Oli Anderson

Hi, I'm Oli Anderson - a Transformational Coach for REALNESS and author who helps people to tap into their REALNESS by increasing Awareness of their real values and intentions, to Accept themselves and reality, and to take inspired ACTION that will change their lives forever and help them find purpose. Click here to read my story about how I died, lost it all, and then found reality.

Other People’s Projections: How To Push Back by Staying Present

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Other People's Projections

How to Deal With Other People’s Projections & Growing Real While Others Are Still Asleep

There comes a moment on the journey of growing real where something subtle yet profound begins to shift inside us:

We start seeing the patterns, stories, and scripts we’ve been unconsciously living by, notice the ways we’ve been performing instead of being present, and begin to acknowledge the ways we’ve avoided our own shadow self because we believed our survival depended on maintaining an ego that never truly represented who we are (almost always because of underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

When this realisation dawns, it can be absolutely electrifying as the fog lifts, the mind sharpens, and life starts to feel more spacious as we finally become AWARE of our own realness and how we’ve been holding back from living and expressing it in the world.

Unfortunately, awakening to our own patterns doesn’t mean that everyone else around us is waking up too:

In fact, quite often the opposite can be true and so just as we’re beginning to develop presence, clarity, and a deeper relationship with reality, many of the people in our lives continue to operate on autopilot.

What this essentially means is that they’re still acting from their ego – a structure they unconsciously built to keep the shadow self at bay (because the ego and shadow are always involved in what I call the Shadow Dance).

In this state, they’re driven by emotional avoidance, shame, guilt, fear, unresolved trauma, and a lifelong habit of prioritising performance over presence.

Because the ego is always the opposite of reality, it clashes with the shadow, which contains the realness they have suppressed in order to feel ‘acceptable‘.

It’s in this gap between our awakening awareness and their ongoing sleepwalking that one of the most challenging interpersonal dynamics emerges – projection:

What this means is that when someone is still trapped in ego, they inevitably project their ‘stuff’ – their fears, fantasies, insecurities, hidden desires, and suppressed emotions etc. – onto the people around them and – if you’re the one who has begun to wake up to awareness – you will become a particularly convenient target for those projections.

If you’re not careful, you can get pulled into them, lose your centre, and end up getting hooked by the story they’re performing as you get pulled into their emotional movie and dragged down into the unreal again.

The irony of projection is that the more aware you become, the more noticeable and painful it can feel – at least until you learn to respond from realness instead of reactivity.

This article will show you how to step into realness and keep the reactivity and old patterns at bay when somebody is other people’s projections try to suck you back in.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Other people's projections are about people seeing you as they refuse to see themselves.

How Projections Work (and Why They Happen)

To understand projection in general (and, of course, other people’s projections), it helps to remember that ego and shadow are always at war in the great Shadow Dance.

The basic mechanics of this ‘dance’ look like this:

The ego is not real; it’s a performance. On the other hand, the shadow is real as it’s simply the aspects of ourselves we were unable to accept.

Someone who has not faced their shadow must pour enormous energy into maintaining the ego, and when they sense – consciously or not – that something threatens that ego, they resort to interpreting reality in ways that protect the fantasy.

This interpretation becomes the projection: a fabricated, filtered version of what’s happening, designed to allow them to avoid their own emotional material.

Because projection is unconscious, the person doing it believes in its validity completely:

They speak and act as though their fabricated version of events is objectively true which is why projection often feels uncanny or ‘off’ – not because it’s subtle, but because it is so confidently delivered despite going against the face of reality itself.

Here’s a quick story from my own life of when other people’s projections tried to suck me in:

I once knew a woman who was convinced she was psychic. In one of her ‘visions’, she saw us working together and also being in love. When I questioned it (because I didn’t feel the same way and really couldn’t see this ‘vision’ become the truth), she’d become upset and say that I was being arrogant in doubting her psychic powers or whatever.

Beneath all of the mystical language and spiritual theatrics, however, the truth was pretty simple:

The vision was a mask for emotions and desires she wasn’t ready to own and so she dressed them up in something that gave her permission to avoid the realness beneath them.

This is an extreme example, but the structure is universal:

A projection is always an interpretation of reality used to avoid reality.

(Write that out on a post-it note and stick it on the fridge).

The difficulty is that, when someone is projecting onto us, it’s tempting o play along with their performance to keep things smooth – especially if we’re too empathetic or conflict-averse because of our own ego ‘stuff’.

The truth, though, is that moments like these are where awareness must deepen into mastery and we become more grounded in our own realness instead of taken away from it.

This always depends on how REAL we can remain in ourselves and with ourselves.

Why Other People’s Projections Pull Us In

If someone projects onto you and you don’t know how to stay grounded and real, then you’ll be pulled into their unreal frame of things:

What this means is that you’ll start doubting reality because you’’ll feel pressure – sometimes subtle, but sometimes overwhelming – to support the unreal story they’re throwing at you.

This is bad news because, once you enter the performance, the dynamic becomes frustrating, draining, and confusing.

This pull into their projection happens because the nervous system senses a threat:

Projections often come wrapped in emotion, tone, and intensity because they carry the weight of the projector’s shadow – shame, guilt, fear, rejection, etc. etc. etc.

If we’re not grounded, our body reacts with fight, flight, or freeze and in this kind of reactive state, we’re more vulnerable to being pulled into someone else’s frame of reality instead of staying in our own.

To stop this, we have to see projections for what they are:

Unreal narratives created by an unreal ego.

They reflect nothing about you as a person who is more aware – in fact, they’re not personal at all; they’re just survival mechanisms expressed through unreal behaviour.

Here are some steps for you to take so you can avoid being pulled into other people’s projections and stay real:

Step One: Recognise the Symptoms of Being Projected Onto

Most people don’t realise they’re being sucked into other people’s projections until they’re halfway through an argument they never wanted or trapped in a dynamic that feels strangely familiar.

Thankfully, being projected on always comes with symptoms, and the earlier we notice them, the easier it is to stay out of the pull:

The first symptom is a subtle sensation that something is ‘off’ – this might feel like a tension in the body, a pressure behind the eyes, a heaviness in the chest, or simply a sense that you’re being invited into a performance instead of a presence.

You may also find yourself confused by the other person’s certainty despite the unreal things they’re coming out with or their emotional tone in general. In short, you may sense that what they’re saying does not match what is real in any way, shape, or form.

This kind of projection can happen between two people, but in family units or groups it can also expand into collective performance:

This is when unspoken rules, alliances, and patterns create a shared unreality and it’s where things like the Drama Triangle come into play – prosecutor, victim, rescuer roles shifting around to support the group’s collective emotional avoidance.

Whenever you feel yourself being nudged into a role that doesn’t reflect who you are – villain, saviour, problem, solution, emotional sponge, or [whatever else] – you’re likely inside someone else’s projection and need to find a way out (which means returning to reality).

Step Two: Name the Projection

Once you recognise it, the next step is to name it – not literally out loud to the person (unless it’s appropriate and you want to), but internally to yourself.

This is a really important step because naming creates distance and prevents you from becoming hypnotised by the story that the projection is wrapped up in.

You can call it a projection, a story, a script, or – one I like to use – Disneyland.

Either way, the name doesn’t matter – what matters is that naming it allows you to hold your own frame and prevents you from you falling into their narrative.

It reminds you:

“This is not mine – this is just their ego trying to avoid their shadow“.

In short, by naming the projection, we create just enough separation to stay conscious instead of being sucked into reactivity and acting on autopilot ourselves.

Step Three: Get Grounded and Regulate Your Nervous System

Once the projection has been spotted and named, we need to anchor ourselves and nothing keeps us real like grounding.

Projection often arrives with emotional charge – anger, fear, guilt, expectation, etc. – so regulating the nervous system is crucial:

Slow breathing, dropping into the body, relaxing the shoulders, feeling your feet on the ground – simple acts like these activate the parasympathetic nervous system and bring you out of fight-flight-freeze (which the projection needs you to be in to keep the illusion going).

When you’re regulated, you can respond with awareness and so you don’t get seduced into the emotional logic of the projection – instead, you don’t abandon yourself to make them feel better and you stay present.

Step Four: Stay Rooted in Your Frame of Reality

Grounding sets the stage for the next step: holding onto your own reality instead of merging with theirs and this is where realness meets resilience.

The projecting person is offering you something that you either CHOOSE to take or that you CHOOSE to decline:

I find it helpful to imagine it as a black bin bag filled with emotional gunk – basically, they’re holding it out and insisting it belongs to you. But it doesn’t. It’s their bag, which means it’s their ‘stuff’ and their responsibility. Not yours.

What you need to remember and embrace is that you don’t have to take the bag, no matter how passionately they extend it to you and try to convince you that it’s yours.

Stay with the truth as you understand it by staying in your frame and not accepting the invitation into theirs (the black bag of gunk):

Trust your clarity, stay rooted in your awareness, presence, and values and realise that when you hold your frame with calm confidence, you remain awake, and you prevent the projection from pulling you back into unconsciousness.

Step Five: Don’t Fight the Projection

If you try to fight a projection head-on, you will lose – not because the projector is right, but because the argument keeps you inside their frame and takes you out of reality itself.

In short, fighting the projection strengthens it because it invites more defence, more performance, and more ego on all sides.

The better approach is recognition without entanglement:

See the projection as a dream that they’re treating as real – this doesn’t mean that you have to insult the dream or attack the dreamer as you can still acknowledge the person without feeding their unreality.

Instead, you can respond with clarity and kindness while refusing to animate their story with your energy (as long as you stay grounded in your own realness).

Step Six: Returning to Your Vision

The final and most grounding principle is this:

Know yourself, know your direction, and know your vision because as long as you’re connected to your own real path – your goals, values, and way of being in the world – other people’s projections lose their power.

They cannot pull you off the road unless you stop walking it.

Realness is a direction, a commitment, and a lifestyle and so when your vision is clear, you don’t need to defend yourself against projections – you simply return to reality and keep moving.

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

Read my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to find the strongest possible foundation in yourself so you don’t get pulled into other people’s projections.

Practical Steps for Staying Out of Other People’s Projections (Quick Review)

  1. Pause and Scan:

    When something feels “off”, take a slow breath and ask yourself:

    Am I being invited into a performance?

  2. Name the Projection:

    Internally label what’s happening:

    “This is a projection”
    “This is their story”
    “This is Disneyland”

    Remember that naming creates distance.

  3. Ground the Body:

    Slow the breath. Drop tension. Feel your feet.

    Let the parasympathetic system switch on.

    Remember that grounding keeps you conscious.

  4. Return to Your Own Frame:

    Remind yourself of the truth as you understand it.

    Mentally hold your own reality with clarity and confidence.

    Visualise the “black garbage bag” and remind yourself that you can CHOOSE not to take it.

  5. Respond Without Entering the Projection:

    Stay calm. Stay factual. Stay present.

    You don’t need to fight their dream, nor validate it – you simply CHOOSE not to enter it.

  6. Re-align with Your Vision

    After the interaction, reaffirm where you are going in life and use your goals, values, habits, and identity to anchor back into reality.
Other people's projections belong to them.

Other People’s Projections: The Final Word

Growing real is a profound transformation that changes how we relate to ourselves, how we move through the world, and how we meet others in their unawareness.

The more real we become, the more clearly we see the unreal in others – not as something to judge, but as something to understand and master:

When we learn to stay out of projections, we protect our awareness, sustain our presence, and continue walking the path towards a more awake, grounded, and truthful life.

Let others perform whilst you stay present; let others project whilst you stay real.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to grow real and to find a solid foundation in yourself to keep unreality at bay then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you find your own real path.

Scarcity Mindset: Why You Feel There’s “Not Enough”

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The Scarcity Mindset

The Scarcity Mindset & How to Step Into Real Abundance

If you’re constantly worrying because you think there aren’t enough opportunities in life or because you feel you lack access to ‘enough‘ of whatever you believe you need – money, love, material things, attention, time, energy, stability, [whatever else you can think of] – then you’re operating from a scarcity mindset:

Most people live this way without even realising it and so they think it’s normal to see the world through a lens of limitation. To make matters worse for themselves, they often also think it’s rational and might even believe it’s ‘realistic’ to think and live in this way.

This article will help you to understand that scarcity is not reality:

Instead, we explore the idea that the scarcity mindset is an unreal way of being in the world that serves as extension of an unreal relationship with yourself.

When your inner experience is fragmented, fearful, and built on emotional avoidance, then the external world looks the same because you project this fragmentation out into the world around you.

This article will help you understand the mechanics behind the scarcity mindset so you can start seeing yourself and life in a real way and slip into the abundance that naturally emerges when you reconnect to your own realness.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The ego is what keeps you in your scarcity mindset.

The Scarcity Mindset Is a Projection, Not a Fact of Life

Let’s start with the that truth most people never consider:

Your scarcity mindset is not caused by the world being genuinely limited; it’s caused by the projection of your inner fragmentation onto your external circumstances.

What this means is that ‘scarcity’ isn’t fundamentally about money, opportunities, or relationships but about the way you perceive them and that perception is shaped by deeper emotional and psychological patterns.

This comes back to a simple law of human experience:

Perception is projection.

There are five core projections that create the illusion of scarcity, all rooted in the same underlying issue: a disconnection from realness and the presence of unprocessed shame.

Once you understand these projections, you can begin to dismantle them and return to the truth of abundance and a relationship with your own realness.

Let’s explore these 5 core scarcity mindset projections in more detail:

1. When You Attach to Ego Over Realness

The first projection that creates scarcity is the belief that you are separate and isolated from everything else.

This comes from identifying with the ego – your constructed sense of self – rather than your realness.

Ego, by its nature, believes in independence and separation:

It loves the idea of being a lone wolf, self-contained, self-sufficient, and in control – these are all ‘good’ qualities to have when balanced but independence, when taken as an identity rather than a practical necessity, becomes a psychological trap.

When you identify in this way then the ego starts to whisper lies to you: “It’s you versus the world and if life becomes a zero-sum competition (which means that if you ‘win’ somebody else ‘loses’), you will always feel like there’s not enough – for you, for those around you, or for anyone at all.

Realness, on the other hand, is interdependent which means that it recognises that we’re all connected to life to other people, to opportunities, and to the natural flow of things at all times.

When you’re connected in this way, then life feels open and you can start to see more clearly which is the direct opposite of limitation you perceive when isolated behind the filter of the ego.

All of this is to say that scarcity begins the moment you forget that you’re part of something larger than your ego.

2. Shame: The Hidden Mechanism Behind Scarcity

Underneath every scarcity mindset is an emotional pattern that most people avoid looking at:

Shame.

This is the shame that tells you you’re not good enough, not safe enough, not worthy enough, and not capable enough to trust yourself or life.

Shame is the emotion that makes you cling to the ego for dear life and so you use the ego as a shield, a form of control freakery, and a way to avoid vulnerability and bypass uncomfortable emotions.

This may ‘protect’ you in the short-term, but this attachment keeps you stuck in a distorted relationship with reality because if you don’t trust yourself, you won’t take real action, and if you don’t trust life, you won’t allow life to help you.

This combination of self-distrust and life-distrust is the perfect breeding ground for scarcity:

It makes the world appear full of barriers and limitations, even when the truth is far more open.

Shame creates the belief that you must fight for every scrap because you don’t believe you have the inner resources to engage with life in a grounded, confident way.

Most of the time, people don’t realise they are operating from shame; they only notice the symptoms like indecision, fear, avoidance, anxiety, overthinking, perfectionism, and the constant feeling of being on the back foot in life.

But when you strip away the behavioural patterns, shame is what you find at the core and it’s what’s causing you to perceive unreal scarcity instead of real abundance.

3. When Self-Worth Becomes Outcome-Dependent

Another major contributor to the scarcity mindset is the tendency to place your sense of self-worth outside yourself:

If your self-worth depends on outcomes like achievements, validation, money, success, or relationships, then you’ll always feel like you are one step away from losing everything because you’re outsourcing your self-worth to something temporary instead of something lasting.

This outcome-dependence creates a subtle but powerful pressure:

The need to constantly ‘prove’ yourself and to perform instead of staying present in the process of creating, working, connecting, and growing because you’re fixated on results. In this (unreal) state of mind, the process becomes something you must endure or control, rather than something you participate in.

Another downside of defining your self-worth by outcomes is that your worth also becomes future-based because outcomes exist in the future:

This means you live in a stressed out state where the present moment never feels like enough and so you don’t feel like enough by extension.

This, again, is where scarcity creeps in: the belief that what you have now is insufficient and what you want is always just out of reach.

The shift here is not to stop wanting things, but to become outcome-independent:

This means you can pursue goals without allowing them to define your identity because – when your worth is rooted in realness rather than results – the world stops feeling scarce and starts feeling spacious again.

4. The Habit of Forcing Life Instead of Flowing With It

Scarcity also manifests when you fall into the trap of trying to force everything:

This basically boils down to the fact that when shame is running the show, you don’t trust life and when you don’t trust life, you try to control it.

This habit of forcing instead of flowing shows up in countless ways:

Over-planning, overworking, micromanaging, catastrophising, pushing beyond your capacity, or trying to get everything done through sheer willpower. You rely entirely on your own understanding, your own strategies, and your own timeline instead of learning by doing and letting life get involved in the process too.

This kind of forcing is exhausting and it goes against the nature of reality:

Flow happens when you are aligned with truth and open to the unexpected; force happens when you are disconnected from truth and terrified of uncertainty.

The more you force, the more opportunities you block but learning to flow is how life brings you possibilities you couldn’t have logically planned. Force is how you cling to rigid expectations and miss what’s actually available whereas flow is about opening your hands out and receiving what life wants to be giving you (as long as you take real action).

In short, forcing life is scarcity in action – the belief that if you don’t make it happen exactly as planned, it won’t happen at all (even though you’re not omnipotent or omniscient and can’t make anything happen exactly as planned).

5. Overvaluing What You Want Because You’re Living in the Void

Finally, when you’re cut off from your realness, you unintentionally create a psychological “Void” – a space inside that feels empty, disconnected, or lacking in meaning.

Most people assume the Void will be filled once they finally get what they want: the money, the partner, the success, the achievement but the Void cannot be filled by anything external – it can only be filled by accepting truth and taking real action in alignment with it.

When you’re living in the Void, you will overvalue external goals:

You turn them into the “Ultimate” and so you make them too important – because of that, you become fearful and rigid around them.

The shift is to see what you want as good, not god:

When something is good, you can pursue it with clarity and openness but, when it becomes god, you cling to it.

Clinging is scarcity but openness and learning to let go is abundance.

Scarcity Is a Symptom of Shame and a Dysregulated Nervous System

At its core, the scarcity mindset is not a character flaw or a rational strategy but a physiological and emotional state:

If you have a scarcity mindset, it basically means that your body has gone into survival mode, your mind is interpreting everything through the lens of ‘threat’, and so your behaviours follow suit.

A dysregulated nervous system makes the world appear threatening, competitive, and limited (all of which make things seem ‘scarce’ instead of ‘abundant’):

When your body calms down, your perception of life begins to shift and so you can finally stop projecting fear onto reality and start seeing things more clearly.

What this means is that scarcity collapses not when the world changes but when you come back into regulation and reconnect with your realness.

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

Check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you’d like to go even deeper into cultivating self-trust and life-trust for abundance.

The Path Out of Scarcity and Back Into Abundance

Overcoming scarcity isn’t about positive thinking or pretending everything is ‘perfect’ – it’s about reconnecting with the truth of reality rather than your shame-fuelled projections.

The real path forward has three essential steps:

1. Regulate the Nervous System

Before anything else, the body must come out of survival mode because you simply can’t make abundant decisions with a scarcity physiology.

Find something that helps you to start activating the parasympathetic nervous system so that you’re not stuck in fight-or-flight mode (the sympathetic nervous system).

Some examples might be:

  • Long-exhale breathing techniques
  • Grounding exercises
  • Somatic release work
  • Regulating exercises like yin yoga (this is my favourite)
  • Cold exposure (if appropriate)
  • Healthy sleep routines
  • Reducing stimulants during periods of anxiety

This step alone can dramatically reduce scarcity-based thinking because you’re teaching your body that it is safe to receive, safe to trust, and safe to engage with life.

2. Master the Mind

Once the body is grounded, you can begin re-training the mind.

This involves:

  • Noticing scarcity-based thoughts as they appear (use my free thought log tool to get started).
  • Identifying the emotional charge (usually shame or fear) underneath them.
  • Naming the projection rather than believing it.
  • Shifting your focus back to what is real, present, and within your control.

Your mind is used to making things seem scarce because it has been shaped by emotional patterns that grew out of shame.

When you recognise the pattern, you can interrupt it and each interruption strengthens your connection to realness.

3. Create a Real Vision and Take Real Action

Abundance doesn’t mean being passive and waiting for life to magically ‘fix’ everything:

Abundance emerges when you participate with life from a grounded, truthful state which means creating a vision rooted in realness – which means it’s aligned with who you are, not who your ego thinks you need to be – and then moving towards it through consistent real action.

Real action is not force – it’s participation:

It is what happens when intention meets truth.

When you take real action, you naturally align with flow rather than pushing against life and this strengthens self-trust and life-trust, which slowly dissolves the scarcity illusion.

Your scarcity mindset dissolves when you embrace your own realness.

Scarcity Mindset – The Bottom Line: Abundance Is Real

The biggest lie of the scarcity mindset is the belief that the world does not have ‘enough’ for you. but in reality:

  • Money is just a number.
  • Relationships are abundant.
  • Opportunities are everywhere.
  • Ideas are infinite.
  • Life is generative by design.

The world may be fuelled by the illusion of scarcity (because ‘The World’ is other people and so many of them have the scarcity mindset) but reality is not scarce and only the ego, fuelled by shame and disconnection, believes otherwise.

When you reconnect to your realness – through regulating the body, mastering the mind, and taking aligned action – you step back into the truth: that abundance is not something you create, but something you learn to see and embrace.

When you live in realness, you discover that life is not withholding anything from you – it was only your scarcity mindset blocking the flow.

Once that dissolves, you realise the thing you’d been searching for all along was never “out there” but was already present in you and waiting for you to return to it.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to stop holding yourself back from your real life because of your emotional ego ‘stuff’ then book a free coaching session with me and we’ll find ways for you to take real action.

Emotional Mastery Without the BS

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Emotional Mastery (Without the BS)

How to Cultivate Emotional Mastery in a Real, Human, and Integrated Way

There’s a lot of noise out there about emotions which will give you complicated explanations about what they are, how we should deal with them, what they ‘mean’, and what techniques we need to use to handle them properly.

Buried within all of this noise is the quiet but reliable truth that most people never really hear:

Emotional mastery is actually a very simple thing but the ego will do everything in its power to make it seem complex, confusing, and overwhelming. This is because as long as things feel ‘complicated‘, we avoid the real work, stay fragmented, and remain out of alignment with our own REALNESS (the opposite of ego).

If you’ve ever found yourself caught between feeling too much or feeling nothing at all, then you’ve already tasted the confusion the ego thrives on:

This is because most people fall into one of two unhelpful patterns when dealing with their emotions, and although the patterns look different on the surface, both are rooted in the same basic fear: the fear of what will happen to the ego if we actually allow ourselves to feel.

Some people become emotionally robotic which means that they suppress anything that threatens their sense of control. Others swing the opposite way and allow their emotions to define their identity, letting every wave of feeling dictate their behaviour.

Both strategies are attempts to avoid reality and both keep people stuck.

What we need, if we’re serious about emotional mastery, is a way of relating to our emotions that doesn’t trap us in either extreme.

We need a real way – a way that aligns with how emotion actually works in the body, the mind, and the deeper levels of human experience. That’s what this article is here to help you understand and embody.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You gain emotional mastery by facing reality.

What Emotions Really Are (And Why People Fear Them)

To begin untangling all the confusion around emotions and emotional mastery, we have to start with the most basic truth about emotions, which most people intellectually know but don’t actually live.

It goes like this:

Emotions are e-motion, energy in motion.

This means that they’re not fixed, they’re not permanent, and they’re not a definition of who you are – they’re simply energetic experiences that arise within your system and want to pass through it.

If we were raised in a world that encouraged embodied realness, this simple fact alone would transform everything but, instead, most of us were taught – directly or indirectly – that emotions are dangerous, messy, inconvenient, or signs of weakness.

We were taught that feeling something fully might overwhelm us, expose us, make us lose control, or even make us unloveable in some way.

This leads to most people living in a state of resistance to their own emotions – not because emotions themselves are harmful, but because our ego feels threatened by what those emotions might reveal.

This kind of resistance is what keeps emotional energy stuck and it’s this ‘stuckness’ that creates the tension, the anxiety, the frustration, and the sense of being emotionally ‘blocked’ that so many people live with on a daily basis.

This is where two traps show up that keep us from emotional mastery:

Emotional Mastery Trap One: Suppressing Emotion (Becoming a Robot)

The first trap is suppression:

This is where people push emotions away, bury them, or pretend they don’t exist.

This leads to them tightening around anything that feels intense or uncomfortable and trying to carry on as if they are unfazed. On the surface, it looks controlled and stable – maybe even like emotional discipline – but underneath, the emotional energy is simply being forced into hiding.

And anything that gets forced into hiding eventually tries to come back out.

Think of the classic example:

Someone feels a surge of anger but immediately swallows it because they don’t want to appear confrontational, rude, or uncontrolled.

They stay calm on the outside, but the energy remains trapped inside the body, tightening everything up – later, when someone leaves a teaspoon in the sink or breathes too loudly, the suppressed anger explodes out of them, seemingly out of nowhere.

Or take lust:

People suppress it because they’re ashamed of it or believe it isn’t “appropriate” but that energy doesn’t disappear – it simply leaks out later in compulsive behaviour (like texting people you know you shouldn’t really be texting or whatever).

Suppression is always a form of resistance because it blocks the natural movement of emotional energy, builds pressure internally, and guarantees that the emotion will come out later in a distorted and unreal way.

Emotional Mastery Trap Two: Identifying With Emotion (Becoming the Emotion)

Then there’s the opposite trap which is full identification with the emotion:

This is where someone feels an emotion and completely merges with it without letting it pass (which is what it ‘wants’ to do because emotions are e-motion, energy in motion).

In cases like this, the person in question doesn’t have anger – they are anger.

They don’t feel jealousy – they become jealousy.

They don’t experience sadness – they sink so deeply into it that they can’t imagine a world in which the feeling will ever pass.

From the outside, this looks expressive and honest as though they’re really “in touch” with their feelings but, on the inside, this too is resistance because instead of allowing the emotional energy to move, the person holds onto it, feeding it with stories, meaning, and reactive action.

The emotion stays at its peak because they won’t step back far enough to see it as a wave rather than an identity (which is always ego).

This is unhelpful because it always leads to unreal action – acting from emotional reactivity and unreal and fragmented ways of identifying instead of from conscious choice.

Anger turns into punching a wall or someone’s face.

Lust turns into texting an ex at midnight.

Fear turns into running away from something that actually matters.

Sadness turns into shutting down and withdrawing from the world.

When emotion dictates action, the action is rarely real because it comes from fragmentation, not wholeness.

The Third Path to Emotional Mastery: The Real Approach (Do Nothing)

Emotional mastery begins when you realise you don’t have to suppress your emotions or express them impulsively because there’s a third option – the REAL option – and it’s surprisingly simple:

Do nothing.

Not nothing in the avoidant sense.

Not nothing in the apathetic sense.

But nothing in the spacious, conscious, and aware and accepting sense.

Doing nothing in this context means stepping back enough to observe the emotional energy without interfering with it. It means letting the emotional wave rise, reach its crest, and then fall naturally.

To put it another way:

It means allowing the Reality Wave to do what reality always does when we stop resisting.

The key to being able to do this is learning to understand that emotions move like waves which means that they build, they crest, and then they dissolve.

People who suppress their emotions never let the wave crest – instead, they stop it at the very beginning.

People who identify with their emotions keep the wave at its peak – which means they refuse to let it fall.

On other hand, those who approach their emotions in a real way allow the entire wave to unfold from start to finish.

This is what you need to train yourself to do if you want to master your emotions.

When you do this, the emotional energy is processed cleanly because it completes its natural cycle:

Nothing gets stuck, nothing explodes, nothing needs to be acted out, and – perhaps most importantly -you regain your ability to make conscious decisions rooted in your principles and vision, not your temporary emotional state.

Emotional Mastery: Principles, Vision, and Conscious Choice

After the emotional wave has fallen – and only after – you are free to choose how you want to move forward.

This is the moment where your principles and vision matter more than anything:

Your principles are the beliefs that support your realness: compassion, courage, honesty, self-respect, integrity, boundaries, and the commitment to living in alignment with truth.

Your vision is your direction – the path you’ve chosen for your own growth, purpose, and becoming even more real.

Together, they provide the foundation from which real action emerges.

The bottom line is that when you only ever make decisions from emotion, you get chaos because emotions are temporary, keep changing and keep conflicting with each other; when you make decisions from principles and vision, you get alignment because these things are REAL and what’s real is always real.

In short, emotions are temporary, but the real is lasting. The real doesn’t shift with your mood or your fear or your impulses. What’s real is always real.

Emotional mastery is therefore not about becoming emotionally numb, nor is it about riding emotional highs and lows like a rollercoaster but about learning to feel everything fully, without resistance, and then choosing consciously from a deeper place based on where you know you want to take yourself.

It’s about remembering that you are the ocean, not the wave.

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The Ocean and the Wave

This metaphor captures the essence of emotional mastery:

The wave is the emotion and it’s always temporary which means it rises and falls and changes shape. It can feel powerful in the moment, but it has no permanence.

The ocean is your wholeness and it’s steady, deep, and unchanging.

When you forget that you are the ocean, you identify with every wave that passes through your experience, and life becomes chaotic, overwhelming, and exhausting but when you anchor into your deeper self (your REALNESS), every emotion becomes something you can allow, observe, and integrate rather than something that throws you around or dictates your behaviour.

This is the foundation of real emotional freedom.

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

Read Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to build the strongest foundation within yourself possible: a foundation of realness.

Practical Steps for Emotional Mastery (Without the BS)

Here’s a simple, grounded process you can use daily to work with your emotions in a real way.

These steps reflect the Awareness → Acceptance → Action process that underpins all real transformation and that I use with my coaching clients (and talk about in some of my books):

1. Pause and Recognise the Wave

When you feel an emotion rising, take a brief pause and breathe – even just three seconds is enough – and acknowledge what’s happening.

Simply recognising that “this is a wave” is often enough to stop the ego from pulling you into reactive behaviour or suppression.

2. Bring Awareness to the Body

Shift your attention from the story in your head to the sensations in your body.

Describe the sensations neutrally without any stories or projections attached: tightness in the chest, heat in the face, pressure in the stomach, shaking in the hands.

This grounds you in reality rather than the ego and its old narratives.

This article goes deeper into this: Escape the Matrix in 4-Steps: From Projection to Presence

3. Do Nothing and Let the Wave Crest

This is the heart of the process:

Instead of reacting or suppressing, just allow the emotional energy to rise and reach its crest (knowing that it will fall afterwards).

Breathe with it, stay present with the sensation, and let it reach its natural peak.

Most emotional waves peak within 30–90 seconds when we stop resisting them.

4. Wait for the Fall

As the wave begins to soften, you’ll feel a shift – a sense of space or release:

This signals that the emotional energy has moved through you.

You aren’t forcing anything – you’re just letting the body do what it naturally knows how to do and following the principle of “emotions are e-motion, energy in motion“.

5. Choose a Real Action

Now, once the wave has fallen, ask yourself:

What do my principles guide me toward here?

What does my vision call me to do?

What action aligns with who I know I’m becoming rather than how I temporarily felt?

This is where emotional mastery turns into real transformation.

Emotional mastery is about letting go of anything unreal so you don't need to be dragged by reality.

Emotional Mastery Final Thoughts: What’s Real Is Always Real

Emotions are part of being human but emotional chaos is not inevitable, and emotional repression is not strength.

The real path lies between these extremes:

When you allow emotions to move through you without resistance, without attaching to them, and without acting impulsively, you begin to experience a kind of inner freedom that most people don’t know is possible.

You realise that your emotions are temporary waves and your realness is the ocean beneath them.

When you learn to trust in this truth, you stop being a slave to your feelings and start becoming a conscious participant in your own life.

This is emotional mastery without the BS, without the ego’s complications, and without the fragmentation that keeps you from your wholeness.

It’s the simple, powerful, and deeply human practice of letting reality move through you so you can respond from truth instead of something else.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to find a foundation of realness within yourself and start living your real life then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you to start building flow and taking real action.

How to Get Over Someone You Love (Really)

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Getting Over Someone You Love

You’re Not “Heart Broken”, You’re “Ego Broken”

Losing someone you love (for whatever reason) is one of the hardest things a human being can go through:

The double-whammy of the loss of a future you imagined and of a cherished connection severed feels like a rupture in the very fabric of your being and – to make matters worse – scientists have shown that heartbreak isn’t just poetic metaphor but actually affects us on a physical level as well as mentally, emotionally, socially, and even spiritually.

If you’re trying to figure out what you can you do after this kind of loss then this article is for you:

It’s about how to pick up the pieces and get moving again in a REAL way so that you don’t simply survive but become stronger, more real, and more whole.

This site is about realness which means it isn’t about dealing in platitudes but about seeing what’s true, releasing what isn’t, and stepping into your actual life instead of your imagined life.

I’m going to hand you the actual ‘secret’ for getting over someone you love and living again instead of feeling broken.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You get over someone you love by letting the light still shine.

The Myth of the Broken Heart

First, let’s dismantle a major myth that holds so many people back:

The truth is that society tells us your heart can be broken and so that you need to get over someone you love because you “have a broken heart”.

This is something that’s deeply ingrained in songs, movies, and day-to-day conversations but it’s a massive misconception because of one simple fact:

What’s real is always real and so your heart – the real you, the whole you – can’t actually be ‘broken’.

This is important to understand because it helps you to see that what many people experience when a relationship ends is not a broken heart, but a broken ego.

Here’s what I mean:

We invest our identity in a relationship maybe more than anything else:

We imagine one person will be “the one” and so we imagine a future with that person. Our ego tells us that “If I’m with you, then I’m safe; then I matter; then my life makes sense” and so it’s only natural that -when the relationship ends – that identity shatters and we find ourselves with all kinds of uncertainty and fear about who we are without the relationship that our identity was rooted in.

In other words, it’s not the ‘heart’ that shatters (which is impossible because, like we said, what’s real is always real) – it’s the ego’s story about who you were, who you were with, and who you were going to become.

The ego’s vision of the future = what we thought the relationship meant and so the moment that vision changes – perhaps once and for all – you feel the shock of loss and this affects your whole system.

This causes you to suffer all the symptoms of heartbreak:

You cling to what was ‘meant’ to be (really, just your old ideas), you cling to the “what if” and the “if only”, etc. etc. etc. but the more you cling, the more you resist reality which is literally always the worst idea because it just causes you to stay in friction, frustration, and then misery because then you’re not living what actually is.

So step one, then, is simple:

Recognise that your heart isn’t broken.

Your heart remains whole but what’s wounded is the ego’s story – the identity, the vision, the narrative that it needed to keep it’s hold over you.

This subtle shift in understanding is foundational to getting over someone you love and actually moving forward.

The Way to Get Over Someone You Love: Reality, Not Repression

Once you see what’s actually going on, you begin to see a way forward:

You learn to deal with it in a real way which means embracing what is, surrendering what was, and CHOOSING what will be (instead of having it ‘chosen’ for you by what your ego is telling you).

Here are three key truths to guide you:

1. There’s a difference between Love and a Relationship

One reason heartbreak hits so hard is because we make a flawed assumption that goes like this:

“If I love someone, I should have a relationship with them“.

That seems logical, but life doesn’t always follow this pattern because you can love someone and not be compatible for a healthy, happy relationship with them – usually due to things like timing, character, life path, or simply because you were projecting a future that wasn’t aligned with what was real because of your own underlying emotional ‘stuff’ (usually, shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

Accepting the distinction between love and relationships is really powerful:

It allows you to still hold the love – the real love you feel that hasn’t gone anywhere but you may be trying to suppress to “get over it” – whilst also seeing clearly that a relationship with that person wasn’t workable (or ‘right’).

When you hold both: “I love you/ I still feel love” and “we couldn’t be relationship-compatible / we weren’t on the same path” – you stop punishing the love and stop fighting a lost future.

Instead, you open yourself to truth instead of illusion.

2. Abundance versus Scarcity Mindset

Heartbreak often comes with the story:

“This was the only one who could make me happy“.

This is an example of ego-driven, scarcity thinking and basically puts you in the position of thinking and acting like:

“If this person is gone, then my happiness is gone”.

(Which means that you turned them into a magical unicorn).

This story just keeps you stuck because you’re waiting for something that already left or retreating into what you already lost.

The real approach is to adopt an abundance mindset instead:

What this means is to realise there are many people out there to love and many people who will love you back. More importantly, it means embracing the fact that there are many possibilities for a relationship that actually works because you have love and compatibility (instead of just one or the other).

This doesn’t diminish the love you felt for the person you’re trying to get over but it also doesn’t imprison you in one (dead) scenario.

Instead, you open the door to new life and new wholeness.

3. Give Up the Quest for “Closure”

Our brains hate open loops and unanswered questions and so they continue to go around in circles seeking ‘answers’ they can never find:

We replay scenes of cherished moments now lost, constantly ask “why?”, hope they’ll call or send a text – it keeps going on and on until we finally believe that loop is ‘closed’ and we have some kind of ‘closure’ about everything that’s happened.

Here’s the truth, though:

‘Closure’ is just a conceptual story built on the assumption that we can know everything about what happened, why it happened, and what should happen next even though we can never know this.

Instead of chasing closure, learn to let go instead:

Accept that it’s over even though the feelings you had for the person are still lingering and the story you imagined about the future will probably no longer happen.

That’s enough ‘closure’ to allow you to move forward:

You don’t need an explanation or a perfect ending – you simply need acceptance.

Accept the end, accept the love you still carry, and accept that you don’t need to do anything with that love – no relationship, no text, no fix.

Just let it be and accept the reality you find yourself in.

What to Do with the Feelings (and the Body)

When a relationship ends, you often react in one of two ways with your feelings and desires:

  1. You do something (send the text, try to rekindle it, etc)

    or:
  2. You suppress the feelings (“I’ll bury it, pretend it doesn’t exist”).

Neither one of these approaches serves you because it causes you to RESIST reality and what’s actually going on for you.

The real approach is to OBSERVE:

Let the feelings be; don’t act on them; don’t suppress them.

Instead, let them move through you like guests surfacing at a dinner table – don’t invite them to stay but you don’t ask them to leave either.

You simply notice: “Here’s sadness. Here’s longing. Here’s old hope“.

When you can hold these feelings without acting or burying, you align with reality (what is) rather than resisting it (what you wish was).

It’s also important to recognise the physical element at play:

When love ‘ends’ (not that real love can ‘end’), it isn’t just a mental story – there’s a literal biochemical shift. in your body and so hormones like oxytocin and dopamine drop, the stress hormone cortisol rises, and neural networks linked to physical pain become active when you feel emotional pain.

There’s even a term for one acute physical manifestation: Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (broken-heart syndrome) which where extreme emotional stress momentarily weakens the heart muscle.

In a way it makes sense to treat heartbreak like an addiction:

Your brain and nervous system were wired to that person and that imagined future. Now, you’re detoxing and so you need to regulate your nervous system, return to wholeness, and re-set your baseline.

You will also benefit and star to heal by creating a new vision for your life and devoting yourself to that with real goals and habits.

Getting Over Someone You Love: The Real Secret

Here it is – the secret every heart broken person is looking for and the path to moving on and into realness:

Accept the love (because it’s real), ‘do’ nothing with it (no forced ‘fix‘, no suppression), create a vision for your future, and take real action.

You aren’t distributing your love elsewhere to fill a void – instead, you’re recognising the love, letting it exist, and letting it become a part of you rather than your lost future.

In other words, you’re shifting from an unreal stance of “someone else was my whole world” to a real stance of “my whole world is within me and I choose to expand it”.

You’re not broken but your ego’s shape changed, your story changed, and your path changed.

What remains is your wholeness and your capacity to go deeper into it.

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

If you want to go deeper than ever into your own realness then read Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

Practical Steps: From Awareness to Action

Here are concrete steps you can take right now to move through this process based on the framework I use in my coaching containers with clients: Awareness → Acceptance → Action.

Step 1: Awareness (Deconstruct Ego)

  • Sit quietly and write down how you’re feeling: the love you still hold, the pain of the loss, the identity you had and need to grow through.

  • Recognise the myth that your heart is broken. Instead, reframe it: your heart is whole but what’s ‘broken’ is the ego’s story of you + them + future.

  • Notice bodily signs: maybe you can’t sleep, you’ve lost appetite, chest aches, your mind goes in loops. These are real signals from your nervous system that show you you need to become more regulated.

  • Accept these as part of the process of growing real, not as proof you’re ‘failing’.

Step 2: Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow)

  • Write a statement that affirms reality: “I accept that this relationship is over. I accept that I still feel love. I accept that I don’t need a relationship with this person to validate that love.“

  • Meditate or breathe: just observe the sensations of loss and let the feelings come. No acting, no suppressing. Just presence.

  • Shift mindset from scarcity to abundance by reminding yourself “There are many options for love and what I have lost was not the only way”.

  • Release the need for closure: write a letter to yourself (not to them) acknowledging that you will likely never get all the answers… and that’s okay. Tear it up or delete it after. Then move on.

Step 3: Action (Trust Yourself and Life)

  • Visioning: Create a vivid description of your future self and the qualities they embody (e.g. stronger, freer, aligned with truth (your Realness)). What are you doing? Who are you being?

  • Set goals/habits: pick 3 habits that support that vision (e.g., yoga every morning; journalling; socialising with real friends).

  • Reset your nervous system: ensure you get enough sleep, eat whole foods, move your body). These help regulate the cortisol/dopamine shifts.

  • Create new rituals: pick something to mark the end of the old chapter (a symbolic walk, burning a list of old hopes, a day offline) then pick something to mark the beginning of the new (a vision board, a weekly date with yourself, a new hobby).

  • Social support: connect with friends and have real conversations (you don’t need to perform “fine”). Real talk heals realness.

  • Time-frame: Don’t rush. Set mini-check-ins (e.g., weekly) where you review how you feel, what’s shifting, and what you’re choosing instead of what you’re losing.
You get over someone you love by letting things fall together instead of apart.

How to Get Over Someone You Love: The Final Word

Heartbreak, when seen through the lens of realness, becomes an invitation not to shrink away from yourself and your life but to GROW REAL:

You’re not defined by the relationship that ended; you’re defined by your willingness to accept what is, love what remains (including yourself), and move into a deeper foundation of truth on which to build your life..

Understand that the pain is real but temporary and so the body will react and the ego will flail as old stories collapse around you.

Even so, your heart – your wholeness – remains intact and so you can and will rebuild… not around someone else, but around your own realness.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to let go of old stories and to find your real life again then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take real action.

Stop Wasting Your Life (How To)

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Stop wasting your life

Grow Real or Waste the Rest of Your Life

There usually comes a point in life – somewhere after the illusions of youth have burned off – when something inside starts to whisper “This isn’t it” (or something along those lines):

Maybe it’s on your morning commute to a job you secretly despise; maybe it’s during another hollow conversation in a relationship that long ago stopped feeling any fire; or maybe it’s just the familiar ache that creeps in during quiet moments…a sense that you’ve somehow built a life that doesn’t belong to you and that you’re living in a kind of void.

When this realisation hits, it can feel like a crisis but, really, it’s a calling:

It’s the moment your real self starts knocking on the door, asking whether you’re going to keep sleepwalking through an unreal life or finally wake up and grow real.

This article will help you to take this process to the next level so you can see it through to completion and get to a place where you feel like you’re living your real life instead of wasting it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You're wasting your life because you're not looking inside and acting from a place of real vision.

Life’s Great Wake-Up Call: Awareness

Many people reach a point where they start to sense that they’re just wasting their lives.

All of the external boxes and socially accepted signs of ‘success‘ might all be ticked: the career, the mortgage, the relationship – maybe even a few holidays a year…but, deep inside, something still feels ‘off’.

The tragedy is that most people ignore this feeling and instead of using it as a SIGNAL that something needs changing they double down on the life they’ve built, convincing themselves that “this is just how it is” and so they better shut-up and put-up.

There are a few, though – those brave enough to listen to the feedback they’re getting from reality – who start to see the truth:

They realise that the unease they’re feeling isn’t a punishment; it’s feedback – in fact, it’s literally life showing them that the path they’re on is out of alignment with what’s real.

This is an uncomfortable but powerful place to be because once you become AWARE that the life you’re living doesn’t fit who you truly are, you can start to do something about it.

And as anyone who’s ever transformed their life knows:

Awareness is always the first step (followed by Acceptance and then real Action).

Awareness: Seeing the Trap for What It Is

People often think they’re ‘trapped’ by their circumstances – a job they hate, a relationship that’s lost its soul, a lifestyle that drains their energy.

But the uncomfortable but liberating truth is that we ‘trap’ ourselves because every unreal situation we find ourselves in is the result of a series of unreal choices – over time, these choices accumulate and solidify into a life that reflects them.

It’s like compounding interest, but in reverse: every small compromise, every avoidance of truth, every time we silence our intuition…it all adds up. One day, we look around and realise the compound effect of unreality has created a prison of our own making.

That’s why I often like to say:

If we put unreal in, we get unreal out. If we put real in, we get real out.

This simple maxim captures the essence of cause and effect in the human experience because our lives are nothing more than the sum of the choices we’ve made and those choices are either rooted in truth or illusion.

When we start to see how our unreal choices have shaped our current situation, the pain can be intense but this pain is also sacred because it’s the pain of waking up and the friction between who we’ve been pretending to be and who we really are.

Acceptance: Owning the Past Without Shame

After Awareness comes Acceptance:

This is the second stage in the model of life transformation that I talk about in my books and use with my coaching clients (following Awareness and preceding Action).

In this case, Acceptance means fully owning the fact that the life you’ve built is the product of your own choices but without falling into shame or blame.

It means recognising that you did the best you could with the level of Awareness you had at the time and so you made the choices you thought would keep you safe, accepted, or loved.

The only problem is that they weren’t real because you were filtering everything through the ego (the false identity we create to deal with underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma).

The moment you stop judging yourself for your past and start learning from it, something powerful happens: energy that was trapped in denial and resistance is freed up for growth as you transcend ego and start to integrate the Shadow Self.

Acceptance isn’t resignation – it’s liberation:

It’s the point where you stop fighting reality and start working with it.

Action: Making Real Choices

Once you’ve accepted where you are, the next step is to start making real choices – choices that align with truth rather than F.E.A.R (“False Evidence Appearing Real”):

This is where many people get stuck, because real choices rarely bring instant results and so you won’t start seeing results literally overnight.

Instead, when you start acting from truth, it takes time for the external world to catch up (just like it took time for all of those UNREAL choices to lead to you getting ‘trapped’).

I call this period the Reality Lag.

The Reality Lag is the gap between the moment you start living truthfully and the moment your outer reality begins to reflect it. It’s like turning a massive ship – momentum doesn’t shift instantly but once it does, the momentum can take you wherever you need to go.

It’s during this period of riding through the Reality Lag that trust becomes essential:

You have to keep taking real, aligned action even when it feels like nothing’s happening; you have to hold your nerve through uncertainty and resist the temptation to revert to your old unreal patterns.

Most people never make it through the Reality Lag because they panic halfway through and run back to the familiar but if you can stay grounded and keep choosing what’s real, reality will catch up.

It simply has to but trust is the bridge that carries you through that lag.

Fate vs Destiny: The Power of REAL Choice

There’s an important difference between fate and destiny that many people don’t know about:

Fate is what you’re born with and into – for example, your family, your genes, your circumstances. It’s the starting point but not the end of the game.

Destiny, on the other hand, is what you create through your choices – it’s the sum total of every real or unreal decision you make.

Most people spend their lives confusing the two and so they resign themselves to fate, telling themselves stories like, “I can’t change because this is just who I am” or “This is just how life works“.

Wrong!

Your destiny is flexible even if your fate isn’t:

It’s shaped by every choice you make today and so the more real your choices, the more real your destiny becomes.

(Though, like we said, you’ll have to ride through the Reality Lag whilst the external catches up with the internal).

How to Start Making Real Choices

If you’re at that crossroads – tired of living an unreal life but unsure where to start – then here are some practical steps to begin your journey of growing real:

1. Know Your Real Values

Most people never stop to define what truly matters to them.

Instead, they chase goals that don’t belong to them – money, status, validation – and wonder why they feel empty when they achieve them.

The way ‘out’ is to start by identifying your real values – the principles or qualities that make you feel alive, grounded, and in integrity with yourself (so things like ‘creativity’, ‘peace’, ‘freedom’ etc.).

Once you know them, turn them into a vision, break that vision into goals, and those goals into habits.

Real life builds itself through repetition of what’s real.

2. Value Your Time, Energy, and Attention

If your life is made of time, then wasting time is wasting life itself.

This means that you need to start treating your time, energy, and attention as the sacred currencies that they are:

Every minute you give to something unreal – mindless scrolling, gossip, people who drain you- is a minute stolen from what’s real and an attack on your own real destiny.

Invest these valuable assets instead:

Read things that expand you. Move your body. Create. Build something that matters.

The compounding effect of these real investments will change your life faster than you might think.

3. Learn to Regulate Your Nervous System

The reason most people can’t make real choices isn’t lack of willpower – it’s because they’re stuck in survival mode and so they see real life as a ‘threat’ (even though it’s what they really want).

When your nervous system is dysregulated, your mind defaults to fear-based thinking and so you choose comfort over truth, familiarity over growth.

Start learning how to regulate your body:

Breathe deeply. Move daily. Meditate. Journal. Rest.

When your nervous system is balanced, you become capable of staying grounded through the uncertainty of the Reality Lag instead of freaking out and running back to the old unreal life you don’t even want to be living.

4. Create a Vision of Who You Want to Become

Real growth isn’t about adding more to yourself – it’s about uncovering what’s already there beneath the ego’s defences.

Create a vision of your future self that reflects truth, not fantasy:

Who would you be if you stopped pretending?

This vision becomes a reference point when your old patterns try to pull you back and so you’ll start to separate your realness from the ego, and you’ll see that you have the power to rewrite the story.

As you integrate the parts of yourself you’ve rejected – the shadow – you’ll start to gather evidence that you’re not trapped and that you never were.

5. Trust the Process

You can’t rush realness – you can only live it and so growing real isn’t a one-time event but a lifelong commitment to truth.

It’s choosing to stay awake when the world tries to lull you back to sleep.

There will be days when you doubt yourself and when the Reality Lag feels endless but if you stay the course, one day you’ll look back and realise you’ve built a life that finally feels like you.

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

If you want to go deeper into understanding realness and living a real life then read my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

The Unreal Alternative of Wasting Your Life

If you don’t grow real, you waste your life – it’s really that simple:

Wasting your life doesn’t necessarily mean ending up homeless or destitute – in fact, it often looks like living a comfortable lie: a life that looks fine from the outside but leaves your soul malnourished and restless.

The comfort of unreality is temporary but the cost is permanent.

The alternative is to grow real and to take the path of alignment, freedom, and love.

This is the only way to live a life that ‘means’ something and that leaves you feeling fired up and in the flow.

You stop wasting your life when you start accepting yourself and living in a real way.

Stop Wasting Your Life: The Final Word

There’s an old saying that goes something like “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now“.

It doesn’t matter how many unreal choices you’ve made in the past; what matters is the REAL choice you make next.

Every real choice plants a seed in the soil of your destiny and so if you keep planting, keep trusting, and keep growing real then you’ll get where you need to be.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to stop wasting your life and to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you clear the fog and start taking real action.

Coaching versus Therapy: What’s the Right One for You?

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Coaching Versus Therapy

Why Choose Coaching Over Therapy? The Case for REALNESS

When you’ve already sat on the proverbial therapy couch for months or years and done all the talk-talk-talk, you may quite naturally find yourself asking: “What now?”.

Therapy has its place for sure – no doubt, it’s a time-tested intervention that helps people to find a sense of stability in their lives after a period of emotional turbulence and turmoil but if you’re reading this, you might feel that the slow crawl forward through endless talking isn’t real enough for you.

This is where coaching enters because it can help you to start moving in a REAL way – and yes, I’m going to argue that for many, choosing coaching may be the better option.

If you’re curious how this might apply to you and your own situation then this article will help you to understand the difference between these two modalities and to make a choice one way or the other.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Coaching is about getting out there and experiencing reality instead of analysing it.

Therapy: The Old Map that Gets You ‘Somewhere’ but Never All the Way Home

Let’s begin with what therapy can do well because acknowledging its value is absolutely essential:

The truth of the matter is that many people have benefitted massively from therapy over the years and that it’s helped many to finally feel ‘seen’, ‘heard’ and capable of finally beginning to understand their patterns and develop a better relationship with themselves. There’s no question that this work can be valid and helpful.

However – and this is a pretty big however – therapy can also be outdated for certain goals:

If your aim is to get on with your life rather than stay in the examining room of your life, you may find therapy frustratingly slow, repetitive, and sometimes even circular as you explore the same things over and over again expecting different results (which – as we all know – is the definition of insanity).

Consider a few of the drawbacks of the therapeutic model:

  • Duration & drift: Research shows that many therapeutic interventions require 15-20 sessions or more before any measurable improvement is seen. Another analysis found that length of-treatment and number of sessions had little association with better outcomes which basically means that you could stay in therapy for a long time without seeing incremental gains. This is all backed up by the fact that many people may engage in therapy for years – literally decades or lifetimes in some cases.

  • Problem-focus versus solution-focus: Traditional therapy often does deep dives into the past – for example looking mainly at trauma, childhood, emotions, and old patterns as an end in themselves (instead of exploring them as barriers to be removed which is what coaching does). That’s needed but many clients I’ve spoken to say: “Yes, I got to understand my patterns but now what?” The trouble is, focusing on the problem means you keep feeding the problem because there’s a law of life that states what you focus on grows (and so if you focus on the problem, you just get more problems).

  • Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic whilst it sinks: The core problem for everybody is always a disconnection from their REALNESS and how this causes them to live a life in the Void. If you don’t deal with this core issue, then you’re just rearranging the furniture on the Titanic whilst it keeps sinking. Therapy sometimes helps you rearrange the deckchairs (beliefs, feelings, stories) but doesn’t always stop the water coming in and so you’re still on the sinking ship, albeit with a slightly nicer arrangement of chairs.

  • Victim mindset can linger: Therapy often frames someone as “traumatised”, “hurt”, “in pain” and deserves compassion – rightly so, of course, but the long-term risk is remaining stuck in the role of victim rather than shifting into creator and actually doing something REAL with your life. In other words, lingering in that safe zone of “I’m damaged, help me” rather than stepping into “I’m alive so let’s build”.

  • Limited action/out-of-session flow: Because many therapeutic models end at the session door, the emphasis is on talking, reflecting, exploring. Action sometimes happens, but less so than you might want – especially if you’re yearning for growth rather than just recovery. With coaching there is usually an accountability structure to keep the RELATIONSHIP going in between sessions (for my coaching this is checking in with clients daily to ensure they’re taking the action they said they’d take and staying focused on what’s real from day-to-day).

In short: therapy can stabilise you and help you survive but may not always help you reach that real place where you thrive. Therapy might help you heal dysfunction but coaching will help you to unlock your POTENTIAL.

Coaching: Getting You Off the Couch and Into Your REAL Life

Now let’s talk about coaching – specifically the kind of coaching I offer, guided by REALNESS and focused on helping you to become the real version of yourself away from all of that unresolved shame, guilt, and/or trauma (the Unholy Trinity).

Coaching is different to therapy because the whole point is that eventually you won’t need any more coaching and so you can go and get on with your life instead of constantly analysing it and replaying the past.

That’s a big shift.

Here are some of the distinctive elements of coaching that help you to shift gear in a real way:

  • Future & action-focus: While therapy sometimes anchors in the past, coaching invites you to create a vision of your real self (unhindered by shame, guilt and/or trauma), break that vision into goals, and then take consistent action so you don’t just feel and talk; you tap into your being and do.

  • Responsibility-culture: There’s a powerful mental shift that coaching always leads to: it goes from a stance of “I was harmed, I was a victim, and someone should ‘fix’ me” to “I’m alive, I declare my vision, and I act”. In other words, it takes you from being an EFFECT of what happened to you to becoming a CAUSE of what you want to make happen (within your control – we can’t control everything or be omnipotent, of course). This doesn’t mean you deny your story – it simply means you don’t let the story define you and so coaching helps you step out of the victim narrative into the architect narrative.

  • Container + between-sessions momentum: With coaching I emphasise the relationship across the four months I tend to work with people for – not just during sessions. For example, I have accountability structures in place where we check in every weekday, you stay on track, take real action you committed to, regulate your nervous system, and build habits that help you keep getting results consistently over time. It’s not just ‘see you next week and chat’ but ‘we’re on this journey together, this week I’m doing this, and we report back and keep refining’. That dynamic drives flow rather than stuckness and banging your head against brick walls.

  • Ending is the goal: Coaching is designed to be finite (not forever) and so the aim is that you grow real, integrate, embody, and then fly to wherever it is that you need to take yourself. You don’t become dependent on the coaching; you become independent and aligned with yourself and what you really want for yourself. This aligns with the REALNESS philosophy of returning to wholeness.

  • Time efficiency and orientation: Coaching tends to move more quickly into action than therapy which might meander through exploration for months/years. If you’re already stable and you’re ready for growth rather than rescue then coaching may fit you better and help you to level yourself and your life up at a pace that gets you excited and fires you up.

Coaching vs Therapy: Which One is For You? A Guide

It’s not a case of “therapy bad, coaching good” because each has its place but here’s a quick guide to help you see what might be best for you:

Choose therapy if:

  • You’re dealing with deep emotional turmoil, crisis, active mental health diagnosis, or trauma that’s so raw you’re just trying to survive.

  • You don’t feel safe enough inside your body or your system to start acting yet (because before you build you need to stabilise).

  • You need to feel ‘seen‘/’heard’, get understanding, regulation, or to just unleash a load of emotional ‘stuff’.

Choose coaching if:

  • You’re reasonably stable (you have a roof over your head, a basic capacity to function in the world, and you’re not on the edge of a mental health crisis), and you’re ready to overcome old patterns and grow real through action.

  • You’re done with endlessly analysing your past and you’re ready to build your future.

  • You’re willing to be held accountable, create new habits, regulate your nervous system, and to step into becoming the kind of person you could have been if shame/guilt/trauma hadn’t defined you.

Why Coaching Can Help You Tap into Your REALNESS

My coaching is a holistic system that is about dealing with more than the mind (as therapy does) – instead, we’re dealing with the body, nervous system, ego, shadow self, emotional ‘stuff’ and action.

Coaching for REALNESS means:

  • Integration of mind-body system: We don’t just talk; we regulate your nervous system and bring your body on board, not just your mind (because nothing real comes from the mind alone).

  • From fragmentation to wholeness: We help you to overcome the inner separation from yourself (the core problem) and to overcome fragmentation (the bodily, emotional, and mental split) so you can put yourself back in alignment with wholeness (your natural, real state).

  • Trust as a muscle: Through the process of Awareness → Acceptance → Action, my coaching helps you start trusting yourself and life again so you can start taking real action instead of holding back and hesitating in life.

  • Vision-driven action: You create a real vision of yourself and life instead of the fearful, past-defined ‘you’ then map it into boldly consistent action and habits. I keep you accountable to make sure that this vision becomes a reality that replaces all of those old ‘Gremlins‘ and unreal patterns.

  • Short-term container, long-term freedom: Coaching is a vehicle to get you to the place where you no longer need the vehicle. We’re not creating dependence; we’re creating independence.
Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to know more about the realness philosophy and how to apply it to your life.

Practical Steps: If you’re curious about coaching — what to do next

Here are five steps you can take to explore all this ‘stuff’ – even if you’re still halfway in therapy or wondering whether coaching is for you:

  1. Clarify your current state
    • Ask yourself: Am I in crisis/stabilising or am I ready to build and grow?
    • Rate your life stability (on a scale of 1-10): Are you repeatedly stuck in the same patterns without much change or are you ready to move into new territory?

    • If you’re at 3-4: perhaps therapy/therapeutic support is still valid. If you’re at 6-8: maybe coaching is now appropriate.

  2. Define the vision of your real self
    • Imagine: If shame, guilt, and trauma hadn’t shaped me, who would I be?

      Write 3-5 statements in the present tense (e.g., I move through life with ease, I express my truth, I love without fear, etc. etc. etc.).

    • This is not indulgent. It’s re-discovery of your realness, uncluttered by those old and unreal patterns that you’ve conditioned yourself to identify with.

  3. Break that vision into goal(s) + habits
    • For each vision statement, pick one goal you’ll commit to over the next 3 months.

    • For each goal, pick 1-2 daily or weekly habits. (Example: vision “I speak my truth” → goal “I have courageous conversations weekly” → habit “Every Monday morning write one honest truth I need to share”).

    • Habit forms the muscle and action is the engine.

  4. Regulate your nervous system and integrate body + mind
    • Coaching isn’t just mind talk – your body will also need to catch up.

    • Use breathwork, somatic exercises, meditation, or movement like (yin) yoga to settle into your nervous system.

    • Weekly: pick 20-30 minutes where you do a somatic check-in:

      Ask yourself “How is my body holding this vision? What resistance is here physically / emotionally /mentally?” then take micro-action to shift it.

  5. Set accountability and review
    • Decide how often you’ll review your progress.
    • Give yourself a weekly check-in: What habit did I do? What progress to my goal? What obstacle? What’s the next real action?

    • At the end of 3 months: Review the vision statements. Which ones feel alive? Which feel stale? Revise and readjust if necessary.

    • If you’re working with a coach then commit to being accountable rather than comfortable.
Coaching is about action that helps you overcome the void.

Coaching vs Therapy: The Final Word

Therapy can be an incredible journey from wound to wisdom, from chaos to calm, but if you’ve already reached a point where calm is familiar, where you’re not just surviving but wondering “What’s next?” then coaching offers the next chapter.

It’s not about dismissing what therapy did for you; it’s about choosing what you now need to live the REAL life you feel called to.

In the language of REALNESS: shed the fragments, step into wholeness, and live aligned with the truth rather than constantly pushing against it.

Coaching is the tool to help you become the realest version of you.

If you’d like to explore this more specifically – whether coaching might be right for you or how it might be structured – then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you take real action.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to shift into gear and take real action then book a free coaching call with me today and I’ll help you start focusing on the solution instead of the problem.

The Mind Prison: When Safety Becomes a Prison

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The Mind Prison

How You Got Trapped in The Mind Prison and Lost Touch With Your REAL Life

There’s an irony at the heart of our human condition:

Our instinct to stay safe and to avoid pain and conflict is one of the most natural and legitimate instincts we have but when it becomes over-activated, rigidified, and even weaponised against the self, it can lock us into a self-made prison that drains all of the life out of our lives.

This is because in this prison we can start to forget ourselves and lose contact with real life as our world shrinks around us until all that remains is a shadow of what could be.

This is the story of the Mind Prison but the ‘good’ news is that we also carry the key to get out again.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Mind Prison is what keeps you from your realest life.

The Natural Need for Safety and How it All Goes ‘Wrong’

From the moment we arrived here on Planet Earth, our nervous systems have been hard-wired to scan for threats:

This means that we’ve evolved to seek safety, to avoid pain, and to steer clear of conflict that could injure us or destabilise our world. This isn’t a pathology or a sign that there’s something ‘wrong’ with us – it’s a design feature of life itself and it helps us to stick around and actually live our lives (without, you know, dying).

Paradoxically, though, when this ‘safety’ instinct is given too much power, we end up over-protecting our lives and so we build layers of control, erect walls of certainty, and vow to ourselves that “I’ll never feel like that again” in the face of threats and chaos.

Unfortunately, when we hide too much from these threats and chaos (which are both inescapable parts of REAL life), we can end up stepping into a static identity and so become someone whose primary job is to avoid pain rather than to actually live life.

Here’s what often happens on the journey to the Mind Prison:

Some time in the past we experienced something that felt utterly unsafe like a betrayal, an emotional collapse, or a moment when froze up and so ended up believing that we couldn’t handle life.

For whatever reason, this moment became so potent and overwhelming that we let it define us and so we decided (often unconsciously) to become the person who doesn’t get hurt again:

We wrapped ourselves in armour and became risk-averse, tightly controlled, and always on the watch for some new threat to knock back and overcome. That identity – a version of ego that we became attached to – was born and started to define ourselves, our lives, and how we interact and relate with both.

At the time, this all mad sense and was a strategy that kind of worked.

Well, for a time, at least:

It achieved safety (to the extent it could) and stopped us feeling uncomfortable feelings that we confused for actual physical danger (‘threats’) but, eventually, we started to notice something:

The armour felt heavier and heavier over time, the world started to feel more distant, and the blood running through our veins felt diluted and detached from life.

We started to see that we were living life as though behind glass – observing instead of inhabiting as the the wall of control we’d built for ourselves had turned into a prison.

The Ego’s Mind Prison: ‘Lived’ in the Mind, Lost in the Body

When we build our identity around risk avoidance and control, we detach from our body and our real presence and start to live in the mind (because it’s ‘safer’ there, after all, and appears to give us more control over our lives):

The mind is where we plan, anticipate, worry, defend, rehearse things but the mind is not reality; the mind is just the map, not the territory.

When we’re attempting to ‘live’ from behind the Mind Prison, we hold ourselves back from real action (which is the only thing that can really improve our lives in a consistent and sustainable way):

We show up in relationships not as ourselves in our own realness but as a performance and believe that if we can just control enough of life – our habits, our environment, and our narratives – then we’ll be safe.

What usually happens, though, is that the opposite begins to happen:

We become disconnected from our feelings, from our bodies, from the rawness and richness of being alive.

This is because trying to control life and stay ‘safe’ all the time just has the effect of becoming that prison we keep talking about:

The walls appear invisible and that’s because they’re not made of literal bricks but of unreal fears, habits, and beliefs. This Mind Prison keeps surprise at bay, keeps chaos out, keeps discomfort muffled, sure – but, over time, the cost becomes too high as life begins passing by like water through fingers and we start to wonder why we never feel real anymore.

We forget the thrill of being surprised; we forget the aliveness of vulnerability; we forget that we were born to live fully – not just to avoid getting hurt and so the identity that once protected us now imprisons us.

The Fear Behind the Fear: What We Really Avoid

When we say we’re “keeping ourselves safe”, what are we really doing?

Beneath the surface – though we might not yet admit it – is a fear of life itself and how it operates in a real and inescapable way.

This fear isn’t just a fear of any potential pain but of being confronted with something so raw that we believe we can’t handle it because it’s going to ask us to (finally) face the shame, guilt, and/or trauma – the Unholy Trinity – that drives us from beneath the surface of our lives.

We also fear that once we stop identifying with the ego/identity that’s led to the Mind Prison that we’ll have to start facing the unacknowledged parts of ourselves that we’ve exiled in the Shadow Territory – all of the goals, values, and qualities that go against the nice, ‘safe’ way that we’d like to see ourselves as embodying (so we don’t have to see life as it really is).

In short, we fear that life will present something to us like a challenge, a loss, or a confrontation with our hidden self and so we arm ourselves, hide from life, and attempt to remain immune to it all.

This is the origin of the control freakery that keeps us in the Mind Prison:

We think if we can just suppress what might hurt, then we can stay “safe” but what we’re really doing is suppressing what makes us human and cutting ourselves off from what we really want: REAL LIFE.

When we step into the Mind Prison of resistance and avoidance, we allow our identity to be determined by what we fear, rather than by what we love. and we just end up keeping our real life at bay – even from ourselves.

The Mind Prison’s Operations: How it Plays Out in Life

This Mind Prison and its illusions of safety and control shows up in all sorts of subtle ways:

  • Our actions: Rather than doing what we deeply want, we hesitate and hold back. We don’t invest in the vision because we’re not sure we’ll ‘succeed‘ and so we don’t lean into the discomfort of growth. Instead we prioritise what feels safe, what is predictable, what we can manage and then just find ourselves ‘stuck’ without direction.

  • Our relationships: We keep walls up because don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Instead of just being present, we perform and show up in the world as a version of ourselves we believe is acceptable instead of what’s actually real. In doing so we lose connection to ourselves, to others, and to life itself.

  • Our approach to reality: We try to keep life at a distance and to sanitise it and shape it to our will because we want smoothness and a false sense of order. We avoid the jagged edges of real life despite the fact that reality will always interrupt, always surprise, always demand something of us. The ego is the opposite of reality and it makes us believe “If I can manage the world, I can stay safe” which contradicts what reality says: “You’ll never be safe but you can be alive”.

The funny thing is that the more control we attempt to force upon life, the more life diluted it starts to feel and so the more we avoid risk, the more we feel stuck.

To make matters worse, the more we prioritise safety over aliveness, the more we drift toward the VOID:

This always leads to a sense of disconnection, restlessness, frustration and a sense that something is missing (which it is: your connection to your own realness).

We end up building a life around ‘almost’, ‘one day’, or ‘not yet’ but that’s just real life passing us by and we look through the cage bars of the Mind Prison.

The Key in Your Hand: Trust and Flow

Here’s the truth and the ‘good’ news:

We already hold the key to our own freedom and back out of the Mind Prison but we’ve simply forgotten about it because we stepped into the cage so long ago.

Long story short, the key is TRUST:

  • Trust in yourself: Knowing you can handle whatever life presents.

    Even though you can’t predict what comes – and can’t control it when it does – you still have within you the the capacity to respond, adapt, and keep growing real. This requires letting go of the belief that you must plan for every outcome and that you must keep armouring up instead of going out into ‘battle’.

  • Trust in life: Knowing that if you step forward, the next step will eventually reveal itself.

    This means embracing that you live in an interdependent system, that life isn’t solely your responsibility, but that you’re a participant in the flow. This is the essence of your REALNESS : the overlapping of subjective experience with objective results.

    This is because results always speak for themselves and so, when we trust life, we step into reality, not merely into our mental constructs (which are what keep us in the Mind Prison in the first place).

In other words: the Mind Prison dissolves not by designing a newer, better cage but by unlocking the door, stepping out, and rediscovering what realness feels and flow feel like.

Getting Out of the Mind Prison: Steps for Reclaiming Realness

So how do we move from the Mind Prison of illusory safety to the freedom of real life?

Here are some practical steps that take you through the Awareness → Acceptance → Action pathway I use with my coaching clients to help them make permanent changes in their lives (all transformational journeys take you through these three stages).

1. Awareness (Deconstruct Ego/Identity)

  • Notice where you are: What behaviours, habits, or identities are you carrying that stem from “I must stay safe” rather than “I want to live”?

  • Name the fear and write down what you are avoiding by hiding behind the Mind Prison’s bars: Is it shame? Guilt? Trauma? The belief “I can’t handle life”? Etc. Etc. Etc.

  • Map the cage doors: What systems of control are in place? What do you avoid? When do you hold back?

2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow Self)

  • Accept what is and start to regulate your nervous system and cultivate presence: Past events that convinced you “I cannot handle life” might still have a hold over you but you can accept that it happened, that you reacted as you did, and that you created protective measures.

  • Accept the Shadow Self: The real ‘parts’ you’ve hidden like the vulnerable self, the wounded self, or any of the parts deemed “unacceptable” because they all contain energy, authenticity, and power. Bring them into light and start using that light in your life to break free of the Mind Prison.

  • Accept and enter the flow: Recognise that life will always involve uncertainty and risk and so feeling safe all the time is an illusion. Real safety comes from being regulated, present, and connected – not from control systems designed to keep you from your own emotional ‘stuff’.

3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)

  • Create a real vision: What might your life look like if you were a bit braver and leaned into your realness? If you embodied your real values instead of your safe identity? Write it out. Let it be bold and messy even (real life comes with chaos and learning to embrace it beyond the false order of ego).

  • Break it down into goals: Find one or two tangible goals tied to that vision – e.g. “I will start a weekly yoga practice”, “I will take one creative risk each month”, or “I will deepen one relationship by showing up in a real way”.

  • Build daily habits: These are small actions that remind you who you are, not who you think you ‘should’ be. It might be a morning check-in with your body, a breathwork session, a short journalling habit, a yin session to regulate the nervous system, or even a power yoga session to feel strength in vulnerability. It can literally be anything (I just like yoga – hence the examples I gave).

  • Become friends with risk instead of avoiding it: Identify a calculated risk that aligns with your vision – ideally something meaningful, something that stretches you beyond your comfort zone. Step into it, see what happens, monitor the outcome, and then learn and adjust.

  • Practice trust: Each time you act, you accumulate evidence of what you’re really capable of. This serves as evidence that you can handle what comes and evidence that life can fill the blanks. Use these as data points to dissolve the stories that kept you locked in the Mind Prison and to free yourself once and for all.
Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace

Read Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to go much deeper into your own realness and building a solid foundation of flow in your life.

The Shift from Illusion to REAL Evidence

As you begin taking real action, something beautiful occurs:

The stories you told yourself – like “I must stay safe”, “I can’t take risks”, or “I must control” – begin to lose their power because reality starts to push back with something stronger – EVIDENCE:

The evidence that you show up and something happens; the evidence that you take a step and life meets you halfway; the evidence that your vision isn’t just a fantasy but a lived experience of realness.

Ultimately, you’ll see that the Mind Prison was never a real prison – it was just a concept or a story in your mind.

In other words, what you feared was never life but your story about life.

What you’ve been starving for wasn’t more safety – it was your own aliveness and the presence, flow, and trust that comes with it.

The Mind Prison is what stops you living in alignment with your own nature.

The Mind Prison: The Final Word

The Mind Prison isn’t some external cage built by other people but an inner fortress that was built with good intentions but layered with self-protection and held together by fear.

The ‘good’ news is that the key has always been in your hand and so when you step out and trust yourself and life then you reclaim what you were always meant to be:

A living, breathing, feeling human being instead of a risk-averse statue to your own unreal life.

Start today by seeing the Mind Prison for what it is, turning the key, and walking out there and allowing life to meet you where you already are:

In reality.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start leaving the Mind Prison then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to find that key and start turning it through real action.

Your Shadow Self in Others: Seeing Your Hidden Self in Other People

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Seeing Your Own Shadow Self in Others

How to Reverse-Engineer Your Reactions to see Your Shadow Self and Integrate What’s Real

Most people think the shadow self is something to be feared or overcome but the truth is much simpler and more liberating:

The shadow self is not evil, dark, or ‘bad’ – it’s simply all the ‘parts’ (‘good’ and ‘bad’) of you that you’ve sent into exile because you’ve decided they’re ‘unacceptable’ in some way.

Sometimes, those ‘parts’ are destructive impulses or unresolved pain; other times, they’re beautiful and powerful things – like your natural confidence, sensuality, or creativity – that you’ve buried in the Shadow Territory because they didn’t fit the image of yourself you thought you had to uphold to fit in with the world.

The key thing to understand is that everything in your shadow is real and what’s real never disappears because what’s real is always real meaning that when you suppress parts of yourself, they don’t just ‘vanish’ – they simply move out of sight, hidden behind the mask of the ego: the image you built to be “acceptable” in the eyes of the world.

The ego is like a self-made prison warden keeping the “unacceptable” parts locked away so that we can function without confronting the discomfort of our own depth but what’s real always finds a way to express itself and so, if we won’t meet those parts consciously, they’ll speak to us through projection and reflection usually via other people.

That’s where things get interesting and it’s exactly what this article is going to help you understand.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Your shadow self is often (not always) revealed in what you don't like about others.

The Mirror Effect: When People Trigger You, They’re Often Showing You You

One of the most consistent ways our shadow tries to get our attention is through our instinctive reactions to others:

When somebody frustrates, annoys, or even disgusts us, it’s often not just because of them but also because they’re showing us something we’ve disowned in ourselves by sending it into the Shadow Territory so our ego can stay where it is.

This doesn’t mean every emotional reaction is projection because sometimes people really are behaving in ways that are genuinely harmful or toxic but when your emotional response feels disproportionately strong or irrational, that’s usually a sign that something deeper is being poked.

It’s like life is holding up a mirror and saying, “Here’s the part of you you’ve forgotten about”, and if you can listen and feel your way to the other side of your frustration then you can accept some deeper truth about yourself and start taking more real action in your life.

A Personal Example: Strength, Weakness, and Dialysis

When I first started dialysis many years ago, I built a self-image around strength as a kind of survival mechanism for dealing with the situation:

Basically, I decided that the only way to get through such a physically and emotionally challenging situation was to take extreme personal responsibility for my emotions and remain composed at all times.

This aligned with the ego I (unconsciously) created for myself at the time which was based on the premise that ‘strength’ meant never showing weakness.

This strategy worked for a while but, one day, I met another patient around my own age who was the complete opposite of how I had chosen to show up:

For example, he got emotional every time the needles went into his arms, panicked when the machine alarmed, and wore every feeling on his sleeve (often breaking down in tears and sobbing).

To me, back then, it looked like he was just being a bit of a wuss (the direct opposite of how I wanted to see myself) and, so, I’ll be honest – I found it incredibly annoying. His tears, his flustered energy, his open display of fear – it all got under my skin and I started to find myself loathing this guy.

I kept feeling this loathing every time I saw him acting like this until, one day, he had the biggest breakdown he’d had so far:

I had finished dialysing and was off the machine at this time so I went over to comfort him and we talked for a while.

As he opened up about his fears, something ‘clicked’ inside of me:

I realised that what was really bothering me wasn’t him at all…it was me.

His “weakness” was mirroring the fear and vulnerability I’d buried inside myself but I’d been pretending those feelings didn’t exist because I was terrified of what would happen if I let them all out.

What it all boiled down to was that my self-professed ‘strength’ was just a coping mechanism – a mask that kept me from feeling the raw truth of my experience.

Without realising it, he was showing me the part of myself I had banished to the Shadow Territory.

Once I saw that, my entire relationship to him and to myself started to shift:

Instead of being annoyed, I felt compassion – not just for him but also for the ‘part’ of me I’d been rejecting:

I realised that real strength isn’t about never feeling weak but about having the humility to accept every part of what’s real – even the bits that scare us.

Seeing Ourselves & The Shadow Self in Others

Once you start paying attention, you’ll notice this pattern everywhere because people constantly act as mirrors for our unconscious material (whether they ‘know’ they’re doing it or not).

Here are a few common examples of how this can play out:

  • You get irritated with someone for being closed or emotionally unavailable but deep down, you know you’ve stopped expressing your own truth.

  • You judge someone for being too loud or too confident but that’s because you’ve buried your own spontaneity and freedom of expression.

  • You feel uncomfortable around someone who’s openly sexual but that’s because you’ve suppressed your own sexual energy and feel safer keeping it hidden.

  • You roll your eyes at someone who’s angry or confrontational but that’s because you’ve told yourself you’re “above” or “beyond” anger when really you’re just afraid of it.

  • You distrust someone for being suspicious or guarded but that’s because you’re forcing yourself to trust and believe and the world around you (though you don’t really believe it).

The examples are endless but the mechanism is always the same: t

The traits we reject in others often reflect the traits we’ve rejected in ourselves.

The moment you realise that, your entire experience of human relationships changes and, suddenly, every irritation, every judgement, every reaction becomes an opportunity to grow real.

The Shadow Self’s Real Agenda: Wholeness

Your shadow self isn’t your enemy – it’s one of your teachers and its whole purpose is to bring you back into wholeness.

When someone triggers or activates you, then, it’s not an attack but a call to integrate and to become a little more real – it’s life’s way of saying, “Look! Here’s something real you’ve forgotten”.

Integration in this context doesn’t mean indulging every impulse or romanticising darkness (which just causes you to get lost in Shadow Work and never taking action) – it’s about balance and truth and about allowing what’s real to come home.

In my dialysis example given above, what I needed wasn’t to abandon strength and start crying like a baby every day but to integrate my fear and vulnerability so that my strength became grounded in truth instead of repression…that gave me emotional freedom and a more stable foundation for real growth.

When we integrate a shadow trait, we don’t become ‘less’ of who we were – instead we become more because we stop playing a role and start living in reality (in other words, we stop performing and find presence).

Reverse-Engineering Your Reactions: How to Spot the Shadow in Action

Here’s a simple way to start recognising when your shadow self is being reflected back to you through others:

  1. Notice the Charge: When you feel an emotional surge like annoyance, anger, disgust, or envy pause and reflect on what’s going on. Strong reactions are usually where the gold is buried but first you have to become aware that you’re reacting in a strong way.

  2. Name the Trigger: What, exactly, is bothering you about this person? Be as specific as possible. Are they too needy? Too loud? Too proud? Too lazy? Naming it clearly helps you track what’s really going on.

  3. Own the Mirror: Ask yourself: When have I shown this trait before? Or When have I wanted to show this trait but stopped myself? Be radically honest: the ego will fight this but stay curious instead of defensive and you’ll start to see yourself.

  4. Look Beneath the Trait: Every behaviour has an underlying energy to it – for instance, someone’s “arrogance” might actually reflect confidence or self-assurance that you’ve buried because of your own ‘stuff’. Someone’s “laziness” might represent your own unacknowledged exhaustion. What’s the real quality underneath the surface behaviour and how does it fit into your own real life?

  5. Reframe the Lesson: What might this reflection be trying to show you about yourself? What’s asking to be reintegrated or accepted? What do you need to embrace about yourself instead of rejecting about the other person?

Practical Steps for Shadow Self Integration

Integration is not an intellectual exercise but an experiential. lesson:

You can’t think your way into wholeness; you have to feel your way there.

Here’s a process you can use whenever you catch yourself being triggered:

1. Awareness

Bring conscious attention to your reaction and notice where you feel it in your body. Don’t judge it – just observe it as a physical sensation without attaching any stories to it. Awareness is the first step towards reclaiming what’s real.

2. Acceptance

Accept that this reaction is showing you something valuable. Instead of trying to ‘fix’ it, allow it to just be whatever it is by breathing into the feeling. Remind yourself that nothing real can threaten you and that what’s happening is just life trying to make you whole again.

3. Action

Do something practical to honour the ‘part’ of yourself that you’ve discovered – for example:

  • If you’ve realised you suppress anger, try expressing it in a healthy way like journaling, physical movement, or setting a boundary.

  • If you’ve realised you hide your joy, do something spontaneous or creative.

  • If you’ve realised you’ve buried your vulnerability, share a genuine feeling with someone you trust.

Every time you take a small, real action, you loosen the grip of the ego and make space for realness to flow back into your life.

Why Recognising Your Shadow Self in Others Matters

Recognising your shadow self in others is one of the fastest ways to grow in realness because it transforms conflict into clarity and turns (self) judgment into acceptance – in other words, it helps you to build relationships that are based on truth rather than projection.

The paradox is that the more you embrace your own shadow, the less shadow you see in others and so the world becomes less about “us versus them” and more about “we’re all learning to remember what’s real“.

The next time someone gets under your skin, try this: pause before reacting, breathe, and ask yourself:

What is this person showing me about myself?

If you follow that question all the way through, you might find that the person you were judging was never your enemy at all – they were a reflection of what you’ve made an enemy of within yourself and guiding you back home.

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

Check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to go deeper into your shadow self and finding your own realness.

A Reality Check: Not Every Irritation Is Your Shadow

It’s worth emphasising that not every person who annoys, frustrates, or triggers you is a reflection of your shadow self because, sometimes, people really are just… annoying.

They may have habits that clash with yours, personalities that grate on your nerves, or behaviours that are genuinely inconsiderate.

The key is to hold both truths at once:

  1. Check for projection: Ask yourself whether this reaction is disproportionately strong or revealing something about your own disowned traits.

  2. Stay grounded in reality: Recognise when someone’s behaviour is simply unpleasant, disruptive, or even toxic, without needing to turn it into a psychological mirror.

By doing this, you avoid falling into the trap of over-analysing every irritation while still keeping yourself open to the lessons your shadow can offer.

Life will always present both challenges and reflections and a big part of growing real is knowing which is which.

Seeing your shadow self can be terrifying which is why you often try to hide from it (behind ego).

Seeing Your Shadow Self in Others: The Final Word

The shadow self’s ultimate goal is not to haunt you but to heal you:

Every reaction, every irritation, every uncomfortable encounter is an invitation to reclaim a piece of your wholeness and so, when you start seeing the world this way, life stops being something that happens to you and becomes something that’s happening for you.

That’s when real transformation begins and how you build a life that’s true.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start integrating your shadow self so you can flow with life instead of continually being frustrated by it then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.

The Golden Shadow Self: The Treasure Hidden Within You

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The Golden Shadow Self

The Golden Shadow Self & Why the Exiled ‘Parts’ of You Might Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened

If you want to live your realest life, you need to integrate your shadow self:

This means facing and reclaiming the ‘parts’ of yourself that have been sent into exile like the qualities, goals, thoughts, values, and energies that you (often unconsciously) decided – or were taught – were “unacceptable” in the eyes of the world.

Until you face these hidden shadow parts, you’ll always live an unreal life trapped behind the mask of ego – a persona built to protect you from unreal shame, guilt, and/or trauma – as you spend your life dancing to a rhythm that goes against the real music of your life on the surface of the Void.

When you live from behind this mask, you’re not really living – instead, you’re just managing the imaginary perceptions of others and surviving, not thriving.

On the other hand, when you start to integrate the shadow – to face what’s been hidden – you begin to live in alignment and start to act, think, and feel in a way that’s actually real.

This article is about something most people never talk about when it comes to the shadow:

The fact that buried within that dark shadow territory are not just your ‘bad’ traits and repressed emotions, but also many of the best parts of who you are at your core.

These parts are the real gold that can change your life for the better if you stop being afraid of them.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The golden shadow self is waiting for you in the dark.

How the Shadow Self Comes to Exist in the First Place

If you haven’t read about this on my site or in my book Shadow Life: Freedom from BS in an Unreal World, then here’s the abridged version of how the shadow self comes into being in the first place:

  1. We’re born whole: We arrive in this world connected to our realness and open, curious, trusting, and free. We live in a natural state of self-acceptance and acceptance of life itself as part of the flow.

  2. Something happens: Maybe it’s a moment of rejection, criticism, or pain but – whatever it is – it’s something that makes us ashamed of who we are or fearful of life. In that instant, we learn that being our real self carries a cost and so we start to question it.

  3. We create a mask: To protect ourselves, we build an ego – a version of “me” that hides what we’ve decided is unacceptable. This is simply a complex performance designed to earn approval, avoid pain, and stay safe instead of being real.

  4. We forget the mask is a mask: Over time, we mistake this performance for our identity and so we filter everything through it, which means we live from fragmentation rather than wholeness.

  5. Meanwhile, the real parts of us never disappear: Everything real that we’ve tried to disown or send into exile is still there – buried in what I call the Shadow Territory. These ‘parts’ are simply waiting to be acknowledged and reintegrated and they keep trying to get our attention from beneath the surface of the ego and the life we’ve built for ourselves to uphold it.

Many people never go so far that they (re)integrate these shadow ‘parts’ and create a foundation of acceptance and realness for themselves:

Instead, they stay behind the mask, as Thoreau put it, living “lives of quiet desperation” always wondering why it feels like something is missing.

Some ‘lucky’ people – and perhaps you’re one of them – reach a point where the mask becomes so unbearable that they start to realise it’s there and wonder how they can take it off because something inside starts whispering that there’s more to life than performance.

That whisper is your shadow calling you back home (and if you don’t listen it will eventually start shouting at you).

The Big Misconception About the Shadow Self

Most people think of the shadow as a container for all their ‘negative’ traits like anger, greed, envy, pride, lust, laziness, or fear.

And, yes, those things can live there but what few people realise is that the shadow also holds the ‘positive‘ qualities we’ve disowned because they didn’t fit our family system, culture, religion, or social circle (though it’s not really about ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ because they’re all just REAL).

For example, if you grew up in a home where being confident was seen as arrogant, you might have exiled your confidence; if you were told to “stop showing off” when you were creative, you might have buried your artistic side; if you learned that trusting others led to disappointment, you might have sent your natural ability to trust into hiding.

All of these qualities – and many others like them – have the power to align you with reality and to put you back on the path to living your REAL life and so the shadow isn’t “evil” or anything like that – it’s just unlived life.

Why the Shadow Holds So Much Good

The shadow territory isn’t just a basement full of bad memories and suppressed emotions, then – it’s also a vault containing your real power.

Here are just a few of the treasures buried in the dark (though there are many more):

1. The Capacity to Trust

When we hide from life, it’s usually because we’ve been hurt in some way and so we learn to control, manage, and predict instead of trusting.

On the other hand, for most of us trust – real trust – lives in the shadow territory and it’s what comes back when we stop trying to force life and start flowing with it again.

Reclaiming this quality means accepting that uncertainty is part of the deal because life can never be tamed but it can always be trusted.

When we do trust it in this way, we rediscover something powerful:

Trust always pays off because it builds self-respect, deepens relationships, and reconnects us with the rhythm of reality itself.

2. Humility

Ironically, most egoic behaviour – showing off, competing, and needing to be ‘right’ all the time, etc – is actually driven by underlying shame.

It’s an attempt to prove we’re good enough because our humility to accept ourselves as real has been buried in the Shadow Territory.

Real humility isn’t weakness but a strength grounded in truth:

It’s the willingness to say, “I don’t know”, “I got it wrong”, or “I’m learning” so that we can keep flowing instead of bashing our heads against reality because we’re clinging to ego.

When we integrate humility, we stop playing God and start cooperating with life instead of fighting it.

That’s when we actually start getting RESULTS.

3. Your Real Goals

Many of the goals we chase are actually ego compensations – things we think will make up for what we secretly believe we lack.

For example, we want success so we can feel worthy, love to feel whole, or recognition to feel alive (when we already are worthy, whole and alive if we tap into our realness.

Instead, behind the mask, our real goals – the ones that make our soul come alive and put us in the zone – are waiting and they’re the goals that align with truth, not shame, guilt, and/or trauma (which is what causes us to hide behind ego).

Integrating this part of the shadow means questioning every ambition:

“Is this coming from wholeness or from ego?”

When it’s from wholeness, you don’t have to force it – you flow with and into it.

4. A Real Relationship with Life

Most people are at war with life without realising it and so they want it to conform to their plans, timelines, and preferences.

When you’ve integrated your shadow, you stop needing life to look a certain way and you can start dancing with it instead of dictating to it.

That’s what I mean by a real relationship with life – not a one-sided affair where you’re always trying to control outcomes, but a partnership where you meet what arises with openness and trust.

5. Strength

People often think they’re weak because they avoid their pain but it takes real strength to face what you’ve avoided and to stand in reality without wavering.

Every time you confront a fear, acknowledge a wound, or take responsibility for your life, you reclaim strength from the shadow.

This is the kind of strength that can’t be faked and it’s the quiet power of someone who knows who they are because they’ve walked through their own darkness and found some real light.

6. Creativity

Creativity is the natural flow between the unconscious and the conscious mind and it’s the ability to bring what’s hidden to light through the process of bringing something into the world (a book, song, business – whatever).

When we repress the shadow, we block that flow and so life becomes mechanical and predictable but when we make peace with our inner world – the messy, raw, emotional side – our creativity flourishes as we learn through chaos instead of resisting it behind the ego’s false sense of order (really, just a way of trying to control life).

Whether it’s in art, problem-solving, or relationships, new life begins to emerge because we’re no longer afraid of what’s inside us and create with it instead of hiding from it.

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Beyond “Good” and “Bad”: What’s Real is Always Real

The truth is, the shadow doesn’t care about our moral labels – it’s not divided into ‘good‘ and ‘bad’; it’s just real.

Everything in there – whether it’s anger, joy, fear, or desire – has a purpose:

For example, anger can become assertiveness, fear can become awareness, and desire can become passion and drive.

When we stop judging and start understanding, transformation happens naturally and so the goal isn’t to become ‘good’ but to become whole.

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

My book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace will take you deep into the Shadow Territory so you can face yourself and find your real strength.

How to Reclaim the Gold in Your Shadow

If you want to start integrating the realness buried within your shadow, then here are some practical steps that can help:

1. Start with Awareness

Notice what you reject in yourself – not just the obviously ‘negative’ traits but also the ‘positive’ ones that make you uncomfortable (because of how you’ve been conditioned to think the external world will see it):

  • When do you downplay your achievements?

  • When do you hold back your opinions to avoid being “too much”?

  • When do you dismiss your intuition or creativity because it feels unsafe to trust yourself?

These are clues pointing directly to the shadow territory and the golden aspects of your realness that are waiting to be reclaimed.

2. Practise Acceptance

Awareness without acceptance just creates more inner conflict:

Acceptance means acknowledging what’s there without judging it and the knowing that you don’t have to approve of everything you find but that you do have to see it clearly and let it exist.

When a “shadow” quality shows up (say, envy, arrogance, or pride), instead of suppressing it, ask yourself:

“What is this trying to teach me about what I’ve been resisting?”

Envy might reveal desire, pride might reveal suppressed confidence, and arrogance might point to buried strength.

Everything has a lesson if you stop shaming it.

3. Take Aligned Action

Integration doesn’t happen in your head – it happens through real action so once you’ve acknowledged a buried quality, express it in a grounded way:

  • If you’ve exiled your assertiveness, start saying “no” when you mean no.

  • If you’ve buried your creativity, make something…even if it’s ‘bad’ at first.

  • If you’ve hidden your capacity to trust, take a small leap of faith by doing something out of your (ego’s) comfort zone.

Every action that honours your real self rewires your nervous system to handle more of truth so that you can grow more real.

4. Develop a Relationship with Reality

The ego thrives in denial and reality always dissolves it so you can face and own the shadow self:

When you stop running from what is – whether it’s a feeling, a situation, or a truth about yourself – the mask begins to crack.

Reality is your greatest ally in integration because it’s the mirror that shows you both your wounds and your worth.

5. Allow the Process to Be Messy

Integration isn’t a neat, five-step checklist – it’s a living relationship with yourself that unfolds over time as you go deeper and deeper into wholeness.

You’ll make progress, fall back into old patterns, then wake up again – each time a little more real, a little less afraid.

The key is to keep choosing honesty over comfort and to keep trusting that you can get where you need to be: back in your REALNESS.

The golden shadow self is the real strength in your life.

The Reward of Shadow Work: A Real Life

When you integrate the realness hidden in your shadow, life changes and becomes more real:

You stop chasing validation because you’ve validated yourself, you stop controlling everything because you trust reality, and you stop overthinking because you’re grounded in truth over fear.

You realise that the shadow was never your enemy but that it can be your greatest teacher and that the ‘darkness’ was just light that hadn’t yet been seen.

In short, the shadow territory isn’t a storage unit for evil; it’s a storehouse of unclaimed potential:

The qualities you need most to live a real, free, and fulfilling life – trust, humility, strength, creativity, connection – are often the very ones you’ve been taught to fear or deny.

When you bring them back into the light, you don’t become someone new – you simply remember who you already were before shame and fear convinced you to hide.

That’s the real work and it’s worth every step.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to bring your trust and strength back to the surface of your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get moving in a real way.

The Healing Trap: When ‘Healing’ Never Ends

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The healing trap

You Already Know Enough to Break Free from the Healing Trap

Doing our “inner work” is one of the most important things we can do if we’re serious about healing ourselves and living a real life:

Facing our shadows, understanding our patterns, and learning to love the fragmented parts of ourselves is essential if we want to grow into wholeness but it all culminates in a kind of paradox if we’re not real in the way that we walk the path:

The same inner work that helps us heal can also become the very thing that keeps us ‘stuck‘.

There comes a point where we can become so identified with the version of ourselves that’s doing the inner work – the one who’s always journaling, “processing”, and analysing – that we forget the actual point of the whole thing: to start living from wholeness and to find a foundation of realness.

If you’ve been on your ‘healing’ journey for years, have read all the books, done all the courses, cried all the tears, but somehow still feel like you’re not actually moving forward, then this article is for you:

What I want you to know is that you’re not broken and that you’re not missing something esoteric or hidden – you’re just missing a final piece of the puzzle: REALITY.

What it all boils down to is that it’s time to stop circling the drain of endless ‘processing’ and to start growing real again through real action.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Healing Trap arises because you try and think your way into a real life instead of actually living one.

The Three Stages of Real Transformation: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action

When it comes to any transformational journey (literally any) there are three core stages I teach in my coaching practice and books: Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

These stages are not just theoretical steps – they represent a living, breathing process that we all spiral through over and over throughout our lives:

  1. Awareness – Deconstruct the Ego

  2. Acceptance – Integrate the Shadow

  3. Action – Trust Yourself and Life

This isn’t a linear ladder we climb once and then reach ‘enlightenment’ but an endless spiral:

Every time we move through these stages, we reach a deeper level of integration and connection to our wholeness and let go of more of the fragmentation that keeps us disconnected from ourselves and stuck in the Void.

We can’t be fully whole in this life because we live in fragmented bodies that experience constant change, pain, and limitation but we can taste wholeness completely in those peak experience moments of real peace, love, and flow that remind us what’s true.

This all being said, the problem is that most people get stuck in the first two stages – Awareness and Acceptance – and never make it to Action, which is always essential for the ‘spiral’ to complete a cycle and where the real growth happens.

Let’s explore each stage in a little more detail:

Stage One: The Awareness Trap

Awareness is about seeing the ego for what it is and the learned patterns, defence mechanisms, and distortions that we’ve mistaken for who we actually are.

It’s about shining light on our conditioning so that we can stop living reactively and start living consciously.

Unfortunately, there’s a potential trap here:

If you get stuck in this stage, you can become addicted to understanding yourself conceptually rather than experiencing yourself directly.

This means that you start mistaking information for transformation.

It’s easy to see how this happens because the modern world gives us endless ways to ‘learn’ about ourselves from now until the day we die if we want:

  • YouTube videos that analyse every psychological wound imaginable.

  • Instagram posts explaining attachment styles and trauma responses.

  • Astrology, Human Design, MBTI – entire (made up) worlds of archetypes to explain our personalities and give us excuses for being the way we believe ourselves to be (because of that ego).

  • Books, courses, podcasts, and retreats promising to help you “find your true self” etc.

None of these things are ‘bad’ – in fact, they can be powerful tools for awakening awareness but they risk becoming a hindrance instead of a healing modality when you start chasing them instead of integrating them.

The classic sign of being stuck in the awareness stage is that you’re always learning but never changing and always preparing but never acting.

The ego loves this because it keeps you busy and distracted but still safely within its control and in a place where you can avoid the shadow self hidden behind the cage the ego is keeping you in – it gives you the illusion of progress without any real risk.

The truth is, no amount of conceptual knowledge will ever be enough to make you feel ‘ready’ to start feeling like you’re ‘healed’ enough to live your real life…

This is because you don’t need to understand everything about yourself to start living a real life – you just need to know enough to take the next step.

Stage Two: The Acceptance Trap

Once we’ve gained some awareness, we naturally turn inwards and start exploring the past and what it all ‘means’:

We look at our wounds, our traumas, and the stories we’ve carried about who we are and what we deserve – this is where shadow work and self-inquiry become essential.

But, again, there’s a trap:

If awareness without integration leads to endless thinking, then acceptance without action leads to endless feeling.

You start to define yourself by your pain – or, rather, by your relationship with your pain and so you might catch yourself saying things like, “I’m just working through my trauma right now” even though you’ve been “working through it” for five years.

Because the lessons from the first stage (Awareness) weren’t embodied, everything you discover in shadow work gets filtered through the same ego lens you’re trying to outgrow and so you find stories and explanations for why things happened but they often just reinforce the same victim identity that you’re trying to dissolve.

This is when shadow work turns into a form of spiritual or emotional bypassing:

You think you’re doing deep work but, really, you’re just building a more sophisticated ego-identity around being somebody who’s healing.

A tell-tale sign is that you keep asking why things happened — even though in many cases, the full conceptual answer is unknowable.

This is because the past is the past and we can’t go back and understand it perfectly because we’re not the same person who lived it.

A more powerful question than why is what:

  • What do I want to replace this fragmented and unreal version of myself with?

  • What would wholeness look like in this area of my life?

  • What’s the vision I want to move towards now?

At some point, the healing work must stop being about ‘fixing’ an unreal relationship with the past and start being about building something real with the future.

The Addiction to ‘Healing’

This might sound strange but many people become addicted to ‘healing’ – it’s a subtle addiction, wrapped in noble intentions but it can be just as paralysing as any other form of avoidance (which is what all addictions always are: an attempt to escape from reality).

The logic goes something like this:

“I can’t move forward until I’ve healed”.

“I can’t open my heart until I’ve fully processed my trauma“.

“I can’t take action until I’ve figured everything out”.

These might sound wise or whatever but they’re really just the ego’s way of saying, “I want control”, because what’s actually being avoided is trust.

Real healing requires surrender which is the willingness to take action without complete understanding (which is impossible) and to live as an unfolding mystery – not as a perfectly controlled project.

You can’t think or process your way into wholeness – you have to live your way into it by becoming EMBODIED in yourself and learning to trust yourself and life.

The paradox of ‘healing’ is that the moment you stop trying so hard to ‘fix’ yourself and start trusting life again, then healing happens naturally as you become more real.

The Missing Ingredient: Action

The third stage – Action – is about trusting yourself and life enough to move forward:

It’s not about waiting until you feel perfect, certain, or that you understand everything but showing up with what you already know and letting the rest unfold with and through you.

When you start to take real action, the lessons from the first two stages integrate through you:

You begin to see what you’ve learned play out in reality and you become embodied wisdom rather than abstract, conceptual knowledge.

This is where your ‘healing’ finally becomes real:

Action grounds awareness and acceptance into the world because it’s the most advanced form of conceptual theory. It also gives you feedback, which allows you to deepen your awareness and acceptance even further as the spiral continues to spiral and you go deeper into wholeness.

Every time you move through the spiral, you bring more of your realness into the form of your life.

From Bypassing to Building

Bypassing is what happens when we use spirituality, psychology, or healing concepts to avoid life; building is what happens when we use them to engage with life.

Instead of analysing why you’re scared of being seen, you start showing up publicly and letting yourself be seen in a way that’s real.

Instead of waiting until your heart feels “fully open” (or whatever), you start loving the people in your life right now, imperfectly but sincerely in the best way that you can (based on what you accept about yourself).

Instead of only ever journaling about your purpose, you take a messy, small step towards it and start changing your life by actually being in it.

Reality is the greatest integrator and so you can’t bypass reality and expect to grow real.

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

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

Practical Steps to Get Unstuck from the Healing Trap

Here’s how to start moving from endless ‘healing’ into real growth:

1. Recognise the Pattern

Notice if you’ve made healing your identity:

Do you constantly consume information about growth but rarely apply it? Do you find yourself saying “I’m still working on myself” as an excuse not to take risks?

Awareness of this pattern is the first step to breaking it.

2. Stop Asking “Why?”

Let go of the need for perfect understanding because you’ll never have it (because complete conceptual closure is impossible):

Instead, ask yourself “What now?”

What do you want to create, experience, or embody from here – from where you stand right NOW?

The energy of WHAT is forward-moving; the energy of WHY is circular.

3. Ground in Acceptance

Acceptance doesn’t mean ‘liking’ where you are – it just means seeing it clearly without distortion:

Say to yourself:

“This is where I am right now, and that’s okay”.

This becomes the solid foundation upon which real growth can be built.

4. Create a Vision

Ask yourself:

“Who am I becoming when I live in truth?“

Create a simple, clear picture of your real life that reflects wholeness, not egoic fantasy then break it down into a compelling vision, actionable goals, and daily habits.

5. Trust the Process

Remember that you already know enough and the rest will reveal itself through experience.

Trust yourself, trust life, and trust that every real step forward – no matter how small – deepens your wholeness and takes you further down that transformational spiral.

The Healing Trap ends when you realise that life continues once you're healed.

The Healing Trap Final Thoughts: You Don’t Need to Be Fully Healed to Be Fully Alive

Wholeness isn’t a destination but a relationship with reality.

You’ll never reach a point where there’s nothing left to ‘heal’, nothing left to understand, and nothing left to learn but you can reach a point where you stop making your healing a prerequisite for living your real life.

The moment you start living in a real way is when you accept your current level of awareness, integrate what you can into acceptance, and then act with trust.

Realness is what happens when you stop waiting for permission from your wounds and start responding to life as it is…right now.

So stop asking whether you’re ready, stop trying to know everything, and stop circling the same lessons hoping they’ll one day complete you.

You already know enough and you already are enough.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to stop going around in circles and start growing real then book a free coaching call with me and I’ll help you get moving towards your realest vision.

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