Oli Anderson |

Embrace the Cringe: How Owning What Makes You Squirm Leads to Wholeness

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Integration/Life Philosophy/Mental Health/Mindset/Psychology/Shadow Life

Often The Things We Cringe At Are Things We’ve Disowned in Ourselves

Let me know if you’ve felt this feeling before:

It’s that tightening in the chest when you remember something awkward you said years ago; the second-hand embarrassment you feel watching someone express themselves openly; the hesitation before posting something sincere online, trying something new in public, or expressing how you really feel.

We’re talking about the cringe.

Usually, when the cringe shows up, we treat it as a sort of warning sign – i.e. that it’s showing us something to avoid, suppress, or reject.

But what if the cringe isn’t what we think it is?

What if cringe is actually feedback about who we want to become and a signal that something REAL within us is waiting to be owned?

In this article we’re going to explore the idea that embracing the cringe in a conscious way can be a powerful pathway to wholeness and REALNESS:

When we stop running from what makes us squirm and instead lean into it with Awareness and Acceptance, then we begin reclaiming parts of ourselves that have been exiled to the shadow self so that we can take real Action and move closer to realness.

(Awareness, Acceptance, and Action works every time which is why I build my coaching containers around it).

Let’s dig a little deeper:

To embrace the cringe is to start winning the battle of becoming yourself in your realness.

What Is the “Cringe” Really?

Sometimes in life we find ourselves cringing at things we’ve either done or want to do which just makes us freeze up and try to reject whatever it is we’re reacting to.

You might have cringed at certain things yourself before:

Expressing your emotions openly.
Trying something new and failing publicly.
Showing enthusiasm for something others might not understand.
A memory from your past when you acted naïvely (in relation to who you are now).
Someone else behaving in a way that feels “too much”.
Etc. Etc. Etc.

In each of these cases, the reaction to the cringe tends to be the same:

Rejection in the sense that we pull away internally and try to distance ourselves from whatever triggered the cringe in the first place..

Here’s the deeper truth that often gets overlooked, though:

In many cases, the cringe is feedback about who we want to become and grow into that also signals that there’s something very real about ourselves that we’re not yet ready to own.

In other words, the cringe is often a signal that appears at the edge of growth and shows us where our realness is pressing against the boundaries of our self-image.

The Hidden Standard Behind the Cringe

What’s also interesting about cringe is that it always happens in relation to some conceptual standard we’ve picked up from the outside world.

In other words, instead of looking at ourselves from a place of acceptance (realness), we look at ourselves from a place of judgement (unreal/ego).

This is almost always because somewhere along the line we’ve absorbed ideas about what’s ‘cool’, socially ‘acceptable’, ‘impressive’, ’embarrassing’, or what we “should” or “shouldn’t” allow ourselves to be.

These standards form a kind of internal measuring system – even though they’re not always REAL – and so when something within us doesn’t meet the standard, we feel the emotional recoil we and call it “cringe”.

The problem is that this measuring system isn’t reality but conditioning in the form of a set of LEARNED beliefs about about what we’re allowed to be, do, think, and feel.

Judgement vs Acceptance vs Discernment

To understand the cringe fully, we need to distinguish between the three different mental stances of judgement, acceptance, and discernment.

Judgement: In this case is the emotional charge of rejection weaponised (for the ego) against the truth. It tells us something is unacceptable, shameful, or wrong simply because it threatens our ego’s self-image.

Acceptance: Is real because it’s capable of recognising what’s actually present without resistance and allows experience to exist without distortion.

Discernment: Is necessary because it helps us to distinguish what is real from what’s unreal and guides us into action that’s aligned with our realness instead of going against it. Discernment never rejects reality – it simply aims to see it in the first place.

The reason that it’s worth knowing about these distinctions is because judgement and discernment are often confused even though they’re not the same.

Clinging to judgement will keep you in a state of unreality but learning to discern will help you make CHOICES that allow you to grow real:

Judgement says: “This part of me (or life) is unacceptable“.
Discernment says: “This is what is happening; how shall I respond in a REAL way?”

Judgement leads to suppression but discernment leads to clarity and the cringe is rooted in judgement and not discernment.

The Cringe as the Ego’s Defence Mechanism

When we find ourselves cringing at ourselves or others, it means some quality has been expressed that our judgements have deemed ‘unacceptable’ because we’re (unconsciously) trying to maintain the ego and keep the shadow self at bay (because of the great Shadow Dance).

Usually, this happens because we carry an arbitrary idea of what happens to be ‘cool’, ‘strong’, ‘intelligent’, ‘worthy’, or [whatever else], and we use this idea as a barometer for what we allow ourselves to be and express in the world.

In short, our self-image depends on maintaining these arbitrary standards and so the the ego judges and rejects anything that threatens it and cringe is one of its primary tools to do this.

The Sequence of the Cringe Reaction

Let’s quickly look at a predictable psychological sequence that unfolds when we cringe at things.

It basically goes like this:

1. We see something in ourselves or others: For example, a behaviour, emotion, desire, or memory appears.

2. It triggers the shadow self, which agitates the ego and its belief systems: Something within us recognises a disowned quality.

3. We cringe: The ego sends a signal that says suppress this, reject it, and distance yourself from it.

In the short term, this protects our identity and keeps our belief systems intact but in the long term, all it does is it keeps us fragmented and so we end up divided against ourselves – i.e. accepting some real ‘parts’ and rejecting others.

This is unfortunate because fragmentation is the opposite of wholeness and moving deeper into wholeness is what we really all need to feel fully alive and REAL.

What We’re Really Cringing At

If you want to live out your realness, then you need to start owning many of the disowned ‘parts’ of yourself – ‘good’ or ‘bad’ doesn’t matter because they’re all REAL (the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ label are the ego’s judgements but realness is beyond this kind of duality).

A good general rule to understand here is that when we cringe, we’re usually just seeing something we haven’t yet owned.

Consider a few common examples:

Cringing at Emotional Expression

Maybe you feel uncomfortable when someone expresses strong emotions openly and in an effusive way.

Often, this reflects judgement towards your own emotional depth and the discomfort reveals a part of yourself that wants to feel freely but has been suppressed.

Cringing at Imperfect Effort

You might cringe when someone tries doing something they love but does it badly – for example, singing, dancing, creating, or speaking.

This often reveals your own fear of imperfection and your reluctance to risk looking foolish because you’re living your own life in an outcome-dependent way.

Cringing at Your Past Self

You might revisit a memory and feel intense embarrassment.

This usually reflects ongoing judgement towards who you used to be (or thought you were) rather than learning from the past so that you can accept yourself today and build something real.

Cringing at Enthusiasm

Sometimes genuine passion makes people uncomfortable because enthusiasm threatens the persona of detachment many people use to feel ‘safe’ (i.e. to protect the ego).

Why Suppression Keeps Us Stuck

When we respond to cringe by suppressing what we see, we reinforce fragmentation.

Whenever we tell ourselves “I shouldn’t be like that”, “This part of me is unacceptable”, “I need to hide this”, or “I shouldn’t think/feel this” then it creates tension within the mind-body system and energy that could be used for growth becomes locked in defence mechanisms.

Over time, this leads to:

Hesitation in action.
Fear of expressing anything real.
Chronic self-consciousness.
Emotional repression that leads to us being ‘stuck’.
Disconnection from authenticity and realness in general.

In other words, when we allow the cringe to dictate our relationship with ourselves then we become performers of a self-image rather than participants in reality and so the ego maintains control at the cost of our true vitality.

Embracing the Cringe as a Path to Real Growth

If suppression leads to fragmentation, then the altearnative is simple:

Ownership – This means that instead of automatically rejecting what makes us cringe, we can embrace it consciously.

This doesn’t mean acting recklessly or abandoning discernment but instead means recognising that the cringe reaction often points to something real that deserves integration.

Embracing the cringe like this involves:

Pausing and recognising the judgement behind the reaction.
Questioning the external standards shaping the judgement.
Accepting the reality of the experience.
Re-owning the disowned quality.

When we do this, the energy locked in resistance becomes available for growth and what once felt like it was a threat (to the ego) becomes a source of power.

Acting “Cringey” as a Practice of Realness

The paradox is that acting in ways that feel “cringey” can actually be part of the solution when it comes to growing real because it directly challenges the ego’s illusory control.

All of the following potential ‘cringe’ activities can actually help you to become more integrated if you do it in a conscious and real way:

Expressing yourself sincerely.
Showing enthusiasm openly.
Trying something new without needing to be impressive in any way, shape, or form.
Speaking the truth.
Allowing yourself to be seen imperfectly.
Etc. etc. etc.

When you consciously push through the cringe like this then you can start to reclaim the ‘parts’ of yourself that were previously exiled.

You demonstrate to your nervous system that expression is safe, weaken the grip of external standards, and put yourself back on the path toward wholeness.

Over time, what once produced cringe becomes natural – not because you’ve changed who you are but because you’ve stopped rejecting who yourself.

The Cringe as Feedback from Reality

From the perspective of realness, cringe is not an obstacle but information that can reveal:

Where judgement has replaced acceptance.
Where the ego is protecting an unreal image.
Where the shadow holds unintegrated energy.
Where growth is available to you.

What matters more than how we ‘feel’ about things is how we respond with the basic lesson being that if we treat cringe as an enemy, we remain divided but if we treat it as FEEDBACK, then at least have the opportunity to become integrated.

Moving Towards Wholeness Through the Cringe

Wholeness requires that nothing real within us is rejected:

This doesn’t mean indulging every impulse that arises in us or abandoning responsibility – it just means acknowledging what we start to become aware of the existence of and relating to it consciously in relation to our vision for ourselves and our lives.

Instead of suppressing what makes us cringe, then, the way forward into realness is to embrace it and find ways to re-own whatever we’re reacting to.

This doesn’t mean that the goal is not to eliminate cringe entirely (which is probably impossible because none of us are perfect) – instead, the goal is to transform our relationship with it so we can move from avoidance to curiosity and from rejection to ownership.

When we do this, we stop living according to arbitrary standards and begin living from our realness.

Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World

If you’re ready to go deeper into unconditional self-acceptance instead of judgement then check out my book Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World.

A Practical Exercise: The Cringe Integration Practice

To make this idea practical, here is a simple exercise you can use whenever you notice yourself cringing and want to grow REAL instead.

Step 1: Notice the Reaction

When you feel the urge to pull away because of the cringe, freeze, or reject something, then PAUSE and take a breath then ask yourself :

What exactly am I reacting to?
What quality is being expressed here?

Step 2: Identify the Judgement

Write down the judgement that’s motivating the cringe in the first place – for example:

“That’s embarrassing”.
“That’s weak”.
“That’s not cool”.
“I shouldn’t be like this”.
Etc. etc. etc.

Remember that these are all learned standards and judgements – not reality (which you can only accept if you’re being real).

Step 3: Find the Disowned Part

Ask yourself what this attempt to judge or push something away says about YOU and your own ‘stuff’:

Where does the quality I’m cringing at already exist in me?
What ‘part‘ of myself have I rejected here?

The goal here is ownership, not perfection, so don’t fall into the trap of judging and deceiving yourself. Nothing ‘bad’ can happen to you if you learn that you have some ‘cringy’ qualities.

Step 4: Practise Acceptance

Instead of rejecting the quality, consciously allow it to exist:

“This is part of the human experience and I allow it”.

Feel the shift from judgement to acceptance because that means you’re standing on the solid ground of REALITY itself.

Step 5: Take One Small “Cringe” Action

Choose a small action that will allow you to actively own the disowned part.

A few examples might be to:

Express a feeling honestly.
Share an idea imperfectly.
Try something you’re not good at.
Show enthusiasm openly.
Forgive your past self.
Etc. etc. etc.

The key is to change things slowly and to stretch yourself – not to overwhelm yourself and create a state of internal panic (which means you’ve gone too far).

Step 6: Reflect

Afterwards, reflect on what you just experienced:

Did the fear match the reality or was it just F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”)?
Do you feel more alive or like you’re carrying less inner friction?
Did the cringe lose intensity overall?

Keep paying attention to the cringe and embracing it like this because integration happens through repetition.

If you want to be real then you need to embrace the cringe.

The Final Word: The Freedom Beyond the Cringe

When you begin embracing what once made you cringe, then you’re finally free to stop organising your life around avoiding embarrassment.

You stop performing an identity and become freer to act, express, and grow because the energy once spent maintaining an image becomes available for living your REAL life.

The cringe isn’t something to escape but an invitation:

An invitation to own what you are.

An invitation to reclaim what you rejected.

And an invitation to move from judgement into acceptance.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

The Unconditioned Man: The Real Man Waiting Inside You

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Men/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Psychology/Relationships/Shadow Life

The Unconditioned Man is Man in His Realness

There’s a man inside many men who has never truly been allowed to live:

He’s not a fantasy or an idealised image of strength, dominance, or perfection – instead, he’s something simpler, deeper, and more powerful: the unconditioned self of your REALNESS.

This Unconditioned Man is the ‘part’ of you that acts without fear of rejection, expresses truth without hesitation, and lives with presence rather than performance.

For many men, though, this REAL version of themselves remains hidden in the wings…waiting:

Waiting behind layers of conditioning, waiting behind strategies learned long ago, waiting behind a self-image rooted not in truth but from an outdated need to survive and to show up without one’s own real power.

What a lot of men don’t realise is that much of their struggle comes from identifying with an unreal version of themselves – a self created as a reaction to past experiences.

This conditioned identity (the ego) keeps the real man hidden in the shadow and until this conditioning is seen and undone, a man can neither be truly be present in his own life or feel fully alive.

This article is about learning to overcome this conditioning so we can grow real instead.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Unconditioned Man is sent into hiding when his parents pass on their own unreality to him in the form of conditioning.

The Conditioned Self vs The Real Self

At the heart of this issue is a simple distinction that plays a role in all of our lives to some extent:

The Conditioned Self (Ego): The personality built through adaptation, defence, and learned strategies that cause you to be fragmented.
The Unconditioned Self (Realness): Your natural presence, essence, and rootedness in wholeness.

Many men believe these two are the same because they – quite naturally – assume that who they think they are is simply who they are.

What they don’t realise is that what they often call “themselves” is actually a reaction to past circumstances – not the actual truth about who they are away from these reactive patterns.

This conditioned identity forms through a process that normally begins in childhood (though it’s not something that usually just happens because of one event but because of a series of events over time):

It basically boils down to the fact that at some stage in the past, every man was a boy who learned certain strategies to win love, approval, or safety from the world around him (usually from his parents or caregivers).

These strategies were not chosen consciously but were adopted unconsciously because they seemed necessary for survival. Over time, the boy begins to identify with these strategies and to start implementing them automatically – eventually carrying them into their adult lives.

Even though the specific circumstances may vary, the underlying structure is always the same in the sense that it leads to a ‘fragmented’ adult who continues to implement strategies that may have ‘worked’ as a boy but just keep him trapped in the Void as a man.

How the Inner Split of the Conditioned Self Begins

There are all kinds of ways that the self can be conditioned through these kinds of strategies but here are some of the most common ones:

1. Blurred Boundaries

Some boys were subtly asked to meet their parents’ emotional needs which is a reversal of the natural order because the parent is supposed to meet the child’s needs, not the other way around.

This just ends up causing the boy to pick up a sense of SHAME because his own needs are seen as being unworthy of attention.

Instead, the boy learns something along the lines of “My value only comes from taking care of others” and so he grows into a man who struggles to say “No”, who abandons his own desires, and who confuses self-sacrifice with love.

2. Being Forced Into a Role

Some boys were pushed into roles that set unreal limits on their identity – for example::

“The rock of the family”
“The responsible one”
“The shining star”
“The easy child”
Etc. etc. etc.

To maintain this role, the boy had to deny very real parts of himself – most commonly, emotions that don’t fit the script that was built into the role.

What this basically means is that ‘difficult’ but very real emotions like vulnerability, confusion, anger, or fear become unacceptable.

In short, he ends up building an unreal assumption into the core of his whole self-image:

“I must perform to be worth anything”.

3. Not Being ‘Seen’

Sometimes parents simply lacked the emotional capacity to recognise the child’s inner world because of their own disconnection from themselves and their own emotional ‘stuff’

What this leads to is a situation where the boy doesn’t feel truly ‘seen’, heard, or understood and so he concludes something like “Something must be wrong with me“.

This exacerbates the shame that comes from being disconnected to oneself in ones realness and leads to a a deep sense of not being ‘enough’ that can permeate adulthood as a result.

4. Guilt and Control

Some boys learn that deviating from a parent’s expectations brings guilt or rejection (because of the parent’s control freakery) and so the they develop people-pleasing and self-effacing behaviours to maintain connection.

What they essentially learn is that “Being real is dangerous” (or something like that) and so they go into hiding as a result (and then feel ‘guilt’ again any time anything real arises in themselves).

These are just some of the most common patterns and everybody’s experience is completely different but the outcome is always the same:

The boy absorbs is conditioned to believe that he’s not acceptable as he is and so he becomes split from himself in his realness.

The Birth of the Mask (Conditioned Man)

When a boy believes he is not ‘enough’ (whatever that even means) he creates an identity to compensate in the form of a mask designed to secure ‘love’ and avoid rejection.

This ‘mask’ (the conditioned self/ego) brings all kinds of shame-driven symptoms with it but some of the most common are:

Perfectionism
Emotional suppression
Overachievement
Excessive niceness
Control freakery
Aggression
People-pleasing

The mask becomes the conditioned self – a.k.a. the ego – and is a survival strategy built around shame, not who the person actually is in their realness.

In order to keep up the illusion of the mask, the boy separates from the very real ‘parts’ of himself that have been deemed unacceptable in some way.

As a result, his natural impulses, emotions, goals, beliefs, and qualities are pushed into the shadow and the real self goes into hiding as the boy begins to identify with the mask and forget that he was wearing it in the first place.

This creates an inner split which leads to an adult life in the Void of disconnection from oneself and life and the endless feeling of the Ache of wanting to return to realness but not knowing how.

The Adult Child (A Child in an Adult’s Body)

If this split is never healed (i.e. the truth is reaccepted instead of hidden behind ego) then the boy grows into a man who appears mature externally but remains fragmented internally:

He looks like a man to the world but psychologically he’s still operating from childhood patterns and is ultimately what we might call an adult child:

A child in an adult’s body.

This doesn’t mean that he’s weak or incapable and isn’t a judgement on his moral worth or anything like that – in fact, many adult children are highly competent, responsible, and successful.

The problem is that despite this external success they still experience inner turmoil caused by that inner split:

A sense that something is ‘missing’.
Chronic dissatisfaction and never feeling like things ‘fit’.
Anxiety or frustration that never ends and can’t be explained by external circumstances.
Emotional disconnection or numbness.
The feeling of “The Ache” – a vague longing for something ‘more’.
A sense of always being held back by some inexplicable force rather than fully participating in life.

All of these symptoms are usually just the experience of the Void which – as we said – is a disconnection from truth and realness and so living as a conditioned man instead of an unconditioned man always produces tension where life feels forced rather than having a sense of flow.

Living as a Strategy Instead of a Presence

The adult child continues judging himself through the lens he adopted as a boy and so he still tries to ‘win’ the love or approval he once needed.

His self-image and belief system reflect this with the assumptions he carries about himself and the world:

“I must prove my worth”.
“I must never upset people no matter what”.
“I must be perfect and infallible”.
“I must never show weakness”.
“I must succeed/perform to be valued”.

These underlying assumptions are built into his self-image and the belief system that stems from it and so he ends up living as a set of strategies rather than as a living presence.

His actions are attempts to manage reality rather than participate in it.

The tragedy is that he believes this is simply who he is despite the real man waiting inside ready to burst forth and away from all of this outdated conditioning.

The Real Man in the Shadow

The real man isn’t something you need to create but is what remains when conditioning falls away and you UNLEARN all of the things that have been keeping you from your realness.

His characteristics come from embodying truth instead of shame:

Presence rather than performance.
Truth rather than strategy.
Responsibility rather than blame.
Experiential rather than conceptual identity.
Inner authority rather than external validation.

This Unconditioned Man can’t emerge as long the conditioned self remains unquestioned because he ego protects itself through self-limiting beliefs, defensive habits, and a kind of self-hypnosis that keeps the old story intact.

To awaken the real man requires integration of the realness that has been sent into exile in the Shadow Territory by raising Awareness, cultivating Acceptance, and then taking real Action.

Integration, Not Elimination

The solution isn’t to destroy or disown the boy within you because the boy isn’t the problem and his strategies once protected you (they just don’t align with reality anymore and so the software needs updating).

The work is to integrate him.

This means:

Acknowledging the original wounds and feeling unfelt emotions.
Reclaiming the emotions that were denied instead of hiding from them.
Welcoming shadow qualities back into awareness so that you can OWN yourself.
Letting go of outdated survival strategies and beliefs.
Recognising that the boy is no longer in charge (though he will kick in instinctually when you feel you need to ‘survive’).

The man steps forward not by rejecting the boy but by becoming his own parent.

The Unconditioned Man & Becoming Your Own Parent

To “become your own parent” might sound a little much but it basically means that you learn to give yourself what you once believed was missing.

This could be anything but it’s usually things like:

Validation
Acceptance
Protection
Direction
Encouragement
Love grounded in truth rather than approval

It’s about learning to flip the script and so instead of living from the outside-in the Unconditioned Man starts to live from the inside-out by asking:

“What do I really want?”
“What is true?”
“What aligns with my realness?”

He stops living as a conceptual identity by censoring himself based on other people’s ideas and starts living as the experience of an ongoing encounter with reality itself.

Letting Go of False Ultimates

Many of the boy’s strategies involve turning certain things into ‘ultimate’ solutions instead of just seeing them as ‘good’ things.

What this means is that the boy will take something ‘good’ but will think that it can offer him the ‘ultimate’ and solve all his problems – this won’t work, though, because the only ‘ultimate’ is an acceptance of the truth in order to overcome that inner split.

These ‘good’ things treated as the ‘ultimate’ always cause us to lose balance:

Success as the answer to shame.
Approval as the answer to insecurity.
Achievement as the answer to emptiness.
Control as the answer to fear.

None of these things are ‘wrong’ or ‘bad’ in themselves – in fact, success, approval, achievement, and control are all great things when we don’t treat them as the ultimate – but they become distortions when used to compensate for inner fragmentation.

Check out Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to dive deeper into overcoming your conditioning and growing real.

From Externalising to Becoming

Transformation can finally begin when a man stops externalising – for example, by blaming circumstances, chasing validation, or waiting for permission – and reconnects to his realness and starts shaping his life intentionally.

This involves three very practical steps that anybody can get started with:

1. Creating a Value-Based Vision

What kind of man do you truly want to be?

(Not what others expect but something that aligns with your deepest values).

A vision provides direction for becoming which helps you to overcome the conditioning of the past.

2. Translating Vision Into Goals

Goals turn values into action and make growth measurable and tangible.

3. Cultivating Supporting Habits

Habits create consistency and help you to embody the man you are becoming (which is really the man you already are when you strip all the conditioning away).

It brings short-term comfort to hide behind the familiar but it's a long-term disaster to hide from the Unconditioned Man.

The Man Who Steps Forward

When the conditioned self loosens its grip, life becomes less forced, action becomes natural, and relationships become more authentic.

The Ache begins to dissolve because the inner split starts to heal.

The Unconditioned Man doesn’t emerge through domination, performance, or self-improvement as ego enhancement but emerges through integration, presence, and truth.

When he does, he realises that he was never ‘missing’ but was waiting:

Waiting for you to stop living as a reaction to the past and start living from the reality of who you are.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to let go of old patterns and to start showing up in your realness then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take real action.

The Ache: Why Your Restlessness is Actually a Compass to Realness

Published on

Integration/Life Philosophy/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology/Shadow Life

The Ache is a Signal From Your Realness Asking You to Course Correct

There’s a persistent feeling that many of us know all too well:

It’s not quite sadness and it’s not exactly boredom but it follows us through life like a shadow as a kind of ache deep in the chest or a restless stirring in the mind.

It gives us the vague sense that something is ‘missing’ and that whatever this ‘something’ is awaits just beyond our reach:

We chase jobs, relationships, experiences, accomplishments, and even hobbies, hoping that one of them will finally make us feel complete…yet, somehow, the Ache persists and we always seem to find ourselves back at square one.

What’s ‘funny’ (depending on your definition) is that we’ve been taught, implicitly or explicitly, that this restless yearning is just part of the human condition and a fact of life we must learn to accept:

“Seeking is what makes us human”, we tell ourselves, “It’s normal to want ‘more‘” – and, on the surface, this seems reasonable because – after all, ambition, curiosity, and desire are undeniably human traits.

Here’s the thing, though:

This popular explanation is entirely misleading because the truth that the Ache isn’t simply a quirk of our species but a signal: a kind of internal feedback that – if we learn to listen carefully – can reveal the path out of restlessness and into realness.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Ache comes when we stop listening to reality and get lost in ego.

What the Ache Really Is & Where it Comes From

The Ache is that constant, restless longing that seems to shadow our lives from youth to old age:

It commonly gets romanticised as a poetic part of existence itself – for example, as “the pursuit of something more”, “the hunger for meaning”, or “the search for purpose”.

It’s so common that we collectively tend to admire those who seem to forever chase the horizon – thinking they’re somehow more alive or even virtuous because they never settle.

What we often fail to notice, though, is the cost:

When we experience The Ache, our typical instinct is to soothe it with action and so we end up picking something ‘good’ like a new career, a romantic partner, a promotion, wealth, or adventure and then treat it as the ULTIMATE thing in our lives.

What this means is that we put it on a pedestal and imagine that achieving it will fill the void inside – and, for a brief moment, perhaps, we feel relief, or even joy.

Inevitably, though, the empty feeling returns, sometimes stronger than before, nudging us toward the next goal or the next distraction and off we go again.

Many spend their whole lives like this, chasing “the next thing” and believing that one day, it will all make sense:

They achieve great accomplishments, even build enviable lives, but despite all this greatness and achievement, the Ache persists. and so they never really reach the point where they feel fully alive in the process of living.

Instead, their energy is consumed by perpetual striving as the subtle pleasures of simply BEING are left unexplored and they distract themselves with all that DOING so that burnout, disillusionment, and a sense of incompletion become the natural result.

The Ache and The Void

What’s really happening here and why does this Ache feel so unrelenting?

To really understand it, we need to take a quick look at The Void:

The Void is the fragmented inner landscape we start to inhabit when we become disconnected from the truth about ourselves, the world, and reality.

This disconnection often arises from shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity), or other experiences that convince us that we’re incomplete, broken, or unsafe if we show up in our REALNESS.

To survive in the Void, we create a kind of character – the ego – to navigate a world that feels fragmented as a projection of our own inner state of disconnection.

This ego acts, performs, achieves, and constructs a self-image that we end up filtering all of our experiences through but here’s the unfortunate catch:

Every time we rely on the ego to navigate life, we push our realness into hiding a little bit more.

What emerges once the ego has taken hold of us is the Shadow Self – our unfragmented essence in hiding and all of the ‘parts’ of us that are whole, unguarded, and real.

The Shadow Self is naturally in conflict with the ego because the ego depends on fragmentation to exist which means that it fears wholeness which is exactly what the Shadow naturally embodies.

In this context, The Ache is the Shadow speaking to us and trying to call us back home:

It’s the internal signal that tells us “You are not aligned with reality – you’re filtering yourself and life through a fractured lens“.

What this means is that when we misinterpret The Ache as just “human desire”, we end up externalising everything and chasing things in the world, hoping they’ll have the power to rescue us from this feeling (spoiler: they won’t).

The Pattern of the Chase

Most people follow a pretty predictable trajectory once The Ache shows up.

It goes like this:

Awareness of the Ache: You feel restless, dissatisfied, or incomplete.
Externalise: You identify a ‘good’ thing in the world that seems capable of ‘fixing’ this feeling – for example, a promotion, a new relationship, a bigger house, or a hobby (it could literally be anything).
Chase it: You pursue it with energy, creativity, and focus because you don’t just see it as a ‘good’ thing but THE ULTIMATE thing.
Momentary satisfaction: Perhaps you attain it, perhaps not – either way, the relief or disappointment is temporary as nothing has fundamentally changed and so you return to your baseline.
Return of the Ache: The feeling reappears, sometimes more intensely than before but either way you’re back at square one.
Repeat: You move on to next pursuit of the next ULTIMATE thing – often at the expense of your inner peace.

The irony of all of this is pretty spectacular:

The Ache, which is a signal trying to guide us toward slowing down and facing ourselves, often drives us to move faster and further away from realness because we mistake restlessness as a call to action, when in reality, it’s a call to awareness.

Zhuangzi and The Taoist Perspective

A classical Taoist parable that was written about 2500 years ago (showing that humans haven’t really changed that much, if at all) captures this dynamic perfectly.

In Zhuangzi, we read:

“There was a man who disliked seeing his footprints and his shadow. He decided to escape from them, and began to run. But as he ran along, more footprints appeared, while his shadow easily kept up with him. Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster without stopping, until he finally collapsed from exhaustion and died.

If he had stayed in the shade, his shadow would disappear; if he had remained still, there would be no footprints.”

This story is a potent metaphor for The Ache as we’ve discussed it so far:

The shadow represents our relationship with reality and truth and all of the ‘parts’ we instinctively try to avoid to protect the ego.
The footprints signify the consequences of our actions – in particular, the unreal consequences that arise when we act from ego rather than essence (realness).
The man’s frantic running mirrors our habitual response to The Ache: more striving, more chasing, more doing – all in an attempt to escape what we can’t avoid: the realness of ourselves and life.

The lesson is simple yet profound:

The Ache arises because we resist what is and so the more we run, the more the Void expands, and the more we chase, the heavier the burden becomes.

Why Seeking Never Does the Job

One of the most common traps is treating something external as the ‘ultimate’ because the truth is that no external achievement, possession, or relationship can serve this function in your life because the ultimate isn’t ‘out there’ because it’s in your connection with life itself.

The Ache is calling you to stop seeking outside and start seeking within – not in a vague and ‘introspective’ sense, but in a practical, engaged way because the only way to overcome The Ache is to recognise that what you’re truly looking for is already with you: your realness.

When we act from realness rather than ego, our decisions, behaviours, and interactions align naturally with reality and so our energy is no longer spent resisting life because it can flow freely instead.

In this state, the Shadow is no longer feared and the footprints of our actions become evidence of authentic engagement rather than indicators of ‘failure’ or extensions of an unreal self.

Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace

If you’re ready to overcome the Ache and tap into your realness then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Practical Steps to Face The Ache

We can start shifting from seeking and searching to being by engaging with some concrete steps to overcome the Ache:

1. Stop the Running

The first step is simple in theory, difficult in practice:

Pause.

When The Ache arises, notice your instinct to move, to act for the sake of acting (ego), or to ‘fix’ something, and, instead, take a moment to stop and breathe so that you can recalibrate your relationship with yourself and life.

Exercise: Each morning, sit quietly for five minutes and notice where your body feels tension or restlessness. Let yourself feel into the Ache and let it expand without needing to change it or ‘do’ anything with it.

2. Identify the Shadows

The Shadow is not something ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ – it’s just your unexpressed realness:

Begin noticing the areas in your life where you feel resistance, guilt, shame, or disconnection because these are often windows into the parts of yourself that have been hidden.

Exercise: Write down three areas where you feel tension or dissatisfaction and ask yourself: “What part of me is hiding here?”

3. Recognise Unreal Patterns

Take stock of where you habitually chase external goals to soothe discomfort and observe how these patterns play out in your life.

The key isn’t to eliminate desire but to distinguish between unreal seeking or striving versus expressing something from you realness.

Exercise: For one week, track moments when you feel restless and then note what you are chasing and why: “Am I chasing this because it will serve life or because it will soothe my ego?”

4. Cultivate Calm and Regulation

The more we can regulate our nervous system, the less the Ache drives compulsive action:

Simple practices like slow breathing, gentle movement, or grounding exercises allow us to return to a state where we can discern real from unreal and put ourselves back on our true path.

Exercise: Give yourself five minutes every day to practice box breathing (inhale 4, hold 4, exhale 4, hold 4) and feel the tension in your body release with each breath.

5. Engage with Reality, Not Illusions

Face what’s real in your life – the ‘good’, the ‘bad’, the ordinary, and the challenging.

Reality isn’t something to escape from – it’s what allows you to finally stop running.

Exercise: Choose one area of life where you’ve been resisting reality and then take one small, real action today to engage with it authentically, without expectation of outcome.

6. Act from Realness, Not Ego

When your actions emerge from your realness, you no longer need to chase life to soothe inner friction – instead, you participate in life fully, and the Ache loses its grip.

Exercise: Before acting on a desire or impulse, ask: “Am I acting from realness or from ego?” – notice the difference in energy and how it feels in your body.

All that seeking and searching will eventually lead back to where you started.

The Final Word: Living Beyond The Ache

The Ache is not a curse nor is it a part of the human condition that you just have to deal with:

It’s FEEDBACK and a compass pointing toward wholeness.

Each moment of restlessness, each pang of longing, is an invitation to slow down, face reality, and reclaim your realness and – once we accept this – a profound shift occurs:

The Shadow is no longer feared but embraced, the consequences of our actions are no longer a source of dread but an opportunity to act in alignment with truth, and the Ache that once drove frantic striving becomes a subtle guide, showing us where we can reconnect with life, fully and deeply.

To live beyond The Ache is to live in realness which is to move through life with authenticity, presence, and clarity so that we can step out of The Void and into a life where longing no longer drives us into exhaustion, but points us back to the one place where we have always belonged: within ourselves, aligned with reality, and whole.

The Ache isn’t a problem to fix; it’s a message to heed.

Stop running, face your shadow, observe your footprints, and you’ll discover there is no Ache: just life and your own capacity to make it either unreal or REAL.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to overcome the Ache and start living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you find a solid foundation to build on.

Emotional Garbage: Why You Don’t Have to Take What Isn’t Yours

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Integration/Life Philosophy/Mental Health/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology/Relationships/Shadow Life

Dealing With The Big Black Bag of Emotional Garbage in a REAL Way

Take a few seconds for this quick thought experiment:

You’re walking down the street, minding your own business, and somebody rushes up to you holding a huge black bag that’s leaking, stinks, and is is clearly filled with rotting rubbish.

Without explanation, they try to hand it to you.

“Here“, they say. “Take this“.

What would you do in this situation?

Odds are, you’d probably step back, perhaps question their sanity, and then outright refuse to take hold of the bag…

That just seems like a no-brainer but this exact situation (metaphorically speaking) happens to us every single day psychologically and emotionally:

If you stop to look at the world around then you’ll see that people are constantly attempting to hand you their emotional ‘garbage’:

Often, they don’t even realise their doing it but their fear, shame, anger, insecurity, confusion, and unprocessed inner chaos are all offered up to you as though it’s YOURS to take a hold of.

If we’re not grounded in our REALNESS, then we can actually find ourselves picking up all kinds of emotional garbage that has nothing to do with us whatsoever.

This article is about recognising the bag when it’s offered, understanding why people try to give it to you in the first place, and learning that you can CHOOSE not to take it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Emotional garbage is often just projection.

The World Is Full of Unprocessed Emotional Garbage

Let’s begin with a simple but potentially uncomfortable observation:

The world is populated with people carrying enormous amounts of unprocessed emotional material.

Many of us spend a great deal of our time running – often unconsciously – from our own inner experience:

We distract ourselves, suppress feelings, construct unreal identities, blame others, and chase endless stimulation as a way of avoiding what’s unresolved within ourselves.

The aim of all this is pretty simple: to forget, escape, or outrun what feels uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, this running only increases suffering because the paradox is that reality itself is medicine and so the more we resist it, the worse we make things for ourselves in the long-term.

When we stop running and actually look at what’s going on inside ourselves honestly and without distortion then we can begin to feel better because reality has a natural self-correcting function and so once something is accepted, it can usually start to process itself because emotions are “e-motion, energy in motion”.

The problem is that many of us never stop long enough to discover this because of short-term emotional discomfort (that a dysregulated nervous system can often confuse for actual physical danger).

The long and short of all this is that instead of facing our own inner worlds, we can attempt to manage it externally with one the most common ways to do this being to try and pass emotional garbage onto someone else.

The Shadow Dance: When People Try to Hand You Their Bag

When people are living in a state of fragmentation – split between the conscious ego that they identify with and filter life through and their hidden shadow self — then they enter the Shadow Dance which is the ongoing struggle between the self-image they want to maintain and the ‘parts’ of themselves they’re not ready to face yet.

Maintaining the illusion of the ego creates TENSION that has to sometimes be released somewhere.

(As the old (supposed) Chinese proverb says: “Tension is who you think you ‘should’ be, relaxation (regulation) is who you really are“).

Rather than looking inward to release this tension by integrating they shadow, the most common strategy – in order to maintain the ego – is to try and offload by giving somebody else that big ol’ black bag of emotional garbage:

Projection: Seeing Their Garbage in You

The most common form that this offloading takes is projection:

Projection is what happens when someone takes their own inner emotional ‘stuff’ – for example, their fear, anger, dishonesty, insecurity, or shame (though it can also happen with ‘good’ emotion) – and perceives it as existing in someone else so they don’t have to feel it directly (and then process it).

Instead of recognising their own inner conflict, they locate it outside themselves (hence the saying that “perception is projection”).

Essentially, in situations like this they’re handing you the bag and saying, “This is yours“.

Whether you take it or not is a CHOICE that’s determined by what’s going on in your own emotional world…

Insecurity and Shame

Being offered the big black bag of garbage can also be something that’s motivated because of general insecurity rooted in underlying shame:

When people feel fundamentally not ‘enough’, for example, they often try to make others responsible for stabilising their emotional state and so they demand reassurance, blame others for their feelings, or create dynamics where you’re somehow help up as the one who needs to ‘manage’ their emotions for them.

Again, this isn’t REAL (because it’s rooted in their ego ‘stuff’ and the ego is the opposite of reality) -they’re just offering you that black bag again and attempting – usually unconsciously – to transfer responsibility for something that only they can work through.

When Something Feels ‘Off’ or ‘Weird’

Before we go too deep into this it’s important to point out that not everything is projection but – if we have our own ‘stuff’ – we can sometimes treat everything as projection as a way of emotionally bypassing:

Sometimes the feedback we get from others about how we’re making them feel or how we’re showing up is a genuine observation of one of our own patterns.

Sometimes we make mistakes and other people reflect things we need to see in ourselves.

This being said, though, being handed that black bag of emotional garbage when it’s not ours to take is a real phenomenon and there’s often a distinct signal when something is ‘off’ and this is what’s going on:

Many people I’ve spoken to about this recognise it as a strange or “weird” feeling – the sense of being pulled into something unreal that seems out of balance or ‘gamey‘ and dramatic in some way…the interaction feels distorted and you’ll feel the subtle pressure to accept a frame (interpretation) of reality that isn’t actually aligned with anything that’s true.

This feeling is a cue that your nervous system recognising an incongruence and that your realness itself is signalling that you’re being invited into a dynamic that isn’t grounded in truth.

In other words:

You’re being offered the bag but you DON’T have to take it.

Why We Take the Bag of Emotional Garbage (Even When We Don’t Really Want To)

If taking someone else’s garbage makes life heavier, why do we do it?

Because we’re often conditioned to.

If we are not grounded, regulated, and real within ourselves, we may feel obligated to accept what’s offered — even when it harms us.

Childhood Conditioning and Emotional Enmeshment

One reason that so many of us think we need to take the big black bag of emotional garbage from people is because so many people grew up in environments where they had to ‘manage’ a parent’s emotional state.

For example, perhaps a parent was unstable, overwhelmed, or unable to regulate themselves and so the child learned that love meant meeting the parent’s emotional needs.

This creates enmeshment (or blurring and blending between one person and another):

One of the worst consequences of this is that adult ego of people that exeprience this kind of thing continues operating from this pattern instead of from their REALNESS (which has always been their but gets hidden behind the distortions of ego) and so when someone offers emotional garbage, the old programming activates:

[Insert Robot noises *beep* *boop*]:

“I must take care of this. I’m responsible“.

But this is a learned survival strategy to try and acquire ‘love’ way back when – not the actual truth.

Unnecessary Guilt

Another reason that we might CHOOSE to take the bag is because we feel guilty (which – if it lingers – is always a sign that we’re being controlled or manipulated by some external source):

When we’re driven by guilt a few things can start to happen:

-We assume responsibility for emotions that aren’t ours.

-We believe we’re ‘bad’ if someone feels upset.

-We confuse empathy with obligation.

-We think refusing the bag makes us ‘selfish’ (or some other loaded term).

The truth, though, is that guilt doesn’t always indicate wrongdoing (though sometimes it definitely does and it’s asking us to learn and make amends) but often it simply reflects conditioning that needs to be questioned.

Our Own Unprocessed Material

The bottom line is this:

More often than not, we take the bag when it’s offered to us because we haven’t dealt with our own emotional ‘stuff’.

Unprocessed emotions often lead to the creation of a self-image and survival pattern where we assume we must carry things for others.

This means that their ‘garbage’ resonates with our unresolved issues and so we unconsciously accept it.

In short, the bag is something we take because something unreal inside of us makes us believe we have no choice.

Growing Real: Recognising the Bag and Choosing

Staying and growing real in these situations begins with Awareness.

‘Awareness’ means learning to notice when the big black bag of garbage is being offered and recognising the strange pull, pressure, or invitation into unreality.

Awareness is just the starting point, though, because the deeper transformation is in realising that we always have a CHOICE and so we can choose not to take it.

This power of choice becomes more of an option when we remain grounded in our realness which means that we stay connected to the things that actually belong to us like our values, our vision, our real emotions, and our inner rootedness.

From this grounded place, it becomes abundantly clear that the ‘bag’ has nothing to do with us unless we make it have something to do with us – instead, we can see that it belongs to the other person’s reservoir of unprocessed emotional ‘stuff’ and reflects their inner relationship with themselves.

In other words, it’s their work and we can stay free if we want to be.

Not Taking the Bag Doesn’t Mean Losing Compassion

Refusing the bag does not mean rejecting the other person or becoming cold, detached, or lacking empathy.

In fact, the opposite is true because it means accepting their REALNESS and their power to deal with all that ‘stuff’ to go deeper into wholeness in their relationship with themselves and life:

When we refuse to participate in unreal dynamics, we create the conditions for genuine growth for both for ourselves and for others.

We can still care, listen, and understand but we don’t need to absorb what isn’t ours – instead, we can focus on our own realness and our vision, our goals, our habits, and our alignment with reality.

By staying focused like this, we establish energetic boundaries that protect clarity and groundedness which, paradoxically, is good for everyone:

When we don’t take the bag, the other person is returned to their own responsibility which means they’re given the opportunity to face their inner world which means that real growth becomes possible.

Why Not Taking the Bag Helps Everyone Grow REAL

When you take someone’s emotional garbage, you participate in their emotional avoidance, help maintain their fragmentation, and reinforce the illusion that their emotional world exists outside them.

When you flip the script and refuse in a calm and real way then something powerful happens:

You interrupt the pattern; you model regulation; you embody realness; you show that facing reality cannot be outsourced.

This doesn’t always feel comfortable in the moment because some people resist (which is what the black bag is all about in the first place) and some might become upset (not because you’re purposely trying to upset people but as a by-product of not enabling those old patterns) but – in the long run – it facilitates authenticity and healing for all involved.

Realness grows through realness.

Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’re ready to step into your realness once and for all.

Practical Steps: How to Stop Taking the Big Black Bag of Emotional Garbage

Understanding the idea is one thing but living and implementing it is another so here are some practical ways to make use of all this ‘stuff’ in daily life:

1. Notice the Signal

Pay attention to your body and listen out for when interactions feel distorted, pressured, or strangely heavy…

When they do, pause and notice any tension, confusion, or feelings of ‘offness’ or ‘weirdness’ because this is often your nervous system signalling that an unreal dynamic is unfolding.

(Not always but often).

2. Ask Yourself: “Is This Actually Mine to Take?”

When emotional heaviness starts to appear, ask yourself straight-up:

Is this actually my responsibility or am I being told that it is?
Did I actually create this emotion or is it something that was already there but that’s been triggered?
Am I being asked to ‘manage‘ something that belongs to someone else?

Clarity interrupts those automatic patterns from an outdated self-image by allowing you to to make a CHOICE.

3. Ground Yourself in Reality

Stay connected to what is real for you and the things that you can actually DO something with:

Your direct experience
Your values
Your intentions
Your goals and vision for yourself

Regulating practices such as breath awareness, slowing down, or feeling into your body can stabilise you in moments of pressure and a grounded person can’t easily be handed someone else’s garbage.

The more you create a foundation of regulation in your life, the easier it gets to stay real when things get unreal.

4. Release Unnecessary Guilt

Recognise that you aren’t responsible for regulating other adults’ emotions and that you can still care deeply without carrying anything that doesn’t belong to you.

You can understand without absorbing and you can love without losing yourself.

5. Set Energetic Boundaries

Boundaries aren’t walls – they’re a commitment to clarity about who you are and what you’ll tolerate.

Sometimes, this means calmly expressing your perspective.

Sometimes, it means not engaging in certain conversations.

Sometimes, it simply means not internalising what’s projected onto you.

Your energy follows your attention and what you focus on grows to choose wisely.

6. Process Your Own Emotional Material

The less unresolved ‘stuff’ you carry in your own emotional reservoir, the harder it becomes for others to hand you theirs.

Turn towards your own experience and accept whatever arises without judgement so you can allow reality to work as medicine.

Once again, as your inner world becomes integrated and regulated, your capacity to remain grounded increases naturally.

7. Focus on Your Vision

The simple truth is that when you’re oriented towards meaningful goals, habits, and growth, you have less space for unnecessary emotional burdens because your life keeps moving forward and so your energy stays aligned with what matters (your realness).

Check out my free 7-day course if you’re ready to work on your real vision: The 7-Day Personality Transplant System Shock for Realness & Life Purpose

Emotional garbage being offered to you isn't personal - it's just people trying to survive their own 'stuff'.

Emotional Garbage & the Freedom of Empty Hands

Life becomes lighter when you stop carrying what isn’t yours:

You move with more clarity, relationships become more real, emotional space opens, energy returns, and reality flows.

Perhaps even more importantly, you discover something that can change your life forever:

You never had to carry the bag.

Realness is simply the willingness to see what is true, remain grounded in it, and choose accordingly and so – even though the world may be full of people offering their garbage – you’re free to keep walking with empty hands.

Stay real out there

P.S. If you’re ready to find a foundation of realness in yourself and life so you can do something REAL then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get in the zone.

Embodiment and Realness: Accepting Truth at the Level of the Nervous System

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Health/Integration/Life Philosophy/Mental Health/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology/Shadow Life/Trust

Embodiment Means That Your Nervous System Accepts the Truth About Your REALNESS

Many of us live with the persistent sense that something is ‘missing’.

This feeling can haunt us even when life appears to be ‘working’ on the surface and so even when our ducks are lined up at the levels of career, relationships, and achievements there’s still often an undercurrent of restlessness in the form of a feeling of disconnection or a sense of searching for more without knowing what “more” actually is.

From the perspective of realness, this feeling isn’t a personal failure but natural reaction to an unnatural situation because one of the reasons so many of us feel restless is because we’ve become disconnected from the truth about ourselves.

In this state, we find ourselves living in the Void – a state of fragmentation where we’re cut off from our own essence and the essence of life itself.

Finding ourselves in the Void isn’t a condition that arises randomly – it’s something that emerges as a reaction to shame, guilt, and trauma accumulated over time – experiences that fragment us internally and create a constant tension between the ego and the shadow self and causing us to become divided against ourselves.

This article is about how to undo all of this through embodiment:

We’ll talk about how to truly embody something is not merely to understand it intellectually but to accept its truth at the level of the nervous system so that we can live, breathe, and express it naturally.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your nervous system affects your embodiment of either realness or egol

The Void: When We Become Disconnected from Ourselves

The Void is the experiential consequence of disconnection from truth and can be seen as the state we enter when living according to unreal assumptions rather than reality.

Of course, nobody really ‘chooses’ to enter this state as it emerges as a survival strategy when we experience shame, guilt, or trauma and begin to develop protective structures.

The main protective structure that we create as a reaction to all of this emotional ‘stuff’ is the ego: a constructed self-image designed to avoid pain, maintain safety, and preserve a sense of control.

Even though this helps us to ‘survive’ whatever we might have been through, it’s a process that ultimately fragments us because the ‘parts’ of ourselves that feel unacceptable or overwhelming are pushed into the shadow self (despite them being REAL).

The end result of all this is that the ego constructs a version of who we believe we SHOULD be instead of who we actually ARE and then we then spend our lives attempting to maintain this image.

The just results in the internal conflict of the Void (the ego is really a character we play because we think the Void is real when it’s actually a disconnection from truth because of our judgement of it):

One part of us seeks authenticity.
Another part seeks protection.
A third part carries unresolved emotional material.
Etc. Etc. Etc.

This fragmentation creates a constant dance between ego and shadow and so we become even more disconnected from our essence as we live from outdated reactions rather than truth.

The feeling of emptiness, restlessness, or searching that many experience is not a mystery – nor is it just the human condition (as we often romanticise the feeling as being) – it’s the felt somatic sense of fragmentation over wholeness.

Returning to Realness Begins with Awareness of the Ego

One of the main ways we begin to undo the damage of the Void is by returning to our realness and this often starts with examining the ego.

(Which is why my coaching containers with clients are built around Awareness (Deconstruct Ego), Acceptance (Integrate Shadow), and Action (Embody Trust)).

The ego is not inherently ‘bad’ and you don’t need to ‘kill’ it because it developed for a reason (to help you survive) – it can start to cause a lot of problems in our lives, though, when we confuse what it shows us for reality and hold ourselves back from our own lives.

One of the reasons that the ego can hold us back is because it asks us to live according to unreal assumptions that are rooted in fragmentation instead of wholenes:

It does this by building a belief system to protect itself rather than to help us uncover truth and by encouraging us to maintain a particular self-image rooted in the past rather than the present.

In practical terms, this means:

We shrink away from very real ‘parts’ of ourselves by misinterpreting them and sending them into the Shadow Territory.
We avoid situations that threaten our (unreal) identity.
We suppress emotions that challenge our self-image and supporting beliefs.
We prioritise control over truth.

In doing all of this, we become closed systems and seal ourselves off from reality, growth, and genuine connection.

Thankfully, our realness can start to return when we become aware of how our self-image holds us back because when we see how the ego filters experience, it begins to loosen its grip.

Awareness and Acceptance: Necessary but Not Sufficient

Working with the ego and shadow is essential if you want to return to your REALNESS:

Raising Awareness is about deconstructing the ego and seeing its assumptions clearly so that we can start to recognise what is real and what is unreal (and once you see it you can’t unsee it which is why this is so powerful).

Developing Acceptance means integrating the shadow and allowing previously rejected parts of ourselves to resurface and become part of our conscious experience of ourselves.

These processes are effective because everything ultimately comes back to self-image and the fact that how we see ourselves tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(This doesn’t mean that we can control everything or get absolutely everything we want from life but it means we can get out of our own way and see that we have way fewer limits than we may have been conditioned to believe).

When you change the self-image from unreal to real then life changes accordingly.

However, conceptual insight and understanding alone won’t produce lasting transformation and so to truly change, we must move beyond intellectual understanding and into embodiment:

What It Means to Embody Truth

“Embody truth” might sound a bit dramatic or over the top but all embodiment really means is accepting truth at the level of the nervous system.

First and foremost, this means getting to a state of regulation – i.e. allowing the parasympathetic nervous system to engage when needed so we are not trapped in constant fight-or-flight.

More importantly, it also means that our nervous system begins to trust reality more than it trusts the limitations of the ego.

This might initially sound abstract or impractical but it becomes a lot clearer when we understand that the mind and body are not separate systems but that they’re one (the mind-body):

The mind feeds into the body and the body feeds into the mind and so our beliefs shape our physiology, and our physiology reinforces our beliefs.

What this means is that when we live in a state of fragmentation, the nervous system reflects this state which means that the ego effectively ‘hijacks’ the nervous system and so – instead of reacting only to genuine external threats – the nervous system begins to treat internal experiences as dangerous too (when, really they’re not dangerous they’re just uncomfortable).

This is when:

Emotions feel threatening so we resist them.
Vulnerability feels unsafe so we hide.
Truth itself feels overwhelming so we perform instead of being present.

When we’re not embodying our realness, we do this automatically because facing these things would challenge the ego and ask us to reintegrate the shadow and so instead the system resists wholeness in order to preserve its conditioned identity.

This is how the Void perpetuates itself and why we end up thinking that the Void is just “the way it is” (when actually it’s a resistance to what is).

The Conditioned Self and the Unconditioned Self

At the heart of this dynamic is a relationship between two versions of ourselves that are in conflict with each other:

The Conditioned Self

This is the version of us shaped by past experience, emotional wounds, and learned patterns.

It filters reality through the ego and its fragments and its primary concern is safety, control, and identity maintenance.

The Unconditioned Self

This is who we are as an experience of realness and isn’t constructed or something that needs to be defended and protected (because you don’t need to defend the truth – only your interpretations of it):

It’s open, responsive, and aligned with truth.

When the nervous system is dysregulated, it supports the assumptions of the conditioned self and perceives the return to the unconditioned self – the way ‘out’ of the Void – as a threat.

Embodiment reverses this relationship and allows the nervous system to recognise truth as safe so that we can rebuild on a solid foundation.

From Awareness to Embodied Trust

To become embodied, we can follow the process of Awareness, Acceptance, and Action again:

Awareness (Deconstruct Ego): Discerning the real from the unreal at the level of our image of ourselves.
Acceptance (Integrate Shadow): Allowing realness to become the default by no longer hiding.
Action (Trust Self and Life): Expressing the truth about our essence (realness) through action.

This is embodied trust because rather than acting from fear, conditioning, or self-protection, we act from alignment with reality and so the nervous system learns to support truth instead of resisting it.

One powerful method for starting to shift gear and move in this direction involves the use of symbols:

The Power of Symbol: A Direct Path to Embodiment

Carl Jung observed that symbols have profound healing power because they bypass the analytical mind and communicate with the psyche at a deeper level thus allowing us to understand truth holistically and experientially rather than intellectually and conceptually.

Aligning with a symbol of the self in realness can therefore be transformative.

Essentially what this means is that when we choose a symbol aligned with our essence instead of the fragments and illusions of the conditioned self then we can create a new (more REAL) reference point for identity.

Instead of identifying with the ego, we grow into the symbol and this symbol replaces the ego as an unreal filter through which we engage with life.

Over the years, I’ve seen how this approach has really helped some of my coaching clients to embody truths they intellectually understood but struggled to live.

For example:

One client working on assertiveness chose to embody the symbol of the Grizzly Bear which was grounded, aggressive (in a healthy way), and unafraid to take up space or take a place at the table.
Another seeking to overcome the wounded inner child that was interfering with his adult life chose to show up as The Man – a stable, responsible, and present version of himself in embodied presence.

The specific symbol isn’t what matters here and it can literally be anything that WORKS for you – an animal, an archetype, a quality, or an image.

All that really matters is that it represents an awareness of your realness and allows you to go deeper into it.

Consciously using a symbol like this allows you to step beyond conditioning and unlearn the patterns that keep you from your essence/realness so that you can express it via real ACTION.

If you want to go deeper into overcoming the Void then check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Practical Steps for The Embodiment of Realness

Embodiment is not achieved through theory but through practice and so it needs to become a consisent daily (ideally) habit.

The following steps can help you to start creating a foundation of regulated embodiment so you can identify with what is real rather than with the symptoms of the Void and the character (ego) you think you need to play within it.

1. Regulate the Nervous System

Embodiment requires a system capable of safety and openness and so nervous system regulation is absolutely essential.

Practices that support regulation include:

Slow nasal breathing.
Yin yoga (I do this with a lot of my coaching clients outside of coaching sessions because it’s so effective).
Meditation.
Somatic exercises.
Time in nature.
Consistent rest and recovery (giving yourself some ‘yin’ time so you’re not in ‘yang‘ energy all the time).

The goal is not constant relaxation but to learn flexibility and responsiveness so that you’re able shift out of fight-or-flight when appropriate.

The reason that all of this is important is that regulated system can accept truth without being shaken (as it has nothing to defend).

2. Raise Awareness of the Ego

Get into the habit of observing your reactions throughout the day (the free Thought Log tool on this site can help you with this):

Where do you defend your self-image instead of being present?
Where do you avoid discomfort because your nervous system has confused it for physical danger?
Where do you shrink or perform instead of actually showing up?

Notice the assumptions behind these reactions and over time you’ll cultivate enough awareness to weaken identification with the conditioned self and step into realness.

3. Discern the Real from the Unreal

Ultimately, changing your life and overcoming the Void is about learning to discern the real from the unreal.

Keep this in mind as much as you possibly can:

Is this reaction based on truth or fear?
Is this aligned with my essence or my conditioning?
Does this open me to life or close me down?

Over time, discernment becomes intuitive and you can start embodying the truth about yourself, the world, and reality as you overcome those old automatic reactions to things.

4. Choose a Symbol of Your Realness

Select a symbol that represents who you know yourself to be beyond conditioning – it should evoke strength, clarity, and truth and have a certain somatic ‘feel’ that is beyond just your mental ideas.

Let it represent the version of you that lives without fragmentation and use it as a filter throughout the day to see if you’re showing up in an embodied or disembodied way.

5. Embodiment Meditation

This is a powerful daily practice that can help you to create a foundation of embodiment and regulation:

Sit comfortably and breathe slowly through the nose.
Allow the body to relax.
Bring your chosen symbol to mind.
Feel into it at the level of its posture, energy, and presence.
Let your body experience what it is like to be this symbol.

Most important: Don’t ‘think‘ about it with concepts – feel it as an experience.

Over time, the nervous system begins to recognise this state as familiar and safe and every time you do this exercise it’s like you’re ‘topping up’.

6. Act From the Embodied State

Embodiment becomes real through action and so eventually you’re going to have to start acting like the real version of yourself.

As you go about your day, ask yourself:

How would this my realness respond to this?
What’s the next REAL step forward?

Then act accordingly.

This rewires the relationship between mind, body, and reality and helps you to stay in the flow.

Embodiment can help you to return to your wisdom instead of your interpretations.

The Final Word: Living Beyond the Void

Ultimately, embodiment creates a new foundation for identity and allows you to get out of concept and into experience:

Instead of identifying with fragmentation, restlessness, or conditioning, you identify with regulated presence and realness which allows the nervous system to learn that truth is safe, openness is possible, and life can be met directly.

This dissolves the sense of searching that defines the Void and you no longer need to keep seeking for ‘more’ because you’re no longer disconnected from yourself.

You start to return to wholeness.

Embodiment isn’t simply a technique but a return to our natural state where awareness, acceptance, and action flow together as one integrated expression of truth.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to embody yourself in your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to start seeing yourself again.

Gratitude & Realness: Why Gratitude Is Essential for Realness

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Health/Integration/Life Philosophy/Mental Health/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology/Trust

Gratitude Shows Us that Acceptance, Not Resistance, Brings Us Back to What’s Real

One of the most important things we can do if we genuinely want to stay real and to keep going deeper into realness is to cultivate habits that help us override the promptings of the ego.

The reason this is important is because the ego can seem so familiar and subtle to us that it just becomes our default mode of operating in the world (even though the ego is the opposite of reality):

It doesn’t always scream for our attention but just hums beneath the surface of our lives, whispering to us in our own voice unreal thoughts of comparison, dissatisfaction, urgency, judgement, and a low-level sense that something about this moment isn’t quite ‘enough‘ – left unchecked, it distorts our perception of reality and pulls us away from truth and wholeness.

This is why staying connected to our realness isn’t something we “figure out” once and for all but is something we have to live into daily, moment by moment, through the practice of consciously CHOOSING the real over the unreal.

Personally, in my own ‘battle’ with the ego, I have a handful of habits that I make sure I do every single day so I can keep my focus on what’s real about myself and my life (to stay on track with them I use the free app Loop Habits – not affiliated, just genuinely useful).

These habits act as regular check-ins throughout the day so that my focus stays on reality rather than whatever story my ego happens to be telling me that day.

Of all the habits I cultivate, though, one stands out as absolutely essential no matter what:

A daily gratitude ritual.

If I could only do one of my daily habits a day for whatever reason it would be this one because – every single time – it reminds me how blessed my life actually is, energises me, and lifts my internal state – most importantly, it moves me out of resistance and back into a real, receptive relationship with life.

This article is about why gratitude is so important when it comes to growing real and how you can begin cultivating it through the same simple daily ritual.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Gratitude tunes you back into your REAL life.

Gratitude is Your Natural State

Gratitude isn’t something we practise just because it might help us hit our goals, manifest outcomes, or help us to feel a little bit more ‘positive’ – it’s something essential to our nature:

If we’re being real with ourselves, gratitude isn’t optional.

As dramatic as it might sound and at the most basic level, every human being is temporary in their current form (who knows what happens next?) because every one of us is hurtling inevitably towards death.

What this essentially means is that life is finite which means it’s also precious because every single one of us is a limited edition.

Every breath, every conversation, every ordinary, unremarkable moment that we barely notice while living inside our heads instead of the present moment is a kind of gift and gratitude is simply the honest recognition of this truth.

Really, it’s just about appreciating the sheer wonder of even being alive in the first place:

Of having a body, of being conscious, of getting to experience joy, pain, love, confusion, beauty, and meaning however imperfectly it all might seem or how little ‘sense’ we might be able to to make of it all.

The bottom line is that when we cultivate gratitude, we stop taking our own existence for granted and – when we stop taking life for granted – we naturally become more receptive to experiencing it fully.

Gratitude and the Body: More than Just a ‘Nice’ Theory

Gratitude isn’t just spiritually sound – it’s also something that affects our quality of life from the most basic level of our biology.

This isn’t just some pseudo-profound, woo woo theory – it’s a measurable reality.

For example, psychologist Robert Emmons who is one of the leading researchers in the field, has shown that people who engage in regular gratitude practices experience all kinds of tangible health benefits:

Improved mood and emotional wellbeing.
Better quality of sleep.
Reduced stress and depressive symptoms.
Stronger immune functioning.

In one well-known study by Emmons & McCullough (2003), participants who kept weekly gratitude journals reported higher levels of optimism and life satisfaction compared to those who focused on hassles or neutral events (another example that what you focus on grows).

A similar powerful example comes from Martin Seligman’s research on positive psychology:

In a 2005 study where participants wrote and delivered a gratitude letter to someone who had positively impacted their life, there was a significant increase in happiness and a decrease in depressive symptoms – lasting up to a month after the exercise.

(Over time, happiness levels went back to ‘normal’ which shows that doing a regular gratitude ritual can sustain the benefits over time).

All of this is to help demonstrate a simple fact about the human experience:

Gratitude changes our internal chemistry in a real way.

It shifts our nervous system, alters how our brain filters information without distortion or resistance, and it moves us out of survival-based threat scanning and back into safety, connection, and coherence.

All of this brings us back to REALNESS:

Gratitude as the Foundation of Acceptance

If realness is about aligning ourselves with truth rather than distortion (ego) then acceptance is the ground we must stand on (and – at the end of the day – without acceptance, nothing real can be built).

Acceptance doesn’t mean ‘liking’ everything, it doesn’t mean passivity or resignation – it means seeing clearly.

Acceptance is linked to gratitude in this sense because, when we practise gratitude, we stop fighting reality and stop arguing with what already is as we stop filtering life entirely through opinion, judgement, and interpretation – most of which are extensions of the ego.

This is important to know because ego thrives on resistance as a way of avoiding the underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma that have caused us to ‘split’ from our realness and hide behind ego in the first place (which causes the creation of the shadow self).

When we’re operating from this split, we don’t see reality but instead see a distorted projection shaped by fear and unmet needs.

Gratitude interrupts this pattern and starts to return us to truth by saying:

“This is real and there’s something here worth appreciating”.

…and this alone is enough to begin restoring wholeness over the fragmentation of ego.

The Ache, the Void, and the Endless Search

When gratitude isn’t actively cultivated, we become preoccupied with desire:

Instead of actually being present in our lives, we start living in an imaginary future and become fixated on outcomes, achievements, relationships, money, validation, or meaning that we believe will finally make us feel whole.

We treat all of these ‘good’ things as the ULTIMATE thing in our lives (because we think they will finally ‘fill’ us) and this creates what I call The Ache:

The Ache is that subtle, restless sense that something is ‘missing’, that we need to keep searching, and that fulfilment is just one more breakthrough away if we can just search and seek in the ‘right’ way.

The Ache feels deeply human and is often romanticised as being an intrinsic part of the human experience but it isn’t our true nature – it’s what we feel when we’re DISCONNECTED from it:

The Ache is just the sensation of living in the Void – a state of disconnection from truth, driven by unresolved shame and ensuing fragmentation.

No amount of ‘success’ can fill it, no relationship can ‘fix’ it, and no identity can stabilise it because the Void isn’t external – it’s just a loss of contact with what’s real.

How Gratitude Soothes the Ache and Helps Heal the Void

The long and short of all this is that gratitude ‘works’ because it brings us back into an acceptance of what’s real and real always works:

When we slow down and genuinely feel into what’s already present in our lives like the relationships, opportunities, lessons, comforts, and moments of fully feeling ALIVE, then we stop abandoning ourselves and lives so we can trust both.

Believe it or not, even when life “sucks”, there is still something real to be grateful for because – like we said above – life is always going to be a gift and so when we accept ourselves and our lives as they actually are, something profound happens:

We reconnect with our ESSENCE – the deeper foundation of realness that was never missing in the first place.

From here, life stops being about compensation for the underlying shame that led to us identifying with the ego and starts being about expression instead:

What this means is that we don’t try and bring things into our lives to soothe the ego but we we bring them in because they allow us to express even more of our realness.

If you’d like to go deeper into overcoming the Void and finding your realness then check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace (there’s a whole chapter on gratitude).

The Shift That Gratitude Makes Possible

When gratitude is felt in an embodied way (“embodied” meaning that we accept the truth about something and live accordingly) – not just thought – then it creates real internal shifts that affect your whole life.

You can go:

From Tension to Trust: So that you don’t have to weigh yourself down with holding onto tension and doubts and can trust yourself and life.
From Force to Flow: So that you can stop trying to make life conform to the ego and can work with life instead of against it.
From Scarcity to Abundance: So that you can stop focusing on what you don’t have or don’t want and start expressing more of what’s already real and start bringing more realness into your future.
From Fear to Assurance: So that you can stop worrying about things and rest assured that things will always be real if you stay focused on what’s real.

These aren’t affirmations (though you could use them that way if you really wanted)- they’re natural consequences of returning to wholeness and living according to your realness.

Gratitude reminds you that your existence itself is a gift.

The Daily Gratitude Ritual

So having said all of this, the gratitude ritual I use every day is intentionally simple and is something that any of us can do without much fuss.

It goes like this:

I keep a notepad on my phone (paper works too, but digital makes it easy to build a record) – personally, I use Google Keep which is great (I only use it about 789749872 times a day).

Each day, I write TEN things I’m grateful for and -most importantly – WHY.

The format is always the same:

“I am really grateful for [THING] because [reason]“.

The reason I write the thing I’m grateful for in CAPITAL LETTERS is so I can scroll back through previous entries and reconnect with the feeling later.

The reason (everything after “because”) also matters because it anchors the gratitude state in reality and shows the nervous system that the appreciation is justified and true instead of being forced or abstract (this isn’t a “fake it ’til you make it” type thing – it’s about genuinely tuning into feelings of gratitude).

After writing each entry, I pause, breathe, and let myself feel the gratitude in my body – really, that feeling is the point because what we’re really cultivating isn’t a list but a state of BEING.

If you do this daily, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll notice something shift – maybe not all at once (because of the reality lag) but steadily and in increments.

You’ll feel less resistance, more acceptance, and more trust as you develop a deeper relationship with what’s real and start getting RESULTS in your life that are aligned with this inner state.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to start focusing on your REAL life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to find a way forward (and keep you accountable).

Holding Emotional Pain: Why We Hold On to Pain (and How to Let Go Without Losing Ourselves)

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Integration/Mental Health/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology/Relationships/Shadow Life

Sometimes, We Hold Onto Emotional Pain Because We Don’t Want To Let Go of Whatever Caused It In the First Place

There’s a strange but very human paradox I see again and again when working with people on going deeper into their own REALNESS.

It always unfolds like this:

People come to a point where they know that something inside themselves is holding them back, they can feel it in their body, they become aware of their patterns, they can name the underlying emotional ‘stuff’ like shame, guilt, trauma, fear, or resentment, and they can even pinpoint exactly where it all started and still – despite all of this awareness – they don’t want to let it go.

This isn’t because they’re ‘weak’ or because they’ve ended up falling into the trap of ‘enjoying’ their own suffering and becoming addicted to it but because letting go of emotional pain sometimes feels like losing something vital that we can’t imagine living without – a connection, an identity, a story, or even themselves.

This article is about this phenomenon:

We’ll explore why people hold on to emotional pain, what’s really happening underneath it, and how to move towards wholeness without falling into the Void.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Emotional pain lingers when we don't consciously grieve what we think we lost.

The Moment People Wake Up to What’s Driving Them

A phenomenon I’ve seen a bunch of times now when working with people to grow REAL and move towards a real vision is this:

They inevitably become aware of unhelpful emotions from the past that are still driving them and acting as blocks or obstacles to the present and a future they actually want to live in.

These emotions usually aren’t random because they’re almost always unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma picked up in relationship with an authority figure – most often a parent, but sometimes a teacher, religious figure, or caregiver.

This is ‘normal’ and something that happens to pretty much all of us because at some point in childhood, something happened that caused us to become split from ourselves and to have to create a self-image (a.k.a. ‘The Ego’) to live by as a way of surviving this.

This can happen for a load of different reasons but usually it’s things like:

Parts of the real self not being welcomed or mirrored by somebody we look up to for guidance (parent etc.)
Emotional needs not being met.
Authentic expression of our realness being subtly or explicitly punished and so we end up trying to disown those expressions.

In all of these types of episodes (and anything similar), a child will do what children always do: adapt.

What ‘adapting’ means in this case is disowning very real ‘parts’ of themselves to preserve connection and so they end up creating the ego-based self-image mentioned above as a coping and survival strategy.

The cost of this is that the ‘parts’ of themselves that didn’t fit go underground and become part of the shadow self.

Fast-forward to adulthood and decades of living in this fragmented way and people start doing the inner work because they know that something needs to change (though they don’t always know what):

They reflect, they meditate, they read books, and they start to notice their reactions, emotional and mental blocks, patterns of self-sabotage, and the way that they resist and avoid life.

This continues for as long as it needs to continue until they eventually dig deep enough and hit something fundamental.

This is when they end up saying something like:

“I know this is holding me back… but I can’t let it go”.

This is because what they’ve actually reached is a cornerstone of their current personality.

Why Letting Go of Emotional Pain Feels Impossible

When they hit this cornerstone it can seem almost impossible to let go of because it seems like reality itself (which, of course, we can never let go of because reality isn’t going anywhere and so can only be ACCEPTED) – actually, it’s just one of the final blocks to fully accepting reality and getting a solid foundation on which to build our real lives.

This apparent inability to let go almost always comes down to two main reasons.

1. The Emotions Are the Fuel of the Ego

The shame, guilt, or trauma people uncover at this stage aren’t just ‘feelings’ but the fundamental drivers of the ego structure they’ve identified with for most of their lives.

This ego – despite being unreal and just a survival mechanism – still has a really important job:

It helps to explain who they became.
It justifies their behaviours and the choices they’ve made.
It gives ‘meaning’ to their suffering.
It offers a sense of control and predictability as they move through the world.

When someone doesn’t yet have a real vision for who they’re becoming in their realness, then it’s only natural that the idea of releasing these emotions feels like stepping off a cliff.

Instead of it being an opportunity for freedom, letting go (when we don’t have that real vision) simply looks like:

Emptiness
Uncertainty
Loss of identity
A terrifying void

So naturally the nervous system says, “No thanks” and we keep clinging to all of the patterns that trapped us in the first place (as a reaction to all the ‘stuff’ we went through).

This is why people can get stuck at a very high level of self-awareness but still feel paralysed by thier emotional pain:

Awareness alone isn’t enough because without something real to move towards in the form of real action, the ego feels like the only thing keeping them alive.

(This is why in my coaching containers we always go through three stages: Awareness (Deconstruct Ego), Acceptance (Integrate Shadow), and Action (Trust Yourself and Life)).

2. Emotional Pain Feels Like the Only Remaining Connection

The second reason is more emotionally charged:

Those ‘cornerstone’ emotions are often the only remaining link to an important relationship from the past.

What this means is that – even if the relationship was painful, distant, or emotionally unsafe – the adult self (identified with the ego that arose in reaction to this emotion pain) might only have shame, guilt, anger, or grief left as proof that it mattered.

Sometimes, letting go can feel like erasing the relationship entirely and so even if what remains is suffering, it still feels better than nothing.

Underneath this is a quiet fear:

“If I let go of this pain, there will be nothing left of them… and nothing left of me“.

When you look at it like this it’s no wonder we sometimes find it so difficult to let go and move on.

What We’re Really Holding On To When We Hold Emotional Pain

Here’s the key reframe that can set you free if what you’re reading here applies to your own situation:

We’re not actually holding on to emotions themselves because once you drop the stories, emotions are just energy stored in the body – what we’re really holding on to is the thread those emotions create in the narrative of our life.

We hold onto this ‘thread’ because it has all kinds of information that helps us make ‘sense’ of life:

This is who I am.
This is what happened to me.
This is why my life looks like this.
This is what love is.
Etc. Etc. Etc.

Because the emotions in question helped to shape our self-image, we fear that letting go of the story will cause us to lose ourselves completely.

For this reason we attach an extra level of ‘meaning’ to the idea of holding on:

Holding on means I’m loyal.
Holding on means I understand them.
Holding on means I’m deep.
Holding on means I’m not heartless.
(Or anything else that supports how you need to see yourself).

At the same time, we attach another kind of ‘meaning’ to letting go (which really just means integrating – not forgetting about something completely):

Letting go means I’m betraying them.
Letting go means it didn’t ‘matter’.
Letting go means I’m abandoning my younger self.

None of this is true – which is why part of healing your relationship with yourself is about testing the reality of the assumptions and beliefs you carry – but it definitely feels true when we’re filtering everything through the ego.

When you strip all of this away, the deeper motivation is pretty simple (though not always easy):

We’re not ready to face reality yet.

Instead of being grounded in the reality of where we are now as an ADULT who can make real choices, we’re still seeing the situation through the eyes of our inner child and holding on to what we thought we needed or hoped would happen back then instead of what actually was and now IS.

Reality as Medicine: The Role of Grief

Reality is always medicine because it allows us to find a solid foundation of acceptance on which we can build something that will actually ‘work’ (because real always works) but it rarely tastes sweet at first.

In this case, embracing reality means grieving the past properly (instead of blocking the grieving process with our ego and it’s belief systems)- not just grieving what happened but grieving what never happened but that we wish did.

This might be things like:

The childhood we didn’t get.
The parent who couldn’t show up in the way we hoped they would.
The relationship that never became safe.

This grief is essential because shame and guilt linger when grief is avoided but grieving is a PROCESS leads to back to acceptance (which means reality is involved).

In other words, acceptance is what finally allows the nervous system to relax and the body to release stored emotional energy that keeps us locked in ego over realness.

Holding Onto Emotional Pain Blocks Our Relationship With the Truth

Here are some truths that usually need to be accepted so that we can start to find that real foundation and start living in the present instead of attempting to cling onto the past:

The Person Who Hurt Us Was Human

It’s hard to accept this initially but it wasn’t the real version of whoever hurt us that hurt us – it was the symptoms of their own disconnection from realness that caused them to act in an unreal way.

This doesn’t excuse harm, of course but it contextualises it so that we don’t have to take it as a sign that the shame and guilt (etc.) we picked up are actually personal or belong to us:

The Shame and Guilt Were Never Ours

We took a lot of this emotional ‘stuff’ on as coping mechanisms – not because it’s real:

They were strategies for preserving connection, not reflections of truth.

Letting them go isn’t giving up something real but about returning something that was never ours to carry.

We Can’t Get What We Wanted From the Past

This is the hardest pill to swallow for many of us:

We can’t go back in time and so we can’t finally make someone see us, love us properly, or become who we needed them to be.

Once this is fully accepted, something extraordinary happens:

We’re free to work with what actually IS right now so we can build something real.

If you’re ready to go deeper into all of this then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Replacing the Old Self-Image With Something Real

Letting go of this old emotional pain only really becomes safe when something real is there to replace the ego (which is why a lot of therapy etc. doesn’t work – they just poke around in the pain and leave it where it is).

This isn’t about inventing a new identity or anything like that – it’s about unlearning the conditioning that led to the unreal one so you can tap back into your realness:

The process looks like this:

1. Tune Into Essence (Realness)

Your essence isn’t what happened to you but what remains when you can let go of all those stories about what you happened and what it ‘means’ about you.

Values are a powerful doorway here and so are shadow qualities (the parts of you that were once disowned but contain life, creativity, strength, and truth).

When you know your core values and you know what parts of yourself you want to resurface you know who you would be without the emotional pain and you can start ACTING in alignment with this.

2. Create a Vision

A vision gives the psyche somewhere to move and allows you to shift your FOCUS so you’re not just looking at your emotional pain all the time (which is a bad idea because what you focus on grows).

Creating a vision doesn’t mean that you’re creating a fantasy of what you’d like (that would be ego) but a grounded sense of who you’re becoming when you live in alignment with your realness.

3. Break It Into Goals

Vision becomes real through structure and so goals allow you to translate essence into form by taking REAL ACTION.

4. Commit to Habits

Almost daily habits anchor growth in the body and this keeps you in process of growing real rather than trapped in a fixed self-image.

Growth replaces identity as you become something that MOVES towards wholeness instead of something that’s ‘fixed’ behind fragments.

The threads we hold onto cause our emotional pain to linger - not the things we went through.

Letting Go of Emotional Pain Without Losing the Relationship

When we accept that the past relationship can never give us what we wanted, we stop trying to extract life from our own emotional pain and that’s when its grip loosens.

Letting go doesn’t erase love, meaning, or impact – it simply removes what was unreal.

Once this happens, we can do something radically different and give ourselves what we didn’t receive:

We can embody the qualities that were ‘missing’ and bring bring them into our families, friendships, and communities.

By giving, we receive and by living in a real way, the past finally catches up with who we really are – not who we think we had to be.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to let go of the past and start living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear in a real way.

CBA (Can’t Be Arsed) Mode: How Sometimes Not Caring Shows the Truth

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Integration/Life Philosophy/Mental Health/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology/Relationships/Shadow Life

CBA (Can’t Be Arsed) Mode is The Withdrawal of Real Energy from Unreal Situations

There sometimes comes an oddly powerful moment in life that doesn’t announce itself with fireworks or dramatic music and definitely doesn’t come wrapped in the language of ‘enlightenment’ or spiritual platitudes but that can take you deeper into REAL life than either.

It usually arrives all-of-a-sudden, almost rudely, and as a blunt internal message that you can’t ignore:

“I can’t be arsed with this anymore”.

Many of us treat this ‘CBA’ moment as a kind of personal failing because our conditioning judges it as laziness, apathy, a lack of discipline, or some moral flaw – but what if CBA isn’t a problem?

What if it’s a strange kind of wisdom?

What if it’s your nervous system, unconscious mind, and deeper sense of REALNESS finally telling you the truth and asking you to stop fooling yourself?

This article is about why sometimes the only solution is to develop an attitude problem – not the sulky teenage kind but an honest kind that comes from listening your body and saying “We’re done here“.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Tuning into your CBA signal is about removing the unreal and unessential from your life.

CBA Mode Isn’t Laziness, It’s Completion

Let’s clear something up straight away so that you know exactly what we’re dealing with.

CBA mode isn’t apathy, laziness, or “giving up” – it’s just what happens after a process has finished processing and reached a state of COMPLETION:

CBA (“Can’t Be Arsed”) Mode is what happens when your unconscious mind and nervous system have gathered enough data to realise that something is unreal – in other words misaligned, distorted, draining, or simply not based on anything true or lasting.

You don’t decide to reach CBA – you arrive there, and – once you’re there – pretending otherwise costs you energy, time, and eventually your sanity.

People think CBA means “I don’t care” but, more accurately, it means something like “I can no longer pretend this is real when I know it isn’t“.

And that’s an entirely different beast:

You’ve Probably Already Experienced CBA (Even If You Ignored It)

Most people reading this will have hit CBA Mode at least once in their life – even if they didn’t necessarily listen at the time:

Maybe it was a job that you took out of necessity and told yourself to be grateful for…you powered through… and powered through… and powered through…until one day you realised that every cell in your body was dragging itself into work like a hostage.

You couldn’t be arsed but you went anyway.

Or maybe it was a relationship:

It was ‘fun’ for a while but it soon became toxic, dramatic, and endlessly circular with the same old arguments, the same old apologies, same old promises, and same old let-downs.

You knew deep down that you couldn’t be arsed with it anymore but you kept going back anyway.

In all these cases (or anything similar), the pattern was the same:

Every time you ignored the CBA signal, life got heavier and more unreal.

That’s not a coincidence – it’s what happens when you ignore your own CBA Mode signal and the feedback it gives you from reality.

A Lesson from My Own Life: When CBA Ends the Argument

I once dated a woman who was utterly obsessed with being ‘right’ all the time:

Not truth – rightness.

She would start trivial arguments over nothing in particular, purely to get the hit of proving herself ‘right’ and it would just create an endless procession of empty, circular arguments that never went anywhere (because they were unreal so they couldn’t).

At the time I didn’t fully understand what was going on, but later it became obvious: it was an addiction driven by underlying shame.

Anyway, for a while, I played along (because that’s what I thought I was ‘supposed’ to do):

I argued.

I explained.

I justified.

I even tried to ‘win’ too (even though there was nothing to win because it was all just ego ‘stuff’ and the ego is the opposite of reality).

Thankfully, something interesting eventually happened:

My CBA signal kicked in.

I finally realised there was never going to be any end to the arguments because the arguments weren’t about the subject – they were the whole point because she literally needed to argue.

That CBA signal kicking in was the moment I stopped feeding into it and when I stopped engaging, stopped justifying, stopped trying to be ‘right’ about nothing in particular the whole thing collapsed.

Not because I had ‘won’ some imaginary competition but because I withdrew real energy from an unreal situation.

CBA wasn’t apathy – it was clarity.

A Second Lesson from My Own Life: Compassion as Ego in Disguise

Another place CBA has shown up in my life is with people who live in constant drama like anger issues, chaotic life choices, and endless crises.

For a long time, I told myself I was being compassionate for keeping them around and ‘tolerating’ all of the unnecessary problems they brought into my life:

“They’ve been through a lot”.

“It’s not their fault“.

“They just need support”.

And while all of that might have been true, something else was also true:

I was tolerating patterns that were unreal and unresolvable and calling it virtue.

Underneath the ‘compassion’ was my own ego in the form of a need to rescue, a need to feel ‘moral’, and a need to see myself as the ‘good’ or ‘strong’ one (or [whatever]).

That’s not real compassion, though, because real compassion doesn’t mean sacrificing your nervous system so someone else can avoid their own work and so – when the drama started causing friction and stress in my life – my CBA signal kicked in again to put me back on a real path:

I stopped answering the phone; I stopped feeding energy into situations that could only be resolved internally by the other person.

It wasn’t cruelty – it was REALNESS and my CBA signal helped me see it.

CBA Is the Body Telling You the Truth Before Your Conscious Mind Can

Here’s a key point that often gets missed:

CBA is a bodily and experiential understanding of the truth – not a mental or conceptual one.

This is because your nervous system and unconscious mind perceive reality far more accurately than your ego does and so where your ego wants:

To be ‘right’
To look ‘good’
To be ‘moral’
To be ‘needed’
To be ‘special’
To be ‘validated’
Etc. etc. etc.

…your body and unconscious mind just want alignment with reality itself.

So when CBA kicks in, it’s not saying “I don’t care” or anything like that – it’s just pulling you back to remembering that “This costs more energy than it gives and it isn’t real“.

When you ignore the signal, unnecessary friction enters your life, friction turns into frustration, and frustration turns into chronic stress and misery.

What this means is that if you’re experiencing ongoing, inexplicable misery that isn’t tied to a genuine life event (like grief or illness), then there’s a good chance you’re forcing yourself to be “arsed” about something your body has already rejected.

The Ego Is Always Why We Don’t Listen

So why do we ignore CBA if it has the potential to be so restorative when seen in a real way?

It’s because CBA mode threatens our ego and its self-image:

We think we should engage in pointless arguments because being ‘right’ matters to us, for example; we think we should tolerate anything and everything because we want to see ourselves as endlessly compassionate; we think we should rescue people because it makes us feel superior or necessary.

Once CBA mode has kicked in, though, continuing to act out the ego’s scripts is no longer noble but dishonest:

At that point, you’re not being real with yourself or with others.

You’re investing energy into unreal situations and using other people to prop up an ego identity built on shame, guilt, or trauma.

That’s not truth or even love (if you wanna go there) – it’s theatre.

CBA Is the Withdrawal of Real Energy from Unreal Situations

This is the cleanest way to understand all of this is with a workable definition of CBA that goes like this:

CBA is the withdrawal of real energy from unreal situations.

That’s it.

The problems really begin when the natural capacity for CBA gets exiled into the shadow self by being judged (the opposite of accepted) and labelled as laziness, a “bad attitude” or anything else that dismisses its benevolent power.

When we exile and suppress our own CBA signal then life becomes increasingly unreal:

Drama increases, stress increases, burnout creeps in, resentment builds and you end up pushing against reality instead of moving with it.

This is unfortunate because pushing against reality always costs more than it gives.

Time and Energy Are Precious Assets So Stop Wasting Them

Life is finite because we’re all gonna die one day which means that your time, energy, and attention are your most valuable assets.

Ignoring your CBA signal wastes all of these things and leads to:

Nervous system burnout
Chronic stress
Low-grade resentment
Emotional numbness
A sense of being “stuck” as we end up living in The Void

It’s not because life is cruel that you end up experiencing these thing but because you’re not listening:

CBA isn’t telling you to stop caring – it’s telling you to care about something more REAL.

CBA vs NFG (No F*cks Given)

It’s worth quickly pointing out a distinction between CBA and NFG because these two often get lumped together when they’re not the same thing.

The difference goes like this:

CBA is about energetic boundaries: It’s about where you stop investing energy.

NFG (No F*cks Given) is about expression: It’s about where you stop holding yourself back.

CBA says “I’m not feeding into this anymore because it’s unreal” but NFG says “I’m not censoring my realness anymore“.

Both are essential but confusing them can lead to chaos so I’m just pointing it out.

If you want to go deeper into unconditional self-acceptance and realness then check out Shadow Life: Freedom From BS in an Unreal World (it’s not for everybody, though).

How to Work with Your CBA Signal (Practical Steps)

Here’s how to use all of this information in real life without turning into a detached hermit or somebody who completely lacks social skills:

1. Notice Where Resistance Is Chronic

Temporary discomfort is a normal part of anybody’s journey but a chronic sense of resistance is a signal that something needs changing in your life.

Start by doing some digging and ask yourself these probing questions (you can journal your answers if you want the best results):

Where do I feel constant heaviness?
Where do I dread engagement with life?
Where am I forcing myself to care when I don’t?

2. Remove Moral Judgement

CBA isn’t ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it’s REAL feedback and course correction from reality about how to be more real so drop the story about what you should do and go do what’s real (as long as you’re not physically hurting anybody).

3. Check for Ego Motives

Ask yourself honestly about how your ego might be getting involved and causing you to act like you’re ‘arsed’ when really you CBA:

Am I doing this to be ‘right’?
To look ‘good’?
To feel ‘superior’?
To avoid ‘guilt’?

If the answer is yes to any of these questions then things have probably become unreal in some way.

4. Withdraw Energy Cleanly

You don’t need drama, big speeches, or even justification:

Once the CBA signal has been triggered all you need to do is stop feeding it (whatever “it” happens to be for you).

5. Redirect Energy Towards Something Real

CBA creates space for you to shift your FOCUS onto something real and to stop distracting yourself from your actual, real life.

Find something real to focus on, create a vision for yourself, break it down into goals, and then cultivate habits that support your growth into the person you need to become in you realness.

CBA mode is about being honest with yourself and life.

CBA: The Only Question That Matters

If you take one thing from this article, let it be this:

Learn to trust your CBA signal.

You can start by asking yourself a really important question:

“Where am I forcing myself to be arsed when I know deep down that I’m not?“

That question alone can change the trajectory of your life because it’s a reminder that you don’t course-correct by thinking harder – you course-correct by listening deeper.

Your REALNESS already knows the way but, sometimes, the truth doesn’t always whisper.

Sometimes it speaks to you clearly and it says:

“CBA“.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to shift your focus and start focusing on something REAL then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get moving.

Pain & Realness: The Myth That “More Pain Means More Healing”

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Health/How-To/Integration/Life Philosophy/Mental Health/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology/Shadow Life/Trust

The Realness of Pain On A Transformational Journey & How To Grow THROUGH It, Not INTO It

There’s an unfortunate badge of honour floating around in modern ‘healing’ circles:

The idea that if it hurts more, it must be ‘working’ more.

Once you start looking, you’ll see it everywhere:

People pushing themselves into emotional breakdowns in the name of ‘growth’, others digging endlessly and relentlessly into their past or the shadow self only to re-traumatise themselves with ‘stuff’ they never really needed.

Intensity and pain are seen as a kind of virtue and calmness and safety (the qualities that ‘healing’ eventually leads to as we return to wholeness) are seen as a kind of ‘failure’ or simply just too ‘boring‘ or something.

The unspoken belief underneath it all is pretty simple when you break it down:

“If I feel more pain, I’ll heal faster“.

On the surface it sounds committed, brave, and maybe even a little ‘spiritual‘ but…it’s a myth that – for many people – ends up being the very thing that keeps them ‘stuck’.

This article will dismantle that myth – not by denying that pain plays a role in growing real or ‘healing’ but by putting it back in its rightful place – because, yes, there is definitely pain on a real healing journey but chasing pain is not the same thing as healing.

In fact, it usually does the opposite.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Growing real sometimes means facing pain but staying unreal causes even more pain in the long-run.

Healing Is a Return to Wholeness (Not a Quest for Suffering)

When we talk about healing – whether it’s psychological, emotional, spiritual, or otherwise – we’re really talking about one thing:

A return from fragmentation to wholeness.

“Wholeness” can be seen as our natural state:

It’s what we are at the core of our BEING underneath all of the adaptations, masks, and strategies we learned to survive in the world with.

Due to this being a broken and fallen world (or whatever you wanna call it), very few of us make it into our adult lives without this connection to wholeness being severed in some way:

Through shame, guilt, and/or trauma, rejection, or simply not being ‘seen’ on some emotional level that was required for our healthy development, we end up disconnecting from ‘parts’ of ourselves and splitting.

Out of that split, something ‘else’ emerges: the ego.

The ego isn’t a villain (though it’s often sold as this) – it’s just a survival mechanism that’s gone slightly askew because we ended up identifying with it and thinking it’s who we really are (when it’s just a filter between ourselves and reality).

At the end of the day, the ego is just the mask we created so we could be acceptable, lovable, successful, or at least safe enough to get through life without feeling more pain than we could handle at the time.

This is a completely normal reaction to a messed up situation:

The problem isn’t that the ego ‘exists’ – it’s that over time we forget it’s a mask and start to believe it is us.

Once we’re filtering life through a fragmented ego ego rather than a natural experience of wholeness, certain patterns start to emerge:

Persistent friction.
Repeating frustration.
A background sense of misery or having to ‘force‘ life instead of being able to flow with it.
A feeling that life is something to manage or control rather than participate in

We can live like this for years – maybe even decades – but the odds are (unless we’re particularly good at holding on to unrealities that don’t serve us), we eventually reach a turning point where something stops working, a relationship collapses, motivation dries up, anxiety creeps in, or we just get tired of performing in stead of being present.

This is usually when the ‘healing’ journey finally begins as we can start to return to our realness.

Why Healing Can Hurt (At First)

Returning to wholeness is essential but it isn’t always comfortable but there’s something important that you need to know:

The short‑term pain people experience on a healing journey doesn’t come from ‘healing’ itself – it comes from what healing requires.

What healing ‘requires’ is starting to raise awareness and acceptance of:

Emotions we’ve avoided resurfacing and processing.
Beliefs that no longer match reality.
Identities that can’t hold up to the light of truth.

There’s a reason I often say “The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable)” and it’s because reality in truth is medicine but – like many kinds of powerful medicine – it can taste bitter when you first swallow the pill.

What hurts on a ‘healing’ journey isn’t the truth itself but the loss of the familiar illusions we’ve been depending on to survive as the stories, self‑images, and interpretations that once protected us now start to dissolve.

Of course, the ego never likes this because the ego is rooted in all of these things:

In fact, the ego’s entire ‘job’ is to keep things predictable and controllable so that when truth shows up in our lives again and says, “This isn’t who you really are” (or some variation of this) it feels like death to the system that’s been running the show.

That’s where much of the pain comes from: not from the ‘healing’, but reconfiguration as we return back to wholeness over fragmentation and realness over ego.

The Three Stages of Real Healing (A Spiral, Not a Straight Line)

Real healing tends to unfold in three fundamental stages which aren’t linear but as a spiral that you can revisit again and again, going deeper into wholeness each time round (though, of course, things can happen in life that cause us to also become fragmented temporarily).

These are the three stages of Awareness (Deconstruct Ego), Acceptance (Integrate Shadow), and Action (Trust Self & Life) that I talk about in my books and walk clients through in coaching containers:

1. Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego)

This is where we start looking honestly at the self‑image we’ve built in reaction to underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma.

As we do so, we notice the patterns, defences & coping strategies, the roles, compulsions, and other ways we distort reality to stay safe.

Awareness isn’t about judging the ego but about seeing it clearly so we can understand how it formed and what emotional material it’s protecting.

When we understand in this way we can start to make choices that are more REAL and aligned with our purpose instead of our programming.

2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow)

As awareness grows and the ego is reconfigured, exiled parts of us that were sent into the Shadow Territory begin to surface:

These are the emotions, impulses, needs, values, qualities, goals, and truths – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but always real – that had to go into hiding so the ego could function. Shame lives here. Grief lives here. So do anger, vulnerability, desire, fear but there’s also a lot of strengths and good qualities like your ability to trust, your joy, and your strength.

Acceptance means making space for these ‘parts‘ without trying to ‘fix‘ or eliminate them which is what allows fragmentation to begin to heal.

3. Action (Trust Self and Life)

Eventually, healing stops being an internal process of excavation and starts becoming a lived practice where we take ourselves back ‘out’ into the world on a solid foundation of Awareness and Acceptance (which means that we have regulation first).

What this looks like is that we begin taking real action – not doing things for the sake of doing things (as a kind of distraction) or acting from fear or a need to ‘compensate‘ for some (mis)perceived untruth about ourselves – but from acting from trust.

Trust means that we trust ourselves in our ability to meet life so that we can “do our best” and take the action that’s ours to take but also that we trust life to fill in the blanks so that we can “let go of the rest” and don’t need to control every outcome for things to work or to feel ‘worthy’.

This is where wholeness starts expressing itself in the world because we’re in touch with the essence of our realness.

Some Pain Is Inevitable but It’s Not Meant to Be Overwhelming

There will be emotional pain on the journey from the unreal to the real – that’s unavoidable but also an important part of the process:

If you’ve spent years – or decades – away from reality, then the return can feel abrupt because there’s a gravity to it (as the saying goes, “what goes up must come down” and so if you’ve been up in the air for a while there is gonna be at least a bit of a fall back to solid ground)

What’s important to remember, though, is that pain doesn’t have to be overwhelming to be effective – in fact, overwhelming pain usually signals that something has gone wrong.

A strategic approach is what can make all the difference to dealing with the pain of old emotional ‘stuff’ when it’s time to face it:

Regulate the nervous system: So the body feels safe enough to process emotions.
Work with thoughts: Using tools like a thought log to challenge distortions and refocus on vision.
Break emotions down: Into components like physical sensation, meaning, and story instead of attaching to them and trying to deal with it all at once.
Let go in the moment using approaches like the Sedona Method when appropriate.

Healing works best when we’re in the stretch zone – not when we’re overwhelming ourselves and end up shifting into the panic zone.

Of course, as regulation improves, emotional waves still arise but they’re smaller, shorter, and easier to integrate.

Where the Myth Creeps That “More Pain = More Healing”

At a certain point, some people take a ‘wrong’ turn that ends up overwhelming their system and causing their fragmentation to become even more rigid and grasping.

Usually it happens when the ego gets involved in the healing process and we allow our sense of fragmentation to create urgency, insecurity, and a need for results NOW.

This idea that we need to rush through our ‘healing’ or be perfectionistic about it just ends up being a mental block that stops us from trusting the natural drive towards wholeness (as the unconscious becomes conscious and life moves towards more life).

That’s where the myth comes in and we can start believing that intensity equals effectiveness – that if we can just dig deeper, feel more, break down harder, we’ll finally be free.

It sounds nice but this is just ego using healing as another control strategy because wholeness doesn’t work like that:

Wholeness unfolds at its own pace and our only ‘job’ is to fit ourselves into its rhythm whilst still moving towards our greatest vision for ourselves and life.

What Actually Happens When We Chase Pain Instead of Letting It Come To Us

When people go looking for pain instead of allowing it to arise naturally – which it always will if you can be still enough to allow what needs to come to come – then several things tend to happen:

They find it because there’s always some unresolved thing we can face as nobody’s ever completely ‘healed’.
The nervous system becomes overwhelmed, triggering fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation.
Intensity becomes addictive, because it feels familiar even when it’s destabilising (our identity is just ‘used to’ feeling a certain kind of intense energy).
Calmness gets mistaken for resistance, even though being calm is a sign of integration.
The focus gets stuck in the past, rather than moving towards a real future and a vision for realness.
Healing becomes fragmented and loses balance and coherence.

Perhaps most importantly, persistent pain is feedback.

The bottom line is that our relationship with the truth communicates at the level of experience and so if something hurts continuously, it’s often signalling misalignment, because reality is medicine and so endless pain is a sign of frequent distortion.

If you believe that pain is proof of progress, then you ignore the feedback that reality is giving you and just and push harder.

All that ends up doing is keeping you stuck in a ‘healing’ loop for years.

Reality Is Medicine But Only If We You Take It

Reality IS the medicine.

That means it gives feedback, guides you back on track, and course corrects until you know that you’re in tune with your realness.

The natural drive towards wholeness is always unfolding in our relationship with ourselves and ourselves but also with ourselves and life which what makes it possible to “trust the process”…what blocks this drive isn’t a lack of ‘pain’ but mental and emotional resistance, clinging to outdated beliefs and ideas, forcing life to meet the ego, and outcome‑dependence.

When we step back and stop interfering, the process self‑organises which means that pain arises when it’s ready to be processed and not a moment before.

This requires trust but it’s way more effective then poking around where we don’t belong, hurting ourselves, and calling it ‘healing’.

The Real Shift: From Excavation to Integration

If we’re lucky (or REAL), something eventually ‘clicks’ and we realise that we don’t need to process everything in order to move forward because we already know enough.

At that point, ‘healing’ stops being about hunting for wounds and starts being about leaning into a real vision that will take us deeper into wholeness:

Who am I becoming?

How do I want to show up?

What would real action look like from here?

As we move forward, whatever still needs integrating will surface naturally without force and we can take it on board as fuel for the process instead of an unnecessary detour.

Check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to go deeper into your own realness and building true momentum in your life.

Practical Steps: Healing Without Chasing Pain

Prioritise nervous system regulation over intensity: If your system doesn’t feel safe, healing will stall no matter how deep you go so only go as deep as you need to. It’s not a race or a competition.
Use pain as information, not instruction: Ask what it’s pointing to instead of assuming you need more of it. Pain is just a signal that shows you something needs attention (if you let it arise naturally).
Work with what’s present: Don’t dig for emotions that aren’t arising organically. You don’t (and can’t) ‘heal’ absolutely everything.
Challenge urgency: Healing isn’t a race but urgency is usually ego and nervous system dysregulation in disguise.
Focus on the present and future: Let the past integrate as you stay present and move towards something real.
Trust the process: Wholeness does its thing without the ego’s involvement so stop getting in the way.

When pain calls it's the doorway into deeper wholeness; if you go looking for it, it leads to deeper fragmentation.

Pain & Realness: The Final Word

‘Healing’ isn’t about suffering more – it’s about resisting less reality so you can feel better.

When resistance drops, pain doesn’t disappear because it’s been chased away but dissolves because it’s no longer needed.

That’s the difference between intensity and integration and the way back home to wholeness.

Stay real out there,

P.S If you’re ready to work on growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to start acting in alignment with wholeness instead of against it.

Sympathetic Dominance: Why a Dysregulated Nervous System Makes It Impossible to Be Real

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Health/Integration/Life Philosophy/Mental Health/Mindset/Nervous System/Psychology

Sympathetic Dominance & Your Journey Back to REALNESS

Many people think their problems are purely psychological, some think they’re emotional, others think they’re due to some esoteric spiritual ‘issue’, and a few blame a lack of discipline, motivation, or the ‘willpower’ to do things in the ‘right’ way.

Though all of these things can come into it here-and-there, very few people stop to consider something a little more foundational:

The quality of our relationship with life is shaped by the quality of our relationship with our own nervous system.

This is one of the most overlooked truths in modern personal development and it’s also one of the main reasons so many intelligent, self-aware people still feel stuck, reactive, exhausted, or strangely disconnected from themselves as the end up living life in the Void.

If you want to understand why it feels hard to slow down, why rest feels uncomfortable or even guilt-inducing, why you keep forcing outcomes instead of flowing into them, and why being REAL sounds nice but feels strangely unsafe then you need to understand SYMPATHETIC DOMINANCE.

More importantly, you need to understand how this kind of sympathetic dominance – the overactivation of your nervous system – pulls you away from your realness and showing up in your own life in alignment with who you really are.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Sympathetic dominance is what happens when your nervous system is evaluating risk when you're safe.

Sympathetic dominance is a signal from the self to the self about how in tune you are with your REALNESS

The Nervous System: The Missing Link Between You and Life

Your nervous system is not just a biological mechanism – it’s the interface between you and reality.

What this essentially means is that from one moment to the next, your nervous system is asking you the same question over and over again:

“Is this safe or is this a threat?”

That’s it.

This is a beautiful, intelligent, and life-enhancing system that’s one of the main reasons human beings have survived and evolved for so long to end up on top of the food chain.

When there is actual, physical danger, your nervous system instantly mobilises energy so that you can fight, flee, or freeze (whatever the circumstances demand).

The problem of sympathetic dominance isn’t the system itself, then, but what happens when it becomes dysregulated:

When the nervous system loses its ability to accurately distinguish between physical danger and emotional discomfort, it starts seeing threats where none exist and so a difficult conversation feels like danger, stillness feels unsafe, uncertainty feels intolerable, and rest feels ‘wrong’.

Once you’ve reached this point, life itself starts to feel like something you need to manage, control, or survive rather than something beautiful and REAL that you actually get to enjoy living.

What Is Sympathetic Dominance?

The autonomic nervous system is the part of your nervous system that works beyond your conscious control (for example, to keep your heart beating or your blood flowing) and it has two main branches:

The Sympathetic Nervous System: Responsible for fight, flight, mobilisation, urgency, and getting ready for action.
The Parasympathetic Nervous System: Responsible for rest, digestion, healing, emotional processing, and integration.

In a healthy system, these two branches move fluidly and kick in when they’re NEEDED:

You mobilise for action when needed and there’s some kind of ‘threat’ that needs attending to and you downshift when the situation is genuinely safe.

Sympathetic dominance occurs when the sympathetic branch is chronically activated – even when there’s no real threat present. In other words, fight-or-flight becomes your default state and so you’re constantly in ‘alert’ mode.

When this happens, the parasympathetic system barely gets a look in which is ‘bad’ news because that’s where recovery, regulation, healing, and emotional integration actually happen.

This is because you can’t heal a system that never feels safe enough to stop and actually just be present.

Proven Symptoms of Sympathetic Dominance

Sympathetic dominance doesn’t always look dramatic – in fact, it often hides behind what modern culture praises as being virtuous or a sign of ‘success‘ in some way.

Here’s a quick list of common, well-documented symptoms of sympathetic dominance so you can see how it shows up for people:

Chronic stress or anxiety.
Difficulty relaxing, even when “nothing is wrong”.
Digestive issues (bloating, IBS, nausea, poor appetite).
Shallow or chest-based breathing.
Constant restlessness or agitation.
Irritability and emotional reactivity.
Difficulty sleeping or waking up tired.
Racing thoughts or mental hypervigilance.
Muscle tension (especially jaw, shoulders, hips).
Difficulty focusing unless under some kind of pressure.
Burnout cycles followed by total collapse.
Feeling “on edge” for no clear reason.
Etc. Etc. Etc.

What’s crucial to understand is this:

None of these things are personal failures – they’re signals from your nervous system telling you to get more REAL.

A Modern Culture That Rewards Dysregulation

Here’s where things get really interesting:

Our culture is overwhelmingly yang-dominant (in relation to yin and yang where ‘yin’ is more about stillness and ‘yang’ is focused on being dynamic):

Speed, hustle, ‘output’, optimisation, visibility, and constant doing for the sake of doing things are seen as the default or ‘normal’ way of doing things and rest and regulation are framed as something you earn.

Slowness is suspicious, stillness is ‘unproductive’, and being busy is worn like a badge of honour.

In this cultural context, a dysregulated nervous system often looks like ‘success’ which is why so many people end up being lost to themselves and the Void:

Grinding is praised, burning out is normalised, and pushing through until exhaustion is seen as morally ‘right’ but the problem with all this is that it’s just a cultural script that guarantees sympathetic dominance.

A culture that doesn’t value rest, integration, or regulation creates people who literally don’t know how to feel safe in their own bodies.

Then everybody starts to wonder why it looks like the world is going to hell…

The Gremlin That Makes Rest Feel ‘Wrong’

Over the years, I’ve spoken to many people who feel guilty when they rest – not a “I’m so lazy” kind of guilty but an almost “I’m an abject moral failure” type of guilt.

This is because there’s a tiny but powerful cultural gremlin in the mind whispering things like:

“You haven’t done enough”.

“You should be using this time better.”

“Rest is indulgent”.

“Slow down when you’re dead”.

This voice isn’t the truth, though – it’s just conditioning layered on top of a dysregulated nervous system.

This brings us onto a deeper truth about the nervous system and our lives as a whole:

Sympathetic dominance isn’t just a sign that you’re tired – it’s a signal that you’re forcing life instead of trusting it.

In other words, it’s a signal that you’ve slipped out of flow and into control (or out of REALNESS and into EGO).

The “Sympathetic Personality”

One of the most damaging consequences of long-term sympathetic dominance is identity confusion because, over time, people develop what I call a Sympathetic Personality and start to think it’s who they actually are.

This isn’t who they are in their realness, though – it’s just who they become under chronic pressure.

The sympathetic personality is:

Impatient.
Reactive.
Outcome-dependent.
Always ‘on’ and performing.
Uncomfortable with stillness.
Addicted to urgency.

Eventually, people start to believe “this is just who I am” but it really isn’t – it’s just a fragmented version of you that exists when your system is constantly perceiving ‘threat’s everywhere..

The ‘good’ news is that don’t need to ‘fix’ your personality or anything dramatic like that – you just need to regulate your nervous system so you can’t start seeing clearly again.

Shame, Urgency, and Unreal Goals

Something else I’ve seen a lot is that sympathetic dominance disproportionately affects shame-driven people:

This makes a lot of sense when you stop and think about it because unresolved shame creates a subtle but constant sense that something is ‘wrong’ with us and so – to try and outrun that feeling – we distract ourselves with action for the sake of action, achievement, and compensatory goals.

The nervous system reads all of this as urgency which basically shows up as something like:

“If I don’t get [x] soon, then something ‘bad’ will happen”.

(Nothing bad will happen – this is just emotional discomfort perceived as a physical danger and then projected out into life).

The end result of thinking and feeling in this unreal way is that goals that could nourish and express our real essence slowly turn into threats and so we genuinely believe that if we don’t achieve them, the shame will define us forever.

Ironically, this outcome-dependence pulls us out of the very process required to succeed and so we just end up rushing, forcing, never listening to ourselves and life, and losing any real sense of flow.

This all comes down to how the sympathetic system is getting us ready for nothing but action and reactivity instead of BEING whilst moving forward in a responsive and real way:

The body tightens, the mind-body system contracts, and failure becomes more likely because we’re stuck in our minds instead of actually engaging with life.

Why Emotions Start to Feel Dangerous in Sympathetic Dominance

The short-version of all this is that in sympathetic dominance, the ego hijacks the nervous system.

The ego is a survival filter and it’s job is to keep things predictable and controllable but facing emotions properly – especially the ‘difficult’ ones like grief, anger, fear, or shame – require moving towards discomfort and this threatens the ego’s sense of control.

This is why the nervous system mislabels emotional discomfort as physical danger.

It’s why people freeze up and get ‘stuck’ when it’s time to do real inner work:

They’re not weak – their system thinks it’s under attack and so resistance follows, reality gets postponed, and the shadow becomes even more distant.

Ego, Survival, and Imaginary Threats

When we’re regulated, the ego is a tool but when we’re dysregulated, the ego becomes a prison.

In sympathetic dominance, we try to survive situations that only exist in our minds – for example, conversations that haven’t happened, hypothetical futures that aren’t real, and judgements that may never come (and that don’t need to ‘hurt’ us even if they do).

Through the interface of sympathetic dominance, life just becomes about unnecessary friction, frustration, and misery rather than anything real or true.

Regulating the Nervous System & Overcoming Sympathetic Dominance: The Way Back to Realness

You cannot ‘think’ your way out of sympathetic dominance – you have to create safety in the body first so that you can return to the present moment, overcome emotional blocks, and allow mental distortions to stop blocking your view of yourself, the world, and reality.

Some practical foundations you can start building include:

Nasal breathing.
Slowing physical movements.
Regular rest without stimulation.
Gentle, grounding exercise (yin yoga is a godsend).
Consistent sleep and eating rhythms.

These aren’t hacks – they’re just basic signals of safety that you can take an active approach over…

As the parasympathetic system comes back online, emotions become workable instead of overwhelming, stillness becomes tolerable, and presence returns.

Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’re serious about regulating your relationship with yourself and life and building flow.

Vision: Becoming Who You Are in Realness

Regulation alone isn’t sufficient but it’s always a necessary starting point if you want to start building your real life.

Another missing piece of the puzzle for most people is that you also need a real vision – not a hustle-fuelled fantasy that serves as an extension of your ego or Sympathetic Personality, but a grounded picture of who you are when your system is regulated and you’re leaning into your realness.

Having this kind of real vision allows you to break things down into:

Realistic goals.
Supportive habits.
A FOCUS for your time, energy, and attention.

This shifts your orientation from survival to expression and so you can stop becoming what the sympathetic personality demands and start becoming who you already are in your realness underneath the noise.

You overcome sympathetic dominance through real action which is why you need a real vision.

Sympathetic Dominance: The Final Word

Sympathetic dominance isn’t a flaw or a failure and it’s not something to override with more effort for the sake of effort:

Sympathetic dominance is a message and a signal from your realness that life is being forced instead of trusted.

When you listen, regulate, and re-orient towards truth, the system softens and your realness becomes natural again.

Stay real out there,

P.S. If you’re ready to shift out of sympathetic dominance so you can start living your real life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.