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.

You Look Better…So Why Do You Feel the Same?

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Look good but feel the same

You Look Better Than Ever But Something Still Feels ‘Off” – What’s Going On?

There’s an old saying that “health is wealth” which – in my experience, at least – isn’t just a cliché but is an actual fact about reality.

Really, it just makes ‘sense’:

If your health is off, everything is off…. and so you can have all the money, the best relationships, and the most abundant opportunities but without that energy, clarity, and a baseline sense of physical wellbeing, you won’t be able to enjoy any of it to the deepest extent available to you.

Basically, without being fit and healthy, life essentially becomes something you ENDURE rather than something you LIVE.

That’s why taking care of your body matters:

It means eating in a way that actually supports you.

It means getting proper sleep – not just scrolling until you pass out.

It means learning how to breathe instead of living in a constant low-grade stress response.

Most obviously, it means moving your body regularly and consistently.

For a lot of men, the way into achieving all of this means becoming dedicated to the gym – this is a ‘good’ thing for all of the obvious reasons but it can also present some confusing new problems.

The main ‘problem’ usually shows up like this:

Somewhere along the way, the myth crept in that getting in shape – getting lean, muscular, ‘ripped’, ‘hench’, and ‘aesthetic’ would solve all of the problems in your life.

It’s the myth that once you looked better, you’d finally feel better and the the perfect body would finally ‘fix things and leave to the perfect life.

It would of course be ‘nice’ if this was true but look around and you’ll see that there are thousands of men walking around right now who have done the work, got off their arses, showed up, trained hard, built the body, and still… something feels off and so still… something is missing, still… they don’t feel the way they thought they would.

If that’s you, you’re not ‘broken’ – you’ve just discovered something important:

The gym is powerful but it’s not the whole picture.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

You've done the work to look better and you've earned it but if something still feels 'off' then you need to go deeper.

The ‘Good’ News: Getting in Shape Does Work (Just Not Completely)

Before we go any further, let’s get something straight:

Working out is one of the best decisions you can make. Full stop. I personally work out in some form every day.

Here are some of the real, tangible benefits that come from getting your body in order:

1. It Builds Confidence

Let’s not pretend otherwise because the facts are facts and so how you look affects how you feel:

When you look in the mirror and see strength, definition, and evidence of your effort actually paying off, then it changes something internally and so you carry yourself differently, move differently, and interact with the world differently (and, often, it will interact with you differently.

Even if it’s “superficial”, it’s still real in the sense that your body is part of your identity and improving it often gives you a psychological lift.

2. It Builds Discipline and Focus

The gym doesn’t just change your body – it also changes something even more important: your character.

The bottom-line is that showing up consistently, pushing through discomfort, and sticking to a plan are transferable skills that will help you in all areas of life (when it comes to getting things ‘done’).

Maybe we’re not supposed to admit it but you can tell a lot about a person by whether they’ve looked after their body:

It signals self-respect, commitment, and that they can do hard things even when you don’t feel like it.

3. It Increases Energy and Resilience

Finally, a well-trained body is a more capable body and so working out regularly will allow you to have have more energy, recover faster, and handle stress better because your nervous system is more conditioned.

In short, working out allows you to become less fragile and more resilient – physically and mentally – and so life becomes easier to navigate because you’re not constantly running on empty.

If all of that is true, then, why do so many men still feel like something’s missing?

Why do they look better but feel the same sense that something is missing or ‘off’ and that they’re stuck in the Void?

The Problem: When a ‘Good’ Thing Becomes The ‘ULTIMATE’ Thing

There are a few key reasons why people can find themselves looking great but not feeling so good:

1. You Put the Body on a Pedestal

Before you started training, you probably believed (at least at the level of your unconscious mind) that getting in shape would solve most of your problems or somehow ‘fix’ your life.

It wasn’t just seen as a ‘good’ thing (which it is) but the ‘ULTIMATE’ thing (which it isn’t – only your relationship with life itself is).

What this means is that you chased it, achieved it, and then…nothing magical happened and you were still the same old ‘You’.

Sure, some things might’ve improved but your deeper problems – the ones you were really trying to escape – remained and so that’s when the disappointment set in.

It’s not that the gym (and all the work you put in) failed you but because you expected it to do something it was never capable of doing for you.

2. You Were Training for Unreal Reasons

There are two broad motivations for working out (or anything else in life, tbh, but this article is focused on the working out side of things:

Real reasons and unreal reasons.

A REAL reason in the case of your relationship with the gym looks like this:

“I want to become the healthiest, strongest version of myself so I can fully show up in my life“.

An UNREAL reason looks like this:

“If I build the perfect body I won’t feel ashamed of who I am anymore”.

Hopefully, you can see the difference which is that one is rooted in growth and alignment with truth and the other is rooted in avoidance and resistance to the truth.

Essentially, if you’re using the gym as a mask to try and over up feelings of inadequacy, shame, or not being ‘enough’ then even if the mask looks incredible…it’s still a mask and so you’ll always feel incomplete and unreal.

The truth is that masks don’t heal anything – they just hide things temporarily and helps us to avoid reality for a little while but, eventually, the truth leaks through again and you have to catch up with yourself and everything you’ve been trying to hide from.

The truth is that the only way to actually dissolve those deeper unresolved emotions is to turn inward and face them instead of building something external in the hope it will help you to compensate.

3. You Haven’t Done the Inner Work

This is the part most men avoid but it’s also the thing that makes the biggest lasting difference.

Working out is hard but it’s a clean kind of hard that allows you to control a lot of the variables:

You lift the weight, you complete the set. you go home and eat – there’s a clear cause and effect with this kind of activity and everything is very ordered and easy to understand.

Inner work isn’t like this, though, because it means facing your own chaos.

It involves:

Here’s the key that can help you to understand why you’ve done all this working out and still feel the same:

Your body can be in great shape while your nervous system is still dysregulated and your emotions are still out of balance.

You can be muscular and still anxious, lean and still ashamed, and strong and still disconnected because the truth doesn’t live in your muscles – it lives in your relationship with yourself and life.

At the end of the day, if you don’t address this, then no amount of physical progress will really ever change or transform anything in a REAL way.

4. You’re Only Developing One Area of Your Life

Another ingredient here is that working out is one domain but life is multidimensional and so if all your growth is only happening in the gym, you’re limiting yourself.

Human beings are wired for expansion which means they’re wired for becoming more aligned, more integrated, and more real.

When you take yourself out of this process then you start to feel a kind of internal friction which usually shows up as a sense that you’re capable of more but not quite accessing it.

This is what I call being stuck outside the Stretch Zone:

You’ve improved one area but you haven’t stepped into the deeper process of growth that integrates your mind, body, and direction in life.

What this means is that even though you’re progressing in some linear ways (like with how much you can bicep curl going up) ,you’re not evolving and that’s why it feels incomplete.

The Truth: The Gym Was Never Meant to Be the Ultimate

The gym is powerful but it’s not ultimate because it’s just a tool and not a destination:

It supports your life but it doesn’t define it and so – when you take it off the pedestal – you can finally start to use it properly:

Not as a way to escape yourself…but as a way to support yourself as you grow into REALNESS.

The Way Forward: A Holistic Approach to Real Change

If you want to feel different and not just look different then you need to expand beyond the body.

A good simple starting point is to begin work at the following three levels:

Mind. Body. Vision.

This will start to open things up for you and help you look at the whole of your life instead of just a few fragments of it.

1. Mind: Letting Go of the Unreal Self

Most of your suffering comes from an identity that isn’t actually real (the ego) because it keeps the real you in hiding (the shadow self).

This is why most of us feel off: because we’re fragmented and split within ourselves.

The mind often serves and supports this fragmentation with a collection of limiting-beliefs that tell us things like:

  • “I’m not enough”.

  • “I need to prove myself”.

  • “I’ll only be worthy when [X]”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

These beliefs create an internal gap between who you are and who you think you should be and, ultimately, this gap is where the sense of disconnection that keeps us in the Void is sustained.

The work here is simple in principle but not easy (it’s 100% doable, though, and I help my coaching clients with it all the time):

  • Start noticing your thoughts without blindly believing them.

  • Question the stories you’ve been telling yourself.

  • Let go of the need to maintain a perfect self-image.

You’re not trying to become someone – you’re just trying to return to what’s already REAL.

2. Body: Regulating Your Nervous System

The game-changer is realising that your body isn’t just something you train – it’s something you live in.

This means that if your nervous system is constantly activated, you’ll feel ‘off’ no matter how good you look and so this is where practices like breathwork and slower forms of movement come in.

Some things I always recommend:

  • Deep, controlled breathing through the nose.

  • Yin yoga or long-held stretches.

  • Sitting still and allowing sensations to arise so you can start to ‘listen’ to the language of your body.

These practices help your body shift out of survival mode and into a state of safety which is ‘good’ news because when your body feels safe, your mind follows.

The second piece of the puzzle at the level of the body is that you also need to learn how to actually feel your emotions instead of bypassing them.

Emotions are physiological which means that they ‘live’ in the body and so if you suppress them (behind a gym addiction or anything else), then they don’t disappear – they just get stored waiting until they day you either face them or they explode out of you.

More often than not, this build-up of stored tension becomes one of the main things that keeps you feeling disconnected and ‘off’..

Then basic work, then, is to:

  • Feel what’s there
  • Let it move
  • Let it pass

Emotions are e-motion, “energy in motion” so just face them without resistance and let them get moving again instead of resisting and causing tension and disconnection for yourself.

3. Vision: Creating a Life That Pulls You Forward

A strong body without direction still feels empty because all human beings need something real to move towards.

What this looks like is different for everybody but it’s not a fantasy that keeps the ego in pace but a values-based vision that takes you into being a deeper expression of yourself.

Ask yourself some basic questions to get started:

  • What actually matters to me?

  • What kind of life feels aligned with who I really am?

  • What would I build if I wasn’t trying to impress anyone?

From there, you break it down into Vision → Goals → Habits

This gives your energy a direction, creates momentum, and it moves you out of stagnation and into growth.

Keep Training Without Worshipping It

None of this means you should stop working out – quite the opposite, in fact:

Keep going, lift the weights, build the body, and stay disciplined but stop expecting it to carry the weight of your entire life and let it be what it actually is:

A powerful support system for a deeper process of transformation – not the transformation itself.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to go deeper into improving your relationship with yourself and reality.

Bringing It All Together

If you’ve been training hard and still feel like something’s missing even though you look better, then here’s the reality of the situation:

You didn’t waste your time – you just reached the edge of what the gym can give you on its own and so now it’s time to go deeper.

This doesn’t mean abandoning what you’ve built but integrating it into something bigger which is a life where:

  • Your mind isn’t working against you.

  • Your body feels safe and regulated.

  • Your actions are aligned with a real vision.

That’s where things start to shift and where you stop chasing or running away from feelings and instead start living in a REAL way.

Looking better is great but self-acceptance is even better (true self-acceptance means accepting your potential too - not just making excuses).

The Final Word: You Look Better…So Why Do You Feel the Same?

Looking better is great and feeling better is even better but being REAL – fully connected to yourself, your body, and your life is where everything clicks.

If you’re standing there, stronger and leaner than ever, wondering why it still doesn’t feel like enough then good.

That question is the doorway – now all you need to do is walk through it.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to open up your life and to start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you change your own life for the better.

Semen Retention & Shadow Work: From Distraction to REALNESS

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Semen Retention & Shadow Work

There’s a pattern that plays out in the lives of many men I’ve spoken to and it goes a bit like this:

At some point, they decide they want ‘more’ which usually means more clarity, more energy, more purpose, and more truth because they’ve had enough of drifting, numbing out, and feeling like life is happening around them instead of through them.

This is usually when they stumble across the idea of semen retention:

At first, it sounds like a cheat code because they’re told that all they need to do is to hold onto their sexual energy and suddenly they’ll become sharper, stronger, more confident, more attractive, and more alive – as though it’s all a kind of modern-day alchemy where restraint leads to power (and whatever else they may want from life).

In fairness, it can actually feel this way for a while but then something unexpected and unwanted often happens:

Instead of feeling like Superman, many men start to feel… worse – in the sense of being more restless, more irritable, more emotional, more anxious, and, sometimes even more lost than before.

This is the point where most men give up because they assume something has gone ‘wrong’ and so they fall back into old habits and conclude that semen retention “doesn’t work”.

But what if that moment when things start to feel ‘worse’ is actually the moment things start to finally become REAL again?

What if that discomfort isn’t a sign of failure but the doorway to something that can finally free you?

What if what you’re encountering is your shadow self?

This article is about the relationship between semen retention and the shadow self and how – if you can push through to the other side of this discomfort – you can finally come back into contact with your REALNESS.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Semen retention will help you master yourself by helping you to finally face your shadow self.

What Is Semen Retention, Really?

Before we go deeper, let’s be clear about what we’re talking about when it comes to semen retention:

Semen retention is the practice of abstaining from ejaculation for a set period of time – often 30, 40, or 90 days – or even in some cases indefinitely. Traditions like Taoism and Brahmacharya speak about cycles (such as 40 days) as a way of restoring balance and rhythm to the body.

At a surface level, it’s all about conserving and then transmuting sexual energy but, at a deeper level, it’s about something far more powerful:

Semen retention is about returning to the natural rhythm of REAL living.

On my own journey, semen retention has been one of the most powerful tools I’ve used to sort my life out, man up, and start growing in a way that’s actually real because it strips things back to the real or unreal, simplifies things by removing distractions from my life, and reveal blind spots where I’m avoiding life and refusing to take the medicine that reality always has to offer.

There are plenty of benefits often talked about like energy, focus, and confidence (and I’ve already written about the benefits in this article) but what I want to focus on here is something that’s rarely understood properly:

Semen retention forces you to come face-to-face with everything you’ve been avoiding and that includes your Shadow Self.

The UNREAL Life Many Men Are Living (Without Realising It)

This isn’t about judgement but is an observation based on my own experience and some of the lives of the men I’ve worked with.

Many men are constantly depleting their sexual energy because sex (or sexual release in general with masturbation) has been put on a pedestal as the ultimate experience in life that’s framed as the peak, ultimate reward, escape, and relief from all the horrors of the world.

Jut to be clear sex is a good thing (to state the obvious!) but it’s not it’s not the ULTIMATE thing:

The truth is that it just feels like the ultimate thing because – for many men -it’s the closest they get to a genuine release from the tension they carry inside because they’ve found themselves living in the Void.

This tension of the Void always comes from living in a state where they’re disconnected from the TRUTH about themselves and life and so have no real purpose.

In this state, sexual release becomes more than just pleasure and instead becomes a kind of temporary salvation because it offers a brief glimpse of wholeness and a moment or two where the noise quiets down and there is a feeling of RELEASE from all the tension of being unreal (living in the Void).

The problem is that because this release is temporary, it has to be chased again.

And again.

And again.

This is where the pattern becomes addictive – not because of sex itself, but because of what it does in relation to how it alters mood, distracts, numbs, and releases pressure.

What this means is that quite a lot of men out there in the world aren’t engaging in sexual activity because they’re genuinely driven by sexual desire but because it serves as an escape from the discomfort of being disconnected.

In other words, they’re using sexual activity and sexual depletion as a way to try and self-medicate the symptoms of the Void.

The Void, Shame, & the Birth of the Shadow

The thing about the Void is that it always arises from the same thing:

Shame.

Normally, this is because at some point in life – most often in childhood – a man learns that certain parts of him are not acceptable for whatever reason:

Maybe it was his anger.

His sensitivity.

His curiosity.

His sexuality.

His vulnerability.

Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever it was, he gets the message (directly or indirectly) that “This part of you is NOT okay” and so he hides it, pushes it down, and creates a version of himself that is acceptable to the world.

This new version is just the mask that we call “Ego” and it order to keep wearing it so he can feel ‘safe’ and ‘acceptable’ everything that gets pushed out of awareness becomes the Shadow Self.

The shadow isn’t just ‘bad’ or ‘dark’ or ‘evil’ nor is it all ‘good’ or ‘light’ or ‘moral’ – it’s just everything that’s REAL but has been disowned and as long it remains hidden, it continues to influence life from behind the scenes.

This is important to know because as long as a man is constantly distracting himself from reality through sexual depletion or anything else then hhe never has to face it.

If he wants to finally be FREE, though, then he needs to take a good look and integrate it so he can become WHOLE and REAL again instead of fragmented and lost to the Void.

Why Semen Retention Changes Everything

This is where semen retention becomes powerful in a way most people don’t expect when they first start learning about it and trying it out:

It all boils down to the idea that when you stop constantly releasing without really ‘needing’ to then you stop constantly escaping.

This is because when you remove one of your main coping mechanisms for the Void (which is what uncontrolled sexual release is for a lot of guys) then you interrupt the cycle of tension → release → tension → release.

When that happens, something inevitable but powerful and freeing starts to occur:

Everything you’ve been resisting and avoiding starts to rise to the surface.

At first, this can feel overwhelming and so you might feel:

  • Irritated for no clear reason.

  • Emotionally volatile.

  • Restless and agitated.

  • Confronted by thoughts and memories you’ve avoided and would rather not have to experience.

  • More aware of your dissatisfaction with life.

  • Etc. Etc. Etc.

This is the point where many men think something is ‘wrong’ and so they give up their semen retention journey (thinking that semen retention is causing these new problems when really it just means they’ve finally found REALITY).

The truth, though, is that something is finally going RIGHT because what’s happening is simple:

You’re becoming conscious of your shadow self and have taken a step closer to integration and REALNESS.

The Backlog of Unprocessed Life Experiences & Emotional ‘Stuff’

The discomfort that arises during semen retention isn’t because life is inherently painful and there’s nothing you can do about it (though pain and discomfort are always part of the natural process of growing and moving forward in life) but because you’ve built up an emotional backlog.

This emotional backlog is just years or – sometimes even decades – of unprocessed emotional ‘stuff’, avoided truths, and suppressed ‘parts‘ of yourself.

Before semen retention, you were managing to avoid this backlog by constantly releasing pressure as the tension of the Void built up inside you but now that you’re no longer doing that the pressure rises naturally (as it’s supposed to) – not to harm you but to be felt and processed.

This is actually a form of healing and is another example of life offering you the ‘medicine’ you’ve been avoiding.

Like any real medicine, it doesn’t always taste ‘good’ in the short-term but in the long-term it will help you to get exactly where you need to be.

The Truth Doesn’t Hurt But Resistance To It Does

In order to make the most of the semen retention journey (or anything else that allows you to remove unnecessary distractions and coping devices from your life so you can raw dog reality) a key shift needs to take place.

Many men interpret this difficult emotional backlog phase as something like “This feels ‘bad’ so something must be ‘wrong’ but the truth more like:

It’s not the truth that hurts but the resistance to letting go of illusions that causes unnecessary pain.

What this means is that the discomfort you feel when finally exposing yourself to the truth instead of distraction again comes from clinging to the identity you’ve built (the ego) despite reality beginning to show you that it’s not who you really are.

Essentially, you’re caught between two worlds:

  • The familiar but false identity or self-image.

  • The unfamiliar but real self in hiding.

This tension is what creates the discomfort and semen retention intensifies the process because it removes your usual escape routes.

The Two Streams: Integration and Release

As you move through this process, two things start happening simultaneously:

1. Integration

You begin to reclaim the parts of yourself you’ve been hiding and so you begin to feel emotions you’ve suppressed, acknowledge truths you’ve ignored, and allow energy that’s been stuck to start moving again.

(Emotions, after all, are “e-motion – energy in motion” and so if you LET them move they’ll deal with themselves – the problems only occur when we block the flow with distractions and unreal beliefs.)

Integration is the process of becoming whole again.

2. Release

At the same time, you start letting go of old beliefs, false identities, outdated narratives, and patterns that no longer serve you.

Essentially, you begin to see that many of the things you thought were “You” were actually just coping mechanisms and – as you see that more and more clearly – they fall away to make space for your REALNESS.

From Performance to Presence

Before going through this process of returning to realness through integrating and releasing, most men are living in performance mode.

What this means is that they’re trying to be someone they’re not, prove something they don’t need to, maintain an image, or control how they’re perceived.

All of this is just the ego at work but as you move through the discomfort of semen retention and shadow integration, something shifts and so you stop performing and (finally) you start being.

You become more present, grounded, and real and so you no longer need to chase constant release because you’re no longer carrying the same level of internal tension caused by unresolved shame (disconnection from truth).

You’re not trying to escape life because you’re in it and this is ultimately what it means to move into REALNESS.

Practical Steps to Ride Through the Process (Instead of Running from It)

Understanding this is one thing but actually living it is another so here are some practical ways to move through this process and get the most out of semen retention without falling back into old patterns.

1. Expect the Dip

Don’t go into semen retention expecting constant highs – in fact, you should actively expect that at some point things will feel ‘worse’.

When that happens, remind yourself:

“This is the work”.

It’s not a problem – it’s THE PROCESS.

2. Stop Interpreting Discomfort as Failure

Discomfort is not a sign that you’re doing something ‘wrong’ – it’s often a sign that something real is happening so learn to sit with it without immediately trying to ‘fix’ it.

3. Create Space for Feeling

If emotions are coming up, let them:

Don’t suppress them or analyse them to death – just start by feeling them in your body and letting them move (“emotions are e-motion, energy in motion”).

This is how the backlog clears and you can return to a solid foundation of acceptance instead of resistance.

4. Journal Honestly

Write down what’s coming up for you (not the polished version of events but the real one):

Your fears, your anger, your confusion, your desires – all of this helps bring the shadow self into conscious awareness so you can finally accept it and then take action from a real place.

5. Move Your Body

Energy needs movement and direction so train, walk, stretch, do yoga, lift weights, or anything else you can think of that will let the energy circulate instead of stagnating.

6. Simplify Your Life

The more noise you have in your life, the harder it is to process what’s coming up and so it’s always a good policy to reduce distractions where possible so you can create space for clarity.

7. Stay Committed (But Not Rigid)

Have a clear intention for your semen retention practice but don’t turn it into another ego performance or turn it into another ‘ultimate’ when it’s actually just another ‘good’ thing.

(The only real ultimate is your relationship with life itself).

It’s not about being ‘perfect’ or ‘superior’ to others or anything like that – it’s just about being REAL.

8. Shift Your Focus from Control to Trust

You don’t need to control every thought or feeling but you do need to trust the process.

Trust that what’s coming up is coming up for a reason and know that if if you face it, it will move because you have to feel it to heal it.

If you’re a man who’s interested in shadow work and semen retention then the Shadow Work Toolkit for Men can take you way deeper and help you reach your goals.

The Real Gift of Semen Retention

Most men start semen retention because they want to feel ‘better’ or being more ‘attractive’ or whatever but the real gift is deeper than that.

It’s not about feeling better all the time – it’s about becoming real which means that it’s about:

  • Facing yourself honestly.

  • Reclaiming the parts you’ve lost.

  • Letting go of what isn’t true.

  • Building your life on something solid.

When you go through this process properly, you’re no longer chasing temporary highs and you’re no longer dependent on constant release because you’re no longer running from yourself.

Instead, you’re living from a place of alignment, flow, wholeness, and realness.

The Final Word: Semen Retention & Shadow Work

If you’re on this journey and you’ve hit that point where things feel worse than before then don’t turn back because it’s not the end – it’s just the beginning.

You’re not breaking down, you’re breaking through, and on the other side of that process isn’t some idealised version of yourself.

It’s something far more powerful:

The TRUTH.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to stop distracting yourself from your real life and you want to make some lasting changes then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.

The Dark Night of the Soul: From Fragmentation to Wholenes

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The Dark Night of the Soul is a Process of Purification into REALNESS

There comes a point in may of our lives where something ‘breaks’ (or ‘collapse’ or [however you want to say it]) and we’re asked to face ourselves and life:

I don’t necessarily mean on the surface – not in a dramatic, cinematic way where it can all fit into a neat narrative when you get to the other side of it – but underneath because the fundamental structures that once held everything together begin to loosen, distort, or crumble entirely.

When we find ourselves in this place, what used to feel meaningful now feels hollow, what used to feel certain now feels questionable, and what used to feel like ‘You’ begins to feel strangely unfamiliar and unreal.

This is what has historically been called The Dark Night of the Soul – or La noche oscura del alma – a term first coined by St John of the Cross more than 500 years ago.

The ‘good’ news is that far from being a sign that something has gone ‘wrong’, the Dark Night of the Soul is actually evidence that something is starting to go ‘right’ for a change:

In the language of REALNESS, it can be seen as the process of moving from fragmentation and shame back into wholeness and truth – in other words, it’s the dismantling of everything unreal so that remains can finally stand rooted in reality itself.

Here’s the problem, though:

Most people don’t understand what’s happening when they enter this phase so they resist it, misinterpret it, or try to escape it and in doing so, they prolong their suffering.

This article is here to change that and help you break on through to the other side.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

The Dak Night of the Soul is a process of purification and being refined into realness.

What the Dark Night of the Soul Really Is

At its core, the Dark Night of the Soul is a process of purification – not in a moral or religious sense, but in a deeply existential one:

It is the stripping away of illusion and the burning off of everything that isn’t aligned with truth.

In REALNESS terms, it’s the movement from:

  • Fragmentation → Wholeness

  • Shame → Truth

  • Ego → Reality

It goes without really needing to be stated that this isn’t exactly a gentle process and this is because the things being stripped away are often the very things we’ve built our identity or self-image on:

  • Relationships
  • Status
  • Beliefs
  • Roles
  • Narratives about who we are and how life ‘should’ be
  • Etc. etc. etc.

Before I ever came across the term “Dark Night of the Soul”, I called this process a “Personal Revolution” based on some ‘stuff’ that I went through in my own life that caused me to drop my old perceptions and update my mental software so I could see something more real.

A “revolution” is exactly what it feels like because the whole process is just about reality swelling up so strongly in your life that you can no longer avoid it:

The illusions you’ve been living in stop working, he ego loses its grip, and you’re forced – whether you like it or not to confront yourself and your own shadow.

It’s not about facing the version of yourself you’ve curated as a kind of performance in life but about the actual truth (which is why our natural tendency is to try and hide).

Why The Dark Night of the Soul Feels So Painful

The pain of the Dark Night of the Soul doesn’t come from truth itself (which can never hurt you) – instead, it comes from losing what we thought was true but wasn’t and attempting to hold onto it.

Most of us unknowingly build our lives around ‘good’ things that we treat as ULTIMATE things:

  • Approval
  • Success
  • Control
  • Validation
  • Certainty
  • Material Goods
  • Money
  • Sex
  • Power
  • Etc. etc. etc

None of these things are inherently ‘bad’ but when treat them as being the ultimate source of our sense of self and allowing ourselves to feel alive then they become fragile foundations that put us in a risky position for sustaining a healthy relationship with ourselves and life.

What this means is that when reality starts to dismantle the things we’ve treated as the ‘ultimate’ and shows us their true value then it feels like everything is falling apart…because, in a sense, it is.

What’s actually happening during times like this is that false foundations are being removed so that a real one can be uncovered and built upon and that requires going through the fire and burning away anything unreal so that only the ‘gold’ can remain (the real ‘stuff’).

The Three Stages of the Dark Night of the Soul (Through the Lens of REALNESS)

Although everyone’s experience is unique, the Dark Night of the Soul tends to unfold in three broad stages that are universal:

1. Descent: The Cracks Begin to Show

The Descent is where it all starts to unravel and so you begin to notice that the structures of your life – like the beliefs, identities, and systems you’ve relied on – aren’t as solid as you thought.

Some things you might experience at this stage include:

  • A loss of meaning or direction.

  • Emotional numbness or overwhelm.

  • A sense of disconnection from life.

  • Questioning everything you once believed.

In short, what used to feel certain now feels shaky and what used to feel fulfilling now feels empty because you’ve entered the beginning of a crisis of meaning.

In REALNESS terms, this is where you start to realise that your life hasn’t been built on truth and wholeness but on ego (false identity) and fragments.

The ‘good’ news is that once you see that, you can’t unsee it which means you’ve reached the point of no return (which means if you keep going you’ll get to the other side of the Dark Night of the Soul and be more complete and grounded in yourself and your own life).

This stage can be confusing because nothing has fully collapsed yet but you can feel it coming – it’s a bit like standing on a structure that’s beginning to crack beneath your feet and knowing that you won’t be able to get away in time to avoid cracking too.

2. The Stripping: Rock Bottom and the Death of Illusion

If you allow the process to unfold, the Descent leads into the most intense phase: The Stripping.

This is where everything unreal begins to fall apart and, yes – it’s often where people hit rock bottom (which believe it or not is better than staying ‘stuck’ in an endless Descent).

That rock bottom can take many forms – for example:

  • The breakdown of a relationship.

  • Loss of a career or identity.

  • Emotional collapse.

  • Existential despair.

However it shows up for you, the external event is not the point because the main point is always to see what’s being revealed which is that the ‘ultimate’ things that you were relying on can no longer hold you and that it’s time to switch things up and put your relationship with yourself and life first.

This is where idols get exposed, illusions dissolve, and false beliefs lose their power…and it hurts – sometimes deeply.

It hurts because the ego doesn’t go or change form without a fight and so it resists, clings, and tries to maintain the old structures or replace them with new distractions and distortions from the truth.

This is why many people get stuck in this stage for years (or even longer) – because they fight the process and try to hold on to the unreal things that are being ‘taken’ (really, they’re just being shown to be unreal).

Here’s the truth that will get you through The Stripping, though:

The pain isn’t in the stripping but in the resistance.

When you cling to what is unreal, you create friction but when you breathe and let it fall away, you create space.

This stage isn’t about ‘fixing’ your life but about allowing what is false to fade away.

3. Ascent: Rebuilding on Truth

If you allow the stripping process to complete itself and carry you back to reality then something eventually starts to shift and you begin to see things clearly again.

Things start to look very different:

You’re no longer seeing through the lens of ego, fragmentation, or illusion but you’re seeing and leaning into something TRUE.

This is the beginning of the Ascent and so finally:

  • You reconnect with life in a real way.

  • You begin to embody truth rather than chase it.

  • You build your life on what is stable instead of what’s temporary (i.e. on something whole instead of fragmented).

You’ll find a sense of presence that wasn’t there before and you’ll develop the strength to stop forcing things so you can get in the flow:

At this stage, you’re no longer trying to control reality in order to confirm with the ego that you identified when you first started to the Descent because you’re aligned with your REALNESS.

Coming through the Dark Night of the Soul like this makes you unshakeable – not because life becomes easy but because you’re no longer rooted in things that can be shaken.

What REALNESS Adds to This Understanding

The traditional framing of the Dark Night of the Soul is powerful but understanding all this in relation to your REALNESS makes it practical because it gives you a lens to understand exactly what’s happening and how to move through it.

At its core, REALNESS is about:

  • Seeing reality clearly.

  • Letting go of what isn’t true.

  • Living in alignment with what is.

What this means is that when you’re in the Dark Night of the Soul, the question becomes:

“Where am I holding onto something that isn’t real?“

Understanding this is ‘the work’ that will carry you through the process because it will help you to identify and release the unreal (and to integrate anything real in the Shadow Self that you were initially hiding from).

Dark Night of the Soul & Realness infographic

Practical Steps for Moving Through the Dark Night of the Soul and Growing REAL

The Dark Night of the Soul isn’t just something to understand conceptually but something to live through and to actually experience.

Here’s how to actually navigate it:

1. Radical Awareness: Tell the Truth

Start by being brutally honest with yourself about what’s actually happening:

  • What in your life feels misaligned?

  • What are you pretending is okay when it isn’t?

  • Where are you relying on something external for your sense of self?

Awareness is always the first step to REALNESS because you can’t change what you can’t see.

2. Acceptance: Stop Fighting the Process

This is where most people struggle because they (quite naturally, really) want the growth without the discomfort.

Unfortunately, the Dark Night of the Soul doesn’t work like that and so there absolutely will be some emotional discomfort (which is fine as you can handle it because it’s not physical danger).

At this stage, you might want to ask yourself:

  • What am I resisting right now?

  • What would it look like to let this unfold?

Acceptance doesn’t mean passivity – it just means not adding extra suffering through resistance.

3. Let Go: Release the Unreal

The core of the process is learning to LET GO of anything unreal.

For example:

  • Identities that no longer fit.

  • Beliefs that no longer hold up.

  • Attachments that are rooted in fear or validation.

This can feel like loss but it’s actually liberation because every unreal thing you release creates space for something real to (re)emerge.

4. Stay With Yourself: Face the Shadow

The Dark Night will bring you face-to-face with parts of yourself you’ve avoided – A.K.A. your shadow self.

To get through the Dark Night of the Soul, you need to face the shadow and meet it instead of running from it:

  • What emotions are you avoiding?

  • What patterns keep repeating?

  • What truths have you been unwilling to face?

Integration happens when you stop rejecting ‘parts‘ of yourself that are real and are never going to go anywhere.

5. Take Real Action: Build on a Foundation of Truth

As you move into the Ascent phase, your actions need to reflect your new level of awareness and acceptance which means that it won’t be ego-driven or force action but REAL ACTION.

This might mean:

  • Making difficult decisions.

  • Changing direction.

  • Letting go of old paths

It always means SHOWING UP in your own life and taking the steps that will move you into deeper wholeness.

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 want to go deeper into finding your realness and making life your ‘ultimate’.

The Gift on the Other Side of the Dark Night of the Soul

The Dark Night of the Soul is one of the most difficult processes a human being can go through and there’s no way to really sugar-coat that side of it.

Despite this, it’s also one of the most valuable things we can ever experience because what you gain on the other side can never be taken from you and will always serve you.

We’re talking about things like:

  • Clarity
  • Wholeness
  • Inner stability
  • Connection to truth

You stop chasing, stop pretending, and stop building your life on things that can collapse.

Instead, you become rooted, real, and unshakeable.

The Dark Night of the Soul will ultimately show you that love was there the whole time but you couldn't see it because of your own unreality.

The Final Word: The Dark Night of the Soul

If you’re in the Dark Night right now, it might not feel like it but you’re not being punished – you’re being refined.

Life is stripping away everything that isn’t true so that you can finally live in alignment with what is and – if you trust the process and let it take what it needs to take – you won’t just get through it but will come out the other side as someone who no longer needs to fear losing anything.

You’ll simply lose some ‘stuff’ that was never real in the first place and make space for the realness to remain.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re in the thick of it and you want to start ascending and growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you find your roots again.

Stuck in the Past: You Just Haven’t Used It Yet

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Stuck in the Past

You’re Not Stuck in the Past – You Just Haven’t Seen the Present in a REAL Way Yet

A lot of people think they’re stuck in the past and so they’ll hypnotise themselves to becoming even more stuck by telling themselves things like:

“I just can’t get over it”.

“It still affects me”.

“I feel like it’s damaged me”.

(Etc. etc. etc)

On the surface, many of these things might even seem true but when you really look deeper, you’ll see that something else is going on and that they’re not just stuck in the past but stuck in a mental and emotional version of past that hasn’t been integrated and hasn’t been used in a REAL way.

Here’s the truth that can start to help you become ‘unstuck’ if it’s what you need:

The past only continues to hurt when it hasn’t been accepted and when it hasn’t yet been given meaning through purpose.

This article is going to help you start thawing yourself out and tapping into a sense of purpose that will help the past make more ‘sense’.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

If you're stuck in the past then you need to start thinking about what tomorrow will look like if you show up and be REAL.

Why the Past Feels Like It’s Still Weighing You Down

Sometimes, we struggle to accept things that have happened to us (which is a totally normal human experience) but when we don’t accept them, they don’t just disappear – they end up LINGERING and causing unnecessary problems in our lives.

Normally, they show up as things like constant rumination, emotional heaviness, a sense that life wasn’t and therefore still isn’t ‘fair’, and a general feeling that we can’t fully be ourselves because we’ve ‘lost’ something in some way.

It’s like we’re constantly carrying a cloud of dust around with us that never quite settles and – over time – this causes us to believe something that can hold us back from ourselves and life indefinitely:

“The past has damaged me and there’s nothing I can do about it”.

Luckily (depending on how you look at it), this isn’t actually what’s happening because the past is DONE and OVER and so it can’t hurt you anymore if you don’t allow it to:

What does hurt you is the resistance to accepting it and the lack of integration of what it left behind.

This is because when something hasn’t been processed, it doesn’t stay in the past – it stays in you…the ‘good’ news is, you can start to put it down and move on whenever you’re ready.

The Trap of “How It ‘Should’ Have Been”

It might sound a little harsh but one of the biggest reasons we can’t let go is because we’re holding onto an imaginary version of reality (i.e. a projection).

This is almost always because we’re attached to a mental picture of how things should have gone – for example:

  • “My childhood should have been different”.

  • “That relationship shouldn’t have happened”.

  • “I didn’t deserve that”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Once again, we might be completely ‘right’ in thinking these kinds of thing but the problem is that it doesn’t HELP us because we’re just comparing reality to a fantasy which just creates fragmentation.

This fragmentation is just a state where we’re disconnected from ourselves and life:

Part of us is here, living our actual life in the present but another part is stuck in a mental loop, trying to rewrite something that already happened.

This inner split is what keeps us from being fully present which is ‘bad’ news because without presence, there’s no realness.

Shock, Pain, and Being Frozen in Time

Sometimes, it goes even deeper than resistance because there are situations where people are genuinely shocked by what they went through.

Not just hurt – literally shocked because it was so intense or deviated too far from the norm.

When shock isn’t processed, it freezes and the frozen energy gets trapped in the body in the nervous system and in the emotional landscape of a person.

When energy is frozen like this, people often find it really difficult to move through it (through no fault of their own – it’s a normal reaction to a difficult situation) and so they build an identity around it because it becomes so ‘familiar’.

What this basically means is that they end up clinging to an ego that formed in reaction to the pain and end up avoiding the shadow self which is all of the the unresolved ‘parts’ of themselves that still need to be felt and integrated.

This leads to a state where they can’t move and so they just stay stuck in the grey area between their reaction who they were and the fear about who they could become.

The Many Ways We Stay Stuck

People resist letting go of the past in ways that feel justified but which actually just keep them trapped.

Some of the most common patterns look like this:

1. “It wasn’t fair”

Maybe it wasn’t but life isn’t something we resolve through ‘fairness’ – it’s something we move through by facing reality.

Holding onto ideas of ‘fairness’ actually just keeps you in a constant argument with what already is instead of helping you find a foundation of actual ACCEPTANCE on which to build something real.

2. “If I stop feeling this, I’m dishonouring it”

This one feels deep and almost noble to some extent but it’s a misunderstanding about the value of pain:

You don’t honour your pain by staying in it but by integrating it and allowing it to transform you.

(This doesn’t mean that we need to chase pain for the sake of itself but that if pain comes our way and can’t be avoided then it can be used as part of our growth into deeper realness).

3. Blame (yourself or others)

Blame feels like progress but it isn’t because it just keeps you locked into the past as you attempt to assign ‘meaning’ at the level of the problem.

This rarely works because the ‘meaning’ we ascribe usually comes from the ego and all of the patterns and beliefs we’ve picked up in reaction to the past in the first place.

When we start to get that foundation of ACCEPTANCE, we start to see that real movement comes from extracting the lesson and not from assigning fault.

4. “If I move on, I lose part of myself”

When you’ve identified with pain for a long time, letting go can feel like losing your identity but you’re not losing yourself:

You’re losing the version of you that was built around fragmentation instead of wholeness.

5. “I’m permanently damaged”

This is one of the most limiting beliefs a person can carry and it’s actually never true.

What feels like ‘damage‘ is usually unintegrated experience and unintegrated experience can always be worked through.

Resistance Is What Keeps the Past Alive

All of these patterns come down to one thing which is resistance of reality instead of an acceptance of reality.

This resistance is resistance the fact that:

It happened, it’s over, and you are now here

As long as you resist this basic fact, then you just stay tied to the past – not because the past has power but because you’re still holding onto it.

The Truth is that You’re Still Free to Choose

Human beings go through painful things and some experiences leave deep emotional marks (trauma is a very real thing) but if you’re safe in the present, then something very important is also true:

The past does not have to define you.

You are still here, you still have agency, and – most importantly – you can still CHOOSE.

You can choose:

  • How you interpret what happened.

  • What you take from it.
  • Who you decide to become next

This kind of choice is where your power is and it will determine whether things get more real or if they just end up staying unreal for the rest of your life.

Why Wallowing Doesn’t Work

A lot of people get stuck because they believe that staying in their pain is somehow the ‘right’ thing to do – as though moving on would mean abandoning their past self.

All this ends up doing, though is turning pain into an identity and so – instead of processing it and learning from it – they orbit around it.

Instead of integrating it, they reinforce it and it lingers and so – without realising it – they end up building a life that revolves around something that’s already over.

Integration Comes Before Purpose

Here’s where a lot of people end up making things worse for themselves than they need to be:

They either try to stay in the past forever or they try to jump straight into purpose without doing the inner work.

The way things actually work is in a sequence that’s aligned with reality itself:

Awareness → Acceptance → Action

(This is the sequence I build coaching containers around when working with clients).

First, you become aware of what’s there, then you accept it – not intellectually, but emotionally and physically so that you can allow the feelings to move instead of staying frozen.

Only then, do things start opening up in a way that allows you to take REAL ACTION:

Real Purpose: The Missing Piece

When you begin to integrate your past, you start to reconnect with your essence (your realness) and then something powerful starts to reveal itself:

Your purpose.

It doesn’t reveal itself as as a forced goal to compensate for your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ (usually shame, guilt, and/or trauma) or as something you pick from a list but as a natural expression of who you are when you’re no longer fragmented.

This is where everything really starts to change because when you find your real purpose, you start to see yourself and your past differently too.

From Pain to Preparation

When you find purpose, then instead of asking “Why did this happen to me?” you can start asking questions like “How can I use this?” to show up and help others.

When this shift happens, the past alchemizes and so once felt like a burden, a mistake, or a source of damage becomes a source of insight, a foundation for growth, and a way to create value for others

You begin to see that what you went through gave you something – even if it didn’t feel like it at the time.

Why People Stay in the Quagmire

A lot of people are stuck in their pain not just because they haven’t processed it but because they simply haven’t given their energy anywhere real to go.

When we don’t give our energy anywhere to go it just keeps looping, feeding back into our memories of the past, and causing us to stagnate.

Purpose changes all this because it gives your energy direction and creates movement again.

This is really important because when you start moving towards something real, you naturally begin to move away from what was holding you back.

The Realness of Movement

In the context of growing real and shifting towards wholeness instead of fragmentation, this is really important because you can’t be fully real if parts of you are frozen and you can’t show up in truth if you’re still resisting what happened.

On the other hand, when you, face your pain, allow your emotions to move, and integrate your experiences, then you come back into alignment and so real action becomes possible.

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 realness and integrating your past experiences.

Practical Steps: Turning Your Past Into Purpose

If you want to actually apply all of this, then here are some practical tips for getting started:

1. Acknowledge Reality

Say it clearly:

“That happened. It’s over“.

This grounds you in the present so you can start making CHOICES based on where you actually are (instead of the past projected onto the present).

2. Feel What You’ve Been Avoiding

If there’s emotion there, sit with it without analysing it – just experience it and let it move (emotions are e-motion, energy in motion).

3. Extract the Lessons

Write down the information that can help you to integrate and move forward:

  • What did this teach me about life?
  • What did I learn about myself?
  • What strengths came from this?

Make it real by acting on what you learn.

4. Challenge the Story

Notice the limiting or beliefs you’ve built around yourself that are holding you back:

  • “I’m broken”

  • “I’ll never recover”

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Question them and see what’s actually true because they’re usually just interpretations – not facts.

5. Reconnect With Your Values

Ask yourself what actually matters to you now – not what should matter but what actually does.

Getting in touch with your core values can really help you here.

Check out this article to go deeper: Unlocking Your Core Values: A Guide to Living Your REAL Life

6. Find a Way to Use It

Ask yourself “How can I take what I’ve been through and use it to create value in the world?” because this is where real purpose starts to emerge.

7. Take Action

Don’t wait for perfect clarity or ‘sense’ – just move because clarity comes through action.

You stop being stuck in the past when you find a purpose that changes the way you relate to yourself and life.

The Final Word: Stuck in the Past

You’re not stuck because your past was too much but because it hasn’t been fully integrated and you haven’t yet found a way to use it.

When you do both of those things, the weight lifts and the ‘meaning’ you’ve (unconsciously) chosen to give things changes too.

You’ll be able to let go of the the story you’ve been carrying that’s been holding you back and allow it to become the very thing that moves you forward.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

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

The Inner Child & Lust: Why So Many Men Chase What They Can Only Become

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The inner child and lust

The Wounded Inner Child Can Distort the Way that Many Men Relate to Their Own Sexual Power

There’s a pattern that shows up again and again with many of the men that I’ve coached and it’s so common in the general population that once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

It usually unfolds like this:

A man feels like something is ‘missing’ inside himself – a kind of low-level emptiness, restlessness, or subtle but persistent sense that something isn’t ‘right’.

This feeling has often followed him around since childhood:

He might not have words for it but it’s definitely there because he can feel its constant presence underneath the surface of all the bravado, ambition, and distractions that he uses to compensate for it.

This is a state of disconnection from the truth about himself and life that the Void:

The Void is paired with an underlying sense of SHAME which is basically the core belief that “something about me isn’t enough” and which creates a powerful inner tension that he constantly tries to outrun (often unconsciously without even realising it).

When a man is driven by this shame he often goes out into the world and tries to fill it by any means necessary.

For a lot of men, his attempts to fill the void lead to unhealthy and unreal relationships with women and that’s exactly what this article is about.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Our lust is what happens when we fall in love with what makes us suffer.

The Wound Beneath the Pattern of Shame and Lust

Let’s be clear about something from the bat:

When we talk about the “wounded inner child” or similar things, we’re not saying there’s literally a child inside you pulling strings like some kind of psychological puppet (which is what a lot of literature around the inner child can make it seem like).

All we are talking about is unfaced emotional reality.

All this means is that – at some point in childhood – something did or didn’t happen – that disrupted your connection to your natural state of wholeness.

It could have been anything but most commonly it’s things like:

  • A lack of emotional validation.

  • Conditional love.

  • Rejection or abandonment.

  • Being shamed for expressing your real self.

  • Emotional neglect that was subtle but chronic (death by a thousand cuts).

The specifics don’t matter as much as the outcome which is usually as follows:

You learned, at some level, that it wasn’t safe to be fully yourself so you adapted and became split off from yourself (i.e. you became FRAGMENTED instead of WHOLE).

When this kind of thing happens a very real part of you stayed buried and holds on to the emotional residue of those experiences whereas another part of you forms an identity to survive in the world (your ego and its self-image).

This split is what creates the feeling of being a boy in a man’s body which means that, outwardly, somebody may look like a man but inwardly, there’s fragmentation – i.e. a gap between who you (really) and who you’re being (when wearing the mask of ego).

That gap is just the Void and the shame that sits on top of it is simply a signal of that disconnection from from your REALNESS.

Attempting to Fill the Void with the World

Here’s where things start to go ‘wrong’ for a lot of men:

They don’t realise that the only way out of the Void is through themselves which means through facing reality, integrating emotion, and returning to wholeness.

Instead, they look outward and attempt to find something in the world to fill what feels empty inside.

What this usually means is they find a ‘good’ thing in the world and attempt to treat it as the ULTIMATE thing (when the only real ‘ultimate’ is your relationship with life itself).

One of the most common “ultimate things” that many men with a wounded inner child turn to is female validation – not because women are the problem (far from it) but because women become the mirror onto which a man projects everything he hasn’t given himself.

For example, he starts to believe:

  • “If she chooses me, I’m worthy”.

  • “If she desires me, I’m enough”.

  • “If she accepts me, I can finally relax”.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

This never gets him anywhere in the long-run because what he doesn’t see is that he’s outsourcing something that can only ever come from within.

Two Common Expressions of the Pattern

This dynamic tends to show up in two main ways (that nearly all men have experienced at some stage in their lives):

1. Toxic and Co-Dependent Relationships

Some men latch onto relationships where there are occasional moments of emotional “reward” like brief flashes of connection, intimacy, or validation.

These moments feel powerful because they touch something deeper and momentarily soothe the Void by releasing the TENSION of living in it.

This being the case, the man stays even when the relationship is unhealthy or when his needs aren’t consistently met and it’s clearly not aligned with his purpose and who he actually wants to be in life.

The reason he stays isn’t because it’s actually REAL but because he becomes hooked on the intermittent reinforcement of unpredictable hits of “acceptance”.

In short:

It’s not love he’s addicted to – it’s relief from shame and so years can pass in cycles of hope, disappointment, and emotional dependency.

2. Addictive Sexual Behaviour and Constant Novelty

Other men go down a different path which is still rooted in the same fundamental problem (a wounded inner child leading to life in the Void and the shame of disconnection):

Instead of attaching to one woman, they chase many.

This usually shows up as becoming addicted to:

  • Dating apps.

  • Pornography.

  • Casual encounters.

  • The thrill of novelty.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

Each new interaction provides a short-term spike of RELEASE from that TENSION of being unreal and provides temporary escape from the underlying discomfort of the Void.

For a moment, they feel wanted and maybe even powerful. and so – for at least a few seconds – the Void seems to disappear.

But it always comes back and so they need more and then more all over again:

More novelty, more stimulation, more validation – it becomes a loop and like all loops rooted in resistance of reality, it slowly drains their life force.

If they continue to live like this, time passes, energy is wasted, and opportunities are missed and so, eventually, a whole new layer is added in the form of REGRET:

“I should be further ahead.”

“I’ve wasted years of my life”.

“What’s wrong with me?”

This only deepens the shame and makes the need to run away from the Void even more intense.

Projection: Living in a Fantasy

At the core of all this is one key mechanism that keeps the men stuck in a kind of frozen where nothing ever really changes:

Projection.

What this means is that man who hasn’t integrated his own capacity for self-acceptance will project it onto women.

For example, maybe he experiences a feeling of warmth, acceptance, and validation in their presence and assumes it’s coming from them but what’s actually happening is this::

They are ACTIVATING something within him that already exists but which has been hidden in the shadow self behind the ego.

They’re triggering a part of his own psyche that he’s disconnected from (because of his wounded inner child) but because he doesn’t recognise it as his own, he attributes it to them.

This is why it feels so real and why it’s so addictive.

He doesn’t realise he’s projecting and so he starts to think things like:

“I need her to feel this way”.

When the actual truth is that:

“That feeling is mine but I’ve just outsourced access to it”.

This is how men end up living in a kind of fantasy – not necessarily in the obvious sense of being delusional or whatever but in a subtle, psychological one where they relate not to women as they are, but to what those women represent.

The relationship is never fully real because he’s not fully there.

Lust as a Misguided Search for Wholeness

Lust, in this context, isn’t just about sex but about about the compulsive seeking of something outside yourself to complete what feels incomplete within.

It’s energy that’s become misguided and misdirected.

At its core, it’s a distorted attempt to return to wholeness but instead of going inward – where the REAL work happens – it ends up going outward into endless seeking.

Because the external can never truly resolve the internal, the cycle continues, and the man always feels the Void and a need to try and outrun it (which is impossible because he IS the void).

The Turning Point: Seeing the Truth

The way forward begins with a simple but potentially uncomfortable realisation:

The shame you feel is not proof that you’re broken but a signal that something within you hasn’t been faced.

What this means is that your shame is pointing you back to yourself – not as a punishment but as an invitation to stop projecting and become PRESENT instead.

It’s also an invitation to stop trying to escape yourself and to come back home to reality because finding your REALNESS is the only place where anything actually changes.

What Was Missing and What Was Lost

To move forward, you have to be willing to look back – not to blame or to dwell and become a victim but to understand.

You can start by sitting and asking yourself some questions that will help you to start facing your childhood as a man:

  • What didn’t I receive that I needed?

  • Where did I learn it wasn’t safe to be myself?

  • What parts of me did I suppress to belong or survive?

This isn’t about creating a victim identity (far from it) but about the opposite which is to reclaim responsibility for your own relationship with yourself and your life because once you see what was missing, you can begin to provide it for yourself.

Re-Parenting: Becoming Your Own Source

If you lacked validation, for example, then you need to step up and become your own champion – not in a delusional, ego-driven way with empty affirmations or by pretending everything is perfect when it isn’t but in a grounded, real way.

You can do this by:

  • Acknowledging your efforts.

  • Recognising your growth.

  • Holding yourself to a standard without tearing yourself down.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

When you do this kind of thing, you stop outsourcing your worth and start generating it from reality in the form of action and alignment.

Returning to the Body

Another crucial piece is embodiment which I like to define as “accepting the truth of something at the level of the body”.

Many men stuck in this “wounded inner child leading to the void and filling it with lust” pattern live almost entirely in their heads by overthinking, fantasising, and projecting.

This is ‘bad’ news because disconnection from the body reinforces disconnection from reality and so the ‘work’ is to come back into sensation and presence.

There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to do this but it can look like:

  • Strength training
  • Yoga (power yoga and yin yoga have helped me loads)
  • Breathwork
  • Cold exposure
  • Walking without distractions
  • Actually feeling emotions instead of analysing them

Embodiment grounds you and starts to bring you out of the illusion of the void and into direct experience so you can actually integrate.

Integration: From Boy to Man

Having said all this, then, the goal isn’t to “get rid” of the wounded parts of yourself but to integrate them by facing what you’ve traditionally avoided about reality, feeling your feelings instead of supressing them, and bringing those fragmented parts back into the whole.

This is what transforms a boy into a man – not age, status, or how many women you’ve slept with but actual integration of the self back into the self.

At the end of the day, a man who is integrated doesn’t need to chase validation or need to try and extract something from women because he’s actually equipped to meet them in reality where he can relate and connect in an authentic way.

He doesn’t come from lack and scarcity but from fullness and abundance.

The Inner Child Toolkit for Men: six black and gold workbooks fanned out

If you keep chasing in other people what you never got as a boy, the Inner Child Toolkit for Men helps you learn to give it to yourself.

The Inner Child & Lust: Practical Steps for Implementation

If you recognise yourself in all of this then here are some places to start taking action:

1. Interrupt the Pattern

Become aware of when you’re seeking validation mindlessly and on autopilot.

For example:

  • Scrolling dating apps mindlessly
  • Fantasising about women to escape discomfort
  • Staying in misaligned relationships
  • Getting lost in cycles of empty sexual depletion

If you catch yourself in this loop then ask yourself:

“What am I actually feeling right now?“

Don’t bypass it but actually face it so you can leave the loop and get REAL.

2. Name the Emotion Beneath the Behaviour

Lust is often a surface emotion and so if you dig underneath it you might find:

  • Loneliness
  • Inadequacy
  • Rejection
  • Fear
  • Etc.

Get specific but find out what you’re actually feeling so you can use the truth to start dissolving your distortions.

3. Give Yourself What Was Missing

If you needed validation:

  • Acknowledge your own efforts daily

If you needed safety:

  • Create routines that ground you

If you needed expression:

  • Start speaking honestly, even in small ways

Become the source of whatever is getting activated by the women you’re projecting onto because you ARE the source – it’s already within you but you haven’t owned it yet.

4. Reduce the Noise

It goes without saying really but a good strategy is to cut down on or eliminate behaviours that reinforce the loop:

  • Excessive porn
  • Endless swiping
  • Chasing short-term validation
  • Etc. etc.

You’re not doing this as a punishment but as a way of making space so you actually face yourself and life and return to the flow.

5. Reframe How You See Women

Stop seeing women as solutions to your unresolved emotional problems and start seeing them as people (wow, what a wild concept!).

You don’t need them to complete you but you need to meet them as you are because that’s what will really determine the quality of the connection.

(Of course, you can still have a great connection if a relationship is just based around sex but if you’re trying to fill the Void and not actually showing up then you’ve fallen into the pattern we’ve been exploring).

Lust keeps you enslaved to the Void and the shame of living in it.

The Final Word: The Inner Child & Lust

The truth is simple but not always easy to accept:

You can’t fill the Void by chasing something outside yourself because the Void isn’t an absence of something external – it’s a disconnection from what’s already within you in your REALNESS.

The moment you stop running and you turn and face yourself and life fully is the moment things begin to shift – not instantly or magically but actually.

When you stop chasing, you can start living as the actual man you are and not the autopilot of the child you used to be.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start growing real and integrating your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’ then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you get in the flow.

Healing Creative Trauma: Returning Creativity to its True Function

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Creative Trauma

Creative Trauma is What Happens When Your Ego Dictates Your Relationship With the Creative Process

There’s a tragedy playing out in the lives of many creative people that’s not often talked about and it looks like this:

On the surface, they’re “doing the work” of writing, filming, designing, composing, painting, and posting and being a ‘Creative’ is the cornerstone of their self-image but underneath all of their output, something feels…off .

Despite their best efforts, their work doesn’t land the way they know it could, the creative process feels strained, inconsistent, or performative and no matter how much they create, it never quite feels like enough.

It may seem like this is “just the way it goes” or that it comes down to a lack of talent, discipline, or opportunity but in many cases it comes down to something deeper:

Creative trauma and filtering our relationship with the creative process through the ego in an attempt to keep hiding from the shadow self.

This article is going to help you understand where this kind of creative trauma comes from, the most common ways it shows up, and what you can start doing about it.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Creative trauma is what happens when you use the creative process to avoid asking questions instead of seeking the truth.

What is Creative Trauma?

Creative trauma in the terms we’ll be using can be defined as the unseen emotional layer that distorts our relationship with creativity:

It’s what happens when your relationship with the creative process is filtered through shame, fear, and unresolved inner fragmentation instead of truth.

This is really important to understand if you want to tap into your creative potential because it’s about how your creativity has become entangled with ego because of your unresolved emotional ‘stuff’.

When we filter creativity through ego then we end up RESISTING the gifts that the creative process it’s truly offering us and so instead of it being a pathway to truth, creativity becomes a defence against it.

Creative Trauma is what happens when you keep resisting and go against what you really want beneath the surface of things: your REALNESS.

When Creativity Becomes an Extension of the Ego

At its deepest level, creativity is not about output – it’s about integration:

This means that creativity is the process of allowing what is unconscious within you to become conscious so that you can see it, face it, and become more whole through it.

When creativity is real, it works in two directions at once:

  • It helps you grow into deeper wholeness.

  • It offers something real to others, allowing them to do the same.

Based on these two things, we can define truly creative work like this:

“The creation of something REAL that allows those who engage with it to become more REAL too”.

Here’s the problem that many people who identify as ‘creatives’ find themselves dealing with (normally unconsciously):

When creativity is filtered through shame and trauma, the natural creative process gets hijacked and so instead of revealing truth, you get resistance; instead of integration, you get performance; and instead of expression, you get self-censorship or self-inflation.

The Two Unreal Paths of Creative Identity

When people carry unresolved shame, they often turn creativity into a way of managing it by soothing themselves or altering their mood.

This usually leads to one of two ego-driven patterns that the ‘creative’ identity can be built around:

1. The Performer (External Validation)

In this mode, creativity becomes a tool for approval and so the person creates with an “invisible audience” in mind whilst constantly anticipating judgement, rejection, or praise.

Their internal dialogue for the Performer goes along the lines of:

  • “Will people like this?”

  • “Is this good enough?”

  • “How will this perform?”

  • Etc. Etc. Etc.

…and all of this just leads to perfectionism (which impossible in a chaotic world like ours) and leads to a kind of safe, calculated output that avoids risk or the expression of anything REAL (for fear of rocking the boat and upsetting that invisible audience).

The work becomes polished but empty as an expression of the creative person’s controlled relationship with themselves and their own ego.

It doesn’t challenge the creator because the creator doesn’t want to challenge themselves (to keep the ego where it is) and so it doesn’t challenge the audience either.

This is because, ultimately, it’s not about truth or sharing anything real – it’s just about the ego’s need to be accepted.

(When, actually, they could work on accepting themselves first and foremost and then have something more REAL to share).

2. The Rebel (Ego Assertion)

At the other extreme – but still rooted in the same underlying shame, trauma, and a disconnection form one’s REALNESS – creativity becomes a tool for self-assertion.

Instead of seeking approval, the person pushes or forces themselves against the world by expressing themselves in a way that prioritises their identity, their emotions, and their need to be seen a certain way.

The internal dialogue of the Rebel sounds like:

  • “This is who I am – take it or leave it”.

  • “I don’t care what people think”.

  • “This is my truth”.

But often, this isn’t truth and it’s a reaction to NOT being grounded in the truth about themselves and needing the world to validate what they want to be true (not what actually is).

In other words, it’s a projection and so the work becomes self-indulgent, unstructured and unreal (because there’s no clear aim for the impact they want to have), and disconnected from the needs of the audience.

In this case, creativity isn’t about giving something real but about projecting something unresolved.

Why Both Paths Lead to Fragmentation

At first glance, these two patterns seem opposite because one is people-pleasing and the other is self-assertion.

At their core, though, they’re the same because both are attempts to deal with an internal sense of the Void:

  • The Performer tries to fill the void through winning validation.

  • The Rebel tries to escape the void through asserting identity.

In neither case is the person actually facing the truth of themselves and so – because of that – the work they create reflects fragmentation (ego) rather than wholeness (realness).

It might get attention in many cases or even ‘success‘ but it probably won’t feel as REAL as it could in order to really satisfy those creative itches and align them with their creative potential.

The Real Creative Process (And Why It’s Uncomfortable)

Real creativity asks something much deeper of you because it will ask you to face yourself.

It’s gonna ask you to:

  1. Get out of your own way.

  2. Allow the unconscious to become conscious.

  3. Face what emerges without distortion.

  4. Give it form in a way that serves yourself and others.

This is not always enjoyable which is why a lot of the most meaningful creative work often feels confronting.

It’s literally asking you to transcend the current version of yourself and so you’re not just making something – you’re becoming something.

It requires you to start facing things like your fears, your contradictions, and your shadow which is why so many ‘creatives’ actually end up avoiding real creativity – not because they don’t want to create but because they don’t want to see yet.

Truth: The Gateway to Real Creativity

Having said all this, then, we can say that real creativity is impossible without truth.

Not conceptual or intellectual truth in the form of nice ideas, philosophies and theories but lived, embodied truth that you accept and work with in your very being.

This essentially means doing two things:

  1. Uncovering the Truth
  2. Living and breathing the Truth

This sounds simple but it’s going to require you to be honest with yourself about:

  • Why you’re creating.

  • What you’re avoiding.

  • What you actually feel.

  • What wants to emerge.

Without this kind of brutal but tender honesty, creativity becomes distorted and so you start creating around the truth instead of through it which is how creative trauma ends up being a default for so many of us.

The Shift: From Outside-In to Inside-Out

Healing your creative trauma requires a fundamental shift that will take you from:

  • Outside-in creativity (seeking something from the world)

To:

  • Inside-out creativity (expressing something real into the world)

This is the difference between ego-based approaches to creative process versus those that are rooted in something more REAL (the ego is the opposite of reality):

  • Creating to be validated vs creating to reveal.

  • Creating to prove something vs creating to understand something.

  • Creating to fill a void vs creating to express essence.

When you make this shift, creativity becomes something entirely different:

Instead of keeping you locked in ego and the void, it becomes a healing process that takes you deeper into realness and the truth.

Using Creativity to Integrate the Shadow

The Shadow Self is the real version of you that has had to go into hiding so that you can keep the ego in place (the ego and the shadow are always involved in what I call the Shadow Dance).

The ego isn’t ‘bad’ or anything like that – it’s simply the ‘parts’ of you that haven’t yet been fully seen, accepted, or integrated yet and the real creative process gives these ‘parts’ a pathway into awareness, acceptance, and then real action.

When you create from an inside-out place, you’ll start to notice recurring themes, emotional patterns, and unfinished inner narratives but instead of suppressing or performing over them, you’ll start bringing them into the creative work.

You won’t do this in a chaotic or self-indulgent way but in a way that’s a structured an intentional expression of your whatever truth you’ve uncovered.

If you can do this then your creativity isn’t just about ‘you’ – it’s about transformation that your audience can relate to and grow more real through as well.

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

If you want to go deeper into creativity and growing into your realness then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace which has a chapter on creativity.

Practical Steps to Heal Your Creative Trauma

This isn’t just a philosophy or theory – it’s something you can actually act on to improve your relationship with yourself, life, and the creative process.

Here’s an abridged version of how to start shifting your creative process back into realness:

1. Audit Your Intentions

Before you create anything, ask yourself:

  • Why am I really making this?

  • What do I want from this?

  • Am I trying to get something or express something?

Be brutally honest with yourself and tender with what you find:

If the answer is validation, approval, or identity, then don’t judge it but just see it clearly because Awareness is the first step out of distortion.

2. Create Without an Audience (At First)

Give yourself space to create without thinking about how it will be received:

Don’t worry about posting, sharing, or vanity metrics like ‘likes’ – just focus on you and your relationship with the process and what it has to teach you.

This removes the pressure of performance and allows something more real to emerge.

Over time, you can reintroduce the audience but from a grounded place where you’re expressing your essence over your ego.

3. Follow What Feels REAL and ALIVE (Not What Feels Safe)

Notice the difference between:

  • What makes you feel safe to create.

  • What makes you feel alive to create.

Safe work usually aligns with your ego and its’ comfort zone but the ‘alive’ work often challenges you and gets you into the STRETCH ZONE (which is where we build flow).

4. Engage the Body, Not Just the Mind

Creative trauma isn’t just mental – it’s an embodied experience of being disconnected from the truth about ourselves and life.

This means that it can be really helpful to pay attention to your physical state when you create something:

  • Are you tense?

  • Are you holding your breath?

  • Are you rushing?

If you are then it means your nervous system isn’t regulated and so you will benefit from slowing down, breathing, and letting your body relax into the process.

The more embodied you are, the less filtered your expression becomes.

5. Let the Work Reveal You

Instead of trying to control what you’re making, allow the process to show you something REAL about yourself.

Pay attention to what’s going on as you create by asking probing questions:

  • What is this bringing up in me from the unconscious?

  • What does this say about where I’m at?

Your work is a mirror so use it to see yourself.

6. Integrate Before You Share

Not everything needs to be published immediately because, sometimes, the main purpose of a piece is personal integration.

Slow down before rushing to share everything with the world and yourself time to:

  • Understand what you’ve created.

  • Process what it means.

  • Refine it so it serves others.

That rush is usually just the ego trying to ‘get’ something (validation etc) but slowing down is where you can move from raw expression to real contribution.

7. Balance Truth with Service

Being real doesn’t mean being self-indulgent but about offering something significant to others:

Check in with yourself and what you’re doing:

  • How does this help someone else become more real?

  • What value does this offer?

This keeps your work grounded and ensures you’re not just expressing but also giving.

Creative trauma blocks the creative process and stops you finding out who you really are.

The Final Word: Ending Creative Trauma & Growing Real

Creative trauma dissolves when you stop using creativity to avoid yourself and start using it to face yourself and life.

When that happens you stop chasing validation, stop performing to maintain an unreal self-image, and stop creating from fragmentation instead of wholeness.

Instead, you can tap into a way of creating that feels grounded, honest, and alive – not because it’s perfect but because it’s REAL.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to step into your true creativity and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you show up for yourself.

Old Roles & Realness: Why People Try to Pull You Back Into Old Roles

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Old Roles & Realness

When You Grow, Not Everyone Can Follow: Old Roles & Growing Into REALNESS

There’s a strange phenomenon that I’ve witnessed happening again and again when you start growing more REAL.

It goes a bit like this:

At first – when you start to shift from unreal to real – it feels like expansion and so things begin to ‘click’, outdated patterns loosen, and you start to feel more aligned, more true, and, well, more…’You‘.

Everything starts to feel like there’s a real sense of momentum – almost as though everything is finally working with you and things are starting to move in the right direction.

But the, suddenly, it happens again…RESISTANCE – not just internally but externally too:

People around you start to react to your realness as though there’s something ‘wrong’ with it (which there can’t be because real just is what it is).

If you’re not aware of what’s really happening when you reach this stage, then it can feel confusing or even destabilising.

You might start questioning yourself:

“Am I doing something wrong?”

“Why is everyone reacting like this to me?”

“Have I changed in a ‘bad‘ way?”

This article is about the deeper truth which is that when you start becoming more real, you don’t just change yourself – you also change the system you’re part of.

And systems don’t always like change.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

When we step away from old roles the system often tries to hammer us back down.

The Invisible Contract: How Old Roles Keep Systems Stable

One of the most important things to understand about human beings and human relationships is this:

People don’t just relate to each other as individuals – they relate through roles.

Roles can basically be defined as the invisible contracts that hold relationships together and they’re often unconscious but incredibly powerful.

They literally pop up in all areas of human life – families, friendships, workplaces, cultures – and they create a kind of balance or homeostasis that brings a kind of ‘order’ to the surface of things.

It’s almost like everybody gets to play the ‘role’ of a different piece of the whole puzzle that keeps the system moving in a familiar and managable way:

Someone is “the Strong One”, someone else is “the Funny One”, another person gets to be “the Problem”, but that’s okay because somebody else can be the “the Rescuer”, and they can all look up to the “the Achiever” who always gets everything ‘right’.

What’s important to know is that none of these roles are random:

They all form as adaptations to emotional environments as a way of avoiding shame, gaining approval, or maintain a sense of safety.

This can be a ‘good’ thing in the short-term but, over time, these kinds of roles can become limiting because they create a kind of frozen identity (ego).

This is where things can become complicated between people because:

Roles are dependent on other roles.

What this means is that the identities of people in a given ‘system’ (group of people, for the sake of simplicity) are interdependent and so if one person starts changing and growing REAL then it can affect the identities of everybody else involved – whether they’re ready for it or not.

In short, a system only ‘works’ if the roles within it stay consistent and so if one person steps up and shifts into something more real, then the whole structure is challenged to become more real too.

The People Pleaser Example: When Growth Triggers Pushback

Let’s take a really common example of how this story unfolds for a lot of people:

Imagine someone growing up in an environment where love felt conditional instead of something that was unconditional and freely given – perhaps they learned early on that expressing their true needs wasn’t safe or that their value came from being agreeable all the time.

The consequence of this was that, over time, they internalised a lot of shame and so to cope they stepped into the role of the People Pleaser.

This role helped them survive, helped them maintain connection (even if it wasn’t necessarily the realest connection), and helped them to avoid conflict and rejection.

That might all sound great but it came with a cost:

By hiding behind the People Pleaser role as a kind of mask, they lost touch with real emotions, real desires, and real boundaries – ultimately becoming fragmented by splitting off ‘parts’ of themselves into the shadow self in order to maintain the role.

Eventually, they start to wake up to the brick walls that they keep hitting because of this role and so they start to do inner work, start dissolving shame, and begin recognising their own needs by practising saying no and refusing to keep overextending themselves.

In short, they start stepping out of the People Pleaser role and begin to feel more alive, more grounded, more authentic, and even start to build some real momentum in their lives – for perhaps the first time ever, they’re actually flowing with life rather than forcing themselves to perform a role.

Everything seems to be going so well and they have a whole new lust for life until…BOOM!

Someone close to them says something along the lines of:

“You’ve changed”.

“You’re not the same any more.”

Or:

“I feel like I don’t know you these days”.

Sometimes it’s said with frustration, sometimes with genuine concern, or sometimes even on an attempt to send you on a guilt trip but – underneath it – there’s the same unspoken message:

“Go back to who you were”.

This is just a sign that your growth has disrupted the system and not everyone is ready for that disruption.

Why People Try to Pull You Back Into Old Roles

When someone starts stepping out of a role, it creates tension in the system because roles don’t exist in isolation – they exist in relation to other roles.

What this means is that if one person stops being the People Pleaser (or any other role), then the others sharing the system with them may feel uncomfortable and have their own emotional ‘stuff’ triggered because they’ve grown used to that role (and who they can be in relation to it).

For example:

-If one person stops being the Victim, someone else might lose their sense of being the Rescuer.

-If the Rock of the family starts showing vulnerability, it may trigger others who rely on emotional avoidance.

-If the Shining Star stops performing, it can destabilise those who depended on their success for validation.

-Etc. etc. etc.

In all cases, the system resists change because change introduces uncertainty and the ego doesn’t like uncertainty (as it may bring reality back into the equation and the ego is the opposite of reality).

When the ego feels this kind of systemic threat, it tries to restore balance – not always consciously but through subtle and not so subtle forms of pressure like guilt-tripping, expressing disapproval, withdrawal of attention, or subtle like “You’re not like you used to be” (as though we’re supposed to stay the ‘same’ our whole lives long).

These attempts to pull you back into an old role aren’t always malicious (in fact, most of the time they’re not) – they’re adaptive as people try to maintain their own internal equilibrium based on their own inner emotional ‘stuff’ (shame, guilt, and/or trauma for most people).

The short version is that if you change, it forces others to look at themselves and that’s not always something people are ready to do.

A Simple but Powerful Truth About Roles

Here’s the rule that explains pretty much everything we’re talking about:

Roles are always dependent on other roles.

This means that if one person steps out of their role, it challenges the structure of the whole system – not because anything is ‘wrong’ but because roles are interconnected agreements within the system as a whole and systems resist change because change exposes the illusion that the system is built upon.

At a deeper level, roles are not who we are in our realness – they’re just functions and temporary adaptations as an extension of the ways we’ve learned to navigate emotional landscapes.

They’re are not the full expression of a human being but just fragments that we identify with in order to survive.

Over time, those fragments can begin to feel like a prison which is why it’s worth rocking the boat sometimes and growing real.

Why Your Growth Feels Threatening to Others

When someone begins to move toward wholeness, they stop performing their role as rigidly and so they start becoming more integrated, more honest with themselves and others, but also more unpredictable.

(Another reason the ego likes everybody to be playing roles is because roles come with predictable boundaries which allows the ego to keep controlling things and keep shame at bay).

This can understandably be deeply unsettling for others because suddenly:

  • The People Pleaser says “no”.

  • The Rock shows emotion.

  • The Victim takes responsibility.

  • The Achiever seeks meaning over results.

The end result of this is that it creates a mirror of where everybody else can step up and transform themselves in a real way.

Instead of facing what’s reflected in this mirror, the system tries to pull you back into your old identity – not because you’re doing something ‘wrong’ but because your growth is disrupting the illusion that others are holding onto.

It’s Not Personal – It’s Structural

One thing that’s really important to understand:

This isn’t about people being bad or manipulative – it’s just the reality of how human systems function.

People are often operating from their own unconscious patterns and being driven by their own shame, their fears, and their own need for stability.

The bottom line is that when someone grows, it can feel like instability to others and so they react in the only way they know how:

By trying to restore the old dynamic.

This is why it’s so important not to take it personally because if you do, you risk collapsing back into your old role just to maintain connection and then you’ll end up being ‘stuck’ again.

This is a trap that a lot of people fall into because they can’t push through this pull-back stage from the system:

They begin to grow… and then retreat…they taste freedom… and then return to the cage.

Not because they want to but because the pressure to give into the unreal is stronger than they’re desire to grow real.

Staying Real in the Face of Old Roles: Awareness, Acceptance, Action

So how do you navigate all of this and stay aligned with your growth without being pulled back into old roles and patterns?

You can approach it through the three simple but powerful principles that I structure my coaching containers around when working with clients:

Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

1. Awareness: See What’s Really Happening

The first step is to become AWARE of the dynamics at play:

When someone reacts to your growth, don’t immediately assume something is ‘wrong’ with you (or them) – instead, pause, observe, and ask yourself:

  • “Are they trying to pull me back into an old role?”

  • “What role did I play in this dynamic before?”

  • “Is this reaction about me or about their role in the system?”

Awareness creates space and this space gives you choice about how to show up and keep moving forward.

2. Acceptance: Own Your Direction

The next step is ACCEPTANCE – not of the old pattern but of your new direction – this means getting clear on what you actually want:

What is real for you NOW?

(Not what you’re ‘supposed’ to want because of what the role dictates).

Acceptance also means recognising that discomfort is part of growth:

When you stop people-pleasing, some people may not like it; when you stop performing, some people may withdraw; when you stop playing small, some people may resist.

All of these things are okay because their reactions aren’t your responsibility.

(That doesn’t mean that you upset people on purpose – just that it can be a by-product of growing real sometimes).

3. Action: Keep Acting Like the Real You

Finally, comes ACTION which is where most people fall off:

They become aware and get an understanding of what’s happening but then they start to hesitate, soften, and compromise as the old role starts to pull them back into old patterns.

The truth is that real change requires consistency and so you need to train yourself to continue acting from your realness even when it’s uncomfortable or when others when others resist and it seems easier to just give up and go back to what’s familiar.

Being consistent like this doesn’t mean being aggressive or dismissive – it just means staying GROUNDED.

You are not here to take on somebody else’s emotional garbage – you’re here to show up and be REAL.

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

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

The Deeper Opportunity Hidden in the Resistance

Here’s an important reframe for all of this ‘stuff’:

The resistance you face is not just an obstacle – it’s also an opportunity.

It’s an opportunity because it shows that the changes you’re going through as you do the ‘inner work’ are REAL because if no one reacted to your growth, it might not be as significant as you think.

When people do react, it means something is actually shifting – not just in you but in the system around you and that’s a sign that you’re moving in the right direction.

If you keep living according to old roles they'll take you where you don't wanna go.

The Final Word: Old Roles & Realness

At the deepest level, the journey into realness is about realising that you’re so much more than just a ‘role:

You are not the People Pleaser, the Victim, the Rock, the Shining Star, or anything else – these might be roles you’ve played at some stage in your life but they’re not your essence.

As you step into realness, you begin to dissolve these identities and this might disrupt the systems around you but that’s part of the process because realness doesn’t just transform the individual but also the community around them.

If people try to pull you back then don’t panic, shrink, or abandon yourself – just remember the truth:

You’re not here to stay the ‘same’ (as if that’s even possible) – you’re here to to become REAL.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to work on stepping into your realness then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to start taking action that’s aligned with your potential – not just the roles you’re identifying with.

The Habit Loop: How Your Habits Are Creating Your Reality (and How to Change Them)

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The Habit Loop

The Habit Loop is What Happens Your Habits Keep Bringing You Back to The Same Place (Whether it’s a REAL or Unreal Place is Up To You)

It can be a pretty difficult pill to swallow but to a far greater degree than most people realise, the life you’re living right now is a consequence of your habitual ways of doing things.

I’m not just talking about the obvious habits like brushing your teeth, going to the gym, or scrolling your phone before bed but the deeper and often invisible ones that can guide our whole lives:

  • How you identify yourself.

  • How you react to discomfort.

  • How you handle emotions.

  • How you show up in relationships.

  • How you speak to yourself when nobody is listening.

  • Etc. etc. etc.

These kind of habits are the ones that really shape your life – even if you’re not conscious of them and so they’re driving you from beneath the surface of yourself.

Really, all of this brings us to an uncomfortable truth:

If your life doesn’t feel REAL and instead feels flat, disconnected, frustrating, or like something is ‘missing’, then it’s most likely because your habits are keeping you on the surface of life instead of allowing you to go deeper into it.

In other words, you’re habitually choosing resistance over acceptance without even knowing it and that choice, repeated over time, becomes your ‘reality’.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Understanding the Habit Loop can help you break the chains that are holding you back from life.

A Necessary Disclaimer: It’s Not All on You

Before we go any further, let’s ground this in actual reality:

Saying that your habits are guiding your life doesn’t mean that literally everything in your life is your ‘fault’ or the result of your habits because life isn’t quite that hat simple and things ‘happen’ all the time that are outside of your control like pure randomness, unexpected circumstance, other people and their quirks, or what some might call fate.

Here’s the key to growing real, though:

Even when you can’t control what happens, you can still control how you habitually respond to what happens.

Over time, your responses shape your experience of life just as much – if not more – than the events themselves.

What this means is that, no, it’s not 100% on you but the majority of your lived experience is being shaped by your habits every single day.

(No pressure!)

The Hidden Depth of Habit

When people think about habits, they usually think in terms of simple behaviours that will get specific results.

For example:

  • “I should wake up earlier”.

  • “I need to exercise more”.

  • “I should stop eating rubbish”.

Whilst it’s true that these kind of things definitely matter, they’re actually just the tip of the ice berg, because the deeper truth is that:

Your life is not shaped by what you do occasionally – it’s shaped by what you do automatically.

This is really important to know because what you do automatically is governed by your conditioning and that conditioning shows up in three powerful and often overlooked domains:

  1. Your identity (ego).

  2. Your emotional patterns.

  3. Your thinking patterns.

If you don’t become aware of these, you don’t choose a life that’s actually REAL but repeat a life that’s a condition of being unreal when you don’t need to be.

Resistance vs Realness

If your present-day life doesn’t feel like one you’d genuinely love to be living, then something deeper is going on than just “bad luck” or “not trying hard enough”.

What’s really happening is this:

You’re not going deeply enough into life to build flow and momentum and the reason you’re not going deep enough is because your habits are pulling you into resistance.

Resistance shows up as various things but most commonly things like:

  • Avoiding uncomfortable emotions.

  • Overthinking instead of acting.

  • Clinging to old identities.

  • Seeking distraction instead of presence.

  • Performing instead of being real.

Over time, this creates fragmentation which just means that you become split inside yourself between who you are, who you think you should be, and how you actually live.

Realness, on the other hand, is about integration and integration requires different habits.

Let’s take a quick look at what they are:

The Three Levels of Real Habits: Body, Mind, & Vision

If you want to start shifting your life in a meaningful way, then you need to build habits that move you towards wholeness rather than fragmentation.

Normally when I’m working with people, this happens across three main levels:

1. Body: Regulate and Release

Your body holds onto everything you don’t process and so things like stress, fear, shame, and anger don’t just disappear if they don’t get felt and integrated – they get stored.

This leads to a dysregulated nervous system, which then shapes your perception of reality and causes you to ultimately become more reactive, more anxious, and more closed to life (because a dysregulated nervous system sees ‘threat’s everywhere instead of being able to feel safe).

Real habits at the level of the body include:

  • Breathing practices that calm the nervous system.

  • Movement that releases tension (walking, training, stretching, or yin yoga).

  • Allowing emotions to be felt instead of suppressed.

  • Slowing down enough to actually notice what’s going on inside you.

When your body is regulated, you naturally become more open to life.

2. Mind: Detach and Choose

Most people are not thinking in a conscious way but being used by their thoughts in an unconscious way.

What this means is that they treat every thought as if it’s true, important, or worth reacting to but this is unreal because thoughts are just mental events – not actual reality itself.

If you don’t develop the habit of stepping back from them, they will run your life.

Real habits at the level of the mind include:

  • Observing your thoughts instead of identifying with them.

  • Questioning whether a thought is actually useful or real.

  • Letting go of narratives that keep you stuck.

  • Choosing actions based on your vision, not your mood.

When you realise that thoughts are something you have, not something you are, you regain agency and can actually start to live your real life again.

3. Vision: Act and Build

Awareness and acceptance of whether or not you’re being real or unreal is a good start but to start making an actual difference in your life you also need direction because without a vision, you drift, and drifting is just another form of unconscious habit.

Real habits at the level of vision include:

  • Taking daily action towards something meaningful.

  • Developing skills that align with who you want to become.

  • Showing up consistently, even when it’s uncomfortable.

  • Building momentum through small, repeated wins.

When your actions align with a real vision, your life starts to compound and flow in a powerful way.

The Less Obvious Habits That Change Everything

Beyond the three levels, there are deeper habitual patterns that often go unnoticed but all of which have a massive impact on our lives:

Habits of Ego (Identity)

Your ego is not just “who you are” in truth – it’s just a habitual way of identifying based on whatever you needed to survive in the past.

Because it’s so familiar, it feels real but it actually isn’t…this is good news because it means you can upgrade it based on where you’re trying to get in life and who you need to become to step into your REALNESS.

For example:

If your ego/identity is built around limitation (“I’m not good enough”, “I’m always unlucky”, “I’m the kind of person who struggles”, etc. etc. ), then your life will reflect that and it becomes a self-fulfilling loop (because your self-image is a self-fulfilling prophecy).

To break the loop, you need to shift from identifying with fixed ideas about yourself to identifying with flow and growth.

Realness in this context means that:

  • You’re not a fixed concept but a living experience.

  • You’re something that’s constantly unfolding, not ‘finished’.

  • You can meet life as it is – not just as your past has conditioned you to see it

Habits of Emotion

One of the biggest blocks to realness is how people deal with emotions and the most common pattern is resistance or avoidance which can show up as suppressing, distracting, numbing out, or rationalising reality away.

This might work in the short term, but over time it creates disconnection and so you stop being present, start performing, and lose touch with what’s actually real.

The alternative is integration which means facing emotions head on and learning from them.

Real emotional habits for integration look like:

  • Feeling emotions fully without being overwhelmed by them.

  • Allowing them to move through you instead of getting stuck (emotions are e-motion, energy in motion).

  • Using the energy of emotion to take meaningful action by transmuting them into purpose.

Emotion is not the enemy – resistance is.

Habits of Thought

If you’re not conscious of your thinking, your thoughts will control you.

This is unfortunate because many people live as if every thought is important even though this actually isn’t the case.

Most of our thoughts throughout the day are:

  • Conditioned

  • Repetitive

  • Fear-based

  • Completely disconnected from reality

The way forward is to understand that realness comes from creating space between you and your thoughts because this allows you to realise that you have a CHOICE.

You don’t have to follow every impulse, every fear, or every narrative – instead, you can step back and ask:

“What would the real version of me do here?”

Then you can do that!

Reverse Engineering Your Life to Get Out of the Habit Loop

If you’re not getting the results you want, there’s a strong chance you’re giving into a habit loop that doesn’t serve you.

The tricky part here is that many of these habits are unconscious and so it can be difficult to see them.

Thankfully, we can train ourselves to REVERSE ENGINEER them based on the results that we’re currently getting but don’t want.

You can start to do this by looking at your life as it is right now:

  • Your relationships
  • Your work
  • Your energy levels
  • Your emotional state
  • Your sense of meaning

None of these things are ‘random’ – they’re patterns and patterns come from habits.

If you follow the thread backwards, you can start to see:

  • How you habitually respond to stress.

  • How you habitually think about yourself.

  • How you habitually avoid or engage with life.

This is where change begins – not with forcing new behaviours on top of old patterns but with seeing clearly what’s already there and then making a CHOICE about what to do with it.

Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

Check out my book Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness if you want to go deeper into being real and living a conscious life.

From Resistance to Realness: Practical Steps for Changing the Habit Loop

Understanding all of this is one thing but living it is another so here’s a few quick things you can do to start making this all practical:

1. Audit Your Reality

Take an honest look at your life and look at where you’re consistently getting results you don’t like or want.

Instead of blaming circumstances, ask yourself:

  • “What habits might be creating this?”

  • “How am I consistently showing up here?”

Be ruthless but fair with yourself so you can start to cultivate AWARENESS.

2. Identify the Pattern Beneath the Pattern

Go deeper than surface-level behaviour by asking yourself:

  • What identity am I reinforcing?

  • What emotions am I avoiding?

  • What thoughts am I believing without question?

This is where the real leverage for change is because you’re getting into that deeper ‘stuff’.

3. Replace, Don’t Just Remove

You can’t just stop a habit – you need to replace it with something more conscious and REAL.

If your habit is to:

  • Avoid → practise staying present.

  • Overthink → take action.

  • Suppress → express.

Make the new habit specific, actionable, and aligned with who you know you can BECOME.

4. Work Across All Three Levels

Don’t just focus on one area aim to do something every day that supports:

  • Body (regulation and release)
  • Mind (awareness and detachment)
  • Vision (action and growth)

Small actions compound massively over time and so this where you will usually get the biggest results in the long-run.

5. Build Tolerance for Discomfort

Growth feels uncomfortable but that’s not a problem – it’s actually the point.

If you can learn to stay with discomfort instead of escaping it, you break the cycle of resistance and that’s where real change happens.

What this means is that you want to feel like you’re STRETCHING yourself a little further each day (but not so much that you start to panic).

6. Act From Who You’re Becoming

Instead of asking something like “What do I feel like doing?”, start asking something like “What would the real version of me do?”

Then do that even if it feels unnatural at first (especially then because it means you’re going against those old and outdated unconscious habits).

If you want to change your life then get out of the Habit Loop and find something real to replace old conditioned habits with.

The Habit Loop: You Are What You Repeat

Your life is not defined by your intentions but by your repetitions.

Every day, in small and subtle ways, you are either reinforcing fragmentation or moving towards wholeness which means that you’re either choosing resistance or choosing realness.

The ‘good’ news is that because your life is shaped by habits, it is also changeable through habits and so – if you start to bring awareness to your patterns, if you start to shift how you relate to your body, your mind, and your actions – then over time, your life will begin to reflect that.

You don’t get a real life by accident – you build it, one real habit at a time.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start acting like the real version of yourself and building a sense of flow and purpose in your life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you shift gear.

Why Trusting ‘God’ Doesn’t Work You (And What Actually Does)

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When Trusting God Doesn't Work for You

Trusting God / Life / Whatever is Always the Way Forward so Why Doesn’t it Work for Everybody?

There’s an idea you’ll hear all over the place once you start dipping your toes into some of the more ‘spiritual‘ realms of self-help and personal growth.

It usually goes along the lines of:

“Just trust God“.

Or:

“Throw it out to the Universe“.

Or:

“Let go and let life handle it“.

It sounds simple enough and maybe even pretty comforting – as though there’s some invisible safety net beneath you just waiting for you to relax enough to fall into it and have all your dreams come true.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth, though:

A lot of people try this and then…nothing happens – they end up being just as ‘stuck’ as they’ve always been.

They say the prayers, repeat the affirmations, write in the gratitude journal, and tell themselves they’re “letting go” but end up with the same old patterns, same old frustrations, and same sense that they’re missing something because life never quite ‘clicks’.

So what’s going on? Why does “trusting God” seem to transform some people’s lives… while leaving others exactly where they started?

This article will break it down for you – not from theory, but from experience.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Trusting God is about being responsive to the truth rather than projecting your unresolved 'stuff' onto it.

I Tried to Control Everything…and Got Nowhere

There was a time in my life where I was trying to control absolutely everything that I possible could – my future, my outcomes, how people perceived me, and even how I allowed myself to feel internally.

I thought that if I could just manage things well enough, I’d finally feel okay.

Spoiler: it didn’t work.

In fact, the harder I tried to control things, the worse everything seemed to get because I just ended up being constantly tense, constantly overthinking, and constantly trying to force life into a shape that felt ‘safe’ instead of REAL.

Perhaps the most insane part of living like this was that it I wasn’t even getting any results:

It was like banging my head against a brick wall – over and over again – thinking that this next attempt would somehow be the one that broke through.

It never did, though, and I always just ended up back at square one instead of where I wanted and needed to actually be.

The Real Problem: Control Was a Symptom, Not the Cause

Eventually, I had to get REAL with myself and to start embracing the truth:

The issue wasn’t that life was ‘against’ me, that I needed a better strategy, or even that I wasn’t trying hard enough (if anything, I was trying TOO hard and forcing life instead of flowing with it).

The issue was this:

I had unresolved shame and that shame was quietly running the show.

Everything I was doing – every attempt to control, ‘fix’, manage, optimise, or whatever else – was actually an attempt to avoid triggering that shame which meant that I wasn’t living, I was defending.

When you’re in this kind of a state, you don’t act from truth – you react from fear because you want to protect the ego which isn’t the truth about you – it’s just a reactive pattern built on top of unresolved emotional pain.

The Turning Point: Learning to Do Nothing

Eventually, I got tired of living like this – not just physically and mentally but existentially:

I was tired of forcing, tired of trying, and tired of getting nowhere, and so I did something pretty radical (for that version of ‘Me’, anyway):

I stopped and learned to DO NOTHING as much as I could.

Instead of being a human doing – constantly acting for the sake of acting and trying to outrun that shame – I trained myself to do nothing so I could being a human BEING again.

I’m not talking about laziness or resistance (I was still taking the real action that I new made sense because it came from my realness, not ego) – just stopping the compulsive need to interfere with everything.

That’s when things started to get interesting:

What Happens When You Stop Forcing Life

When I stopped trying to control everything, I started to notice things more clearly:

I became more grounded, more present, less reactive and – perhaps ironically – things actually started working out.

This wasn’t because I was doing more (to state the obvious seeing as my strategy was to DO NOTHING or as little as possible) but because I was finally doing what was actually mine to do instead of whatever my fear told me to do.

Life began to flow again – not perfectly or magically but in a way that felt REAL.

The end result of this is that all these years later, my life is pretty awesome – not because everything goes my way but because I’m no longer at war with reality.

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So Why Doesn’t “Trusting God” Work for Some People?

So here’s the thing:

A lot of people say they “trust God” or “trust the Universe” or [“something similar”]… but nothing ever changes for them.

From what I’ve seen (and lived), there are two main reasons for this that I wanna share with you:

1. They Don’t Actually Take Action

Let’s start with the obvious one which is that some people tend to think that “trust” means:

  • Sitting back
  • Doing nothing
  • Waiting for life to ‘fix’ everything for them

This is what I call spiritual bullshit because it’s just the ego in disguise – the illusion of total control and getting whatever we want whenever we want it without doing anything.

What’s really happening when we filter the idea of “trust” through the ego like this is that we’re attempting to avoid discomfort, risk, and actual growth.

To be clear, then, real trust doesn’t mean you never act:

It means you take the real action that’s yours to take and forget about doing anything else.

There’s a difference between:

  • Forcing outcomes (ego)
  • Avoiding action (also ego)
  • Taking aligned action (truth)

Trust lives in that third space where you meet life on its own terms and work with it to grow through whatever comes your way.

2. They’re Not Trusting ‘God’ / Life / Whatever… They’re Trusting a Projection

This is the deeper and more important reason that can help you to improve your relationship with life in a meaningful way:

Most people who turn to “trust” do so because something in their life isn’t working.

For example:

They feel the Void.

They’re confused and lack direction.

They’re in pain.

They have unmet emotional and material needs.

Instead of resolving those things directly, they project them outward into an idea of what ‘God’ (or whatever) ‘should’ be to meet all these needs.

This causes them to trap themselves because:

They put their trust in the projection they created rather than in the truth itself.

The “Cosmic Vending Machine” Illusion

Normally, this projection ends up unfolding like this:

They create an idea of “God” or “the Universe” that functions like a kind of magical cosmic vending machine where if they press the right buttons (performative prayer, affirmation, gratitude etc.), look like they ‘trust’ with their external behaviour, follow the rules then – eventually – they might get what they want.

This might sound pretty harmless but here’s the problem:

The “God” they’re trusting isn’t real – it’s just a projection of their fragmented relationship with their unmet needs, emotional wounds, and unconscious expectations.

Why Trusting the Projection Never Works

At first, this projection can feel ‘good’ because it brings hope, creates optimism, and makes it feel like the universe is finally on your side.

Unfortunately, as time passes, reality kicks in (because what’s real is always real):

Perhaps something ‘bad’ happens, things don’t go as expected or longed for, and the great cosmic vending machine doesn’t deliver what you thought you’d get when you started pressing the buttons.

This just leads to frustration, disappointment, and even anger at ‘God’.

Here’s the truth, though:

You can’t be angry with reality itself (for example, you wouldn’t be angry at the sky for being blue) because reality just is what it is.

All you can get angry at is the projection because the projection can never meet your expectations for one very simple reason:

It can only give you what you already have.

If your inner world is built on unresolved shame, fear, and unmet needs, then that’s what gets reflected back – not because life is punishing you but because you’re not actually engaging with life:

You’re engaging with your own distortion of it whilst telling yourself that the distortion will free you (when it’s actually the only thing keeping you ‘trapped’).

Real Trust Isn’t Conditional

One of the biggest shifts I had to make that really helped me was this:

Trust doesn’t mean you only trust when things are going well.

That’s not trust – it’s preference because REAL (actual) trust means that:

  • You trust when things feel ‘good’.

  • You trust when things feel ‘bad’.

Because you understand that both are part of the same process of becoming more real, more whole, and more aligned with the TRUTH.

Projection vs Truth

Here are simple differences in how we show up when we’re either aligned with projection or truth:

Projection says:

  • “Life should go this way”.

  • “I need this [thing] to be okay”.

  • “If this doesn’t happen in a certain way and by a certain time, then something’s wrong”.

  • “This is what’s happening”.

Truth ASKS:

  • “What’s happening here?”

  • “What is life teaching me here?”

  • “What is being revealed here?”

  • “What’s mine to do here?”

Projection resists reality by forcing itself upon it; truth works with it by learning from it moment-to moment.

The key is in understanding a simple truth about life:

You can only truly trust when your trust is placed in reality itself and not in your ideas of how reality ‘should’ be.

How to Shift Into Real Trust

So how do you actually make all of this practical so that you can shift into real trust and flow in life:

How do you stop projecting and start trusting in a way that actually works?

From my experience, it comes down to three things:

1. Regulate

2. Integrate

3. Accelerate

Let’s check each one out quickly:

1. Regulate: Slow Down Your System

If you’re constantly rushing, overthinking, and reacting then you’re not trusting – you’re surviving.

This means that your nervous system is in a state of urgency, trying to control outcomes to feel safe and so the first step is simple (but not easy):

Slow down.

  • Breathe more deeply (especially through your nose).

  • Spend time in stillness.

  • Stop acting on every impulse and pause before you act.

When your system calms down, you stop trying to force life and so you can become patient which just means you can ride through uncertainty and work on life’s timeline – not your ego’s timeline.

2. Integrate: Deal With Your Emotional “Stuff”

If you have unresolved emotional wounds (especially shame), they will just end up distorting your perceptions, creating projections, and by extension driving your behaviour in an unreal way.

Instead of bypassing your emotions by putting your “trust” in your own projections, then, a more real approach is to finally FACE THEM:

As you integrate these ‘parts’ of yourself then projection starts to dissolve and so reality becomes clearer (and you can put your trust in that instead).

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

If you want to go deeper into trusting yourself and life and finding realness then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

3. Accelerate: Take Real Action (and Let Go of the Rest)

Once you’re more regulated and integrated then you can finally act from truth instead of fear.

What this basically means is that you learn to:

Do your best and let go of the rest.

You can finally take the actions that are actually yours to take, stop trying to control outcomes you can’t control, and stay present in the process

This is where life starts to flow in the way it does in reality- not because you’ve “figured it all out” (that’s ego) but because you’ve stopped interfering with what’s already working.

Trusting God is about doing your best and letting go of the rest.

The Final Word: Trusting God & Staying REAL

If “trusting God” (etc) hasn’t worked for you, it doesn’t mean trust itself is a flawed strategy – it means one of two things:

  • You’re not taking real action.

  • You’re trusting a projection, not reality.

The shift is simple in theory and it goes like this:

Stop trying to control everything, stop outsourcing your power to a projection, and start engaging with reality as it actually is.

In the end, the bottom line is that God, truth, reality – or whatever else you wanna call it – isn’t something you manipulate but something you align with.

This alignment doesn’t come from doing more – it comes from becoming more REAL.

If you take anything from this article, then let it be this:

Trust isn’t about getting what you want; it’s about becoming someone who can meet life fully whatever it brings.

That’s where the real results are and where the real freedom is and where life actually starts to ‘work’.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start growing into your realness so you can build more flow in life then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start taking real action.

Limerence & Realness: Escaping the Void and Coming Back to Life

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Limerence & Realness

Getting Out of Limerence by Returning to REALNESS

Have you ever felt so absolutely “in love” with somebody that it reached the point of almost feeling like madness or insanity?

It might’ve felt a little like this:

Your thoughts revolved around them, your mood would rise and fall depending on their responses, you’d replay conversations over and over again in your mind, you’d analyse the tiniest gestures and so a simple smile became a signal or a chance encounter became your destiny, and if they replied to your text it would make your day but if they ignored it it would ruin your whole week (or beyond)…

Experiences of ‘love’ like this can feel completely intense, intoxicating, and strangely meaningful – as though fate itself has intervened in your love life – but, beneath the excitement, something else often lurks: anxiety, obsession, and a growing sense that your life has somehow become smaller and more dramatic than it needs to be.

This kind of experience has a name: Limerence.

Understanding it – and how to move beyond it – can help you return to something far more powerful and stable than the maddening kind of obsession that we call “love”: your REALNESS.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Limerence is about your unconscious needs more than anything real.

What Is Limerence?

The term limerence was coined by psychologist Dorothy Tennov in the 1970s while she was attempting to study romantic love scientifically.

What she noticed was that what many people describe as “being in love” often includes a very specific set of psychological symptoms:

In other words, limerence is less like stable, real love and more like an emotional rollercoaster:

It feels intoxicating because the brain is constantly searching for signals that the feeling is mutual and so when a signal appears, we experience euphoria but when it doesn’t, we crash into despair.

From the outside, then, limerence can look romantic but from the inside it often feels closer to obsession and starting to move past it is about understanding the deeper truth which is that:

Limerence isn’t really about the other person but it’s about what’s happening inside us.

To understand why this is we need to start by exploring what I call the Void:

The Void: Life After Losing Touch With Ourselves

Many people move through life carrying a sense of inner emptiness:

They may function well on the surface in their jobs, relationships, and routines – for example – but something feels missing underneath it all.

This ‘missingness’ is the Void:

The Void appears when we become disconnected from the truth about ourselves and life in our REALNESS and this always happens because we pick up shame, guilt, and/or trauma along with some kind of social conditioning that teaches us that very real ‘parts’ of ourselves are unacceptable.

To survive and be accepted in the world, we hide these parts away in what’s known as the Shadow Self but they never disappear (because what’s real is always real) – instead, they simply move into the background of our psyche where they continue influencing us unconsciously.

Whilst all of this is going on, we develop a kind of protective mask – a kind of character designed to help us navigate the world without the ‘parts’ that we’ve attempted to hide from or send into exile:

This mask is the Ego and it’s not evil or anything like that because it’s just a survival strategy – unfortunately, it holds us back because of a simple truth about life:

The ego can only ever react to the Void – not to reality itself.

When we live according to the ego alone, then we’re no longer responding directly to life but end up reacting to a distorted inner landscape created by fragmentation (disconnection from the self and life in wholeness).

It’s this fragmentation that creates a powerful sense that something is ‘missing’ and that we need to find something ‘out there’ in the world to feel complete again.

The Ache of the Void

When we’re disconnected from realness and enter the Void, then life begins to feel incomplete and so there’s often a subtle ache or longing in the form of a feeling that there must be “more” to life than this (and, there is – the realness that we became disconnected from).

Because we don’t realise the problem is an inner split but think it’s just the way life is or whatever, then we start looking for solutions outside ourselves.

This is why you see so many people in the world attempting to fill the Void with all kinds of substitutes:

  • Money
  • Status
  • Shopping
  • Sex
  • Power
  • Achievement
  • Endless entertainment
  • Literally anything

Many of these things aren’t ‘bad’ in themselves – in fact, they can be perfectly ‘good’ healthy parts of life as a whole but the problem arises when we start treating these ‘god’ things as the ultimate solutions to our problems.

The truth is that literally nothing in the external world can permanently fill the Void because the Void was created by losing connection with the truth about ourselves and life and so the only thing that can overcome that split is truth itself.

Until we realise this, however, we keep searching for substitutes and one of the most powerful substitutes humans reach for is romantic love in the form of LIMERENCE.

Limerence: When We Try to Fill the Void With Another Person

Limerence happens when we unconsciously decide that another human being will fill the Void for us.

We see someone and feel an immediate emotional pull – instead of simply experiencing attraction, then the odds are that we’re just projecting all of our unmet emotional needs onto them.

What this means is that they become the symbol of everything we believe we’re missing in our relationship with ourselves and life.

(For example, happiness, completion, validation, meaning or whatever else the Void has caused us to feel is missing).

In other words, they become the ultimate thing.

Once this happens, the mind begins constructing a fantasy around them and so we idealise them, put them on a pedestal, and interpret everything they do through the lens of our longing – this process is usually unconscious, which is why it feels so powerful and mysterious.

As Carl Jung famously said:

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

In other words, the destiny narrative we end up constructing around the object of our affections (the “limerent object”) is actually just a projection of what’s going on inside ourselves – not reality itself.

The Two Possible Outcomes of Limerence

Limerence like this usually plays out in one of two ways:

1. The Feelings Are Reciprocated

Occasionally, the person we idealise returns our feelings:

At first, this can feel like confirmation that the universe has delivered exactly what we needed but relationships built on projection tend to become dramatic.

This is for one pretty simple reason:

Anything placed on a pedestal must eventually fall off it.

Over time, reality breaks through the fantasy of projection and the real person emerges and – as the projections collapse – disappointment follows and what began as magical can quickly become chaotic.

2. The Feelings Are Not Reciprocated

More commonly, the limerent object does not fully return our feelings and this just ends up creating lovesickness which is a painful cycle of hope and despair.

People in this state often spend years searching for signs that the other person secretly feels the same way:

A smile becomes evidence, a casual message becomes a signal, a coincidence becomes destiny.

The mind begins interpreting neutral events as confirmation of what it wants to believe rather than what is actually true and what’s scary is that this cycle can last years – sometimes even decades or whole lifetimes.

Why Uncertainty Makes Limerence Worse

One of the most powerful drivers of limerence is uncertainty because it creates two psychological traps:

1. It Creates Emotional Tension

When we don’t know how someone feels about us, the mind stays alert, searching for clues and this constant anticipation generates a kind of emotional suspense that keeps us hooked.

2. We Project Into the Unknown

When information is missing, the mind fills the gap and – when we’re in limerence – it fills that gap with our own feelings.

For example, we start assuming the other person must feel the same way – even when there is little evidence.

This is because uncertainty becomes the perfect canvas for projection and so we can fill it with whatever we WANT (instead of questioning it to find out the TRUTH and start overcoming the Void).

The Biggest Illusion of Limerence

Perhaps the most dangerous belief in limerence is when we start thinking things along the lines of:

“My feelings are so deep that they must mean something is true”.

This is such a common trap that people fall into (especially if they’re really struggling with the Void) but the bottom line is simle:

Depth of feeling does not equal truth.

Feelings are powerful but they are also fragments which means that they shift, conflict with each other, and change or disappear over time.

On the other side of the coin, the TRUTH, is about wholeness which means that it’s stable and unchanging.

When we place feelings above reality, we begin distorting life itself in order to maintain the emotional story we want to believe but that distortion always creates friction and suffering.

Part of the way forward is realising that it’s not about believing what we WANT to believe but about learning to believe what’s actually true.

Limerence & Returning to Realness

The way out of limerence is not to suppress feelings or become emotionally numb but to return to reality because reality is always medicine:

That might sound dramatic but all it means is that when we stop prioritising our emotional projections and start prioritising truth again then the fantasy dissolves and other person stops being the centre of our world.

Life itself becomes the centre of itself again.

This shift requires a change in priorities because instead of making another person the ultimate thing in our lives, we make our relationship with life itself the ultimate thing.

This is pretty much the only thing that can help us to get out of limerence and to do it we need to move through three stages:

The Path Out of Limerence

These three stages (Awareness, Acceptance, and Action) are the three stages I build my coaching containers around when working with clients.

They can help us with any transformational journey we’re going through in life:

1. Awareness – Deconstruct the Ego

The first step is always recognising what’s actually happening by raising awareness of how our self-image is holding us back.

In the case of limerence, you can get started by asking yourself things like:

  • What needs am I projecting onto this person?

  • What do I believe they will ‘fix’ in my life?

  • What needs do I think this person will meet that I can only meet myself?

Simply becoming aware of projection begins weakening its hold and, when you see the pattern clearly, it loses much of its power.

2. Acceptance – Integrate the Shadow

The next step is to turn towards the parts of yourself that you’ve been (unconsciously) avoiding.

Usually, limerence appears and takes a hold of us when we’re disconnected from our own sense of worth, purpose, or emotional wholeness and so – instead of chasing validation externally – healing begins by accepting the parts of yourself you’ve pushed into the shadows.

This includes:

  • Acknowledging emotional wounds.

  • Accepting imperfections.

  • Recognising unmet needs.

  • Taking responsibility for our inner world

Integration reduces the fragmentation that created the Void in the first place by returning you to a sense of wholeness.

3. Action – Trust Yourself and Life

Finally, we need to start redirecting our energy back into life instead of into our fantasies and so instead of obsessing about another person, we start building something real.

This means:

  • Creating a meaningful vision for your life.

  • Breaking that vision into goals.

  • Developing habits that move you towards growth.

As you invest energy into real life, your sense of identity becomes rooted in something stable again which means that the limerent obsession can finally fade because your life becomes larger than it.

Changing Your Relationship With Uncertainty

Another crucial step on the journey to overcoming limerence is learning to work with uncertainty rather than projecting into it.

Uncertainty is not a problem – it’s just a feature of life.

When we create a vision and move towards meaningful goals then we take a degree of control over our lives because it allows uncertainty to become a space for growth rather than a space for fantasy.

For example, instead of asking:

“Do they love me?”

You begin asking things like:

“What kind of life am I building?”

This shift moves your focus from outside-in living to inside-out living and so you don’t need to regulate yourself based on how something external is treating you but how you treat yourself.

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

If you want to go deeper into your realness and leaving the void then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

More Practical Steps to Break Free From Limerence

If you find yourself caught up in limerence, then the following steps can help you return to realness instead:

1. Stop feeding the fantasy: Limit behaviours that reinforce your obsession like constant social media checking, re-reading messages, or analysing every interaction and looking for meaning that aligns with what you want to believe more than the truth.

2. Write down the projections: List what you believe the person represents like love, security, validation, or whatever else and then ask whether those things can actually come from your relationship with yourself and life instead.

3. Reconnect with your life: Redirect energy into real activities that serve your growth like work, creativity, friendships, physical health, and getting out in nature. Life expands and the Void closes when attention returns to life itself.

4. Accept uncertainty: You may never know exactly how the other person feels and that’s okay. Remind yourself constantly that truth doesn’t require perfect certainty to move forward (it requires trust).

5. Build a vision: Define the kind of person you want to become and the life you want to build then break this vision into goals and habits.

6. Remember that feelings are not truth: Feelings are information about your automatic reactions to life – not reality itself. Remind yourself that truth emerges from wholeness, not emotional intensity.

Limerence is the mistaken belief that love is easy and pre-destined to meet all our needs.

The Final Word: The Real ‘Cure’ for Limerence

Limerence can feel overwhelming because it seems like the other person holds the key to your happiness but the deeper truth is more simple:

The key is your relationship with yourself and life first and foremost.

Limerence isn’t proof that you’ve met “the One” (plus, there are many of “the ones” for everybody) but it’s a sign that you have temporarily lost contact with yourself.

The cure isn’t in finding the perfect person but in is returning to realness which is a state of being rooted in truth, connection to life, and where you’re no longer searching for substitutes to fill an inner void.

When you live from that place, relationships are no longer desperate attempts to fill the emptiness of the Void but something much deeper:

Two whole people meeting in reality.

This kind of connection doesn’t require obsession but TRUTH.

Stay real out there,

Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

P.S. If you’re ready to start overcoming the Void and growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start raising awareness, cultivating acceptance, and taking real action.

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