not a Whodunit

Lindsay Clancy’s defense doesn’t dispute that she caused the deaths of her children. Instead, it argues that she lacked criminal responsibility because she was experiencing severe mental illness. Her attorneys say she had postpartum psychosis and bipolar disorder and that a fragmented, constantly changing course of psychiatric treatment contributed to her deterioration.

The Commonwealth’s argument is that Lindsay was criminally responsible. Prosecutors say she deliberately created an opportunity to be alone with the children, understood what she was doing, and carried out a calculated plan. Several clinicians who treated her before the deaths have testified that they did not observe mania or psychosis.

Those are questions for the trial.

The public conversation keeps trying to reduce the case to two teams: Lindsay was a calculating murderer, or Lindsay was a blameless victim of postpartum psychosis.

But women’s mental healthcare cannot wait for a jury to choose between those narratives.

A patient does not have to be legally insane for her care to have failed her.

A healthcare system can miss a dangerous psychiatric decline even if no individual provider intended harm. A woman can appear coherent during a thirty-minute appointment and still be disintegrating during the other 1,410 minutes of the day. A clinician can make a defensible decision with the information available while the larger system fails to ensure that anyone has all the information.

That’s what the testimony in Lindsay’s trial is revealing. It’s not just one locked door that someone refused to open; it’s an entire hallway full of partially open doors, each leading to a different provider who could see only part of the woman walking through them.

She Did What We Tell Women to Do

When conversations about maternal mental health turn tragic, people often ask why the mother didn’t ask for help.

Lindsay did.

Beginning in the months after Callan’s birth, she actively looked for care from multiple outpatient providers. She entered a perinatal behavioral health program. She contacted a suicide hotline. She went to emergency departments. She voluntarily admitted herself to McLean Hospital. She used MyChart to report symptoms and medication reactions. She attended appointments. She tried prescriptions despite being afraid of what they might do to her. She told providers she could not sleep, felt disconnected, experienced intrusive thoughts, and desperately wanted to get better.

Her journals reportedly contain the words of a woman trying to explain an internal emergency before she had language capable of containing it.

She wrote that she felt as if she were drowning every day. Her mind never shut off because it was constantly thinking about what someone needed next. She wrote that she felt disconnected from herself, time, and reality. She wanted help. She wanted to be well.

According to testimony reported from the trial, a screening performed through South Shore Hospital’s Perinatal Behavioral Health Program placed her anxiety in the “extreme” range. Her score on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale reportedly reached 23, a result indicating severe symptoms that required clinical attention.

In December 2022, she reported persistent and intrusive thoughts of suicide, according to testimony. She was strongly encouraged to enter more intensive treatment. Evidence presented at trial indicates that one specialized program declined to admit her amid concerns about the number of medications she had been prescribed.

No one seems to have had the entire story.

We tell women to ask for help like “help” is easy to find. In reality, help may be a collection of intake forms, portals, telehealth calls, emergency assessments, waiting lists, insurance rules, referrals, medication trials, and clinicians who may not have access to one another’s records.

The patient becomes the only person carrying the complete case file.

The same patient who can’t sleep, feels disconnected from reality, and whose cognition may already be impaired by illness, medication effects, exhaustion, or all three. We call that continuity of care because the same woman keeps appearing in every room.

But the continuity is her.

Everyone Treated a Piece of Her

Testimony during the trial has exposed huge gaps in communication among Lindsay’s providers.

Psychiatrist Jennifer Tufts began treating Lindsay in September 2022, shortly after completing residency and beginning independent practice. Their appointments were conducted over Zoom. Tufts diagnosed generalized anxiety disorder and an adjustment disorder with depressed mood. She testified that Lindsay didn’t show signs of psychosis or sustained mania during their sessions.

Under cross-examination, Tufts acknowledged that she didn’t have complete records from some of the other facilities Lindsay visited. She didn’t obtain records from every emergency evaluation and testified that she relied on Lindsay’s account of what occurred during at least some of those encounters.

Rebecca Jollotta, a psychiatric nurse practitioner with perinatal training, testified that she didn’t observe psychosis while treating Lindsay. She also acknowledged that she didn’t speak with Tufts and didn’t have complete knowledge of medications prescribed through other parts of Lindsay’s care. According to current trial reporting, Jollotta didn’t follow up for more information after a specialized program reportedly declined Lindsay because it believed she was taking too many medications.

This doesn’t prove either clinician was negligent. Lindsay and Patrick have filed separate civil claims against healthcare providers, and those allegations remain unresolved.

But we don’t need a malpractice verdict to see the structural problem.

One provider was managing anxiety and depression. Another was focused on perinatal symptoms and insomnia. Emergency clinicians evaluated whether Lindsay met the immediate threshold for hospitalization. McLean Hospital assessed and treated her during a brief inpatient admission. Different clinicians prescribed, stopped, restarted, or adjusted medications.

Each encounter may have produced a clinically plausible explanation for why she could go home.

But who was responsible for asking why she kept coming back?

Who was responsible for placing “I can’t sleep,” “I feel disconnected from reality,” “I am having intrusive thoughts,” “I feel close to suicidal,” and “I really need help” into the same sentence?

Modern healthcare is very good at creating specialists, but less reliable at creating a witness.

The Medication List Was Not a Treatment Plan

The defense emphasized that Lindsay was prescribed more than a dozen psychiatric medications over approximately four months. The prosecution has countered by showing that many pills remained in the bottles and that toxicology didn’t indicate a lethal overdose. Most detected medication levels were reportedly not toxic.

Those facts matter in the criminal case, but they don’t answer the larger healthcare question.

A list of prescriptions doesn’t tell us whether the treatment was coordinated or who was monitoring the overall effect of starting, stopping, combining, and changing medications. It doesn’t tell us whether symptoms were being caused by an underlying disorder, medication effects, withdrawal, sleep deprivation, or some interaction among them.

According to testimony, Lindsay reported crying all day after an increase in Zoloft. She described Prozac as making her feel disconnected, “out of it,” and spacey. She worried about becoming dependent on Ativan. She said different medications were being thrown at her insomnia while the insomnia continued.

Medication isn’t inherently the villain in this story; psychiatric medication saves lives. Treating postpartum illness can require trials, adjustments, and more than one clinician.

But when a patient’s medication changes repeatedly while her symptoms intensify, the system needs something more than another isolated adjustment. It needs coordination and complete records. It needs someone tracking not just what she has been prescribed, but what she’s actually taking, what she stopped, why she stopped it, how she reacted, whether she is sleeping, and whether her relationship with reality is changing.

“She Denied Suicidal or Homicidal Intent”

Again and again, testimony returned to a sentence familiar to anyone who has read psychiatric records:

The patient denied suicidal or homicidal ideation.

That sentence carries a lot of clinical and legal weight. Providers can’t read minds; they have to ask questions, assess observable behavior, consider reported symptoms, and work within laws governing involuntary treatment. Lindsay at times denied having a plan to hurt herself or anyone else. Multiple providers testified that she appeared coherent and didn’t display signs of psychosis during their appointments.

That evidence can’t just be dismissed because the outcome was catastrophic, but it should force us to examine what our safety systems require from sick people.

To receive the highest level of protection, a mother may have to disclose the thought she is most afraid to say aloud to the person who has the power to separate her from her children.

She may have to state an intention she doesn’t understand, describe a hallucination she believes is real, or admit to an intrusive thought she fears will be mistaken for desire.

Meanwhile, a person experiencing psychosis may have little insight into the fact that she is ill. A person with intrusive thoughts may hide them precisely because they horrify her. A mother may minimize suicidal thinking because her children are the reason she wants to live, or because she’s terrified that honesty will be treated like evidence that she is an unfit mother.

This isn’t an argument that clinicians should ignore a patient’s denial or involuntarily hospitalize every distressed mother, but that a denial cannot erase the surrounding pattern.

Statements about dark thoughts, hopelessness, or feeling close to suicidal matter even when the patient says she doesn’t have a plan.

Coherence Is Not the Same as Wellness

One of the most persistent arguments in the public discussion is that Lindsay couldn’t have been psychotic because she seemed normal.

She took Cora to a doctor’s appointment. She texted photographs of the children. She ordered dinner. She called CVS. She spoke coherently to Patrick while he was shopping. Her psychiatrist met with her the day before the deaths and didn’t observe psychosis.

These facts are relevant to the jury’s assessment of criminal responsibility.

They’re also part of a dangerous cultural misunderstanding about mental illness: the belief that a person who can perform ordinary tasks must still be fundamentally okay.

People can work while suicidal. They can pack lunches while dissociated. They can answer a direct question while experiencing delusional beliefs they haven’t told anyone about. They can look calm because their fear is happening internally. They can be organized in one moment and profoundly impaired in another.

Women are trained to pretend to be fine long after they were desperate for help. Mothers become exceptionally skilled at completing the next necessary task because kids still need breakfast, medication, clean clothes, transportation, and reassurance whether their mother’s mind is collapsing or not.

A healthcare system that equates presentation with safety will continue to miss women who are articulate, compliant, professionally knowledgeable, frightened of consequences, or simply very practiced at seeming fine. Lindsay was a labor and delivery nurse. Medical fluency may have helped her navigate care. It may also have made her sound more organized inside a system that expects illness to announce itself through obvious disorder.

Postpartum Psychosis Is Not an Explanation for Every Frightened Mother

Postpartum psychosis is a rare psychiatric emergency, estimated to affect approximately one or two people per thousand births. It can involve hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, confusion, mania, severe depression, and profound sleep disruption. It is often associated with bipolar-spectrum illness and can carry an elevated risk of suicide or harm to a child.

It is treatable.

It is also not the same as postpartum depression, postpartum anxiety, or intrusive thoughts.

Most people with postpartum mental illness never harm their children. Most people who experience intrusive thoughts are horrified by them and do not want to act on them. Most people living with psychosis are not violent.

We need language precise enough to communicate danger without turning every struggling mother into a suspect because that’s partly why women stay silent.

If the public hears “I had a scary thought” and translates it into “I wanted to hurt my baby,” honesty becomes dangerous. And if she believes asking for help will cause everyone to interpret her illness as evidence of moral failure, she may wait until she can’t explain what is happening.

The lesson of this trial is that perinatal mental illness requires knowledgeable, coordinated care, and that the person experiencing it may not be capable of building that system for herself while she’s sick.

The System Was Waiting for One Unmistakable Emergency

Looking back after a tragedy creates a powerful illusion: the warning signs appear to form an arrow pointing directly toward the ending; but real life doesn’t feel like that while it’s happening.

Insomnia and anxiety are common after giving birth. So is feeling overwhelmed by three young children. Medication side effects happen. Parents say they are drowning and don’t go on to harm anyone. Emergency clinicians can’t hospitalize every person who feels hopeless, but providers still have to distinguish suffering from imminent danger using incomplete information and limited time.

Lindsay reached for help repeatedly without fitting cleanly into the level of care available at each moment. Too distressed for ordinary life, perhaps not visibly disorganized enough for emergency containment. Too complicated for one program, still coherent enough to be discharged from another. Reporting extreme symptoms, but denying the particular intention that would have forced the system to act.

Why Women Are Saying, “I See Myself in Lindsay”

Women don’t typically rush to defend someone accused of killing a child, especially when that person is the child’s mother. A mother associated with her child’s death is treated as a violation of nature. The public response often moves past guilt into something more absolute: she failed the one instinct a woman is assumed to possess automatically and without limit.

That is why the response to Lindsay’s trial is significant.

Online, women are saying things they previously believed were unspeakable.

They’re sharing experiences of postpartum anxiety, depression, psychosis, intrusive thoughts, medication reactions, insomnia, dissociation, and the terror of asking for help while trying not to say anything that might cause someone to take their baby away.

Some believe Lindsay lacked criminal responsibility. Some have doubts about the prosecution’s theory. Some don’t know what the verdict should be, but so many are refusing to let the word monster end the conversation.

The Conversation Has to Begin Earlier

I don’t know what verdict the Lindsay Clancy jury should return.

What I am hearing come out of the trial doesn’t fit together cleanly like I thought. I honestly have doubts. I think there are possibilities that should be considered, but, I think the testimony already established something else: Lindsay was visibly struggling inside a fragmented system, and no one successfully assembled the full pattern before Cora, Dawson, and Callan died.

Whatever the jury decides, those children paid the ultimate price.

This story is tragic from every direction. Nothing we learn can make the ending less devastating.

But maybe the women speaking now can change what happens before the next ending. We need to make it possible for a mother to say, “I am afraid of my own mind,” without believing that honesty makes her irredeemable.

We need providers who understand the difference between intrusive thoughts and psychotic commands, and know that both deserve careful assessment without automatic moral judgment.

We need medical records that follow the patient, medication plans with one accountable coordinator, and escalation systems that consider patterns rather than waiting for one perfectly worded disclosure of imminent danger.

We need families to recognize that severe insomnia, confusion, paranoia, disconnection from reality, or behavior that feels profoundly unlike the person they know is not ordinary new-mother exhaustion.

We need to stop asking postpartum women to prove that they are sick while requiring them to remain organized enough to coordinate their own rescue.

And we need to understand that taking maternal mental illness seriously is not a betrayal of children.

It is one of the ways we can protect them.

If you or someone you know may be experiencing postpartum psychosis, treat it as a medical emergency. Stay with the parent and child and seek immediate help. In the United States, call or text 988 for crisis support. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is available 24/7 at 1–833-TLC-MAMA (1–833–852–6262). Postpartum Support International’s HelpLine can be reached at 1–800–944–4773.

Sources and Further Reading

• Associated Press: At Lindsay Clancy’s trial, focus turns to medications prescribed before the deaths

• ABC News: Psychiatrist testifies she did not have access to Lindsay Clancy’s complete medical records

• CT Insider: Day 11 testimony concerning Lindsay Clancy’s treatment and provider communication

• Boston.com: Testimony from Jennifer Tufts and Julie Paul

• Massachusetts Department of Public Health: About Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders

• Massachusetts resources for healthcare providers treating perinatal mood and anxiety disorders

• Postpartum Support International: Postpartum Psychosis Help

• Toor et al.: “Postpartum Psychosis: A Preventable Psychiatric Emergency”

We lived down the street from a Dairy Queen at the time, and sometimes we stopped on the way home from church. Going out to eat, shopping, or doing basically anything other than church on Sunday was against the rules, but this was soft serve, not armed robbery.

It was one of those tiny, mostly harmless rebellions that let you feel like you’re still a person while living inside a system that has rules for basically every part of being human. Trust me. Rules for days, and you absolutely will be judged by your community for not following them. I used to hide Starbucks cups when I was in public, just in case I ran into anyone from church. I say that like it’s an old thing; I literally brew my coffee in my bathroom every morning at the age of 38 to avoid offending my mother with the scent. (Yes, I know this is ridiculous)

Then one Sunday, my tenderhearted baby girl was sobbing in the back seat at six years old because she truly believed that eating Dairy Queen made her bad, and all of a sudden my tiny rebellion stopped feeling harmless. I can remember being around 8 years old, pacing around my pool again and again and again worrying that if I got baptized and sinned, there wouldn’t be any saving me.

I was able to tolerate a truly astonishing amount of fear when it was directed at me. I had been trained for it, and I can take it. I had been taught that fear meant I needed more faith, guilt meant I needed to repent, and discomfort meant I wasn’t trying hard enough… But watching that machinery begin to assemble itself inside my six-year-old daughter was different. She wasn’t worried that she had made an unhealthy choice or broken a family rule. She was worried that fried chicken on a Sunday made her irredeemably bad.

And somewhere inside me, a thought appeared: Oh shit. Maybe this isn’t healthy.

*Side note: I didn’t swear back then, so I absolutely would not have thought that. I would have thought something like “Oh my gosh, maybe I should pray and repent.”

I want to pretend like I walked away right then and there, but it honestly took me years to leave.

I wish recognizing an unhealthy environment worked like finding a glowing EXIT sign over a door. You see it, you walk through it, and congratulations! You’re free!

Unfortunately, that’s not how this shit works.

Sometimes you realize something is wrong years before you can actually leave. You can see the crack in the wall, but you still have to live inside the building while you figure out whether you’re allowed to trust your own eyes.

I tried to leave the Mormon church two or three times before I finally managed it, but Mormonism is a very black-and-white religion. It isn’t taught as one possible way to understand God. It’s taught as the only true restored gospel of Jesus Christ. Everyone else might have little pieces of the truth, and we were supposed to feel a bit sorry for them because we had the whole thing.

That made us feel special, but it was also a mental trap. If you’re raised in the church, you can be deeply unhappy and still never seriously consider that the church might not be true. You assume the problem is you because the other possibility has been made almost impossible to think about.

The church teaches that there are three kingdoms of heaven, and getting into the highest one requires all the right ordinances, keeping the commandments, and remaining faithful for the rest of your life. That is also where you get to keep your eternal family. Mormonism is really big on the whole “families are forever” thing, but the unspoken second half of that promise is that your family can also be taken away forever if you get it wrong.

To add an extra layer of threat, members like me who knew the fullness of the restored gospel, took their temple ordinances, and left anyway would be cast into outer darkness. That’s Mormon’s version of Hell, and to add insult to injury, assholes like Ted Bundy were baptized after they died, so they get to go to Mormon heaven, and I don’t. Outer darkness sounds a lot cooler anyway.

Technically, the church’s definition of who gets sent to outer darkness is more complicated than “anyone who leaves.” I know that now, but the terrified Mormon living in my nervous system didn’t stop to check the fine print. Questioning the church felt like risking heaven, my children, my eternal family, and everything I had been taught made life meaningful.

We were taught to “doubt our doubts.” We were warned to stay away from anti-Mormon literature, which could mean basically anything the church had not approved. The church gave us a sparkling white version of its own origin story and buried the parts that might have changed how we felt about it.

I’m not exaggerating when I say South Park taught a more accurate version of Mormon history than the Mormon church did while I was attending.

I didn’t stay because I had examined all the evidence and freely decided the church was true. I stayed because I didn’t know how much information I had never been allowed to examine.

I used to leave church with a pounding headache and feel awful for the rest of the day. But the church was true, so obviously the church couldn’t be the problem.

That meant the problem must be me.

Maybe I couldn’t feel the Spirit correctly. Maybe I wasn’t faithful enough. Maybe I was broken. Maybe I was wrong. One day after church, I finally Googled some version of, “Why do I feel so awful after Mormon church?” That search led me to the Mormon Stories podcast, which eventually led me to Grant Palmer’s book The Incomparable Jesus. Near the end, Palmer talks about the Book of Mormon and the truth claims I had built my entire life around.

It felt like someone handed me the keys to my freedom.

The book didn’t force me to leave, but it sure as hell made leaving mentally possible.

The first system I had to leave taught me that authority always lived somewhere outside of me. If my own experience contradicted that authority, my experience was obviously the least trustworthy witness in the room.

The Second Realization

The second time I realized, Oh shit, maybe this isn’t healthy, I was looking at my marriage.

Once again, I realized it years before I actually managed to leave. When my son was a baby, my husband cheated on me with a woman from his unit, something he still denies to this day. Things got progressively worse, especially through 2020, but the moment that finally made the truth impossible to avoid wasn’t even the most dramatic thing he did.

He quit his job and accepted another one in Texas without waiting to discuss it with me.

I know that sounds almost laughable compared with everything else. Marriages survive job changes, families move, and sometimes people make impulsive decisions, but nothing happens by itself. By then, that decision was sitting on top of years of evidence I had been rearranging into shapes I could survive.

Something about it made me stop lying to myself. I knew I was never going to be treated the way I deserved.

Later there would be much bigger things, things like driving off an overpass, blacking out during cross-country drives, regularly disappearing, and spending hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars in a night. The least offensive explanations involved strippers and lap dances.

Those are the stories that sound big enough to justify leaving. The job in Texas doesn’t, but sometimes the thing that finally breaks you isn’t the worst thing. It’s just the moment when the story you’ve been using to explain everything stops fucking working.

I had been taught to approach harm like it was a perspective problem. I was supposed to be gentle, submissive, kind, and endlessly forgiving. Before I responded to someone who hurt me, I needed to think about what they might be going through.

That sounds emotionally mature, doesn’t it? Empathy is good, and perspective matters, but empathy without boundaries is just self-erasure wearing a prettier outfit.

For most of my life, this was my process when someone made me angry:

First, I replayed what happened. Then I examined how I felt about it. Then I tried to imagine the situation from every possible angle the other person might have experienced it from. I waited until I wasn’t angry anymore before I said anything. Then I wrote a message, erased it, rewrote it, softened it, reread it, and softened it again. I needed to make absolutely sure I wasn’t hurtful. I also needed them to know I wasn’t mad. Yes, my feelings had been hurt, but it was okay because I was already over it, and perhaps they could pretty please remember next time, unless that was asking too much.

By the time I expressed anger, I had completely removed the actual anger from it.

I wasn’t walking around consciously thinking, I am a selfish woman destroying my family. It was deeper than that. I just assumed I was broken. I was desperately sad for a very long time, and I treated that sadness like a character flaw instead of information about what my life was doing to me.

That was the rule I carried directly from the church into my marriage: if the system is good, then the woman suffering inside it must be the problem.

The Third Realization

I left the church. I left the marriage. I thought those were the exits, and they were.

Then I tried to be a full-time student, work full-time, and keep up with everything I believed a mother should be doing. If I spent the day working, I felt horrible about the cooking and chores. If I fell behind at home, I felt like I was failing my children. I was spread so thin I was basically transparent, but I never questioned whether the workload was unreasonable.

I questioned why I couldn’t handle it.

It took months of burning out before I understood what was happening.

I had left the systems, but I still had their conditioning.

I had stopped going to church, but there was still my inner Mormon girl living in my brain with a clipboard, monitoring my performance. I had divorced my husband, but I was still cross-examining my own feelings and building a defense case for everyone else.

This is when I started playing with the “good girl” language: women trained to be useful, agreeable, forgiving, and small. I understood the concept immediately. Apparently understanding the concept and actually removing the machinery from your own brain are two very different projects.

And my anxiety was becoming impossible to hide.

For months, I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell is happening inside my mind and body. I have PTSD. I also have a raging case of ADHD and complex trauma, both of which can explain a lot of what I experience. Then perimenopause showed up and poured gasoline on all of it.

My progesterone isn’t just low. It is low as fuck. My hormones seem to have flared the physical symptoms I suspect may involve MCAS, and there is inflammation showing up all over my bloodwork. I don’t have a neat medical flowchart proving exactly how every one of these things connects. I just know that my physical health, hormones, sleep, trauma symptoms, and mental health all seemed to start screaming at the same time.

Now my therapist is assessing me for OCD.

I want to be very clear about the wording there. I am not saying I have OCD. My therapist is assessing me for it. OCD, ADHD, PTSD, complex trauma, severe anxiety, hormonal changes, sleep problems, and physical illness can overlap in complicated ways, and many have overlapping symptoms. I need a professional to help me sort through what belongs where.

If any of this sounds familiar, please do the same. This is a personal essay, not an online diagnostic quiz. Do not diagnose yourself because a stranger on the internet described your brain a little too accurately. Take that information to someone qualified to help you understand it.

But learning what OCD can actually look like gave me language for lifelong patterns I had never understood. Like a lot of people, I thought OCD meant visible compulsions: checking a lock, washing your hands, or arranging everything in exactly the right order. It can look like that. It can also be almost completely invisible.

Mental compulsions can look like replaying a conversation fifty times to make sure you didn’t say something wrong, analyzing your motives, confessing, asking for reassurance, and trying to achieve absolute certainty. In other words, my entire personality and my content plan obsession in one fell swoop. It’s taking one frightening thought apart piece by piece until you can prove it doesn’t secretly mean you are a terrible person, but that’s the trap because you can never prove that.

Side note: After realizing this might be a thing I didn’t know about myself, I spiraled and thought I was horrible for about two weeks, convincing myself I was the scum of the earth for daring to think I may have an anxiety disorder, only to then remember yet another piece of my past and go, ah, fuck.

Then I learned about scrupulosity, which is OCD wrapped around religious or moral fear. It can involve being terrified of sinning, offending God, breaking a rule, or discovering that one of your thoughts means you are secretly bad.

A strict religion does not automatically cause OCD, and being religious is not a mental illness. But if your brain is already vulnerable to obsessive doubt, being raised in a world divided into righteous and wicked, worthy and unworthy, eternal family and eternal loss gives that doubt an absolutely endless buffet.

If uncertainty is dangerous, you have to keep checking. If thoughts can be sinful, having the wrong one becomes an emergency. If your worthiness is always up for review, normal self-reflection can turn into a 24-hour surveillance program run by the meanest possible version of yourself.

The first time I heard someone explain how Mormonism can feed religious scrupulosity, I felt like they had snatched away my security blanket.

The really confusing part is that PTSD has never made me feel ashamed. I can say I have PTSD without believing it makes me defective. I also genuinely do not believe there is anything shameful about having OCD. When I started spiraling over the possibility, I reached out to friends who have it. I would never look at any of them and think their diagnosis meant their suffering was their fault.

But something inside me absolutely did not want anyone to know this about me.

Some of that fear was practical; women aren’t exactly pulling that fear out of nowhere. Our mental health has been used to discredit us, minimize our pain, question our ability to mother, and turn perfectly reasonable reactions to terrible environments into proof that we were unstable all along.

But the deepest fear was even more intimate: what if this confirmed that everything really had been my fault?

I had spent months dealing with physical illness, mental distress, hormonal chaos, and the growing feeling that I was somehow causing all of it. I had already spent years believing the problems in my marriage were mostly my fault. Learning that I might have spent my entire life caught in obsessive fear and mental compulsions didn’t initially feel like an explanation; it felt like a confirmation that everything really was my fault.

This reaction still doesn’t make sense to me. Shame rarely does. I know there is nothing wrong with having OCD at all. I know being assessed is not the same thing as being diagnosed. I know recognizing a pattern might help me get the right support; it doesn’t mean I invented everything that happened to me.

And still, when I imagine people knowing, something in me recoils.

That is exactly why I’m talking about it.

I’m taking the fear to my new therapist because I clearly haven’t worked through it yet. I’m writing about it because whatever part of me still thinks this needs to remain a secret has already been in charge for long enough.

The Long History of the “Unwell” Woman

Women have some pretty solid historical reasons to be afraid of what happens when someone else gets to decide what our minds mean.

During the European and colonial witch trials, most of the accused were women. The accusations often landed on women who were already vulnerable: older women, poor women, widows, healers, women who depended on community charity, and women who had gotten into conflicts with their neighbors.

I’m not going to pretend every accused witch was secretly a modern mental-health case. We absolutely can’t diagnose women hundreds of years later from records created through superstition, coercion, and torture. That would be its own version of deciding we know women better than they knew themselves.

But we can see the pattern. When a woman became poor, inconvenient, religiously suspicious, physically different, sexually disobedient, argumentative, grief-stricken, ill, or just too difficult to squeeze into the approved role, society had a category ready to explain why she was the problem.

Later, medicine came up with cleaner, more scientific-sounding categories. Menstruation, pregnancy, postpartum changes, and menopause were all used as evidence that women were emotionally unstable or intellectually unreliable. “Hysteria” became a giant diagnostic junk drawer for neurological symptoms, trauma responses, illnesses doctors couldn’t explain, sexual distress, despair, resistance, and women whose lives had become genuinely intolerable.

The label changed, but the trick stayed the same.

Put the problem inside the woman, and no one has to look too closely at the environment making her sick.

That doesn’t mean mental illness is just something patriarchy made up. OCD is real. PTSD is real. Anxiety can become completely disabling. Hormonal changes can affect sleep, mood, and emotional regulation, and perimenopause can make existing mental-health problems harder to manage.

Taking a condition seriously is not the same as using it to erase the person who has it.

The feminist question isn’t whether women can be mentally ill. Obviously we can. I have personally been collecting symptoms like they’re Girl Scout badges. (I wish they came with cookies)

The question is who gets to decide what those symptoms mean.

Do my symptoms mean I’m unreliable, or do they mean I deserve support? Does trauma erase my testimony, or does it help explain the cost of what I survived? Does anxiety mean my anger is irrational, or can I be anxious and still be right? Can I be traumatized and credible? Possibly obsessive and still not responsible for another person’s choices? Hormonally overwhelmed and still allowed to have boundaries?

Of course she can.

When the Mask Stopped Working

Perimenopause didn’t walk in demurely and ask which parts of my personality I wanted to keep. It burst into a system already overloaded by trauma, chronic stress, work, motherhood, school, physical illness, and fear like Miley Cyrus on that wrecking ball.

I stopped being able to conceal when I was upset.

The anger scared the shit out of me at first. I had tolerated an unbelievable amount from my ex-husband, and the examples I’ve shared are barely the tip of the iceberg. For years, I translated anger into empathy before anyone else had to see it. Then suddenly I was arguing with my boyfriend, more frazzled at home, and getting more anxious by the month.

I felt like a bottle of Coke after someone dropped in an entire package of Mentos and screwed the lid back on.

After the latest round of court, the fear got even louder. Sometimes the panic and PTSD symptoms showed up together, because apparently one crisis at a time would have been too convenient. I became so physically uncomfortable that I cleaned, swam laps, or did anything else I could think of to force the feeling out of my body. I was terrified almost every minute of the day.

I don’t want to romanticize any of this, even though I don’t know how any of this sounds even the teeniest bit fun. Unmasking isn’t always a triumphant movie montage where a woman throws away her shapewear, buys red lipstick, and walks into freedom while Florence + the Machine plays in the background.

Sometimes the mask comes off because your body can’t afford the energy required to hold it in place anymore.

Perimenopause didn’t create a brand-new broken version of me. It revealed the anxiety I had hidden, the anger I had edited, the fear of mistakes I had built my life around, and the mental rituals I had mistaken for thinking things through. It showed me how hard I had worked to look fine, not only for everyone else, but for myself.

The mask was never proof that I was healthy.

It was proof that I had become extremely skilled at hiding what my environments could not safely hold.

Joining the Hysterical Women

The first time, I left a church.

The second time, I left a marriage.

The third time, I had to begin evicting both of them from my mind.

Unfortunately, this escape doesn’t come with a door. I can’t resign from my nervous system or have my conditioning served with divorce papers. I have to catch the old rules every time they start speaking in my own voice:

You made a mistake. You’re in danger. You need to be certain. You need to explain. You should probably apologize and explain. Have you considered everyone else’s perspective at least seventeen times before deciding you’re allowed to believe yourself?

Then I have to practice not obeying it.

I still don’t know whether my therapist will diagnose me with OCD. Maybe this will be better explained by severe anxiety, ADHD, complex trauma, perimenopause, or some chaotic little cocktail of all of them. Whatever the answer is, it can’t turn every environment that hurt me into something I secretly caused.

It would just give me better information about my own brain, which, frankly, seems helpful.

For most of my life, I thought safety came from being good enough. Anger was dangerous because an angry woman might say what happened before she had time to explain it away. Doubt was dangerous because it might lead outside the approved story. Distress was dangerous because someone might use it as proof that I couldn’t be trusted.

Now I’m wondering whether the feelings I worked hardest to suppress were never evidence against me at all. Maybe they were the parts of me that never stopped keeping track of the truth.

So yes, I am ready to join the ranks of the hysterical women.

The witches. The patients. The difficult wives. The furious mothers. The women who asked too many questions, wanted too much information, refused to smile through the pain, or finally became inconvenient to systems that relied on their silence.

Not because suffering makes us magical or because every diagnosis is oppression or every angry thought is automatically correct. I’m joining them because I’m finished with the ancient bargain that says I can only be believed if I stay pleasant, perfectly regulated, and easy to manage.

I want the anger. The refusal. The visibility. The unruliness. The truth, appetite, and authority. I want all of it.

I’m finally taking off the mask, not because I know exactly what is underneath it, but because I am ready to meet the person who survived there.

And this time, when she tells me something is wrong, I intend to listen.

Author’s note: This essay describes my personal experience and an ongoing professional assessment. It is not medical advice and should not be used to self-diagnose OCD or any other condition. OCD can involve visible behaviors, internal mental compulsions, or both, and it can overlap with other mental and physical health concerns. If these experiences sound familiar, consider speaking with a qualified mental health professional, ideally one familiar with OCD, trauma, and differential diagnosis.

Sources:

• National Institute of Mental Health: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

• NIMH: When Unwanted Thoughts or Repetitive Behaviors Take Over

• International OCD Foundation: What Is OCD and Scrupulosity?

• U.S. Office on Women’s Health: Reproductive Health and Mental Health

• U.S. Office on Women’s Health: Menopause Symptoms and Relief

• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Kingdoms of Glory

A gold watch swings from side to side while a stranger’s eyelids grow heavy. Someone says, You are getting very sleepy, in a voice that honestly belongs exclusively in the Twilight Zone. Then the hypnotized person loses control completely, and before the audience knows what will happen next, they begin clucking like a chicken. The hypnotist makes them forget their own name before *dramatic gasp* they reveal a closely guarded secret, commit a murder, and wake up with no memory of what happened while an audience applauds the person who apparently borrowed their mind for the evening.

While it is an impressively durable little horror story, and one I fully believed for years, it’s also a strange way to represent a practice rooted in science used to help people manage pain, change habits, reduce anxiety, and work with patterns held in the subconscious mind.

Somewhere between the swinging watch and the therapist’s office, hypnosis acquired two contradictory reputations. It is dismissed as fake while also being feared as dangerously powerful. It supposedly does nothing, except perhaps allow another person to take complete possession of your will.

Photo by Grooveland Designs on Unsplash

Even its name is misleading.

The word hypnotism was derived from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep. But hypnosis isn’t actually sleep. A person experiencing hypnosis may look deeply relaxed, but they can hear, think, speak, move, make decisions, accept suggestions, reject suggestions, and open their eyes whenever they choose.

So why did we name it after sleep?

To answer that, we have to go back to a time when hypnosis was not called hypnosis at all. It was called magnetism (like something Austin Powers would say: Animal magnetism baby, yeah!) and blamed on an invisible fluid. Magnetism provoked accusations of fraud, indecency, witchcraft, and dangerous female imagination. It passed through hospitals where traumatized women were displayed before audiences of men. Hysteria was repeatedly renamed as each generation tried to decide what it could bear to believe about the relationship between the mind, the body, and authority.

The secret history of hypnosis isn’t the story of how humans learned mind control; it’s the story of how long it took us to admit that human beings influence one another at all.

The Experience Came Before the Explanation

Histories of hypnosis often begin in ancient Egypt or Greece. There are accounts of healing temples, ritual sleep, repetitive prayer, chanting, focused attention, and sacred ceremonies designed to produce visions or relief.

It is tempting to draw a straight line from an Egyptian sleep temple to a modern hypnotherapy office, mostly because history looks very tidy when everyone in it has been waiting patiently to invent us.

The truth is less convenient. Ancient healing rituals were not simply early hypnosis under moodier lighting. They belonged to their own religious and cultural worlds. There is no single, uninterrupted tradition connecting them to what we now call hypnosis, but they do reveal something important.

The human capacity came before the clinical explanation.

People didn’t need the word hypnosis before they could become absorbed in a story, respond physically to expectation, enter an altered state through ritual, or feel relief because a trusted authority told them relief was possible.

We still do these things constantly.

We stop noticing the road while driving a familiar route, and we cry over people who do not exist while watching a movie we know is fictional. We can become so absorbed in a book that the room around us completely disappears, and we enter a new dimension. Our bodies can react to a frightening thought alone, even when nothing dangerous is physically present.

None of this requires a fancy gold watch. It requires attention, imagination, expectation, and a nervous system capable of responding to meaning.

What changed over time wasn’t the existence of those capacities, but the story authorities told about them.

A Very Mesmerizing Man

In the late eighteenth century, Austrian physician Franz Anton Mesmer offered Europe an explanation with excellent branding.

Mesmer believed the universe was filled with an invisible force that flowed through living things. Illness, he proposed, occurred when this natural fluid became blocked or unbalanced. A trained magnetizer could manipulate it and restore the body to health.

He called it animal magnetism.

Mesmer’s treatments were not quiet affairs. Patients gathered around a wooden vessel called a baquet, fitted with iron rods and arranged to conduct the supposed magnetic force; music played; and ropes connected participants. Mesmer moved through the room in elaborate clothing, making passes over bodies or directing his magnetic influence with a wand.

Patients, many of them women, might cry, faint, shake, laugh, convulse, or experience what Mesmer called a healing crisis.

And some reported getting better.

This created an awkward scientific problem. The proposed fluid could not be seen, measured, or reliably demonstrated. The reactions in the room, however, were very real.

In 1784, King Louis XVI appointed commissioners to examine the claims of animal magnetism. The group included Benjamin Franklin, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, whose surname would soon enjoy a rather more memorable association.

The commissioners designed experiments intended to separate the supposed magnetic force from the patient’s belief that they were receiving it. In some tests, people reacted when they thought they had been magnetized, even when they had not. In others, they failed to react when magnetism was supposedly being applied without their knowledge.

The commission found no proof of Mesmer’s invisible fluid. It attributed the effects largely to imagination, imitation, and touch.

Animal magnetism had been debunked.

Except something fascinating had happened in the process: the commissioners had shown that belief and expectation could produce observable changes in the body.

They treated imagination as the embarrassing explanation left behind once the real medicine had been removed. But imagination was not the absence of an effect; it was just a part of it.

This is still one of the problems we have when talking about the mind. We tend to divide experiences into two categories: physically real or merely imagined. If a symptom is influenced by expectation, stress, fear, memory, or suggestion, we can begin to treat that as proof that the symptom was never real.

The body has never respected this distinction.

It blushes because of embarrassment and vomits from sheer terror. It tightens in response to a memory and is capable of producing pain, paralysis, numbness, arousal, nausea, relief, and panic in response to meanings no instrument can hold in its hand.

Mesmer was wrong about the fluid, but his patients’ bodies weren’t necessarily lying about getting better.

The Danger Behind the Curtain

The public report was not the commission’s only report.

A second, confidential document warned the king about the moral dangers of animal magnetism, particularly when male practitioners treated female patients. The commissioners described prolonged physical proximity, intimate touch, emotional excitement, and the possibility that a woman might be drawn into a sexual relationship under the magnetizer’s influence.

Some of their language reflected the era’s obsession with female modesty and the belief that women’s sexuality required male supervision. But underneath the paternalism was a legitimate concern that remains recognizable now.

Mesmerism created a significant imbalance of power.

The practitioner claimed possession of a mysterious force. The patient was told that her body would respond to it. Treatment could involve touch, privacy, emotional intensity, and a state she had been taught the practitioner understood better than she did.

In other words, the danger was not a magical fluid; it was authority without accountability.

That distinction matters in this case because fear of hypnosis often focuses on the imaginary possibility that another person can override the human will. It is much less comfortable to examine the ordinary conditions under which people can be pressured, confused, exploited, or trained to distrust themselves.

Anyone who has experienced trauma or abuse can tell you that control doesn’t announce itself with a swinging watch.

It’s more likely to arrive as expertise you are not allowed to question and love you have to prove through obedience, a spiritual authority who speaks for God, a partner who understands your motives better than you do, or a healer who tells you that discomfort is resistance and resistance means the treatment is working.

The problem isn’t that influence exists, it’s what happens when one person is granted the power to define another person’s entire experience.

The Sleeping Man Who Was Not Asleep

Animal magnetism began moving toward something closer to modern hypnosis through one of Mesmer’s followers, the Marquis de Puységur.

In 1784, Puységur reportedly attempted to magnetize Victor Race, a young peasant who worked on his family’s estate. Instead of producing one of Mesmer’s dramatic crises, Victor entered a calm, sleep-like state. He could speak, respond to questions, and behave as though he possessed a different kind of awareness.

Puységur called the condition artificial somnambulism, artificial sleepwalking.

The spectacle in front of an audience was no longer necessary; a person could become quiet rather than convulsive, inwardly focused rather than publicly overwhelmed. The magnetizer’s role also began to look less like the manipulation of a physical fluid and more like a relationship involving attention, expectation, and communication.

The story is sometimes told as a gentler chapter in the development of hypnosis, and in many ways it was. Puységur emphasized rapport and appeared interested in Victor’s inner experience. But even this softer origin story contains a hierarchy worth noticing. Puységur was an aristocratic landowner, while Victor was a young man from a family employed on his estate.

We cannot remove the relationship from the technique.

That doesn’t mean Victor experienced nothing meaningful, but methods of influence never occur in a vacuum. Every suggestion enters through a relationship, and every relationship contains some distribution of power, trust, expectation, and choice.

Modern ethical practice doesn’t become ethical by pretending influence is absent. It becomes ethical by making consent, collaboration, scope, and the client’s continued agency impossible to mistake.

How Hypnosis Got the Wrong Name

By the nineteenth century, animal magnetism had become a strange mixture of medical treatment, spiritual practice, public entertainment, and scandal. Then a Scottish surgeon named James Braid attended a mesmerism demonstration and began looking for an explanation that did not require invisible fluid.

Braid experimented with concentrated attention and visual fixation. He observed that people could enter the unusual state by focusing their eyes and attention in particular ways. The phenomenon, he argued, arose from processes within the person rather than a force transmitted by the operator.

He used terms including neurohypnology and hypnotism, drawing from the Greek hypnos, meaning sleep. His 1843 book was titled Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep.

This gave the practice exactly what it needed: a scientific-sounding name that separated it from Mesmer and his invisible fluid. It also gave us a misunderstanding that has lasted for nearly two centuries.

Braid eventually recognized that ordinary sleep did not adequately explain what he was observing. Focused attention was more important. People in hypnosis weren’t actually unconscious or asleep, but by then the name had begun to stick, and now hypnosis has a PR problem.

There is something almost perfect about that. Hypnosis became respectable not because the human experience had changed, but because the explanation had changed hands. A practice associated with spectacle and questionable magnetic forces was given Greek roots, physiological language, and a male medical author.

The new name outlived the theory that inspired it.

It also helped create the image we still carry: a person whose eyes close, whose agency disappears, and whose mind becomes available for someone else to use.

That image was about to find its most famous stage.

The Women Who Made Hysteria Visible

In the late nineteenth century, the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris became one of Europe’s most influential centers for the study of neurological illness and hysteria.

The institution had long housed women who were poor, disabled, mentally ill, socially inconvenient, or otherwise difficult for families and authorities to place. Under neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, some of its patients became internationally famous without ever becoming powerful.

Charcot believed hypnosis was a distinct neurological state associated with hysteria. During his celebrated Tuesday lectures, female patients were hypnotized and induced to demonstrate symptoms before audiences of doctors, artists, writers, and intellectuals. Their bodies stiffened, collapsed, arched, fainted, and moved through what Charcot presented as predictable stages of hysterical illness.

The room looked medical, but it also looked remarkably like a theater. Patients were photographed, classified, posed, discussed, and transformed into visual proof of the theories being built around them. Paintings and photographs preserved the scene: a fully dressed male audience looking toward a woman whose body had become the lesson.

One of the most photographed patients was a teenager known as Augustine.

Augustine entered the Salpêtrière at fourteen. Accounts of her history describe childhood sexual abuse and rape before her confinement. At the hospital, she became one of Charcot’s star patients, repeatedly photographed and presented as an exemplary case of hysteria.

There is no neat way to hold the contradiction.

Charcot helped establish that symptoms dismissed as feminine performance could be real. He resisted the idea that hysteria belonged exclusively to women and recognized related symptoms in men. His work helped move medicine toward the possibility that psychological trauma could create physical consequences.

And yet traumatized women were asked to perform their suffering for rooms full of men.

They were finally believed to be suffering, but belief came at a price: their suffering had to become legible to the authorities studying them. Augustine’s body was treated as a source of knowledge while she herself was not given equal authority over what that knowledge meant.

This pattern reaches far beyond one hospital.

Women have repeatedly been asked to make pain visible enough to deserve belief. We are expected to describe it calmly, but not so calmly that it seems unimportant. We must be distressed, but not hysterical. Specific, but not rehearsed. Consistent, but not suspiciously consistent. Wounded enough to explain what happened, yet composed enough to be considered credible.

The standard changes, but the performance remains.

At the Salpêtrière, hypnosis did not simply reveal hysteria. The expectations of the institution may also have helped shape how patients expressed it. Later critics argued that Charcot’s famous stages could not be reliably reproduced outside his hospital and that patients had learned what doctors expected them to display.

Which raises an unsettling question: What happens when the authority observing a symptom is also suggesting its form?

Sick Women or Ordinary Human Beings?

Charcot’s interpretation of hypnosis didn’t go unchallenged.

At the Nancy School, physicians Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim argued that hypnosis was not a special symptom of hysteria. It was an extension of normal suggestibility: a capacity found, to varying degrees, in ordinary people.

The disagreement was larger than it appears.

If Charcot was right, hypnotic responsiveness revealed disease.

If the Nancy School was right, it revealed something ordinary about being human. The Nancy view eventually became far more influential. Suggestion, not female pathology, moved toward the center of the explanation.

That should have made hypnosis less frightening. Instead, it may reveal something more difficult to accept.

Suggestion doesn’t begin when someone announces an induction. It is woven through ordinary life.

Authority affects what we expect.

Repetition affects what feels familiar.

Familiarity affects what feels true.

Context changes how we interpret physical sensations.

A trusted person’s words can soothe us, frighten us, or become part of the way we speak to ourselves long after that person has left the room.

Trauma can make attention narrow toward danger. Abuse can train a person to monitor someone else’s mood before noticing her own. Gaslighting can repeat an alternate version of reality until certainty itself begins to feel dangerous.

None of this means survivors are uniquely gullible. It means the human nervous system learns from relationship, repetition, emotion, and consequence.

The same capacities that allow us to learn language, trust caregivers, absorb culture, respond to reassurance, and feel moved by stories also make influence possible.

The cultural fantasy of irresistible hypnotic control may actually make coercion harder to recognize. We wait for the villain with supernatural power while ordinary control enters through love, fear, belonging, exhaustion, and the slow replacement of our judgment with someone else’s.

Hypnosis Meets Trauma

As hypnosis moved through nineteenth-century psychology, Pierre Janet used it in his work with dissociation and traumatic memory.

Janet understood that overwhelming experiences could remain disconnected from ordinary awareness while continuing to appear through physical sensations, emotions, behaviors, and fragmented memory. He was interested not only in uncovering traumatic material but in helping it become integrated into a person’s larger life story.

This part of the history requires particular care.

Hypnosis isn’t a truth serum. Memory is absolutely not a perfect recording stored somewhere in the mind, waiting to be played back without alteration. Memory is reconstructive, and suggestion can influence what a person recalls or how certain that recollection feels.

An image that appears during hypnosis may be emotionally meaningful without being treated as historical proof. Ethical trauma-informed work should not lead clients toward a predetermined explanation or turn uncertain imagery into certainty.

But the misuse of hypnosis doesn’t erase the relationship between trauma, attention, dissociation, imagination, and the body.

Sometimes the conscious mind knows the danger is over while the body continues preparing for it. Sometimes a person can explain exactly why a belief is unfair and still feel governed by it. Sometimes an old instruction, keep the peace, don’t make them angry, be useful, be easy, don’t trust yourself, survives long after the authority who delivered it is gone.

That is not proof of weakness.

It may be proof that the mind learned an instruction when following it was the safest available response.

Modern hypnotherapy can work with attention, imagery, expectation, association, and suggestion to help a person relate differently to those learned responses. Its ethical purpose is not to replace one authority’s instructions with another’s. It is to help the client participate consciously in what happens next, and that difference is everything.

The Suggestions We Receive While Awake

The history of hypnosis is often told as a march from superstition to science.

First came ancient ritual. Then Mesmer’s invisible fluid. Then Braid’s nervous sleep. Then Charcot’s hysteria. Finally, modern psychology arrived to clear up the confusion.

But history rarely moves so politely.

Each era noticed something real and wrapped it in the assumptions it already carried, and reflected the times. Sacred ritual recognized the power of meaning and expectation. Mesmer recognized that one person’s presence could alter another person’s experience, then attributed that influence to a fluid. The royal commission rejected the fluid but treated imagination as an embarrassing contaminant. Braid moved the source of the phenomenon inside the subject but named it after sleep. Charcot took women’s physical symptoms seriously while turning their suffering into spectacle. The Nancy School recognized suggestion as ordinary but left us with the unnerving task of admitting how influenceable ordinary people are.

The same human capacities kept appearing under different names:

Absorption. Expectation. Imagination. Focused attention. Dissociation. Relationship. The body’s ability to respond to meaning. The mind’s ability to learn below the level of deliberate thought.

Sometimes those capacities were treated as sacred. Other times they were magnetic. Devastatingly, they were proof that a woman was ill, and sometimes that proof was displayed in front of an audience.

Eventually, they were placed inside a therapeutic office and given professional boundaries, informed consent, and a new purpose.

Hypnosis didn’t become ethical because influence disappeared.

It became ethical when the client’s agency became more important than the practitioner’s authority, and maybe that’s the most useful thing its strange history can teach us.

We are easily influenced, creatures.

We’re shaped by the voices we trust, the stories we repeat, the roles that keep us safe, and the expectations waiting for us when we enter a room. And hey, there’s no shame in that. A nervous system that learns from its environment is doing exactly what nervous systems evolved to do.

The goal isn’t to become impossible to influence, but to become more conscious of which influences are allowed to remain. Most of the suggestions that shape a life don’t arrive after someone waves a watch and tells us to sleep; they arrive while we’re fully awake.

They come from parents, partners, churches, doctors, classrooms, advertisements, and cultures. They get repeated until it sounds a lot like common sense and tell us that obedience is goodness, pain is love, exhaustion is virtue, and doubt is proof that someone else should decide for us.

Maybe the real power of hypnosis isn’t that a stranger can enter your mind and place an idea there.

Maybe it is that, for a little while, you can become quiet enough to notice who already has.

Sources and Further Reading

• Hypnosis in History — Hypnosis Motivation Institute

• Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep — James Braid, 1843

• Report of the Royal Commission on Animal Magnetism, 1784

• Between Charcot and Bernheim: The Debate on Hypnotism in Fin-de-Siècle France

• Women and Hysteria in the History of Mental Health

• The Life and Work of Jean-Martin Charcot

• Pierre Janet and the Breakdown of Adaptation in Psychological Trauma

I know exactly what I want to create. I’ve known for a while, and I can tell you exactly what I want to do and the reasons and the therapeutic benefits behind it. Right now, as I’m writing this, I can feel the tension in my body increasing. My muscles are tensed so hard around my bones that I’m hyper-aware of them. I can feel the teeth in my mouth, and I am entirely too aware of the tightness in the muscles around my arms. Describing the sensation makes my chest tighter, like now that I’m acknowledging it, I can’t run away the way my muscles are bracing me.

My mind knows where I want to go, and what I want to accomplish, but my muscles are braced to escape because I don’t know how to do what I want to do, and not knowing how to do it feels intolerable. Physical heat is spreading all across my skin, and I am aware of the energy radiating off of me. If I were a cartoon, I’d be placed in a comically vast desert, with sweat evaporating off my skin from the heat of the sun. My thoughts are causing a literal, physical reaction in my body. I can feel the heat, I’m sweating, and my heart is racing right now, but I’m not a cartoon in the desert; I’m just me sitting in my room, and that’s the problem. I’m just me, and it feels like I have this big task in front of me, but I need a map.

And the thing is, I don’t think what I want to make technically has been built before in the way I’m imagining it. Saying that makes me feel like I’m puffing myself up or pretending to be more important than I am, but I’m painfully aware of who I am, and that’s the problem. I don’t believe I’m someone capable of great things.

I don’t believe I’m someone who deserves great things.

I’m the invisible girl who makes life better for everyone else before quietly fading into the background. Easily forgotten and easily replaced, and I know that reading this right now, you probably are experiencing one of three reactions. 1. Whoa, that’s sad as fuck dude. If this is you, you probably want to fix it by telling me that’s not true, but no matter how many times you believe me, I won’t believe it’s true. Then I’m going to ask, “What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I just be happy?”

That makes me want to go on a side quest explanation because that’s the real issue. The other reactions to my sad brain don’t even matter that much because this whole issue was created in my mind because I have an idea and I can’t build it because my brain doesn’t think I deserve to.

Then I think, this isn’t fair; I used to be able to follow my thoughts and build things, but that was before trauma taught me that it isn’t safe to trust my thoughts, and that whatever I build will be taken from me.

You know that scene in A Bug's Life where the ants are all lined up, and they each have their little bit of grain or food for the colony, and one by one they put their grain in the pile, but then a twig falls in the path, and suddenly one of the ants panics because where is the path to follow? There was a path, and then suddenly this goddamn twig fell out of the sky, and now the ant is lost, and as an audience member it’s pretty funny because what do you mean… you literally just walk around the twig… no big deal, my dude, except to that ant it is a big deal because it’s not just a twig that he can easily maneuver around, because it’s not just about the twig.

It’s that he was walking a path he’s walked a thousand times before, and suddenly his sense of safety was stolen from him. He had a sense of purpose; he was sure of his path, but something happened that stole that certainty from him. Sure, he was led back to the path, but the ants in front of him don’t know what it’s like to have a twig fall in your path, and the ants behind him are starting to react. Do they know they were almost just squished? If the ant had taken another step forward, he might not even be there right now. He’d be under the twig, and then he realizes that he has to step carefully because there could be another twig now. He doesn’t move as quickly or as confidently anymore, because now he knows twigs exist, and he knows what can happen when they fall in his path, so he moves a little slower, a little more carefully, and the whole time he’s thinking, “What are you doing? You’re falling behind. Everyone else is way up there.” And he knows that he has to keep going, but doesn’t everyone understand what happened with the twig? Don’t they know that another twig could fall, and he’s the only one who knows the twig could fall because the other ants are just doing their job, but now he has awareness of what could go wrong, and he can’t just get back in line because every step he takes he’s worrying about the twig.

Side note: it was actually a leaf. I went to Google this scene, and when I saw it was a leaf instead of the twig I keep describing, my brain says, “See, you can’t even get this right. What makes you think you could ever figure this out?”

And suddenly, the story about the ant being terrified of the twig isn’t so funny anymore when you think about it like that, is it? Because for just a few moments, I showed you what it’s like to be in my head.

And then I think goddamn, Karly, can’t you just keep things lighthearted? Why are you such a bummer all of the time?

And the secret driver of my brain takes a drag of her cigarette, turns directly to the camera, and says, “Because I live like this all of the time.”

And then suddenly, the audience is in on the secret, and we understand that we aren’t in A Bugs Life; we’re actually in a high-stakes game of survival where every choice is a matter of life and death because you might have started out in A Bugs Life, waiting your turn in line, but then a goddamn twig fell in your path and now you know, and once you know, you can’t unknow.

That’s what trauma does to you.

It forces you to open your eyes and look at the world differently, and then how could you go back to walking that path after knowing what you know?

I used to feel more like Flick with his crazy ideas that somehow just work. Like the scene where he takes a blade of grass and a drop of water, and the other bugs look at him like he’s crazy until he hands it to them and they look through the opening and realize he made a magnifying glass. The other bugs don’t see things the way he does, and he knows that, and while he desperately wants to be accepted, he wants to be accepted and valued for who he is, not for how well he can walk in line.

And that’s the thing.

I spent the last few weeks looking at the invisible rules we follow. I was examining them through the lens of conditioning and the training to be good that so many of us endured, but I didn’t realize I was setting the scene to meet the secret driver of my brain.

I thought I had spent this entire time (gestures broadly to the last several years of my career more than this exact instant) understanding the way my flavors of neurodivergence work after a twig fell in my path, but I feel like a twig falling in my path wasn’t enough of a descriptor. I didn’t have a twig; I got caught in a goddamn hurricane, and the people behind me that I had to worry about keeping safe weren’t just a random collection of other ants, but my children.

Hurricanes feel like one long storm; it can be easy to miss when you look at how big the storm is on the radar, but if you pay attention, it’s not one big storm; it comes in waves. The rain band hits, and the wind picks up speed. Debris flies, and lightning crashes down all around you. Sometimes there are tornadoes, and everything feels loud and intense, and then it quiets again. You know the storm isn’t over, so you can’t fully relax, but you have enough time to catch your breath and assess the damage before the next wave hits, and maybe, you’re like Flick, and there is enough time between the bands to think of what’s possible when the storm ends.

The trouble is, if the storm goes on for too long, and it’s more intense than anyone could have predicted, you forget that it’s temporary. Everything feels as urgent, as important, as deciding if you’re going to evacuate or wait out a hurricane.

I am somehow both Flick and the ant on the path, so I can tell you exactly what happens when a mind like mine grows to expect danger at every turn, and when the consequences of those decisions stare you in the face. Flick faced those choices, too.

At the end of the movie, Flick nearly gives up. He loses his fight, and the grasshopper’s foot is raised to squish him. The other ants look on in horror, because they know they can’t possibly save him from Hopper; after all, they’re just ants, and if this wasn’t a Disney movie, it probably would have been lights out for good ole Flick, but that’s where Disney got it right, because somtimes the real hero of the story isn’t the adult persevering against all odds, but a pissed off little girl seeing her buddy hurt.

The final scene is set like this: The grasshoppers have invaded, and Hopper has the little girl ant clutched in his hands, and there is no way Flick would let anything happen to her, so he says No, it’s me you want. I did this; I built all of this; it was all my idea; hurt me instead. It’s the act of the selfless hero, the act of supreme accountability.

It’s a little bitty ant who stood up to his bully with a fuck you for even thinking about these even littler ants that he somehow ended up protecting. It was brave and heroic, and he got the shit absolutely kicked out of him, and that’s when he finally runs out of fight. That’s when he doesn’t know how to get back up again, and that’s when Hopper says this:

In that moment, Flick somehow manages to get to his feet again; he’s bruised, but he still gets up and says, "No, this isn’t how it should be." He gives his impassioned speech, and that’s when he takes the blow that he can’t get back up from. He got up again and again the entire movie, but then it was one hit too many, and it wasn’t just the hit; it was that he was reminded that he really is just a little ant.

I had a very specific point that I was going to make with that, because I thought the ant that stepped in to save Flick was the littlest princess, the slightly feral little ant that reminds me a lot of my own little princess, but like with the twig at the beginning of this piece, my memory was wrong. It wasn’t actually the little ant, but the princess next in line for the crown who stepped in to shield Flick.

I can think of recent events in my life that made me feel like I was finally standing up to my bully, and even though it wasn’t a dramatic showdown with grasshoppers, I understand how Flick felt when he finally stopped fighting. I understand that moment where it almost would be a relief to get squished because who did I think I was, daring to believe that I could be more than just an ant in line.

Metaphorically speaking, I’ve been stuck in a hurricane for a long time. I don’t know if you’ve ever waited out a hurricane alone, but I have. It wasn’t a bad storm, but it was right before I was supposed to move from Florida to Texas; my oldest daughter broke her elbow. I made a makeshift sling out of a ninja turtle sheet, and I kept guard all night.

We slept in the closet under my stairs, just in case, and I waited all night, keeping careful tally of kids, dogs, and cats, making sure everyone was safe and staying alert through every band of rain. That hurricane ended years ago, but I’m not sure my mind ever managed to escape that closet because while the actual storm passed, the figurative one never did.

It’s still raining in my world, and every so often the winds pick up, and I know it means I have to get ready for the next wave, but nobody around me understands what’s happening. No one else can see that this is a desperate fight for survival and that if I don’t make exactly the right move, we’re all getting squished, and that’s not because I’m an ant and a twig fell in my path, but I can see how it looks like that from the outside.

It’s because I’m the ant that survived the hurricane while being told the hurricane was my fault.

And my final squishing moment didn’t come from a grasshopper. It didn’t even come from my bully; it came from me.

Do you remember the secret driver of the van, smoking her cigarette, casually reminding the audience that she was there the entire time? I’ve been focused on the rules, focused on my conditioning, focused on still feeling trapped in my life and desperately looking for a way out. I learned the ins and outs of my neurodivergence, and the ins and outs of my C-PTSD and trauma, so why do I still feel like this?

Why do I still have this NEED to be sure, this need to know, this need for guaranteed safety when I know perfectly well there is no such thing because I live in a hurricane that doesn’t end. The eye passed a long time ago, and I barely surface to catch my breath before another band hits, and all I know is that I desperately need to know exactly what to do next because I know that if I fall down this time, I don’t know if I can get back up.

I keep having these situations pop up where I feel the weight of that desperation, and everyone around me can tell that I feel it, but they don’t understand why. They don’t understand the pressure because they don’t get that the reason they don’t understand is that I took all those hits so they didn’t have to, but the reason I took all those hits is because my secret driver believes I deserve it.

The part of me sucking on a cigarette that I’ve never even smoked in real life is silently driving the van, and every time I get hit, it reminds me that I deserve this pain. I didn’t know she was a factor until recently, because she’s always been there. It’s like the moment in Fight Club where you suddenly realize, “I am Tyler Durden.” Except I’m not actually Tyler Durden, I just have a mind that thinks I deserve to be punished because of course, I do.

There are lots of different reasons my brain is like this. Lots of titles it could have, lots of different factors that individually play a part, but together form this endless hurricane. I’m not going to lie to you and pretend like I suddenly realized that I’m someone who deserves peace, too, but that would be a bald-faced lie, and I can’t lie to you because the idea of misleading you makes me so uncomfortable that you wouldn’t even have to torture me for information. Just strap me to a chair, hold up a mirror so I can’t get away from my own reflection, and I’ll break because everything does feel like it’s my fault.

Everything feels like it’s my fault, and I know the weight of every decision I make. I’m currently the equivalent of a very panicked ant with my arms full of plans and grains, and there are ants behind me waiting, but I can’t move forward because what if I make the wrong decision?

What if it’s wrong, and I can’t save us this time?

The what-ifs in my mind get so big they feel more real than the storm, and suddenly, I can’t just pull a blade of grass from my pocket and make a telescope. I know how to do it, but I don’t trust that I can do it, and I know that if I don’t do it exactly right, I’ll be the one to pay the price, so I need a blueprint.

But then it’s time to start building, and I see a smudge, or an incomplete line, and the driver of my van takes a drag of her cigarette and just says, “See, I told you so.”

And then my little panic ant avatar rips up the blueprints while apologizing profusely to everyone around them, and tries to draw a new one, but this time the original idea is harder to hear, and my ant remembers the flaw from the last one, so this new blueprint needs to be even more perfect than the last one before I can begin.

Do you see the issue? I know what happens if it’s not right, and I can literally never make it right, so I can’t fully commit to the path because what if it’s the wrong path, and the longer I stand there, the more I’m aware that I need to be doing something, and that’s when the driver of my van takes another drag, stares at me, and asks, “Why am I just standing here? Do I not know how to do anything?”

The voice is punishing and cruel, and I never questioned it, because it’s always been there, until a TikTok shined the spotlight on her, and I was forced to realize that I was fighting the wrong battle the entire time. I thought I was fighting the storm, my conditioning, and my trauma, but it turns out I’ve been fighting the part of me that is hell-bent on punishing me because I deserve it.

I didn’t know how to get back up from that one, because it’s right, and it’s always been right. I don’t know how to be Flick, the ant on the path, and my own judge, jury, and executioner at once. I could tell you that I know I don’t deserve to treat myself like that, except that’s the thing:

I don’t believe it.

This is the point in the movies where the special effects go dark. This is the battle of Helm's Deep. The screen has the blue tinge to it, and everywhere you look, there is just darkness and death, and the last remaining soldiers have mounted their horses, knowing there is no escaping the inevitable tide, when suddenly, on the horizon, the Riders of Rohan appear.

They didn’t give up or abandon their king, and suddenly hope is restored. There is still a battle to be fought, but the light has returned, and it’s enough to turn the tide.

My youngest daughter was that light for me.

I keep catching myself looking at her, this precious, feral, lizard-catching queen, and finding myself in absolute awe of her. I feel that way about all of my children, for different reasons, and they all deserve to be told that in every imaginary world I’ve been able to dream up, I’ve never managed to dream up anything better than them.

My oldest daughter deserves to be told every day that when she was born, I felt a missing piece of my heart click into place. I see the way she looks at projects and fearlessly decides she can figure it out in ways that work for her mind. I see her listening to and responding to the world around her and honoring her needs.

My son deserves to hear that when he was born, I saw his blue skin and the way his chest was caved in, and that I’d never been more sure that I would trade places with him in an instant. I’d take his pain and discomfort and live with it for the rest of my life if I could keep him from feeling it, and I’m in awe of his strength and his abilities because I remember that fragile, helpless baby, and I see the man he’s growing into.

And my youngest.

My beautiful, feral, little queen.

She is who I could have been, if I had been free to be myself and had support in letting that develop, instead of learning how to mask. I know she’s learned that, too, but with me she has a space where she can be fully unmasked and have support for her big feelings and understand that feeling big feelings doesn’t make her bad.

Because that’s the thing I’ve been noticing these past few months. Never in her life has she been made to feel bad or wrong for being who she is, and yet, I still see it in her reactions when she thinks she’s done something that makes her bad, and I recognized it before I had words for it.

She has the same driver in her mind that I have in mine, and that’s what gave me the strength to stand up again.

I might be wrong about what that driver is called, but whatever it is, she has it too, and there is no way in hell I’m letting her end up like me.

So that’s why I need to throw my carefully detailed plans aside, and why I am back in therapy. They were a mental trap I didn’t know I was falling into, and the honest truth is, I didn’t have the right tools to properly fight this battle. But now I know, and while I still struggle to believe I deserve to feel better, I’d scour every inch of hell itself to save her from the same struggles.

I’m still wading through waves of shame, still crying and clutching my plans because I don’t know how to do this without them. I want someone to save me, but I know it’s my job to save me, and it’s my job to work through the shame that took root in my mind before I had language for it.

I’m still gritting my teeth in an effort not to scream because I can’t properly explain how scary it feels to do this, to trust that I can take a step without the perfect plan, because I already know what it costs, and if I look at myself like a panicked ant with a twig in their path, and then zoom out to imagine my daughter in my place, there isn’t a monster in this world that I wouldn’t face.

So I’m going to learn that I am someone who deserves a good life, goddamnit. I’m going to do the work, and you’re all going to have to learn right alongside me, so there.

I want to tell you all that I have a plan, but that’s the issue. In order for me to move forward, I have to learn to be okay without a plan, and to trust that I can get there without a map, and that’s a terrifying place to begin. That’s why, for now, I have to be unpolished and unedited, even though it makes my skeleton want to escape my body.

I can learn to tolerate uncertainty again, and learn to not only trust my ideas, but to allow them to grow and develop without micromanaging them into a plan that I will hate; I just need a lighthouse to remind me I’m not lost in the storm.

A note before you go:

This essay is a personal account of my own lived experience and the thoughts I was having while writing it. It reflects my perspective at this moment in time, not a clinical diagnosis or medical advice. I’m currently working with a mental health professional to better understand what I’m experiencing, and I recognize that my understanding may continue to evolve. If any part of this resonates with you, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional rather than using my experience as a substitute for your own care.

And I’m not saying that in the omg, I have to put my keys in the same place every day, isn’t that so silly goofy of me?

Except the thing is, I know that’s a joke, and I mean it as a joke; but inside my head I’m thinking, “but there are people who really do need their keys to be in the exact same spot and saying that is super unkind to them.” And then I feel like I’m a bad person, so I want to do something to prove that I’m actually a really good person.

So then I go along just being the nicest person I can be, and everyone is like oh wow! You’re so nice! And I’m like yeah, thanks, it’s because I’m secretly terrified that if I do something wrong everyone will find out that I’m secretly bad, and I don’t know how or why, I just know that I am.

There is this one beer stain (I was trying to say Berenstein and I was going to make a joke about the mandala effect, but then the autocorrect was so funny that I felt like I should leave it and now we’re two people reading one very long sentence because I also have adhd.)

Anyways. There was this one Berenstein Bears book about strangers because sister bear is afraid of strangers and suddenly everyone looks so scary like all hunched over and scary and mean. And sister bear is over here like oh my god there are strangers EVERYWHERE ya know?

So sister bear is panicking, and all the bears are like yeah, you totally should be afraid of strangers because you wanna know what strangers do? They grab you and throw you in the back of a white van and then you’re just fucked. So long sister bear.

That didn’t happen in the book, clearly my childhood trauma took the wheel with that one but mama bear finally pulls sister bear aside and is like look, sister bear, babes, not everyone who is a medium ugly bear is a bad guy, okay?

And then she cuts open an ugly apple and look! It’s perfect inside, but then she picked up an apple that looked perfect and cut it open, and it’s gross inside, and I’m pretty sure there’s a worm.

I LOVED that book as a child, can you tell? And the thing about that is…

I’m convinced that I am the apple that looks pretty on the outside but is really rotten on the inside.

And the thing is, I’ve always been like that. And even in saying that, I can point to what I said above and show you exactly where certain things are neurodivergence, trauma, and PTSD. They’re my buddies and I know how they work really well because they are my special interest.

Except here’s an interesting thing that I didn’t know:

People with moral OCD get obsessed with figuring out what’s happening inside of them. 🙃

And I do have adhd, and a deep interest in mental health as someone who might also be autistic, but now I have PTSD and they’re kinda similar so who can really tell, ya know?

Either way, I am well aware that I am a special little cocktail with some trauma flavoring.

It’s always been easy for me to talk about those aspects of my personality, but what I don’t talk about publicly or privately is that while I was approaching that with humor, I was also trying to figure out how to fix the parts of me that aren’t palatable.

That reeks of trauma and religious conditioning, and I know that, and then I think that means you don’t have OCD, you have trauma and thinking you have OCD when you don’t makes you a bad person because who pretends to have something they don’t? Bad people.

And then the thought that I am bad feels bigger and I can feel a wave of shame spread through my body. Once the shame spreads my skin starts to crawl and my thoughts start to race along with my heartbeat. My thoughts get more frantic and loud and I know what they’re saying isn’t true, but it feels true and that makes it true to me in that moment.

It feels like the mental equivalent of sliding down a mountain, and feeling your legs and hands get cut and scratched as you grab for anything to help you stop falling because that pit is so deep and so dark you don’t know if you’ll ever get out again.

You know that you’re falling; you heart is racing in your chest, but you can’t stop it, and the more you flail and try to stop it; the louder the lie in your brain gets.

And the lie my brain tells me is that I don’t deserve to have a good life. I don’t deserve to be happy, or settled, or successful. And if you asked me why I feel that way I can tell you oh it’s because I was conditioned to feel that way by the church, by my abuser, there are so many ways that this lie was formed, but that’s not the real lie.

The real lie is that those things are true, but there is still a something underneath them. There is something in my chest, in the very core of my being that believes I don’t deserve to be treated well.

I allow myself to be mistreated because I believe I deserve it.

It’s true that I didn’t know I was being abused, and it’s not only because I had a very limited understanding of what abuse is at the time, but it’s also because I believed I deserved it.

When the people around me feel disapproving of something I’m doing I think it means that they disapprove of me, personally. Then I work harder to prove I’m not a disappointment, and that I really am good enough; but plot twist I never am, because I’m the one judging me.

I’m never going to be enough because I don’t believe I’m enough.

I keep looking for things in me to fix, and it never occurred to me to stop looking because maybe there isn’t anything wrong to me, but that’s just it. I think there is.

I think there is something wrong with me, so when I look for evidence I always find it and then I always have something to work on and something to get better at, so I am literally always striving for perfection; but there will never been a finish line because I can never be perfect and therefore I could never stop.

I knew that I felt this way about myself, but I didn’t understand that the way I see myself is a distortion. I know I have people who tell me I’m not the horrible things I think I am. I have people who question why I carry so much guilt and blame that doesn’t belong to me, and it’s because up until very very recently…

I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to feel like this because I’ve always been like this.

I didn’t know that not everyone thinks they’re secretly terrible and that if people find out that they’re the bad apple; they’ll leave.

I didn’t know that not everyone remembers past events and tortures themselves like they’ve done something horrific.

I didn’t know that the reason I can’t tolerate making a mistake is because I’m afraid one mistake and my mask will slip and everyone will know how awful I am.

I threw up twice while writing this, and just in writing those statements my body is bracing; waiting for some punishment it’s never received, and when nothing comes, because I haven’t actually done anything wrong, I punish myself. My heart is racing right now because I want to run away from all of this. I do not want to have to stop to face the fears because the thing that I’m really afraid of is me.

I can’t let myself be an awful person, but I still believe that I am. Then I look at the absolute lack of logic and it pisses me off. Right now, as I am thinking about this and feeling what I write as I write it, right now, if you put a gun to my head and asked me if I deserved to live I’d say no.

And it’s not NOT because I don’t want to be alive, I desperately do want to live. It’s also not because I want to harm myself in any way, it’s because at my very core that’s what I believe about myself and I didn’t know that it is not a normal thing to feel like that.

I didn’t know that having OCD means that you aren’t always stuck rearranging cans for hours on end or turning the lights on and off, but that you can get stuck in your thoughts, too.

And I didn’t know that there is a type of OCD that convinces you that you are wrong, bad, or horrible.

I didn’t know that with moral OCD the obsession is being obsessed with being a good person.

That feels like a vast understatement, and right now I feel like I need to erase everything I just said, and then I need to spend a few more hours researching because I might have missed a detail, and if I miss a detail I could be misrepresenting a mental condition that I don’t even know I have, and that would be wrong for me to assume and misrepresent. That will make me feel like I need to edit one more time, just in case, and then I better check again just to be safe.

On the surface this is perfectionism and good work ethics, nothing wrong here, right? Except below the surface the part that I don’t say is I’m terrified to get it wrong.

If I say or do the wrong thing terrible things will happen.

This is a lie my brain believes is true, and trauma made it more true, because I believe no matter what everything is ultimately my fault.

I don’t know if I have OCD or not, which is why I am going to a therapist. I’ve been feeling this more and more intensely over the last year, and I have been tracking, endlessly tracking my medical symptoms because I thought a doctor could help. I know the medical issues are real because I see it in my blood work and test results, but I also know the primary driver is my nervous system, and now I know what’s making me so sick might not be what I thought it was this whole time.

I feel the urge to confess to you here, because thinking about being sick reminded me how I figured out what’s making me sick because I just was sick and I want to tell you everything that happened and I also want to tell you why it’s my fault.

And that’s the disorder talking.

It’s the voice of my pain, no matter what label it ends up having, and that voice deserves proper care, and that’s the real reason I’m writing this.

I’m writing this because I know the only way to stop the thought loops I have been stuck in is to stop, face them, and break them.

Normally when I produce an article it takes me hours because I write it and then I rewrite it and then I write it again; and then once more just in case because the others were clearly garbage and I have to get every single detail right.

My heart is elevated just thinking about publishing something I didn’t edit ten million times before I deemed it worthy because I already know the answer:

It’s never going to be good enough.

And right now I am stuck as fuck, and it’s my own damn fault which pisses me off because now I know why I’m so stuck and I also know I deserve compassion, but that makes me mad because I still don’t think I deserve to be nice to myself and I can’t finish anything because it’s not perfect.

After I publish my articles I almost always panic because I must have missed something or gotten a detail wrong.

I can never relax and feel like I did enough because I am never enough.

That’s the truth that I feel, and I know it’s not true, and you can tell me it’s not true, and guess what? I still won’t believe you.

I thought that meant there was something wrong with me, like why can’t I just accept a compliment? Why do I have to over think everything? And it turns out, that’s not even my fault; it’s just the way my brain works.

And I’m writing this because apparently writing about my mental health on the internet scratches a deep internal itch, but also because right now I don’t believe that I deserve to feel better, but I believe that you deserve to feel better and I want to help you feel better.

So even though I am going to have to take a propranolol and exercise until the adrenaline surge passes, I am going to publish this just like it is, without editing it.

My heart is literally racing in my chest right now and my thoughts are frantically trying to convince me that I should read it back at least once, just in case, but I know if I read this back I won’t stop with just once. I won’t stop until this is so perfectly polished it sounds like a text book instead of a messy little human talking about mental health, and recently my friend Bizzy told me that it’s okay to do things messy because it reminds people that we’re human.

I don’t believe that it’s okay for me to not be perfect, but I do believe Bizzy, and I can hold onto that while I work on believing it myself.

After I publish this, I am going to promise myself to make my new hyper fixation to be learning self worth, and that it’s okay to be imperfect. So for a while, things are going to be very messy, and that’s okay.

Even though my heart is racing and my nervous system is screaming for me to run, because I know that what I’m afraid of is letting people see my secret darkness. I’m afraid for you to read this and know that I actually really am a fraud because I tell people every day that they should be kind to themselves, but I believe that everyone except for me deserves that.

My hope is that by reading this, just one person feels less alone and that having that secret darkness inside of them doesn’t make them bad either. I hope if you see yourself in what I wrote about me, that it helps you feel like you deserve to get help, because nobody deserves to feel like this, and that includes me.

I know that I still don’t believe me, but I also know I will work very hard if I think I’m helping you, and that by default; it will help me.

So, take my hand.

We’re going to go to therapy, and I am going to share without filtering myself or trying to be perfect until I believe that it’s okay for me to be who and how I am.

P.s. I’m sorry that this is unedited. *cringes in I am a writer I promise*

P.S.S. I’m going to give myself the comfort of a strong SEO friendly title because holy fuck the way my body feels you’d think I was free diving off of Mount Everest, not publishing an unpolished article.

A note before you go:

This essay is a personal account of my own lived experience and the thoughts I was having while writing it. It reflects my perspective at this moment in time, not a clinical diagnosis or medical advice. I’m currently working with a mental health professional to better understand what I’m experiencing, and I recognize that my understanding may continue to evolve. If any part of this resonates with you, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental health professional rather than using my experience as a substitute for your own care.

*whispers: I definitely read a little bit back and fixed a few commas. Sky Daddy, forgive me for I have sinned.

Neither of them was taught to obey.

They were taught to want to obey.

There’s a difference, and that distinction matters more than almost anything else in this conversation.

Obedience under threat is relatively simple. You comply because the alternative is punishment, and the moment the threat disappears, so does the motivation to comply.

High-control systems rarely stop there.

Whether it’s a religion, a family, a marriage, or any community where belonging depends on conformity, the goal isn’t simply to shape behavior: It’s to shape identity.

You don’t just follow the rule; no, instead you become the kind of woman who follows it without question. You feel proud when you’re praised for your obedience and anxious when you’ve disappointed someone. You’re relieved when you’ve done well, and sometimes praise makes you warm in ways you never imagined.

Over time, the system no longer needs someone standing over your shoulder because your nervous system has learned to do the monitoring for them. The rules become automatic, and you become your own supervisor.

And, speaking as someone who accidentally earned a PhD in Good Girl Studies simply by existing… It’s remarkably effective conditioning.

Children aren’t born knowing how the world works. They learn by looking to the adults around them. Parents, teachers, religious leaders, and communities become the people who explain what’s safe, what’s dangerous, what’s expected, and what it means to be “good.” As children grow, they’re meant to gradually replace those borrowed rules with judgment of their own.

That’s exactly how childhood is supposed to work.

As we grow, however, something important is meant to happen. Those outside voices gradually become an inner voice. We stop relying entirely on someone else to tell us what’s right and begin developing our own judgment, values, and sense of direction.

High-demand systems interrupt that process.

Instead of developing an inner compass, you become incredibly good at reading everyone else’s. Somewhere along the way, you stop asking yourself what you think and start becoming an expert in anticipating what everyone else might think first.

It can look like people-pleasing from the outside, but from the inside, it feels much more urgent than that. You find yourself scanning someone’s face after you’ve spoken, wondering if you’ve said the wrong thing. You replay conversations on the drive home. You notice subtle shifts in tone that other people never even register. Approval doesn’t just feel nice; it feels regulating. Disapproval doesn’t just sting, it can feel surprisingly destabilizing.

And, I already know what you’re thinking. The answer is no, it isn’t because you’re too needy.

It’s actually because your nervous system learned, very early on, that belonging and safety were closely connected. If acceptance felt conditional, then paying close attention to the people holding the conditions became an intelligent survival strategy.

The trouble is that survival strategies don’t disappear just because you’ve grown up; they quietly follow you into adulthood, reminding you of the rules like the imaginary friend you never asked for.

One of the ways I explain this to my hypnotherapy clients is by explaining how the subconscious mind works. Whether you picture it as the part of your mind that’s quietly running old software in the background or simply the place where habits, emotional learning, and automatic patterns are stored, its job isn’t to make moral decisions; it’s to make fast ones. It notices what helped you survive yesterday and assumes it might be useful tomorrow. Most of the time, it’s incredibly efficient. But… occasionally… it’s still trying to protect an eight-year-old version of you who’s long since grown up.

Sometimes these strategies show up at work, where constructive feedback feels less like advice and more like a verdict on your worth. Sometimes they appear in friendships, where a delayed text message can send your mind searching for evidence that you’ve done something wrong.

And sometimes they show up in romantic relationships.

Women who have spent years learning to earn love through being very, very good can find emotional unavailability especially destabilizing. A distant partner may not be cruel or abusive, but their withdrawal can still activate an old and familiar panic. When affection, attention, or reassurance suddenly disappears, it can feel like more than disconnection.

It can feel like evidence that you have failed the relationship somehow.

That’s when the old rules come back with punishing force.

If I can just love better.

If I can be more patient.

If I can ask for less.

If I can stop being so much.

The relationship quietly becomes another place to prove your worth instead of a place where you are allowed to experience it. You become obsessed with restoring connection, not necessarily because the relationship is unhealthy, but because distance feels intolerable to a nervous system that once depended on approval to feel safe.

Emotional unavailability and emotional abuse are not the same thing. But the same conditioning that makes distance feel threatening can also make harmful relationships much harder to recognize.

When you’ve been taught that being a good woman means giving people the benefit of the doubt, your first instinct usually isn’t to question someone else’s behavior. It’s to question your own perception of it. You assume there’s context you don’t understand, a reason they’re acting this way, or something you could have done differently.

Instead of wondering, “Is this relationship treating me well?” you find yourself wondering, “How can I be easier to love?” The relationship slowly teaches you to become an expert in self-correction while almost never asking whether the other person is doing the same. That doesn’t mean you chose abuse or wanted an unhealthy relationship. It means the relationship may have been speaking a language your nervous system already recognized.

After enough years, you stop noticing how often you look outside yourself for confirmation that you are okay. You become so focused on reading the other person that you lose contact with the quieter questions inside you:

Do I feel safe here?

Am I allowed to have needs?

Can I disagree without being punished?

Does this relationship make room for me, too?

Stepford Was Never About Robots

I’ve been thinking about The Stepford Wives all week.

To be fair, that’s not unusual. Part of my neurodivergence involves watching the same movie on repeat until my brain finally decides we’ve extracted every possible psychological metaphor. This week, The Stepford Wives has been keeping the committee very busy.

The first time I watched The Stepford Wives, I thought it was a story about obedience. The more I watched it, the more I realized that wasn’t what unsettled me. What haunted me was the absence of an inner life. The women don’t seem to deliberate, wrestle with decisions, or even hesitate. They don’t appear to have private opinions they’re weighing against public expectations. Every answer is instant with a practiced smile. Every response seems prewritten. It’s as though the conversation between “What do I think?” and “What should I do?” has disappeared entirely. That’s the real horror of Stepford. Not that the women follow the rules, but that they no longer seem to notice there was ever another option.

It isn’t submission.

It’s automation.

The women stop checking inward before responding outward. They don’t seem to wrestle with decisions because the decision has already been made. Then, the question shifts from, “What do I want?” to, “What’s expected of me?” And eventually, the first question disappears altogether.

I don’t think that’s just a clever movie metaphor. I think it’s one of the things long-term conditioning can do to us. Your nervous system isn’t trying to limit your life; it’s trying to make your life more predictable. It notices the behaviors that consistently lead to safety, acceptance, or belonging, and it quietly begins moving them onto autopilot. The less energy your brain has to spend deciding what to do, the more efficiently it can respond the next time a similar situation appears.

That’s why so many recovering good girls almost always eventually say something along the lines of: “I don’t know what I want.”

Of course you don’t.

You spent years becoming incredibly fluent in attending to everyone else’s expectations. Your desires didn’t disappear, but they never had room to grow, let alone be expressed.

Why Permission Can Become Pleasurable

This is the part where everyone suddenly becomes incredibly interested in talking about literally anything else. (Unless you’re like me, and this is where you lean in)

We can talk about trauma, nervous systems, and even about shame, but the second we ask how all of that shaped our sexuality, everyone suddenly remembers they have emails to answer.

Personally… I think it’s 2026. We can handle a conversation about sex.

The same experiences that shape how we understand love, safety, shame, and belonging can also influence how we experience desire. Long before we understand sexuality, we are learning what earns approval, what creates closeness, what invites rejection, and how much of ourselves we are allowed to reveal.

For many women raised in high-demand environments, those lessons arrive wrapped in rules. Good girls don’t ask for too much. They don’t tempt men with a wanton shoulder. Good girls do not disappoint. Good girls do not take up space. Good girls obey.

Bonus points if you somehow manage to accomplish all of that while remaining effortlessly beautiful (and preferably blonde), endlessly patient, and incapable of making anyone uncomfortable. Women have been expected to perform impossible magic tricks for centuries.

Those messages do not dictate anyone’s future sexuality, and women with similar backgrounds can grow into completely different desires, fantasies, and relationships. Human sexuality is entirely too varied for a simple formula. Sexuality, like many other areas of the human condition, is a spectrum. Still, those early rules can influence which experiences later feel emotionally charged. If approval was precious, praise may feel unusually powerful. If you were expected to surrender your preferences, being asked what you want may feel almost startlingly intimate. If permission was carefully rationed, receiving it freely can bring relief, excitement, vulnerability, or all three at once.

This can become especially confusing when women discover that they are curious about guidance, surrender, structure, praise, or consensual power play after leaving a system that demanded obedience from them. The resemblance can create immediate shame. You may wonder whether enjoying any version of those dynamics means the conditioning succeeded or that some part of you still wants to be controlled.

But similar language doesn’t always describe the same experience.

There is a profound difference between having your choices taken away and choosing to explore what it feels like to release control for a while. There is a difference between obedience demanded as proof of goodness and surrender offered because it feels pleasurable, safe, or freeing. One experience asks you to disappear. The other depends on your presence, your preferences, and your ability to change your mind.

That distinction matters because desire isn’t a moral verdict on your healing. And having a fantasy doesn’t mean you approve of everything it resembles. Also, I really want you to pay attention to this one:

Curiosity does not obligate you to act on anything.

Sometimes an idea captures your attention because it offers something emotionally meaningful: the relief of not having to manage every detail, the pleasure of being deeply noticed, the thrill of being asked to name what you want, or the safety of exploring intensity inside clearly chosen boundaries.

Your nervous system, bless her heart, is not conducting a theological review every time something makes you blush. It responds to sensation, meaning, trust, anticipation, and emotional charge. It can recognize that an experience containing choice, communication, and the freedom to stop is fundamentally different from one built on fear or obligation.

That is why the more useful question may not be, “Why am I drawn to this?” as though desire requires a defense. A better question might be, “What does this allow me to feel?”

Maybe it allows you to feel wanted without performing for it. Maybe it lets you receive praise without first proving that you deserve it. Maybe it gives you structure while keeping the authority to say yes, no, slower, more, or not today. Maybe it simply makes you curious.

Whatever the answer is, you do not have to turn it into a diagnosis. You can let it be information. You can notice what draws you closer, what makes you soften, what sparks your imagination, and what leaves you completely unmoved. Desire does not have to be a test you pass. It can be a language you slowly learn to speak for yourself.

Consent Changes Everything

This is where I think many conversations about sexuality accidentally become too simplistic.

From the outside, two experiences can look remarkably similar. In both, one person gives direction, and another person follows it. If we only pay attention to the behavior, they can appear almost identical.

Psychologically, they may have almost nothing in common. The difference isn’t found in what the people are doing, but in how they arrived there. One experience begins with obligation. The other begins with choice.

One asks, “What do I have to do?”

The other asks, “What do I want?”

That’s why trauma-informed sex educators spend so much time talking about consent, communication, curiosity, and ongoing choice. They aren’t trying to create a long list of rules. They’re trying to understand the emotional experience taking place underneath the behavior.

The freedom to say yes matters, but the ability to say no matters just as much.

The freedom to change your mind halfway through matters.

The freedom to ask questions, negotiate boundaries, laugh, pause, or decide something isn’t actually for you matters too.

Those aren’t technicalities; they’re absolute necessities.

For women who spent years believing that permission belonged to parents, partners, religious leaders, or institutions, that kind of agency can feel surprisingly emotional. Sometimes the most intimate part of an experience isn’t the experience itself. It’s realizing that your preferences matter. That your comfort matters. That your curiosity matters. That someone else’s desire doesn’t automatically outrank your own.

There’s an enormous psychological difference between being expected to surrender yourself and choosing to share yourself.

One asks you to become smaller, while the other asks you to become more present.

One depends on silence, while the other depends on honesty.

One teaches you that love must be earned.

The other assumes you were already worthy of receiving it.

When people hear words like structure, guidance, or power exchange, they sometimes assume those words always describe the same thing.

They don’t.

Context changes meaning.

Choice changes meaning.

Consent changes meaning.

The same dynamic that feels frightening when it’s imposed can feel incredibly liberating when it is freely chosen, openly discussed, and built on mutual trust.

That’s why I don’t think the opposite of control is chaos. It’s having the freedom to decide what belongs in your life, what doesn’t, and knowing that your “yes” is only meaningful because your “no” is equally welcome.

Honestly, I think that’s one of the sexiest ideas in the world, because there’s something profoundly attractive about a woman who knows that her desires, her boundaries, and her voice all deserve a seat at the table.

Become a Student of Your Own Desire

Can I offer you a different way to think about desire?

What if your job isn’t to already know what you like?

What if your job is as easy as letting yourself be curious?

Recovering good girls often feel an enormous amount of pressure to figure themselves out as quickly as possible. We leave one set of rules behind and immediately start wondering what kind of woman we’re supposed to become next. We want the right answer. The right relationship. The right fantasy. The right label, and we expect nothing but perfection in our new roles, because we still haven’t learned another way to be, yet.

Unfortunately, desire doesn’t work that way. Desire is something we get to know over time, and, like a friendship, it deepens through attention. It becomes clearer the more opportunities we give it to speak.

That means your assignment isn’t to suddenly become a sex kitten, but more power to you if that’s the way you go.

Your assignment is to start paying attention.

And, one of the safest places to do that isn’t in another person’s bedroom. It’s in a book.

I’ve become a huge fan of romance novels *cough smut cough* for exactly this reason. They give us a private place to pay attention to our bodies, and our reaction before anyone else’s expectations have a chance to enter the room. Every story becomes a tiny experiment in self-discovery.

Which characters make you smile?

Which moments make you feel unexpectedly turned on?

Which moments make your heart race?

Which scenes gave you the ick?

Which ones make you think, “Well… I wasn’t expecting that, but I liked it.”

The characters are simply giving you something to react to. What you’re really paying attention to is yourself. Before you enthusiastically disappear into the romance section of your local bookstore, or more realistically, lose an entire weekend to BookTok recommendations, let me offer one practical piece of advice.

Read the trigger warnings.

Seriously.

Think of them the way you’d think about ordering salsa. There is a meaningful difference between mild, medium, and someone should probably alert the fire department.

The same is true of romance.

Some novels are gentle love stories. Others explore consensual power exchange, praise, dominance, submission, restraint, or other relationship dynamics. Some are emotionally intense. Some are sexually explicit. Some are both.

None of those categories are inherently better than the others.

The point isn’t to prove how adventurous you are. The point is to give yourself an experience that feels interesting without becoming overwhelming. There is absolutely nothing wrong with becoming curious about power play or kink. There is also absolutely nothing wrong with discovering that none of it appeals to you.

Curiosity isn’t commitment.

Fantasy isn’t obligation.

And reading a story isn’t signing a contract.

You’re collecting information and discovering your taste, and taste is something many recovering good girls were never encouraged to develop. For years, you were taught what a good woman should want. Now you get to discover what you want.

That’s a very different education.

One of the things I love most about fiction is that it gives us distance. You can notice your reactions before anyone asks you to explain them.

“I loved that.”

“Absolutely the fuck not.”

“That surprised me.”

“I want to know more about that.”

Every one of those responses teaches you something.

You don’t have to defend them or even act on them. You also definitely don’t have to organize them into a Playboy identity by Saturday.

You just have to notice. And if, somewhere along the way, your curiosity eventually inspires a little… independent field research…

Well.

I fully support a well-rounded education.

After all, it would be terribly irresponsible to rely entirely on the literature.

Before we end, I’d like to leave you with one final invitation.

Everything we’ve talked about today has lived mostly in your thinking mind. We’ve explored ideas, asked questions, and hopefully opened a few doors that have been closed for a very long time.

But understanding something intellectually and experiencing it emotionally are often two very different things.

One of the central ideas in this article is that there is a profound difference between obedience demanded as proof of goodness and surrender that is freely chosen because it feels safe, pleasurable, or deeply relieving.

That’s not a lesson your nervous system learns by reading about it.

It’s something you have to experience.

So I recorded a companion hypnosis for this week’s article.

Together, we’ll gently explore what it feels like to release control for a little while, not because anyone is taking it from you, but because you’re choosing to set it down. We’ll explore what it feels like to trust your own ability to decide when to hold on, when to let go, and what it feels like to discover that those are, and always have been, your decisions to make.

If you’re reading this on Substack, you’ll find the audio waiting just below this article.

If you’re reading somewhere else, the hypnosis is available exclusively for my Substack subscribers, where each Mistress, May I? essay is paired with a guided audio designed to move these ideas out of your head and gently into your experience.

Until next week…

May your curiosity be louder than your conditioning.

And may the next permission you receive be one you give yourself.

One of my favorite things about writing these articles is that sometimes words can only take us so far.

We can understand where our patterns came from and recognize the inherited rules we’ve been living by. We can even decide that we’re ready for something different, but knowing and feeling aren’t always the same thing.

That’s why I recorded today’s companion hypnosis.

Instead of just thinking about the old rules you’ve carried, this session invites your subconscious somewhere else entirely, a quiet library where every chapter of your life has been carefully preserved. Together, you’ll explore the rulebook that helped you survive, honor the wisdom it once held, and begin writing something new.

Not because your past was wrong or because you need to erase who you’ve been.

But because you’re allowed to choose what belongs in the next chapter.

Normally, these companion hypnosis recordings are reserved for members of the Good Girls Audio Club. This week, though, I wanted everyone to experience what these sessions feel like.

Also, this recording gets a special shoutout to my friend Anthony, who is already changing the rules and beginning to live a life more authentic to where he is now, instead of following the old rulebook.

If today’s recording resonates with you, enjoy it while it’s here.

Beginning next week, these bonus hypnosis sessions will once again become an exclusive part of the Good Girls Audio Club. Every article is paired with its own guided audio experience designed to help you move beyond insight and into lasting change.

And if you discover this weeks, or even months, from now, don’t worry. This recording will still be available individually through my Etsy shop for anyone who wants to revisit it or begin their own collection.

I hope this session helps you set down a few rules that no longer belong to you...

...and begin writing the ones that finally do.

-Karly

P.S. I made you a little something below 💕

Good Girl Rules

23.2MB ∙ PDF file

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Don’t split up.

Check the back seat.

Never investigate the strange noise by yourself.

In Zombieland, Columbus takes it a step further. He narrates an entire numbered list of survival rules as he moves through a wrecked, zombie-infested world:

Cardio.

Double tap.

Beware of bathrooms.

Wear your seatbelt.

Each one sounds absurd on its own, but they all have their reasons for existing. Together, they create a system built to survive the unsurvivable. A boy who used to be anxious and friendless in his old life turns out to be perfectly suited to the apocalypse, because he’d already been quietly rehearsing catastrophe for years. The rules aren’t really about zombies, but the various examples of zombie attacks in the introduction make you forget that fact. They’re about a mind that learned, long before the outbreak, that survival depends on never being caught unprepared.

His world changed completely, and the rules he’d built to survive it changed with it. He didn’t just wake up one day and decide to become hypervigilant with a list of rules he has to compulsively follow. He became vigilant through the same process that water becomes ice: a direct, physical response to conditions.

I started wondering how many of us are still living by rules our nervous systems wrote during the worst chapters of our lives.

I understand Columbus because I’m a little awkward, a little weird, and I also live by an invisible list of rules.

Work before you rest.

Think three steps ahead.

If something feels off, don’t let it go until you’ve figured it out.

Stay useful.

Stay prepared.

Don’t get caught off guard again.

I didn’t sit down one afternoon and consciously write those rules; in fact, I think most of them are ridiculous and exhausting, but I discovered them the same way Columbus probably did: by noticing the things my nervous system refused to stop doing long after the immediate danger had passed.

Looking back, I don’t think those rules were irrational. They were brilliant in a self-punishing kind of way, because they had to be. They got me through too many times where I had no clue if my world would ever be okay again.

The problem is that nervous systems don’t retire survival strategies simply because the calendar says the danger is over. They retire them when the body finally believes it’s safe enough to do something different.

Those are two very different timelines, and for those of us who spent years surviving things that didn’t involve zombies but often felt just as relentless, that realization changes everything.

Before the Zombies

One of the things I’ve been thinking about is that Columbus probably didn’t become a rule follower overnight. The zombies just gave him a delicious (pun intended) new reason to need the habit he’d already developed.

That made me wonder if most of us arrive at our own apocalypses carrying a rulebook we didn’t even realize we had. Long before life teaches us how to survive it, someone usually teaches us how we’re supposed to live.

For some women, that training is subtle.

For others, it’s so complete that they begin building an entire future around it before they’re old enough to imagine another one.

Over the last few years, social media has become fascinated with the idea of the “trad wife.” Depending on who you ask, she’s either the picture of traditional femininity or a symbol of everything women have fought to escape. More recently, there has been a string of teenage trad wife influencers, a sentence I never thought I’d write, taking to social media to defend their life choices.

Watching the reactions has been fascinating.

Because people keep comparing them to The Stepford Wives.

And honestly… I understand why.

In Ira Levin’s novel and its film adaptations, the women of Stepford are slowly replaced with eerily perfect versions of themselves. They smile more. They complain less. They’re endlessly beautiful, endlessly accommodating, endlessly devoted to making everyone else comfortable.

It’s horror dressed up as domestic bliss.

The terror isn’t just that they’re robots. It’s that they become exactly what everyone expected them to be.

The remake offers a satisfying ending. The computer chips controlling the women are destroyed, and suddenly they wake up. Underneath the programming, they’re brilliant executives, artists, lawyers, scientists, powerful women who were there all along, just waiting to be set free.

I’ve always wanted that ending to be true, but unfortunately, that’s just not how conditioning usually works, and especially in this case because women like me weren’t replaced by robots.

There isn’t another fully formed personality hiding underneath the programming, waiting for someone to flip the right switch. The programming is the operating system we were taught to build.

I was that teenage trad wife.

I got married at nineteen and became a mother five days after my twenty-first birthday. I was learning how to run a home while my peers were learning how to build careers, travel, live alone, make mistakes, and slowly discover who they were outside of everyone else’s expectations.

At the time, it didn’t feel strange; it felt like I checked a box on my list that was supposed to guarantee my happily ever after. Side note: That’s funny, but Mormons have one of those. There is quite literally a list of the things you’re supposed to do and do perfectly in order to get into heaven and be with your family forever.

That’s the part that’s hardest to explain.

I wasn’t forced into my life.

I walked into it willingly.

Looking back, I don’t think I ever stopped to ask where those desires came from in the first place. I just always knew I wanted to be a mom, and then I became one, easy as that.

When every adult you trust celebrates one path, every story points toward one destination, and every version of a “good woman” looks remarkably similar, it becomes surprisingly difficult to recognize how much of your future was imagined for you before you ever had the chance to imagine one for yourself.

Before I ever learned survival rules, I had good girl rules.

Be agreeable.

Be grateful.

Don’t ask for too much.

Keep the peace.

Make yourself useful.

Carry more than your share.

Don’t make people uncomfortable.

Don’t be difficult.

Nobody hands you a laminated checklist titled How to Become a Stepford Wife.

Instead, the rules arrive one conversation, compliment, Sunday school lesson, family expectation, and one cultural script at a time until they become so normal you stop noticing they’re there.

For a while, those rules can even feel like they’re working.

You’re praised and rewarded for following them. (Hello praise kink in the making) And you build an identity around following them, until one day, despite doing everything “right,” life falls apart anyway.

The marriage ends.

The church no longer feels like home.

The people or systems you trusted most become the very things you have to survive.

And suddenly the rulebook you’ve trusted your entire life no longer explains the world you’re living in.

Nature abhors a vacuum.

So the nervous system writes a new one.

Then the World Changes

Leaving the old rules behind doesn’t automatically teach you how to live. Sometimes it just drops you into a different, more chaotic kind of survival, the world after, when the rules you knew no longer apply and no one has handed you new ones.

If The Stepford Wives is about inherited programming, Zombieland is about what happens after the apocalypse, when you’re the one who has to write the rules from scratch, in real time, with no guarantee you’re getting them right.

This is where the nervous system takes over the authorship your family or your culture used to hold. It starts writing its own commandments, usually without asking your permission:

Stay busy. Think three steps ahead. Don’t relax. Expect the worst. Be prepared for anything. Everything is urgent. Never get caught off guard again.

These weren’t handed to you by a parent or a pulpit. They were written in blood, by betrayal, by abuse, by courtrooms, by 2 a.m. panic attacks, by every moment your body quietly vowed, we are never letting that happen to us again.

This is, in a very literal sense, what trauma researchers describe when they talk about a nervous system stuck in sympathetic activation, the fight-or-flight state, long after the actual threat has passed. Your body isn’t malfunctioning. It’s doing exactly what it was built to do: remembering. Hypervigilance isn’t a character flaw. It’s a survival adaptation that generalized, the way a smoke detector that’s gone off during a real fire will keep going off at burnt toast for a long time afterward. Not because it’s broken. Because it’s trying, desperately, to make sure you’re never caught by surprise again.

That’s why these rules feel so difficult to question, let alone break. They didn’t come from weakness. They came from wisdom, hard-won, expensive, blood-earned wisdom that kept you alive through something that should never have happened to you in the first place.

The Problem Isn’t That They’re Wrong

The hardest part of healing isn’t identifying the old programming. Naming it is almost the easy part. The hard part is realizing that you can physically leave the environment that created the programming, move out, cut contact, get the divorce, leave the church, and still wake up every morning inside the exact same nervous system that built its whole architecture around that environment.

Some mornings, before anything has even happened, your body has already decided today is an emergency. Nothing is on fire. No one has yelled. No crisis has arrived. Your inbox is empty of anything alarming, and your phone hasn’t even buzzed with bad news. And yet everything still feels urgent: a low hum of something is about to go wrong, something is coming, how are you going to keep everyone safe running underneath a quiet morning drinking coffee in bed.

Every decision starts to feel like it carries impossible weight.

You can’t fully explain why choosing a restaurant or answering an email feels like defusing a bomb.

You just know that some part of you believes one wrong move could make everything collapse.

If you’ve experienced that, I wonder whether you’ve also blamed yourself for it, told yourself you’re being dramatic, or too sensitive, or that you should be over it by now. I know I have. I did it literally today, and then I did it extra because doing it the first time made me late on the schedule I made for myself to write this article. Last time I checked, no one is looming over me demanding to know why I haven’t finished yet. I do that myself, meaning I have fully taken on the role of my bullies *cough* abusers for them.

But lately I’ve been considering another possibility. Maybe we’re not broken. Maybe we’re living between two operating systems that haven’t finished the handoff.

One system still believes survival depends on perfect vigilance. The other quietly knows the world has changed. One insists rest is dangerous, that the moment you let your guard down is the moment it happens again. The other understands that rest is not the opposite of safety; it’s evidence of it. One believes your worth is measured by how much you can carry without breaking. The other keeps gently trying to remind you that you’re allowed to put something down, even if nobody claps when you do.

Neither voice feels imaginary because they both sound exactly like you, in your own inner voice, with your own turns of phrase. That’s what makes this transition so incredibly disorienting; you’re not choosing between yourself and an intruder. You’re choosing between two versions of yourself, one forged by necessity and one still waiting to be trusted.

Learning a New World

One of the things I love about Amélie is that it never pretends the world is safe or simple. Her father is emotionally distant. The people around her are lonely, misread each other constantly, carry old grief they never quite put down. The film doesn’t sand away the hard parts to make room for whimsy.

And yet, there is also so much beauty, curiosity, and play. A woman who finds delight in cracking the top of a crème brûlée with a spoon, in skipping stones, in the small, specific textures of an ordinary day. Amélie doesn’t earn her joy by first solving all her problems. She practices noticing it, deliberately, almost as a discipline, in the middle of an unresolved life.

That’s what healing has started to feel like for me. Not pretending the world never hurt me. Not forgetting what happened, or performing forgiveness I don’t feel. I wasn’t about to discard the wisdom my nervous system fought so hard to earn, as if it were some embarrassing mistake rather than a survival strategy that once did exactly what it needed to do.

Just slowly, unevenly, discovering that my whole life no longer has to be organized around danger. That noticing the light on the kitchen wall in the late afternoon can sit right next to the vigilance, instead of being crowded out by it.

Some days I can feel that shift clearly. Other days I wake up back in Zombieland, running an inventory of everything that could go wrong before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee, cardio and double-tap and check the back seat, except there’s no zombie, just a Monday to-do list.

On those days, the work isn’t becoming a different person. It’s remembering that another version of me already exists, running quietly underneath the alarm. The one who knows we’re building something different now. The one who believes a slower pace isn’t the same as failure. The one who dares to want things again, not just survive them.

Maybe This Is the Next Chapter

For a long time, I thought healing meant deleting every survival strategy I’d ever developed, clearing the hard drive and starting clean. I’m not so sure anymore. Some of those rules saved my life. They deserve gratitude, not shame. A smoke detector that saved you from a real fire once doesn’t deserve to be ripped off the ceiling and thrown in the trash.

But gratitude doesn’t mean those rules get to run the rest of your life unquestioned. It just means you get to sit down with them, really sit with them, and ask which ones are still doing their job, and which ones are still shouting fire at a piece of burnt toast.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether your nervous system has rules. Of course it does. Everyone’s does, and you’re lying to both of us if you think you’re an exception to that rule. Maybe the real question is this:

Which rules still protect you, and which ones belong to a world that no longer exists?

Because eventually there comes a point when no one else gets to hand you the rulebook.

Not your family.

Not your religion.

Not your former relationship.

Not even your own survival instincts, however faithfully they’ve served you.

Eventually, you have to begin writing your own. One rule at a time, tested against your actual life instead of the life you used to have to survive.

And I suspect that’s one of the hardest, the messiest, and somehow, the most hopeful, things any of us will ever learn to do.

One Last Question

If your life no longer had to revolve around surviving…

What kind of world would you begin building instead?

On Wednesday, we’re exploring something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: why so many women recovering from rigid systems quietly wish someone would just tell them what to do, and whether it’s possible to create a different kind of structure, one that doesn’t demand obedience, but slowly teaches us how to trust ourselves instead.

At first, survival is something you do. Then it’s something your nervous system expects. Eventually, it becomes the person you believe you are.

And the people who love you can’t understand why you won’t just move on, and you can’t understand how they don’t see that moving on was never actually an option.

The Case

In 1978, Laurie Strode was seventeen years old when a man in a white mask walked into her babysitting job and tried to kill her.

She survived.

Cut to 2018. Laurie is in her sixties, living alone in a house she has fortified like a bunker, reinforced doors, security cameras, a basement full of weapons, escape routes mapped and memorized. She drinks too much. She bursts into tears without warning. She has been married and divorced twice. Her daughter grew up resenting her, raised by a woman so consumed by preparing for the next attack that she couldn’t be fully present for the life that was actually happening around her.

Everyone in Laurie’s world thinks she’s paranoid, and they’re not entirely wrong about that; Laurie IS paranoid, but that’s kind of the point. What they’re wrong about is what it means.

Because here is what the people around Laurie in 2018 don’t know, and what most of us forget by the time the credits roll: she was right. Every single time she said he’s coming back, she was right. The thing the people who loved her dismissed as obsession turned out to be an accurate threat assessment. Her hypervigilance wasn’t a symptom of being broken. It was a nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do, maintaining the alarm that went off in 1978, because no one ever came along to tell it the danger had passed.

That’s not paranoia; it’s a woman who learned, at seventeen, that the world is genuinely dangerous, and never received a single piece of evidence that contradicted it.

The question this investigation is asking isn’t why couldn’t Laurie move on.

The question is: what does it cost a person when they’re right, but no one believes them, and what does surviving on high alert for forty years do to a life?

The Investigation

Here is the thing about the original 1978 Laurie Strode: she is facing acute trauma.

Something terrible is happening. Right now. Tonight. Her nervous system is responding appropriately: adrenaline, hyperawareness, the kind of focused terror that keeps people alive in emergencies. By the end of the film, she has survived. The monster has been stopped. She is safe, at least for now.

This is what we typically mean when we talk about PTSD. Something terrible happened. The nervous system responded. Eventually, with time and support and the actual absence of the threat, the alarm is supposed to quiet.

But here’s what happens when it doesn’t.

When the threat returns, or when the nervous system never receives convincing proof that it ended, the alarm doesn’t quiet. It becomes the background noise of your life. It stops being a response and starts being a way of being. It stops being a response and starts being a way of being. The alarm stops asking, “Am I safe?” And starts assuming that you aren’t. Hypervigilance stops being a response to danger and becomes the lens through which you experience the world.

This is the clinical difference between PTSD and CPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD says: something terrible happened. CPTSD says: something terrible kept happening, or never fully stopped, until surviving it became the whole architecture of who I am.

Original Laurie is PTSD. 2018 Laurie is CPTSD. And the forty years between them is the story no one tells about trauma, not the original wound, but what happens to a life when that wound never closes.

What hypervigilance actually is

Hypervigilance isn’t anxiety, though it can look like it, and it’s not paranoia, though it gets called that. It is the nervous system doing its job, scanning the environment for threat, maintaining readiness, refusing to stand down, in a context where the original threat has technically passed, but the body is still waiting for proof that it’s safe.

The body doesn’t take your word for it. It needs evidence. And if the evidence never comes, or if life keeps delivering new evidence that the original assessment was correct, the alarm stays on.

For 2018 Laurie, the evidence that Michael is coming back eventually arrives, because he does. But by then, the cost of forty years of sustained alert has already been paid. Two failed marriages. A daughter who doesn’t trust her. Years of being dismissed by everyone around her as the woman who couldn’t let it go.

Here’s the thing: Laurie was right the whole damn time, but being right didn’t save her from the cost of the hypervigilance, and being vindicated didn’t give her back the life that was spent in preparation for a threat no one else believed in.

Laurie Strode was left to survive alone, while the people she loved the most turned their backs on her, and acted like her response to survival was the issue. Not that she survived a terribly life-changing event, but that she stayed “broken” in their eyes for too long and failed to get on with a normal life, as if there were such a thing as “normal” for Laurie. And that’s the thing about surviving on high alert. The relief of being right doesn’t feel like relief.

It feels like exhaustion.

The cost of being right

There’s something nobody talks about when we discuss trauma survivors and hypervigilance, and it’s this: sometimes the hypervigilance is accurate.

Sometimes the threat is real.

Sometimes the person everyone around you thinks is overreacting is simply the only one paying close enough attention.

And that creates a particular kind of hell, because you can’t relax, not because you’re broken (from experience I can say you feel pretty broken) but because you’ve learned that relaxing is when things go wrong. Your nervous system has the data. It has been collecting it for years, and the data keeps confirming the original conclusion: it’s not safe to let your guard down.

Laurie Strode couldn’t move on because every time she got close to moving on, Michael Myers came back. The lesson her nervous system took from that wasn’t you’re overreacting. It was you were right to never stop watching.

The people around her called it paranoia.

The film calls it vindication, but it’s actually a nervous system that adapted so completely to ongoing threat that it can no longer distinguish between vigilance and survival, because for Laurie, they were always the same thing.

The Evidence

In 2022, my ex-husband drove a BMW off an overpass.

I didn’t witness it, which is one of the markers for a PTSD diagnosis: being in or witnessing a near-death experience. I was states away. But I felt my nervous system change in the weeks and months leading up to it, and I think that’s worth explaining, because most people only understand PTSD in retrospect, and I was aware of it happening in real time, which is a particular kind of hell for extremely self-aware neurodivergents like me.

There is nothing more agonizing than knowing exactly what’s happening and why within your nervous system and your physical body, and being completely unable to stop it.

For months before the crash, money had been disappearing from our accounts. When I asked about it, he’d lash out verbally, with enough force that I learned quickly that asking the question cost more than the money did. The explanations came in pieces, each one just plausible enough to almost hold: a round of drinks for everyone at a bar, a sports bet that didn’t land, a stupid decision he regretted. I knew there was more. I always knew. What I didn’t know yet was that the money was going to strip clubs, champagne and lap dances, with the insistence that none of it was cheating. And even when he told me that, I knew there was still more that wasn’t being said.

By the time he went off that overpass, we had nothing. I was a stay-at-home mother with no savings, no degree, no income, no fallback. I had built my entire life inside a structure that he controlled, and when that structure started cracking, I had no way out, not just for me, but for my kids.

Here is what I want to say about a crash like that, even when you don’t witness it, even when you’re states away: it is a full-body event. The call that something catastrophic has happened, even to someone who has been emotionally harming you, lands in the nervous system like a bomb. I felt something shift in me in those weeks. Not metaphorically, but physically. The instant dread at recognizing a pattern. The way I slept changed. The way I parsed every interaction for threat changed. I was watching for the next thing before the current thing had even finished landing.

Because my safety, my children’s safety, depended on keeping him stable. And keeping him stable meant learning to read his moods before they became an issue. It meant anticipating. Preparing. Scanning. Making myself small enough not to trigger anything, present enough to manage everything, and useful enough to justify my continued existence in a situation that had no good exits.

Finally, when I knew I couldn’t by myself any more time, I took my father up on what he had been offering for months. My dad flew to Florida to get me and the kids. One of my brothers flew down to help me pack. Without that, I don’t know how we would have gotten out. And I say that not for sympathy, trust me, at this point I know damn well none is coming, but because I want to be very clear about this: I had help. Real, tangible, flew-across-the-country help. And I am still, in 2026, fighting to build something from scratch. I am still working on providing for myself in a way that doesn’t depend on anyone else’s stability. I am still waiting for the next bad thing, because the next bad thing keeps happening, exactly like I say it will.

Every few months, just when I think I might be through the worst of it, something new pops up like the world’s worst jack in the box. Something I didn’t cause, something I didn’t choose, and somehow I still end up absorbing the cost of it anyway. My nervous system hasn’t stood down, because it hasn’t been given convincing evidence that it’s safe to.

I’ve had people who have been working overtime trying to get me to believe my hypervigilance is a character flaw, but honestly? That’s a nervous system doing the math.

And the math keeps checking out.

Case Reflection

Before the autopsy, here are some questions worth sitting with and thinking about as you go about your day.

What part of you is still scanning for the next threat, even in rooms where the threat is gone?

What did survival teach you to call your personality?

How much energy are you spending managing the stability of someone whose instability was never your fault?

And this one, the one I think is the hardest: if your hypervigilance turned out to be accurate, if everything you were dismissed for turned out to be right, what do you do with the years you spent being told you were overreacting?

Autopsy Report

Subject: A nervous system that never received proof the danger had ended.

Cause of Death: Chronic activation. The alarm that was installed during the original threat was never disarmed, because the threat, in various forms, kept returning.

Mechanism: Hypervigilance becoming identity. When sustained alert runs long enough, the nervous system stops asking Am I safe right now and starts asking Who am I without the watching. The vigilance stops being a response and becomes the self.

Evidence Collected: Forty years of preparation for a threat no one else believed in. Two marriages. A daughter who learned to see her mother as a warning rather than a woman. A basement full of weapons that turned out to be exactly necessary. A life spent being right in ways that offered no relief.

Contributing Factors: The absence of anyone who believed her. A world that kept asking her to move on before the thing she was moving on from had finished happening. A nervous system designed for survival, deployed in a life that required something else entirely.

Findings: The subject was not broken. The subject was adapted. The hypervigilance wasn’t a malfunction; it was the correct response to an environment that kept confirming the original threat assessment. What it cost her was not a symptom of her damage. It was the price of being right in a world that kept telling her she was wrong.

Manner of Death: Conditioned, then vindicated, in that order, at great expense to Laurie.

One Last Question

The 2018 version of Laurie Strode isn’t some cautionary tale about what trauma does to a person. She’s a precise, unflinching portrait of what happens when a nervous system adapts completely to ongoing threat, and then has to keep living in a world that has moved on without it.

She isn’t paranoid; she’s prepared.

The question her story leaves behind isn’t why couldn’t she let it go.

It’s: what would it have taken for her nervous system to believe it was finally safe?

And maybe, sitting with that question honestly:

What would it take for yours?

If you recognized yourself anywhere in this investigation, you don’t have to convince yourself to “just relax.”

Hypervigilance isn’t a character flaw, and it isn’t something you can reason your way out of. It’s a nervous system that learned to keep you alive.

Healing doesn’t begin by forcing the alarm to turn off. It begins by giving your nervous system enough new experiences that it no longer has to stay on high alert.

That’s the work I do with clients every day as a Certified Master Hypnotist specializing in trauma recovery, emotional abuse, and nervous system regulation. I help people move at the pace their nervous system can actually tolerate, without forcing, reliving, or pretending they’re “over it.”

If you’re ready to stop surviving and start feeling safe inside your own life again, I’d love to hear your story and help you begin writing a different one.

Not a good one.

Not one that would simply help me stay consistent.

I mean the one.

The one that would finally organize my business, support my children, help me earn enough money to stand on my own two feet, and somehow quiet the constant sense that I was falling behind.

Every week I was convinced I’d finally figured it out, only to make it to Tuesday, Wednesday, if I was lucky, before tearing it apart and starting over.

I’d rearrange ideas. Move articles, rename series, obsessively research SEO, and of course the regularly programmed self-loathing comparison to creators who seemed to have everything figured out. I’d color-code, reorganize, optimize, simplify because I’m doing too much and then immediately overcomplicate, and convince myself that this version, this one, was finally the answer.

I’d put the meticulously put-together plan into action, and then I’d spot a flaw, and a flaw, in nervous systems like mine isn’t just intolerable, it’s completely destabilizing. I was convinced that if I didn’t fix the perceived flaw, everything would unravel.

So, I’d start over.

I told myself I was trying to build a business, and that to be successful I needed to get it right, but looking back, I think I was trying to build a life raft.

Because it was never really about the content plan; it was about the feeling of safety I have been desperately trying to build.

I Thought I Needed a Better Plan

There is something every trauma survivor understands. If we want a different life, we know we’re the one who has to build it.

I know that no one is coming to save me. There is no knight in shining armor riding up to extend a hand to the helpless maiden, and no fairy godmother coming to save me from my to-do list with a night of dancing at the ball.

But when you say that to people, especially people who aren’t traumatized, you usually get met with a very specific reaction that feels like people think you’re practicing self-pity, or wanting comfort, when really it’s just… reality.

I’m incredibly fortunate to have a father who has given me the space and support to rebuild my life after divorce, trauma, and chronic illness. I don’t take that for granted for a second, but I also know I want more than barely surviving.

I want to support myself financially.

I want a home that belongs to me.

I want to create meaningful work that helps people.

I want my children to watch their mother build something she believes in.

So I put in the work, or at least, I tried to.

The problem was that last summer, something shifted. I don’t want to get into the details because I already did in the past. There is something bold and empowering about coming forward with parts of your story, but there is also the blowback, whispers, and blame. That’s not the point though.

The point is that I experienced something terrifying, that scared me in a way I hadn’t experienced before, and unlike the event itself, my nervous system never realized it was over.

The Year My Nervous System Forgot How to Stand Down

The closest visual I’ve ever found for what hypervigilance feels like comes from the 2019 film Ready or Not. At the end of the film, the main character sits quietly, covered in blood, staring into space after surviving unimaginable chaos.

That’s what hypervigilance feels like.

After spending the entire night running, fighting, hiding, and surviving, Grace walks out of the mansion and collapses onto the front steps. She’s covered in blood, and the danger is finally over, but she doesn’t suddenly become relieved or joyful. She just sits there, staring into the distance, almost hollow. Her body made it out alive, but her nervous system hasn’t gotten the message yet.

That’s what hypervigilance feels like.

It’s the inability to remember what it felt like before survival became your full-time job, and realizing you’ve spent so long scanning for danger that your brain has forgotten how to linger on beauty, curiosity, or joy.

It’s looking at your own life one day and recognizing every piece of it, while quietly wondering where you went.

Except in my case, the blood was metaphorical.

There wasn’t one dramatic moment where I suddenly fell apart. Instead, like a creeping poisonous fog, I slowly stopped recognizing myself. The bright, curious, optimistic woman I’d spent years becoming seemed to disappear beneath a layer of numbness, panic, exhaustion, and relentless vigilance.

Everything felt dangerous.

Everything felt urgent.

And every damn thing felt like it carried the weight of my entire future.

When Orange Juice Becomes a Life-or-Death Decision

Here’s the strange thing about hypervigilance.

It really doesn’t care whether you’re escaping a burning building or choosing between orange juice and guava juice with your gluten-free toast.

Every decision feels like it has life-or-death importance attached to it, and the worst part is that you know it’s not. Your rational mind usually knows the decision isn’t that serious, but your nervous system isn’t listening to your rational mind.

It’s listening for danger.

When you’ve lived through trauma, especially repeated or prolonged trauma, your brain becomes extraordinarily good at detecting threats.

That’s because one of the brain’s primary alarm systems, the amygdala, becomes more sensitive. At the same time, the parts of the brain responsible for perspective, planning, and calming that alarm can become harder to access when you’re overwhelmed.

Your brain isn’t trying to ruin your life.

It’s trying to keep you alive.

The trouble is that once your nervous system learns the world isn’t safe, it often starts treating ordinary decisions as though they’re life-or-death situations. So yes, choosing your morning juice can suddenly feel catastrophic.

Planning your week can feel catastrophic.

Sending an email can feel catastrophic.

Because your nervous system isn’t asking, “Which option do I prefer?”

It’s asking, “Which option keeps me alive?”

We understand this instinctively when we watch someone survive something unimaginable. No one watches Grace walk out of that mansion and thinks, “She really needs to get herself together.” We expect her to be shaken. We expect her body to need time to realize it’s safe.

Yet somehow, when it’s our own nervous system struggling in the aftermath of trauma, we call ourselves lazy. Dramatic. Weak. Broken. We wonder why we can’t just move on.

We offer ourselves a level of criticism we would never dream of offering someone else who had just survived a nightmare.

What Hypervigilance Actually Feels Like

For me, hypervigilance looked like bursting into tears over things that looked small from the outside.

It looked like replaying conversations over and over to make sure I hadn’t imagined them.

It looked like constantly asking trusted friends, “Am I crazy?” and feeling like a burden for needing so much reassurance.

It looked like random bursts of anger that seemed to come out of nowhere that I struggled to express or find an outlet for because I have never been allowed to be angry.

It looked like waking up already exhausted because my brain had apparently been working overtime while I slept.

And do you want to know what the most frustrating part is?

Most of the time I knew the thing my brain was obsessing over wasn’t actually an emergency.

I knew it.

Which meant I got to experience two kinds of suffering at once:

That’s one of the cruelest parts of complex trauma, because knowing something intellectually doesn’t necessarily change what your nervous system believes emotionally.

When Your Brain Starts Looking for Danger Everywhere

The thing about being hypervigilant is, it isn’t just being jumpy; it’s becoming a full-time detective. Your brain starts scanning literally everything: other people’s facial expressions, the tone of a text message, sudden silences, delays, and tiny changes. But the fun doesn’t stop there! You also scan future possibilities and worst-case scenarios, and eventually, it starts scanning you, too.

Was I overreacting?

Did I remember that conversation correctly?

Was I actually the problem?

Was I selfish?

Needy?

Manipulative?

Did I make everything about myself?

Your own perception starts feeling suspicious, and not because you’ve suddenly become irrational, but because trauma teaches you that getting reality wrong can be dangerous.

So you check.

And then you check again.

And then you absolutely have to ask someone else.

And then, even after they answer, you have to ask another person just to make sure.

It’s not because you’re incapable of thinking for yourself, or you’re needy. It’s because somewhere deep inside, your nervous system is desperately trying to prevent another catastrophe, and it doesn’t trust your perception of reality.

I Wasn’t Looking for the Perfect Content Plan

I was Looking for Safety. I spent hours, sometimes entire days, moving pieces around.

This article belongs here.

No... there.

Maybe the podcast should move to Wednesday.

Maybe I need a different niche.

Maybe I should sound more professional and stop posting thirst traps.

Maybe I should stop talking about horror.

Maybe people don’t actually want memoir.

Maybe I need to teach more.

Maybe less.

Maybe...

Maybe...

Maybe.

Looking back, I wasn’t creating; I was just trying to eliminate uncertainty before I ran into the possibility of things going wrong because that’s what trauma does. It convinces you that if you can just anticipate every possible problem, you’ll finally be safe enough to relax.

The catch is that there is no amount of planning capable of convincing a traumatized nervous system that danger has passed.

Because certainty and safety are not the same thing.

Living Inside Three Different Bodies

Here’s where my story gets even messier.

I’m almost certainly neurodivergent, very likely AuDHD, though I don’t have a formal diagnosis. I do have a diagnosis of PTSD, although if I’m being honest, complex PTSD feels like a far more accurate description of my experience.

I’m also chronically ill.

Those three things don’t always want the same things.

My nervous system wants predictability.

My ADHD-flavored brain craves novelty.

My body regularly reminds me that my energy has limits.

Meanwhile, I’m homeschooling two of my three children, co-parenting with a high-conflict ex, building a hypnotherapy practice from the ground up, and trying to create work that actually matters to me for the long term.

I kept trying to force myself into systems that worked beautifully for other people, and then I blamed myself when they didn’t work for me.

I wasn’t failing because I lacked discipline, even though that’s what I told myself.

I was trying to solve a nervous system problem with productivity.

“You Don’t Function Like You Used to.”

Years ago, one of my closest friends said something that has echoed through my mind ever since.

“You don’t function like you used to.”

She said it knowing it would cut deep, and it did, because it wasn’t wrong; she was telling the truth.

The problem wasn’t what she said.

The problem was what I heard.

I didn’t hear, “You’ve survived something enormous.”

I heard, “You’re broken now.”

Once that belief took root, everything became evidence that I don’t function, rather than proof that I am functioning under impossible situations.

Every forgotten task.

Every abandoned project.

Every unfinished plan.

Every bad day.

I wasn’t collecting proof that I was healing; I was collecting proof that I had failed to become who I used to be.

The Loneliness Nobody Talks About

I also needed people.

A lot of people.

I’m a verbal processor, which means I don’t think before I talk; I think by talking.

Trauma has a way of turning your thoughts into a pile of loose papers scattered across the floor. Verbal processing is the act of picking them up one at a time. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m feeling until I hear the words come out of my own mouth. Sometimes the answer appears halfway through a sentence I didn’t even know I was going to say.

To someone watching from the outside, it can look like I’m going in circles.

From the inside, it’s the moment the fog finally starts to clear.

So I talked to anyone who would listen. I talked to my therapist, to my closest friends, to my boyfriend, to the pages of my journal, to the tarot cards spread across my kitchen table. I talked to anything that would let me slowly gather those scattered pieces into something that made sense.

And still... I felt like I was drowning.

That’s another cruel trick hypervigilance plays on you. It doesn’t just convince you the world is dangerous. Eventually, it convinces you that you are difficult to carry through it. Every time I picked up the phone, there was a little voice asking, “Haven’t you already talked about this?”

“They’re going to get tired of hearing this.”

“You’re too much.”

“You’re becoming a burden.”

The irony is that I wasn’t asking for someone to rescue me. Most of the time, I wasn’t even asking them to solve the problem. I was asking them to help me carry it for a few minutes while my nervous system remembered what safety felt like, and sometimes that can be a lot, and when you’ve spent enough time in survival mode, even receiving love starts to feel dangerous.

So you begin measuring every conversation.

Every text.

Every moment someone shows up for you.

You start keeping an imaginary ledger in your head, convinced you’re taking more than you’re giving. So, like so many trauma survivors, I did what felt responsible.

I pulled away.

Not because I wanted to be alone, but because I thought I was protecting the people I loved from becoming exhausted by me. The tragedy is that isolation feels like relief in the moment. You stop worrying about being too much because there’s no one left to burden, but our nervous systems don’t heal in isolation.

They’re built to heal in safe connection.

Sometimes the very thing we’re withdrawing from is the thing our brains need most to finally believe the danger has passed.

What Finally Changed

The cycle didn’t end because I finally discovered the perfect content plan.

It ended because something inside me finally broke open. The grief I’d spent months trying to outrun and outplan finally demanded to be felt. And as terrifying as grief is, because it truly feels like it might swallow you whole, it also created something I hadn’t had in a very long time.

Space.

Enough space for my actual voice to begin whispering what I want to create again.

Enough space to remember what I enjoyed before everything became about survival.

Enough space to realize that I’d spent a year trying to earn a feeling that productivity could never give me.

Safety.

Maybe This Was Never About Productivity

From the outside, hypervigilance can look like perfectionism.

Or indecision.

Or procrastination.

Or endlessly reorganizing your planner.

Or researching until two in the morning.

Or rewriting the same email fifteen times before you finally hit send.

Or spending six hours trying to build the perfect content calendar.

From the inside... it feels like trying to survive. That’s what makes trauma so difficult to recognize, especially in ourselves.

If someone watched Grace walk out of that mansion at the end of Ready or Not, covered in blood and staring into the distance, they wouldn’t expect her to bounce back the next morning. They wouldn’t accuse her of lacking discipline because she couldn’t concentrate. They wouldn’t roll their eyes if she startled at every sound or needed people around her while she tried to make sense of what she’d lived through.

We understand that survival leaves a mark. At least... we understand it when it’s someone else.

When it’s us, we call ourselves lazy.

We call ourselves dramatic.

We wonder why we can’t just get over it.

We compare ourselves to who we were before our nervous systems learned to live in survival mode, and we treat every difference like evidence that we’ve failed.

Maybe we’ve been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

What if we started asking, “What happened to my nervous system that made this feel necessary?”

Because the truth is, your brain has been doing exactly what it was designed to do. It adapted and learned. It protected you. The problem is that brains don’t automatically know when the danger has passed. Sometimes they need help remembering, and I’m not going to lie… I’m still learning what safety actually feels like.

I’m still recovering.

I’m still figuring out how to build a life around curiosity instead of catastrophe.

Some days I still catch myself opening another Google Doc or rearranging another content calendar because some part of my brain still believes that if I can just make everything perfect, I’ll finally be safe, but now, at least, I recognize what’s happening.

I don’t meet that version of myself with shame anymore.

I meet her with compassion, because she isn’t broken.

She’s surviving the only way she knows how, and maybe you are, too.

Maybe the next time you find yourself reorganizing your planner for the fifth time, researching until two in the morning, replaying a conversation you can’t let go of, or convincing yourself that one wrong decision will ruin everything...

Pause, not to judge yourself, but to get curious, because what looks like perfectionism from the outside may actually be a nervous system that’s been working overtime to keep you alive.

And once you know what you’re looking at, it’s a little easier to stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

...and start asking,

“What the fuck happened to me?”

Episode One of the Good Girls Audio Club is here, and I have to admit... this one surprised me, which in itself shouldn’t be a surprise because ADHD brain weasels run this ship.

I thought I spent all week writing about self-trust. Instead, I found myself asking a much bigger question: How do good girls slowly learn to stop listening to themselves in the first place?

That question took me through people-pleasing, Ted Bundy’s girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer, religious conditioning, desire, and the quiet ways we learn to doubt what we already know.

If you’ve ever been called “easygoing,” “low-maintenance,” or “so easy to love,” I think this episode might resonate with you.

After the conversation, you’ll also find an Inner Journey, a guided hypnosis designed to help you begin reconnecting with your own inner voice.

PSA: If one of your friends came to mind while you were reading this, would you consider forwarding this email to them?

So many women have spent years believing they’re the only one who struggles with these questions. Sometimes the most helpful thing we can do is let someone know they aren’t alone.

Thank you for being here and for helping this little community grow. It means more to me than you know.

Karly

Not did I consent or did I enjoy parts of it?

Something quieter than that, and much harder to admit.

If I stripped away everything I thought I was supposed to feel… what would actually be mine?

I don’t think this is really a question about sex. At least, I don’t think that’s where it starts. I think it’s a question about self-trust, and about how quietly a person can lose the thread connecting her body to her own knowing until she’s become fluent in everyone else’s desire but her own.

I want to say something here before we go any further.

This conversation isn’t only for the women who learned to disappear because they were taught to be good. It’s also for the people whose relationship with desire was changed by coercion, sexual assault, or abuse.

Those are different experiences, and they leave different wounds, but they often leave behind the same question.

Can I trust what my body is telling me?

For some people, that question was buried beneath years of people-pleasing, religious conditioning, or learning that being loved mattered more than being known. For others, it was buried beneath the experience of having choice taken away altogether.

I’m not suggesting those experiences are the same, because they aren’t.

But they can both leave a person feeling disconnected from their own desire, unsure where compliance ends and wanting begins.

Photo by Cassidy Dickens on Unsplash

I’ve Been Wondering…

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about something this week.

While I was writing about self-trust and the slow, invisible ways people learn to doubt their own instincts, one question kept following me around long after I closed my laptop. You know how certain ideas refuse to stay inside the piece you wrote them for? They keep tugging at your sleeve until you realize they were never separate thoughts to begin with.

The question was this:

If self-trust can be slowly dismantled inside a relationship, taken apart one small accommodation at a time, or taken apart all at once in a single violation that rewrites everything after it, what happens to desire? And yes, I mean sexual desire.

Desire asks something of us that most of us were never taught how to do: it asks us to listen inward. And for a lot of us, inward is exactly where we stopped being allowed to go.

The Good Girl Problem, and the One Nobody Names

I think about growing up, and about the particular architecture of messages that arrive so early and consistently that girls stop experiencing them as messages at all, and start experiencing them as simple facts about who she is, just like how you’d know the color of your own eyes without ever having chosen them.

Be nice.

Don’t disappoint people.

Don’t make anyone uncomfortable with the size or shape of your wanting.

Be desirable, but only in the ways that are convenient for other people.

Don’t be too much of anything, including yourself.

Be chosen, and be grateful for the choosing, and never, under any circumstances, ask whether you would have chosen back.

Nobody sits little girls like me down and teaches them to ask what they want. Instead, somewhere in the space between childhood and womanhood, that question gets quietly replaced with a different one entirely, not What do I want? but What do I need to do to keep someone else happy? The substitution happens so gradually, so without ceremony, that most of us never notice the moment the swap was made.

But some of us didn’t get the gradual version. Some of us got the fast one, a hand where it wasn’t invited, a no that got pushed past, a body that was touched before it had language for what touch was even supposed to mean. If that’s you, I don’t want this to read like a piece about slightly-too-agreeable women who need to learn to speak up at dinner parties. What was done to you wasn’t a communication problem. It was a violation, and your nervous system responded to it exactly the way nervous systems are built to respond to a threat it cannot outrun: it froze, it fawned, it left the room without leaving the room. That response saved you. It is not evidence that some part of you secretly wanted it, or consented to it, or failed to fight hard enough. Freezing is not agreement. It never was.

Both roads, the slow training and the sudden violation, tend to arrive in the same place: a woman who has become an expert at everyone’s desire except her own, because at some point, checking in with her body stopped feeling safe.

The Performance

*sings* Let’s talk about sex, baby.

I’m serious. Let’s actually talk about it, and if you’ve followed my work, you should know, given my history of writing smutty stories for traumatized women, that I love talking about sex, especially when the conversation is about helping trauma survivors reclaim their sexuality.

I’ll admit something before we go any further.

I’ve almost talked myself out of publishing this essay more than once. Not because I think there’s anything wrong with talking honestly about sexuality, but because there are still people who believe that a woman writing about desire must somehow be revealing a flaw in her character instead of an interest in her subject.

I’ve decided I’m no longer interested in borrowing someone else’s shame.

So let’s talk about sex.

More accurately…

Let’s talk about what happens to it after trauma, people-pleasing, coercion, and years of learning that someone else’s comfort mattered more than your own.

I was raised to believe sex was wrong, and then, once it became sanctioned and expected, I flipped straight into believing it was my duty, and somehow both of those beliefs produced the exact same result.

I froze.

Every. Single. Time.

Not because I lacked the capacity for desire, but because my body had learned that sex wasn’t a place where my own desire mattered.

The Performance

This is where the conversation gets a little more intimate. Maybe you learned that wanting something first felt dangerous, so you waited for someone else to make the first move, convincing yourself that you were simply “low desire,” when really you’d never been taught that your desire was allowed to lead.

Or maybe you did make the first move, not because you were reaching for pleasure, but because you’d learned to stay one step ahead of someone else’s disappointment. If you initiated, maybe you could control the moment. Maybe you could keep the peace. Maybe you could make it happen on your terms before it happened on someone else’s.

Maybe saying no felt heavier than saying yes. Not because yes was what you wanted, but because you’d learned how expensive a no could become. Sometimes the cost was guilt. Sometimes it was conflict. Sometimes it was hours of sulking, bargaining, or being made to feel selfish for having boundaries.

And for some of you, the lesson was even harsher than that.

Some of you learned that no wasn’t simply difficult.

It was ignored.

Or argued with.

Or worn down.

Or punished.

After enough experiences like that, many survivors stop asking themselves whether they want something at all. Not because they don’t have desires, but because their nervous system has stopped expecting desire to influence the outcome.

That’s not consent, it’s adaptation.

Maybe you’ve spent an entire encounter paying more attention to someone else’s breathing than your own. Watching their face for signs that they’re happy. Measuring whether you’re performing intimacy correctly while your own experience drifts farther and farther into the background.

Some of you know that feeling by another name: dissociation.

Maybe you’ve heard the word before, but only in conversations about trauma. What we don’t talk about nearly enough is how often it shows up in intimacy.

Your body leaves because, at some point, it learned that distance was safer than presence, and bodies are remarkably loyal to the strategies that once kept them alive, even after the danger has passed.

Then comes the quiet afterward. It’s not always guilt or shame.

Sometimes it’s just the unsettling realization that you never once stopped to ask yourself a question that suddenly feels incredibly important.

Did I want that?

Or maybe the question itself feels impossible because your body learned something much more horrible long ago:

Whether I wanted it wasn’t going to change what happened next.

None of this makes you broken, and it makes sense, not because what happened to you was okay, but because nervous systems adapt. They keep reaching for yesterday’s survival strategy long after we’ve arrived somewhere safer.

And healing, I’ve started to think, isn’t about teaching yourself to want more.

It’s about slowly convincing your body that it gets a vote again. I wonder how many women have spent years mistaking being wanted for wanting, as though the two were interchangeable, as though the warmth of being desired could somehow stand in for the very different warmth of desiring something yourself.

Photo by Taras Chernus on Unsplash

How many have mistaken praise for pleasure, applause for arousal, the relief of having performed well for the entirely separate, entirely unrelated experience of actually feeling something.

How many have become so exquisitely fluent in anticipating what someone else needs from a moment that they lost the ability to notice what they needed from it themselves, some through a thousand quiet erosions, a little at a time, so gradually that by the time the ground was gone it had started to feel like it had never really been there, and others in a single afternoon, or a single relationship, or a single night that split their sexuality cleanly into before and after.

The Difference Between Permission and Desire

Desire doesn’t usually disappear all at once. Even after something violating, it doesn’t vanish so much as it goes underground, buried beneath something that looks similar from the outside but feels almost nothing alike from within, observation.

Instead of feeling, we’re monitoring.

Instead of receiving, we are evaluating.

Instead of letting a sensation simply exist in the body the way sensations are meant to, we are standing just outside ourselves with a clipboard, taking notes, checking for signs of correctness, or checking for signs of danger, because for some of us those two clipboards got taped together a long time ago and never fully came apart.

Instead of asking what do I want, the question quietly becomes am I doing this right, or, for some of us, am I safe right now, and here is the part that took me a long time to understand, the part I think a trauma-informed sex coach would recognize instantly and a lover almost never would: those questions can produce the exact same movements, the exact same sounds, the exact same body arranged in the exact same positions, and still be entirely different events happening in entirely different rooms of the self.

One is presence.

The other is a woman standing guard over her own experience, keeping careful watch for an audience, or a threat, that was never actually in the room to begin with.

The Shift

Maybe recovering your sexuality was never really about becoming more adventurous, more skilled, more willing, more anything measured from the outside.

Maybe it is about becoming more honest, in the slow, occasionally brutal way that honesty actually requires, honest enough to hear your own yes when it rises, unprompted, from somewhere beneath all that training.

Honest enough to recognize your own no, even when it arrives quietly, even when it would be easier to let it pass unspoken.

Honest enough to sit with the strange, uncomfortable realization that you may never have actually been asked what you wanted, not by any partner, not by any relationship, and, for some of you, not even by the person who took the asking away from you entirely.

That’s the kind of realization that quietly rearranges the rest of your life, because once you start asking yourself what you want, you begin noticing all the places where you’ve been asking a different question instead.

Not just in bed, but everywhere.

And maybe that’s what recovering your sexuality actually is, not learning to become someone new, but learning to trust the person who has been there all along.

There’s no prize for getting there quickly.

No gold star for healing on someone else’s timeline.

The only thing that matters is that, little by little, your body starts believing it gets a vote again.

Before We Leave This Here

The more I’ve been thinking about desire this week, the less I believe it’s something we have to create. I think we’ve been taught to imagine desire as a fire that either burns brightly or doesn’t exist at all. Something to fix if it’s gone. Something to chase if it’s faded.

I’m starting to wonder if that’s backwards.

Maybe desire isn’t something we lose because it’s something we stop hearing. Maybe it gets talked over by obligation, by fear, by shame, by trauma, by years of asking ourselves what everyone else needed before we ever stopped to ask what we needed.

And maybe healing isn’t about becoming a different person.

Maybe it’s about becoming someone who believes their own experience is worth listening to again.

So today, don’t ask yourself whether you’re desirable.

That question has spent most of our lives asking us to measure ourselves through someone else’s eyes.

Ask yourself something that belongs entirely to you instead.

What do I want?

You don’t have to know the answer today.

For some people, just asking the question is the beginning of getting themselves back.

Imagine for a minute with me that it’s 1974 in Seattle, and you’re looking at a woman with a newspaper open on a kitchen table, and a cup of coffee going cold beside it.

The coffee has been cold for a while, but she hasn’t noticed yet. She’s too busy sitting frozen in her chair, looking down at the composite sketch on the page in front of her for so long she’s lost track of time. It’s the kind of drawing that usually resembles no one in particular, generic by design, assembled from a dozen partial memories of frightened witnesses, except this one doesn’t feel generic.

Something in her chest has gone quiet, recognising what her mind isn’t ready to admit. She knows this face, and not from a newspaper. She knows the way it looks first thing in the morning, when it’s relaxed and unguarded. She knows it across a dinner table, in the passenger seat of her car, and tilted toward her three-year-old daughter while he reads to her at bedtime. The face staring up at her from the newspaper is a face that she knows intimately well.

Panicked thoughts race one after the other, and then, gently, almost like a relief, in a voice that has talked her anxious thoughts down before, a thought arrives to meet her.

It doesn’t really look like him.

Composite sketches are never accurate.

You’ve been anxious lately.

You know how you get.

Suddenly, she stands up, folds the newspaper, pours out the coffee. Then, she rinses the cup, sets it in the rack, and goes on with her day, because that voice has never once given her reason to doubt it. She goes on with her day, because the voice that just reassured her felt familiar.

Familiar enough to mistake for her own.

She doesn’t know it yet, but that’s the real mystery we’re here to investigate.

The Case

You already know the story of Ted Bundy, but we aren’t really here to talk about him. We’re here to talk about Elizabeth Kloepfer, later known publicly as Elizabeth Kendall, who was Ted Bundy’s girlfriend for six years, while he was murdering women across multiple states. For decades, her story has been told as a kind of cautionary footnote to his: the woman who shared his bed and somehow didn’t see what was happening.

The question people ask about her is almost always the same one.

How could she not know?

It’s a reasonable question, but also the wrong one, and I think the reason it persists is that it’s easier to ask than the question underneath it. How could she not know implies a failure of perception, that something was missing in Liz, some deficit of attention or intelligence or self-preservation, that a sharper woman would not have shared.

But Liz Kloepfer did know.

Long before anyone believed her, she knew. She found the things she wasn’t supposed to find. She noticed the things that didn’t add up. She called the police, not once, but three separate times, and told them, plainly, that she thought the man she loved might be responsible for the disappearances terrifying her city.

So the question that actually leads somewhere isn’t how could she not know.

It’s: what had been done to her knowing?

Those are two different investigations. One asks what was wrong with her perception, while the other asks what was done to her trust in it. And once you start asking the second question, Elizabeth Kloepfer’s story stops being a story about a serial killer’s girlfriend and becomes something far more useful, a forensic account of how coercive control disassembles a person’s relationship with their own instincts, piece by piece, explanation by explanation, until the truth can be sitting in plain sight and still not be enough.

This matters beyond Ted Bundy. (because seriously, fuck that guy) It even matters beyond true crime.

The mechanisms that operated on Liz Kloepfer for well over six years are not unique to men who turn out to be serial killers. They’re just easier to see in hindsight when the stakes turn out to be murder. The same architecture, the same slow erosion of self-trust, shows up in relationships, families, and institutions that never make the news at all. If you have ever found yourself apologizing for a concern you didn’t start out apologizing for, or talked yourself out of something your body already knew, this is, in some sense, also an investigation into you.

The Investigation

To understand what happened to Liz, you have to recognize that coercive control rarely shows up as a single, recognizable event. There’s no scene where you could point a camera and say: that’s where it started. It is more like a windshield crack: it starts as a little ping of a rock, slowly spreading too slowly to notice, until one day it is everywhere, and you can’t remember when the rock hit.

It begins, almost always, with love bombing. The name makes it sound almost romantic, but unfortunately, it’s anything but.

Love bombing isn’t just excessive affection or grand gestures, but the rapid acceleration of intimacy. The relationship begins moving faster than trust can develop, and you feel deeply understood before you’ve been deeply known. Conversations become confessions, and future plans appear almost immediately. The connection feels extraordinary, not because it’s necessarily fake, but because it arrives before reality has had time to catch up.

It isn’t a character flaw in the person who responds to it; it’s just part of being human. It feels good to be showered with love and attention, and unfortunately, our nervous systems weren’t designed to distinguish between genuine love and a highly convincing performance of it.

By the time the rational mind begins asking, Who is this person, really? the attachment is often already running on its own logic.

Liz met Ted Bundy in the fall of 1969 at the Sandpiper Tavern in Seattle. She was twenty-four, a single mother working as a secretary, stretching every paycheck, and using alcohol to take the edge off a life that rarely let up. She noticed a young man sitting at a table, looking lonely, and she walked over, because she was, by nature, the kind of person who notices lonely people in crowded rooms and feels some quiet obligation to do something about it.

They talked, and danced before she brought him home. In the morning, he made breakfast, for her, and for her three-year-old daughter.

It is tempting to treat that breakfast as a small, sweet detail; but nothing is small to a woman who had been doing everything alone for years. To her, a man who got up and fed her child without being asked wasn’t just a gesture. It was an opening move, and an extraordinarily effective one, because it was never really about the eggs. It was evidence, manufactured, but convincing, that she had found someone safe.

The hard thing to sit with here is that the qualities that made Liz susceptible to Ted Bundy weren’t weaknesses or character flaws. They were the same qualities that made her a good mother, a good friend, a person capable of walking toward a stranger’s loneliness instead of away from it. Ted didn’t identify a flaw in her and exploit it. He identified her humanity and turned it into a door.

What makes stories like Liz’s so uncomfortable is our tendency to imagine them as isolated, as though manipulation exists only inside one relationship, affecting one particularly vulnerable person.

It doesn’t.

People skilled at controlling the perception of others know how to perform different versions themselves for different audiences, carefully shaping each relationship around what that particular person is most likely to believe, and Liz wasn’t the only person Ted Bundy convinced.

She was just the one history keeps asking to explain herself.

While dating Liz, Bundy was simultaneously volunteering on a suicide-prevention crisis line, working alongside a former police officer named Ann Rule, who would go on to write The Stranger Beside Me, widely considered the definitive account of his crimes, specifically because she could never reconcile the man she’d worked beside with the one later convicted of murder. If a trained investigator and true crime journalist sitting across from him for months sensed nothing but warmth, the idea that Liz should have somehow known earlier collapses under its own weight.

The Mechanism of Doubt

What came next wasn’t dramatic enough to make headlines.

It rarely is.

The warmth that had once felt so effortless became unpredictable.

Some days Ted was attentive, affectionate, and deeply present. Other times he seemed to disappear emotionally, pulling away without explanation, sometimes for days at a time. Then, just as Liz began wondering what she’d done wrong, the man she’d fallen in love with would return as though nothing had happened.

It’s an unsettling rhythm, not because it’s consistently painful.

Because it isn’t.

If someone were cruel all the time, leaving would often be easier. But when tenderness and distance take turns occupying the same relationship, the mind starts searching for an explanation.

What changed?

Did I say something?

Was I asking for too much?

How do I get us back to the way we were?

This is called intermittent reinforcement, and it’s one of the most powerful ways human beings become attached to uncertainty. Unlike love bombing, it’s not that inconsistency feels good, but because it keeps hope alive. Every moment of warmth begins to feel like evidence that the relationship can still be saved, and the question quietly changes.

It is no longer,

“Why is he treating me this way?”

It becomes,

“How do I get back to the version of him who loved me?”

And once that happens, you’ve stopped evaluating the relationship… and started trying to earn it.

Liz began organizing herself around earning back warm Ted. The longer that continued, the less bandwidth remained for the more important question underneath it: why does cold Ted keep showing up at all?

This is the seed of what’s known clinically as a trauma bond, an attachment that forms specifically because of the cycle of warmth and withdrawal, rather than in spite of it. The nervous system, over time, files the relationship under survival rather than choice. This is why leaving rarely feels like a possibility when you’re in it, and most people usually leave that part out. It feels like a physiological emergency, the body resisting its own better judgment, because the hidden parts of your brain and your nervous system have decided that this person, no matter how they treat you, is crucial for your survival.

Liz had an additional layer of conditioning working against her, one that I am personally familiar with because I grew up the same way. She’d grown up Mormon, in a high-demand religious environment where trusting your perception over the people and institutions around you is treated as spiritually dangerous. What gets rewarded in that framework isn’t discernment; it’s agreeableness, accommodation, a willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt past the point most people would consider reasonable. So when something started to feel wrong with Ted, the question Liz had been trained to ask wasn’t why is he behaving this way. It was what am I doing wrong?

One of those questions points toward the truth.

The other points directly into the hands of someone counting on you never asking it.

The marriage license

For a while, the relationship looked exactly the way healthy relationships often do. They talked about marriage, and actually went to the courthouse together and got a marriage license. Liz wasn’t imagining a fantasy life. She was imagining a future.

Then something remarkably ordinary happened, or ordinary in the way that only someone who grew up the way Liz did, and later left the church, would recognize.

Her parents were coming to visit.

On the surface, okay, what’s the big deal? But she’d been raised Mormon, and that comes with very strict orality rules. Living with a man she wasn’t married to wasn’t just something her parents might disapprove of; it threatened her standing in the community she’d grown up in. The consequences weren’t hypothetical; women had been judged, excluded, and quietly pushed to the margins for far less.

So she made what, to her, felt like a practical request.

Would he move some of his things out of the apartment while her parents were there?

She wasn’t ending the relationship or withdrawing her commitment. Liz was just trying to survive the discomfort of being a grown woman avoiding her parents’ displeasure, and trust me, as a 38-year-old woman who brews my coffee in the bathroom to avoid offending my mother, I get it.

Ted never answered the question she was asking.

Instead… he tore the marriage license in half.

Think about what happens psychologically in that moment. One minute you’re discussing where a few boxes should go for the weekend. The next, the future of your entire relationship seems to be hanging in the balance, and the conversation is no longer about your parents, or even the apartment and the marriage license.

It’s about whether you really love him, whether you’re committed enough, and if you’ve somehow wounded the person you were trying so desperately to protect.

Liz entered that conversation with Ted trying to solve a problem, and left defending her love. That’s not just an argument; it’s a transfer of reality. The original issue quietly disappears, replaced by a new one.

Not,

“Should we find a temporary solution?”

But,

“Can I prove that I’m devoted enough?”

I’ve heard survivors describe this moment in dozens of different ways.

“I walked in wanting to talk about something they did.”

“I walked out apologizing.”

At first, it feels like a misunderstanding, but then it happens again, and again. Until you stop preparing for conversations about problems… and start preparing to defend your character.

That’s one of the quietest and most devastating shifts coercive control creates, not because it convinces you they’re always right, but because it slowly convinces you that every conflict is really a question about you.

By the time Ted Bundy began killing women, the most significant thing he had already taken from Liz wasn’t her trust in him.

It was her trust in herself.

The Evidence

What happened next can be reconstructed almost entirely through the things Liz found, and the explanations that, each time, made the discovery disappear faster than the object itself.

The first was a meat cleaver, sitting on his desk, not in a drawer, not on a wall, just sitting there. She asked about it, and Ted answered in the same even, reasonable tone he always used. By the end of the conversation, something strange had happened: the cleaver was still there, but the question about it was gone. This is how self-trust erodes without anyone noticing; it doesn’t happen in one dramatic rupture, but one plausible explanation at a time, each landing just on the acceptable side of believable.

Then a surgical glove, found in his coat pocket, explainable alone, except she wasn’t finding it alone. She was finding it on top of the cleaver, on top of five years of explanations that had each just barely held up. Left over from a medical course, he said, so she put it down and added it to the pile.

Then a bag of women’s underwear, in her own apartment, that wasn’t hers.

Before Liz Kloepfer is a woman who might suspect her boyfriend is a serial killer, she’s a woman holding evidence of an ordinary betrayal, wondering whether any of it, six years of it, had ever been real. He said he was holding it for a friend. The actual truth was so far outside what her mind was prepared to process that it genuinely had no shape yet. She believed him, or got close enough to keep functioning.

There’s a phrase people raised in high-control religious environments, like Mormonism, often use for what was happening to Liz:

Put it on the shelf.

The phrase sounds almost harmless, practical, even, almost like you’re just setting something aside until you have more information, but that’s rarely what the shelf actually is. The shelf is where we place the things that threaten the version of reality we’ve built our lives around.

A contradiction here, a question that refuses to go away there, a conversation that leaves us unsettled, or a little piece of evidence that doesn’t fit the story we’ve been telling ourselves.

Here’s the thing: sometimes the truth isn’t difficult because we don’t understand it. It’s difficult because understanding it would require dismantling something we’ve built our identity around.

A marriage, religion, family, career, or even a future we’ve already started grieving the thought of losing, so we don’t throw the evidence away, because we can’t. Our bodies know it matters. Instead, we make a quiet agreement with ourselves.

“I’ll come back to this later.”

Only later has a remarkable way of becoming years, and in the meantime, the shelf gets another item to hold. Another conversation, another explanation, another uneasy feeling, and another moment our intuition whispers,

“Something isn’t right.”

The shelf isn’t built because we’re foolish. It’s built because we’re trying to survive two realities at once. The one we’re beginning to suspect… and the one we still desperately need to be true.

For a while, that strategy works, until one day it doesn’t, because shelves aren’t designed to carry uncertainty forever. Eventually, they collapse, not because of one heavy object, but because of the accumulated weight of every truth we’ve postponed believing.

There was a smell, too, some nights when Ted came home late, not alcohol, but just wrong, in a way her body registered before her mind had words for it. By morning the feeling had usually softened enough to talk herself back from believing it.

Then, finally, the newspaper with the composite sketch, and the description of a tan Volkswagen Beetle, her car, and a name witnesses kept repeating.

Ted.

Everything on the shelf shifted at once.

The reports

Liz drove to the King County Police Department and told a detective, out loud, that she believed the man she loved might be responsible for the disappearances terrifying Seattle. It is difficult to overstate what that cost a woman who had spent five years being taught that her own perception was the least reliable thing in any room she entered.

The detective thanked her for coming in, and then sent her home.

They were drowning in tips, and Ted Bundy, educated, employed, conventionally charming, with no criminal record, and an active volunteer on a suicide hotline, didn’t fit the profile they were working from.

There’s a particular kind of relief that follows being told an authority figure doesn’t believe your worst fear, and it deserves more scrutiny than it usually gets. It isn’t the clean relief of having been wrong about something inconsequential. It’s the relief of being handed permission to put the whole thing back on the shelf, paired with a fresh, specific shame, because she’d just told a police officer her boyfriend might be a serial killer, and now had to go home and sit across from his face at dinner.

She never told Ted she’d gone to the police. He was attentive that night; he was easy and present, just like the man she had fallen for in 1969. The shelf went back up, a little less sturdy than before, and she came close to believing she’d been wrong, not because she was foolish, but because the architecture he’d spent five years building inside her was still standing. Architecture doesn’t collapse just because the person living inside it has started to suspect the builder. The police had handed her back the blueprint and told her she must have misread it.

She called again that fall, after Ted moved to Salt Lake City for law school and the disappearances followed him there. Her voice, by then, carried something different, not just suspicion, but the exhausted certainty of someone who has been right about something for long enough that being right has stopped feeling like relief.

She called a third time in the spring of 1975, while he was still writing her letters about their future together.

Three times.

It’s worth sitting with that number, because the story most often told about Liz Kloepfer is a story about a woman who failed to see what was directly in front of her, and the record shows the opposite. She saw it, reported it, and she was sent home each time.

And each time she was sent home, the truth she already carried got a little harder to hold onto.

The arrest, and what came after

On August 16, 1975, a Utah Highway Patrol officer named Bob Hayward watched a tan Volkswagen Beetle circle his neighborhood twice at two-thirty in the morning. When he activated his lights, the car ran, then pulled over a few blocks later. The driver was calm, cooperative, got lost coming home from a movie, he said, and smiled.

Inside the car, officers found a ski mask, a second mask made from pantyhose, a crowbar, handcuffs, rope, an ice pick, and a bag of torn sheeting strips.

Ted Bundy was arrested. Forensic testing later linked hair in that car to multiple victims from Washington state, women whose names Liz had been saying aloud to police officers for more than a year while everyone around her concluded she was probably mistaken.

She had been right the entire time.

The first thing Ted did from a jail cell was call her, not to confess, but to manage her. He told her he’d been arrested for stealing a bicycle, a gift, he said, intended for her. His voice was the warm version. The Sandpiper Tavern version. A man had just been arrested with what amounted to a kidnapping kit in his car, and his first instinct wasn’t panic. It was to keep the system he’d built inside Liz running, from six hundred miles away, without needing to be physically present to operate it.

She told him to go to hell… but she kept answering the phone, and before you judge her, it takes, on average, seven attempts for victims to leave their abusers. Distance, it turns out, doesn’t automatically produce clarity. The hardest part isn’t leaving. It’s the slower, more disorienting work of dismantling something built so carefully, over so long, that it has become load-bearing, discovering, in the process of removing it, that pieces of yourself come away with it.

What kept Liz answering wasn’t love so much as cognitive dissonance, the exhausting psychological tension that arises when two incompatible realities exist at the same time. The man she had loved for six years and the man sitting in a jail cell accused of murder could not both be true, yet somehow they were. Every phone call offered one more chance to resolve that contradiction without destroying the life she’d believed she was living.

What kept Ted calling was something entirely different.

That has a clinical name: narcissistic supply, a term describing someone who experiences other people not as fully realized humans, but as sources of something they require, a steady stream of attention and belief that functions almost like a drug. From the moment Ted sat down beside Liz at that bar, he wasn’t falling in love. He was identifying a source.

But supply like that has its own shelf life, because history works against it: the longer someone knows you, the more questions they need answered, and conditional belief stops functioning as fuel and starts functioning as work. Liz had been asking questions for well over a year by the time of the arrest. So Ted found someone new: a woman named Carole Ann Boone.

From the outside, that reads as one more betrayal. From the inside, it may have given Liz something she hadn’t had in years: perspective. When you’re standing inside the machinery, it’s easy to believe you’re the malfunction, that more patience might finally make things settle. Watching someone else step into the exact same role makes the machinery visible for the first time. The problem was never Liz. The mechanism simply needed someone new to run on.

During his 1979 murder trial in Florida, Ted proposed to Boone from the witness stand, exploiting an old state law recognizing an in-court declaration as legally binding marriage. She accepted, in a courtroom in the process of convicting her new husband of two murders and three attempted murders. Watching from a distance, a decade into her own ordeal, something in Liz finally began to shift for good.

The confession

The prison calls kept coming, often around two in the morning. At first they were what they’d always been: warm, managing. Then, as his execution date approached, something in them changed.

He told her he was sick, not sick like an illness, but sick in the way that lands like a stone dropped into still water.

He confessed, not out of remorse, but because confession, even now, was useful. Making Liz the keeper of his darkest secret pulled her back in at the exact moment she was closest to finally leaving for good.

He told her about a night early in their relationship when he had closed the damper to the fireplace while she slept, let the smoke fill the room, and waited.

He had tried to kill her. The same man who had once made breakfast for her daughter had attempted to kill her in her sleep, and then gotten up the next morning and made breakfast.

The shelf, this time, didn’t bend. It came down completely.

She broke off all contact, and then she did something remarkable: she wrote all of it down, and in 1981, she published her account under the name Elizabeth Kendall, not his story, but hers. A record of what it actually looks like, from the inside, when someone spends six years methodically teaching you not to trust yourself.

Ted Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989. In his final days, he confessed to at least thirty murders; most investigators believe the real number was significantly higher. He never fully accounted for what he did to Elizabeth Kloepfer, and there’s a reason for that. What he did to her doesn’t show up in a body count.

Case Reflection

Before the autopsy, a pause, not for advice, but for a few questions worth sitting with honestly, the way Liz eventually had to.

What have you been putting on your own shelf, quietly, a little at a time, telling yourself you’d deal with it later?

What conversation do you keep replaying, the one where you walked in with a reasonable concern and somehow walked out apologizing?

What explanation have you accepted, not because it fully made sense, but because believing yourself instead felt too expensive at the time?

These aren’t rhetorical. They’re the same questions Liz Kloepfer eventually had to answer, except hers came with the weight of a serial killer behind them. Most of ours won’t, but that doesn’t mean the mechanism isn’t the same.

Autopsy Report

Subject: Self-Trust

Cause of Death: Progressive erosion through coercive control.

Mechanism: Love bombing. Intermittent reinforcement. Gaslighting and the transfer of responsibility (DARVO). Sustained external invalidation — including, in this case, from the institutions she turned to for help.

Contributing Factors: Empathy. Loneliness. High-demand religious conditioning that equated self-trust with spiritual risk. Hope. A genuine, deep capacity for love.

Evidence Collected: A breakfast made for a child who wasn’t his. A torn marriage license. A meat cleaver, a surgical glove, a stranger’s underwear, a smell she couldn’t name. Three police reports, filed and set aside. Two-in-the-morning phone calls from a jail cell, then a confession used as a tether rather than an apology.

Findings: The subject’s intuition was never actually impaired. It remained, throughout, remarkably accurate. What deteriorated was her confidence in it — manufactured, deliberately and over time, by someone who understood exactly what he was doing.

Manner of Death: Conditioned.

One Last Question

Elizabeth Kloepfer’s instincts were never the problem. They were, if anything, the most reliable thing in the entire story, accurate from nearly the beginning, ignored by the people whose job it was to listen, and finally vindicated by forensic evidence she had been describing out loud for over a year before anyone believed her.

The tragedy was never that she couldn’t see the truth.

It was that someone had spent years teaching her exactly what to do the moment she did.

That’s the question I keep coming back to, the one her story actually leaves behind, not how could she not know, but something closer to home.

If your own intuition knocked on the door tonight, would you recognize its voice? Or would you, like Liz did for so long, assume it belonged to someone else?

“You’re so easygoing.”

“You’re so low maintenance.”

“You never ask for much.”

“You’re just so easy to love.”

And honestly? They felt good to hear. Because somewhere along the way, I had learned, without anyone ever saying it directly, that the most lovable version of me was the one who didn’t require anything. The one who kept things smooth and made herself comfortable to be around by making herself small enough that no one ever had to accommodate her.

So when someone called me low maintenance, I heard: you’re doing it right.

When someone called me easygoing, I heard: they’re not going to leave.

When someone said I was easy to love, I heard something that felt uncomfortably close to relief.

That’s the thing about compliments that reward smallness: they work. They feel like safety. Especially when you’ve spent years being shaped, quietly and consistently, into someone who understands that her needs are inconvenient, that her full self is a lot, that the version of her that gets to stay is the version that asks for the least.

You don’t question compliments that feel like survival.

At least, not at first.

Now I’m not so sure. Because I’ve started wondering something that makes me deeply uncomfortable:

What if they weren’t actually describing me?

What if they were describing how little space I took up?

The Training

I was raised Mormon. Which means I was raised on a very specific kind of compliment: Be modest, unassuming, selfless, and always sacrificing because that’s what makes you a good, virtuous woman.

I got a lot of compliments about my looks growing up. I can remember people complimenting me, and the thing is… I never fully believed them.

There was always something I could feel underneath the compliment, some part of me that deflected before the words could land, that redirected the gratitude outward before I had to feel it, that performed the appropriate response while something else entirely was running underneath.

I thought for a long time that it was humility, but I’m not sure that’s what it actually was.

Because here’s what I know now: when you grow up in an environment that trains you to be small, and when you add to that the particular damage that comes from having your body violated before you even had language for it, something happens to your ability to receive. You learn, at a level far below conscious thought, that good things aren’t really for you. That compliments are performances to be returned. That love is a transaction, and your job is to make sure the other person always comes out ahead.

You become, in other words, very easy to love.

And you never stop to ask what that’s costing you.

Most of us don’t wake up one morning and decide to become people-pleasers; we adapt.

Some of us learned that keeping the peace kept us safe. Some of us learned that love became more predictable when we anticipated everyone else’s needs before our own. Some of us learned that being “difficult” came with consequences we couldn’t afford.

So we became easy.

Easy to be around. Easy to rely on. Easy to ask favors from.

Easy to disappoint ourselves.

And eventually, being easy stopped feeling like a strategy and started feeling more like our personality.

For me, that personality had been under construction for a long time before any relationship got to benefit from it.

Growing up Mormon means growing up inside a very specific set of instructions about what a woman is for. You are modest. Unassuming. You put everyone else first. You sacrifice quietly, and you do it with a smile, because your willingness to disappear gracefully is framed as a virtue, as righteousness, and the thing that makes you worthy of love.

By the time I was old enough to be in a serious relationship, I didn’t need anyone to teach me how to make myself small. I already knew. I’d been practicing for years.

The Architecture Stays

So when I found myself in a marriage where he was always the priority, his needs first, his wants first, his career first, it didn’t feel like something was wrong.

It felt like something I already knew how to do.

The institution eventually left. We left it together, actually, walked away from the church as a unit, which felt like freedom at the time.

But here is the thing nobody tells you:

The institution can leave. The architecture stays.

I kept doing what I’d always done, making myself smaller, more accommodating, more useful, more invisible. And when things weren’t working, when he seemed stressed or distant or dissatisfied, I didn’t think: this isn’t mine to fix. I thought: I’m not doing enough. I kept doing what I’d always done, making myself smaller, more accommodating, more useful, and more invisible. And when things weren’t working, when he seemed stressed or distant or dissatisfied, I didn’t think: this isn’t mine to fix. I thought: I’m not doing enough.

I can remember the specific shape of that thinking. He must be stressed with work. If I could just earn a little more money, take some pressure off him, maybe then he’d see how hard I was trying. Maybe then I’d be enough.

The result was that I slowly started doing more and more, while he did less and less.

And nothing ever changed.

I didn’t have the language for what was happening. I just knew I felt terrible. I kept thinking that if I could just be a little more, a little more patient, a little more understanding, a little more everything, he would finally see me as someone worthy of being loved.

I didn’t understand yet that I was trying to solve an equation that was never designed to have an answer. The hardest part is that this version of ourselves often gets rewarded.

The Difference Between Kindness and Fear

People like us.

They describe us as kind. Selfless. Patient. Mature.

And maybe we are those things.

But kindness offered freely feels very different from kindness that’s driven by fear. One comes from choice. The other comes from survival. From the outside, they can look almost identical.

Inside, they feel completely different.

The Barren Field

I can remember standing in front of the mirror, more than once, in more than one season of my life, and being consumed by a grief I didn’t have words for, because the person looking back at me was a complete stranger.

It felt like standing in an endless, barren field, where I could look back and catch glimpses of who I was before, and then get pulled under, like quicksand, one minute you’re wondering how you became a stranger in your own body, and the next it’s pure heartbreak for the person you were, and then despair, because you can’t see a path back.

I had no idea what I actually wanted. What I liked. What made me feel like myself.

I had given everything to everyone else, and there was nothing left to answer with.

This is one of the quietest ways self-trust disappears. Not because someone forces you to betray yourself, but because you get so good at reading everyone else’s emotional weather that you stop checking your own.

Then one day, someone asks you a simple question: What do you want?

And you’re not avoiding the answer.

You genuinely don’t know anymore.

I don’t think Good Girls are born. I think they’re trained.

Not always intentionally. Sometimes by families. Sometimes by churches. Sometimes by relationships. Sometimes by classrooms that rewarded compliance over curiosity. Sometimes by environments where belonging depended on being agreeable.

Little by little, we learn that certain parts of us are welcome. Other parts are… inconvenient.

The anger. The ambition. The sexuality. The grief. The boundaries. The opinions. The needs.

So we become experts at editing ourselves. We get so practiced that we stop noticing we’re doing it.

And then one day, someone calls us easy to love, and we smile and say thank you, and we never let ourselves feel it.

Because somewhere underneath, we already know the truth.

It isn’t love they’re describing.

It’s how thoroughly we’ve learned to disappear.

What the Body Keeps

Here is something I want you to understand, because it took me a long time to understand it myself.

This isn’t just emotional.

It lives in the body tissue.

Years of managing everyone else’s nervous system while ignoring the signals from your own doesn’t just make you tired. It rewires you. The HPA axis, your body’s central stress response system, is designed to fire when threatened and recover when safe. In a woman who learned that threat is constant and safety is conditional, it never fully recovers.

It runs chronically.

The result is a body that can’t modulate its own responses anymore. Inflammation that has no infection behind it. Hormonal systems disrupted by years of cortisol flooding. An immune system that has learned, from the nervous system, to treat everything as a potential threat, including safety itself, because rest has become so unfamiliar that it registers as danger.

My own body has been keeping this account for years. The extended burnout cycles. The C-PTSD. The systemic inflammation. The autonomic nervous system, which swings between extremes it can no longer modulate on its own.

The woman who learned to be easy to love learned to suppress her own signals in the service of everyone else’s comfort. She learned to override the sensation of threat to keep the peace. She managed her stress responses so thoroughly that they became invisible even to herself.

The body doesn’t forget what the mind manages.

The stress that was never processed, the anger that was redirected into helpfulness, the grief that was converted into productivity, the fear that was performed as calm, it all went somewhere.

Until one day, it doesn’t have anywhere left to go.

And then the body submits the bill.

I have been found, and lost, and found again, more than once.

The first time I started finding my way back, it was through tarot cards, of all things. The cards gave me an invitation to look inward and permission to start asking questions I had stopped allowing myself to ask.

I pieced myself back together slowly, and then new traumas came, and I lost her again.

I am, in a lot of ways, starting over right now.

I am learning what this new phase of me looks like. The woman I am becoming is calmer. Quieter. I don’t seek out the spotlight the way I once did. I struggle to open up. I struggle to maintain connection with the people I love most, because connection requires presence, and presence requires a self to be present with, and some days that self still feels like a work in progress.

There is a calm, quiet confidence beginning to grow in me. But it is a tug of war. Some days, the wounds open up raw and ugly and can’t be ignored. Years of repressed pain come pouring out of me like tidal waves. I can’t stop the flood of emotions and pain, and I feel completely engulfed by it. Those days often have me lashing out or pushing people away, both desperate for connection and terrified it will mean losing myself again. Other days, I know this is part of the process.

I miss the bright, shining version of me. The horror author. The paranormal investigator who was always ready with a laugh and a joke, with a deck of cards at the ready. The manic pixie dream girl who made people fall in love with her energy.

But here’s the thing I’m slowly learning to sit with:

That version was also easy to love.

She got approval. She fit a shape that people recognized and rewarded. She was magnetic and fun and uncomplicated, and she never made anyone uncomfortable.

And I wonder now, with the particular grief of someone who has done a lot of hard work and is still asking the question, whether anyone has ever loved me without needing me to be something first.

Not performed or earned, and not shaped into something that would keep everyone comfortable.

Just… for me.

Being easy to love isn’t the same thing as feeling loved, because if love depends on performance, your nervous system quietly understands something terrifying:

If the performance stops, maybe the love does too.

That’s an exhausting way to live. And more than exhausting, it’s lonely in a way that’s hard to name, because you are surrounded by people who love you, and you are starving.

I still feel that. Even now, in a relationship that is healthy, with a partner who is genuinely present. The hunger is still there. The wondering whether it will ever feel like enough. The vigilance, waiting for the moment when simply being myself will turn out to be too much.

It’s easy for me to blame myself for those moments, but it’s not a character flaw. It’s a nervous system that learned to wire love directly to performance, and is slowly, painstakingly, learning that it doesn’t have to anymore.

So this week’s question isn’t: How do I become more lovable?

It’s this: What parts of myself have I been setting aside in order to stay easy to love?

And perhaps the harder one: Has anyone ever had the opportunity to love the real me?

And the hardest one of all: Do I even know who she is?

Because maybe that’s where this actually starts, not in becoming more. Not in finally doing enough. Not in shrinking or expanding or performing some better, more acceptable version of yourself.

But in getting very quiet, and very honest, and asking the part of you that’s been keeping score underneath all the compliance:

Who are you when no one needs anything from you?

She’s in there.

She has always been in there.

And she has been waiting a very long time to be asked.

If any of this felt uncomfortably familiar, if you recognized that flicker of yourself somewhere in these words, you’re not alone, and you’re not broken. That recognition is where it begins.

This month inside The Good Girl’s Guide to Life, we’re doing the work of learning to tell the difference between who you were conditioned to be and who you actually are. If you’d like to go deeper, I’d love to have you inside, join me on Substack.

I have a deep love of horror films, especially ones that rattle me to my core. There is an interesting phenomenon among trauma survivors where some of us retreat into comfortable, gentle spaces, and others, like myself, find a particular sort of comfort from watching horror films. It’s not comfort as much as a way for our nervous systems to feel the terror we keep locked at bay, but because it’s confined to the pacing of a movie, our nervous systems get to feel the fear, release it, and close the cycle within our nervous systems instead of getting stuck.

There’s actual research behind this, not just my own pattern recognition. A key marker of trauma is that the person didn’t have control over what happened to them, and that lack of agency is part of what makes the experience so devastating.

Horror flips that. You know something terrible is coming, and you chose to be there. You can pause it, leave the room, or turn it off. The protagonist on screen might not get a choice, but the viewer does, and with that choice comes agency, the exact thing trauma takes away, handed back to you in a two-hour dose.

Researcher Coltan Scrivner has studied this directly, finding that people who deliberately seek out frightening media tend to come away from it having practiced something real: regulating fear in a setting where the stakes are imaginary. In fact, one study of horror fans during the early pandemic found they were coping noticeably better, psychologically, than people who avoided the genre entirely.

That tracks with what I feel happening in my own body when the outside world fades around me, and I enter the horror experience. My nervous system gets to do the thing it never got to do when the fear was real: feel it, peak, and come back down. Start to finish, on a timer, with the lights coming back on at the end.

Currently, there is a movie no one can stop talking about, Obsession. It’s breaking everything the corporate bigwigs thought they could predict about box office hits everywhere, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I actually have gone to see it twice in theatres, and I’m still thinking about it because it scared the shit out of me. One scene in particular made me jump and shriek the first time I watched it, and I drove home on a euphoric adrenaline high. It’s the first time I understood why adrenaline junkies exist.

That’s not the part I came home and couldn’t stop thinking about, though. The part that followed me into my own house, into my own head, was Nikki.

Something got wished onto her, something that took over, and for most of the movie she is not herself. She’s compliant, devoted, and endlessly, unsettlingly devoted to the man who made the wish. And then, every so often, the illusion cracks. She jolts and screams as for one terrible, lucid second, the real Nikki claws her way to the surface, horrified at what she’s been doing, what she’s about to do, what she can feel happening to her own mind.

And then she’s gone again as whatever entity inside of her regains control.

Audiences have been calling those moments the scariest in the film. I’d agree, but probably not for the reason most people mean.

Because that flicker, the half-second where someone surfaces inside their own life just long enough to be horrified by it, and then gets pulled back under before they can do anything about it? That’s not science fiction to a lot of us because most of us good girls know the horror of living a life built on other people’s hopes, rules, or expectations for how we should be.

The Voice That Isn’t Yours

Not whether it feels true. That’s a different question, and it’s the one most people accidentally answer instead.

Here’s what I mean: Imagine the thought is I’m too much. That thought might show up with total conviction. It might arrive with evidence attached, every time you spoke up and watched someone’s face change, every time wanting something loudly was met with a sigh or a joke or a “must be nice.” It feels true the way a fact feels true, because your brain has years of data that seem to confirm it.

But feeling backed by evidence isn’t the same as being yours. A belief can be airtight and still be something you were taught to conclude, rather than something you arrived at on your own. Someone can spend years responding to your needs as though they were inconvenient, until “I’m too much” stops feeling like their opinion of you and starts feeling like a fact about you, one your own mind now produces without their help.

That’s the part that makes this so disorienting. The thought doesn’t show up labeled. It doesn’t say I was installed by your mother in 1998, or I was installed by an ex who needed you smaller than him. It just shows up sounding exactly like your own voice, because by now, it is your voice. You’re just not the one who taught it what to say.

Most people never ask where that voice came from. They just assume the inside of their own head is reliable territory, that if a thought shows up there, it must have originated there too, but conditioning doesn’t announce itself.

Nobody hands you a script and tells you to perform it for the rest of your life. They just correct you, gently or not so gently, over and over, until the correction starts running on its own.

That’s the part Obsession gets so unnervingly right, even if it didn’t mean to. Nikki isn’t lying when she’s compliant and devoted. She’s not performing. Something else is genuinely driving, and the most horrifying part isn’t the violence, it’s that she knows. She’s in there. She can feel herself being used, feel her own face smiling at things she would never choose, and she cannot get her hands back on the wheel.

That’s what conditioning feels like from the inside, for the people who manage to notice it at all. Not a clean possession story with a beginning and an end. A flicker. A half-second of horror. And then the smile comes back, because the smile is what gets rewarded, what keeps things calm, what makes you easy to love.

The Nice Guy Was Never the Safe Option

There’s a second layer to this film worth mentioning, because it’s doing just as much work as Nikki’s unraveling.

Bear, the man who makes the wish, spends the entire movie being framed, by himself and by the story, as the harmless one. The shy one. The nice guy who could never get the girl, who just wants to be loved, who would never hurt anyone on purpose.

And then he gets exactly what he wished for, a version of Nikki who adores him completely, who has no room left in her for anyone or anything else, and he keeps her. Even after he learns the real Nikki is suffering somewhere underneath it. Even after the people around him start dying. He keeps her, because her devotion finally answers something in him that years of being “the nice guy” never did.

That’s not a twist. That’s a reveal, the same way it always is. The nice guy wasn’t a different category of man than the controlling one. He was the same entitlement, wearing a softer mask, waiting for permission.

This matters for the conditioning conversation, because so much of what teaches a person to distrust their own voice doesn’t arrive as cruelty. It arrives as a nice guy. A devoted partner. Someone who “just loves you so much.” Someone whose desire to be near you, to keep you, to be the center of your attention, gets framed, by him and often by you, as flattering instead of what it actually is.

You don’t always get conditioned by people who are cruel to you. Sometimes you get conditioned by people who are very, very nice to you, right up until your devotion becomes negotiable.

Meet Your Committee

Here’s the part that doesn’t get explained in horror movies, but I think it deserves the explanation because we’ve already come this far: that voice in your head, the one that sounds so much like your own thinking that you’ve never thought to question it, usually isn’t one voice. It’s several.

I call it the committee. It’s the accumulated result of every critical voice you absorbed so completely that you can now generate its output without the original source anywhere in the room. They don’t need to be present anymore. Most of them aren’t. They installed themselves a long time ago, and the installation holds.

There’s usually a parental voice on the committee, the one that specializes in worth and capability, that shows up the moment you try something new with an echo of something you were told at eight, or twelve, or seventeen. There’s often a religion voice, the one that doesn’t just tell you what you’re doing wrong but what you fundamentally are, and dresses the whole thing up in language like humility and submission so that questioning it feels spiritually dangerous instead of just untrue. And for a lot of women, there’s an ex voice, installed by someone who specialized in dismantling your trust in your own perception, the one that doesn’t even need the original person in the room anymore because it learned to do the doubting automatically.

Am I overreacting?

Is this actually as bad as I think?

Maybe I’m being too sensitive.

The committee doesn’t usually send one member at a time. A situation activates the most relevant one, and then the others pile on, until you’re not just discouraged, you’re comprehensively discouraged, from multiple angles, in multiple voices, all of which sound exactly like your own internal monologue.

That’s the scary part, not that it’s intentional, exactly. It’s that all of these voices were installed by systems that happened to want the same thing: keeping you manageable. Keeping you small. Keeping you doubtful enough of yourself that you’d stay easy to direct.

By the time a voice has been running long enough, you can’t hear the original accent anymore. It just sounds like the truth about you, like a realistic assessment, or like knowing your own limits.

It isn’t. It’s a very old, very practiced haunting, wearing the voice of your own thoughts so convincingly that you forgot to ask who taught it to talk like that.

What the Flicker Is Actually Telling You

If you’ve ever had a moment like Nikki’s, the jolt, the half-second of horror at your own life, the flash of who is this and why am I like this before the smile slides back into place, I want you to know that flicker isn’t a malfunction.

That’s the part of you that was never fully conditioned out, the part still keeping score underneath all the compliance, still capable of being horrified on your behalf even when the rest of you has learned to perform otherwise. Most people spend years pushing that flicker of authenticity back down because it’s inconvenient and always surfaces at bad times, and because being horrified by your own life is a hard thing to sit with when you don’t yet have anywhere to put it.

But the flicker is the difference between a belief and a fact. It’s your nervous system telling you, in the only language it has left, that the voice running the show right now isn’t actually yours. It’s a committee member. And committee members, no matter how long they’ve had the floor, don’t get to vote forever without your permission.

Learning to trust that flicker instead of smiling through it is most of the work. So is learning to ask, every time that voice opens its mouth: which one of you is talking right now?

This Month, We’re Doing the Work

Inside The Good Girl’s Guide to Life, hosted on Substack, we’re spending the month exploring self-trust: learning to tell the difference between a belief you inherited and a fact about who you are. Between conditioning that sounds like your own voice and the voice you’d actually choose if nobody had spent years telling you who to be.

For paid subscribers, this month also marks the beginning of something new.

We’re building The Good Girl’s Guide to Self-Trust in real time. Every week, paid members will receive a new workbook chapter along with a companion hypnosis audio designed to help you reconnect with your own voice beneath all the noise.

By the end of the month, the completed workbook and audio collection will be released as a standalone item to purchase, but paid subscribers get access to every chapter as it’s written, every audio as it’s released, and a front-row seat to the process as it unfolds.

So if you’ve ever wanted to peek behind the curtain, get early access, and actually work through the material as we’re building it together, this is your invitation.

And if any part of this landed, if you recognized that flicker in yourself, that half-second where something inside you sat up and said, wait a minute, I’d love to have you inside.

Because that flicker isn’t the problem.

It’s where recovery begins.

The first time I watched Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining, I hated it.

To be fair, my first exposure to the world of The Shining, and the beginning of a lifelong obsession with The Overlook Hotel, came from the 1997 Miniseries, and then the book itself. It’s probably important to note that I’m the flavor of neurodivergent that finds change jarring, so by the time I finally watched the iconic Kubrick film, my genuine first reaction was, “What the fuck is this?!”

I have since developed a deep appreciation for the Kubrick film, but I have to treat them as separate entities because, to me, they are wildly different works of horror, especially when it comes to the depiction of Wendy Torrence.

Underneath my neurodivergent stubbornness about which version is “right,” there’s a reason I keep coming back to this story instead of letting it stay a Halloween costume or a meme. It’s Wendy.

Specifically, it’s what happens to Wendy once the mask slips.

There’s a scene almost everyone remembers from The Shining, even if they’ve never read the book.

Jack Torrence, sitting at his typewriter. Wendy, walking up the stairs with a stack of pages in her hands, smiles, then she reads them. Page after page after page of the same sentence, typed thousands of times, and somewhere in that stack, she understands that the man she married has not been working.

He’s been hiding, and she has been living with a monster for longer than she realized.

What gets lost in the cultural memory of this story, the part that becomes a meme, a Halloween costume, a punchline, is what it actually depicts underneath the horror elements. Stephen King didn’t just write a ghost story. He wrote, with uncomfortable precision, what it looks like to live with someone whose baseline cruelty was always there, waiting under a surface that used to look like love.

The hardest part isn’t when they become a monster. It’s realizing the monster was always there, and you were in love with the mask.

That’s the thing nobody prepares you for. It’s not the moment the mask comes off, but the moment you understand that it was always a mask, and you spent years mistaking it for a face.

The Torrence family arrives at the Overlook Hotel already fractured. Jack has a history. A broken arm he gave his son in a drunken rage, explained away as an accident, absorbed by the family as something to manage rather than something to name. A job he lost for losing his temper. There is a clear pattern already in motion, long before any hotel, any ghosts, any supernatural explanation arrives to make it easier to talk about.

Because the most insidious thing about the story isn’t that the hotel corrupts Jack. It’s that the hotel doesn’t have to work very hard. It finds a man who is already primed, already carrying rage just under the surface, already someone who has hurt the people closest to him and been forgiven, excused, protected by a family that didn’t know what else to do.

The horror isn’t possession.

The horror is recognition.

The Two Men She Married

Here’s what the ghost story lets people look away from: there were always two of him.

There was the Jack who carried his son on his shoulders, who wanted to be better, who talked about teaching and writing and starting over in a way that made Wendy believe the worst of it was behind them. That version is charming, self-deprecating, and easy to believe that this time things would really be different.

And there was the other version of him. The one who showed up when no one else was in the room. The one whose voice dropped half an octave before anything had even gone wrong yet, the one who could turn a forgotten errand into proof that everyone in his life was failing him on purpose.

A lot of people watch The Shining and wait for the moment Jack “becomes” something else. They want a clean line, a clear moment the possession took over, almost like a before and an after they can point to.

But that’s not what the book is actually showing you.

It’s showing you a man whose cruelty was conditional, contained, and selectively deployed, long before any hotel got involved. He wasn’t a good man who broke. He was a man who had already learned exactly which version of himself to perform for which audience, and Wendy was the only audience that ever saw both.

By the time we meet Jack Torrence, he’s already been hiding things for years. His drinking wasn’t a secret so much as a managed performance, explained away, joked about, kept just contained enough that it never quite became undeniable, until he couldn’t hide it anymore. And then, just when it looked like he was regaining control over his life, there was the student that Jack beat badly enough to lose his teaching job over, a young man who, by every account, did nothing to warrant the level of rage that came down on him. That wasn’t the hotel, and it wasn’t a ghost. That was Jack, sober, in a school parking lot, with witnesses.

What’s chilling isn’t that nobody knew. It’s that everybody knew enough, and decided not to know any further.

“He just has a temper.”

“It was a bad night.”

“He was under a lot of pressure.”

Sound familiar? Those weren’t just explanations, they’re permission slips, the same ones families hand out when protecting someone like Jack Torrance is easier than believing the people he hurt.

By the time Wendy is reading a manuscript of the same sentence typed a thousand times, she isn’t discovering who Jack is. She’s watching the version everyone else agreed to believe finally run out of road.

If you’ve ever caught yourself thinking, he’s not like that with everyone, just with me, sit with that sentence for a second. Notice what it’s actually saying.

Living With the Weather, Not the Person

Anyone who has lived with someone whose moods could shift the entire emotional climate of a house knows this feeling. You stop tracking what kind of day it is by the calendar and start tracking it by something else entirely. The tone of a hello. The way a door closes. Whether his shoulders are up around his ears or loose at his sides.

Wendy does this constantly throughout the story. She reads Jack the way you’d read weather before a storm, not because she’s anxious by nature, but because she has learned, through repetition, that her safety depends on catching the shift before it fully arrives.

This is what people outside these relationships rarely understand. It’s not that you’re waiting for something dramatic. It’s that you’ve become a full-time meteorologist for someone else’s internal state, and you didn’t apply for the job. It was assigned to you slowly, through a thousand small moments where staying alert kept things calmer, and letting your guard down made things worse.

That hypervigilance doesn’t turn off when the relationship ends. It’s not a switch. It’s a nervous system that learned its lesson too well.

The Slow Part Is the Cruel Part

If the Overlook had simply turned Jack into something unrecognizable overnight, it would almost be a kinder story because Wendy would have a clear before and after.

Instead, she gets degrees.

A little more distance here. A little more irritability there. An explanation that almost makes sense, followed by another one that makes slightly less sense, followed by one that requires her to stop asking questions just to keep the peace. By the time the eyes go dark, by the time the version of Jack standing in front of her is unmistakably dangerous, she has already spent months adjusting her own perception in small increments to accommodate him.

Nobody wakes up one day fully aware they’re in danger. You arrive there gradually, recalibrating your sense of normal one small concession at a time, until the floor you’re standing on has moved so far from where it started that you can no longer remember what solid ground felt like.

And that’s the cruelty hiding inside the slow version. It doesn’t just hurt you. It erodes your ability to know, with any confidence, that you’ve been hurt at all.

Why She Stays Long After the Mask Is Gone

People watch this story and ask the same question they ask about every account of staying too long: why didn’t she just leave sooner.

But Wendy isn’t navigating a simple equation. She’s isolated, snowed in, miles from anyone who could help, financially dependent, and carrying a child who needs both his parents to survive. The hotel didn’t create that isolation out of nothing. It’s an exaggerated, gothic version of a structure that exists in plenty of ordinary homes. Limited resources. Limited support. A genuine, well-founded fear of what happens if you try to leave and fail.

Add to that the years of conditioning that came before the hotel: The broken arm explained away, or the job lost to a temper everyone agreed to stop discussing. By the time Wendy is hiding in a bathroom with a baseball bat, she isn’t just responding to one bad night. She’s responding to a pattern she has been quietly absorbing and minimizing for years, the same way so many people do, right up until the moment minimizing it is no longer possible.

That’s not weakness, it’s what survival looks like when it’s been asked to do far too much for far too long.

What the Story Gets Right

The most honest part of this story isn’t the violence at the end. It’s everything that came before it. Years of small accommodations, each one reasonable on its own, each one building toward a version of normal nobody would recognize from the outside. And underneath all of it, the same quiet hope: that the calm Jack, the charming Jack, the one who wanted to be better, was the real one. That the other version was the aberration, not the architecture.

That hope isn’t naive. It’s how attachment works; nobody falls in love with the worst version of a person. You fall in love with the version you’re shown, and the version you’re shown is the one that gets built for that exact purpose, polished, consistent, and convincing enough that it stops feeling like a performance at all. By the time you can see the seams, you’ve already loved the mask for years. You’ve already built a life around it.

There’s a moment late in the story, the one most adaptations linger on, where Jack’s eyes seem to empty out, where whatever was left of restraint just isn’t there anymore. People remember it as the moment he becomes something else, but the eyes going dark was never a transformation.

It was a reveal showing the same man when the performance finally became too heavy to hold.

And that’s what makes recovering from something like this so disorienting. It isn’t only about getting away from the person. It’s about going back through everything you loved and asking which parts were real, and sitting with the answer that some of what felt most real, the warmth, the charm, the version of him you’d have defended to anyone, was never separate from the cruelty. It was the delivery system for it.

If This Story Has Ever Felt Too Familiar

If you’ve ever found yourself reading a room before you walked into it, bracing for a version of someone that might or might not show up that day, you already understand this story on a level no film analysis can fully capture.

That hypervigilance isn’t a character flaw. It’s a skill you built because you needed it. And it can be unbuilt, slowly, the same way it was formed, once your nervous system finally believes it’s safe to put it down.

If you’re working through what it means to have loved a mask, and to grieve both the version of someone you thought you knew and the reality underneath it, I’d be glad to help. Through hypnotherapy, we work on helping your nervous system finally exhale, so you can stop reading the weather and start trusting solid ground again.

*Cue the Jaws theme.*

Low self-worth.

*horror movie screaming*

The annoying thing about low self-worth is that it rarely feels like low self-worth. Most of the time, it just feels like endlessly trying harder or like being the person everyone else thinks has their shit together while secretly wondering when you’ll finally feel like enough.

This week’s companion hypnosis is for the part of you that learned a long time ago that worth had to be earned before it could be received.

In this session, we’ll begin loosening that equation and creating something new.

The audio is about twenty minutes long.

Find somewhere comfortable.

Put your headphones on and get cozy.

I’ve got you.

A note on language: I use she/her pronouns throughout this session because this work grew out of my own experience and the community I'm most in conversation with. But the nervous system patterns we're working with, earning worth, performing for safety, waiting for the verdict, don't belong to any gender. If you're here and this resonates, this session is for you.

And if you’re ready to go deeper, this is exactly the kind of work we do together in private sessions. https://calendly.com/spellboundhealing

How fucking sad is that?

And, I know what you’re thinking… “Aren’t you a hypotherapist? Isn’t a huge part of your job related to helping with mindset shifts?”

Yes, it is, but I’m not just a hypnotherapist, I’m also a trauma survivor, and I’m human as fuck, and refuse to pretend like I don’t feel the exact same way you do. All these gurus selling love and light, high vibes only are full of shit. Negative emotions are meant to be felt, and all emotions tell us a story. They tell us where and how our minds (and subconscious) have attached a story to a feeling.

Here’s something nobody tells you about low self-worth: it doesn’t usually feel like low self-worth.

It feels like high standards and the endless drive to get things done. Seriously, it’s like the Energizer Bunny just going and going. People wonder where you get the ambition. It’s a lot like being someone who cares about doing things well, who takes pride in their work, and who holds themselves accountable. From the outside, it looks like a woman who has her shit together. From the inside, it feels like running a race where the finish line keeps moving, and you’re starting to suspect it was never real to begin with.

Which, surprise, is exactly the point.

Let me back up.

Women like us have a name, as it turns out.

Not the kind of name anyone gives you directly, more like a diagnosis you stumble across at two in the morning when you’re supposed to be sleeping, but instead you’re deep in a Google rabbit hole that started with “why do I feel guilty when I sit down” and somehow ended with you reading about nervous system dysregulation and going oh. OH.

We’re called Good Girls.

And before you click away, no, this is not about being well-behaved. It is not a compliment, exactly, although it was always delivered as one. It’s actually a pretty specific psychological pattern that gets installed in women who grew up in environments where love, safety, and belonging were conditional. Religious environments, emotionally unpredictable homes, cultures with very strong opinions about what kind of woman is acceptable, any combination of those will do it. The result is a woman who learned early that her worth had to be earned, and who has been quietly, exhaustingly, earning it ever since.

She’s the one who can list everyone else’s needs from memory but goes completely blank when someone asks what she wants for dinner. She’s the one who apologizes before she’s done anything wrong. She stays too long, gives too much, works twice as hard as anyone in the room, and still feels behind.

She also, and I say this with full love and zero judgment because I am her, has what the internet delightfully calls a praise kink, meaning that when someone tells her she did a good job, it has an entirely different response. The “praise kink” is less about the sexual dimension and more about the dysregulation underneath it. When someone says those words, especially during spicy times, it activates something that was wired very early: this is what it feels like to be enough. The validation lands with a force that doesn’t match the situation because it’s carrying decades of need.

Which sounds fun until you realize it’s less of a personality quirk and more of a nervous system that learned to wire approval directly to survival. The “good girl” lands like relief because, for a very long time, it was relief.

Anyway. That’s us.

And here’s something nobody tells you about what it does to your sense of self-worth:

Why It Happens

The reason Good Girls end up with low self-worth isn’t some mysterious psychological accident. It’s actually pretty logical once you see the system that produced it.

When you grow up in an environment, religious, familial, cultural, or some delightful combination of all three, where love and belonging are conditional, your brain does something very rational. It builds a framework. A cause-and-effect map. If I do X, I get Y. If I am good enough, quiet enough, helpful enough, small enough, I stay safe, loved, and I know I belong.

The problem is that “enough” was never actually defined.

Nobody handed you a rubric. Nobody said: here is the exact amount of goodness that will guarantee your worth. It was always a shimmering goal post, just slightly out of reach, and every time you got close, it moved again. And a child’s brain, desperate to solve the equation, draws the only logical conclusion available to her: I haven’t found it yet. I need to keep trying.

That belief, that worth is something you earn through performance, rather than something you simply have, is the root of the whole issue. And here’s what makes it so sneaky: once it’s installed, it doesn’t stay in one place. It doesn’t politely confine itself to the area of your life where it originated.

The Disguise Is the Whole Point

Here’s what makes this belief so difficult to question: it doesn’t look like a wound. It looks like a personality.

People-pleasing looks like generosity. Overworking looks like ambition. Staying too long looks like loyalty. Silencing your needs looks like being easygoing. Running yourself into the ground looks like being someone who just really, really, super cares.

And because those things get rewarded, praised, actually, which as we’ve established hits a little differently for us, they don’t feel like symptoms. They feel like superpowers.

That’s the trap.

Because you can’t question something you think is a compliment. You can’t examine a wound that everyone keeps telling you is actually a superpower. So the belief just keeps running, quietly, underneath all of it, wearing the costume of your best qualities, collecting gold stars on its way out the door.

The conditioning doesn’t announce itself. It never says: I am a survival strategy you developed in childhood that is now quietly dictating every decision you make as an adult. It just sounds like your conscience or your standards. It sounds like the part of you that knows better, that cares more, that refuses to give up.

It sounds, in other words, exactly like you.

And that’s what makes it so hard to put down, because putting it down feels like abandoning the things you actually like about yourself. If I stop being so giving, who am I? If I stop pushing so hard, what does that make me? The belief and the identity have been living in the same house for so long that they’ve started to look like the same person.

They’re not.

One of them is you. The other one is just very good at wearing your face.

What It’s Actually Costing You

The exhaustion you feel, the one that doesn’t go away after vacation, the one that no amount of sleep fixes, the one that shows up in your work and your bank account and your relationships and your inability to sit still for ten minutes without generating a to-do list, that’s not a productivity problem.

That’s the cost of still trying to solve an equation that was never meant to have an answer.

Because the equation was designed to be unsolvable, a system that needs you small can’t give you a number that will let you be big. The goalpost moves because a goalpost that stays in place eventually gets crossed, and then what? Then you get to be enough. Then you get to rest. Then you get to stop performing.

And that is not what conditional worth systems are built to allow.

The cruelest part is what happens when you do everything right and still feel empty. She doesn’t think: this wasn’t mine to fix. She thinks: I didn’t do enough. I should have tried harder. What did I miss?

And she goes back to work.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s a survival strategy that outlived the conditions that created it.

The Question Worth Asking

So here’s the thing I want to say, and I want to say it slowly, because I know how fast you’re going to try to read past it:

You were never behind.

There was no rubric. There was no finish line. There was no amount of good that was ever going to be enough, because “enough” was a tool being used to keep you running, not a destination that was ever going to let you stop.

Maybe the goal isn’t to finally become enough.

Maybe the goal is to get curious about the part of you that became convinced you weren’t.

Maybe the next stage of healing isn’t proving yourself. It’s retiring from the competition entirely. It’s looking at the finish line you’ve been chasing for decades and asking: who put that there?

And maybe more importantly: what would my life look like if I stopped running toward it?

Because if you’re waiting for permission to be enough, I have some bad news.

Nobody is coming to give it to you.

You were enough before the productivity. Before the success. Before the healing. Before the proving.

Before someone convinced you otherwise.

And maybe that’s the story worth exploring.

Where the Story Actually Lives

Remember what I said at the beginning, that emotions tell us a story, and that the story is attached at the level of the subconscious?

This is where that matters.

Because here’s the thing about the belief that you’re not enough: you already know, consciously, that it isn’t true. You’ve probably known for a while. You’ve read the books, done the journaling, said the affirmations, sat across from a therapist and said the words out loud. You know you are enough. You know the goalpost was rigged. You know the conditioning wasn’t your fault.

And you still feel it anyway.

That’s not a failure of willpower or self-awareness. That’s just how subconscious beliefs work. They don’t live in the part of your brain that responds to logic. They live deeper than that, in the part that was wired before you had language for any of it, before you could consent to what was being installed, before you were old enough to question whether the story was even true.

Conscious insight can name the belief. It cannot, on its own, change where it lives.

This is why I do what I do.

Hypnotherapy works directly with the subconscious, not to erase what happened, and not to trick your brain into toxic positivity, but to go back to where the story was written and actually examine it. To ask, with the part of you that’s been running the program this whole time: does this still need to be true? Is this still keeping us safe? Can we try something different?

It’s not magic. It’s not instant. But it is one of the most direct routes I know to the place where the belief actually lives, which is the only place it can actually be changed.

You were never just going to think your way out of this one.

But you can find your way to the source.

Karly R. Latham is a certified hypnotherapist specializing in trauma recovery, emotional abuse, and nervous system regulation, and a recovering Good Girl herself. If any of this felt uncomfortably familiar, that’s the point. More at https://calendly.com/spellboundhealing.

You’re with someone you’re excited about.

The energy between you has been building all night. The room feels smaller than it did an hour ago. Every glance lands a little harder. Every accidental brush of contact feels suspiciously intentional.

Things are going well, which feels like the kind of understatement you’d use in front of your grandmother, but we’ll go with it.

And then, in a moment you aren’t expecting, they look at you and say two words.

Good girl.

The heat is immediate and thorough, the kind that moves through you before your brain has had a single second to weigh in, straight past thinking and straight somewhere lower, and everything else falls away. There are only the words, the warmth, the want, and the very sudden, very strong desire to do whatever it takes to hear them again.

So you do.

Maybe you come down from it glowing and a little breathless, pleased with yourself in a way that feels genuinely earned.

And then later, maybe the next day, maybe in the quiet moment before you fall asleep, curiosity surfaces.

Why did that hit different?

Not different in a bad way, more like those two words reached somewhere that most things don’t reach. And instead of wondering what’s wrong with you, you find yourself wondering something much more interesting:

How can I feel that again?

That question matters, but here’s the thing: the more interesting question isn’t really about the moment. It’s about why something that simple landed that hard. And the answer to that starts a lot earlier than you think.

Let’s Start With the Good Girl

Most women grow up receiving a very thorough, very early education in conditional worth.

Maybe in those words, nobody hands you a pamphlet and says, " Your value is tied to your usefulness and your compliance.”

(Okay, some of us did get a pamphlet. I grew up in the LDS church, and the Young Women’s program had a whole separate document with a special supplementary set of rules just to really, really clarify where we belonged. I wish I were making that up.)

For most women, the lesson arrives more quietly than that. It comes through what gets praised and what gets ignored, and the particular warmth in someone’s voice when you were helpful, and the particular chill when you weren’t. It comes through learning that being easy and accommodating and small made you safe, and that having needs, opinions, or inconvenient emotions made you a problem to be managed.

The lesson isn’t that you are worthless.

It’s more insidious: your worth is tied to what you give. You learn, before you have language for any of it, that existing isn’t enough. You have to earn your worth every day through helpfulness and compliance, and never, ever being too much.

And the reward for those performances? Approval, validation, and the specific, unmistakable warmth of being seen as good.

Over years of this, something happens to your nervous system. The approval stops being a preference and becomes a need. Not oh that would be nice-to-have, but a biological need, because your system has learned to associate it with safety, belonging, and being enough.

You become, without ever deciding to, someone who requires external validation the way a houseplant requires water. You can go without it for a while and seem fine. But eventually, the leaves start to wilt.

The Neuroscience, Briefly, Nerd Life

pushes glasses up

When you experience something repeatedly, like approval following performance, or validation following compliance, your brain builds a pathway. And this isn’t a metaphor. Your brain is physically changed by repeated experience, which is pretty wild when you think about it. The connection between praise and safety gets worn in like a groove, until it isn’t something you think about; it’s just something that happens.

Dopamine gets involved because dopamine is always involved when something that feels like survival happens. Your brain tags the experience:

This is important.

Remember this.

We want this again.

And then, years later, in a context that has nothing to do with your childhood or your religion or the family system that wired this in, someone says two words, and your nervous system responds as though it has been waiting for them for a very long time.

Because it has been.

The praise response isn’t a quirk or a weird thing you should be embarrassed about. It’s the entirely predictable output of a nervous system that learned, very early, that those words mean you are safe, you are enough, you belong.

It hits hard because it’s carrying decades of need.

The good girl isn’t really about the moment. It’s about every moment before it, where you tried to earn that feeling and didn’t quite get all the way there.

What Purity Culture Added to the Mix

For those of us who grew up in high-control religious environments, ex-Mormon here, the good girl conditioning came with an extra layer.

We were taught that our bodies were problems to be managed and that desire was dangerous, not inconvenient but actually dangerous, like the kind of spiritual liability that needed to be caught early, confessed, and corrected before it led somewhere worse.

I grew up hearing lessons about how your worth was like a piece of chewed gum. Once used, who would want it? I wish I were making that up, too.

You learned, without anyone having to say it directly, to treat your own wanting as a warning sign. To feel something stir in you and immediately ask: Is this okay? Is this too much? Should I be feeling this?

And more often than not, the answer was no.

So you learned not to want, or to want very quietly, in ways you could hide even from yourself. In ways that didn’t count as wanting because you never let them get all the way to the surface.

And then you left, the religion, the relationship, maybe both, you little overachiever, and discovered something genuinely disorienting: you had absolutely no idea what you actually liked. Not just sexually. In general. You had spent so long learning the shape of what you weren’t allowed to want that you had never developed a feel for what you did.

You had rules where desire was supposed to live. And nothing else.

So when something lands with the force that the praise response lands with, when two words reach somewhere that most things don’t reach, it isn’t just the approval-safety wiring doing the work. It’s also years of having your desire treated as a liability, suddenly finding something that feels like permission. Like a door opening in a room you forgot had doors.

This is allowed.

This is safe.

This is the thing that finally gets through.

That’s what we call a praise kink. And I know, it sounds like something you’d have to explain at length to your therapist, or quietly close a browser tab about if someone walked into the room. But stay with me, because the name is the least interesting thing about it.

At its core, a praise kink isn’t really about the kink. It’s about the response, the specific, full-body reaction when someone tells you that you did well, or calls you a good girl, or looks at you like you just exceeded every expectation they had.

The relief is enormous.

The want is immediate.

It was never really about the bedroom. It was always about belonging.

This Is Not Evidence of Damage

Here’s what I want you to know, whether you’ve experienced the praise response specifically or you’re just now starting to recognize the outline of the good girl conditioning in your own life:

It is not weird or shameful, honestly? It can be delightful.

The goal isn’t to stop enjoying the response. The goal is to understand why it carries so much weight.

It’s a rational response to an irrational system. The nervous system that learned to associate approval with safety was doing its job, keeping you connected to the people and communities you needed to survive. It was building the pathways that kept you safe in the environment you were actually in, even if those pathways are now running in contexts they were never designed for.

The embarrassment that often comes alongside the recognition, I can’t believe I need this, what does that say about me, is usually just one more layer of the same conditioning. You’ve been taught that needing things this much is something to be ashamed of. The shame isn’t new information. It’s the original programming protecting itself.

What the response is actually pointing to isn’t a flaw.

It’s a hunger. A very old, very understandable hunger for the thing the praise was always standing in for: being enough, just as you are, without earning it first.

That’s what the response is reaching for every single time.

So What Do You Do With This?

There is something genuinely powerful about finally having language for something that has been running your life from the inside without your knowledge or consent.

You aren’t a mystery to be solved. You’re a person with a history, and your history makes sense. And that's where everything starts to shift.

The embarrassment that often comes alongside the recognition, I can’t believe I need this, what does that say about me, is usually just one more layer of the same conditioning. You’ve been taught that needing things this much is something to be ashamed of. The shame isn’t new information. It’s the original programming protecting itself.

So let it go, maybe not all at once, I know that’s a big ask, but just enough to look at it clearly.

Because what the response is actually pointing to isn’t a flaw. It’s a hunger. A very old, very understandable hunger for the thing the praise was always standing in for, being enough, just as you are, without performing it first.

That’s what it’s been reaching for, every single time. Not the words. The thing underneath the words. The unconditional version. The one that was always supposed to be yours.

You can have it. Not from someone saying the right words at the right moment, though that can be a beautiful thing, but from the inside. Built in the genuinely interesting work of becoming someone who knows what she wants and believes she’s allowed to want it.

That’s where we’re going.

And the first step is just this: letting yourself be seen clearly enough to begin.

Your First Page: A Mini Workbook Prompt

This is the beginning of a practice. Each essay in this space will end with a prompt, a small invitation to take what you just read from your head into your hands.\

You don’t have to answer these perfectly. You don’t have to answer them at all right now. But if something in this essay moved something in you, this is where you let it land.

If this landed for you, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming. There’s a new essay in this series every week, and on Wednesday, a special hypnosis drops that pairs directly with everything we just talked about. You’re going to want to be here for that one.

❤️ Karly

Journal Prompt 1: Follow the Trail

Take a few minutes to think about the approval you wanted most as a child or teenager.

Then write:

• Whose approval mattered most to you?

• What did you have to do to earn it?

• What happened when you didn’t?

Don’t worry about writing it well. Just write what comes up.

Journal Prompt 2: Where Is It Still Living?

Take a moment to notice where this pattern still shows up in your life.

Then write:

• Where do you still seek approval?

• What does praise feel like in your body?

• What does it feel like when approval doesn’t come?

• What do you do when you feel that discomfort?

Trust the first answers that arrive.

Journal Prompt 3: Permission

Take a breath before you begin.

Then finish this sentence as many times as you’d like:

Something I’ve been waiting for permission to want is...

Don’t edit yourself.

Don’t explain.

Just let the answers exist on the page.